When an Asian ambassador hosted a sumptuous lunch for more than a dozen
U.N. correspondents in his swanky New York apartment many moons ago, he
confessed he had a hidden agenda.
When an Asian ambassador hosted a sumptuous lunch for more than a dozen
U.N. correspondents in his swanky New York apartment many moons ago, he
confessed he had a hidden agenda.
Military auditors failed to complete an audit of the business systems of an Ohio-
based company – Mission Essential Personnel – even though it had billed for one
billion dollars worth of work largely in Afghanistan over the last four years.
The heat in the upper six miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times as
much energy as found in all the world’s oil and gas reserves combined. Despite
this abundance, only 10,700 megawatts of geothermal electricity generating
capacity have been harnessed worldwide.
Among its unstable and conflict-ridden neighbours, Rwanda stands out. It has
been pegged as a model of development and one of Africa’s success stories:
Since the 1990’s, when a civil war ravaged the country, average incomes have
doubled, its people have become healthier and less hungry and it has the highest
proportion of women parliamentarians worldwide. Yet, maintaining this stability
is a government accused of muzzling its opponents and committing human
rights abuses.
As details emerged this week of the U.N.’s knowledge of rebel
activity in the villages where nearly 200 women were
systematically gang raped by armed groups in the eastern
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) late last month, human
rights groups are demanding an investigation into the U.N.’s
failure to prevent the raid from occurring.
Thirty-four years ago, Canada was one of the first Western
countries to abolish the death penalty. In 1987, the question
of capital punishment and whether it should be reinstated
resurfaced in the House of Commons.
Analysts have been warning for several years that the impacts
of climate change directly relate to the national security of
the U.S. and other countries, but the link has never been so
clear as it is today in northwest Pakistan.
After all the turbines in the Xiaowan hydropower station sputtered to life this
week in China’s south-west Yunnan province, the Asian giant was able to lay
claim to having the world’s largest hydropower capacity.
In the first ever U.N.-mandated self-assessment of the United
States’ human rights record, the Barack Obama administration
has reaffirmed its commitment to closing the detention centre
at Guantanamo Bay and to fixing the country’s “broken
immigration system”.
Civil society organisations have reacted with outrage to claims that the
international campaign against genetically modified (GM) crops is partly
responsible for food shortages and food insecurity in Africa.