Entire villages in the Republic of Congo have been affected by recent flooding, leaving more than 350,000 people in need of food, shelter, clothing and other basics.
People are living on top of their houses and some women are even giving birth in rafts, said Chris Mburu, UN Resident Coordinator the country, speaking to UN News’s Alexandre Carette in Geneva.
Emirati Hospital in southern Gaza is one of last functioning maternity facilities in all of Gaza where “there aren’t enough staff and not enough medicine” for women about to give birth, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned on Friday.
Amid ongoing active conflict that has killed tens of thousands, UNICEF is doing its utmost to help, by delivering essential relief supplies to health teams, formula milk, clothes and food for women too weak to breastfeed.
Nine months ago, UN teams in Sudan were forced to evacuate from their headquarters in Khartoum, as heavy fighting between government and rebel forces raged in the capital.
The impact on the civilian population has been catastrophic, with half of the population in need of aid and more than seven million people forced to flee their homes. The security situation is so bad that humanitarian workers have been unable to bring aid to the areas worst hit by fighting.
With only ‘one door’ open on Gaza’s southern border at Rafah, for aid to reach more than two million Gazans who need lifesaving aid, Israel must provide greater and more reasonable access, said the veteran humanitarian official who is the interim Resident Coordinator for the enclave, in an exclusive interview with UN News.
Houthi rebel attacks on ships using the Red Sea trade route off the coast of Yemen, are bad for global business and consumers everywhere but have also exposed a chronic shortage of vessels in the supply chain.
That’s according to Jan Hoffman, chief of the trade logistics branch at the UN trade and development body UNCTAD.
The enormous potential of GPT4 caught the popular imagination in 2023, with its ability to generate texts in a range of styles, in response to written prompts.
But many expressed concern about the jobs that might be lost, the ease with which bad actors could produce highly convincing misinformation and, in a coming year full of elections, the risks AI could pose to democracy itself.
Earlier in December, the UN Department of Global Communications hosted Knowledge, History and Power, an event featuring noted journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Laura Trevelyan. The event was organized by the Department of Global Communications Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in collaboration with the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium.
Pauline Batista from UN News talked to both award-winning journalists about the challenges, hopes and dreams for “the future of reparations,” in the United States and globally.
Humanitarian workers visiting the frontline in Ukraine are showing solidarity with the people affected by the almost two-year-long conflict as “war does not stop on Christmas Day”, according to the UN’s most senior humanitarian representative in the country.
Denise Brown, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator led a convoy of aid to Kupiansk in the east of the country.
Saviano Abreu began by asking her what support the UN is providing on the frontline and elsewhere.
UN humanitarians carried out an emergency fact-finding mission to central Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital on Christmas Day, in response to fears of mass casualties after reports that three refugee camps were hit by Israeli airstrikes.
Doctors at the hospital, which was already at full capacity, reported seeing “100-plus patients” brought in with serious injuries in just the first 30 minutes, with around the same number of dead bodies.
Since the military incursion into Gaza, which followed deadly attacks by Hamas on Israel on the seventh of October, 135 staff members of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, are known to have been killed, the most ever in one incident.
Despite the danger and extremely difficult working conditions, UNRWA is continuing to assist those caught up in the fighting through no fault of their own. And the task is monumental. Nearly two million people have been displaced across the Strip, many forced to move repeatedly in search of safety.
