Message of the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on International Day of Families, 15 May 2010

This year's commemoration of the International Day of Families focuses on the impact of migration on families around the world.

Rising social and economic disparities create both pressures and incentives for people to leave their homes in search of better opportunities. Many migrate out of necessity due to poverty, unemployment, political or armed conflicts or violations of human rights.

“Unleash your creativity against poverty” is the theme of a Europe-wide advertisement competition launched today by the United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC), in partnership with the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) Vienna, United Nations Information Centres around Europe and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as part of a Europe-wide campaign to promote the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The heart of the campaign is the website www.WeCanEndPoverty.eu. Open to citizens of 48 European countries, the competition invites everyone – individuals, but also advertisement professionals to take part by submitting print entries.

Opinion peace by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon

A few weeks ago, traveling in Kazakhstan, I had the sobering experience of standing at Ground Zero. This was the notorious test site at Semipalatinsk, where the Soviet Union detonated 456 nuclear weapons between 1947 and 1989.

Apart from a circle of massive concrete plinths, designed to measure the destructive power of the blasts, there was little on the vast and featureless steppe to distinguish this place. For decades it was an epicenter of the cold war — like similar sites in the United States, a threat to life on our planet. Its dark legacy endures: poisoned rivers and lakes, children suffering from cancer and birth defects.

Article from Asha-Rose Migiro, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations

Mine is the rare job that allows me to meet, within the span of a very few hours, both a president and a homeless mother. And each told me the same thing.

Three months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, President Préval welcomed me to his offices in Port au Prince -- a modest building in the gardens behind his ruined presidential palace. Education, he said straight-off, must be a corner stone of the international effort to rebuild Haiti. Without that, there is no future.

4 May 2010 – The review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered its second day today at United Nations Headquarters with speakers taking up issues ranging from the Middle East, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to practical measures towards disarmament and peaceful uses of nuclear technology.