#United Nations agencies

[endingviolenceagainstwomenday]

Official United Nations Commemoration of the 2023 International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The commemoration of the 2023 International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women will have the following objectives:

Invite everyone to be an ally in preventing VAWG through taking a stand publicly, engaging in activities and events to raise awareness of VAWG in their communities.

Mobilize all member states to allocate national budget to prevent violence against women and girls, including through their own national action plans and prevention across education, health, and social protection sectors by incorporating VAWG prevention.

Advocate for increasing ODA towards prevention of VAW, in line with national priorities and to support policy formulation, if feasible.

Call for greater support, increased long-term, sustainable investments from states, private sector, foundations, and other donors to autonomous women’s rights organizations working to end violence against women and girls in all their diversity.

Advocate for private and public sector investments on workplace policies and measures that ensure women’s economic security and safety.

Mobilize member states, development partners, philanthropies, private sector, universities and all actors to join the Generation Equality Action Coalition on GBV and make tangible policy, programmatic and financial commitments to accelerate transformative action to end all forms of gender-based violence against women and girls, including through:

o Investing in the collective commitment on prevention, and o Joining the collective commitment of the Action Coalition on GBV and the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights on gender based violence and harassment in the world of work and to ratify and implement the ILO Convention 190. The Official UN Commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 2023 will be a multistakeholder event with the participation of high-level representatives of Member States, women’s civil society organizations, United Nations agencies, Leaders and/or Commitment Makers of the Generation Equality Action Coalition on Gender Based Violence and Goodwill Ambassadors.

[unitednationsday]

When the World works together, Progress is possible.

Multilateralism Matters. October 24 marks United Nations Day. Watch what's possible when we work together.

[developmentinformationday]

From the SDG Summit to the Summit of the Future: Building the United Nations We Need.

Panelists will discuss how the 2024 Summit of the Future may best accelerate the implementation of the outcomes agreed at the SDG Summit by promoting effective United Nations reform for a stronger, more accountable and inclusive multilateral system.

Side Event at the SDG Action Weekend organized by Coalition for the United Nations We Need, Permanent Mission of the Republic of Maldives to the United Nations, Permanent Mission of the Republic of Uganda to the United Nations, United Nations Department of Global Communications, Stakeholder Group of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent, Together 2030, International Development Law Organization, Global Women Leaders: Voices for Change and Inclusion, SDGs Kenya Forum, Stimson Center, Baha'i International Community, Oxfam International, International Alliance of Women, Global Call to Action Against Poverty.

To maximize the 2023 SDG Summit's impact, the Secretary General is convening an SDG Action Weekend, which will generate opportunities for stakeholders, United Nations entities, and Member States to convene inside the United Nations Headquarters and set out specific commitments and contributions to drive SDG transformation between now and 2030.

The SDG Action Weekend will consist of the SDG Mobilization Day on Saturday, 16 September, and the SDG Acceleration Day on Sunday, 17 September at UNHQ in New York.

The SDG Action Weekend includes a select number of high-level side-events identified through an open call that concluded in August. They are jointly organized by coalitions of Member States, United Nations agencies and other Member States, United Nations agencies , and global stakeholder networks.

[worldartsday]

Shape policies, ideas and practices to better equip all learners with the relevant knowledge and skills they need today and in the future.

The UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education 2023 aims to reinvigorate and strengthen a global coalition for culture and arts education, as well as shape policies, ideas and practices to better equip all learners with the relevant knowledge and skills they need today and in the future.

Building on the legacies of the World Conferences on Arts Education in Lisbon in 2006, and Seoul in 2010, the intergovernmental conference will bring together policymakers, United Nations agencies, Inter-Governmental Organizatuions and UNESCO partners from around the world to share and generate new knowledge, practices and innovative ideas, as well as build creative alliances.

[worldnotobaccoday]

Actions for the United Nations Agencies.

The United Nations Agencies should work together to address SDG Targets 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 (improve food security and nutrition), SDG Target 3a (implementation of WHO FCTC), SDG Target 13 (combat climate change) and SDG Target 17 (strengthen partnership for sustainable development). This can be achieved by establishing enabling crop production and marketing ecosystems to support farmers to shift from tobacco to alternative crops.

