Interviews

Phasing out pollution and changing inefficient industries which damage the environment for greener systems and solutions, represents the biggest financial opportunity “of the century”.

That’s according to Bertrand Piccard - psychiatrist, UN goodwill ambassador, chair of the Solar Impulse solar-powered aircraft project, and the first person ever to make a non-stop balloon flight around the world, back in 1999.

Overcoming an outbreak of one of the deadliest diseases on the planet is a complicated prospect at the best of times.

But imagine how you would go about it in a place where there’s frequent fighting that prevents you from reaching some of the sick and dying.

That’s what’s facing the World Health Organization (WHO), which has 300 workers on the ground helping 800 national staff fight the epidemic in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has seen more than 270 deaths so far.

The mass arrest of demonstrators in Indonesia who were attempting to mark a national day for indigenous people in the east of the archipelago, has been condemned by the UN human rights office, OHCHR.

More than 500 activists were detained at the start of the month - though they’ve since been released.

Spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani explained to UN News' Daniel Johnson on Friday, what’s behind these latest developments.

Road traffic crashes have become the leading killer of young people, aged five to 29, with most deaths happening in lower-income countries.

This data comes from World Health Organization's latest global status report on road safety, which indicates that road traffic deaths are on the rise, totally 1.35 million a year now, over 90 percent of which occur in poorer parts of the world now.

Dr. Etienne Krug, Director of the WHO Department that handles violence and injury prevention, said high level political will must be applied to take on the problem.

Women have left an indelible mark on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but when they first started working on it, men were “thinking that the declaration wasn’t going to be much of anything”, a leading author and researcher told UN News this week.

It was the strength of women such as Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Begum Shaista Ikramullah from Pakistan, and Hansa Mehta from India that proved them wrong, said Stockholm University researcher, Rebecca Adami.

There is “no question,” of the positive benefits that could be reaped from migration, if the world was to implement the UN Global Compact, an all-inclusive agreement to make migration safe and orderly.

As thousands of political leaders, advocates and private sector representatives from around the world are gathered in Katowice, Poland, for the COP24 conference, to define concrete guidelines for climate action, one person stands out: Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba.

For the 14^th year in a row, the Mobile Film Festival rounded up videos from around the world to promote emerging talent, and give a creative opportunity to all geographic cultures and backgrounds.

It may be surprising to some, but the International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL, is playing an active role in helping the countries of the world where police serve, reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In an interview with UN News, global police chief Jürgen Stock has been explaining how INTERPOL’s set of seven Global Policing Goals aim to create a safer world, and not just for humankind.

Families in Afghanistan are being forced into debt, “making the difficult decision of using their children as collateral”, says the Chief of Communications for UNICEF in Afghanistan, Alison Parker.

In a recent interview with UN News, Ms Parker alerted to the fact that “some of these children are betrothed when they are only 1 or 3 months old”.