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UNITED NATIONS, Oct 04 (APP): Pakistan Thursday reaffirmed its commitment to eradicate drug-abuse from its society and back global efforts for combating narcotics-smuggling and transnational organized crime, but voiced concern over the moves in some countries to legalize the use of illicit drugs.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Attorney General William Barr and other U.S., U.K. and Australian officials are pressing Facebook to give authorities a way to read encrypted messages sent by ordinary users, re-igniting tensions between tech companies and law enforcement.

Facebook’s WhatsApp already uses so-called end-to-end encryption, which locks up messages so that even Facebook can’t read their contents. Facebook plans to extend that protection to Messenger and Instagram Direct.

3 Oct 2019; MEMO: South Africa’s Ambassador to the UN Jerry Matjila has criticised the UN for not implementing any of its 72 resolutions on Palestine since 1948.

Matjila, president of the Security Council for October, made his remarks to Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper about the international community’s failure to help the Palestinian people achieve their aspirations for independence and freedom.

NEW YORK, Oct 3 (APP): An influential American newspaper Friday characterized as “absurd” the claim by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that revocation of occupied Kashmir’s special status meant that the people there, have got equal rights with other Indians, pointing out that the disputed state was “essentially under martial law.”

2 Oct 2019; MEMO: Before leaving New York last week, French President Emmanuel Macron made a failed last-minute push to get US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to speak on the sidelines of the annual UN gathering of world leaders, according to several sources familiar with the situation, Reuters reports.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- President of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Tijjani Muhammad-Bande on Tuesday urged member states to strengthen women's political participation, as only eight percent of speakers on behalf of member states had been women at the just-concluded the General Debate of the UNGA.

It was "not a good figure, especially in relation to our commitment to gender equality," he told reporters, adding that he would keep urging member states to allow for the broadest participation and "unlock obstacles to the participation of women in politics."

NEW YORK (AP) — Erin Brockovich, who has some experience in revealing disturbing secrets, knows what she would say to the government whistleblower at the heart of allegations that President Donald Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival Joe Biden.

“I would say, ‘You are obviously a person of integrity and you take it seriously when you hear about wrongdoing,‘” Brockovich, the environmental and consumer activist, said in a recent telephone interview. “The name ‘whistleblower’ gets a bad connotation, and I’ve never understood that.”

NEW YORK, Oct. 01 (APP): Azad Kashmir President Masood Khan has warned that a deteriorating security situation in the disputed Kashmir region had the potential to escalate into a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, and urged the U.N. and the world community to deal with the crisis.

In an interview with NEWSWEEK, a leading American weekly magazine, he described the situation at the Line-of-Control (LoC) as “volatile.”

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 30 (Xinhua) -- A representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Monday asked the United States to drop its hostile policy against Pyongyang.

The key to consolidating peace and stability and achieving development on the Korean Peninsula is in the full implementation of the DPRK-U.S. Joint Statement agreed and adopted at the historic DPRK-U.S. summit held in Singapore in June 2018, Kim Song, DPRK's UN ambassador, told the General Debate of the UN General Assembly.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — As Afghans await the results of a presidential election roiled by Taliban threats, the government used its platform at the U.N. General Assembly on Monday to tell the insurgents: “Join us in peace, or we will continue to fight.”

Afghanistan was not the only country sending a message: North Korea had one for the United States , saying it was up to Washington whether now-stalled nuclear negotiations “become a window of opportunity or an occasion that will hasten the crisis.”