Financial Crisis Impact On ‘End Poverty’ Work
Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, used his opening statement at the General Assembly to warn us of the danger of relying too much on ‘free markets’. He wanted us to increase our understanding of business ethics and governance with more compassion, and less uncritical faith in the ‘magic’ of the market. The financial crisis has big impact to UN work in ending poverty. It is difficult to do a good job with existing resource allocated for present activities. I am not so sure that the Millennium Development Goal of ending poverty by the year 2015 is achievable at all. Economic crisis has already spreaded to many developing countries, which means that they cannot meet this goal relying on local resources alone. The Brazillian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in addressing the General Assembly earlier this week, said that we must not allow the burden of boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all. I cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel in getting an increase in development assistance to developing countries. On 25th September, the High-Level Forum of World Leaders are reviewing the progress of work, identify gaps and commit to concrete global efforts for the next seven years. I am certain that they will have to overcome the difficulty of finding donor-governments, at this crisis time, that are willing to give additional resources needed. And without an increase in development assistance, the wide poverty gaps cannot be bridged. For this High-level review, three roundtables discussions are set up at the UN headquarter in New York on: Poverty and Hunger, Education and Health, and Environmental Sustainability, with Gender Equality and Global Partnership for Development addressed as cross-cutting issues. We can only hope that they can come up with creative new ideas on how to stretch existing resources for the work needed to be done in order to reach the UN goal in the year 2015.
Filed under United Nations, World Affairs | Comments OffUndermining Women’s Rights & Women’s Health
I want to send my voice of support to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat Senator from New York, and Cecile Richards, the President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in their campaign the Blocking Care For Women against the Bush Administration proposed new rule that would prevent US women from having full access to quality medical care, including reproductive health and family planning services. The new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services said that any health care entity that recieves federal financing need to certify in writing that none of its employees are required to assist in any way medical services they find objectionable. It is estimated that this new rule will affect services of about 600,000 hospitals and clinics and other health care providers. It will allow health providers to refuse to participate in abortion or other medical procedures that contradict their religious beliefs. More than a decade ago, the US government joined in the world’s consensus by adopting the Platform for Action of the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. The Platform defines reproductive health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, implying that women and men are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life, the capability to reproduce and freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so. Implicit in this freedom are the rights of women and men to be informed, and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice to regulate fertility. This new proposed rule is working against the human rights of women to have quality health care services that have been recognized by the world’s community decades ago. Care for the health and well-being of people should be provided by government as citizen’s rights, free from interference, coercion in any shape or form by any religious ideology.
Filed under Gender Issues, World Affairs | Comment (0)Funny And Not-So-Funny Politics
Logics and reasons are not needed following news about electoral politics these days. Instead we need to have “a sense of humor to keep our sanity”. The selection of Sarah Palin, a religious conservative rural woman and a caribou-hunter from Alaska as vice-presidential nominee of the Republican Party for the up-coming election in the United States, is a sick joke. The Obama’s remark (though sexist) , seems palatable to me and quite appropriate in this case. “You cannot put lipsticks on a pig, a pig is still a pig”. This becomes funny when it trickered a response from Palin herself that Obama should have been talking about a pit bull instead of a “pig” referring to herself. But boasting caribou-killing as her favorit sport, in the campaign trail, is for me, hard to take. It is not funny to abuse animals and the natural habitat and the environment just for fun. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times comically compared Sarah to the innocent Eliza Doolittle of “My Fair Lady” story, for me, is too cute and mild. Sarah Palin is outright dangerous. Imagine if she, for what ever reasons, becomes the future president of the United States. What damage she could do to the rights of women to make decision about health and reproductive choices, not only for women in the United States, but also in the rest of the world. Funny things also happened in politics in other part of the world last week. In Thailand, after so much street protest by thousands and thousands of people, the taking over of the Prime Minister’s Office by the People Alliance for Democracy, asking the former Prime Minister to resign, Samak Sundaravej, the Thailand’s 25th Prime Minister was kicked out of office last week, not by the demonstrators, but by a TV Cooking Show which the Constitution Court’s ruled illegal, not qualify to be a Prime Minister in breaking conflict of interest law — because of his getting paid by a commercial firm, while being Prime Minister — to cook and adverstise food products on television. And just today, I can’t help but to join in a laugh with Tulsathit Tapptim, of the Nation Newspaper, when he suggested that we should celebrate the great divide and grand paradox in Thai politics, for the House of Representatives has just elected Somchai Wongsawat, the brother-in-law of the most controversial former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who ran away from recent court hearing to live in exile in London. Thaksin’s sister, Yawapha, the wife of this newly elected Prime Minister, happened also to be one of the 111 former leaders of the defunct Thai Rak Thai Party being forced out of politics for five years by a court decision last year of election fraud, vote buying and corruptions. With sister and brother-in-law in charge of the Thai government, Thaksin and his wife Potjaman now have no excuse to ask for political asylum in England. They now could return to Thailand to face the courts and defend various corruption cases. Today also, the Supreme Courst has postponed its verdict on the Ratchada land purchase case until October 21 because so that the couple should be present to hear the verdict. No change. People Alliance for Democracy will continue their protest and demonstration on the street, and the civil disobidience at the Prime Minister’s Office for a long time to come. Thailand’s politics is really moving in circles. Funniest of all is that the new Prime Minister will not be able to move into his office which is still under occupation by the People Alliance for Democracy. The new Prime Minister will work from a new office being set up for him at the old Don Muang Airport Terminal Building.
Filed under Funny, Thailand | Comment (0)Atom Smashing- “Big Bang” Theory
As an enthusiastic observer of scientific researches, I join in the excitement of thousands of physicists and scientists around the world waiting for the start of the biggest scientific test at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) based in Switzerland. Tomorrow, on September 10th, scientists will send a beam of proton to circulate through a large tunnel with multiple loops stretching for 27 kilometre underground at a depth ranging from 50-175 metre between France and Switzerland. Two tiny particles called “Hadron” will be propelled by 1,600 super-conducting magnets installed around the circuit in the 3,8 metre diameter concrete-lined tunnel, from opposite directions, at the speed of light aiming to creat a collision. It is expected that the resulting explosion will create 100,000 times more heat than the Sun and an area a billion times smaller than a dust-particle. This whole experiment is called Large Hydron Collider (LHC). CERN’s scientists expects to have the first energy collision in October 21st, the day of the launching of the LHC. Doomsday people warned us that if something goes wrong the whole earth will go down in a blackhole resulting from such an explosion and that will be the end of us all. With so many scientists involved in so many years, I don’t belief that this could happen. I must admit that I first learned about this atom smashing experiment at CERN by reading Dan Brown’s novel, Angels & Demons, eight years ago. This novel, introduced me to an exciting adventures of a Particle Physicist, Maximillian Kohler, and a Religious Iconology Professor of Harvard University, Robert Langdon, in a murder case investigation around this kind of test in Switzerland. The novel is a thriller and a mystery. But this time, the experiment at CERN is trilling but not in a fiction, but a real live story, the outcome of which would change how we look at the beginning of the Universe and of our own Planet Earth. From the test, we will have answers to many questions about whether the Higgs boson, popularly called the “God Particle”, mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model of physics is found to be true in nature, and whether particles have super symmetric partners or why there are apparent violations of symmetry between matter and anti-matter. We will know for sure whether there are extra dimensions in the gravitation “String Theory” that scientists have predicted. And also we will know the nature of dark matter and dark energy that many scientists belief existed in the Universe. Being an optimist, I am not worry about how things could go wrong with this kind of experiments. I am much more curious to learn from the results of ths observation about the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the Universe. I am happy that this test happens in my lifetime.
Filed under Science, World Affairs | Comment (0)