Une patrouille spéciale à vélo de la Police a parcouru certains axes de la ville de Cotonou ce mercredi 19 novembre 2025. Cette patrouille est composée des éléments du commissariat du 5e arrondissement de Cotonou.
Renforcer la présence de la Police républicaine aux côtés des citoyens de la capitale économique du Bénin, c'est l'objectif d'une patrouille spéciale à vélo qui a parcouru certains axes de la ville de Cotonou ce mercredi 19 novembre 2025. L'équipe conduite par le commissaire et son adjoint selon des sources policières, a effectué plusieurs tours du jardin de Mathieu avant de continuer sa ronde vers le carrefour "trois banques". A travers cette nouvelle initiative, la Police entend assurer de sa présence dissuasive.
Ces vélos de la Police qui viennent après les quadricycles destinés à la patrouille le long de la berge lagunaire et de la plage, visent à renforcer en toute simplicité la proximité de la Police républicaine avec les populations pour leur sécurité et celle de leurs biens.
F. A. A.
Le chauffeur d'un camion en surcharge a perdu le contrôle au marché de Dantokpa dans la matinée ce jeudi 20 novembre 2025.
Plus de peur que de mal après l'accident d'un camion à Dantokpa au petit matin de ce jeudi 20 novembre 2025. Le véhicule selon nos sources, a échappé au contrôle du conducteur et s'est renversé au niveau du pont.
Pas de blessé ni de perte en vie humaine. Mais la circulation a été perturbée pendant plusieurs heures avant d'être rétablie par les forces de sécurité.
Marina HOUENOU (Stag)
L'Association du transport aérien international (IATA), a lancé le 20 octobre 2025, une campagne mondiale de sécurité appelée « Travel Smart with Lithium Batteries » (Voyagez intelligemment avec des piles au lithium) qui indique aux voyageurs des règles simples concernant le transport par avion de téléphones portables, d'ordinateurs portables, de chargeurs portables et autres dispositifs alimentés par des piles au lithium. La campagne sera déployée sur le site Web et les réseaux sociaux de l'IATA et sera offerte comme actif de marque blanche aux compagnies aériennes, aux aéroports et aux autres partenaires de l'écosystème des voyages.
« Les appareils alimentés par des piles au lithium sont sans danger lorsqu'ils sont manipulés de façon adéquate, mais ils présentent un risque s'ils sont endommagés ou empaquetés de façon incorrecte. Etant donné que de plus en plus de voyageurs emportent de tels appareils, notre campagne Travel Smart with Lithium Batteries va aider les compagnies aériennes à informer les voyageurs de règles simples qu'il faut garder à l'esprit lorsqu'on voyage avec des appareils électroniques, qui sont devenus essentiels dans la vie de tous les jours », explique Nick Careen, vice-président principal de l'IATA, Opérations, Sécurité et Sûreté.
Les voyageurs transportent un plus grand nombre d'appareils, mais disposent d'une connaissance incomplète
Un récent sondage de l'IATA auprès des passagers démontre que la plupart des voyageurs prennent l'avion avec des appareils alimentés par des piles au lithium :
• 83 % des voyageurs ont un téléphone portable ;
• 60 % ont un ordinateur portable ;
• 44 % ont un chargeur portable. Bien que 93 % des voyageurs considèrent qu'ils sont bien informés des règles concernant le transport d'appareils alimentés par des piles au lithium (et 57 % d'entre eux se disent très informés des règles), une méconnaissance critique subsiste :
• 50 % des répondants croient à tort qu'il est correct de placer des petits appareils à pile au lithium dans le bagage enregistré.
• 45 % croient à tort qu'il est correct d'emballer un chargeur portable dans le bagage enregistré.
• 33 % croient à tort que les chargeurs portables et les piles de rechange n'ont pas de limite de capacité.
Sept règles simples de sécurité
La campagne met en évidence sept règles simples que tout voyageur devrait observer :
• Voyagez léger : n'apportez que les appareils et les piles vraiment nécessaires.
• Restez vigilant : si un appareil est chaud, produit de la fumée ou est endommagé, avisez immédiatement l'équipage (ou le personnel aéroportuaire).
• Gardez vos appareils avec vous : transportez toujours vos téléphones, ordinateurs portables, appareils photo, vapoteuses (si autorisé) et autres articles alimentés par piles dans votre bagage à main, et non dans le bagage enregistré.
• Protégez les piles en vrac : les piles de rechange et les chargeurs portables doivent être rangés dans leur emballage d'origine, sinon il faut couvrir les bornes avec du ruban adhésif pour éviter les courts-circuits.
• Rappel au moment de l'embarquement : si votre bagage à main vous est retiré à la porte d'embarquement pour être placé en soute, enlevez d'abord toutes les piles au lithium et les appareils.
• Vérifiez le format des piles : pour les plus grosses piles (plus de 100 watts-heures, comme celles utilisées dans les caméras grand format, les drones et les outils à piles), vérifiez auprès de votre compagnie aérienne, car une autorisation pourrait être requise.
• Vérifiez les règles de la compagnie aérienne : il faut toujours confirmer les politiques de votre compagnie aérienne, puisque les exigences peuvent varier, selon les règlements locaux.
Déploiement dans l'ensemble de l'industrie
Cette campagne multilingue sera déployée dans tous les actifs numériques que les compagnies aériennes et les autres partenaires peuvent adapter et partager avec les passagers, pour assurer une communication sur la sécurité uniforme dans toute l'industrie. Une courte vidéo d'animation, conçue pour rendre les règles simples, intéressantes et faciles à mémoriser, pourra être utilisée par les compagnies aériennes et les aéroports dans leurs canaux numériques et leurs médias sociaux.
Le matériel de la campagne sera aussi offert aux médias et à d'autres entités de la chaîne de valeur de l'aviation pour les aider à informer les voyageurs sur la façon de voyager en toute sécurité avec des appareils alimentés par des piles au lithium.
Gary Baker (right), CEO of Equimundo speaks on the SDG Media Zone panel "The Manosphere: Understanding and Countering Online Misogyny" with, from left to right, Janelle Dumalaon, Panel Moderator and US Correspondent for Deutsche Welle; Jaha Durureh, UN Women Regional Goodwill Ambassador for Africa; and Ljubica Fuentes, Founder of ‘Ciudadanas del Mundo’. Credit: UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein
By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2025 (IPS)
As the digital landscape continues to expand and integrate into various aspects of daily life, humanitarian experts have raised concerns about the associated risks, particularly as artificial intelligence (AI), online anonymity, and the absence of effective monitoring frameworks heighten the potential for abuse and harassment. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by digital abuse, facing heightened risks, with nearly half of them worldwide lacking effective legal protections.
Ahead of the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign, which aims to leverage digital platforms to empower women and advocate for gender equality, UN Women raises the alarm on the digital abuse crisis affecting women. According to their figures, roughly 1 in 3 women globally experience gender-based violence in their lifetime, with anywhere from 16 to 58 percent of women having faced digital violence.
“What begins online doesn’t stay online,” said UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous. “Digital abuse spills into real life, spreading fear, silencing voices, and—in the worst cases—leading to physical violence and femicide. Laws must evolve with technology to ensure that justice protects women both online and offline. Weak legal protections leave millions of women and girls vulnerable, while perpetrators act with impunity. This is unacceptable. Through our 16 Days of Activism campaign, UN Women calls for a world where technology serves equality, not harm.”
In recent years, online harassment has become increasingly prevalent, fueled by the rise of platforms such as Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. The use of generative AI tools have also contributed to a surge in cyberstalking, non-consensual image sharing, deepfakes, and disinformation aimed at humiliating and intimidating women. According to figures from the World Bank, fewer than 40 percent of countries worldwide have adequate legal frameworks to protect women from online harassment, leaving around 44 percent of women and girls—approximately 1.8 billion—without legal protection against digital abuse.
The rapid advancement of generative AI in recent years has streamlined the process of image-based abuse against women, with user-friendly platforms allowing abusers to create highly realistic deepfake images and videos, which are then shared on social media platforms and pornographic sites. AI-generated deepfakes can be replicated multiple times and stored and shared on privately owned devices, making them difficult to monitor and remove. Accountability remains a significant issue due to the lack of adequate protections and moderation to ensure safe and consensual use.
According to UN Women, image-based sexual harassment has surged over the past few years, with schoolgirls facing increased rates of fake nude images of themselves being posted onto social media, as well as female business leaders being met with targeted deepfake images and coordinated harassment campaigns.
“There is massive reinforcement between the explosion of AI technology and the toxic extreme misogyny of the manosphere”, Laura Bates, a feminist activist and author, told UN Women. “AI tools allow the spread of manosphere content further, using algorithmic tweaking that prioritizes increasingly extreme content to maximize engagement.”
“In part, this is about the root problem of misogyny – this is an overwhelmingly gendered issue, and what we’re seeing is a digital manifestation of a larger offline truth: men target women for gendered violence and abuse,” added Bates.
Digital violence can take many shapes and forms, such as inappropriate messages, actions of abuse and control from intimate partners, and anonymous threats, impacting women from all walks of life. While women and girls in low-income or rural areas are disproportionately affected by digital violence, women and girls in nearly all contexts can be vulnerable to its impact.
