Children in Gaza and Zimbabwe desperately need help to ensure they have food, clean water and schooling, a senior United Nations official said on Monday. Dan Toole, director of emergency programmes for Unicef, said a shortage of donor cash was having a dramatic effect in the territories.
The United Nations refugee agency warned on Friday of a humanitarian disaster looming in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where more than 160Â 000 people have fled fighting and atrocities this year. Despite successful polls last year that chose Joseph Kabila as DRC’s first democratically elected president in more than 40 years, fears were growing of a return to war in North Kivu.
E Neville Isdell has come a long way from delivery boy in apartheid South Africa to chief executive of The Coca-Cola Company , and now, champion of environmental protection. Isdell took the stage alongside United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this week, leading the call for companies to do more to protect the environment.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday called on China, whose rapid industrial growth has turned it into one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, to do more to tackle climate change. ”China is one of the biggest emitters and should take part … in common efforts to address these climate-change issues,” Ban told journalists.
Recent floods in Asia and Britain and heatwaves in southern Europe show the world must be better prepared to cope with the impact of climate change, the United Nations’s top disaster-prevention official said on Wednesday. ”We cannot wait to be taken by surprise,” said Salvano Briceno, director of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.
The United Nations health agency and the international Red Cross warned on Friday that hospitals in the Gaza Strip were being drawn into the fighting there and were fast becoming overwhelmed by the number of wounded. ”Shots were fired inside or around four hospitals in Gaza,” World Health Organisation spokesperson Fadela Chaib said.
South African Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu called on Wednesday on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to ensure that violations of human rights and humanitarian law in their region were punished. In a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, he also called for an international investigation of the Israeli shelling of the town of Beit Hanoun in Gaza last November.
Up to 400 child soldiers who had fought with the Islamic Courts Union have been discovered in Mogadishu by government forces, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Friday. They were found during an operation in the trouble-torn capital where the government and African Union forces are struggling to quell the remnants of an Islamic group.
A group of United Nations human rights experts on Wednesday began examining the situation in the strife-torn Sudanese region of Darfur, under the terms of a resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council, a UN source said. The group is due to meet Sudanese government representatives on Thursday.
The United Nations Children’s Fund urged Western donors on Tuesday to put aside politics and back its health, nutrition and education projects in Zimbabwe, where nearly one in three children is stunted by malnutrition. Only ,6-million has been received towards an appeal of ,8-million launched six months ago, the agency said.
The United Nations human rights office on Friday accused Sudanese security forces of killing more than 100 people in indiscriminate machine-gun attacks on villages in South Darfur over a three-month period. At least 200Â 000 people have been killed and more than two million displaced since 2003 in an ethnic and political conflict.
The United Nations human rights chief on Friday said recent air raids by Sudanese forces on at least five Darfur villages appeared to be ”indiscriminate and disproportionate”, and violated international law. The attacks between April 19 and 29 have already been condemned by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, although Khartoum says they never took place.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter said on Wednesday that he had no doubts that the 2010 Soccer World Cup will take place in South Africa short of a natural disaster. ”I have no doubts, not one single doubt,” Blatter said, adding that he would publicly proclaim the world governing body’s confidence in South Africa’s ability to organise the event at Fifa’s congress from May 29.
International aid agencies reported scenes of chaos in Somalia on Tuesday as columns of people fled fierce fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, swelling the ranks of the 321 000 displaced since February. A United Nations refugee agency staffer reported a ”growing scene of chaos” on a main road out of Mogadishu.
A humanitarian catastrophe is looming in Somalia unless heavy fighting subsides and access for relief aid is opened up, a United Nations official said on Thursday. ”Unless something is done, the humanitarian crisis is going to turn into a catastrophe very soon,” Eric Laroche, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Somalia, told journalists.
Global trade growth will slow slightly in 2007 to 6% as risks in financial and property markets and large commercial imbalances weigh on the global economy, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) said on Thursday. In their first forecast for 2007, WTO economists said that the outlook for trade was based on expectations that the world economy would expand about 3% this year.
