New York

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22 (APP): Children were both seen and heard in the United Nations General Assembly on the World Children’s Day, during a celebration to commemorate 30 years since the adoption of a milestone treaty that protects their rights.

Pakistan was represented by Alyana Akram, daughter of Ambassador Munir Akram, at the ceremony that was among numerous events this year taking stock of progress achieved under the landmark Convention on the Rights of the Child.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22 (APP): Senior UN officials on Thursday ‘strongly’ condemned an attack that targeted vulnerable civilians, including elderly people, women and children on a camp for displaced people in Qah village in northwestern Syria.

At least 12 people were killed and hundreds injured in a missile attack on a crowded residential area in a camp for displaced people in Qah village of northwestern Idlib province, also injuring four humanitarian workers. The camp buildings and a nearby maternity hospital were damaged during the attack.

21 November 2019; AFP: An independent UN expert has apologised for misspeaking during a news conference in Geneva this week, correcting his claim that more than 100,000 children were being held in migration-related US detention.

AFP and a range of other media outlets were forced to retract their stories after it became clear that the expert had mistakenly presented four-year-old cumulative figures as if they were the current total number of migrant children in US detention.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 20 (APP): A key committee of the UN General Assembly Tuesday unanimously passed a Pakistan-sponsored resolution reaffirming the right to self-determination for peoples who are subjected to colonial, foreign and alien occupation.

Co-sponsored by 81 countries from all over the world, the resolution was adopted without a vote in the 193-member Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with Social, humanitarian and cultural issues.

THE UNITED NATIONS, November 20. /TASS/: Russia and China have coordinateed a new draft plan on settling the situation on the Korean Peninsula and are ready to present it to partners in the region, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov told reporters on Tuesday.

"We have just recently coordinated an updated version [of the settlement plan] with our Chinese friends," Morgulov said. "We plan to distribute this updated version among our partners. We are talking about a draft plan, and no details can be announced yet," he added.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — A white supremacist manifesto that appeared to be a copy of one linked to a man accused of attacking two mosques in New Zealand was circulated electronically at Syracuse University, campus law enforcement said Tuesday, adding to a string of racist episodes that have shaken the upstate New York campus.

Officials said the manifesto appeared to be copied from one written by the man accused of killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in March.

NEW YORK (AP) — Two jail guards responsible for monitoring Jeffrey Epstein the night he killed himself were sleeping and browsing the internet instead, according to an indictment released Tuesday charging the guards with lying on prison records to cover themselves.

The grand jury indictment provides a damning glimpse of safety lapses inside a high-security unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where Epstein had been awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

NEW YORK, Nov 19 (APP): US Democratic presidential candidates including frontrunners — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg — have strongly criticized an announcement by the Trump administration that the U.S. will no longer view controversial Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as violating international law.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 18 (APP): Despite big strides in improving the lives of children since 1989, many of the world’s poorest are being left behind, the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF warned Monday.

In a report marking the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF said poverty and marginalization continued to put the well-being of millions of young people at risk.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 17 (APP): Saving lives by improving road safety is one of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda’s objectives, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his message for the global day set aside for remembering the victims of traffic accidents.

Noting that more than 1.3 million people die in road accidents every year, he pointed out that more young people between the ages of 15 and 29 die from road crashes annually than from HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis or homicide.