“Online abuse can undermine women’s sexual and reproductive rights and has a real-life impact. It can be used to control partners, restrict their decision-making, or create fear and shame that prevents them from seeking help, contraception, information or care,” said Anna Jeffreys, the Media and Crisis Communications Adviser for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
“Young people who experience online harassment or extortion often avoid health services altogether. In extreme cases, it can impact mental health, career progress and even threaten lives,” Jeffreys told IPS.
According to UN Women, young women, journalists, politicians, activists, and human rights defenders are routinely subjected to sexist, racist, or homophobic slurs, with migrant, disabled, and LGBTQ+ individuals being met with misogyny merged with additional forms of discrimination.
“When you get away from your abusers, you feel kind of safe, but digital violence is following you around everywhere you go”, said Ljubica Fuentes, a human rights lawyer and the founder of Ciudadanas del Mundo, an organization that promotes education free from gender-based violence across all education sectors. “You always have to be 120 per cent prepared to make an opinion online. If you are a feminist, if you are an activist, you don’t have the right to be wrong. You are not allowed to even have a past.”
Recent studies from UN Women shows that digital violence, assisted by AI-powered technology, is rapidly expanding in both scale and sophistication, yielding real-world consequences that permeate digital platforms entirely. Digital violence has been increasingly associated with rising rates of violent extremism as abuses silence women and girls in politics and media. Additionally, it is associated with increased rates of femicides in contexts where technology is used for stalking or coercion.
In the Philippines, 83 percent of survivors of online abuse reported emotional harm, 63 percent experienced sexual assault, and 45 percent suffered physical harm. In Pakistan, online harassment has been linked to femicide, suicide, physical violence, job loss, and the silencing of women and girls.
In the Arab states, 60 percent of female internet users have been exposed to online violence, while in Africa, 46 percent of women parliamentarians have faced online attacks. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 80 percent of women in public life have restricted their online presence due to fear of abuse.
UN Women is urging for strengthened global cooperation to ensure that digital platforms and AI systems adhere to safety and ethical standards by calling for increased funding for women’s rights organizations to support victims of digital violence, as well as stronger enforcement mechanisms to hold perpetrators accountable.
“The key is to move toward accountability and regulation – creating systems where AI tools must meet safety and ethics standards before being rolled out to the public, where platforms are held accountable for the content they host, and where the responsibility for prevention shifts from potential victims to those creating and profiting from harmful technologies”, said Bates.
The organization also calls on tech companies to employ more women to facilitate inclusivity and a wide variety of perspectives. Tech companies are also implored to remove harmful content and address abuse reports on a timely basis. UN Women also stresses the importance of investing in prevention efforts, such as digital literacy and online safety training for women and girls, as well as initiatives that challenge toxic online cultures.
Jeffreys tells IPS that UNFPA is on the frontlines assisting survivors of gender-based digital violence by working with governments to review and improve national laws and policies while also working directly with communities, schools, and frontline responders to build digital literacy, promote safe online practices, and ensure that survivors can access confidential support.
“Digital platforms can be powerful tools for expanding access to information, education and essential health services — especially for young people. But these tools must be safe,” said Jeffreys. “UNFPA works with governments, educators and youth-led groups to promote digital literacy and critical thinking, and we call for stronger safeguards from governments, tech providers and others to prevent online spaces from being used to harm women and girls. This includes safer product design, better reporting mechanisms, and accountability for harmful content. When digital platforms are made safe, they can help advance gender equality instead of undermining it.”
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Des quartiers de Sofia sont assiégés par les ordures. La mairie de la capitale bulgare a décidé de ne pas renouveler des contrats de collecte de déchets, alors que la mafia aurait exercé des pressions pour bénéficier de prix astronomiques. Reportage.
- Articles / Une - Diaporama, Courrier des Balkans, Environnement, BulgarieLe gouvernement grec a déployé depuis quelques jours des agents de police dans tous les campements roms du pays. La mesure fait polémique alors que la communauté rom est déjà victime de discrimination et de marginalisation.
- Le fil de l'Info / Une - Diaporama, Courrier des Balkans, Roms Balkans, Grèce, Défense, police et justice, Populations, minorités et migrations, Une - Diaporama - En premierThe UN General Assembly in session. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2025 (IPS)
The 193-member General Assembly (GA), the UN’s highest policy-making body, has long been the repository for scores of long-winded outdated resolutions accumulated over several decades– and lying in cold storage.
