The flooding just keeps getting worse and worse. On Saturday, the UN estimated that 4 million people were affected by the flooding in Pakistan. By Sunday they revised that estimate to 6 million people. Today, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that over 13 million people are affected.
Two weeks ago, a UN report confirmed that May was the bloodiest month in Darfur since the United Nations peacekeeping mission deployed in 2007. State sponsored violence, clashes between rebel groups, and regular banditry have resulted in over 400 people killed that month.
65 years ago today, the world entered the age of nuclear weapons. Ban Ki Moon is in Hiroshima, along, for the first time, a U.S. government official, for a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima. From UN News Center:
Mariko Hall of the World Food Program reports on the ICT aspect of the humanitarian response to massive flooding in northwest Pakistan:
The IT Emergency Preparedness and Response team of WFP is deploying an emergency mission to support the team of five national ICT staff in Islamabad currently managing the operation.
Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan tag teamed for an op-ed about the value of vaccination campaigns in the fight against child mortality, which is part of MDG4. Childhood vaccines have a great track record when properly implemented. In fact, they call vaccination campaigns against Measles and Polio among the "world's most successful childhood health interventions." The problem is, these gains are starting to slip. The two Elders explain what needs to be done:
Over at Passport, David Kenner argues that the tree-shooting incident shows that UNIFIL is a failure. I fear, though, that Kenner undermines his argument with this concluding statement.
Poor rainfall last year means children are beginning to starve in Niger. UNICEF is putting that number at 400,000 severely malnourished children. As I have said before, this is the biggest humanitarian emergency that you have never heard about. Here is the latest video dispatch from UNICEF.
I just came across this cool montage of historical footage of Nelson Mandela at the UN. The UN's new media people uploaded it to YouTube last week for Nelson Mandela International Day. Check it out.