(UN News)* —Two years since Sudan’s brutal conflict began, UN agencies warned that famine is spreading and civilians of all ages continue to suffer shocking abuse, including rape and gang rape.
“With no viable peace in sight, the Sudanese are trapped in a humanitarian crisis of industrial proportions,” said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN aid coordination office, OCHA.
“Two out of three people need aid, that’s 30 million people…This, of course, demands a massive ramp-up of international support; what we see instead is donors pulling back funding across the world.”
(Washington, DC) –The governments of the United States and El Salvador have subjected more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention, Human Rights Watch said today [11 April 2025].
(UN News)* —Sexual violence against children in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has reached staggering proportions, with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reporting thousands of new cases in just two months – evidence that it’s being used as a systemic weapon of war and deliberate terror tactic.
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 11 2025 (IPS)* –As the Trump administration’s hostility towards the United Nations and other international organizations keeps growing, a New York Times columnist last week proposed what he frivolously described as “something a little incendiary”.
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Credit: John Birch Society
Maybe Trump could follow up on his non-appointment of Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the United Nations—who has been virulently anti-UN—by withdrawing the US from the United Nations entirely.
()* — As governments and global markets struggle to deal with the deep concerns and disruptions caused by volatility over trade tariffs, Rebeca Grynspan, the head of the UN trade and development agency (UNCTAD), told UN News on Thursday that the poorest countries – whose activities have a negligible effect on trade deficits – should be exempt.
Ms. Grynspan was speaking in the wake of growing UN concern at the effect on-going uncertainty could have on the most vulnerable developing economies.
On Tuesday , the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, stated that “trade wars are extremely negative,” and warned that the impact of tariffs could be “devastating.”
UPPER NILE STATE, South Sudan, 9 April 2025 – Mary Kak is threading beads onto a string, making jewellery she hopes to later sell at a marketplace in Renk, a border town in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State.
“The beads we make here are sold and we earn money from it, but the most important thing is information and knowledge sharing on violence and other dangers,” she explained at a safe space for women and girls run by UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
NAIROBI, Apr 10 2025 (IPS)* – Animal scientist Lindiwe Majele Sibanda became what her grandmother earnestly prayed for she was growing up on a farm in southern Zimbabwe.
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Professor Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CGIAR partnerships chair. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
Majele Sibanda, an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria, is a practicing livestock farmer and a successful one at that. She is raising pedigree and indigenous cattle as well as hardy Matabele goats.
“Livestock is livelihood,” Majele Sibanda says, speaking to IPS at CGIAR Science Week, responding to the growing concerns about livestock farming as an environmental threat.
(Nairobi) – South Sudan’s use of improvised air-dropped incendiary weapons has killed and horrifically burned dozens of people, including children, and destroyed civilian infrastructure in Upper Nile state, Human Rights Watch on 9 April 2025 said.
(UN News)* —Hunger in South Sudan’s northeast has reached a critical tipping point, with nearly 7.7 million people facing severe food insecurity as conflict escalates, the UN’s emergency food relief agency warned on Wednesday .
The situation is especially dire for returnees fleeing violence in Sudan, who now account for nearly half of those experiencing catastrophic hunger levels.
The influx of over 1.1 million displaced people into already fragile communities has overwhelmed resources and relief efforts, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
A leaked paper reveals that Germany’s conservative political parties, the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), want to add a clause to Germany’s Nationality Law to allow the country to revoke German nationality from dual nationals if they are deemed “supporters of terrorism, antisemites and extremists.”