PAHO - World No Tobacco Day 2023. May 31st.

[totallynotcensorship]

credit to motaz azaiza

[reasonsforhope]

"The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.” ...

The IEA, in a report entitled Net Zero Roadmap, published on Tuesday morning, also called on developed countries with 2050 net zero targets, including the UK, to bring them forward by several years.

The report found “almost all countries must move forward their targeted net zero dates”, which for most developed countries are 2050. Some developed countries have earlier dates, such as Germany with 2045 and Austria and Iceland with 2040 and for many developing countries they are much later, 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.

Cop28, the UN climate summit to be held in Dubai this November and December, offered a key opportunity for countries to set out tougher emissions-cutting plans, Birol said.

He wants to see Cop28 agree a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, and a 75% cut in methane from the energy sector by the same date. The latter could be achieved at little cost, because high gas prices mean that plugging leaks from oil and gas wells can be profitable...

He also called for Cop28 to agree a doubling of energy efficiency. “To reduce fossil fuel emissions, we need to reduce demand for fossil fuels. This is a golden condition, if we are to reach our climate goals,” he said.

Birol stopped short of endorsing the call that some countries have made for a full phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050 to be agreed at Cop28, but he said all countries must work on reducing their fossil fuel use."

-via The Guardian, September 26, 2023

[garadinervi]

Some of the Palestinians, (1976, documentary, 55min), (restored, 2018), Directed and Edited by Mamoun Hassan (pt. 3) (pt. 1 here) (pt. 2 here) [Movie Masterclass. Palestine Film Index]

[xtruss]

Native Tribe To Get Back Land 160 Years After Largest Mass Hanging In US History

Upper Sioux Agency state park in Minnesota, where bodies of those killed after US-Dakota war are buried, to be transferred

— Associated Press | Sunday 3 September, 2023

The Upper Sioux Agency State Park near Granite Falls, Minnesota. Photograph: Trisha Ahmed/AP

Golden prairies and winding rivers of a Minnesota state park also hold the secret burial sites of Dakota people who died as the United States failed to fulfill treaties with Native Americans more than a century ago. Now their descendants are getting the land back.

The state is taking the rare step of transferring the park with a fraught history back to a Dakota tribe, trying to make amends for events that led to a war and the largest mass hanging in US history.

“It’s a place of holocaust. Our people starved to death there,” said Kevin Jensvold, chairman of the Upper Sioux Community, a small tribe with about 550 members just outside the park.

The Upper Sioux Agency state park in south-western Minnesota spans a little more than 2 sq miles (about 5 sq km) and includes the ruins of a federal complex where officers withheld supplies from Dakota people, leading to starvation and deaths.

Decades of tension exploded into the US-Dakota war of 1862 between settler-colonists and a faction of Dakota people, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. After the US won the war, the government hanged more people than in any other execution in the nation. A memorial honors the 38 Dakota men killed in Mankato, 110 miles (177km) from the park.

Jensvold said he has spent 18 years asking the state to return the park to his tribe. He began when a tribal elder told him it was unjust Dakota people at the time needed to pay a state fee for each visit to the graves of their ancestors there.

Native American tribe in Maine buys back Island taken 160 years ago! The Passamaquoddy’s purchase of Pine Island for $355,000 is the latest in a series of successful ‘land back’ campaigns for indigenous people in the US. Pine Island. Photograph: Courtesy the writer, Alice Hutton. Friday 4 June, 2021

Lawmakers finally authorized the transfer this year when Democrats took control of the house, senate and governor’s office for the first time in nearly a decade, said State Senator Mary Kunesh, a Democrat and descendant of the Standing Rock Nation.

Tribes speaking out about injustices have helped more people understand how lands were taken and treaties were often not upheld, Kunesh said, adding that people seem more interested now in “doing the right thing and getting lands back to tribes”.

But the transfer also would mean fewer tourists and less money for the nearby town of Granite Falls, said Mayor Dave Smiglewski. He and other opponents say recreational land and historic sites should be publicly owned, not given to a few people, though lawmakers set aside funding for the state to buy land to replace losses in the transfer.

The park is dotted with hiking trails, campsites, picnic tables, fishing access, snowmobiling and horseback riding routes and tall grasses with wildflowers that dance in hot summer winds.

“People that want to make things right with history’s injustices are compelled often to support action like this without thinking about other ramifications,” Smiglewski said. “A number, if not a majority, of state parks have similar sacred meaning to Indigenous tribes. So where would it stop?”

In recent years, some tribes in the US, Canada and Australia have gotten their rights to ancestral lands restored with the growth of the Land Back movement, which seeks to return lands to Indigenous people.

‘It’s a powerful feeling’: the Indigenous American tribe helping to bring back buffalo 🦬! Matt Krupnick in Wolakota Buffalo Range, South Dakota. Sunday 20 February, 2022. The Wolakota Buffalo Range in South Dakota has swelled to 750 bison with a goal of reaching 1,200. Photograph: Matt Krupnick

A National Park has never been transferred from the US government to a tribal nation, but a handful are Co-managed with Tribes, including Grand Portage National Nonument in northern Minnesota, Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona and Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, Jenny Anzelmo-Sarles of the National Park Service said.

This will be the first time Minnesota transfers a state park to a Native American community, said Ann Pierce, director of Minnesota State Parks and trails at the natural resources department.

Minnesota’s transfer, expected to take years to finish, is tucked into several large bills covering several issues. The bills allocate more than $6m to facilitate the transfer by 2033. The money can be used to buy land with recreational opportunities and pay for appraisals, road and bridge demolition and other engineering.

Chris Swedzinski and Gary Dahms, the Republican lawmakers representing the portion of the state encompassing the park, declined through their aides to comment about their stances on the transfer.

— The Guardian USA

[an-onyx-void]

Disclaimer: I am not the original owner or creator of this content. The source account is listed below.

[unitednationsday]

Celebration of the anniversary of the entry into force of the United Nations Charter in 1945.

24 October is #UNDay! The anniversary of the entry into force of the United Nations Charter in 1945 is a symbol of hope for global unity. Today, the urgency for all countries to come together has rarely been greater.

[awkward-teabag]

Love (cannot emphasis how much sarcasm there is in that word) that an official Canadian government response to high cellphone rates is to switch carriers.

Switch it to what? We basically have three companies since one was allowed to eat the forth (with the government saying it wasn't anti-competition and the company eating the other pinky promising they wouldn't jack rates up). Even the smaller companies have to rent infrastructure from the Big Three so there's only so much they can do if that rent costs an arm and a leg.

And that's not touching on how many "small companies" are actually just subsidiaries of the Big Three. You may save $5 but you're still with Telus/Rogers/Bell.

Or that the actual small companies tend to have shit coverage because they don't have the infrastructure available to them and are prevented from getting it. Or their traffic is throttled in favour of the Big Three's customers. Or both.

Or that they're extremely regional thus aren't an option for a huge chunk of Canada's population.

We have no true options and the government has shown time and again that they're fine with monopolies, in multiple industries, and don't care when said monopolies jack up prices to make shareholders and the c-suite more money at the expense of everyone else. At most there will be a verbal slap on the wrist and a giftcard for $25 that people have to register for, for a decade and a half of price gouging.

It's not talked a whole lot about outside the country from what I've seen and heard but Canada is a country of monopolies. A handful of companies own nearly everything, every province has a family or two that owns a hell of a lot (Nova Scotia is basically owned by one family at this point), and our government ignores it. Even the branch that is supposed to be against monopolies is fine with mergers and takeovers in most cases.

Because, you know, the company said it totally wouldn't use consumers' lack of options to increase prices.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists.

Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.

That heating is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and much of the current impacts of that combustion — rising temperatures, extreme weather — were predicted by Exxon scientists almost half a century ago.

The company’s 1970s and 1980s projections were “at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models,” according to a 2023 Harvard study.

Since taking over from former CEO Rex Tillerson, Woods has walked a tightrope between acknowledging the critical problem of climate change — as well as the role of fossil fuels in helping drive it — while insisting fossil fuels must also provide the solution.

In comments before last year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28), Woods made a forceful case for carbon capture and storage, a technology in which the planet-heating chemicals released by burning fossil fuels are collected and stored underground.

“While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient,” he said. “Wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

International experts agree with the idea in the broadest strokes.

Carbon capture marks an essential component of the transition to “net zero,” in which no new chemicals like carbon dioxide or methane reach — and heat — the atmosphere, according to a report by International Energy Agency (IEA) last year.

But the remaining question is how much carbon capture will be needed, which depends on the future role of fossil fuels.

While this technology is feasible, it is very expensive — particularly in a paradigm in which new renewables already outcompete fossil fuels on price.

And the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been spending money on developing carbon capture technology, IEA head Fatih Birol wrote last year on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

To be part of a climate solution, Birol added, the fossil fuel industry must “let go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”

He noted that capturing and storing current fossil fuel emissions would require a thousand-fold leap in annual investment from $4 billion in 2022 to $3.5 trillion.

In his comments Tuesday, Woods argued the “dirty secret” is that customers weren’t willing to pay for the added cost of cleaner fossil fuels.

Referring to carbon capture, Woods said Exxon has “tabled proposals” with governments “to get out there and start down this path using existing technology.”

“People can’t afford it, and governments around the world rightly know that their constituents will have real concerns,” he added. “So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable, so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”

For example, he said Exxon “could, today, make sustainable aviation fuel for the airline business. But the airline companies can’t afford to pay.”

Woods blamed “activists” for trying to exclude the fossil fuel industry from the fight to slow rising temperatures, even though the sector is “the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies.”

That is an increasingly controversial argument. Across the world, wind and solar plants with giant attached batteries are outcompeting gas plants, though battery life still needs to be longer to make renewable power truly dispatchable.

Carbon capture is “an answer in search of a question,” Gregory Nemet, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Hill last year.

“If your question is what to do about climate change, your answer is one thing,” he said — likely a massive buildout in solar, wind and batteries.

But for fossil fuel companies asking “‘What is the role for natural gas in a carbon-constrained world?’ — well, maybe carbon capture has to be part of your answer.”

In the background of Woods’s comments about customers’ unwillingness to pay for cleaner fossil fuels is a bigger debate over price in general.

This spring, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will release its finalized rule on companies’ climate disclosures.

That much-anticipated rule will weigh in on the key question of whose responsibility it is to account for emissions — the customer who burns them (Scope II), or the fossil fuel company that produces them (Scope III).

Exxon has long argued for Scope II, based on the idea that it provides a product and is not responsible for how customers use it.

Last week, Reuters reported that the SEC would likely drop Scope III, a positive development for the companies.

Woods argued last year that SEC Scope III rules would cause Exxon to produce less fossil fuels — which he said would perversely raise global emissions, as its products were replaced by dirtier production elsewhere.

This broad idea — that fossil fuels use can only be cleaned up on the “demand side” — is one some economists dispute.

For the U.S. to decarbonize in an orderly fashion, “restrictive supply-side policies that curtail fossil fuel extraction and support workers and communities must play a role,” Rutgers University economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe wrote last year.

Without concrete moves to plan for a reduction in the fossil fuel supply, “the end of fossil fuels will be a chaotic collapse where workers, communities, and the environment suffer,” they added.

But Woods’s comments Tuesday doubled down on the claim that the energy transition will succeed only when end-users pay the price.

“People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price,” Woods said. “That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇱⚔️🇺🇳🇵🇸 🚨

ISRAELI OCCUPATION AUTHORITIES DEMAND THE DISMANTLING OF UNRWA BEFORE ALLOWING AID INTO THE GAZA STRIP

The Israeli occupation authorities have submitted a proposal to the United Nations demanding the dismantlement of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, also known as UNRWA.

In an article published in the British liberal news website The Guardian, a source within the United Nations (UN) describes a proposal submitted by the Israeli occupation authorities to the UN for the dismantlement of UNRWA in return for the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) allowing humanitarian aid to flow into the besieged Gaza Strip.

According to The Guardian, the proposal was submitted last week by the Israeli Chief to the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi to UN Officials stationed in occupied Palestine who forwarded the proposal to the United Nation's Secretary General, António Gutierrez on Saturday.

The agency itself had no part in the discussions as the IOF refuses to deal with the humanitarian organization beginning last Monday with accusations occupation authorities made against the organization which remain unproven, even according to The Guardian.

Still, "Israel's" allies acted quickly to back their claims, with 16 major donors immediately withdrawing funding from the organization, cutting off the aid agency from more than $450m in funding, at a time when nearly the entire population of Gaza, around 2.3 million Palestinians, are dependant on UNRWA for food.

The United States Congress went so far as to ban funding for UNRWA in a recently passed budget bill, however some countries have restored funding to the aid agency, citing a lack of evidence provided by Israeli authorities.

Under the terms of the potential agreement, Zionist authorities are prepared to allow large amounts of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, with the only limiting factor being the capabilities of the United Nations and the newly formed aid agency, however the agreement would gut the humanitarian infrastructure already existing, and hollow out the agency by transferring 300-400 UNRWA staff to other UN agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP).

According to The Guardian, more UNRWA staff could be transferred at a later date, however details are few and far between for how another humanitarian organization could be created on a scale necessary to provide for the humanitarian needs of the civilian population of Gaza, nor where the staff for such an organization would come from. Also absent were any security guarantees for humanitarian staff, nor who would provide such security guarantees.

Such an arrangement will likely sound attractive for those wishing to see an end to "Israel's" starvation campaign in Gaza, however, unlike whatever organization could be created on such short notice, UNRWA has been established in the Gaza Strip, and in the occupied Palestinian territories, going back to 1950, and over generations has earned the trust of the Palestinian population there, providing countless jobs for a Gazan population under blockade by "Israel" for the last decade and a half.

The Guardian quotes UNRWA's Director of External Relations, Tamara Alrifai, as saying, “Unrwa has not been systematically privy to conversations related to coordinating humanitarian aid in Gaza."

Alrifai also said the size proposed by the Israelis for the new humanitarian organization would "hobble its ability to effectively deliver aid in Gaza" at a time when it is so desperately needed by the civilian population in the Palestinian enclave.

“This is no criticism of WFP, but logically if they were to start food distribution in Gaza tomorrow, they’re going to use UNRWA trucks and bring food into UNRWA warehouses, and then distribute food in or around UNRWA shelters,” Alrifai told The Guardian, “So they’re going to need at a minimum the same infrastructure that we have, including the human resources.”

The Guardian article also mentions that some UN officials told their reporters that they see the proposal by the Israelis as a way to portray the United Nations as unwilling to work with the Zionist entity to get aid into Gaza in time to prevent a famine.

On Thursday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague, in the Netherlands, implemented additional provisional measures in South Africa's case investigating "Israel" for the crime of genocide, ordering the Zionist entity to take "all necessary and effective measures" to ensure the large-scale delivery of humanitarian aid be provided to Gaza.

The Guardian also mentions that some inside the UN see this as the "culmination of a long Israeli campaign to destroy UNRWA."

UNRWA has long been a target of the Israelis. As the UN agency in charge of maintaining the records of Palestinian families who were displaced from their homes during the Nakba, and where those family's homes were located, the organization essentially guarantees their Right to Return under International Law.

Israeli authorities see this record keeping as a threat to their expansionist aspirations, and hopes that by dismantling the agency, they will help eliminate the threat those records pose to their settler colonial agenda.

“If we allow this, it is the slippery slope to us being completely managed directly by the Israelis, and the UN directly being complicit in undermining UNRWA, which is not only the biggest aid provider but also the biggest bastion of anti-extremism in Gaza,” one UN official is quoted as saying.

"We would be playing into so many political agendas if we allowed this to happen.”

UNRWA derived its mandate from an act passed by the United Nations General Assembly, which The Guardian says, "in theory" remains the only organization with the authority to end that mandate.

The United Nations Secretary General's office did not respond to The Guardian's inquiries into the proposal, nor did the Israeli occupation army before the time of publishing.

#source1

#photosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[news4dzhozhar]

Verified charities and aid organizations with their websites if you want to donate to help Palestinians. If you cannot afford to donate, please share this post.

[sitting-on-me-bum]

An albino squirrel at the national mall in Washington DC, US. Albino squirrels are extremely rare in nature and albinism is considered a genetic anomaly

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images