UN Radio

To mark World Radio Day, celebrated on 13 February, UN News has reached back into our audio archives to a classic collaboration between UN Radio and the great broadcaster Edward R Murrow.

The voice of World War Two for millions of Americans, Murrow put his talents at the disposal of the UN in 1948, to produce a searing and moving radio documentary on the plight of Europe’s children.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) came into being two years earlier, to combat famine and disease across the war-torn landscape of the shattered continent.

The man in charge of blue helmets serving at the UN’s deadliest peacekeeping mission, which is facing serious shortfalls in equipment and personnel, has pledged to succeed - if he’s given the tools to do the job.

The death penalty is applied for many different crimes in Iran, but no official figures are released for who is on death row, or what they are accused of.

That’s one of the issues being highlighted by Asma Jahangir, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

She was at UN Headquarters in New York recently, to give her annual report to the General Assembly, along with other independent UN rights’ experts.

Prices have declined for some of the world’s most important foods as harvests continue to outstrip demand, the UN food and agricultural agency (FAO) said on Thursday.

FAO, which announced the development in its monthly Food Price Index, said that lower dairy prices led the downward trend in key commodities.

Forecasts for 2018 indicate that worldwide cereal production and surpluses are likely to reach record levels, FAO senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian told Daniel Johnson.

A major alert has been issued for hundreds of thousands of Myanmar youngsters who’ve been forced to seek shelter in what’s been described as a “hell on earth” of makeshift camps in southern Bangladesh.

UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) raised the alarm in Geneva.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has said that the violence experienced by refugees who’ve fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh is among the worst he has encountered – and that their plight is a “recipe” for a health “disaster”.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva on Wednesday, Filippo Grandi praised the Bangladeshi authorities for keeping their borders open, before calling on the government of Myanmar to find solutions to the crisis.

A key milestone has been reached in the fight against HIV, according to UN health experts, who say that more than half of all sufferers now have access to treatment.

The announcement from the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) accompanies new data showing that an estimated 37 million people had human immunodeficiency virus in 2016, an 11 per cent drop since 2010.

Horrific and deadly acts of violence against babies and children have been reported in the Central African Republic (CAR), where fighting has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes in recent months.

The warning  from UN Children's Fund UNICEF and UN Refugee Agency UNHCR follows months of renewed conflict involving armed groups in the mineral-rich state, which has seen decades of instability after declaring independence in 1960.

A bid to protect global consumers from naturally occurring arsenic-contaminated rice has been given the go-ahead by Member States, the UN said on Monday.

The initiative is one of many food safety measures covered by an international body known as the Codex Alimentarius Commission.

Helping migrants integrate into host communities is crucial to everyone’s wellbeing, but it’s something that’s frequently misunderstood by authorities, the UN has said.

The issue is one of many on the agenda at the International Dialogue on Migration in Geneva beginning on Tuesday, hosted by the UN migration agency, IOM.