After six days of speeches from the UN General Assembly podium, one word rose above all others: peace. This final edition of The Takeaway distils the messages he said reverberated through the Assembly Hall and looks at where the 193-member body goes from here.
A new academic year is underway in many countries across the world, yet millions of children still attend schools where the water is unsafe to drink, toilets are unusable and there is nowhere to properly wash their hands.
UN Human Rights Council-appointed experts on Monday laid out a grim picture of the human cost of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a spotlight on civilians facing a third wartime winter as well as the intimidation of Russians who have fled abroad.
More than eight decades on, the UN General Assembly remains the place where the UN’s 193 Member States come together to debate the defining challenges of the day, from war and peace – to development, climate change and human rights.
People displaced by the renewed fighting in Yemen have described fleeing for their lives amid shelling and gunfire, aid agencies reported on Friday, while highlighting the dramatic increase in humanitarian needs in the country and in Djibouti, where thousands have sought shelter.
UN peacekeepers have increasingly been sent into places where there is no peace to keep – under resourced, outgunned and exposed to violence they are not equipped to counter. The Security Council meets this afternoon in New York to confront that problem, with Secretary-General…
The catastrophic flooding that swept away entire villages in northern Nepal could occur again in the country or elsewhere in the Himalayas due to climate change.
Renewed fighting in Yemen is deepening an already severe humanitarian crisis in a country where more than 12 million children depend on aid, after more than a decade of conflict.
Voluntary self-regulation by companies developing frontier artificial intelligence (AI) is “nowhere near sufficient” to address existing harms and prevent advanced autonomous AI models from circumventing human safeguards, UN human rights chief Volker Türk wrote on Monday.
Ola Ishtiwi sits with her children in front of the remains of her home in the Al-Tuffah neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City, a few metres away from a series of painted cement blocks Israel has placed to mark what has become known as the “yellow line”.
The ongoing war in Sudan took centre stage at the UN Human Rights Council on Monday where the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, led calls for an end to attacks on civilians in “markets, hospitals [and] fuel stations”.
The recent earthquake in Colombia could increase the risk of child recruitment by armed groups in Chocó and Valle del Cauca, where thousands of children remain out of school in areas already affected by conflict, the UN warned on Friday.
The killings in Kenscoff began late Sunday, when armed men descended on the farming community in the hills overlooking Haiti’s capital, setting homes ablaze and attacking residents. By Monday, bodies lay in the streets and survivors were searching for missing relatives.
The global funding crisis for humanitarian work is taking a growing toll on the most vulnerable children in Somalia, where some aid programmes and facilities have been forced to shut down.
As tensions triggered by the US-Iran war continue to ripple across the Middle East, the Security Council holds an open debate Thursday on Yemen, where escalating deadly military clashes are worsening an already fragile humanitarian situation amid fears that recent Houthi…
The UN Security Council is meeting on Monday at Ukraine’s request, following recent large-scale Russian attacks on Kyiv and elsewhere. At least one civilian was killed and more than a dozen wounded in an overnight strike on the capital on 19 July that also damaged homes and…
Flash floods have killed at least 26 people across eastern Afghanistan, including 23 in the mountainous province of Nuristan, where homes, markets and roads were swept away and search teams continued looking for people reported missing.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), UN health teams and partners are still racing to contain the rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak, despite ongoing insecurity in eastern areas where the virus has taken hold. As of 19 July, the DRC Government has recorded 2,423…
In a world of “parallel realities” where stark inequalities seemingly divide people and challenge the promise of multilateralism, the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to bring people together and help them achieve a better reality.
In war-torn Sudan, a deadly new cholera outbreak has already claimed more than 100 lives, heightening serious concerns for vulnerable communities including in besieged El-Obeid, where daily drone attacks have continued to hamper aid access.
Who is legally responsible when Artificial Intelligence causes harm? The issue took centre stage on Tuesday – day two of the first ever UN summit on AI governance, where leading experts warned of mounting evidence of human rights violations linked to the revolutionary technology.
UN chief António Guterres appealed on Monday for far-reaching, worldwide controls on Artificial Intelligence, as increasingly powerful AI chips that are designed for civilian use shift to the battlefield, where “killer robots” are already the norm.
Where children once trained as baseball players, families now sleep under tarpaulins. The stadium at Playa Grande, on Venezuela's central coast, has become an emergency shelter for people who lost their homes – or cannot safely return to them – after the deadly quakes that…
UN teams scrambled on Thursday in support of the international response to the devastating double earthquake disaster in Venezuela, where buildings lie flattened and people are likely still trapped in the capital, Caracas, and beyond.
After another deadly night of clashes in Lebanon, aid agencies issued a new alert for Gaza, where 265 Palestinian children have been killed since a ceasefire was announced in October 2025.
It’s 20 years to the day since the UN Human Rights Council began its work as the world’s principal forum tasked with promoting and defending fundamental rights everywhere, particularly the world’s most vulnerable people.