News headlines in 2025, page 21

The United Nations on Friday welcomed a newly signed peace accord between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda as a “critical step” toward restoring trust, while warning that active fighting near border areas continue to exact a heavy toll on civilians.

Israeli airstrikes took place within the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon’s (UNIFIL) area of operations, the mission said in a statement issued on Friday.

A spike in Israeli military raids and settler violence across the occupied West Bank is driving new displacement, shutting schools and disrupting essential services for tens of thousands of Palestinians, the UN relief coordination office, OCHA, said in its latest humanitarian update Friday.

Summary executions and other violations continue in Syria nearly a year after the fall of the Assad regime, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Friday.

The ongoing emergency in northern Mozambique continues to worsen as prolonged attacks by non-state armed groups in Nampula trigger one of the largest displacement surges of the year, the UN warned on Friday.

PRETORIA, December 4 (IPS) - Nature is a double-edged sword for global business. A groundbreaking report will reveal how businesses profit from exploiting natural resources while simultaneously impacting biodiversity.

CLERMONT-FERRAND, France, December 4 (IPS) - During the Global Development Conference 2025, development experts and researchers kept warning that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were being pushed into a wave of digital transformation without the basic statistical systems, institutional capacity, and local context needed to ensure that AI and digital tools truly benefited the poor.

UNITED NATIONS, December 4 (IPS) - For seventy-eight years, the question of Palestine has been on the agenda of this General Assembly, almost as long as the institution itself.

SRINAGAR, December 4 (IPS) - “I see more philanthropic support aligning with systems thinking, linking climate stability, biodiversity protection, Indigenous leadership, and community resilience,” says Michael Northrop, Program Director at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

A major UN meeting in Doha wrapped up on Thursday with a renewed drive to help the world’s poorest countries move towards long-term stability and prosperity, as senior officials urged stronger global partnerships to ensure that development gains are not lost once States exit the Least Developed Country (LDC) category.