United Nations

The United Nations’ cultural agency recommended Thursday that Laos invite a monitoring mission to the historic city of Luang Prabang, a World Heritage Site where a nearby dam project on the Mekong River has raised concerns it could lose the coveted status. While the World Heritage Committee welcomed Laos’ efforts ...

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — Hundreds of thousands of people are being coerced in Southeast Asia by criminal gangs into carrying out online scams, often under the threat of torture, the United Nations said Tuesday. Many have been trafficked into working in online criminality and face serious violations such ...

The United Nations is convening this week a global gathering to try to map out the frontiers of artificial intelligence and to harness its potential for empowering humanity. The UN hopes to lay out a clear blueprint on the way forward for handling AI, as development ...

The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) surpassed 1.8 million in war-ravaged Myanmar on June 12, 2023, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Prior to the February 2021 military coup, the estimated number of internally displaced people was 328,000. They were in ...

A bold Cambodian plan to secure World Heritage status along their stretch of the Mekong, where the free-flowing river has sustained some of the world’s greatest biodiversity, could provide much-needed respite to a river in danger of dying from dams and over-exploitation, experts say. In Phnom Penh, the Environment ...

The United Nations Refugee Agency has urged countries in Southeast Asia to rescue some 200 Rohingya refugees whose unseaworthy boat has been reported drifting in the Andaman Sea. The UNCHR said in a statement on Thursday that it had received reports that the Rohingya had been ...

Following a week of discussions and events in Lisbon, Portugal, the UN Ocean Conference concluded on July 1, with governments and heads of state agreeing on a new political declaration to “Save Our Ocean”. Recognizing the past “collective failure” in the Conference’s final declaration, world leaders ...

The world is facing a cost-of-living crisis unseen in at least a generation, partly due to the Ukraine conflict, said a UN report on Wednesday. “The largest cost-of-living crisis of the 21st century has come when people and countries have a limited capacity to cope,” said ...

A United Nations envoy has called for Thailand’s support to prevent an escalation of the crisis in neighbouring Myanmar and welcomed assurances that refugees fleeing Myanmar military operations would be protected by the Thai government. Noeleen Heyzer, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy on Myanmar, made the ...

Urban poverty is on course to triple in Myanmar, pushing nearly half the population below the poverty line next year, the United Nations said on Wednesday, as the twin impact of the pandemic and a military coup threaten progress made in the past decade. The army ...