General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

In a year of clarion calls for reform in the Middle East and North Africa that truly reflected peoples’ aspirations, the United Nations must not miss the “massive” opportunity presented by the so-called Arab Spring to act, whether by providing aid to famine-stricken countries, helping to mediate crises or standing up to regimes that persecuted their people, world leaders said today as the General Assembly moved into day two of its annual general debate.

Acting to bolster global resolve to combat racism, the United Nations today adopted a Declaration aimed at mobilizing political support to end all forms of racial discrimination and related intolerance, and to place victims at the centre of measures to promote equal opportunity, openness and inclusion.

Opening the General Assembly’s annual high-level debate amid a global climate marked by lingering financial uncertainty, widening social inequality and growing cries for self-determination, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged world leaders to tackle those challenges decisively so as to secure a better world for future generations.

Addressing the General Assembly’s two-day summit on non-communicable diseases this afternoon as it drew to a close, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York, implored Governments worldwide to adopt the type of public policies and strategies that had enabled his administration to reduce deadly chronic illnesses and promote healthy lifestyles among the city’s 8.4 million people.

An international framework to control non-communicable diseases must include broad factors and actors at every level, speakers said this morning at the final round table at the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the threat.

Too often seen as a “lost cause”, the world’s drylands — home to 2 billion people — must be placed higher on the international agenda as poor land management, climate change and conflict threatened to jeopardize hard-won gains in painstaking national efforts to reduce poverty and improve development prospects, top United Nations and other officials said today during the High-level Meeting of the General Assembly to address desertification, land degradation and drought.

Participants in this afternoon’s round table discussion on non-communicable diseases stressed the urgency of international cooperation to boost national capabilities in prevention, policy formulation, monitoring and analysis, as well as building health-care systems.

Non-communicable diseases were quickly becoming a threat to socio-economic development in the world’s poorest countries, speakers participating in the first round table of the General Assembly’s high-level meeting on the subject said this morning.

Proclaiming the spread of non-communicable diseases a socio-economic and development challenge of “epidemic proportions,” Governments today pledged to work with the United Nations to adopt before the end of 2012 targets to combat heart disease, cancers, diabetes and lung disease and to devise voluntary policies that cut smoking and slashed the high salt, sugar and fat content in foods that caused them.

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) met this morning to fill vacant positions on its Bureau for the upcoming sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly.