Director of Dutch NGO Milieudefensie Donald Pols after a court in the Hague ruled on May 26 2021 that Shell must reduce its emissions by 45 per cent by 2030. (Keystone/ANP/Remko De Waal)

⚖️ Climate cases before the courts increase as crisis worsens. As governments and corporations fail to slash their carbon emissions, climate campaigners, especially in the global south, are increasingly wielding the law to hold them to account, according to a new UN report.

🗳️IPCC elects Jim Skea as its new chair. The Scottish scientist and longtime insider will hold office for the next five to seven years, during a critical time for the planet’s climate. In a press briefing held ahead of the elections, Skea warned that countries need to get ready for the worst-case scenarios. “We do have to face up to the possibility that we could overshoot 1.5ºC.”

💥UN dismisses Russian claims about POWs from Mariupol. A top human rights official on Tuesday dismissed Russian claims that a US-made missile caused a blast that killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war in a Russian-controlled detention centre in eastern Ukraine last July.

🇺🇳The UN’s counterterrorism office keeps growing, but is its strategy working? It opened its newest program hub in June in Madrid, one of 11 worldwide. But some civil society experts who follow the UN’s counterterrorism work closely remain skeptical, accusing it of “bluewashing”.

🚓Behind the security detail of the 1985 Reagan-Gorbatchev meeting. The American-Soviet meeting mobilised 3,000 soldiers and police in Geneva, including the Geneva Police Intervention Group which, fifty years after being established, is still in service – its mission to prevent any dangerous acts.