Geneva

Africa is facing an explosion of preventable diseases due to delays in vaccinating children, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on April 28, with measles cases jumping 400 percent.

Twenty African countries reported measles outbreaks in the first quarter of this year, eight more than in the first three months of 2021.

The Montreux Jazz Festival is to return this summer promising a "dizzying panorama of sound" after two years muted by the pandemic, with Diana Ross, Bjork, Stormzy and Herbie Hancock in the line-up unveiled on April 13.

World food prices hit an all-time high in March as Russia's invasion of breadbasket Ukraine has disrupted wheat and coarse grain exports, the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization said on April 8.

The FAO's food price index surged by 12.6 percent between February and March, "making a giant leap to a new highest level since its inception in 1990," said the FAO.

The United States has warned the United Nations that it has information that Russia has lists of Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps in the event of an invasion. This is stated in a letter received by AFP on Sunday.

It also says that the United States is deeply concerned and warns of a potential catastrophe involving human rights violations.

In that city, the Prime Minister of Serbia, Ana Brnabi, met with the founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, and Børge Brende, the President of the World Economic Forum.

The Facebook-backed digital currency project Diem has announced the winding down and $182-million sale of its technology, capping a years-long initiative that drew significant concern from regulators.

Heirs of Pablo Picasso, the famed 20th-century Spanish artist, are vaulting into 21st-century commerce by selling 1,010 digital art pieces of one of his ceramic works that have never before been seen publicly, riding a fad for "crypto" assets that have taken the art and financial worlds by storm.

"As you have heard from the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser and others, we do not know if the Russians are playing diplomatic games, but we hope they are not playing. Our intention is to seriously move diplomacy forward so that its doors remain open and if the Russians are ready for that, they will move through diplomacy," said a White House spokeswoman.

The United States on Wednesday rejected Russia's key demand to bar Ukraine from NATO and said it believed Moscow was ready to invade but offered what it called a new "diplomatic path" out of the crisis.

The United States has ordered the families of its diplomats to leave Ukraine, as rising fears of a Russian invasion pushed Western officials to meet on Jan. 24 in a bid to coordinate their response and compile a battery of sanctions against Moscow.

U.S. top diplomat Antony Blinken will join a meeting of his EU counterparts by video-link.