KAMPALA/KABALE, Sep 07 (IPS) - Before the outbreak of COVID-19, an education officer in the district neighbouring Uganda’s capital Kampala decreed that teachers could not take computers, mobile phones, or tablets into classrooms.

China must address grave human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and the international community must not turn a blind eye, more than 40 UN independent experts said on Wednesday. 

A rise in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves will not only increase wildfires this century but also worsen air quality – harming human health and ecosystems, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) launched on Wednesday, the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies.

GENEVA, Sep 07 (IPS) - Afghanistan is where history has taken it! The Trump-Taliban "Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan," signed on 29 February 2020, is deemed by many as the submission of a superpower to a group that had perpetrated acts of extreme ferocity and terror.

SAN SALVADOR, Sep 07 (IPS) - A year after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele decided to make El Salvador the first country where bitcoin is legal tender, the experiment has so far failed, as few of the original plan's objectives have been achieved.

International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies, marked on 7 September, takes place in a world where almost all the air we breathe is polluted, and some seven million people die from air pollution every year. Ahead of the Day, UN News spoke to two experts about the scale of the problem, and the solutions that already exist.

Briefing the Security Council on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres again underlined the need to de-escalate the situation around the embattled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. 

As fighting continues in South Sudan, a new UN report released on Tuesday documents 173 civilian deaths over a four-month period along with widespread human rights violations committed without repercussion.

Denied decent work opportunities and highly vulnerable to systemic shocks such as pandemics or economic downturns, workers in Asia and the Pacific are under pressure, according to a report launched on Tuesday by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

Sri Lanka is at a critical juncture and the new Government must make progress on accountability as well as institutional and security sector reforms, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said in a report published on Tuesday.