On 19 August 2003, a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives to the United Nations headquarters in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, Iraq, and blew it up, killing 22 people – among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN mission in Iraq.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday condemned an air strike by pro-Yemini Government coalition forces, which killed scores of children who were on board a bus travelling through a busy market area in the northern province of Saada.
Despite a myriad of “long-neglected social, economic and development needs”, the Head of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on Wednesday said progress had been made towards recovery and stability in the battle-scarred country, and called for Iraqi political leaders to continue to “work for national reconciliation” through “inclusive” solutions.
At a joint press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed the ongoing talks between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as well as Japan’s renewed initiative of dialogue with the country.
It’s essential that Nagasaki’s devastation should “not be forgotten” now or in the future, if the threat of nuclear war is to be lifted, said the Director of the Japanese city’s Atomic Bomb Museum, ahead of a visit there on Thursday by the UN Secretary-General.
Following the magnitude 7 earthquake which rocked the Indonesian island of Lombok at the weekend, more than 130 aftershocks have been felt with some villages being turned into “ghost towns”, journalists at the UN in Geneva heard on Tuesday.
Over a year after cholera broke out in Yemen, killing more than 2,000 people, the disease is back and spreading fast in the Houthi-held port city of Hudaydah; a target of continued air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition to regain control of the city.
There was jubilation in the streets of South Sudan’s capital overnight on Sunday, as residents celebrated a new agreement that the top UN official in the country has described as “a big step forward” towards ending nearly five years of brutal conflict.
Calling 2017 “the first year in human history” that more new clean energy was added to the grid than new oil, gas and coal combined, Erik Solheim, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has told UN News that “we are on track” but “we really need to speed up”.
Protecting vulnerable people in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from the latest Ebola Virus outbreak is going to be “very, very complex”, given the huge logistical challenges and ongoing conflict there, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
