'Unseen' News and Views
From the very start, addressing the existential threat of nuclear weapons has been central to the work of the United Nations.
In 1946, the very first General Assembly resolution sought “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”
Seventy-six years later, we have yet to achieve that resolution’s goals.
24 September 2021 (United Nations)* — Achieving global nuclear disarmament is one of the oldest goals of the United Nations.
It was the subject of the General Assembly’s first resolution in 1946, which established the Atomic Energy Commission (dissolved in 1952), with a mandate to make specific proposals for the control of nuclear energy and the elimination of atomic weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.
– Food processing extends shelf-life and can transforms raw food into attractive, marketable products. It can also prevent contamination. The transformation can involve numerous physical and chemical processes such as mincing, cooking, canning, liquefaction, pickling, macerating, emulsification, irradiation and lyophilization.
Processed, canned food lines the shelves at a Canadian supermarket. Credit: Trevor Page
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”[1] are the famous words of a reporter, from the New York Herald, Mr Morton Stanley[2], who was dispatched to the Dark Continent[3]: Africa, to search and locate Dr. David Livingstone, who was gone missing and found him in the city of Ujiji[4]on Lake Tanganyika in 1871[5].
Dr. Livingstone was a physician, journalist, explorer, and an empire builder. However, first and foremost he was a missionary who embarked upon the Lord’s work to convert the heathens[6] in Africa to Christianity[7], the religion of the coloniser, which was his priority to eradicate the God of the “pagans”[8] in Africa.
New York, 21 September 2021 (UNEP)* – Today, at Climate Week NYC 2021, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Global Environment Facility (GEF) and partners launched UrbanShift – a new global initiative to improve lives and transform cities into green and liveable spaces that address climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.
Credit: Unspalsh/Koukichi Takahashi
Cities are home to 4.2 billion people, more than half of the world’s population. But they face growing challenges – from floods, storms and heatwaves triggered by the climate crisis to dangerous air quality, lack of affordable housing and deep social divides.
Indigenous Peoples’ food systems have survived for centuries, generating an incredible diversity of food without depleting the natural resource base of surrounding ecosystems. ©National University of Columbia/Daniel Baena
(FAO)* — The running fresh water of the Amazon River is a welcoming sound to the peoples of the indigenous resguardo (reserve) in Puerto Nariño, southern Colombia.
This watercourse is the only access to the banks of rivers, lakes, flood plains and mainland areas that connect the 22 communities where the Tikuna, Cocama and Yagua peoples live.
Why food? According to scientists from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land use for farming is responsible for one-quarter of all global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
11 August 2021 (UNEP)* — Nemonte Nenquimo has spent years fending off miners, loggers and oil companies intent on developing the Amazon rainforest.
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The leader of Ecuador’s indigenous Waorani people, she famously fronted a 2019 lawsuit that banned resource extraction on 500,000 acres of her ancestral lands — a court win that gave hope to indigenous communities around the world.
H.G. Wells
The enormously prolific English writer, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), who also wrote novels. short stories, history books, biology textbooks, utopias, and so on, has been called “The Shakespeare of Science Fiction”.
John Scales Avery
During his writing career, he made a number of predictions about the future, many of which were astonishingly accurate.
He foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.
George Orwell’s famous dystopian book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, warned the world of the dangers of totalitarianism. In Orwell’s book, people are terrorized into submission. Orwell had Stalinist Russia in mind when he wrote the book, but sadly, it seems to describe the situation in a large number of countries today.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 