UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia on Thursday of weaponizing food and holding grain for millions of people around the world hostage to help accomplish what its invasion of Ukraine has not -- “to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people.”
DILI, East Timor (AP) — Former East Timor independence fighter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta was sworn in as president of Asia’s youngest country late Thursday as it marks its 20th anniversary of independence.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked the United States for the $40 billion aid package, which got final congressional approval on Thursday.
“This is a demonstration of strong leadership and a necessary contribution to our common defense of freedom,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the nation.
GENEVA (AP) — Britain and Rwanda on Thursday faced down two United Nations agencies that have sharply criticized their controversial plan in which Britain expects to send some asylum-seekers from the U.K.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan announced Thursday that it will donate 2 million euros ($2.1 million) to the International Atomic Energy Agency for its efforts to ensure the safety of Ukrainian nuclear facilities that have come under Russian attack.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — On a recent nighttime visit to a drugstore, a double-masked Kim Jong Un lamented the slow delivery of medicine. Separately, the North Korean leader's lieutenants have quarantined hundreds of thousands of suspected COVID-19 patients and urged people with mild symptoms to take willow leaf or honeysuckle tea.
GENEVA (AP) — The number of coronavirus deaths globally dropped by about 21% in the past week while cases rose in most parts of the world, according to the World Health Organization.
In its weekly report on the pandemic released Thursday, the U.N.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — With global hunger levels at a new high, the United Nations chief said Wednesday he is in “intense contacts” with Russia and other key countries and is “hopeful” of an agreement to allow the export of grain stored in Ukrainian ports and ensure Russian food and fertilizer have unrestricted access to global markets.
UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations chief said Wednesday he is in “intense contacts” with Russia and other countries to stop escalating global hunger exacerbated by the war in Ukraine by allowing the export of grain stored in Ukrainian ports and ensuring Russian food and fertilizers have unrestricted access to world markets.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Sweeping U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran have badly impacted the country’s economy and worsened the humanitarian situation in the Persian Gulf nation, a United Nations special envoy said Wednesday.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations on Wednesday significantly lowered its forecast for global economic growth this year from 4% to 3.1%, saying the war in Ukraine has triggered increasing global food and commodity prices and exacerbated inflationary pressures, upending the fragile recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations chief on Wednesday launched a five-point plan to jump-start broader use of renewable energies, hoping to revive world attention on climate change as the U.N.’s weather agency said greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification reached record highs last year.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Health authorities in Mozambique declared a polio outbreak Wednesday after confirming that a child in the country’s northeastern Tete province had been paralyzed by the disease.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Wednesday added hundreds of thousands of infections to its growing pandemic caseload but also said that a million people have already recovered from suspected COVID-19 just a week after disclosing an outbreak, a public health crisis it appears to be trying to manage in isolation as global experts express deep concern about dire consequences.
TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s nuclear regulator on Wednesday approved plans by the operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant to release its UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. special envoy for Iraq warned its political leaders Tuesday that “the streets are about to boil over” because of their deadlock and failure to address a host of issues, including the suffering of ordinary people and armed groups firing rockets with impunity.
GENEVA (AP) — The head of the World Health Organization said China’s extreme approach to containing the coronavirus is unsustainable because of the highly infectious nature of the omicron variant, but that it’s up to every country to decide what policy to pursue.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman said the Russian military was holding more than 3,000 civilians from Mariupol at another former penal colony near Olenivka in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — With just two weeks left in a two-month cease-fire in Yemen, the U.N. envoy to the war-torn country said Tuesday that talks with the government and Houthi rebels are going on right now and he hopes the truce will be extended.
CAIRO (AP) — An attempt by one of Libya’s rival prime ministers to seat his government in the capital of Tripoli triggered clashes Tuesday between competing militias, forcing the newly appointed premier to leave the city.
GENEVA (AP) — An expert group convened by the World Health Organization says there may be some benefit in giving a second booster dose of coronavirus vaccine to the most vulnerable people amid the continuing global spread of omicron and its subvariants.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The quick acceptance of Ukrainians fleeing Russia's aggression puts a spotlight on Europe's “double standard” for migrants, standing against its nonwelcome for people fleeing violence in Africa, the Mideast and elsewhere, the head of the world's largest humanitarian network said Monday.
SANAA, Yemen (AP) — The first commercial flight in six years took off from Yemen’s rebel-held capital on Monday, officials said, part of a fragile truce in the county’s grinding civil war.
The flight by national carrier Yemenia — also known as Yemen Airways — was bound for Jordan’s capital of Amman.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli police decided on Saturday to investigate the conduct of their officers who attacked the funeral of a slain Al Jazeera journalist, causing mourners to briefly drop the casket during the ceremony in Jerusalem.
KYIV, Ukraine — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said although Ukrainians are doing everything they can to drive out the Russians, “no one today can predict how long this war will last.”
“This will depend, unfortunately, not only on our people, who are already giving their maximum,” he said in his nightly video address to the nation.
TURKANA, Kenya (AP) — A top United Nations humanitarian official has raised concern about people going hungry in a remote part of northern Kenya, joining calls for the international community to commit more resources to address the wider region's drought crisis.
KYIV, Ukraine —Ukrainian officials say their forces took out another Russian ship in the Black Sea.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said late Thursday the Vsevolod Bobrov logistics ship was struck as it was trying to deliver an anti-aircraft system to Snake Island.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The war in Ukraine is a “child rights crisis” where education is under attack, nearly 100 youngsters have been killed in just the last month, and millions more have been forced to flee their homes, the U.N.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The first factory to produce COVID-19 vaccines in Africa says it has not received enough orders and may stop production within weeks, in what a senior World Health Organization official described Thursday as a “failure” in efforts to achieve vaccine equity.
GENEVA (AP) — The number of new coronavirus cases reported worldwide has continued to fall except in the Americas and Africa, the World Health Organization said in its latest assessment of the pandemic.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Vida Mehrannia is trying to save her husband’s life. Iran is scheduled to put him to death within nine days — by May 21.
To Iran, the 50-year-old Ahmad Reza Jalali is a spy for Israel.
KYIV, Ukraine — An adviser to the Mariupol mayor said Wednesday that Russian forces have blocked all evacuation routes out of the city.
The adviser, Petro Andriushchenko, said there were few apartment buildings fit to live in after the weeks of bombardment and very little food or drinking water.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, one of the satellite channel’s best-known reporters, was shot and killed on Wednesday while covering an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank.
CAIRO (AP) — A United Nations' pledging conference raised $33 million on Wednesday, far short of funds needed for a salvage operation of a decaying tanker full of oil moored off the coast of Yemen, a ship whose demise could cause an environmental disaster.
LONDON (AP) — Members of the World Health Organization’s European region have condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine, which could result in moving one of the agency’s offices out of Russia and suspending all meetings there until Moscow pulls its troops out of Ukraine.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — More than 90% of Great Barrier Reef coral surveyed this year was bleached in the fourth such mass event in seven years in the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, Australian government scientists said.
The frequency and duration of droughts will continue to increase due to human-caused climate change, with water scarcity already affecting billions of people across the world, the United Nations warned in a report Wednesday.
BEIJING (AP) — China on Wednesday defended sticking to its strict “zero-COVID” approach, calling critical remarks from the head of the World Health Organization “irresponsible.”
The response from the Foreign Ministry came after WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he had been discussing with Chinese experts the need for a different approach in light of new knowledge about the virus.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House emphatically approved a fresh $40 billion Ukraine aid package Tuesday as lawmakers beefed up President Joe Biden’s initial request, signaling a magnified, bipartisan commitment to thwart Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bloody three-month-old invasion.