By Kalinga Seneviratne SUUSAMYR, Kyrgyzstan (IDN) – Travelling on the new Silk Roads recently upgraded by the Chinese, one drives up through stunning mountains that are still covered by snow even as summer approaches. The road from Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek climbs up to a peak of about 4.000 meters before descending over 1500 meters to […]
FAO Starts Giving Much-Needed Seeds to Cyclone Hit Mozambique
By Santo D. Banerjee NEW YORK | ROME (IDN) – While clock is ticking to reboot agriculture as secondary growing season is .already underway, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has started distribution of much-needed seeds and tools in cyclone-ravaged Mozambique. Nearly three weeks after the Tropical Cyclone Idai, which was […]
India Between Democracy and Religious Nationalism
By Milan Vaishnav The following are extensive excerpts from the Executive Summary of a study on ‘The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism’ published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.The views represented herein are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees. The […]
African Nations Can Choose Their Own Destiny
Viewpoint by Beatrice Fihn Following are extensive excerpts from International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Executive Director Beatrice Fihn’s address to the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council on April 4, 2019 at the organization’s Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ADDIS ABABA (IDN-INPS) – Across the world we have seen the devastating impacts […]
South Africa a Shining Example of Dismantling Nuclear Arsenal
By J Nastranis NEW YORK (IDN) – As the nuclear weapons and fossil fuel divestment campaigns gather steam, their political impact could be as powerful as the divestment campaign against South Africa in the late 20th Century, which was a critical factor in moving the South African government to end apartheid in 1994, anticipates Thies […]
Call for Renewed U.S.-Russian Strategic Dialogue
By Daryl G. Kimball* WASHINGTON , D.C. (IDN-INPS) – In the latest in a series of expert conferences and dialogues in Moscow and Washington, a group of distinguished U.S. and Russian experts released a public statement calling on U.S. and Russian officials to get back to the arms control negotiating table, with the first order […]
Moving Money for a Nuclear-Free and Eco Friendly World
By Jamshed Baruah GENEVA | BASEL (IDN) – While Fridays for Future protests underline a global dissatisfaction with the continuing failure of governments and industry to protect the climate, the setting of the Doomsday Clock hands to 2 minutes to midnight in January 2019 signifies a continuing high risk of a nuclear clash with disastrous […]
Call for UN Summit on Digitalization and Sustainability
By Rita Joshi BERLIN (IDN) – A new report has called on Germany and the European Union to convene a United Nations summit on ‘Digitalization and Sustainability’ in 2020 – 30 years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development, widely known as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The central theme of the […]
Hookah Culture Invades Central Asia
By Milena Melnikova* NAYRN, Kyrgyzstan (IDN) – The culture of smoking hookah is becoming popular among young adults in the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, because of its affordability as well as due to its being legal as a way to relax and get rid of the accumulated stress, in the absence […]
Rich Nations Slash Development Aid to Neediest Countries
By Krishan Dutta PARIS (IDN) – “Donor countries are not living up to their 2015 pledge to ramp up development finance and this bodes badly for us being able to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría has cautioned. The warning of the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development […]