Africa

The Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on amending the rules on the invalidation of allowances in the market stability reserve, in order to increase long-term market liquidity and predictability within its emission trading system.

Unidentified gunmen on motorcycles swooped on a remote village on Friday, looting shops and setting houses ablaze.

Lugano schlägt ein starkes Thun am Ende mit 3:2. Die Berner Oberländer werden für eine starke Leistung nicht belohnt, während die Tessiner weiter ungeschlagen bleiben.

The authorities had justified the ban by saying online content was fuelling conflict, while the opposition had condemned it as an abuse of power.

That Girl Boina's post about why she had closed her beauty parlour struck a nerve with other small business owners.

Le Ballon d'Or est la plus prestigieuse récompense individuelle du football, et la soif de le remporter s'est accrue ces dernières années.

Les autorités estiment qu'une partie de ces recettes échappe encore au contrôle fiscal faute d'une traçabilité suffisante des ventes.

She was a close family member of the first victim, a man who had travelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rescue efforts are under way to find people trapped under the block, which was still under construction when it buckled.

8 November 1996
Graca Machel (left), former Minister of Education of Mozambique and the Secretary-General's appointed Expert on the Impact of Armed Conflict of Children, presents her report titled "The United Nations Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict of Children" to the Third Committee. Right is Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Mikiko Otani
TOKYO, Japan, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind. The United Nations was established with this commitment.

Children, while constituting nearly a third of humanity, are disproportionately affected by war. Yet, children’s voices are rarely heard and children are largely absent from peace processes.

From Machel to Security Council Resolution 2427

Graça Machel, thirty years ago, in her groundbreaking report “Impact of Armed Conflict on Children” already told the United Nations: “clearly the most effective way to protect children is to prevent the outbreak of armed conflicts”; “All people need to feel that they have a fair share in decision-making,” emphasizing that young people should be seen as “active participants in creating solutions, not just as victims”.

The need for child participation was emphasized in the Paris Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups (2007). While the participation of children received less attention in the original Machel report, it was highlighted as an important issue in the 10-year strategic review (2009), having an entire chapter devoted to “Children as Peacemakers”. This recognition was followed by Security Council resolution 2427 (2018), which called on Member States and the UN system “to ensure that the views of children are taken into account … throughout the conflict cycle”, and to fully incorporate and prioritize “empowerment” of children in the post-conflict recovery, reconstruction and peacebuilding processes, taking into consideration the views of children.

Participation: a child’s right and a driver of peace

Participation is a right of the child under the most widely ratified Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Children must be heard and have their views given due weight in all matters that affect them, including in the conflict context. Children’s participation is critical for conflict prevention, their protection in the conflict, recovery, reintegration and reparation. Children can also play an important role in bringing divided, torn communities together, as catalysts for social cohesion and building peace.

The momentum has been building for a further call for participation of children. The Security Council heard the views of a former child soldier from Colombia (2018), a 15-year-old girl from Mali (2020), and an 18-year-old peacebuilding activist from Cameroon (2023). All three speakers called for the participation of children.

In this year of special importance for children affected by conflict, 30th anniversary of the creation of the children and armed conflict mandate by the UN General Assembly, the Human Rights Council strengthened the scope of the call for child participation in its resolution 61/21 devoted to the rights of the child affected by armed conflict. It invites States to ensure the meaningful participation of children affected by armed conflict in the design, implementation, follow-up and evaluation of policies and programmes throughout the conflict cycle, including conflict prevention, peace and post-conflict processes, including protection, justice, accountability, reparation and recovery.

This resolution is particularly significant. Twenty-four children aged 12-17 from 10 countries in conflict situations shared their views in a consultation with the European Union, one of the penholders, and many of their recommendations helped shape the resolution (Child Rights Connect, meeting report and Child Friendly Guide, 2026).

The children and armed conflict agenda, deeply embedded in the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a basis for the Machel report, established by the General Assembly, strengthened by the Security Council, is now complemented by the Human Rights Council from the child rights perspective. This is very much in line with the call of the UN Secretary-General’s Guidance Note (2023) for mainstreaming child rights throughout the whole UN system including the peace and security pillar.

Three recommendations for the next steps

First, UN mechanisms, States and civil society should support and strengthen partnership with children and young people to make meaningful participation of children a reality. Second, children should be included in the Conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Paris Principles to be convened by France with UNICEF in February 2027, highlighting the transformative role that children associated with armed forces and armed groups can play as rights holders and agents of change. Third, children’s participation should be supported in the global peacebuilding architecture and space, starting from the annual peacebuilding week in June 2027, the beginning year of the International Decade of Strengthening of Peace for Future Generations (2027-2036) proclaimed by the General Assembly resolution 80/269 (2026).

