(UN News)* —The blistering early-summer heatwave that’s brought life-threatening temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere is a worrying sign of things to come, UN weather experts said on Tuesday .
Three days after Spain’s national weather service confirmed a record 46°C reading in the southern town of El Granado, there’s been little let-up in stifling day and night temperatures across the continent and beyond.
SEVILLE & BHUBANESWAR, Jul 2 2025 (IPS)* –While droughts creep in stealthily, their impacts are often more devastating and far-reaching than any other disaster.
In Nairobi’s Kibera, the largest urban informal settlement in Africa, girls and women wait their turn for the scarce water supply. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS
Inter-community conflict, extremist violence, and violence and injustice against vulnerable girls and women happen at the intersection of climate-induced droughts and drought-impoverished communities.
Five consecutive years of failed rain in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya brought the worst drought in seventy years to the Horn of Africa by 2023.
(UN News)* —Conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa in the last two years reportedly killed, maimed, or displaced over 12 million children across the region, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Alarmingly, 110 million children in the region live in countries affected by war, with homes, schools and health facilities damaged or destroyed in fighting.
(UN News)* — The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is deepening at an alarming rate, a senior United Nations official warned on Monday , as Israeli military operations and attacks on civilians seeking aid continue to exact a devastating toll on lives and infrastructure.
Briefing ambassadors in the Security Council, Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East Khaled Khiari said more than 1,000 Palestinians had been killed since mid-June alone, many of them while seeking aid.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 22 2022 (IPS)* – The ominous warnings keep coming non-stop: some of the world’s developing nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, are heading towards mass hunger and starvation.
Credit: World Food Programme (WFP)
The World Food Programme (WFP) warned last week that as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night while the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million — since 2019. A total of 50 million people in 45 countries are teetering on the edge of famine.
But in what seems like a cruel paradox the US Department of Agriculture estimates that a staggering $161 billion worth of food is dumped yearly into landfills in the United States.
The world’s richest 1% increased their wealth by more than $33.9 trillion in real terms since 2015, reveals new Oxfam analysis ahead of the world’s largest development financing talks in a decade, in Seville, Spain.
Almost a billion of us go to bed hungry every night. Not because there isn’t enough food for everyone, but because of the deep injustice in the way food is produced and accessed. | OXFAM.
This is more than enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over at the World Bank’s highest poverty line of $8.30 a day.
The wealth of just 3,000 billionaires has surged $6.5 trillion in real terms since 2015, and now comprises the equivalent of 14.6% of global GDP.
(UN News)* — A decade after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), development is facing serious headwinds – including what UN officials describe as a “silent crisis” of surging debt service payments in low-income countries.
After years of hiding under a false identity, a Syrian father in Jordan reclaims his name and secures a future for his family.
Outside of Salem Al-Ahmed’s tent in Lubban. Photo: Shaden Abdulrahman/NRC
Life in hiding
Salem Al-Ahmad* fled Syria in 2012, using his cousin’s name to escape arrest as a military deserter. Once in Jordan, he was able to register as an asylum seeker and obtain a Ministry of Interior card.
He settled in Al Lubban, west of Amman, where he married Buthainah, a fellow refugee. Together, they had five children: Tasneem, Nidal, Omar, Sinan, and Ameer, all registered under Salem’s assumed name.
(UN News)* — UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday [] reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, warning that the humanitarian crisis has reached “horrific proportions” and that the world must not let the suffering of Palestinians be overshadowed by other regional conflicts.
Speaking to reporters at UN Headquarters ahead of his departure to Spain for the International Conference on Financing for Development, the UN Secretary-General said that while the Israel-Iran conflict had dominated recent headlines, the plight of civilians in Gaza remained urgent and dire.
“Families have been displaced again and again – and are now confined to less than one-fifth of Gaza’s land,” he said.
“Even these shrinking spaces are under threat. Bombs are falling – on tents, on families, on those with nowhere left to run.”
(UN News)* — The first delivery earlier this week of urgently needed medical goods to enter Gaza in months will provide scant relief to the enclave’s people, who continue to be shot and killed in their search for food, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday [].
“Definitely, people get shot,” said Gaza-based medic Dr. Luca Pigozzi, WHO Emergency Medical Team Coordinator. “They are victim of blast injuries as well and bodily injuries.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 