As part of the proposed restructuring of the United Nations, which is facing a severe liquidity crisis, there is now a move to streamline and revitalize the General Assembly which has been mired in a bureaucratic backlog.
The President of the General Assembly (PGA), Annalena Baerbock, has called on each Main Committee to review its working methods and propose concrete measures to enhance efficiency, including:
• Merging similar agenda items to avoid repetition;
• Reducing the frequency, length and number of resolutions;
• Using biennial or triennial cycles where appropriate;
• Limiting explanations of vote to five minutes; and
• Simplifying adoption procedures — one gavel, one decision, all texts.
These recommendations, mostly spelled out in a recent resolution, would help re-shape the General Assembly to respond to global challenges with agility and coherence. But unless these reforms are implemented, they remain just words on paper, just another resolution.
“Business as usual will not suffice. We need fewer repetitive resolutions, shorter debates, and smarter scheduling. No more ‘resolutions for resolutions’ sake,” the PGA said.
“We cannot preach on Sunday that we need fewer resolutions, then proceed to submit one for consideration on Monday. And this is, unfortunately, taking place”, she warned.
Dr Palitha Kohona, a former Chief of the UN Treaty Section and one-time Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, told IPS the UN is burdened under a heavy baggage of resolutions piled up over 80 years.
“Many are no longer relevant, others are superfluous, and some repetitive. Given its current perilous financial situation, it would be appropriate for each department and office to review rigorously the resolutions under their purview and identify those that could be terminated.”
This, he said, may be done through an omnibus resolution. Some might require delicate negotiations with member states which might claim ownership to resolutions that they had proposed. Sensitively, handled, this could deliver considerable financial and staffing dividends.
New resolutions, he pointed out, should be vetted carefully to avoid redundancies. UN staff could proactively assist in this process. Even where resolutions are to be implemented within existing resource allocations, there will be some cost involved, including time.
Where a proposed resolution could not be implemented due to resource constraints, it should be vetoed from the beginning, said Dr Kohona, who until recently, was Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China.
Action officers should be located or moved to an office where a resolution is most likely to be implemented and it would be most effective. For example, the responsibility for implementing UNDP-related resolutions should be allocated to Nairobi, he proposed. Peacekeeping should also be moved to Nairobi as most peacekeeping now happens in Africa, he declared.
Baerbock said: “We have seen the Main Committees put forward resolutions for three-day conferences, with no budget attached, fully aware of the fiscal situation we are debating at the same moment. We have seen over 160 sides events during High-Level Week, despite the call for less, or the call by some, for no side events at all”.
“And we have seen, already, three or four high-level meetings submitted for consideration for the 81st High-Level Week (next year), with four for each of the 82nd and 83rd, despite the decision of this Assembly – so by all of us – to limit this to a maximum of three.”
“While we all want to protect the things we care about, each of us must make concessions in this time of reform”, she declared.
Dr. Purnima Mane, a former Deputy Executive Director (Programme) and UN Assistant-Secretary-General (ASG) at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS the major ongoing effort to review the working methods of each of the Committees of the UN GA and enhance their efficiency is certainly laudable.
It is a golden opportunity to challenge some of the so-called ‘givens’ of the ways in which the GA functions and focus on what matters in a streamlined fashion.
The currently proposed solutions however are somewhat peripheral even if they indicate a desire for change. One of the major problems faced by the Committees is the range of issues taken on without clear prioritization including a lack of focus on neglected, key issues. And the absence of a sense of urgency, she pointed out
“The suggestions offered touch on enhancing efficiency of working but avoid tougher issues perhaps due to lack of time and sometimes will on the part of some members to take the risk of proposing solutions which might necessitate dismantling of well-entrenched methods of working”.
Another barrier, she said, might be concerns about potential difficulties that are likely to be experienced in getting agreement on these methods and more so the possibility of limited involvement by member states in their implementation.
“Perhaps starting small and identifying possibly achievable objectives for how the committees are run and managed might be a good beginning, but without the commitment of member States to the issues being prioritized and to implement the resolutions being proposed, all this change and effort is unlikely to achieve any benefits, including saving of resources”, she said.
Reducing agenda items and avoiding repetitive resolutions and endless debates are all a good start but it requires the will of the member states to implement these resolutions, once passed, she added.
And while the will to implement is understood as a given, in reality that is exactly where the problem sometimes lies. How to encourage and ensure implementation is really the true challenge, said Dr Mane, a former President and CEO of Pathfinder International.
Andreas Bummel, co-founder and Executive Director of Democracy Without Borders, told IPS ironically, the issue of revitalizing the General Assembly itself has become a ritualistic item.
