UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon addresses dignitaries on Monday during the opening of the 8th African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. An African Union summit opened in Ethiopia Monday, with Sudan coming under increasing international pressure to resolve the worsening violence in Darfur./AP UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cited the success story of Korea during a speech urging African leaders to put an end to suffering caused by regional conflicts and to strive for economic development. Delivering an address at the African Union Summit in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Secretary-General Ban spoke of his childhood growing up in a war-torn country plagued by starvation, disease and suffering. He stressed that settling conflicts is a prerequisite for improving the lives of Africa’s people. The Secretary-General told of old women scavenging for scraps, children suffering from malnutrition and rice paddies abandoned after the fratricidal Korean War. Ban said that he still has flashbacks of these memories. He called on African leaders to learn a lesson from South Korea, which rose from the ashes of the Korean War to become a productive economy. Africa could turn the world’s poorest continent into another example of economic success, he […]
A California-Nevada clergyman who is a key organizer behind the campaign to prevent President George W. Bush from getting a half billion dollar presidential library at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has explained the motivation behind his campaign – which includes a condemnation of Bush’s endorsement of torture. The Rev Dr Andrew Weaver told Ekklesia this weekend that he hopes British Methodists and their ecumenical partners will join the protest, which includes an online petition. He and other United Methodist Church (UMC) members in the USA, including a dozen bishops so far, consider the recent proposal to place the library and think tank at the Texas university bearing the Methodist name ‘nothing short of a disgrace.’ The Perkins School of Theology graduate has been widely interviewed by radio, TV and newspapers since his ‘Protect SMU’ campaign started gathering steam. He says that in the first day the petition was online, the number of signatures reached nearly 2,000. In an interview with Instant Connection, Dr Weaver explained why he is so vigorously seeking to prevent the library from landing at SMU – as previously reported on Ekklesia. ‘Methodists have a long history of social conscience, so questions […]
Plans for an emergency summit of world leaders to break the international impasse on cutting greenhouse gases are being discussed by Ban Ki-moon, United Nations secretary-general. At the summit, mooted for September, heads of state would discuss the possibility of a successor to the Kyoto protocol on climate change, the main provisions of which expire in 2012. Mr Ban will fly to Nairobi on Tuesday to discuss plans for the summit, which are at an early stage, with officials from the UN Environment Programme, the body charged with tackling climate change. It would be among the first important commitments made by Mr Ban since he replaced Kofi Annan on January 1. He has chosen to stake some political capital on climate change, surprising US president George W. Bush by raising it at their meeting two weeks ago. Calling a summit would be a high-risk strategy. Heads of state may refuse the invitation, or fail to reach agreement, and Mr Ban will want to be sure of a full attendance before committing. Mr Bush is the leader most likely to decline, but any important agreement would be difficult without the US, the biggest emitter of greenhouse […]
Making healthful changes in your life is the best thing you can do for both your physical and emotional well-being. In order to understand more about what motivates the people who successfully take action day-by-day to improve their health, we polled 1,072 adults across the country. To test your nutrition and exercise knowledge, take our Health IQ Quiz, drawn from the 2007 Cooking Light Insight survey. Eating Habits The survey found that, for the most part, people were well versed in nutrition issues. For example, most knew that fatty acids in fish are good for you, a multivitamin can’t take the place of food, LDL is ‘bad’ cholesterol, and some high-fat foods such as avocados are healthful. Still, there were some areas of confusion. How do you compare? 70 percent of American adults drink lower fat milk instead of whole milk 59 percent eat chicken with the skin removed 54 percent take vitamins 52 percent use lower fat alternatives when cooking 51 percent read nutrition labels on food Fitness Findings Nearly half of Americans feel better on the days when they exercise, though just as many admit finding time […]
The three reports that make up the fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be published in full this year and the process begins this Friday in Paris with the publication of the first, which concentrates on the science of climate change. The importance of this and the remaining two reports should not be underestimated. For the past six years, some 2,000 of the world’s leading climatologists, glaciologists, meteorologists, oceanographers and specialists from dozens of other disciplines have trawled through all that has been published in the scientific literature on climate change and related matters. It has been a mammoth undertaking and the fruits of that work will be there for all to see in the final version of the IPCC’s first report of its fourth assessment: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Reading through the technical summary of this draft report, it is clear that no one could go away with the impression that climate change is some conspiratorial hoax by the science establishment, as some would have us believe. Far from it. It is clear from the draft version of the report that there is now overwhelming evidence to link man-made emissions […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