Up to 400 people, far more than previously feared, were killed in Chad during a cross-border attack by Sudanese Janjaweed militia about 10 days ago, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday. The estimated toll followed a visit to the remote area on Sunday by a group of United Nations agencies which described the scene there as ”apocalyptic”.
The United Nations human rights chief, Louise Arbour, called on Friday for the Sudanese government to fully investigate rapes reportedly carried out by soldiers in several villages in Darfur in December. The victims were as young as 13 years old and at least two pregnant women were targeted in the violence.
The Central African Republic faces a mounting humanitarian disaster, with the lives of a quarter of its people disrupted by civil and regional warfare, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Wednesday. It said the north of the country is engulfed in a growing conflict between government forces and various rebel groups.
The Central African Republic faces a mounting humanitarian disaster, with the lives of a quarter of its people disrupted by civil and regional warfare, the United Nations children agency said on Wednesday. Unicef said the north of the country is engulfed in a growing conflict between government forces and rebel groups.
A new -million prize for good leadership could spur African heads of state to govern better, said former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, who will head the committee making the award. The Mo Ibrahim Prize would make African rulers more conscious of their records on human rights and democracy, said Annan.
The United Nations’s top human rights body on Friday kept up the pressure on Sudan over Darfur, but stopped short of explicitly blaming Khartoum for widespread killings and rape in the vast western region. The Human Rights Council asked a group of six of its special investigators on human rights violations to work with Sudan on implementingrecommendations.
At least 29 people were killed and 71 reported missing after knife-wielding smugglers forced about 450 Somali and Ethiopian migrants into the sea off Yemen, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said on Monday. The incident occurred last Thursday along a remote stretch of coastline.
European Union states called on Wednesday for closer international surveillance of human rights in Darfur after a United Nations-commissioned report largely blamed the Sudanese government for continuing war crimes there. In a proposal to the UN Human Rights Council, they said a team of experts should be formed to keep pressure on Khartoum.
Meningitis has killed about 1 670 people this year in a string of African countries despite an extensive vaccination campaign, the World Health Organisation said on Friday. The deaths amount to more than a tenth of the 15 595 cases reported in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda.
Africa’s leading cotton-producing countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad — are upset over Washington’s continued failure to implement the commitments it undertook at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Hong Kong ministerial meeting in 2005 to address the distortions caused by the United States subsidies in the global cotton trade.
Sudan on Tuesday rejected as invalid the findings of a United Nations human rights mission that accused Khartoum of orchestrating and taking part in gross violations in Darfur. Sudan’s Justice Minister Mohamed Ali Elmardi also told the UN’s Human Rights Council, which had dispatched the mission, that the humanitarian situation in Sudan’s vast western region was ”much more stable now”.
The United Nations copyright agency saw a 15% increase in ”cybersquatting” complaints last year. The World Intellectual Property Organisation, which handles arbitration for more than half of the world’s cybersquatting disputes each year, registered 1 823 complaints in 2006.
A United Nations human rights mission on Monday accused Sudan’s government of orchestrating and taking part in war crimes in Darfur and called for urgent international action. The UN mission, led by Nobel peace prize laureate Jody Williams, was dispatched by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate charges of widespread abuse in Sudan’s vast western region.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will open a three-week session on Monday with member states and top officials smarting from Sudan’s rebuffing a mission to assess the situation in strife-torn Darfur. The fledgling and divided assembly, which replaced the largely discredited commission in 2006, is struggling to build up its monitoring rules by a mid-year deadline.
The flowing, elegant lines and even the name of the Russo-Baltique Impression appearing at the Geneva Motor Show on Thursday for the first time marked a distinct shift in gear for Russia’s ramshackle old motor industry. The grandiose new coupé unashamedly harks back to the elitist luxury of the tsars.
A motorist’s trip to the filling station is likely to be a complex business soon if the green marketing promises at the Geneva Motor Show, which opens on Thursday, are anything to go by. Petrol, diesel and its bio versions; ethanol, either pure or in differing blends with petrol; possibly liquid hydrogen; and an electric socket are all candidate fuel sources.