New York

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, voted to unionize on Friday, marking the first successful U.S. organizing effort in the retail giant’s history and handing an unexpected win to a nascent group that fueled the union drive.

Warehouse workers cast 2,654 votes in favor of a union, giving the fledgling Amazon Labor Union enough support to pull off a victory. According to the National Labor Relations Board, which is overseeing the process, 2,131 workers rejected the union bid.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 31 (APP): The United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), known as MONUSCO, has secured the crash site of the ill-fated UN helicopter in which six Pakistani peacekeepers were martyred, and begun a preliminary investigation into the incident, a UN spokesman said Thursday.

One Russian and one Serbian peacekeepers also died in the crash on Tuesday.

UNITED NATIONS, March 31 (NNN-Xinhua) — As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, 23 countries – home to around 405 million schoolchildren – are yet to fully reopen schools, with many schoolchildren at risk of dropping out, said the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Over the past two years, nearly 147 million children missed more than half of their in-person schooling, amounting to 2 trillion hours of lost learning, UNICEF said in a report called “Are children really learning?”

NEW YORK, Mar 30 (APP): The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent watchdog body, Wednesday called on India to immediately reverse their decision to block Rana Ayyub, a prominent Indian investigative journalist, from traveling outside the country, saying the action was “unjustified.”

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 27 (APP): United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has denounced attacks on civilian facilities in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

“The Secretary-General is deeply concerned about reports of ongoing airstrikes
in Hudaydah city and the targeting of Hudaydah’s ports, which provide a critical humanitarian lifeline for the Yemeni population,” the UN chief’s spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said a statement issued on Saturday in New York.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 26 (APP): UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Saturday called for making “peace with nature” in his message for Earth Hour, commemorated annually on the last Saturday of March.

“Without nature’s help, we cannot thrive or even survive on this planet Earth”, the UN chief said, noting that climate disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution threaten lives, jobs and health the world over.

“It’s time to re-evaluate and reset our relationship with nature,” he said, describing 2022 as “a year to change course.”

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 26 (APP): Around 13 million people in Ukraine are unable to flee hostilities due to blockades and damaged roads while the high number of civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure points to possible war crimes in the ongoing Russian military offensive, United Nations agencies have warned.

The conflict in Ukraine has so far displaced at least 10 million people, over 3.7 million of whom have sought refuge abroad, according to the UN.

NEW YORK, March 26. /TASS/: The United States is set to impose sanctions against Russian companies who provide goods and services to the Russian military and intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the paper’s sources, the new sanctions may be announced early next week.

Among the companies that may be affected are equipment makers Sertal and Serniya Engineering. The US authorities also mull sanctions against microelectronics company NII Vektor, chipmaker JSC Mikron and supercomputer company T-Platforms.

NEW YORK, March 26 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Federal Reserve officials' hint of a more aggressive hike of the benchmark interest rate in recent days pushed up key Treasury yields and concerns over a possible economic recession in 2023 or later.

John C. Williams, president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, on Friday joined a chorus of a number of other central bankers saying he is open to raising interest rates by 50 basis points (bps) at some point.

NEW YORK (AP) — Ukraine, which has waged a staunch defense against Russian invasion, says it has pioneered a new source of financial support: People around the world who have donated millions of dollars directly to its war effort via cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.