United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. | Photo Credit: AP The United Nations is aware of the reports about Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s two-year jail sentence and that his party plans to appeal the verdict, a spokesperson for the U.N. chief Antonio Guterres has said. Farhan Haq, the Deputy Spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, was responding … Read more
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that major Himalayan rivers like the Indus, the Ganges, and Brahmaputra, all hugely important for India, could see reductions in their flows as glaciers and ice sheets recede over the coming decades due to global warming. “Glaciers are critical to all life on Earth. Over centuries, they carved out the … Read more
Bhupender Yadav, minister environment of India, speaks at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit | Photo Credit: PTI India on Sunday called as historic the U.N. climate summit in Egypt for securing an agreement on establishing a fund to address loss and damage due to climate change-induced disasters, saying “the world has waited far too long for this”. Making an intervention … Read more
The Taliban have detained two foreign journalists on assignment with the U.N. refugee agency and a number of its Afghan staff working in the country’s capital, UNHCR said Friday. The development in Kabul comes as President Joe Biden was expected to issue an executive order that would allow U.S. financial institutions to facilitate access to … Read more
President Joe Biden and China‘s Xi Jinping will hold their much-anticipated virtual summit on Monday evening as the two sides look to dial back tensions after a rough start to the US-China relationship since Biden took office earlier this year. The White House is setting low expectations for the video call between the leaders. Biden … Read more
President Joe Biden offered a public apology to a U.N. climate conference over his predecessor Donald Trump‘s move to pull the U.S. from the Paris accord. Biden was speaking in Glasgow, Scotland on Monday where world leaders were gathering to discuss implementing the agreement to contain global warming by mid-century. He said: “I shouldn’t apologize, … Read more
The World Health Organization said on Friday it was setting up a new group to trace the origins of the coronavirus, seeking to end what it called “political point scoring” that had hampered investigations. The inability of the WHO to say where and how the virus began spreading has fuelled tensions among its members, particularly … Read more
First, a remote provincial capital in Afghanistan’s southwest fell. The next day, it was a city in Afghanistan’s north. By Sunday, Taliban fighters had captured three more cities, including their biggest prize yet, the major provincial capital of Kunduz. All the while, the Afghan central government has acknowledged very little of it. In three days, … Read more
The speaker of Iran‘s parliament said on Sunday Tehran will never hand over images from inside of some Iranian nuclear sites to the U.N. nuclear watchdog as a monitoring agreement with the agency had expired, Iranian state media reported. “The agreement has expired … any of the information recorded will never be given to the … Read more
The top United Nations human rights official said on Monday she hoped to agree terms for a visit this year to China, including its Xinjiang region, to look into reports of serious violations against Muslim Uyghurs. It was the first time that Michelle Bachelet had publicly suggested a timeline for the visit, for which her … Read more