
More than 825,000 people who were displaced within Syria have returned to their areas of origin since December, the UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, said on Thursday.

As the clock ticks toward 2030, parliamentarians gathered at UN Headquarters in New York on Thursday to assess the state of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – and the verdict was anything but unanimous.

Cacao, sugar and butter are part of the recipe for chocolate, more specifically, Peace by Chocolate – a company started by the Hadhad family, who fled to Canada long before the brutal 13-year-long war in Syria came to a close last December.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 14 (IPS) - When some of the world’s “authoritarian and repressive regimes” were elected as members of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) --including Cuba, China, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -- a US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher infamously remarked: “The inmates have taken over the asylum, I don’t plan to give the lunatics any more American tax dollars to play with.”

Feb 13 (IPS) - The climate crisis is severely endangering human well-being. While the climate security nexus is omnipresent in national security strategies and on international institutions’ agendas, political responses remain insufficient and are often problematic. Among other issues, related policies often struggle with siloization or a focus on symptoms instead of root causes.
Read the full story, “Human Insecurity from Climate Change on Vanuatu and Guam”, on globalissues.org →

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 13 (IPS) - The Trump administration’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the US government’s primary channel for humanitarian aid and disaster relief, is expected to have a devastating impact on the world’s developing nations.
The 2025 Budget Request, under the former Biden administration, amounted to a staggering $58.8 billion in US foreign aid for this year.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Thursday issued a stark warning over escalating violence in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where hundreds of civilians have been killed and tens of thousands displaced as M23 rebels continue to attack and seize control of towns and villages.

As M23 rebels continue to gain ground in South Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country’s top UN humanitarian official has told UN News that increasing “complexity and needs” are fuelling a crisis which had already left more than a million people displaced before the latest surge in fighting.

The UN is racing against time to expand humanitarian relief and prepare for the monumental task of rebuilding Gaza, as a fragile ceasefire holds but tensions loom over a potential resumption of fighting.