The Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, has reiterated her call to the Syria authorities to stop the killing and maiming of children, noting that over the past months, the number of child victims in Syria has climbed into the hundreds and the rate is increasing.

Everyday people — from a Japanese oyster fisherman cultivating his business by planting trees in an estuary devastated by the 2011 tsunami, to two Michigan teenagers campaigning to ensure Girl Scout cookies and other palm oil-based products were deforestation-free — were among the panellists sharing their grass-roots approaches to forest preservation at a Headquarters press conference today.

French fashion designer agnès b. and a panel of ocean experts welcomed today the arrival in New York of the Tara Oceans Expedition, which was poised to complete a three-year journey to gather critical information on how climate change would further damage the world’s major bodies of water.

The Secretary-General is concerned by the lack of progress in the negotiations on post-independence issues and the possibility of further escalation of tensions following unilateral decisions taken by the Governments of Sudan and South Sudan over their oil dispute. He says the moment has come for the necessary compromises.

After lodging protests against what he described as the United Kingdom’s militarization of the South Atlantic with the leadership of major United Nations bodies, Argentina’s Minister for Foreign Affairs called today for the start of dialogue on the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands (Falklands).

Argentina’s allegations that the United Kingdom was deliberately increasing its military presence in the South Atlantic was “manifestly absurd”, Mark Lyall Grant, the latter country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said at a Headquarters press conference today.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, addressed the General Assembly on Syria this morning, saying that the number of dead and injured continues to rise every day. Tens of thousands, including children, have been arrested, with more than 18,000 reportedly still arbitrarily held in detention.

This morning, the Secretary-General spoke at the KPMG Summit on the Business Perspective for Sustainable Growth, saying that we need corporate sustainability to be in the DNA of business culture and operations. At Rio+20 later this year in Brazil, business and investors have a true opportunity to show leadership.

With a food crisis looming over Africa’s Sahel belt and potentially threatening up to 12 million people, a senior United Nations humanitarian affairs official said today that, even as regional Governments moved swiftly to put resilience-building strategies in place, the wider international community must take “decisive and generous” action to ward off disaster.

Leaders of United Nations agencies, representatives of affected Governments, and major donors today called for an urgent scale-up of assistance to address rising levels of hunger and malnutrition caused by the combined effect of drought, high food prices, displacement and conflict affecting the Sahel region of West Africa.