Switzerland's deputy state secretary Thomas Gürber addresses the UN Security Council, 19 December 2024. (Keystone/AP Photo/Richard Drew)

🇨🇭Bern names Thomas Gürber as new UN ambassador in Geneva. Switzerland has picked Thomas Gürber, who oversees its UN strategy from Bern, to succeed Jürg Lauber as its top diplomat for multilateral affairs in Geneva. The career diplomat, who previously led Dcaf, will return to familiar ground.

🔥Record leap in CO2 fuels fears of accelerating global heating. An upsurge in wildfires and a weakening carbon sinks drove up the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to record levels last year, intensifying the impact of temperature increases, according to the latest report by the World Meteorological Organization.

⚕️Where is the accountability for the producers of health misinformation? At the World Health Summit in Berlin on Tuesday, a senior adviser to the UN Children’s Fund warned that misinformation has become a growing challenge to public perceptions of vaccines and putting people's health at risk.

🛬Passenger traffic in Geneva drops further in the wake of the UN crisis. September, the number of travellers to Geneva Airport suffered a further decline in September, while it continued to grow in Zurich. UN agencies, forced to tighten their financial seatbelts, are curbing staff travel.

🚚Palestinian Authority says it is ready to operate Rafah crossing. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Mohammad Shtayyeh, special envoy to president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, also expressed concern about who will pay for the reconstruction of Gaza after two years of war.

🌾‘We’re turning away 9 out of 10 hungry people’: The cost of shrinking aid. Officials from humanitarian agencies including the World Food Programme warns of the alarming effects on the ground of aid cuts, pushing millions of people to the brink and reversing years of progress.