Dr. Mikiko Otani, widely recognized as an international human rights lawyer, is currently the President of Child Rights Connect, a Geneva-based global NGO network promoting child rights. She was the Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2021-2023) during her eight-year membership for two terms.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Reigning world women's marathon champion Peres Jepchirchir is provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit after a sample tests positive for EPO.

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A BBC investigation has found evidence that Sudanese paramilitary fighters systematically destroyed el-Fasher's healthcare system.

This is President Peter Mutharika's fifth visit to South Africa this year.

Her husband is currently in isolation but has not developed any symptoms, Swiss officials say.

Boats in Villa Marina, Falcón State. Credit:Jujovar2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Francisco R. Rodríguez
DENVER, Colorado, USA, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

 
Money chase

So, if Venezuela claims to be importing from the rest of the world roughly as much as it was exporting during those years, and the rest of the world confirms Venezuela’s story, then where could those additional $11 billion that presumably ended up in the bank accounts of Maduro’s cronies be?

Technically, there are some ways in which a country could spend as much as it earns and still have large sums go missing. The first obvious one is if there were $11 billion lying around to steal. Except we know there weren’t, because the Venezuelan government was broke and had all its international accounts frozen. Even the Central Bank didn’t have access to most of its international reserves at the time. And remember, the Times is telling us that these $11 billion were coming out of unpaid receivables. In other words, the oil was being sold, it was being loaded into ships, and the owners of these ships were promising to pay Venezuela for that oil but, according to the Times, never did.

Another possibility is that Venezuela was accumulating assets because someone was lending it money. But that explanation doesn’t pass the smell test either. Nobody in their right mind would have lent $11 billion to Venezuela in 2021 and 2022. The country was sanctioned, barred from issuing any type of debt in the United States, and even non-US investment funds wouldn’t go near it with a 10-foot pole. The country didn’t even have access to bank accounts where a loan of that size could be wired.

And, quite frankly, if, say, China or Russia had lent Venezuela $11 billion and somehow gotten those dollars to Venezuela, don’t you think the New York Times, or Reuters, or the Wall Street Journal, would have written a story about that? And, by the way, where is that $11 billion creditor trying to get their money back? No other Venezuela creditors seem to know about them, which is quite odd for a country that has just announced that it’s about to start restructuring its debt.

In sum, nobody lent Venezuela $11 billion in 2021–22 because anyone deluded enough to do so wouldn’t have been lending the money; they would have been giving it away. The country already had a debt that was well in excess of its capacity to pay, and country risk premiums were through the roof. The expected return on any Venezuela debt issuance in those years would have been zero.

Digging in

Now here it is actually worth stopping for a minute and looking carefully at the numbers in the country’s current account, because what the balance of payments data allows us to do is not just look at how much the country receives and spends in foreign exchange, but also where that money comes from and where it goes. And here the story gets interesting because, oddly enough, what these numbers seem to tell us is that the Venezuelan government did borrow around $11 billion (or, more precisely, $10.4 billion) in those two years. They also tell us that it accumulated some $14 billion in accounts receivable, precisely the ones that the New York Times is telling us were not paid.

So, say you had just come down from Mars, knew nothing about Venezuela’s pariah status at the time, and looked at these numbers. You would say: well yes, Venezuela borrowed $10 billion in those years and at the same time accumulated $14 billion in accounts receivable (that is, promises to pay in the future) for its oil sales. And if then, on your short trip from Mars, you picked up a copy of the New York Times and read it, you would say: well, it looks like of those $14 billion, around $11 billion never got paid.

So why does the country’s current account data get us these numbers that are so strange? Herein lies what I think is the resolution of the issue.

Below is a slide from a presentation prepared by PDVSA in late 2022, where it reports all of the oil that was sold between 2020 and 2022.[1] Note that $13.3 billion in invoices were ceded to the Republic. That’s actually a bit higher than the Times’ $11 billion because it includes 2020. In other words, the government was paying for its imports through oil shipments because it could not use international bank accounts as a result of US sanctions. Normally, PDVSA would have sold the oil, received dollars in payment, and sold those dollars to the Central Bank. Then the government would have gone to the Central Bank and bought dollars from it to pay importers.

Exhibit 1: November 2022 PDVSA Presentation Shows Receivables Ceded to Republic

Source: Ministry of Popular Power for Oil.

Since that mechanism could not be used, the government resorted to paying in-kind. It went to the importers and said: look, if you bring this much in imports into the country, we’ll let you go and collect from the people who bought our oil and who owe us money.

