'Unseen' News and Views
July 7, 2017 — After a decade-long effort by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), and 72 years after their invention, today states at the United Nations formally adopted a treaty which categorically prohibits nuclear weapons
On 7 July 2017, the United Nations adopted a landmark agreement to ban nuclear weapons, known officially as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
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7 July 2017 (Greenpeace)* — Today at the UN Headquarters in New York, a global treaty banning nuclear weapons has been adopted.
Activists release peace doves during the Hiroshima atomic bombing 60th anniversary. (2005)
This is an historic moment: according to the treaty, to possess and develop nuclear weapons is now illegal under international law. The treaty will be open for signature by states on September 20th.
08/07/17
I HAVE a unique confession to make: I like Gaza.
Uri Avnery
Yes, I like this far-away corner of Palestine, the narrow strip on the way to Egypt, in which two million human beings are crowded, and which is closer to hell than to heaven.
My heart goes out to them.
I HAVE spent quite a lot of time in the Strip. Once or twice I stayed there with Rachel for a couple of days.
I became friendly with some people whom I admired, people like Dr. Haidar Abd-al-Shafi, the leftist doctor who set up the Gazan health system, and Rashad al-Shawa, the former Mayor, an aristocrat from birth.
After the Oslo agreement, when Yasser Arafat came back to the country and set up his office in Gaza, I met him there many times. I brought to him groups of Israelis.
3 July 2017 – TRANSCEND Media Service — A true mediation history from Johan Galtung
Prof. Dietrich Fischer
An Italian husband was fitting bathrooms with tiles for a living, while his wife, who was eight years younger, stayed home and took care of the household. Her main concern was her security in old age.
Since Italian women live on average eight years longer than men, she expected to outlive her husband by about sixteen years.
But his preference after working for 40 years was to spend some hours after work in the evening drinking a glass of wine and discussing with his friends at the local pub.
She complained that he had stopped working overtime.
He told her that she had no idea how difficult it was to fit the last tiles behind a toilet or bathtub, that his shoulders were aching, and that after many years of hard work he deserved to spend some time with his friends in the evening.
John Scales Avery, author of this book: We Need Their Voices Today! has generously granted Human Wrongs Watch permission to publish it in a series of chapters. This is Chapter 7: The Marquis de Condorcet. The others will follow successively.
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Figure 7.1: The Marquis de Condorcet (public domain).
A vision of human progress
In France the Marquis de Condorcet had written an equally optimistic book, “Esquisse d’un Tableau Historique des Progres de l’Esprit Humain”.
Condorcet’s optimism was unaffected even by the fact that at the time when he was writing he was in hiding, under sentence of death by Robespierre’s government.
Unprecedented levels of population displacements in the Lake Chad Basin ‒Cameroon, Chad, the Niger and Nigeria. Credit: FAO
Also that the billions of dollars that the major industrialised powers—those who are the main responsible for climate change, spend on often illegal, inhumane measures aiming at impeding the arrival of migrants and refuges to their countries, could be devoted instead to preventing the root causes of massive human displacements.
Gonorrhoea is becoming harder to treat due to antibiotic resistance, the United Nations health agency on 7 July 2017 cautioned, adding that there is a need for better prevention and treatment of the disease that infects an estimated 78 million people each year.
Gonorrhea tests can be done on urine samples or samples of body fluid from the area where the infection is suspected. Photo: WHO/G. Hampton
“The bacteria that cause gonorrhoea are particularly smart. Every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them,” said Dr. Teodora Wi, Medical Officer, Human Reproduction, at the UN World Health Organization (WHO).
Countries meeting at a United Nations conference in New York on 7 July 2017 adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first multilateral legally-binding instrument for nuclear disarmament to have been negotiated in 20 years.
The remains of the Prefectural Industry Promotion Building, later preserved as a monument – known as the Genbaku Dome – at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. UN Photo
“The treaty represents an important step and contribution towards the common aspirations of a world without nuclear weapons,” the spokesperson for Secretary-General António Guterres said following its adoption.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 