By Santo D. Banerjee NEW YORK (IDN) – Ambassadors from Central Asia and UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) Tadamichi Yamamoto met at Kazakhstan’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations on December 14, two weeks ahead of the Central Asian state’s non-permanent membership of the […]
Japan Shines with a Youth Forum to Commemorate Universal Human Rights Declaration
By Katsuhiro Asagiri TOKYO (IDN) – When the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in Paris on December 10, 1948, it came up with a milestone document in the history of human rights that took into account the horrendous experiences of the Second World War. With the end of that […]
World’s Poorest Look Forward to 2019 Climate Summit at the UN
By J Nastranis NEW YORK | KATOWICE (IDN) – The year 2018 has been marked by a series of natural disasters underlining that no country is immune to the impacts of climate change. But it is the nearly 1 billion world’s poorest people living in the 47 least developed countries (LDCs) that are often hit […]
Africa – Realising The Promise of the Demographic Dividend
Viewpoint by Graça Machel The author, who writes this piece following the recent publication of the Africa Report on Child Wellbeing and the African Child-Friendliness Index, is the widow of Nelson Mandela and former First Lady of both South Africa and Mozambique. She is Chair of the International Board of Trustees of the African Child […]
‘Ugly’ Is the New Delicious in Singapore
By Nadia Amirah Binte Kamsani SINGAPORE (IDN) – As Asian societies become affluent, their modern lifestyles are leading to much wastage in the food chain to satisfy the high standards of hygeine and freshness consumers demand. To combat the issue of higher food wastage in Singapore – one of the most affluent countries in the […]
EU Should Speak Against the Ill-Treatment of Eritreans
Viewpoint by Chief Fortune Charumbira The author is from Vice President of the Pan African Parliament (PAP), and President of the Chief Council in his home country Zimbabwe He gave an opening speech to the Conference titled ‘We the People: Peace in the Horn & the Safety and Future of the Eritrean People’ 12-14 December […]
EU Urged to Evacuate Eritreans from Libyan ‘Death Camps’
By Ramesh Jaura BRUSSELS (IDN) – When the Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed signed in July a peace deal after two decades of war and ensuing violent border clashes, “a new era of peace and friendship” was felt to have begun in the Horn of Africa comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, […]
UNDP Welcomes Significant Rise in German Funding
Berlin a ‘Launch Partner’ to UNDP’s Accelerator Labs in 60 Countries By Santo D. Banerjee NEW YORK (IDN) – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has greeted the German government’s decision to raise a further 25 percent in funding from its 2019 core resources, which follows a 60 percent increase for 2018. Germany is currently […]
Why Green New Deal Advocates Must Address Militarism
Viewpoint by Medea Benjamin and Alice Slater* Where is the call for the New Peace Deal that would free up hundreds of billions from the overblown military budget to invest in green infrastructure? ask the authors of this article that first appeared on Common Dreams on 12 December 2018. NEW YORK (IDN-INPS) – In the […]
Participatory Development is a Humane Alternative to Migration
Viewpoint by Yossef Ben-Meir and Manon Burbidge While Yossef Ben-Meir, Ph.D. is a sociologist and President of the High Atlas Foundation, based in Marrakech, Manon Burbidge is a post-graduate studying Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden and currently interning at the High Atlas Foundation. MARRAKECH (IDN) – December 2018 is gearing up to be a […]