In fact, if you look at the decomposition of the supposed borrowing that the government did, you’ll find $6.3 billion of portfolio investment securities being issued by the government. And that rhythm of roughly $500 million per quarter continues until the end of 2025. That’s not because the government is issuing bonds. Believe me, if the government had issued a single bond, we would know about it (and whoever had bought that bond would have become the laughingstock of the securities world). But if you look at the fine print of the IMF’s Balance of Payments Statistics Manual, you’ll find that what characterizes portfolio investment is the fact that securities have to be negotiable. And this is precisely what Venezuela was giving importers: negotiable IOUs that they could exchange for oil receivables entitling them to receive payment for oil that Venezuela had sold.

We find a very direct statement of this in another slide of the PDVSA 2022 presentation, where the board states, in discussing cases of cesión de facturas (assignment of invoices) corresponding to shipments requested by the National Executive, that these were used to compensate debts with providers of the Republic.

There it is: we’ve found our mystery lender: importers who were being issued debt so that they could exchange them for oil shipments. So, when you see the balance of payments accounts say that the government was accumulating receivables and issuing debt, what you are really seeing is the way in which balance of payments statistics handle a practice that is as old as humanity: barter.

Oil and prejudice

Reality is often much more prosaic than what we want it to be. Government cronies did not walk away with $11 billion in unpaid oil shipments. What really happened is something much simpler: Venezuela didn’t have a way to pay in cash for the imports it needed, so it ended up paying with oil. And because PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, is legally distinct from the Republic, it did not directly collect on the shipments but rather transferred them to the Republic in payment of its tax and royalty obligations.

American journalist Sydney Harris once wrote that “we believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.” And yes, the idea that Maduro’s henchmen walked off with $11 billion in oil shipments feeds well into many stereotypes of Venezuela under Maduro. Even if it sits awkwardly with the fact that he doesn’t seem to have money to pay for his defense in a Brooklyn court, most of us are predisposed to believe it.

Yes, Maduro’s regime was highly corrupt. No one puts that in doubt. But there is a long distance between recognizing its corruption and claiming that regime insiders walked away with half of the country’s oil exports. That image may fit a lot of political stereotypes and be useful for many political narratives. It just doesn’t fit the facts.

Francisco R. Rodríguez is a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net) in Washington, DC and a professor and fellow at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies.

[1] I obtained this presentation two years ago from reporters who wrote stories on it and who asked me to see it to discuss their interpretation of it.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

The international day for the eradication of poverty, commemorated last week, was a grim reminder that the UN will not achieve its highly-ambitious target of helping eradicate extreme poverty—”in all its forms”– by 2030.

According to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres eradicating poverty by 2030 requires urgent political will, massive investments, and a commitment to justice rather than charity.

But that is unlikely to happen by the targeted date?

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters last week the message to donors is that there is a crucial importance towards focusing aid on eliminating poverty as much as possible.

“It’s a disgrace that so many people – really, hundreds of millions of people around the world – still face acute poverty. Because of that, and because there’s still such a large gap in the needs that are to be addressed, it’s unlikely that we’re going to meet the targets by 2030. But the Secretary-General, as you know, continues to push for determination. The idea being, as he puts it, that he is neither hopeful nor pessimistic, but determined. And that’s what we have to do in the fight against poverty.”

Guterres has described poverty as an “insult” to human dignity, a denial of fundamental human rights, and an issue of social justice.

In 2026, an estimated 826 million people (or 1 in 10 people worldwide) were living in extreme poverty. If current trends continue, 9% of the world’s population will still live in extreme poverty by 2030.

Richard Ponzio, Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program and a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, told Inter Press Service (IPS) ending poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030 is Goal #1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“While we saw tremendous progress on a similar Millennium Development Goal poverty alleviation effort from 2000-2015 — thanks in large part to advances in two large developing countries at the time (China and India) — we have seen less progress overall during the present period (2015-2030) for multiple reasons, including growing debt burdens, the COVID-19 pandemic, continued environmental degradation, and the drag on global economic growth stemming from tariffs and new major wars.”

Despite these obstacles, he pointed out, the Secretary-General and his UN system’s continued determination to fight acute global poverty merits the support and commensurate levels of commitment and determination by the world body’s 193 member states.

In the run-up to next September’s SDG Summit in New York, international efforts, including innovative developments strategies and new financing approaches, should be redoubled in support of the “No Poverty” SDG — while ensuring that steps to eradicate extreme poverty remain a central plank of an emerging Post-2030 Development Agenda, he declared.

