An Iraqi man burns a Quran outside a Stockholm mosque on June 28. (KEYSTONE/TT News Agency/Stefan Jerrevång/TT)

💬 UN human rights body adopts religious hatred motion, boosting ‘rights’ of religion over individuals. NGOs warn the motion, seen as a major blow to western nations, risks legitimising religious crackdowns against minorities.

🏦 Nearly half of humanity caught in a debt trap, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned yesterday at the launch of a new report that revealed that global public debt reached $92 trillion last year.

💸‘Some aspects of innovative finance are dressed up to be what they are not’, says Peter Sands, executive director of The Global Fund, in a frank interview on the state of the global health sector.

🎙️Human rights and those who defend them. An interview with Mary Robinson, the second person to serve as UN Human Rights Commissioner, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Image: Unsplash/Dan Meyers

🌾 That’s the number of people projected to be facing hunger by 2030 – the year in which the UN aimed to reach a zero hunger target as part of its Sustainable Development Goals, according to a new report by five UN agencies, including the World Health Organisation and the UN’s hunger relief agency, the World Food Programme.

The organisation’s five chiefs said that the major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition, namely the ongoing effects of the pandemic, growing disruptions fueled by climate change and conflicts were now “our new normal”. The report comes on the back of warnings from several humanitarian and hunger relief NGOs that global engagement and funding to combat daunting levels of malnutrition and hunger have been dwindling for years.