News headlines in April 2024, page 3

The UN’s top humanitarian official in South Sudan has urged the government to lift newly imposed taxes and charges that are causing aid deliveries to be suspended, affecting tens of thousands of people.

An increase in civilian casualties caused by intensifying attacks from the Russian armed forces against Ukraine’s electric power infrastructure and railway system calls for concern, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said on Monday.

UN Security Council members on Saturday called on the warring parties in Sudan to immediately halt the military build-up and take steps to de-escalate the situation in El Fasher, the provincial capital of North Darfur.

HAVANA, Apr 26 (IPS) - Just to obtain a good fertilizer it was worth building a biodigester, says Cuban farmer Alexis García, who proudly shows the vegetables in his family's garden, as well as the wide variety of fruit trees that have benefited from biol, the end product of biogas technology.

KATHMANDU, Nepal & SIKKIM, India, Apr 26 (IPS) - Climate change-induced flooding has devastated the lives of people living on the Indian and Nepalese sides of the Hindu Kush Himalaya. Although the floods have destroyed their lives and livelihoods, as this cross-border collaboration narrates, neither community has received any substantial compensation.For the last three years, Sambhunath Guragain has been waking up every morning to a view he doesn't want to see: discarded agricultural land where he and his family used to grow food, including rice, but the flood in 2021 changed everything.

COTONOU/BENIN, Apr 26 (IPS) - A group of young girls aged between 15 and 17 sit tight, following attentively a lesson being taught by a Mualim (Islamic teacher) in a makeshift madrassah (Qur’anic school) located in one of the impoverished townships of Benin’s economic capital, Cotonou. They arrived in Benin recently, fleeing poverty, hunger, climate change, and rising insecurity in their home country, Niger, in the aftermath of the military coup that toppled democratically-elected president Mohamed Bazoum.

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, Apr 26 (IPS) - As we pass 200 days of war, the population of northern Gaza is teetering on the brink of mass starvation. Oxfam analysis found that the 300,000 people in northern Gaza had been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories per day from January to March—less than a single can of beans, and well below the recommended daily intake of 2,100 calories.

BONN, Germany, Apr 26 (IPS) - In December 2022, the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) saw governments worldwide unite behind a set of ambitious targets aimed at addressing biodiversity loss and restoring natural ecosystems, through the Global Biodiversity Framework – known now as the Biodiversity Plan.

Bassem Al-Habal carried a large bag of flour provided by the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, inside one of the shelters in the city of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, part of his daily journey to find food and water for his family while overcoming displacement, bombardment and the challenges of being deaf and mute in a war zone.

Following the installation of a transitional council in Haiti, seven countries officially notified the UN Secretary-General on Friday of their intention to contribute personnel to the Security Council-backed support mission for the crisis-wracked Caribbean nation.