GLOBAL ISSUES – Page 179 – IDN-InDepthNews

PLANET EARTH2014-10-272023-07-10

Eco-Drive A Sustainable Solution at the heart of the UN Agenda

By Valentina Gasbarri and Katsuhiro Asagiri | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

NEW YORK (IDN) – As an American actor Leonardo DiCaprio, the newly appointed UN Messenger for Peace, warned some 120 heads of states at the UN Climate Summit on September 24, impacts of climate change and global warming have been perceived more dangerous and globally widespread and it has become the gravest existential threat to humanity. While he urged governments and industries to take an immediate and decisive actions to tackle this global issue, he stressed that protecting our future on this planet depends on “the conscious evolution of our species”.

Climate change is a problem requiring new and transformative solutions. In order to achieve the goal of sustainability, the role of public-policy makers, governments and international institutions as well as of the private sector and the academia is essential. Taking a cue from the United Nations, the first “International Conference on Global Environment, Carbon Reduction, and Eco-Drive as a solution towards sustainability” was held on October 17, 2014 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. It was co-hosted by the World Association of Former United Nations Internes and Fellows (WAFUNIN), the ASUA Corporation of Japan and the Permanent Mission of Romania to the United Nations.

ARMAMENTS2014-10-072023-07-10

Obama’s Talk Closer to Indian Position On Nukes

By Shastri Ramachandaran* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

NEW DELHI (IDN) – Present-day summit meetings are about optics and atmospherics. It is the triumph of style over content. The meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Barack Obama was no different. In the age of tweet and TV-driven news coverage, events take precedence over outcomes and sound bytes over substance.

Documents such as the vision statement or the joint statement, which in times past served as a measure of the agenda and accomplishments of bilateral meetings, are today ignored as pointless verbiage unavoidable for the record.

MEDIA2014-10-052023-07-10

Commercialisation of Children’s Media Hampering Global Citizenship

By Kalinga Seneviratne* | IDN-InDepth NewsReport

KUALA LUMPUR (IDN) – Excessive commercialization of children’s media, especially television, is obstructing efforts aimed at education and capacity building for global citizenship and raising awareness among children of the diversity of the world, according to experts.

Many of the speakers at the recent World Summit on Media for Children in Kuala Lumpur agreed with Dr Patricia Edgar, former director of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, that the majority of children’s programmes are commercially driven and not educational.

GLOBAL ISSUES2014-09-292023-07-10

Asian Leaders Show A Way Out of the ‘Hell’ Let Loose

By Kalinga Seneviratne* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

SINGAPORE (IDN) – In 2003 when U.S. President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were contemplating invading Iraq based on the now discredited claims of Iraqi President Saddam Hussien possessing “weapons of mass destruction”, the then Arab League chief Amr Moussa warned that such an action would “open the gates of hell” in the Middle East.

Today, not only Iraq, but also many of its neighbours such as Syria, Palestine and Libya have descended into the “hell” Moussa predicted. Yet, the West seems blind to it and is repeating the same mistakes again, lacking the wisdom to understand that the threat the West argues needs to be neutralized, is coming from the “hell” they themselves created.

Six months after invading Iraq, in September 2003, President Bush addressing the UN General Assembly (UNGA) said that the U.S. and its allies were fighting “a global movement of violent extremists” and in September 2014 President Barack Obama used almost identical words when he said that the U.S. will work with a broad coalition to “dismantle this network of death”.

ARMAMENTS2014-09-282023-07-10

Waiting For Zero Nuke

By D Ravi Kanth* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

GENEVA (IDN) – The commemoration of the United Nations International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons on September 26 was a grim reminder of the continued threat from nuclear weapons to people at large.

USA and Canada2014-09-222023-07-12

U. S. Military Three Years After ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

By Chas Henry* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

WASHINGTON DC (IDN) – On a recent summer morning in Northern Virginia, about 100 very fit 20-somethings in camouflaged uniforms marched onto a large asphalt parade field in Quantico, Virginia – elated after ten weeks of tough physical and mental screening to have been selected as officers in the U. S. Marine Corps.

Among their ranks: Joseph Rocha, who many would have imagined the last person who would want to be part of that formation.

GLOBAL ISSUES2014-08-202023-07-10

Squaring the ‘Islamic Democracy’ Circle in Tunisia

By Eric Walberg* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

The self-immolation of a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in December 2010, was the spark that set off the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Do events there since prove or disprove those who see the Arab Spring as an important turning point in the Middle East?

TORONTO (IDN) – In an irony of imperialism witnessed throughout the region, Islamists in Tunisia (11 million, 98% Sunni) were repressed more after ‘independence’ in 196, than before under the French imperialists. The French handed power to secularist President Habib Bourguiba, who was pushed aside in a coup in 1988, and his corrupt and ruthless successor Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, was president for the next 23 years.

Contrast with Egypt

Just as Egypt’s Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak initially courted the Islamists only to turn against them, members of Tunisia’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked group Ennahda (founded in 1981, meaning Renaissance) were allowed to participate in the 1989 elections as independents and, despite blatant repression and vote rigging during the elections, garnered 17% of the vote.

ARMAMENTS2014-08-162023-07-10

Austrian Parliament Backs Government Efforts For Nuclear Disarmament

By Jamshed Baruah | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

VIENNA (IDN) – As the Austrian government prepares to host the third international conference on the humanitarian consequences of atomic weapons on December 8-9 in Vienna, the county’s parliament has provided it the legal basis for its commitment to usher in a world without nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

The forthcoming gathering in Vienna will be the third since the March 2013 conference in Oslo convened by the Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide who said the Conference had “provided an arena for a fact-based discussion of the humanitarian and developmental consequences of a nuclear weapons detonation”.

ARMAMENTS2014-08-072023-07-10

69 Years On: Need To Tread A Nuke Free Road

By Akira Kawasaki* | IDN-InDepth NewsViewpoint

August 6, 2014 marked the 69th anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon over Japan. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki held ceremonies commemorating those hundreds of thousands who perished in the two nuclear attacks in 1945, and the countless more whose lives would forever be affected. But in these past decades, can we say that we have truly learned from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is our recognition of the suffering inflicted upon those cities matched with the concrete action to ensure that it can never be repeated? Akira Kawasaki answers these and other questions in a contribution to IDN partner Pressenza

TOKYO (IDN) – While the numbers of nuclear weapons are down significantly from the days of the Cold War – when it seemed as though another Hiroshima or Nagasaki could be imminent – we are far from having secured our future against another such unspeakable human tragedy.

ARMAMENTS2014-08-052023-07-10

69 Years On: A Survivor Account of the Hiroshima Bombing

By Setsuko Thurlow | IDN-InDepth NewsDocument*

At the Little White House in Key West Florida, on 16 May 2014, atomic bomb testimony was delivered in an official forum on Truman ground for the first time. Together with Clifton Truman Daniel, Hibakusha Stories organized an event where Setsuko Thurlow and Yasuaki Yamashita were able to share their experience of being children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. Thanks to support from the Truman Family, The Little White House and The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, atomic bomb survivors are now on the official record defending the position that nuclear weapons are immoral no matter in whose hands. The following is Setsuko Thurlow’s speech from that evening.