Community archive

A sprawling online scam industry worth an estimated tens of billions of dollars a year is being powered by trafficked workers subjected to torture, sexual abuse and forced labour inside heavily guarded compounds in Southeast Asia, a new UN human rights report has found.

Next Saturday, the 28th of February, stargazers will have the chance to spot Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all clustered together in the sky. Called a planetary alignment, they occur when the planets, which orbit atop the same horizonal line—called the ecliptic plane—happen to...

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is scaling up its emergency response in South Sudan’s Jonglei state, where escalating conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and pushed hunger to critical levels.

40 years ago today, the Soviet Union launched the space station Mir, and with it, a new phase in space exploration. Mir, which means both peace and world in Russian, would provide the home base for a permanently manned international complex orbiting the Earth– and was occupied for 10 years of its 15...

The world has “entered the age of clean energy” and renewables are now the cheapest, fastest and safest source of new electricity almost everywhere, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message to the International Energy Agency ministerial meeting in Paris on Wednesday.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Wednesday for warring parties in Sudan to take urgent steps to protect civilians after at least 57 people were killed in separate drone strikes over two days this week.

Decades of underinvestment in mining and refining across Europe and North America has landed the manufacturing sector in a problem, which a group of scientists believe can be helped by mushrooms rather than excavators. One must have been living under a rock not to have recently read the terms “criti...

At least 52 people have died after Tropical Cyclone Gezani made landfall on the eastern coast of Madagascar on 10 February, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday, citing the authorities.

Amid the scorching/freezing desert of Atacama in Chile, one of South America’s largest botanical storehouses aims to protect both the wild and cultivated heritage of the country’s plant life. Called the Initihuasi Seed Bank, this genetic mothership is the central node in a nationwide network of inst...