Latest News

The United Nations Special Adviser on Yemen, Jamal Benomar, welcomed the lifting of the house arrest of the country’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and other Cabinet members as a “good gesture that may restore the missing confidence in the current political negotiations.”

In spite of logistical challenges facing the humanitarian response in Vanuatu, a nation that comprises over 80 islands, United Nations agencies continue to scale up their efforts to assist with priority needs including the provision of food, water and healthcare in the wake of the devastating cyclone that battered the country over the weekend.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has announced a scale-up in its support to Jordan and other countries in the Middle East affected by the humanitarian crisis in Syria that has entered its fifth year.

A culture of impunity continues to flourish inside Syria amid a conflict that has generated over four million refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead, the head of a United Nations-mandated Commission of Inquiry said today, urging the international community to step up efforts in bringing the four-year-long war to a close.

A researcher who describes his work as “a life project of teaching, research and dissemination of ideas” has won the 2015 United Nations Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction.

With reports slowly emerging about the damage wrought in Vanuatu, which suffered the brunt of Cyclone Pam that pummeled the South Pacific over the weekend, leaders from the region made a joint call today from a United Nations conference on disaster resilience for scaled-up storm recovery efforts, as well as durable partnerships that would help their countries strengthen capacities to deal with such extreme weather events.

Children and youth are a major part of community-level responses to disasters and must play an important role in risk reduction, United Nations officials said today in Sendai, Japan, with the head of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) challenging a gathering of youth representatives to demand that they be involved in processes that impact them.

Some nine million children have seen “death and suffering beyond their comprehension,” and protecting them and their communities is critical in the fight against Ebola in West Africa, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in a report released today.

The greater participation of women and girls in sports can help lift their involvement in society, fight gender stereotypes and accelerate progress towards gender parity, the head of the United Nations entity for gender equality and women’s empowerment declared today.

Twenty years ago in Beijing, countries signed on to a comprehensive global blueprint for gender equality and women’s empowerment, and achieving that goal remains “humanity’s biggest project,” according to senior United Nations official Lakshmi Puri.