Eliminating plastic pollution, reducing pesticide use by two-thirds, halving the rate of invasive species introduction and eliminating $500bn (£360bn) of harmful environmental government subsidies a year are among the targets in a new draft of a Paris-style UN agreement on biodiversity loss.

The United Nations is calling for an end to so-called “conversion therapy” on members of the LGBTQ community after a report released in May that documented the global reach of the practice found that it may amount to torture.

Videos produced by environmental groups to be shown to thousands of participants in a major UN climate summit were banned by organisers for mentioning fossil fuels, in a move campaigners say amounts to censorship. AFP has obtained emails sent by the United Nations to NGOs asking them to remove frames referring to "dirty energy" and "pipelines", claiming that they breached the UN climate convention's rules of participation.

Formal recognition would help protect those who increasingly risk their lives to defend the land, water, forests and wildlife, says the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment.

A UN report into the death of its former secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in a 1961 plane crash in central Africa has found that there is a “significant amount of evidence” that his flight was brought down by another aircraft. The report, delivered to the current secretary general, António Guterres, last month, took into account previously undisclosed information provided by the US, UK, Belgian, Canadian and German governments.

The UN has finally acknowledged it played a role in an outbreak of cholera in Haiti in 2010 that has since killed about 10,000 people in the country. Scientific studies have shown that Nepalese UN troops were the source of the disease - but the UN repeatedly denied responsibility until now. An internal report seen by the New York Times is said to have led to the shift. But the UN still says it is protected by diplomatic immunity from claims for compensation from victims' families.