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The Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has been tasked with reinvigorating an inclusive political process towards ending the crisis in the country, based on the aims set out in the 2012 Geneva Communiqué, which was adopted by the first international conference on the issue and has been endorsed by the UN security Council.

Actor and environmental activist Robert Redford paid his first visit to the United Nations Headquarters in New York this week to address the UN General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Climate Change, which aimed to energize multilateral cooperation on the issue ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris later this year. In the French capital, countries will discuss an agreement intended to succeed to the landmark Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It was 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, and world leaders were struggling to understand how they had been so taken by surprise by an economic shock that had struck their populations with the ferocity and suddenness of a natural disaster.

A young man wants to smoke a cigarette but does not have the money to buy a pack.

More than a billion people – one in five globally – lack electricity to light their homes or conduct business, according to a recent World Bank report. Nearly three billion rely on dangerous, polluting fuels – such as wood, charcoal and animal dung – to cook and heat their homes.

This is a critical year for development as countries hammer out a new, post-2015 development agenda. At the 13th Crime Congress, taking place in the Qatari capital of Doha - from 12 to 19 April 2015 - policymakers and experts from around the world have joined forces with the UN, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations to chart a new course for crime prevention and rule of law in support of sustainable development.