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New York. October 26 – An international treaty banning nuclear weapons the world has been awaiting in the past 75 years will finally enter into force on January 22, 2021 but without the support of nuclear powers like the United States, China and Russia.

Japan, the world’s only country that suffered atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 also declined to join the treaty.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2017 by 122 countries, required that 50 of those countries signed and ratified it to fulfil conditions for the entry into force and Honduras was the last one to do so.

For years the UN conducted negotiations to build the first global treaty prohibiting the use, threat of use, development, production, testing and stockpiling of nuclear weapons. The treaty also commits countries to clear contaminated areas and help victims.

Countries that have not signed and ratified the treaty included Japan and Australia, and all of the nuclear powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The nuclear powers reportedly have a combined 14,000 nuclear bombs and many of those weapons have warheads that are more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(Exact replica of atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki displayed at a Nagasaki museum)

The Kyodo News reported from Tokyo on October 26, 2020 that the Japanese government will not join the treaty as it is protected by the US nuclear umbrella under a bilateral agreement.

“We believe, given the increasingly difficult security environment surrounding Japan, it is appropriate to make steady and realistic progress toward nuclear disarmament while maintaining and strengthening our deterrence capabilities to deal with threats,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said at a press conference.

“Japan shares the goal of this treaty, the abolition of nuclear weapons…but as we differ in how to approach the issue, we will not become a signatory,” he said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the development and countries that ratified the treaty, saying that the enter-into-force of the treaty is a tribute to survivors of nuclear explosions and tests, particularly those who campaigned for the treaty to become effective.

“The entry-into-force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the culmination of a worldwide movement to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons,” he said. “It represents a meaningful commitment towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons, which remains the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations.”  

Francesco Rocca, President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said: “Today is an historic day: even a few years ago, the dream of a nuclear ban recognized by the international community seemed unfathomable. This is a victory for every citizen of the world, and it demonstrates the importance of multilateralism. I would like to congratulate all 50 States that have ratified the treaty and to call on all the other world leaders to act with courage and join the right side of history.

“The simple reality is that the international community could never hope to deal with the consequences of a nuclear confrontation. No nation is prepared to deal with a nuclear confrontation. What we cannot prepare for, we must prevent.”

Geneva/New York, October 22 – The World Health Organization and Wikimedia Foundation announced join efforts to defeat widespread misinformation online while people worldwide need facts and trusted sources of news to fight the pandemic.

Wikipedia, which is administered by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, will provide its formidable global network of over 250,000 volunteer editors to assist WHO in disseminating more than 5,200 Covid-related articles in 175 languages.

Both organizations said the collaboration will make trusted, public health information available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license as Covid-19 showed signs of strong resurgence and the public everywhere demand facts about the coronavirus.

“Through the collaboration, people everywhere will be able to access and share WHO infographics, videos, and other public health assets on Wikimedia Commons, a digital library of free images and other multimedia,” they said in announcing the join venture. 

“Equitable access to trusted health information is critical to keeping people safe and informed during the COVID-19 pandemic,”  WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Our new collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation will increase access to reliable health information from WHO across multiple countries, languages, and devices.”

WHO said it had been fighting “infodemic” since the beginning of the pandemic. It defined infodemic as “an overabundance of information and the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news, images, and videos.” 

Wikipedia editors have also been at the forefront of the fight against misinformation.

“Access to information is essential to healthy communities and should be treated as such,” said Katherine Maher, CEO at the Wikimedia Foundation. “This becomes even more clear in times of global health crises when information can have life-changing consequences. All institutions, from governments to international health agencies, scientific bodies to Wikipedia, must do our part to ensure everyone has equitable and trusted access to knowledge about public health, regardless of where you live or the language you speak.”

The two organizations said in  news release that while they are building up their collaboration, the public in the meantime can access WHO’s mythbusting series of infographics on Wikimedia Commons. In the coming months, the Wikimedia Foundation and WHO will continue uploading resources to Wikimedia Commons and collaborating with Wikipedia volunteer editors to better understand gaps in information needs on Wikipedia articles related to COVID-19 and how WHO resources can help fill these gaps. 

Additionally, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, other organizations, individuals, and websites can more easily share these materials on their own platforms without having to address stricter copyright restrictions.

New York, October 17 – A simple daily meal of rice and beans may cost $1.25 in New York but it costs $399.82 for a poor in South Sudan where Covid-19 impacts are added to years of conflict, climate change and economic troubles, which drive up the levels of poverty, the World Food Program said in its newest “Cost of a Plate of Food 2020” report. South Sudan tops the list of 20 countries with extreme poverty, 17 of them are sub-Sahara region countries.

The Rome-based WFP said the same basic meal costs $90.73 for a person in Burundi, $73.76 in Haiti, $60.52 in Sudan, $46.19 in Mozambique, $32.12 in Congo and $32.12 in Burkina Faso because poverty affects some 270 million around the world. The UN said half of the world population live with $2.50 a day and an estimated 900 million people cannot read or write.

 (The report uses an average per-capita income across each country to calculate what percentage people must spend to buy a basic meal like rice and beans. The price a New Yorker may pay for a similar meal is calculated by applying the meal-to-income ratio for a consumer in a developing country to a consumer in New York.)

WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, won the Nobel Peace Prize 2020 for its work in combating hunger around the world, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

List of countries experiencing extreme poverty: South Sudan, Burundi, Malawi, Haiti, Sudan, Mali, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Tajikistan, Gambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Benin, Zambia and Mauritania.

The release of the report coincided with the annual International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on 17 October, which warned that Covid-19 will have a long-term impact on poverty, threatening efforts to boost economic recovery, reduction in inequality and ending extreme poverty.

 “This new report exposes the destructive impact of conflict, climate change and economic crises, now compounded by Covid-19, in driving up hunger,” said WFP’s Executive Director David Beasley. “It’s the most vulnerable people who feel the worst effects. Their lives were already on the edge – prior to the coronavirus pandemic we were looking at the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II – and now their plight is so much worse as the pandemic threatens nothing less than a humanitarian catastrophe”.

“People in urban areas are now highly susceptible too, with COVID-19 leading to huge rises in unemployment, rendering people powerless to use the markets they depend on for food. For millions of people, missing a day’s wages means missing a day’s worth of food, for themselves and their children. This can also cause rising social tensions and instability”.

The report said conflict is the main driver for hunger in many countries as it displaced people from their homes, land and jobs, which resulted in the loss of incomes and ability to buy food in order to survive.

Among the top 20 countries with extreme poverty, South Sudan’s years of conflict have displaced over 60,000 people, crippled their daily lives as they had to abandon land and harvests.

In Burkina Faso, a surge in conflict along with climate changes resulted in tripling the number of people to 3.4 million people facing hunger.

 The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs  said in a policy brief on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty that the pandemic will have a long-term impact on poverty and prospects for fully eradicating poverty by 2030 now appears “highly unlikely” despite efforts to boost economic growth  around the world. Eradicating poverty by 2030 is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The brief said as many as 100 million people could slip into poverty this year because of the pandemic.

 “It is no longer unimaginable that the global number of people living in extreme poverty will continue to go up in the coming years, pulling hundreds of millions of people into extreme vulnerability, if the horrendous consequences of the pandemic for developing countries are not effectively managed”, the brief said.  
 

Oslo/New York, October 9 – The United Nations World Food Program has won this year’s coveted Nobel Peace Prize for its intensified efforts to provide life-saving food provisions to millions of people facing starvation under conflict and the pandemic.

The Nobel committee announced the winner for the prize in Oslo, saying that WFP, a UN agency, addressed hunger that also contributed to bring peace to countries devastated by conflicts.

“In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said. “The combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation.”

“The world is in danger of experiencing a hunger crisis of inconceivable proportions if the World Food Program and other food assistance organizations do not receive the financial support they have requested.”

The Nobel committee said WFP recognized early in 2020 that the combination of conflict and the pandemic would result in more than doubling the number of people facing food insecurity to 265 million and immediately intensified programs to assist them.

WPF was established in 1961 and has been working in scores of developing countries affected by conflicts, natural disasters and famine.

The UN has won seven Nobel Peace Prizes before 2020:

It was awarded to the UN peacekeeping forces in 1988; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1981; the International Labor Organization in 1969; UNICEF in 1965; UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskhjold in 1961; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1954 and Ralph Bunche, the US envoy to the UN, in 1950.

New York September 29 – Government leaders and international organizations joined the United Nations to seek solutions for the current virus-inflicted devastation and plan for the post-pandemic era.

One million people have died from the coronavirus and over 32 million have been infected, a situation the UN said has surpassed a health and humanitarian crisis to become an unprecedented global development emergency.

It said the pandemic is expected to push some 100 million people into extreme poverty and an estimated additional 265 million people could face acute food shortages by the end of 2020, including over 17 million people in South America suffering severe food insecurity, a jump from 4.5 million just months ago.

The International Labor Organization estimated that the equivalent of 500 million jobs have been lost so far this year, a situation that will spread economic inequalities, disproportionately impacting developing countries and vulnerable groups.

Governments around the world have so far spent $11 trillion in response to the financial impacts caused by the pandemic and high-income economies were responsible for 88 per cent of the total amount, the UN said. Emerging and developing countries were responsible for 2.8 per cent of the amount.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres hosted the virtual high-level meeting on Financing for Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond with the participation of Canadian Prime Minister

Justin Trudeau and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness as co-sponsors to find solutions to the global financial crisis and to maintain current efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Guterres said the pandemic has caused the largest economic contraction since World War II with global income from work declining by more than 10 per cent so far this year with the massive job losses and government expenditures have skyrocketed while tax revenues plummeted.

“The Covid-19 pandemic is a catastrophe,” Guterres said. “But it is a generational opportunity to shape our future for the better. I have spoken of the need of a New Global Deal.”

The UN leader said a global economic recovery and an end to the pandemic would be possible only if the world can mobilize resources for diagnostics, treatment and vaccines.

He said the WHO’s program known as ACT-Accelerator requires a total resources of $38 billion to deliver over 2 billion vaccine doses, 245 million treatments and 500 million tests.

“We cannot reopen the global economy fully until we stop this virus in its tracks,” he said.

“At this moment, we have the opportunity to re-imagine our economic systems, reaffirm our common understanding of a more sustainable and inclusive recovery and re-establish momentum toward achieving the SDGs to build back better,” Trudeau said. “Only together can we lay the foundations of a better world.”

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