UNHCR relieved shipwreck victims now safe More than 100 victims of a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea this week were later rescued by an aid group, a spokesperson from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Friday. UNHCR had previously reported that 146 people may have died or gone missing when their vessel began [...]

"If there is a conflict, leave it to Dag" became a popular phrase in the 1950s when the late Dag Hammarskjรถld was Secretary-General of the UN. Swedish historian and biographer Henrik Berggren, made the observation at UN Headquarters while discussing his recently published book on "the man and the diplomat". During his years as UN [...]

There has been a "dramatic increase" in food insecurity around the world the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday. FAO was one of the UN agencies contributing to a new report on food crises, along with the European Union (EU), the United States development agency USAID, and others. Around 108 million people were [...]

In terms of civil liberties for people with autism, the international community overall is living in "the Dark Ages," an autism expert said at the UN on Friday. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen is the director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. He was at UN Headquarters for an event marking World Autism [...]

Scars of rape last "longer than the war": UN Special Representative Addressing sexual violence in conflict is the "great moral challenge of our time," the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sexual Violence in Conflict has said. Zainab Hawa Bangura, who's stepping down from her post soon, was speaking at a panel discussion at UN Headquarters [...]

There is danger that one of the world's most protracted crises could be "partially forgotten" by the international community, a former senior UN official fears. Mark Bowden was speaking about the situation in Afghanistan, where civilian casualties reached a record high of more than 11,000 in 2016. Mr Bowden spent more than four years as Deputy [...]

The only way for women to receive equal rights is for them to "stand up" and "demand" them, a women's rights activist told a meeting at UN Headquarters this week. Zainab Salbi is the founder of Women for Women International, a non-profit organization that provides financial, interpersonal and educational aid to women survivors of injustice, [...]

UN official strongly condemns "heinous" terrorist attack in Iraq A suicide bombing in Iraq on Wednesday has been strongly condemned by the senior UN official in the country. Several people were killed in the terrorist attack which targeted a police checkpoint in southern Baghdad, the second such incident in just over a week. In a [...]

Listen to a bulletin of news and features from the United Nations, with Matthew Wells and Dianne Penn. In today's programme: The number of Syrian refugees now stands at 5 million, and their plight is intensifying says UNHCR…. And, the head of UN Peacekeeping tells us in his final interview that it's grown more efficient [...]

UN to conduct inquiry into deaths of DRC experts The United Nations has confirmed the deaths of two members of a Security Council expert group who had been missing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for more than two weeks. Michael Sharp and Zaida Catalán, accompanied by four Congolese nationals, were in the Kasaï [...]