IDN-InDepthNews – Page 701 – News for a Sustainable World, Peace and Security

UN INSIDER2016-10-132023-07-10

Nuclear Disarmament – A Challenge for the New UN Chief

Analysis by Alyn Ware*

NEW YORK (IDN) – The United Nations General Assembly has on October 13 affirmed António Guterres, the former Prime Minister of Portugal and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, as the next United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG). The UN Security Council had on October 5 nominated him for the position after considering 13 candidates.

Guterres will have a number of challenges as he prepares to take up the UNSG position in January 2017. These include implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, addressing climate change, managing the continuing global refugee crisis, ensuring progress on disarmament, curtailing armed conflicts in a number of countries and regions, and reducing the tensions between Russia and the West, and between China and its neighbours in East Asia.

ARMAMENTS2016-10-132023-07-10

The Legacy of the Reykjavik Summit – The Road Ahead

By Jayantha Dhanapala*

This is an expanded version of thoughts expressed by the author at a conference organized by the International Peace Institute (IPI) with the Foreign Ministry of Iceland on October 10-11 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Summit meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev.

REYKJAVIK (IDN) – Richard Rhodes, the famous author of several books on nuclear weapons, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (1986), has written a play entitled “Reykjavik” dramatizing the famous Summit. At the conclusion he has Gorbachev say, “Reykjavik is not a failure – it’s a breakthrough”.

ARMAMENTS2016-10-132023-07-10

Gorbachev: ‘Worst Thing” Collapse of Trust Between Major Powers

REYKJAVIK – At an IPI seminar in Reykjavik, Iceland on October 11, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said via video, “I would like to emphasize something, with all the emotions I have in my soul: the worst thing that has happened over the past few years is the collapse of trust in relations between the major powers, which, according to the UN Charter, bear primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, and which still have enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons and must reduce them, up to and including their elimination.”

UN INSIDER2016-10-122023-07-10

Staff Unions Censure Outgoing UN Secretary-General

By Jamshed Baruah

GENEVA (IDN) – During his farewell visit to Geneva early October, the outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was told by Prisca Chaoui, deputy executive secretary of the staff union: “As you leave the UN, you leave behind civil servants who are full of concern and apprehension about their future.”

Painting a black picture, Chaoui said the staff feared job cuts after the introduction of an expensive software (Umoja – meaning “unity” in Swahili) designed to unite UN employees scattered around the globe and another efficiency initiative aimed at streamlining administrative services.

Africa2016-10-122023-07-10

Fellowships to Help Avert Brain Drain in Africa

By J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – A Fellowship Program will fund 69 new projects at African universities in the coming months, bringing 52 professors and scholars from universities in the U.S. and Canada to universities in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda as visiting Fellows.

Together, the teams will develop curricula, conduct research, teach graduate students, and train and mentor students and professors in priority areas that were proposed by the African universities. The program is also accepting new applications from host universities and diaspora scholars for projects to be conducted in 2017. Deadline is December 8.

UN INSIDER2016-10-112023-07-10

US in High Level Talks on New Sanctions on North Korea

By Rodney Reynolds

NEW YORK (IDN) – As a belated response to North Korea’s fifth nuclear test in September, the United States is in the process of negotiating a new Security Council resolution introducing additional economic sanctions while tightening existing ones.

But the final text of the resolution will depend on compromises demanded by China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, which has remained a strong political supporter of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Ambassador Samantha Power, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, told reporters, during a visit to South Korea October 10: “There are a set of political questions at the heart of any sanctions negotiation, but also a set of very, very technical issues, looking at the sources of hard currency for a regime that uses that currency in only one way, and that is to advance its destructive capabilities.”

OPINION2016-10-112023-07-10

The Press is Blind to the Africa of the Future

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – Africa up or down? After 10 years of quite remarkable growth across the continent most countries are experiencing a downturn, with average growth nearer 3.75% than 5% as before.

Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country with its largest economy, was at one time growing year after year at 7+%. Now it looks like it’s heading for recession and a growth rate pointing to zero. It has been hit by a six-fold whammy – oil prices sharply down, the effects of the great recession in the industrialised countries, the Chinese economy slowing, bad economic and foreign exchange policies under the relatively new president, Muhammadu Buhari, increased corruption under his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, and the war against Boko Haram in the far north.

ARMAMENTS2016-10-112023-07-10

Atomic Bombing Survivors Want a Ban on Nukes

By J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – The ‘International Hibakusha Appeal Signature Campaign’, launched early 2016, aims to collect hundreds of millions of signatures by 2020 in the hope that a treaty to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons will be achieved in their lifetime. As of October 1, 2016, the Campaign had gathered 564,260 signatures in Japan and in several other countries around the world.

The Campaign was initiated on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers’ Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo).

ARTS & CULTURE2016-10-102023-07-10

Mexican Artists Featured in Mesmerising Paris Expo

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.

UN INSIDER2016-10-102023-07-10

Malawi Shines in Ending Child Marriages

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.)