United Nations secretary general António Guterres visits the SDG Pavilion at the UN headquarters in New York, 16 September 2023. (UN Photo)

🇺🇳 UN sustainability train is dangerously off track. The SDG Summit taking place in New York as part of the UN General Assembly has entered its second day. This diplomatic moment comes at a time when the UN's Agenda 2030 is drifting worryingly off course. This also sends a warning for Geneva.

📉 Mirjana Spoljaric: ICRC has already had to use its reserves to cover a deficit in 2022. The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross was visiting Chad to measure the impact on the neighbouring countries of the war in Sudan. According to her, the funding gap for ICRC programmes in Africa has increased eightfold in five years.

📋 UN experts say Ethiopia's conflict and Tigray fighting left over 10,000 survivors of sexual violence. The report, published on Monday, comes as the Human Rights Council is set to decide next month whether to extend the team’s mandate in the face of efforts by the Ethiopian government to end it.

🇷🇺 Human rights in Russia have 'significantly deteriorated' since war. The report by UN special rapporteur Mariana Katzarova alleges that Russian authorities have carried out mass arbitrary arrests of critics of the war and says those detained risk death due to the "persistent use of torture and ill-treatment".

💸 Exclusive: UN probes pay-for-aid scam in Somalia. A network of Somali landowners and other authorities have been systematically enforcing a coercive system of taxes on US-funded aid recipients displaced by drought and conflict.

😷 WHO chief pushes China for ‘full access’ to solve Covid’s origins. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the health body is ready to send a second mission as Omicron variants drive rise in cases.