World | WPN World People News

With the dramatically worsening situation in Syria’s Idlib province, where close to a million people are in grave danger, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi supports calls for a cessation of hostilities and appeals for urgent action to allow people trapped in the conflict to move to places of safety.

Bangladesh needs to invest an estimated extra $7.8 billion over the next decade to halve its road crash fatalities, says a new World Bank report.

Nearly 3 million people in Niger, more than half of whom are children, need humanitarian assistance amidst the risks posed by insecurity, malnutrition, recurrent disease epidemics, cyclical floods, droughts and displacement. UNICEF called for increased attention to the plight of children and their families, on Febuary 19.

On 13 February 2020, boys stand together at an informal settlement in the Syrian Arab Republic near the Turkish border. The settlement houses around 500 displaced families from eastern Ghouta and rural Idlib and western rural Aleppo governorates.

U.N. rights chief Michelle Bachelet said Tuesday civilians are at "higher risk than ever" in Syria as forces backing the government carry out an offensive to take back territory in the northwestern part of the country.

The establishment of the first regional Road Safety Observatory in the Asia-Pacific region was announced in Stockholm on the eve of the 3rd Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety, on Febuary 18. The conference gathers ministers and policymakers from across the world to set the future direction for road safety action.

A former chief justice in the central African nation of Equatorial Guinea has gone into hiding and is appealing to the U.S. and the United Nations for help as security forces hunt for him on the orders of the country's longtime ruler, Teodoro Nguema Obiang.

Violence in North and West Africa is increasingly targeting civilian and border regions as the conflicts involve non-state actors with diverging agendas, according to a new report by the OECD’s Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC).

U.S. President Trump will never start a war with Iran during an election year, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said.

Rouhani told a Tehran news conference Sunday that Trump knows a war between Iran and the United States would "ruin" his chances of reelection in November.

Syrian government forces now control all of the strategic Damascus to Aleppo highway, which they had been trying to wrest from Turkish-backed rebels for weeks. As Syrian troops continue to push ahead inside the rebel-held enclave of Idlib, Turkey sent reinforcements to observations posts it occupies, while dispatching its foreign minister to Moscow.