ASMARA, Eritrea, Feb 10 2025 (IPS)* – At night, when the world lights up, large swathes of Africa remain cloaked in darkness—a stark reminder of the continent’s lack of reliable access to electricity.
Around 600 million Africans still lack reliable access to electricity, which is nearly half the continent’s population and more than 80 per cent of the global electricity access gap. Credit: Raphael Pouget / Climate Visuals Countdown via UNDP
This access is one of the key ingredients to accelerating the continent’s progress – powering homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses, towards unlocking the continent’s full potential.
(UN News)* — The civilian death toll in Sudan has surged dramatically, with at least 275 people killed between 31 January and 5 February, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, reported on Friday.[].
(Washington D.C., February 6, 2025) –The United States government’s decision to permit Lithium Americas to mine at Thacker Pass in Nevada violated Indigenous people’s rights, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU said in a report released today.
()* — Armed groups in Haiti are inflicting “unimaginable horrors” on children, turning their “bodies into battlegrounds”, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The agency’s spokesperson James Elder has just visited Port-au-Prince, the capital of the embattled Caribbean nation and has been speaking about what he experienced there.
Staggering abuse and neglect
“There has been a staggering 1,000 per cent rise in sexual violence against children in Haiti, which has turned their bodies into battlegrounds.
The 10-fold rise, recorded from 2023 to last year, comes as armed groups inflict unimaginable horrors on children.
NEW YORK, Feb 7 2025 (IPS)* –Even after Trump declared that he wanted to take back the Panama Canal, acquire Greenland by force, if necessary, and rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, I could not, like many others, imagine that his madness could reach a new unfathomable height.
Much of Gaza has been destroyed in the current conflict. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba, February 2025
At his news conference on February 4, with Prime Minister Netanyahu standing beside him, sporting a sinister grin, Trump announced that the US would take over Gaza, ship the Palestinians like sheep to Jordan and Egypt, build such a mesmerizing Riviera along the Mediterranean Sea and, voilà, bring peace and prosperity to the whole region.
( UN News)* — Some 230 million girls in more than 90 countries – predominantly in Africa and Asia – have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) and can suffer lifelong physical, emotional and psychological scars, an issue that the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency has been tackling with the support of the international community including the United States.
Zeinaba Mahr Aouad, a 24-year-old woman from Djibouti, remembers the day when, as a ten-year-old, an unexpected visitor came to her house: “She had a syringe, a razor blade and bandages.”
The woman was there to carry out a brutal, unnecessary and – since 1995 in the Horn of Africa country – illegal operation known as female genital mutilation, which involves sewing up a girl’s vagina and cutting out her clitoris.
Two weeks after Goma was captured by the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels, many families who lost their loved ones are begging for peace. Some of them have had no news of their loved ones, while others have already identified their relatives, civilians and soldiers, who died during the fighting in the city.
M23 fighters at border between Rwanda and DRC. At least 2,800 people have died in renewed hostilities. Credit: Ajabu Adolphe/IPS
GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo, Feb 6 2025 (IPS)* – Zawadi Delphine is a soldier’s wife and mother of three. She and her family live in Camp Katindo, east of the city of Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu.
US president, Donald Trump, on 4 February 2025, announced his plan for the Middle East: the US to take control of Gaza, 2 million Palestinians to be evacuated to Egypt and Jordan, and to build in Gaza an international touristic resort… World’s human rights organisations stated that the plan violates international laws and amounts to “ethnic cleansing“...
On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Declaration setting out, for the first time, the fundamental human rights that should to be universally protected.
(Washington, DC) – US President Donald Trump’s statement on February 4, 2025, that the United States would “take over” the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian population there would need to be moved out would, if implemented, amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, Human Rights Watch on 5 February 2025 said.
(UN News)* —UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged the international community to continue pushing for a full ceasefire and the release of all hostages in Gaza, and “to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” in the enclave, in a speech in New York on Wednesday [].
UN News | Children in Gaza stand on debris from a destroyed building.
The UN chief spoke in the wake of comments made by United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday night in the White House, who suggested the US could “take over” the Gaza Strip, calling on Palestinians living there to leave.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 