United Nations

Bumping elbows at the United Nations By Evelyn Leopold The United Nations has shut down most of its meetings and all of its conferences, but the world body in New York stays open. There are peacekeeping missions to follow, conflicts around the world and the plight of the millions of… »

As reported by Genevieve Balance-Kupang In solidarity with the global celebration of the UN World Interfaith Harmony Week, UniHarmony Partners Manila held a week-long series of activities in line with the theme of interreligious dialogue towards harmony. Established in 2012, UniHarmony Partners Manila was formed to implement the United Nations… »

The start of the New Year finds the world facing four looming threats to human progress: surging geopolitical tensions, the climate crisis, global mistrust and the downsides of technology, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday. Global tensions mounting For the Secretary-General, global tensions are at their highest level in years, making the… »

By Thalif Deen The United States and 18 other UN member states have come under fire for denying a woman’s legitimate right to “bodily autonomy”—the right to self-governance over one’s own body without coercion or external pressure. The Executive Director of Women’s March Global, Uma Mishra-Newbery, told… »

In the wake of an Iranian ballistic missile attack on air bases which house US forces in Iraq, the UN Secretary-General said on Wednesday that he would “continue his active engagement” to de-escalate tensions and avert full-scale war. In a statement released by his Spokesperson, António Guterres re-iterated the “passionate appeal for… »

By Nayema Nusrat  “Right now, I don’t want to get married. I have a long life and a dream in front of me”, a 14-year-old young girl from Bangladesh told her parents as she was just not ready to get married. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG… »

By Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. “We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long. We are approaching a reckoning. This is the point, as the poet W. B. Yeats warned, when things fall apart and… »

Despite global progress in tackling poverty, hunger and disease, a “new generation of inequalities” indicates that many societies are not working as they should, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) argues in its latest report released on Monday [9 December 2019].  The 2019 Human Development Report (HDR) states that just… »

By Bryan Dyne The United Nations Environment Program issued its tenth Emissions Gap Report yesterday, which highlighted the stark failure of the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions and halt global warming. Even if countries hold themselves to their emissions pledges from four years ago, the report warns… »

This week Swedish prosecutors dropped an investigation into sexual assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, stemming from 2010. Assange, who has always denied the allegations, took refuge inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden on the charges. British authorities dragged him… »