Interviews

If you were passionate about a cause, would you give up a well-paid job for it – even if it drove your parents mad?

That’s what Ya Wang from Beijing, China, did, and now he’s helping other volunteers to promote youth empowerment through concerts, through the organization, Up With People.

They’re on tour in Switzerland, which is where UN News’s Daniel Johnson caught up with Ya, along with fellow cast member Ahmed Hassan from Aleppo, Syria, who has his own story to tell.

The UN is working in Iraq on many fronts, including assisting the rebuilding of northern areas devastated during the war against ISIL terrorists, says the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator there.clennon

Marta Ruedas cites the World Bank and Iraq Government in estimating that reconstruction will cost $88 billion - but just over $1 billion has been received so far.

“It’s a drop in the ocean”, she said, while acknowledging that international funding has already helped “to improve the situation for millions of people”.

If we told you that greenhouse gas emissions are measured in gigatonnes, how many of them do you think we need to stop producing, if we’re to keep the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius in line with the Paris Agreement?

For the answer to that question – and some advice on how countries like Denmark and South Africa are doing their bit - here’s John Christensen, lead author of the UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report, speaking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

With unemployment in Gaza standing at 54 per cent, young people there are living “a daily existence in a nightmarish scenario”, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory.

Jamie McGoldrick said Palestinian youth gaze across the Mediterranean at the lives of their European counterparts and wonder why they too cannot have a job, or buy a car, or afford to go on holiday.

It’s widely understood that exercise is good for you, but how much should that be?

In the first global study of its kind into schoolchildren aged 11 to 17 years old, the World Health Organization (WHO) found that four in five of them are not active for even 60 minutes of exercise a day – that’s the minimum recommended amount.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, the agency’s Dr Leanne Riley explains why it is urgent that Governments do something about it – and how frozen Finland is already leading the way.

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are facing a “toxic combination” of escalating violence, displacement, hunger, poverty and climate change, which has driven the whole central Sahel region to the “cusp of disaster”.

That’s according to World Food Programme (WFP) spokesperson, Marwa Awad, who was in Burkina Faso just a few days ago, where already this year, civilian deaths are four times the level they were for the whole of 2018, and close to half a million have been displaced.

She spoke to UN News’s Matt Wells

Around 15 countries are preparing to test a technique that sterilizes male mosquitoes using radiation as part of a global health effort to control diseases such as chikungunya, dengue, and Zika.

In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, Jeremy Bouyer, a UN pest control expert, explains how the process of using radiation on the bugs works.

Polarization and divisive language could be a major impediment to reaching the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the world needs to prioritize youth education to reach targets by 2030.

That’s from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who also previously served as envoy for the Middle East Quartet, which includes the UN. He sat down with Dan Thomas, who heads up communications for the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, at the recent UN Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

Cases of Ebola virus are slowing down in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but it is still way too soon to say the deadly disease is beaten.

That’s the message from the World Health Organization (WHO), which on Tuesday also hailed the decision by European regulators to green light the production of a new Ebola vaccine.

This will help prevent future outbreaks from spreading, the agency’s Christian Lindmeier told UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

Not only does torture not work, it’s counterproductive, and when the practice elicits false confessions, societies pay a “very high price.” 

That’s from Professor Juan Méndez, who served at the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2014 to 2016, and experienced torture himself while practicing law in his native Argentina, defending political prisoners during the country’s 1970’s military dictatorship.