Articles

Communities are still reeling from the effects of the typhoon, which made landfall in no less than nine places across an area the size of Austria, killing some 500 people. Relief teams have compared Rai to Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, which killed more than 6,000 people and left four million homeless. “It just ripped across an area that is enormous, razing houses to the ground,” said Brenda Barton, Country Director for the World Food Programme (WFP). She said she had seen “no building that was...

Despite travel bans and other COVID-19 restrictions, the small team at Viet Nam’s wildlife forensic lab has been bolstering police efforts to crack down on illegal trafficking, with support from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The limited research lab worked on almost 250 criminal cases last year, representing hundreds of individual samples from high-profile cases related to rhino horns, pangolin scales, elephant ivory, big cats, fish, bear parts, turtles and lion bones. Lab...

Ten months since the military takeover in February 2021, food insecurity in Myanmar has risen sharply, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday. According to the agency, the rise is driven by the ongoing political crisis, poverty, displacement, and the economic fallout from COVID-19. Needs are now widespread, from areas affected by conflict in border regions where humanitarian action has been focused for years, to impoverished urban areas where families have seen jobs vanish...

The UN and partners launched a more than $5 billion funding appeal for Afghanistan on Tuesday, in the hope of shoring up collapsing basic services there, which have left 22 million in need of assistance inside the country, and 5.7 million people requiring help beyond its borders. Speaking in Geneva, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said that $4.4 billion was needed for the Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan alone, “to pay direct” to health workers and others, not the de...

Just two days ago, the United Nations launched its largest-ever humanitarian appeal for a single country, requiring more than $5 billion this year. Speaking to journalists in New York, the UN chief said the scale of the appeal “reflects the scale of the despair.” “Babies being sold to feed their siblings. Freezing health facilities overflowing with malnourished children. People burning their possessions to keep warm. Livelihoods across the country have been lost.” Currently, more than...

Iran must halt the looming execution of juvenile offender Hossein Shahbazi, four experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Thursday. Mr. Shahbazi, now 20, was 17 when he was arrested for fatally stabbing a classmate during a fight involving four people. He was scheduled to be executed on 5 January, which was temporarily halted. Uphold international law The experts said the court had relied in part on confessions reportedly obtained under torture and ill treatment...

At least three people have died in Tonga following the massive volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami wave that hit over the weekend. Homes and other buildings across the archipelago have suffered major damage. Islands covered in ash, dozens of homes destroyed According to a Tongan Government press release on Tuesday, the three fatalities are a British national, and two Tongan nationals. The UN World Health Organization, WHO, has reported that many people are still missing, whilst...

In total, about 84,000 people, more than 80 per cent of the population of the South Pacific Kingdom, have been affected by the disaster. Besides the three fatalities reported earlier in the week, no further deaths have been confirmed. In an update released on Thursday, OCHA confirms that the whole economically vital agricultural sector, including crops, livestock and fisheries, have suffered substantially. The agency is particularly concerned with the effect of ashfall on crops along...

When a tsunami swept over much of Tonga last weekend, Joseph Sikulu, a Tongan national, was in Sydney, Australia, exiled from home by strict COVID-19 travel restrictions. For three days, with most communications lines severed, his family and friends were cut off from the outside world, and Mr. Sikulu feared the worst. “I grew up here in Australia, but I spent my last few years living in Tonga as Pacific Director for climate action group 350.org. I came back to Australia at the beginning of...

As news coverage of the eruption and tsunami that hit Tonga starts to fade away, the United Nations Coordination Specialist in the country has a message to the outside world: Tonga’s people are going to need sustained support responding to a disaster of this scale. “The resources that we have in the ground are not enough”, Sione Hufanga explained, in an interview on Saturday morning local time, with UN News. “We ought to always look at the situation and ask, have we done enough, for this...