Max Lawson, Oxfam International’s Head of Inequality Policy, told IPS extreme poverty can be ended by 2030—“but only if we radically reduce inequality.”

“Right now, for every new dollar of wealth created in the world, the richest one percent pocket 41 cents ―and the entire bottom half of humanity gets just a single cent. While everyday people are hit hard by rising prices, wars, and pandemics, billionaires have more than doubled their fortunes,” said Lawson.

According to one report, poverty has many dimensions. Its primary causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and the high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, disease, and other crises that prevent them from earning a productive living.

The UN’s SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals and 169 specific targets adopted by UN Member States in September 2015 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

These goals also include an end to worldwide hunger, the need for quality education, good health and well-being, among others.

Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute, told IPS: “As we look for solutions to end poverty, we need to focus on the causes of poverty.”

The international day for the eradication of poverty should be the day to eradicate wars around the world, she argued.

Global military spending continues to rise. Trump’s proposed defense budget for 2027 – a record high of US$1.5 trillion, nearly doubling the 2023 budget – is in line with projections estimating global military spending could reach $6.6 trillion by 2035.

The buildup of the military industrial complex comes at the expense of common good. A small fraction of annual military budgets – less than $300 billion could help eliminate extreme poverty. $93 billion per year – less than 4% of yearly global military spending – could help address global hunger, she said.

Today, over half the world’s 1.1 billion poor live in conflict situations. War diverts necessary funds for public health, education, and social safety nets. Destruction and pillage of war manufactures poverty and then maintains it,” said Mittal.

Danielle Nierenberg, President and Founder, Food Tank, told IPS “determination is good but in order to be effective, we need to have courage.”

With the cutbacks to international aid including the systemic dismantlement of USAID, we need to stand up to those who the aid is a waste of money, she said.

Millions of people are dying unnecessarily when only a very small percentage of rich countries budgets could help save them. Aid benefits us all—it’s not only the moral thing to do, but it helps strengthen national security, declared Nierenberg.

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, told IPS focusing on “donors” to address the poverty and climate crises that the world faces today is misdirected.

Poverty goes hand in hand with growing inequities and cannot be addressed separately. There is plenty of money to go around to solve both these crises.

According to Oxfam, US$9 trillion could be raised just from increasing taxes on the wealth and income of the top one percent richest people and the profits of 722 of the world’s biggest corporations.

As the wealth of the billionaires and the largest corporations keeps increasing to insane levels, there is no other way to address poverty than to tax it. The UN should lead the way on an international tax reform that will allow a redistribution of the wealth towards the poor and the adaptation to the climate crisis, declared Mousseau.

According to the SDG 2026 report, poverty has many dimensions. Its primary causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and the high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, disease, and other crises that prevent them from earning a productive living.

Why should I care about other people’s economic situation?

There are many reasons, but the simplest is that as human beings, our well-being is deeply interconnected. Growing inequality hurts economic growth and undermines social cohesion. This raises political and social tensions and, in some circumstances, drives instability and conflict.

Why is social protection so important?

Strong social protection systems are essential to cushion the blow of economic shocks and prevent vulnerable families from falling into poverty.

While social protection measures did expand during the COVID-19 crisis, approximately 46% of the world’s population—about 3.8 billion people, including 1.4 billion children—remained entirely unprotected in 2023.

In response to the subsequent cost-of-living crisis, 105 countries and territories announced nearly 350 social protection measures between February 2022 and February 2023. However, 80% of these programs were only short-term. To truly achieve the SDGs, nations must build permanent, universal, and sustainable social protection systems for all.

The contribution of science to end poverty has been significant. For example, it has enabled access to safe drinking water, reduced deaths caused by water-borne diseases, and improved hygiene to reduce health risks related to unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation.

• If current trends continue, 9% of the world’s population may still live in extreme poverty by 2030, and only one in five countries will succeed in halving their national poverty levels.
• In 2025, 7.9% of the global workforce (284 million workers) lived in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2015.
• For the first time on record, over half of the world’s population receives at least one social protection benefit. Despite this milestone, 3.8 billion people remain completely uncovered.
• Development aid focused on poverty reduction has fallen sharply, erasing a decade of progress and returning to 2015 levels.
• Advanced economies spend a significantly higher share of government budgets on essential services (like education, health, and social protection) compared to emerging and developing nations.
• Guaranteeing basic social security floors in low- and middle-income countries requires an additional $1.4 trillion annually, equal to 3.3% of their combined GDP in 2024.

Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

The UN human rights chief Volker Türk says the multiple attacks may amount to war crimes.

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