(UN News)* — UN Secretary-General António Guterres, during his visit to the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh, vowed to do everything in his power to prevent further hardship as drastic aid cuts threaten food supplies and other critical relief efforts.
(Stockholm, 10 March 2025) — Ukraine became the world’s largest importer of major arms in the period 2020–24, with its imports increasing nearly 100 times over compared with 2015–19.
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Photo: US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Alexander Cook
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European arms imports overall grew by 155 per cent between the same periods, as states responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and uncertainty over the future of US foreign policy.
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2025 (IPS)* –– With enough steel and concrete, the hospitals that have been smashed to bits in Gaza can be rebuilt.
But a construction plan paired with an army of bulldozers will not be enough to reconstruct the entirety of Gaza’s health care system, which, after many months of war, has been decimated by the Israeli military forces.
The Al Basma fertility clinic in Gaza City after an Israeli missile strike. December 2023. Credit: Mohammad Ajjour.
Children and their families are returning to their homes or the remains of their homes to check the status of their homes. (Photo: Alef Multimedia Company/Oxfam)
GENEVA, 13 March 2025 –Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities, according to a new report issued today by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
(UN News)* —The UN’s top relief official warned on Wednesday [that the global humanitarian system has reached breaking point, with funding cuts forcing life-or-death decisions over which aid programmes to sustain and which to shut down.
UNOCHA/Giles Clarke | Aid programmes in Yemen are already being forced to shut down due to lack of funding.
Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters at a briefing in New York that the current crisis was the most severe challenge to international humanitarian work since World War II.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Mar 11 2025 (IPS)* – NATO geopolitical strategy has now joined the ‘coalition’ of Western geoeconomic forces accelerating planetary heating, now led again by re-elected US President Donald Trump.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Industrial Revolution Economic development is typically associated with the spread of industrialisation over the last two centuries.
The Industrial Revolution involved greater energy use to increase productive capacities significantly.
Burning biomass and fossil fuels greatly expanded mechanical energy generation. The age of industry in the last two centuries has thus involved more hydrocarbon combustion to increase output.
Uneven development has also transformed population geography.
(UN News)* —Haiti is in freefall. Gangs are tightening their grip on the capital, violence is spreading, and “suffering permeates all social strata” in a nation teetering on the brink, according to the UN human rights office’s designated expert on the country, William O’Neill.
After his fourth visit to assess conditions on the ground, Mr. O’Neill briefed journalists at UN Headquarters in New York, describing a nation overwhelmed by pain and despair. “I hate to sound like a broken record,” he said, “but the situation is more dire each time I go”.
Despite the efforts of the Haitian National Police (PNH) and the Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission, the threat of the capital falling under full gang control looms larger than ever.
GAZA STRIP, Occupied Palestinian Territory, 10 March 2025 –Two weeks into her ninth month of pregnancy, Roozan Abu Jbarah hoped she would manage to give birth safely.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 