“Tackling the number of annual resolutions and avoiding useless repetition year after year is a no-brainer. This should have been implemented long ago. But deeper changes are needed”.
For instance, he said, there needs to be continuity and institutional memory in the office of the President of the General Assembly. It should be a two-year tenure and receive proper funding.
Further, by creating a Parliamentary Assembly, the instrument of Citizens’ Initiative and Citizens’ Assemblies, the General Assembly can become a center of innovation and inclusion for the entire UN system. This should be on the agenda.
Use or not use at your discretion. The final two sentences are the most important as far as I am concerned, declared Bummel.
Meanwhile, revitalization is also being extended to the Office of the President of the General Assembly (OPGA).
The 80th session, Baerbock said, benefited from an early, seamless handover from the 79th — allowing us to hit the ground running. Yet the volume of work remains immense.
“Our High-Level Week featured over seven major meetings in just a few days;
The remainder of the session will see nearly twenty intergovernmental processes and multiple mandated High-Level Meetings; And the total number of resolutions has barely changed — many nearly identical to those of past sessions.”
But this is not sustainable, she said. And it’s contradicting the call from smaller missions that they cannot be in three meetings at the same time.
Transitions matter. Preparation matters. “We must ensure each presidency is set up for success”.
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Children and youth engaging at COP. Credit: UN Climate Change/Zô Guimarães
By Cheena Kapoor
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 21 2025 (IPS)
Jyoti Kumari missed her online classes again today. Her father, a vegetable seller in West Delhi’s vegetable market, had to go to work, taking with him the only smartphone the family uses. Kumari has been taking online classes since November 11, when the state government declared a shutdown of all elementary schools due to air pollution hitting the “severe” category.
A class five student in a government school, she relies on her father’s mobile phone to attend her classes. But her class timings coincide with her father’s work time, and due to this clash, the 10-year-old has been missing her lessons.
She represents what has become a common story in India—children missing school due to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
“Their schools shut down several times during peak summer months due to heatwaves, and the closing of schools due to air pollution in October/November has become a regular thing over the last few years. Now that the winters are starting, they will close again when the mercury drops to a freezing point,” said her father, Devendra Kumar.
In a country that has seen remarkable progress in girls’ education only in the last decade, these regular disruptions due to climatic events are threatening the progress. The school closures, compounded with poverty and loss of income due to extreme weather, threaten to push girls like Kumari into child marriage.
In Delhi, the Air Quality Index has been hovering between the “very poor” (300-400) and “severe” (over 400) categories since last week. Since November 11, when Kumari’s school shut, the government imposed stage three of the Graded Response Action Plan, or GRAP, under which nonessential construction and industrial activities are banned in the city. Civil rights groups and college students have been staging protests demanding immediate action to improve the national capital’s air quality.
But Kumari, who wants to become a scientist when she grows up, does not understand the government’s imposition and worries about her classes, which she has been missing.
As per a UNICEF report from earlier this year, climate-related extreme events disrupted education for 54.7 million students in India in 2024 alone. “April saw the highest global climate-related school disruptions, with heatwaves as the leading hazard affecting at least 118 million children in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, the Philippines, and Thailand,” stated the report. It also added that fast-onset hazards like cyclones and landslides cause destruction of schools, while environmental stressors like air pollution and extreme heat are hindering school attendance.
Against this backdrop, world leaders have gathered in Belém for the 30th Conference of the Parties, in what is called the world’s largest climate negotiation platform. Decisions taken here will directly affect the future of children like Kumari. But by the 10th day of the summit, it is clear that non-economic loss and damage, or NELD, a term coined for all losses that are not directly related to finance, including mental health effects, loss of biodiversity, education, displacement, and culture, are not a priority.
While negotiators, packed in closed rooms, engage in high-level discussions around climate finance, adaptation targets, and fossil fuels, NELD waits to be noticed through the back door despite its growing relevance. It featured in only one side event where some experts highlighted its urgency, but it remains largely absent from the agenda.
“Social impacts of climate change are already worsening, and long-term impacts can lead to stunted education,” said Saqib Huq, Managing Director at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). “Within the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, experts are collating data and knowledge regarding NELD, but we keep hearing that we need more data and more policy. Meanwhile, impacts are escalating.”
Part of the challenge, researchers say, is that NELD does not fit into a straightforward financial evaluation. While economic losses like collapsed infrastructure and destroyed crops are easier to quantify and thus draw funding, non-economic harms require more subtle accounting. Lost childhoods and interrupted learning do not fit into traditional finance frameworks.
But for Jyoti, the next few days do not depend on the negotiations and draft text in Belém, but rather on whether the pollution in Delhi falls enough for her to go to school again.
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