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) – 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).
(UN News)* — Amid the ongoing Israeli aid blockade and bombardment of Gaza, aid teams on warned that civilians trapped there face multiple daily challenges as relief supplies run critically low.
In a joint statement, the heads of the UN’s aid agencies warned that “we are witnessing acts of war in Gaza that show an utter disregard for human life,” with Israeli displacement orders forcing hundreds of thousands to flee – with nowhere safe to go.
(UN News)* — Unprecedented aid cuts are putting global progress to end maternal deaths at risk, three UN agencies warned in a new report that calls for greater investment in midwives and other health workers.
PORTLAND, USA, Apr 2 2025 (IPS)* – For most voters, to make America great again, as the 47th president has repeatedly pledged, meant to make the United States markedly superior globally.
The US administration’s actions, policies, program cuts and employee firings will not improve but likely only worsen America’s mediocre standing on virtually every major measure of societal wellbeing and development. Credit: Shutterstock.
However, the administration’s actions, policies and program cuts will not improve but only worsen the US’s mediocre standing among advanced countries.
(UN News)* — Amid reports of escalating settler violence in the West Bank, the UN rights office, OHCHR, briefed the Palestinian rights committee at UN Headquarters in New York, which also featured a screening of the Oscar winning documentary No Other Land.
UN Photo/Loey Felipe | Basel Adra (left), Palestinian film director, delivers testimony during a meeting of the Committee on the Exercise of Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.\
Ambassador Riyad Mansour of the Observer State of Palestine and Israeli Human Rights lawyer Netta Amar Schiff – who joined via videolink – also took part.
(UN News)* —The recent killings of 15 medical personnel and humanitarian aid workers in Gaza raise further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told the Security Council on Thursday .
UN Photo/Loey Felipe | Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, briefs the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.
Ambassadors met for an emergency session to discuss the escalation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Rights chief Volker Türk said he was pained to brief the Council once again on the “catastrophic suffering of people in Gaza,” noting that “the temporary relief of the ceasefire, which gave Palestinians a moment to breathe, has been shattered.”
As new findings show record-high hunger in Africa’s second-largest country, a severe funding crunch and insecurity hamper WFP’s efforts to reach tens of thousands of desperate people in the northeast.
Linda collects WFP food assistance in Bweremana, in northeastern DRC. She hopes it will tide her family by until harvest time. WFP/Benjamin Anguandia
— Linda L. is back home again. Back to a field full of weeds and a roof full of holes. Back to find once-precious livestock and other belongings long looted. Back to an uncertain future, as fierce fighting rages across northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo where she lives.
(UN News)* —UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed grave concern on Wednesday over the human toll resulting from the intensified hostilities in Gaza.
He condemned the reported killing of more than a thousand people, including women and children, since the collapse of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on 18 March.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 