By A.D. McKenzie
PARIS (IDN | SWAN) – It is being billed as the largest exhibition devoted to Mexican art in at least half a century, and the impressive show now on at Paris’ Grand Palais does feel like a landmark event.
Titled Mexique 1900 – 1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Orozco and the avant-garde, it features Mexico’s most famous artists, as well as those less known, and gives a historical perspective of the Latin American country through its art.
By IDN-INPS UN Bureau
NEW YORK | LILONGWE (IDN | UN Women) – On the eve of International Day of the Girl Child, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson visited Malawi on October 10 to shine a global spotlight on the need to end child marriage. She met with traditional chiefs and girls who have returned to school after having marriages annulled.
In 2015, Malawi passed the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act, raising the minimum age of marriage to 18. UN Women, together with partners, played an integral role in advocating the new law and works with traditional chiefs to change local practices. (Click for video here.)
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) – 2017 will be an important year for Kazakhstan, a transcontinental country in northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Not only because on January 1 the country begins its two-year term as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, but also because it will host EXPO 2017 from June 10 to September 20.
By creating a platform to showcase cutting edge technologies that could provide solutions to energy issues, official sources said the EXPO will establish Kazakhstan as “a global leader on the challenge of future energies” and it will serve as a catalyst for Kazakhstan’s transition to a “green” economy.
By Justus Wanzala
NAIROBI (ACP-IDN) – Nestled in the dry Kajiado County, one and half hour drive from Kenya’s capital Nairobi is the Oloishibor Community Energy Project, an oasis of light in a remote hamlet. It was started in 2009. A brainchild of a community based organisation established by the local pastoral Maasai Community.
Simon Parkesian, the Energy Project’s manager says the community had been facing a myriad of problems ranging from poor health, education to economical. The situation was compounded by lack of electricity.
By Stella Paul
In the upper Himalayan villages of India, hundreds of women have been finding a livelihood in the fiber of a pariah plant: the itchy nettle.
MANA VILLAGE, India (IDN) – Under a grey sky in Mana, the last Indian village before the border of Tibet begins, 36-year-old Bhotiya woman Gayatri Raut is trying hard to sell a basketful of knitwear to the visitors. A few more weeks and the entire population of Mana will migrate to a village far down the mountain to avoid heavy snowfall and extreme cold.
Analysis by Lowana Veal
REYKJAVIK (IDN) – Recently released declassified documents by Washington have unleashed a debate whether the U.S. ever deployed nuclear weapons in Iceland, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since its foundation in 1949.
Experts are of the view that though the U.S. claims to have never deployed nuclear weapons in a country at a strategic juncture of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, it does not mean that it had no nuclear plans for Iceland. Previous research by Valur Ingimundarson and William Arkin demonstrates that during the Cold War Iceland was considered a potential storage site.
By Ramesh Jaura
BERLIN | NEW YORK (IDN) – The choice of former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres as the next United Nations Secretary-General is profoundly historic, though it has not come as a surprise.
Guterres has not only gathered valuable experience as head of the UN Refugee Agency for ten years until December 2015, and as prime minister of his country in critical times, but also as president of the Socialist International.
This global social democratic organisation played a significant role at the height of the Cold War and in the Middle East under the stewardship of the late Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and Nobel Laureate and (West) German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
By Kalinga Seneviratne
VIENTIANE (IDN) – U.S. President Barack Obama’s early September visit to Laos helped to focus attention on one of the most horrendous war crimes in history, the bombing of the small landlocked Southeast Asian country during the Indochina War in the 1960s and 1970s, and its massive human and development costs.
The Laotians made use of the visit of both Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for the ASEAN and East Asia Summits to launch their own Sustainable Development Goal 18 to reduce the impact of unexploded ordnance (UXO) on development and economic activities.
By IDN-INPS UN Bureau
GENEVA (IDN) – Keen to provide strategic support and boost efforts for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls worldwide, the New York based UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, has opened its Geneva Liaison Office.
Explaining the decision to open the Office on October 6, UN Women said in a media release: “Serving as a gateway to development stakeholders, Geneva is host to over 40 United Nations (UN) entities, more than 400 non-governmental organizations, some 35 international organizations as well as renowned academic institutions, several of which support the promotion of women’s rights and gender equality.”
By J Nastranis
NEW YORK (IDN) – Over the past decade, Ban Ki-moon has worked ceaselessly to bring countries together to accelerate the global response to climate change. As he is fond of saying, he has visited communities on the climate frontlines, from the Arctic to the Amazon, and has witnessed how climate impacts are already devastating lives, livelihoods and prospects for a better future.
Some two months ahead of relinquishing his post as UN Secretary-General on completion of the second five-year term on December 31, he will have his efforts rewarded, allowing him to leave behind a valuable legacy.
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