1.
United Nations
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The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization to promote international co-operation. A replacement for the ineffective League of Nations, the organization was established on 24 October 1945 after World War II in order to prevent another such conflict, at its founding, the UN had 51 member states, there are now 193. The headquarters of the UN is in Manhattan, New York City, further main offices are situated in Geneva, Nairobi, and Vienna. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states, the UNs mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades by the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union and their respective allies. The organization participated in actions in Korea and the Congo. After the end of the Cold War, the UN took on major military, the UN has six principal organs, the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Secretariat, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Trusteeship Council. UN System agencies include the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, the UNs most prominent officer is the Secretary-General, an office held by Portuguese António Guterres since 2017. Non-governmental organizations may be granted consultative status with ECOSOC and other agencies to participate in the UNs work, the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, and a number of its officers and agencies have also been awarded the prize. Other evaluations of the UNs effectiveness have been mixed, some commentators believe the organization to be an important force for peace and human development, while others have called the organization ineffective, corrupt, or biased. Following the catastrophic loss of life in the First World War, the earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the US State Department in 1939. It incorporated Soviet suggestions, but left no role for France, four Policemen was coined to refer to four major Allied countries, United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China, which emerged in the Declaration by United Nations. Roosevelt first coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries, the term United Nations was first officially used when 26 governments signed this Declaration. One major change from the Atlantic Charter was the addition of a provision for religious freedom, by 1 March 1945,21 additional states had signed. Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto, the foregoing declaration may be adhered to by other nations which are, or which may be, rendering material assistance and contributions in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism. During the war, the United Nations became the term for the Allies. To join, countries had to sign the Declaration and declare war on the Axis, at the later meetings, Lord Halifax deputized for Mr. Eden, Wellington Koo for T. V. Soong, and Mr Gromyko for Mr. Molotov. The first meetings of the General Assembly, with 51 nations represented, the General Assembly selected New York City as the site for the headquarters of the UN, and the facility was completed in 1952. Its site—like UN headquarters buildings in Geneva, Vienna, and Nairobi—is designated as international territory, the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Trygve Lie, was elected as the first UN Secretary-General
2.
Corporate social responsibility
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Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a mechanism whereby a business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards. The binary choice between complying with the law and going beyond the law must be qualified with some nuance, weak law must not be confused with soft law. CSR strategies encourage the company to make a impact on the environment and stakeholders including consumers, employees, investors, communities. Proponents argue that corporations increase long-term profits by operating with a CSR perspective, political sociologists became interested in CSR in the context of theories of globalization, neoliberalism and late capitalism. CSR is titled to aid an organizations mission as well as serve as a guide to what the company represents for its consumers, Business ethics is the part of applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business environment. ISO26000 is the international standard for CSR. Public sector organizations adhere to the bottom line. It is widely accepted that CSR adheres to principles. The term corporate social responsibility became popular in the 1960s and has remained a term used indiscriminately by many to cover legal and moral responsibility more narrowly construed, Business Dictionary defines CSR as A company’s sense of responsibility towards the community and environment in which it operates. Companies express this citizenship through their waste and pollution reduction processes, by contributing educational and social programs, a broader definition expands from a focus on stakeholders to include philanthropy and volunteering. Most consumers agree that while achieving business targets, companies should do CSR at the same time, most consumers believe companies doing charity will receive a positive response. Somerville also found that consumers are loyal and willing to spend more on retailers that support charity, consumers also believe that retailers selling local products will gain loyalty. Smith shares the belief that marketing local products will gain consumer trust, however, environmental efforts are receiving negative views given the belief that this would affect customer service. Oppewal et al. found that not all CSR activities are attractive to consumers and they recommended that retailers focus on one activity. Becker-Olsen found that if the social initiative done by the company is not aligned with other company goals it will have a negative impact, mohr et al. and Groza et al. also emphasise the importance of reaching the consumer. Some commentators have identified a difference between the Canadian, the Continental European and the Anglo-Saxon approaches to CSR, and even within Europe the discussion about CSR is very heterogeneous. A more common approach to CSR is corporate philanthropy and this includes monetary donations and aid given to nonprofit organizations and communities
3.
Human rights
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Human rights are moral principles or norms, which describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. They are applicable everywhere and at time in the sense of being universal. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the rights of others. They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on circumstances, for example, human rights may include freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture. The doctrine of human rights has been influential within international law. Actions by states and non-governmental organizations form a basis of public policy worldwide, the idea of human rights suggests that if the public discourse of peacetime global society can be said to have a common moral language, it is that of human rights. The strong claims made by the doctrine of human rights continue to provoke considerable skepticism and debates about the content, nature, ancient peoples did not have the same modern-day conception of universal human rights. Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the family is the foundation of freedom. All human beings are free and equal in dignity and rights. According to Jack Donnelly, in the ancient world, traditional societies typically have had elaborate systems of duties, conceptions of justice, political legitimacy, and human flourishing that sought to realize human dignity, flourishing, or well-being entirely independent of human rights. These institutions and practices are alternative to, rather than different formulations of, one theory is that human rights were developed during the early Modern period, alongside the European secularization of Judeo-Christian ethics. The most commonly held view is that the concept of human rights evolved in the West, for example, McIntyre argues there is no word for right in any language before 1400. One of the oldest records of rights is the statute of Kalisz, giving privileges to the Jewish minority in the Kingdom of Poland such as protection from discrimination. Samuel Moyn suggests that the concept of rights is intertwined with the modern sense of citizenship. The earliest conceptualization of human rights is credited to ideas about natural rights emanating from natural law, in particular, the issue of universal rights was introduced by the examination of extending rights to indigenous peoples by Spanish clerics, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas. In Britain in 1689, the English Bill of Rights and the Scottish Claim of Right each made illegal a range of oppressive governmental actions, additionally, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 encoded into law a number of fundamental civil rights and civil freedoms. These were followed by developments in philosophy of human rights by philosophers such as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, hegel during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although the term had been used by at least one author as early as 1742, in the 19th century, human rights became a central concern over the issue of slavery
4.
Environment (biophysical)
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The biophysical environment can vary in scale from microscopic to global in extent. It can also be subdivided according to its attributes, examples include the marine environment, the atmospheric environment and the terrestrial environment. The number of environments is countless, given that each living organism has its own environment. The term environment is used as a short form for the biophysical environment. The expression the environment often refers to a global environment in relation to humanity. All life that has survived must have adapted to conditions of its environment, temperature, light, humidity, soil nutrients, etc. all influence any species, within any environment. However life in turn modifies, in forms, its conditions. Some long term modifications along the history of our planet have been significant and this process consisted in the breakdown of carbon dioxide by anaerobic microorganisms that used the carbon in their metabolism and released the oxygen to the atmosphere. This led to the existence of oxygen-based plant and animal life, other interactions are more immediate and simple, such as the smoothing effect that forests have on the temperature cycle, compared to neighboring unforested areas. Environmental science is the study of the interactions within the biophysical environment, part of this scientific discipline is the investigation of the effect of human activity on the environment. Ecology, a sub-discipline of biology and a part of environmental sciences, is mistaken as a study of human induced effects on the environment. Environmental studies is an academic discipline that is the systematic study of interaction of humans with their environment. It is a field of study that includes the natural environment, built environments. Environmentalism is a social and philosophical movement that, in a large part, seeks to minimise. The issues of concern for environmentalists usually relate to the environment with the more important ones being climate change, species extinction, pollution. One of the studies related include employing Geographic Information Science to study the biophysical environment, biophysics subject to the context List of conservation topics List of environmental issues Lists of environmental topics Miller, G. Tyler. McCallum, Malcolm L. Gwendolynn W. Bury, google search patterns suggest declining interest in the environment
5.
Political corruption
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Political corruption is the use of powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. An illegal act by an officeholder constitutes political corruption only if the act is related to their official duties, is done under color of law or involves trading in influence. Forms of corruption vary, but include bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, parochialism, patronage, influence peddling, graft, Corruption may facilitate criminal enterprise such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and human trafficking, though is not restricted to these activities. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents, the activities that constitute illegal corruption differ depending on the country or jurisdiction. For instance, some political funding practices that are legal in one place may be illegal in another, in some cases, government officials have broad or ill-defined powers, which make it difficult to distinguish between legal and illegal actions. Worldwide, bribery alone is estimated to involve over 1 trillion US dollars annually, a state of unrestrained political corruption is known as a kleptocracy, literally meaning rule by thieves. Some forms of corruption – now called institutional corruption – are distinguished from bribery, a similar problem of corruption arises in any institution that depends on financial support from people who have interests that may conflict with the primary purpose of the institution. In politics, corruption undermines democracy and good governance by flouting or even subverting formal processes and it violates a basic principle of republicanism regarding the centrality of civic virtue. More generally, corruption erodes the institutional capacity of government if procedures are disregarded, resources are siphoned off, Corruption undermines the legitimacy of government and such democratic values as trust and tolerance. Recent evidence suggests that variation in the levels of corruption amongst high-income democracies can vary depending on the level of accountability of decision-makers. Evidence from fragile states also shows that corruption and bribery can adversely impact trust in institutions, although some claim corruption reduces costs by cutting bureaucracy, the availability of bribes can also induce officials to contrive new rules and delays. Openly removing costly and lengthy regulations are better than allowing them to be bypassed by using bribes. Where corruption inflates the cost of business, it distorts the playing field, shielding firms with connections from competition. Corruption also generates economic distortion in the sector by diverting public investment into capital projects where bribes. Officials may increase the complexity of public sector projects to conceal or pave the way for such dealings. In Nigeria, for example, more than $400 billion was stolen from the treasury by Nigerias leaders between 1960 and 1999, University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers estimated that from 1970 to 1996, capital flight from 30 Sub-Saharan countries totaled $187bn, exceeding those nations external debts. In the case of Africa, one of the factors for this behavior was political instability, and this encouraged officials to stash their wealth abroad, out of reach of any future expropriation. In contrast, Asian administrations such as Suhartos New Order often took a cut on business transactions or provided conditions for development, through investment, law and order
6.
Millennium Development Goals
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Critics of the MDGs complained of a lack of analysis and justification behind the chosen objectives, and the difficulty or lack of measurements for some goals and uneven progress, among others. As of 2013, progress towards the goals was uneven, some countries achieved many goals, while others were not on track to realize any. A UN conference in September 2010 reviewed progress to date and adopted a plan to achieve the eight goals by their target date. New commitments targeted womens and childrens health, and new initiatives in the battle against poverty, hunger. The Sustainable Development Goals replaced the MDGs in 2016, preparations for the 2000 Millennium Summit launched with the report of the Secretary-General entitled, We the people, The Role of the United Nations in the Twenty-First Century. Additional input was prepared by the Millennium Forum, which brought together representatives of over 1,000 non-governmental, the Forum met in May to conclude a two-year consultation process covering issues such as poverty eradication, environmental protection, human rights and protection of the vulnerable. MDGs derive from earlier development targets, where world leaders adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, the approval of the Millennium Declaration was the main outcome of the Millennium Summit. The MDGs originated from the United Nations Millennium Declaration, the MDGs set concrete targets and indicators for poverty reduction in order to achieve the rights set forth in the Declaration. The Brahimi Report provided the basis of the goals in the area of peace, the Millennium Summit Declaration was, however, only part of the origins of the MDGs. More ideas came from Adam Figueroa, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, a series of UN‑led conferences in the 1990s focused on issues such as children, nutrition, human rights and women. The OECD criticized major donors for reducing their levels of Official Development Assistance, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan signed a report titled, We the Peoples, The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. The OECD had formed its International Development Goals, the two efforts were combined for the World Banks 2001 meeting to form the MDGs. The MDGs emphasized three areas, human capital, infrastructure and human rights, with the intent of increasing living standards, human capital objectives include nutrition, healthcare and education. Human rights objectives include empowering women, reducing violence, increasing political voice, ensuring access to public services. The goals were intended to increase an individual’s human capabilities and advance the means to a productive life, the MDGs emphasize that each nations policies should be tailored to that countrys needs, therefore most policy suggestions are general. Thus developing nations ostensibly became partners with developed nations in the struggle to reduce world poverty, the MDGs were developed out of several commitments set forth in the Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000. There are eight goals with 21 targets, and a series of health indicators. Target 1A, Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of living on less than $1
7.
Sustainable Development Goals
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The Sustainable Development Goals, officially known as Transforming our world, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a set of 17 Global Goals with 169 targets between them. The Resolution is a broader intergovernmental agreement that acts as the Post 2015 Development Agenda, the SDGs build on the Principles agreed upon under Resolution A/RES/66/288, popularly known as The Future We Want. The SDGs were in large measure informed by the often quoted assertion by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that we don’t have plan B because there is no planet B. On 19 July 2014, the UN General Assemblys Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals forwarded a proposal for the SDGs to the Assembly, the proposal contained 17 goals with 169 targets covering a broad range of sustainable development issues. These included ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, making cities more sustainable, combating climate change, and protecting oceans and forests. On 5 December 2014, the UN General Assembly accepted the Secretary-Generals Synthesis Report which stated that the agenda for the post-2015 SDG process would be based on the OWG proposals, the Intergovernmental Negotiations on the Post 2015 Development Agenda began in January 2015 and ended in August 2015. Following the negotiations, a document was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit September 25–27,2015 in New York. The title of the agenda is Transforming our world, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in 1992 the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio. The first agenda for Environment and Development, also known as Agenda 21, was developed and adopted in Rio, in preparation for the Rio+20 Conference, Indonesia held a July 2011 government retreat in Solo, Indonesia. At this event, Colombia proposed the idea of the SDGs, in the run-up to Rio+20 there was much discussion about the idea of SDGs. At the Rio+20 Conference, a resolution, known as The Future We Want was reached by member states, among the key themes agreed on were poverty eradication, energy, water and sanitation, health, and human settlement. The goals should address and incorporate in a way all three dimensions of sustainable development and their interlinkages. The development of these goals should not divert focus or effort from the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, paragraph 249 states that the process needs to be coordinated and coherent with the processes to consider the post-2015 development agenda. Taken together, paragraph 246 and 249 paved the way for the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs were officially established following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000 and the agreement in the Future We Want outcome document. Because the MDGs were to be achieved by 2015, a process was needed. The Report was the first attempt to achieve the requirements under paragraph 246 and 249 of the Future We Want document, other processes included the UN Secretary Generals High Level Panel on the Post 2015 Development Agenda, whose report was submitted to the Secretary General in 2013. On 25 September 2015, the 194 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Development Agenda titled Transforming our world, known as Project Everyone, the independent campaign introduced the term Global Goals and was supported by corporate institutions and other International Organizations. Because this decision was made without the approval of the member states, in addition, several sections of civil society and governments felt the UNDG ignored sustainability, even though it was the most important aspect of the agreement
8.
Kofi Annan
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Kofi Atta Annan is a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize and he is the founder and chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organization founded by Nelson Mandela. Born in Kumasi, Annan went on to study economics at Macalester College, international relations from the Graduate Institute Geneva, Annan joined the UN in 1962, working for the World Health Organizations Geneva office. He went on to work in several capacities at the UN Headquarters including serving as the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping between March 1992 and December 1996 and he was re-elected for a second term in 2001, and was succeeded as Secretary-General by Ban Ki-moon on 1 January 2007. As the Secretary-General, Annan reformed the UN bureaucracy, worked to combat HIV, especially in Africa and he has been criticized for not expanding the Security Council and faced calls for resignation after an investigation into the Oil-for-Food Programme. After leaving the UN, he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation in 2007 to work on international development, in 2012, Annan was the UN–Arab League Joint Special Representative for Syria, to help find a resolution to ongoing conflict there. Annan quit after becoming frustrated with the UNs lack of progress with regard to conflict resolution, in September 2016, Annan was appointed to lead a UN commission to investigate the Rohingya crisis. Kofi Annan was born in the Kofandros section of Kumasi in the Gold Coast on 8 April 1938 and his twin sister Efua Atta, who died in 1991, shared the middle name Atta, which in the Akan means twin. Annan and his sister were born one of the countrys Ashanti and Fante aristocratic families. In the Akan names tradition, some children are named according to the day of the week on which they were born, Kofi in Akan is the name that corresponds with Friday. Annan has said his surname rhymes with cannon in English, from 1954 to 1957, Annan attended the elite Mfantsipim school, a Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in the 1870s. Annan has said that the school taught him that suffering anywhere concerns people everywhere, in 1957, the year Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, the Gold Coast gained independence from Britain and began using the name Ghana. In 1958, Annan began studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology of Ghana. He received a Ford Foundation grant, enabling him to complete his studies in economics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. Annan then completed a diplôme détudes approfondies DEA degree in International Relations at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1961–62. After some years of experience, he studied at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Sloan Fellows program. Annan is fluent in English, French, Akan, some Kru languages, in 1962, Kofi Annan started working as a Budget Officer for the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations. From 1974 to 1976, he worked as the Director of Tourism in Ghana, in 1980 he became the head of personnel for the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees in Geneva
9.
World Economic Forum
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The World Economic Forum is a Swiss nonprofit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva. The Forum is best known for its meeting at the end of January in Davos. The meeting brings together some 2,500 top business leaders, international leaders, economists. Often this location alone is used to identify meetings, participation, and participants with such phrases as, a Davos panel, beside meetings, the foundation produces a series of research reports and engages its members in sector specific initiatives. The forum was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, a German-born business professor at the University of Geneva and he then founded the WEF as a nonprofit organization based in Geneva and drew European business leaders to Davos for the annual meetings each January. Political leaders soon began to use the meeting as a neutral platform. The Davos Declaration was signed in 1988 by Greece and Turkey, in 1992, South African President F. W. de Klerk met with Nelson Mandela and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi at the annual meeting, their first joint appearance outside South Africa. At the 1994 annual meeting, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat reached an agreement on Gaza. In late 2015, the invitation was extended to include a North Korean delegation for the 2016 forum, in view of positive signs coming out of the country, North Korea has not been attending the WEF since 1998. In 2017, the World Economic Forum in Davos attracted considerable attention when for the first time and he sharply rebuked the current populist movements that would introduce tariffs and hinder global commerce, warning that such protectionism could foster isolation and reduced economic opportunity. Headquartered in Cologny, the forum also has offices in New York, Beijing, on October 10,2016, the Forum announced the opening of its new Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. The World Economic Forum strives to be impartial and is not tied to any political, partisan, the foundation is committed to improving the State of the World. Until 2012, it had observer status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the foundations highest governance body is the foundation board. During its annual meeting, more than 2,500 participants from slightly fewer than 100 countries gather in Davos, approximately 1,500 are business leaders, drawn from its members,1,000 of the worlds top companies. The foundation is funded by its 1,000 member companies and these enterprises rank among the top companies within their industry and/or country and play a leading role in shaping the future of their industry and/or region. Membership is stratified by the level of engagement with forum activities, with the level of membership fees increasing as participation in meetings, projects, and initiatives rises. As of 2011, an annual membership costs $52,000 for a member, $263,000 for Industry Partner. An admission fee costs $19,000 per person, in 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, making the cost for Strategic Partner from SFr500,000 to SFr600,000
10.
Headquarters of the United Nations
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The headquarters of the United Nations is a complex in New York City designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The complex has served as the headquarters of the United Nations since its completion in 1952. It is located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, on spacious grounds overlooking the East River and its borders are First Avenue on the west, East 42nd Street to the south, East 48th Street on the north and the East River to the east. The term Turtle Bay is occasionally used as a metonym for the UN headquarters or for the United Nations as a whole, the United Nations has three additional, subsidiary, regional headquarters, or headquarters districts. These were opened in Geneva in 1946, Vienna in 1980 and they are technically extraterritorial through a treaty agreement with the U. S. government. However, in exchange for police, fire protection and other services, the United Nations agrees to acknowledge most local, state. The United Nations Headquarters complex was constructed in stages with the complex completed between 1948 and 1952. The US$8.5 million purchase was funded by his father, John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family owned the Tudor City Apartments across First Avenue from the site, Wallace Harrison, the personal architectural adviser for the Rockefeller family and brother-in-law to a Rockefeller daughter, served as the Director of Planning for the United Nations Headquarters. His firm, Harrison and Abramovitz, oversaw the execution of the design, the property was originally a slaughterhouse before the donation took place, bordered on one side by the Rockefeller owned Tudor City Apartments. While the United Nations had dreamed of constructing an independent city for its new world capital, the diminutive site on the East River necessitated a Rockefeller Center-type vertical complex, thus, it was a given that the Secretariat would be housed in a tall office tower. During daily meetings from February to June 1947, the team produced at least 45 designs and variations. Rather than hold a competition for the design of the facilities for the headquarters, the American architect Wallace K. Harrison was named as Director of Planning, and a Board of Design Consultants was composed of architects, planners and engineers nominated by member governments. Niemeyer met with Corbusier at the latters request shortly after the arrived in New York City. Corbusier had already been lobbying hard to promote his own scheme 23, instead, he asked the younger architect to assist him with his project. Niemeyer began to absent himself from the meetings, only after Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz repeatedly pressed him to participate did Niemeyer agree to submit his own project. This would not split the site, but on the contrary, after much discussion, Harrison, who coordinated the meetings, determined that a design based on Niemeyers project 32 and Le Corbusiers project 23 would be developed for the final project. The complex as built, however, repositioned Niemeyers General Assembly building to the north of this tripartite composition and this plan included a public plaza as well
11.
Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative
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Other key stakeholders include the World Federation of Exchanges, and the International Organization of Securities Commissions. The SSE provides a learning platform for stock exchanges, investors, regulators. In collaboration with investors, regulators, and companies, they strive to encourage sustainable investment, the Sustainable Stock Exchanges Global Dialogues are held every two years as the SSE initiative’s flagship event. They provide a unique, high-level platform to explore how the world’s exchanges can work together with investors, regulators and they are designed to analyze, promote and foster communication on stock exchanges’ sustainability-related activities. They demonstrate the progress of stock exchanges, while highlighting challenges and opportunities ahead, the 2014 Global Dialogue was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on 14 October 2014, at the United Nations Palais de Nations. The focus of this event was Capital Markets for Sustainable Development and this event was held as part of the four-day UNCTAD biennial World Investment Forum from October 13 to 17. The 2012 Global Dialogue was held on 18 June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro and it focused on the role of the world’s stock exchanges in encouraging responsible, long-term investment and creating sustainable financial markets. The event took place in the leading up to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development as part of the UN Global Compact’s Corporate Sustainability Forum. The 2010 Global Dialogue was held on 8 September 2010 in Xiamen, the 2009 Global Dialogue was held on 2 November 2009. These high-level events are open to the public and bring exchanges together with policy makers, regulators, investors, companies and other relevant stakeholders. For the SSE Regional Dialogue, LatAm & Caribbean, Latin America’s four largest stock exchanges gathered in Colombia for the first Sustainable Stock Exchanges Regional Dialogue, LatAm & Caribbean. The regional version of the flagship SSE Global Dialogue was facilitated by the SSE, hosted by the Colombian Securities Exchange, the SSE Regional Dialogue, South East Asia was held on 18 May 2015. The Sustainable Stock Exchanges Regional Dialogue South East Asia kicked off in the heart of Bangkok, afternoon workshop sessions were made possible through the support of collaborating partners GRI, CDSB, ASRIA and MSCI. During the Regional Dialogue, leaders of the Hanoi, Hochiminh, the SSE Regional Dialogue, Nordic Countries began on 4 November 2015. The Sustainable Stock Exchanges Regional Dialogue, Nordic Countries took place in Helsinki, hosted by Nasdaq Helsinki, the SSE Regional Dialogue welcomed more than 100 participants from across Nordic markets. Eight new exchanges joined the SSE initiative at the SSE Regional Dialogue, the SSE Leaders Luncheon, Climate was held in December 2015. World leaders gathered for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference to complete a new global agreement and this summit caps a year that has seen numerous momentous international breakthroughs, from the G20 pact on climate policy to the China-USA Joint Presidential Announcement on Climate Change. As climate plays a prominent role in the development of investment policy and regulation, it also has a growing impact on capital markets, investors
12.
Principles for Responsible Investment
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The United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment is an international network of investors working together to put the six Principles for Responsible Investment into practice. Its goal is to understand the implications of sustainability for investors and support signatories to incorporate these issues into their investment decision making, in implementing the Principles, signatories contribute to the development of a more sustainable global financial system. The Principles are voluntary and aspirational and they offer a menu of possible actions for incorporating environmental, social and corporate governance issues into investment practices across asset classes. Responsible investment is a process that must be tailored to fit each organisations investment strategy, approach, the Principles are designed to be compatible with the investment styles of large, diversified, institutional investors that operate within a traditional fiduciary framework. As of November 2016,1,600 signatories representing US$62 trillion assets under management have signed up to the Principles, in some cases, before retaining an investment manager, institutional investors will inquire as to whether the manager is a signatory. In early 2005, the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, a 20-person investor group drawn from institutions in 12 countries was supported by a 70-person group of experts from the investment industry, intergovernmental organisations and civil society. The Principles were launched in April 2006 at the New York Stock Exchange, the six Principles provide a global framework for mainstream investors to consider these ESG issues. The PRI was created alongside the Principles to help put the framework into practice,1,600 signatories have signed up to the Principles, with an increased sign-up arising from the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to a report in the Financial Times. The Principles are ‘voluntary and aspirational’ and they do not have entry requirements or absolute performance standards for responsible investment. However, signatories have an obligation to report on the extent to which they implement the Principles through the annual Reporting, the PRI has around 90 staff based mostly in London, with offices in New York City, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Cape Town. The Principles are as follows, As institutional investors, we have a duty to act in the best long-term interests of our beneficiaries, in this fiduciary role, we believe that environmental, social, and corporate governance issues can affect the performance of investment portfolios. We also recognise that applying these Principles may better align investors with broader objectives of society, therefore, where consistent with our fiduciary responsibilities, we commit to the following,1. We will incorporate ESG issues into investment analysis and decision-making processes and we will be active owners and incorporate ESG issues into our ownership policies and practices. We will seek appropriate disclosure on ESG issues by the entities in which we invest and we will promote acceptance and implementation of the Principles within the investment industry. We will work together to enhance our effectiveness in implementing the Principles and we will each report on our activities and progress towards implementing the Principles. A report published by the PRI found that fiduciary duty is not an obstacle to asset owner action on ESG factors, fiduciary duty in the 21st century looked at fiduciary duty across eight markets through a series of events, interviews, case studies and a legal review. Fiduciary duty has long been an issue, especially in the US. The report found that investors have yet to fully integrate ESG issues into their investment decision making processes
13.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
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The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development was established in 1964 as a permanent intergovernmental body. UNCTAD is the organ of the United Nations General Assembly dealing with trade, investment. The primary objective of UNCTAD is to formulate policies relating to all aspects of development including trade, aid, transport, finance, the conference ordinarily meets once in four years, the permanent secretariat is in Geneva. One of the achievements of UNCTAD has been to conceive. It was argued in UNCTAD that to promote exports of manufactured goods from developing countries, since imports of such items from other developed countries are subject to the normal rates of duties, imports of the same items from developing countries would enjoy a competitive advantage. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development was established to provide a forum where the countries could discuss the problems relating to their economic development. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, UNCTAD was closely associated with the idea of a New International Economic Order, currently, UNCTAD has 194 member states and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. UNCTAD has 400 staff members and a regular budget of $138 million in core expenditures. It is a member of the United Nations Development Group, there are non-governmental organizations participating in the activities of UNCTAD. As of October 2012,194 states are UNCTAD members, all UN members, UNCTAD members are divided into four lists, the division being based on United Nations Regional Groups with six members unassigned, Armenia, Kiribati, Nauru, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Tuvalu. List A consists mostly of countries in the African and Asia-Pacific Groups of the UN, list B consists of countries of the Western European and Others Group. List C consists of countries of the Group of Latin American and Caribbean States, list D consists of countries of the Eastern European Group. The lists are similar to those of UNIDO, an UN specialized agency, not assigned countries, Armenia, Kiribati, Nauru, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Tuvalu. Other states that do not participate are Cook Islands, Niue, in response to developing country anxiety at their worsening position in world trade, the United Nations General Assembly voted for a one off conference. At Geneva, the LDCs were successful in their proposal for the conference with its Secretariat to become a permanent organ of the UN, with meetings every four years. The New Delhi Conference, held in February and March 1968, was a forum that allowed developing countries to reach agreement on principles of their development policies. The conference in New Delhi was an opportunity for schemes to be finally approved, the conference provided a major impetus in persuading the North to follow up UNCTAD I resolutions, in establishing generalised preferences. The target for private and official flows to LDCs was raised to 1% of the Norths GNP and this has proven a continuing point of debate at UNCTAD conferences
14.
United Nations Convention against Corruption
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The United Nations Convention against Corruption is a multilateral treaty negotiated by member states of the United Nations and promoted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. It is one of several legally binding international anti-corruption agreements, another goal of the UNCAC is to strengthen international law enforcement and judicial cooperation between countries by providing effective legal mechanisms for international asset recovery. The Conference of the States Parties to the UNCAC provides participating countries with resources, UNCAC was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 31 October 2003 by Resolution 58/4. It was opened for signature in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, from 9–11 December 2003 and it was signed by 140 countries. As of December 2016, there are 181 parties, which includes 177 UN member states, the Cook Islands, the Holy See, the State of Palestine, and they have also recognized the need to develop effective measures against corruption at both the domestic and international levels. International action against corruption has progressed from general consideration and declarative statements to legally binding agreements, uNCACs comprehensive approach and the mandatory character of many of its provisions give proof of this development. UNODC acts as the secretariat to the CoSP, the CoSP has established a number of subsidiary bodies to further the implementation of specific aspects of UNCAC. The first session of the CoSP took place on 10–14 December 2006 at the Dead Sea, in its resolution 1/1, States Parties agreed that it was necessary to establish an appropriate and effective mechanism to assist in the review of the implementation of UNCAC. An inter-governmental working group was established to start working on the design of such a mechanism, two other working groups were set up to promote coordination of activities related to technical assistance and asset recovery, respectively. The second CoSP was held in Bali, Indonesia, from 28 January to 1 February 2008, the third session of the CoSP took place in Doha, Qatar, from 9 to 13 November 2009. The CoSP adopted the landmark Resolution 3/1 on the review of the implementation of UNCAC, the CoSP was preceded and accompanied by numerous side events, such as the last Global Forum for Fighting Corruption and Safeguarding Integrity and a Youth Forum. The fourth session of the CoSP took place in Marrakech, Morocco, the Conference considered the progress made in the IRM and recognized the importance of addressing technical assistance needs in the Review Mechanism. The next sessions of the CoSP will take place in Panama in 2013, UNCAC covers five main areas, preventive measures, criminalization and law enforcement, international cooperation, asset recovery, and technical assistance and information exchange. It includes both mandatory and non-mandatory provisions and they also include definitions of critical terms used in the instrument. UNCAC does not provide for a definition of corruption, in accordance with Article 2 of the UN Charter, Article 4 of UNCAC provides for the protection of national sovereignty of the States Parties. UNCAC recognizes the importance of the prevention in both the public and private sectors, Chapter II includes preventive policies, such as the establishment of anti-corruption bodies and enhanced transparency in the financing of election campaigns and political parties. Anti-corruption bodies should implement anti-corruption policies, disseminate knowledge and must be independent, countries that sign the convention must assure safeguards their public services are subject to safeguards that promote efficiency, transparency and recruitment based on merit. Once recruited, public servants should be bound by codes of conduct, requirements for financial and other disclosures, preventing corruption also requires an effort from all members of society at large
15.
Unfree labour
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Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, and related institutions. According to the Marxian economics, under capitalism, workers never keep all of the wealth they create, as some of it goes to the profit of capitalists. Slavery was common in ancient societies, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Israel, ancient China, classical Arab states, as well as many societies in Africa. Being sold into slavery was a fate of populations conquered in wars. The term slavery is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, examples are the Repartimiento system in the Spanish Empire, or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In the latter case, workers were rarely or never paid, in late 16th century Japan, unfree labour or slavery was officially banned, but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside the period penal codes forced labour. Somewhat later, the Edo period penal laws prescribed non-free labour for the family of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes promulgated between 1597 and 1696, according to Kevin Bales, in Disposable People, New Slavery in the Global Economy, there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. Convict or prison labour is another form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, three British colonies in Australia — New South Wales, Van Diemens Land and Western Australia — provide probably the best examples of the state use of convict labour. A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation for treason while fighting for Irish independence from British rule, more than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868. Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation, however and it is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chinese laogai camps. Chinas Laogai system and North Koreas Kwalliso camps are current examples, about 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Poles and Soviet citizens, were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha were forced to work by the Japanese military, about 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning there was a death rate of 80%. Kerja rodi, was the term for forced labor in Indonesia during Dutch colonisation, the Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps, a specific kind of truck system, in which credit advances are made against future work, is known in the U. S. as debt bondage. Many scholars have suggested that use such systems to exploit workers and/or indebt them
16.
Child labour
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This practice is considered exploitative by many international organisations. Legislation across the world prohibit child labour, Child labour has existed to varying extents, through most of history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer families still worked in Europe and these children mainly worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories, mining and in services such as news boys. Some worked night shifts lasting 12 hours, with the rise of household income, availability of schools and passage of child labour laws, the incidence rates of child labour fell. In developing countries, with poverty and poor schooling opportunities. In 2010, sub-saharan Africa had the highest incidence rates of child labour, worldwide agriculture is the largest employer of child labour. Vast majority of labour is found in rural settings and informal urban economy, children are predominantly employed by their parents. Poverty and lack of schools are considered as the cause of child labour. Globally the incidence of child labour decreased from 25% to 10% between 1960 and 2003, according to the World Bank. Nevertheless, the number of child labourers remains high, with UNICEF. Child labour forms a part of pre-industrial economies. In pre-industrial societies, there is rarely a concept of childhood in the modern sense, Children often begin to actively participate in activities such as child rearing, hunting and farming as soon as they are competent. In many societies, children as young as 13 are seen as adults, the work of children was important in pre-industrial societies, as children needed to provide their labour for their survival and that of their group. In pre-industrial societies, there was little need for children to attend school and this is especially the case in non literate societies. Most pre-industrial skill and knowledge were amenable to being passed down through direct mentoring or apprenticing by competent adults, with the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 18th century, there was a rapid increase in the industrial exploitation of labour, including child labour. Industrial cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool rapidly grew from small villages into large cities and these cities drew in the population that was rapidly growing due to increased agricultural output. This process was replicated in other industrialising counties, the Victorian era in particular became notorious for the conditions under which children were employed. Children as young as four were employed in factories and mines working long hours in dangerous, often fatal
17.
Bribery
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Bribery is the act of giving money, goods or other forms of recompense to a recipient in exchange for an alteration of their behavior that the recipient would otherwise not alter. Gifts of money or other items of value which are available to everyone on an equivalent basis. Offering a discount or a refund to all purchasers is a rebate and is not bribery. Giving the rebate to influence them to look favorably on the utilitys rate increase applications, however. The bribe is the gift bestowed to influence the recipients conduct, in economics, the bribe has been described as rent. Bribery in bureaucracy has been viewed as a reason for the higher cost of production of goods, one must be careful of differing social and cultural norms when examining bribery. Expectations of when a transaction is appropriate can differ from place to place. Tipping, for example, is considered bribery in some societies, in some Spanish-speaking countries, bribes are referred to as mordida. In Arab countries, bribes may be called baksheesh or shay, french-speaking countries often use the expressions dessous-de-table, pot-de-vin, or commission occulte. While the last two expressions contain inherently a negative connotation, the expression dessous-de-table can be understood as a commonly accepted business practice. In German, the term is Schmiergeld. The forms that bribery take are numerous, for example, a motorist might bribe a police officer not to issue a ticket for speeding, a citizen seeking paperwork or utility line connections might bribe a functionary for faster service. Bribery may also take the form of a commission, a profit made by an agent, in the course of his employment. Euphemisms abound for this Bribers and recipients of bribery are likewise numerous although bribers have one common denominator, Bribery around the world is estimated at about $1 trillion. The reason for this dissociation is to make the steps of a corrupt deal already an offence and, thus. Besides, such a dissociation makes the prosecution of bribery offences easier since it can be difficult to prove that two parties have formally agreed upon a corrupt deal. A grey area may exist when payments to smooth transactions are made, in some countries, this practice is the norm, often resulting from a developing nation not having the tax structure to pay civil servants an adequate salary. Nevertheless, most economists regard bribery as a bad thing because it encourages rent seeking behaviour, a state where bribery has become a way of life is a kleptocracy
18.
Global Reporting Initiative
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As of 2015,7,500 organizations used GRI Guidelines for the sustainability reports. GRI Guidelines apply to multinational organizations, public agencies, smaller and medium enterprises, NGOs, industry groups, for municipal governments, they have generally been subsumed by similar guidelines from the UN ICLEI. The GRI is an example of an organization that acts outside of the top-down power command structures associated with government, environmental governance is the multifaceted and multilayered nature of governing the borderless and state-indiscriminate natural environment. Unlike major protected areas such as finance or defence, the environment requires sovereign states to sign up to treaties. Sustainability reporting is a recent concept that encourages businesses and institutions to report on their environmental performance. The GRI was formed by the United States-based non-profits Ceres and Tellus Institute, later that year it became a permanent institution. In 2002 GRI moved its Secretariat to Amsterdam, Netherlands, although the GRI is independent, it remains a collaborating centre of UNEP and works in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact. A member of the board of the Dutch National Contact Point of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, herman Mulder was appointed as a Chairman of the GRI in 2011. In the past Mr Mulder was a senior executive vice-president at ABN AMRO, diverse geographic and sector constituencies are represented in these governance bodies. The GRI headquarters and Secretariat is in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the Performance Indicators includes criteria on energy, biodiversity and emissions. There are 30 environmental indicators ranging from EN1 to EN30, the recent 3.1 guideline has been replaced by the materiality-based 4.0 guideline in 2014, which has raised critical comments regarding the comparability and credibility. Sustainability reporting aims to standardize and quantify the environmental, social, some of the examples of the reporting measures to be used would be the quantified results of the CO2 emissions, working and payment conditions, financial transparency and alike. ISO14010, ISO14011, ISO14012 and ISO26000 set out a standard for assessing the impact, while OHSAS18001 lays down a health. GRI’s Data Partners collect and process information about GRI reporting and sustainability reporting in general and they regularly share data with GRI about reports and reporting organizations, and also serve as on-the-ground hubs, identifying reporting trends in their countries and regions. The report and organization related information provided by Data Partners is added to GRIs Sustainability Disclosure Database, the GRI data partners analysis of reports show an increase in GRI reporting worldwide. GRIs focus has been to continually get governments and stock exchanges to require more organisations around the world to produce sustainability reports, the focus on quantity over quality supports the value of GRIs brand but has also resulted in many reports that are little more than public relations efforts. In 2013, GRI released the update to its Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, G4. Of particular concern is GRI’s handling of the principle known as sustainability context
19.
World Business Council for Sustainable Development
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The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is a CEO-led, global advocacy association of some 200 international companies dealing exclusively with business and sustainable development. He created a forum called Business Council for Sustainable Development, which went on to become Changing Course and it works on a variety of issues related to sustainable development. A2003 World Bank/IFC commissioned study identified the WBCSD as one of the most influential forums for companies on social responsibility issues. A2004 Globescan survey found the WBCSD as the second most effective SD research organization, the 2006 survey by the same company reports that 54% of all surveyed experts believe the WBCSD will play a major role in advancing sustainable development. Only the European Union received higher approval, in the 2007s Ethisphere Institute list of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics, WBCSD President Bjoern Stigson has been ranked 9th, which made him the 2nd most influential NGO leader. Business is good for development and sustainable development is good for business. Business is part of the sustainable development solution, while development is an effective long-term business growth strategy. Business cannot succeed in societies that fail, there is no future for successful business if the societies that surround it are not working. Governments and business must create partnerships to deliver essential societal services like energy, water, poverty is a key enemy to stable societies. Poverty creates political and economic instability, a big threat to business, by contrast, businesses can lift living standards and eradicate poverty. Access to markets for all supports sustainable development, Sustainable development is best achieved through open, transparent and competitive global markets. Good governance is needed to make business a part of the solution, supportive frameworks and regulations are needed for business to contribute fully to sustainable development. Business has to earn its licence to operate, innovate and grow, the way business acts and is perceived is crucial to its success. Accountability, ethics, transparency, social and environmental responsibility and trust are basic prerequisites for successful business, innovation and technology development are crucial to sustainable development. They provide key solutions to many of the problems that threaten sustainable development, Business has always been, and will continue to be, the main contributor to technological development. Eco-efficiency – doing more with less - is at the core of the case for sustainable development. Ecosystems in balance – a prerequisite for business, Business cannot function if ecosystems and the services they deliver, such as water, biodiversity, food, fiber and climate, are degraded. Sustainable development challenges are huge and require contributions from all parties — governments, business, civil societies, confrontation puts the solutions at risk
20.
Ban Ki-moon
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Ban Ki-moon is a South Korean diplomat who was the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 2007 to December 2016. Before becoming Secretary-General, Ban was a diplomat in South Koreas Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He entered diplomatic service the year he graduated university, accepting his first post in New Delhi. Ban was the minister of South Korea from January 2004 to November 2006. In February 2006 he began to campaign for the office of Secretary-General, Ban was initially considered to be a long shot for the office. As foreign minister of South Korea, however, he was able to travel to all the countries on the United Nations Security Council, on 13 October 2006, he was elected to be the eighth Secretary-General by the United Nations General Assembly. On 1 January 2007, he succeeded Kofi Annan, as Secretary-General, he was responsible for several major reforms on peacekeeping and UN employment practices. Ban was named the worlds 32nd most powerful person by the Forbes list of The Worlds Most Powerful People in 2013, in 2014, he was named the third most powerful South Korean after Lee Kun-hee and Lee Jae-yong. In 2016, Foreign Policy named Ban one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for his achievement of making the Paris Agreement a legally binding treaty less than a year after it was adopted. António Guterres was appointed by the General Assembly on 13 October 2016 to be the successor of Ban Ki-moon as he stepped down on 31 December 2016. He was widely considered to be a candidate for the 2017 South Korean presidential election, before announcing, on February 1. Ban was born on 13 June 1944 in the farming village of Haengchi, Wonnam Township, in Eumseong County. His family then moved to the town of Chungju, where he grew up. During Bans childhood, his father had a business, but the warehouse went bankrupt. When Ban was six, his family fled to a mountainside for much of the Korean War. After the war ended, his family returned to Chungju, Ban has said that, during this time, he met American soldiers. In secondary school, Ban became a student, particularly in his studies of the English language. In 1962, Ban won an essay contest sponsored by the Red Cross, as part of the trip, Ban met U. S. President John F. Kennedy
21.
Rotary International
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It is a non-political and non-sectarian organization open to all people regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, or political preference. There are 34,282 member clubs worldwide,1.2 million individuals called Rotarians have joined these clubs. Rotarians usually gather weekly for breakfast, lunch, or dinner to fulfill their first guiding principle to develop friendships as an opportunity for service, the Rotarians primary motto is Service Above Self, its secondary motto is One profits most who serves best. This objective is set against the Rotary 4-Way Test, used to see if an action is compatible with the Rotarian spirit. It is still seen as a standard for ethics in business management, the 4-Way Test considers the following questions in respect to thinking, saying or doing, Is it the truth. Is it fair to all concerned, will it build goodwill and better friendships. Will it be beneficial to all concerned, the first Rotary Club was formed when attorney Paul P. In addition to Harris and Loehr, Silvester Schiele, and Hiram E. Shorey were the two who attended this first meeting. The next four Rotary Clubs were organized in cities in the western United States, beginning with San Francisco, then Oakland, Los Angeles, the National Association of Rotary Clubs in America was formed in 1910. On November 3,1910, a Rotary club began meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on 22 February 1911, the first meeting of the Rotary Club Dublin was held in Dublin, Ireland. This was the first club established outside of North America, in April 1912, Rotary chartered the Winnipeg club marking the first establishment of an American-style service club outside the United States. To reflect the addition of a club outside of the United States, in August 1912, the Rotary Club of London received its charter from the Association, marking the first acknowledged Rotary club outside North America. It later became known that the Dublin club in Ireland was organized before the London club, but the Dublin club did not receive its charter until after the London club was chartered. During World War I, Rotary in Britain increased from 9 to 22 clubs, in 1922, the name was changed to Rotary International. By 1925, Rotary had grown to 200 clubs with more than 20,000 members, Rotary Clubs in Spain ceased to operate shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. At the UN Charter Conference in San Francisco, nearly fifty Rotarians served as delegates, advisors, Rotarys work in promoting peace through education began as early as 1943 with a London conference on international, cultural, and educational exchanges. Rotary International established consultative status with the UN and UNESCO beginning in 1946-47, in one of the first cooperative activities with UNESCO, the Rotary Foundation awarded a $5,000 ‘grant-in-aid’ for fellowships to social service and educational leaders in war-devastated countries. The funds were designed to provide training to those who trained others, in 1985, Rotary launched its PolioPlus program to immunize all of the worlds children against polio
22.
Melbourne
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Melbourne is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in Australia and Oceania. The name Melbourne refers to an urban agglomeration spanning 9,900 km2, the metropolis is located on the large natural bay of Port Phillip and expands into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon mountain ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley. It has a population of 4,641,636 as of 2016, and its inhabitants are called Melburnians. Founded by free settlers from the British Crown colony of Van Diemens Land on 30 August 1835, in what was then the colony of New South Wales, it was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837. It was named Melbourne by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, in honour of the British Prime Minister of the day, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. It was officially declared a city by Queen Victoria, to whom Lord Melbourne was close, in 1847, during the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, it was transformed into one of the worlds largest and wealthiest cities. After the federation of Australia in 1901, it served as the interim seat of government until 1927. It is a financial centre in the Asia-Pacific region. It is recognised as a UNESCO City of Literature and a centre for street art, music. It was the host city of the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the main passenger airport serving the metropolis and the state is Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia. The Port of Melbourne is Australias busiest seaport for containerised and general cargo, Melbourne has an extensive transport network. The main metropolitan train terminus is Flinders Street Station, and the regional train. Melbourne is also home to Australias most extensive network and has the worlds largest urban tram network. Before the arrival of settlers, humans had occupied the area for an estimated 31,000 to 40,000 years. At the time of European settlement, it was inhabited by under 2000 hunter-gatherers from three indigenous tribes, the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung and Wathaurong. The area was an important meeting place for the clans of the Kulin nation alliance and it would be 30 years before another settlement was attempted. Batman selected a site on the bank of the Yarra River. Batman then returned to Launceston in Tasmania, in early August 1835 a different group of settlers, including John Pascoe Fawkner, left Launceston on the ship Enterprize
23.
Circles of Sustainability
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Circles of Sustainability is a method for understanding and assessing sustainability, and for managing projects directed towards socially sustainable outcomes. It is intended to handle seemingly intractable problems such as outlined in sustainable development debates, the method is mostly used for cities and urban settlements. Circles of Sustainability, and its treatment of the domains of ecology, economics, politics and culture. It is also being used in relation to such as Circles of Child Wellbeing. The rationale for this new method is clear, as evidenced by Rio+20 and the UN Habitat World Urban Forum in Napoli and Medellin, sustainability assessment is on the global agenda. However, the complex the problems, the less useful current sustainability assessment tools seem to be for assessing across different domains, economics, ecology, politics. For example, the Triple Bottom Line approach tends to take the economy as its point of focus with the domain of the environmental as the key externality. Secondly, the quantitative basis of many such methods means that they have limited purchase on complex qualitative issues. Thirdly, the size, scope and sheer number of indicators included within many such means that they are often unwieldy. Fourthly, the focus of current indicator sets means that they do not work across different organizational and social settings—corporations and other institutions, cities. Most indicator approaches, such as the Global Reporting Initiative or ISO14031, have limited to large corporate organizations with easily definable legal. Circles of Sustainability was developed to respond to those limitations, two concurrent developments provided impetus, a major project in Porto Alegre, and a United Nations’ paper called Accounting for Sustainability, Briefing Paper, No. The researchers developed a method and a set of tools for assessing and monitoring issues of sustainability while providing guidance for project development. A further refining of the ecological index quadrant is underway in Canada, the Canadian project is significant because it is developing an ongoing index that measures and scores the ecological footprints cities have on their surrounding ecosystems. It is also used by a number of cities across the world in different ways to manage major projects or to provide feedback on their sustainability profiles and it is a method for understanding urban politics and urban planning, as well as for conducting sustainability analysis and profiling sustainable development. The methodology is available by UN Global Compact Cities Programme for its engagement with its more than 80 Signatory Cities. They use a cross-sectoral and holistic approach for developing a response to self-defined seemingly intractable problems, the Vila Chocolatão project refers to the 2011 resettlement of approximately 1,000 residents of the inner-city Vila Chocolatão slum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The lengthy preparation to resettle was led by a local cross-sectoral network group, the project was supported by the City of Porto Alegre through the municipality’s Local Solidarity Governance Scheme
24.
Committee for Melbourne
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The Committee for Melbourne is a non-profit organisation based in Melbourne, Australia. The Committee was founded in 1985 to bring together businesses, academia and non-profit organisations to do activities, networking and its aim is to keep Melbourne as one of the worlds most liveable cities. The outcomes of the Committee for Melbourne come in three categories, private collaboration, establishing organisations, and shaping government policy. The Committee for Melbourne gives the prestigious Melbourne Achiever awards
25.
RMIT University
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RMIT University is an Australian public research university located in Melbourne, Victoria. It was made a university by act of the Parliament of Victoria in 1992 after merging with the Phillip Institute of Technology. With an annual revenue of A$1.163 billion in 2015, the foundation campus of RMIT forms part of the Melbourne city centre and is located on the northern edge of its Hoddle Grid. It began as the Working Mens College building, on the corner of Bowen Street and La Trobe Street, in addition to its City campus, it has two radial campuses in the Melbourne metropolitan area which are located in the northern suburbs of Brunswick and Bundoora. Outside of Australia, it has a presence in Asia and Europe, in Asia, it has two branch campuses in Vietnam which are located in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and maintains teaching partnerships in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. In Europe, it has a centre in Spain located in Barcelona. RMIT is rated a five star university by Quacquarelli Symonds and it is ranked as 16th in the world for art and design in the 2016 QS World University Rankings, which makes it the top art and design school in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere. It is also ranked as 16th in the top 50 universities under 50 years old by QS, the antecedent of RMIT, the Working Mens College of Melbourne, was founded by the Scottish-born grazier and politician The Hon. Francis Ormond in the 1880s. Ormond donated the sum of £5000 toward the foundation of the college and he was supported in the Victorian Parliament by Charles Pearson and in the Melbourne Trades Hall by William Murphy. The workers unions of Melbourne rallied their members to match Ormonds donation, the site for the college, on the corners of Bowen Street and La Trobe Street, opposite the Melbourne Public Library, was donated by the Victorian Government. The Working Mens College of Melbourne opened on June 4,1887, with a ceremony at the Melbourne Town Hall. It took 320 enrollments on its opening night and it opened as a night school for instruction in art, science and technology—in the words of its founder—especially to working men. Ormond was a believer in the transformative power of education and believed the college would be of great importance. In 1904, it was incorporated under the Companies Act as a private college, between the turn of the 20th century and the 1930s, it expanded over the neighbouring Old Melbourne Gaol and constructed buildings for new art, engineering and radio schools. It also made its first contribution to Australias war effort through training of returned military personnel from World War I, following a petition by students, it officially changed its name to the Melbourne Technical College in 1934. It became the higher education institution in Australia with the right of the prefix Royal along with the use of the monarchy of Englands regalia. Its name was changed to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1960. During the mid-20th century, it was restructured as a provider of higher and vocational education
26.
United Nations Human Settlements Programme
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The United Nations Human Settlements Programme is the United Nations agency for human settlements and sustainable urban development. It was established in 1978 as an outcome of the First UN Conference on Human Settlements and Sustainable Urban Development held in Vancouver, UN-Habitat maintains its headquarters at the United Nations Office at Nairobi, Kenya. It is mandated by the United Nations General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and it is a member of the United Nations Development Group. The mandate of UN-Habitat derives from the Habitat Agenda, adopted by the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul, Turkey, the twin goals of the Habitat Agenda are adequate shelter for all and the development of sustainable human settlements in an urbanizing world. Since October 2010 the Executive Director is Joan Clos, former mayor of Barcelona and Minister of Industry, Tourism, the Governing Council of UN-Habitat is the intergovernmental decision-making body for the Programme. Every two years, the Governing Council examines the UN-Habitat’s work and relationships with its partners and it is a high-level forum of governments at the ministerial level during which policy guidelines and the organizations budget are established for the next two-year period. The Governing Council is taking place in Nairobi, Kenya, the World Urban Forum is an international conference dedicated to urban issues, organized by UN-Habitat. The World Urban Campaign is the world living platform on cities for sharing and learning on initiatives, actions, coordinated by UN-Habitat, it is a global coalition of public, private and civil society partners seeking to raise the urban agenda. The campaign is UN-Habitats partners platform for the preparation of the Third United Nations Conference on Housing, the United Nations has designated the first Monday of October every year as World Habitat Day. This is an occasion to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and it is also intended to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of human habitat. The UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour Award is a given by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in recognition of work carried out in the field of human settlements development. The aim of the award is to individuals and institutions instrumental in improving the living conditions in urban centres around the world
27.
Climate change
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Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time. Climate change may refer to a change in weather conditions. Climate change is caused by such as biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics. Certain human activities have also identified as significant causes of recent climate change. Scientists actively work to understand past and future climate by using observations, more recent data are provided by the instrumental record. The most general definition of change is a change in the statistical properties of the climate system when considered over long periods of time. Accordingly, fluctuations over periods shorter than a few decades, such as El Niño, the term climate change is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change. Anthropogenic climate change is caused by activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earths natural processes. In this sense, especially in the context of environmental policy, within scientific journals, global warming refers to surface temperature increases while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas levels affect. A related term is climatic change, in 1966, the World Meteorological Organization proposed the term climatic change to encompass all forms of climatic variability on time-scales longer than 10 years, regardless of cause. Change was a given and climatic was used as an adjective to describe this kind of change, when it was realized that human activities had a potential to drastically alter the climate, the term climate change replaced climatic change as the dominant term to reflect an anthropogenic cause. Climate change was incorporated in the title of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate change, used as a noun, became an issue rather than the technical description of changing weather. On the broadest scale, the rate at which energy is received from the Sun and this energy is distributed around the globe by winds, ocean currents, and other mechanisms to affect the climates of different regions. Factors that can shape climate are called climate forcings or forcing mechanisms, there are a variety of climate change feedbacks that can either amplify or diminish the initial forcing. Some parts of the system, such as the oceans and ice caps, respond more slowly in reaction to climate forcings. There are also key factors which when exceeded can produce rapid change. Forcing mechanisms can be internal or external. Internal forcing mechanisms are natural processes within the system itself
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Globalization
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Globalization or globalisation is the action or procedure of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Advances in transportation and in telecommunications infrastructure have been factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic. Large-scale globalization began in the 1820s, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectivity of the worlds economies and cultures grew very quickly. The term globalization is recent, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s, further, environmental challenges such as global warming, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and overfishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas, economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization. The term globalization is derived from the word globalize, which refers to the emergence of a network of economic systems. One of the earliest known usages of the term as a noun was in a 1930 publication entitled Towards New Education, a related term, corporate giants, was coined by Charles Taze Russell in 1897 to refer to the largely national trusts and other large enterprises of the time. By the 1960s, both began to be used as synonyms by economists and other social scientists. Economist Theodore Levitt is widely credited with coining the term in an article entitled Globalization of Markets, However, the term globalization was in use well before this and had been used by other scholars as early as 1981. Levitt can be credited with popularizing the term and bringing it into the mainstream audience in the later half of the 1980s. Due to the complexity of the concept, research projects, articles, sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society. Globalization can be located on a continuum with the local, national and regional, without reference to such expansive spatial connections, there can be no clear or coherent formulation of this term. A satisfactory definition of globalization must capture each of these elements, extensity, intensity, velocity and it pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world. The ideological dimension, according to Steger, is filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs and they have also argued that four different forms of globalization can be distinguished that complement and cut across the solely empirical dimensions. According to James, the oldest dominant form of globalization is embodied globalization, a second form is agency-extended globalization, the circulation of agents of different institutions, organizations, and polities, including imperial agents. Object-extended globalization, a form, is the movement of commodities. He calls the transmission of ideas, images, knowledge, and information across world-space disembodied globalization and he asserted that the pace of globalization was quickening and that its impact on business organization and practice would continue to grow. Economist Takis Fotopoulos defined economic globalization as the opening and deregulation of commodity, capital and he used political globalization to refer to the emergence of a transnational elite and a phasing out of the nation-state
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Georgi Parvanov
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Georgi Sedefchov Parvanov is a Bulgarian historian and politician who was President of Bulgaria from 2002 to 2012. He was elected defeating the incumbent Petar Stoyanov in the second round of the November 2001 presidential election. He was reelected in a victory in 2006, becoming the first Bulgarian president to serve two terms. Parvanov was a supporter of Bulgarias membership in NATO and the European Union, according to Bulgarian law, a Bulgarian president is not allowed to be a member of a political party, thus Parvanov left the Bulgarian Socialist Party after his election in 2001. Although he identified as a socialist, Parvanov often called himself a social president, after completing his second term as President, Parvanov returned to the Socialist Party, prompting a dispute over the party leadership. In January 2014 Parvanov restarted his Alternative for Bulgarian Revival project, on January 15,2017 he stepped down as party leader and was replaced by Konstantin Prodanov. Georgi Parvanov was born in the village of Sirishtnik, Pernik Province on 28 June 1957, in 1988 Parvanov defended his doctoral thesis in history, which is titled Dimitar Blagoev and the Bulgarian national question 1879-1917. Parvanov joined the Institute for History of the Bulgarian Communist Party as a researcher in 1981 and his main interest was the Bulgarian national issue and the early history of social democracy in Bulgaria. In 1989 he was promoted to a research associate. In May 2001 he became a member of the Internet Society of Bulgaria, in 1981 Parvanov joined the Bulgarian Communist Party. In April 1990 the party was transformed into the Bulgarian Socialist Party, in 1989 Parvanov formed the nationalist organization Nationwide Committee for the Defense of National Interests. In 1994 he became Deputy Chairman of the BSP national Council and it was also in that year that he was elected to the National Assembly, he was reelected in 1997 and 2001. Parvanov was chairman of the Parliamentary Group for Friendship with Greece and member of the Parliamentary Committee on Radio, because of a severe financial crisis, the Prime Minister and leader of the BSP, Zhan Videnov, resigned in December 1996. Georgi Parvanov was elected as his successor that month, however, after large protests against the socialist government in January 1997, Parvanov and Nikolay Dobrev returned the mandate to form a government. In the early elections that ensued, the Socialist Party went into opposition. In 2000 Parvanov was reelected as Chairman of the National Council of the BSP and he has been credited with altering the geopolitical orientation of the party, paving the way for Bulgarias joining of NATO in 2004. Parvanov led his party to its worst electoral performance in 2001, both the BSP and the SDS suffered greatly from the rise of the newly founded National Movement for Simeon II. In the first round of the 2001 presidential election, Parvanov won 36. 4% of the votes, finishing ahead of the incumbent SDS candidate, Petar Stoyanov, the voter turnout was the lowest to date, only 41. 8%
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United Nations Development Program
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The United Nations Development Programme is the United Nations global development network. Headquartered in New York City, UNDP advocates for change and connects countries to knowledge, experience and it provides expert advice, training and grants support to developing countries, with increasing emphasis on assistance to the least developed countries. The status of UNDP is that of an executive board within the United Nations General Assembly, the UNDP Administrator is the third highest-ranking official of the United Nations after the United Nations Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General. UNDP also encourages the protection of rights and the empowerment of women in all of its programmes. The UNDP Human Development Report Office also publishes an annual Human Development Report to measure, in addition to a global Report, UNDP publishes regional, national, and local Human Development Reports. UNDP is funded entirely by contributions from member nations. The organization operates in 177 countries, where it works with governments to meet development challenges. Additionally, the UNDP works internationally to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Currently, the UNDP is one of the main UN agencies involved in the development of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, UNDP works with nations on their own solutions to global and national development challenges. As they develop local capacity, they draw on the people of UNDP, the UNDP was founded on 22 November 1965 with the merger of the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance and the Special Fund. The rationale was to avoid duplication of activities, the EPTA was set up in 1949 to help the economic and political aspects of underdeveloped countries while the Special Fund was to enlarge the scope of UN technical assistance. The Special Fund arose from the idea of a Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development, while countries such as the Nordic countries were proponents of such a United Nations controlled fund. The concept of SUNFED was dropped to form the Special Fund and this Special Fund was some compromise over the SUNFED concept, it did not provide investment capital, but only helped to bring pre-conditions for private investment. With the US proposing and creating the International Development Association within the World Banks umbrella, the EPTA, in 2013, UNDP’s entire budget was approximately US$5 billion. The following table lists the top 15 DAC5 Digit Sectors to which UNDP has committed funding, the UNDP claims on the IATI Registry website that the data covers 100% of development flows. UNDP’s offices and staff are on the ground in 177 countries, working with governments, UNDP links and coordinates global and national efforts to achieve the goals and national development priorities laid out by host countries. UNDP also supports existing democratic institutions by increasing dialogue, enhancing national debate, UNDP also works at the macro level to reform trade, encourage debt relief and foreign investment, and ensure the poorest of the poor benefit from globalisation. On the ground, UNDP sponsors developmental pilot projects, promotes the role of women in development, in this way, UNDP works with local leaders and governments to provide opportunities for impoverished people to create businesses and improve their economic condition
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Bulgaria
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Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in southeastern Europe. It is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, with a territory of 110,994 square kilometres, Bulgaria is Europes 16th-largest country. Organised prehistoric cultures began developing on current Bulgarian lands during the Neolithic period and its ancient history saw the presence of the Thracians, Greeks, Persians, Celts, Romans, Goths, Alans and Huns. With the downfall of the Second Bulgarian Empire in 1396, its territories came under Ottoman rule for five centuries. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 led to the formation of the Third Bulgarian State, the following years saw several conflicts with its neighbours, which prompted Bulgaria to align with Germany in both world wars. In 1946 it became a one-party socialist state as part of the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, in December 1989 the ruling Communist Party allowed multi-party elections, which subsequently led to Bulgarias transition into a democracy and a market-based economy. Bulgarias population of 7.2 million people is predominantly urbanised, most commercial and cultural activities are centred on the capital and largest city, Sofia. The strongest sectors of the economy are industry, power engineering. The countrys current political structure dates to the adoption of a constitution in 1991. Bulgaria is a parliamentary republic with a high degree of political, administrative. Human activity in the lands of modern Bulgaria can be traced back to the Paleolithic, animal bones incised with man-made markings from Kozarnika cave are assumed to be the earliest examples of symbolic behaviour in humans. Organised prehistoric societies in Bulgarian lands include the Neolithic Hamangia culture, Vinča culture, the latter is credited with inventing gold working and exploitation. Some of these first gold smelters produced the coins, weapons and jewellery of the Varna Necropolis treasure and this site also offers insights for understanding the social hierarchy of the earliest European societies. Thracians, one of the three primary groups of modern Bulgarians, began appearing in the region during the Iron Age. In the late 6th century BC, the Persians conquered most of present-day Bulgaria, and kept it until 479 BC. After the division of the Roman Empire in the 5th century the area fell under Byzantine control, by this time, Christianity had already spread in the region. A small Gothic community in Nicopolis ad Istrum produced the first Germanic language book in the 4th century, the first Christian monastery in Europe was established around the same time by Saint Athanasius in central Bulgaria. From the 6th century the easternmost South Slavs gradually settled in the region, in 680 Bulgar tribes under the leadership of Asparukh moved south across the Danube and settled in the area between the lower Danube and the Balkan, establishing their capital at Pliska
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Paraguay
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Paraguay lies on both banks of the Paraguay River, which runs through the center of the country from north to south. Due to its location in South America, it is sometimes referred to as Corazón de Sudamérica. Paraguay is one of the two landlocked countries that lie outside Afro-Eurasia, Paraguay is the smallest landlocked country in the Americas. The indigenous Guaraní had been living in Paraguay for at least a millennium before the Spanish conquered the territory in the 16th century, Spanish settlers and Jesuit missions introduced Christianity and Spanish culture to the region. Paraguay was a colony of the Spanish Empire, with few urban centers and settlers. Following independence from Spain in 1811, Paraguay was ruled by a series of dictators who generally implemented isolationist and protectionist policies and he was toppled in an internal military coup, and free multi-party elections were organized and held for the first time in 1993. A year later, Paraguay joined Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay to found Mercosur, as of 2009, Paraguays population was estimated to be at around 6.5 million, most of whom are concentrated in the southeast region of the country. The capital and largest city is Asunción, of which the area is home to nearly a third of Paraguays population. In contrast to most Latin American nations, Paraguays indigenous language and culture, Guaraní, in each census, residents predominantly identify as mestizo, reflecting years of intermarriage among the different ethnic groups. Guaraní is recognized as an official language alongside Spanish, and both languages are spoken in the country. There is no consensus for the derivation or meaning of the name Paraguay, the most common interpretations include, Born from water Riverine of many varieties River which originates a sea Fray Antonio Ruiz de Montoya said that it meant river crowned. The Spanish officer and scientist Félix de Azara suggests two derivations, the Payaguas, referring to the tribe who lived along the river. The French-Argentine historian and writer Paul Groussac argued that it meant river that flows through the sea, Paraguayan poet and ex-president Juan Natalicio González said it meant river of the inhabitants of the sea. Indigenous peoples have inhabited this area for thousands of years, pre-Columbian society in the region which is now Paraguay consisted of semi-nomadic tribes that were known for their warrior traditions. These indigenous tribes belonged to five language families, which was the basis of their major divisions. Differing language groups were generally competitive over resources and territories and they were further divided into tribes by speaking languages in branches of these families. Today 17 separate ethnolinguistic groups remain, the first Europeans in the area were Spanish explorers in 1516. The Spanish explorer Juan de Salazar de Espinosa founded the settlement of Asunción on 15 August 1537, the city eventually became the center of a Spanish colonial province of Paraguay
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Sustainable development
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The desirable end result is a state of society where living conditions and resource use continue to meet human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural systems. As the concept developed, it has shifted to more on economic development, social development. The concept of development has been — and still is — subject to criticism. What, exactly, is to be sustained in sustainable development, Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social, political, and economic challenges faced by humanity. Sustainability science is the study of the concepts of sustainable development, there is an additional focus on the present generations responsibility to regenerate, maintain and improve planetary resources for use by future generations. Sustainable development has its roots in ideas about sustainable forest management which were developed in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1713 Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a mining administrator in the service of Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony published Sylvicultura oeconomica. Building upon the ideas of Evelyn and French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his work influenced others, including Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Ludwig Hartig, eventually leading to the development of a science of forestry. Two years later, the United Nations World Charter for Nature raised five principles of conservation by which human conduct affecting nature is to be guided and judged. In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released the report Our Common Future, the report included what is now one of the most widely recognised definitions of sustainable development. In 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development published the Earth Charter, which outlines the building of a just, sustainable and it emphasises that in sustainable development everyone is a user and provider of information. Furthermore, Agenda 21 emphasises that broad public participation in making is a fundamental prerequisite for achieving sustainable development. Broadly defined, sustainable development is an approach to growth and development and to manage natural, produced. A2013 study concluded that sustainability reporting should be reframed through the lens of four interconnected domains, ecology, economics, politics, the goals are to be implemented and achieved in every country from the year 2016 to 2030. Sustainable development, or sustainability, has described in terms of three spheres, dimensions, domains or pillars, i. e. the environment, the economy. The three-sphere framework was proposed by the economist René Passet in 1979. It has also been worded as economic, environmental and social or ecology, economy and this has been expanded by some authors to include a fourth pillar of culture, institutions or governance. The ecological stability of human settlements is part of the relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments, also termed human ecology, this broadens the focus of sustainable development to include the domain of human health
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Mozambique
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It is separated from Madagascar by the Mozambique Channel to the east. The capital and largest city is Maputo, between the 1st and 5th centuries AD, Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from farther north and west. Swahili commercial ports existed along the coasts until the arrival of Europeans, the area was explored by Vasco da Gama in 1498 and colonised by Portugal from 1505. The country was an important place where Somali merchants enslaved the local population, after over four centuries of Portuguese rule, Mozambique gained independence in 1975, becoming the Peoples Republic of Mozambique shortly thereafter. After only two years of independence, the country descended into an intense and protracted civil war lasting from 1977 to 1992, in 1994, Mozambique held its first multiparty elections and has remained a relatively stable presidential republic. However, since 2013, following more than 20 years of peace, Mozambique is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world. Mozambique is endowed with rich and extensive natural resources, the countrys economy is based largely on agriculture, but industry is growing, mainly food and beverages, chemical manufacturing, and aluminium and petroleum production. The countrys tourism sector is also growing, South Africa is Mozambiques main trading partner and source of foreign direct investment. Belgium, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain are also among the countrys most important economic partners, since 2001, Mozambiques annual average GDP growth has been among the worlds highest. However, the ranks among the lowest in GDP per capita, human development, measures of inequality. The only official language of Mozambique is Portuguese, which is mostly as a second language by about half of the population. Common native languages include Makhuwa, Sena, and Swahili, the countrys population of around 24 million is composed overwhelmingly of Bantu people. The largest religion in Mozambique is Christianity, with significant minorities following Islam, the island-town was the capital of the Portuguese colony until 1898, when it was moved south to Lourenço Marques. Between the 1st and 5th centuries AD, waves of Bantu-speaking people migrated from the west and north through the Zambezi River valley and then gradually into the plateau and they established agricultural communities or societies based on herding cattle. They brought with them the technology for smelting and smithing iron, from the late first millennium AD, vast Indian Ocean trade networks extended as far south into Mozambique as the ancient port town of Chibuene. Connections are evident at sites including Manyikeni for 11–14th century ties with the inland Great Zimbabwe kingdoms, from about 1500, Portuguese trading posts and forts displaced the Arabic commercial and military hegemony, becoming regular ports of call on the new European sea route to the east. The voyage of Vasco da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 marked the Portuguese entry into trade, politics, the Portuguese attempted to legitimise and consolidate their trade and settlement positions through the creation of prazos tied to Portuguese settlement and administration. Historically within Mozambique there was slavery, Human beings were bought and sold by African tribal chiefs, Arab Muslim traders and Portuguese and other European traders as well
35.
United Arab Emirates
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In 2013, the UAEs population was 9.2 million, of which 1.4 million are Emirati citizens and 7.8 million are expatriates. The country is a federation of seven emirates, and was established on 2 December 1971, the constituent emirates are Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain. Each emirate is governed by a monarch, together, they jointly form the Federal Supreme Council. One of the monarchs is selected as the President of the United Arab Emirates, Islam is the official religion of the UAE and Arabic is the official language. The UAEs oil reserves are the seventh-largest in the world while its natural gas reserves are the worlds seventeenth-largest, Sheikh Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi and the first President of the UAE, oversaw the development of the Emirates and steered oil revenues into healthcare, education and infrastructure. The UAEs economy is the most diversified in the Gulf Cooperation Council, while its most populous city of Dubai is an important global city, nevertheless, the country remains principally reliant on its export of petroleum and natural gas. The UAE is criticised for its rights record, including the specific interpretations of Sharia used in its legal system. The UAEs rising international profile has led analysts to identify it as a regional. It appears the land of the Emirates has been occupied for thousands of years, there is no proof of contact with the outside world at that stage, although in time it developed with civilisations in Mesopotamia and Iran. This contact persisted and became wide-ranging, probably motivated by trade in copper from the Hajar Mountains, in ancient times, Al Hasa was part of Al Bahreyn and adjoined Greater Oman. Sassanid groups were present on the Batinah coast, in 637, Julfar was an important port that was used as a staging post for the Islamic invasion of the Sassanian Empire. The area of the Al Ain/Buraimi Oasis was known as Tuam and was an important trading post for camel routes between the coast and the Arabian interior. The earliest Christian site in the UAE was first discovered in the 1990s, a monastic complex on what is now known as Sir Bani Yas Island. Thought to be Nestorian and built in 600 AD, the church appears to have been abandoned peacefully in 750 AD and it forms a rare physical link to a legacy of Christianity which is thought to have spread across the peninsula from 50 to 350 AD following trade routes. Certainly, by the 5th century, Oman had a bishop named John – the last bishop of Oman being Etienne, in 676 AD. This led to a group of travelling to Medina, converting to Islam and subsequently driving a successful uprising against the unpopular Sassanids. Following the death of Prophet Muhammad, the new Islamic communities south of the Persian Gulf threatened to disintegrate, with insurrections against the Muslim leaders. The Caliph Abu Bakr sent an army from the capital Medina which completed its reconquest of the territory with the battle of Dibba in which 10,000 lives are thought to have been lost
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United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
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The idea was raised at the founding of the League of Nations in the 1920s and again following the end of World War II in 1945, but remained dormant throughout the Cold War. In the 1990s and 2000s, the rise of global trade, the Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance, chaired by former U. S. Several proposals for apportionment of votes have been raised to address disparities in UN members population, CEUNPA advocates initially giving the UNPA advisory powers and gradually increasing its authority over the UN system. Opponents cite issues such as funding, voter turnout, and undemocratic UN member nations as reasons for abandoning the project altogether and it stated that the UN Charter was inadequate to preserve peace and proposed the transformation of the U. N. It cannot be based on treaties. in which the states. act and it called for limited but definite and adequate power for the prevention of war. Grenville Clark and other participants in the Dublin conference went on to active in the United World Federalists. In the United States, internationalism came to be associated with communism, in the post-Cold War era, several factors contributed to a more favorable environment for UNPA proposals. A Trilateral Commission report notes that the shift from a world led by the two rival Soviet- and U. S. -led blocs meant a general diffusion of power. Democracy in general had spread, in 2003, Freedom House counted 121 electoral democracies, a new diplomacy seemed to be taking shape in which NGOs and governments cooperated to create new global institutions such as the International Criminal Court. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy Chairman Harold C and its Secretariat is led by the Committee for a Democratic U. N. Over 150 civil society groups and more than 550 parliamentarians from all over the world are taking part in the Campaign, clarke and Edgar Mitchell, former NASA astronaut and sixth human being to walk on the moon. On 25 September 2007, the statement by H. E, so far, four international conferences of CEUNPA have taken place. One of the most influential and well-known pro-UN organizations, UNA-USA has been on both sides of the issue, according to Stefan Marschal, the post-World War II years, particularly the 1980s and 1990s, saw tremendous growth in parliamentary assemblies, with more than 40 established since 1949. About 42% of the worlds parliamentary assemblies are formally affiliated with an organization, 32% are informally affiliated. However, many organizations, such as the UN and WTO. There are five options for creating a U. N. Parliamentary Assembly, according to various assessments, amending the UN Charter, possibly through a Charter Review Conference under Article 109 of the UN Charter, is a commonly cited possibility. This is difficult because it requires ratification by two-thirds of UN members, there have been only five amendments to the UN Charter since 1945, and none of them were done through the Article 109 process
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World government
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World government is the notion of a common political authority for all of humanity, yielding a global government and a single state that exercises authority over the entire Earth. Such a government could come into existence either through violent and compulsory world domination, or through peaceful, There has never been nor is there currently a worldwide executive, legislature, judiciary, military, or constitution with global jurisdiction. The United Nations is limited to an advisory role. The idea and aspiration of world government is known since the dawn of history, Bronze Age Egyptian Kings aimed to rule All That the Sun Encircles, Mesopotamian Kings All from the Sunrise to the Sunset, and ancient Chinese and Japanese Emperors All under Heaven. These four civilizations developed impressive cultures of Great Unity, or Da Yitong as the Chinese put it, in 113 BC, the Han Dynasty in China erected an Altar of the Great Unity. The Greek Stoic School preached one monarch over all mankind, polybius expressed one Government over the Mediterranean world as the marvelous achievement of Fortune and the main task of Historian is to explain how she did it. The ideal of world government outlived the fall of the Pax Romana for a millennium. What tempests must need toss thee, what treasure be thrown into the sea, what shipwrecks must be endured, so long as thou, like a beast of many heads, thou art sick in either intellect, and sick likewise in thy affection. Thou healest not thy high understanding by argument irrefutable, nor thy lower by the countenance of experience, early father of international law, Spanish philosopher Francisco de Vitoria is considered the founder of global political philosophy. De Vitoria conceived of the res publica totius orbis, or the republic of the whole world, de jure belli ac pacis is a 1625 book in Latin, written by Hugo Grotius and published in Paris, on the legal status of war. It is now regarded as a work in international law. Grotius was a philosopher, theologian, playwright, and poet and he is known for coming up with the idea of having an international law, and is still acknowledged today by the American Society of International Law. Immanuel Kant wrote the essay Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch, specifically, Kant described his proposed peace program as containing two steps. Has shown itself successively in several States which could make pretensions to such a dominion, whether clearly or not—it may be obscurely—yet has this tendency lain at the root of the undertakings of many States in Modern Times. Although no individual Epoch may have contemplated this purpose, yet is this the spirit which runs through all these individual Epochs, in early 19th century Mormon theology, Joseph Smith taught that a theodemocracy would guide and direct the Kingdom of God on the earth during the end times. On March 11,1844, Smith organized a Council of Fifty and this group of three organizations was expected to rule as a world government just prior to the Millennium. / Till the war-drum throbbd no longer / and the battle-flags were furled / In the Parliament of man, / There the common sense of most shall hold / a fretful realm in awe / And the kindly earth shall slumber / lapt in universal law. The first thinker to anticipate a kind of unity under the American primacy seems to be British politician William Gladstone
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Anti-nationalism
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Anti-nationalism denotes the sentiments associated with an opposition to nationalism. Some anti-nationalists are humanitarians or humanists who pursue an idealist view of world community and they often oppose chauvinism, jingoism and militarism, and desire peace rather than perpetual conflict, which they claim can be rooted in nationalism. Various forms of internationalism propose alternatives, some anti-nationalists oppose all types of nationalism, including ethnic nationalism among oppressed minority groups. This strain of anti-nationalism typically advocates the elimination of national boundaries, variations on this theme are often seen in Marxist theory. Marx and Engels rejected nationalism as a whole, stating that, many Trotskyists, however, such as Chris Harman, were critical of nationalism while advocating support for what they saw as progressive national struggles. Anarchism has developed a critique of nationalism that focuses on nationalisms role in justifying and consolidating power, domination. Through its unifying goal, nationalism strives for centralization, both in specific territories and in an elite of individuals, while it prepares a population for capitalist exploitation. In his Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Arthur Schopenhauer rejects nationalism, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche can also be seen as opposing all forms of nationalism, although he opposed virtually every other form of social movement and ideology as well. Søren Kierkegaards philosophy is a criticism and vehement rejection of Christian nationalism
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