As top officials from the Group of Eight (G8) gathered in Germany for their summit meeting, UNAIDS urged them to show continued leadership on the issue of HIV/AIDS.
The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) "urges the G8 leaders to translate their previous commitments on AIDS into tangible action and to ensure that additional pledges on AIDS reinforce and build on existing" and praised the G8 leaders for their "unprecedented commitments."
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Our own Jessica Valenti will be on The Colbert Report tonight to discuss her new book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Tune in at 11:30 eastern standard time...and buy her book!
by John Prendergast and Julia Spiegel
Since the conflict in Darfur erupted in early 2003, students, religious groups, politicians and concerned citizens around the world have spoken out to try and help bring an end to the suffering in Western Sudan. Sadly, Darfur continues to burn, but many of us who have worked for decades in African crisis zones have been deeply inspired and moved by this groundswell of support and action on behalf of the people of Darfur.
United Nations General Assembly President Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa says that for gender equality to become a reality in the Middle East, more women must take leadership positions in the public sphere.
"The Middle East is a vast, diverse region and the status of women varies significantly from one country to the other...Women in some parts of the region still face multi-layered discrimination that is deep-rooted in our legal framework, culture and educational system."
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Some may recall the so-called "Cash for Kim" scandal trumpeted by the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in which the Journal alledged that "hundreds of millions of dollars" had been systematically diverted from the United Nations Development Program to the coffers of Kim Jong Il. A preliminary audit of UN agencies in North Korea that was released over the weekend, finds no large scale diversions of cash to the North Korean government.
Hilary Swank, the two-time Academy Award winning actress, kicked off a race--known as the Blue Planet Run--to bring safe drinking water to 20 million people by 2015.
"We're gathered here to acknowledge that for over one billion people on this planet, safe drinking water is simply not available," the Hollywood actress said at the launch in New York of the first-ever around-the-world relay race to raise funds and spread awareness about the need for safe drinking water.Swank also lauded the men and women participating in the race: "Because of your efforts on behalf of the one billion people who struggle daily to get the water they need to stay alive, I know I'll never take a glass of water for granted again." More
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour says that she is appalled by the level of sexual and gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Burundi.
"I have to say the level of sexual violence and its intensity is pretty surprising and appalling...Gender-based violence is not just an affront to dignity; it is a form of torture and absolute brutal physical and mental assault on the victims."
For more information on sexual violence against women, check out the work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
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Long before Susan Rice was Obama's pick for UN Ambassador, she contributed this piece to UN Dispatch. Originally published May 31, 2007.
by Susan Rice, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
When Americans see televised images of bone-thin African or Asian kids with distended bellies, what do we think? We think of helping. For all the right reasons, our humanitarian instincts tend to take over. But when we look at UNICEF footage or a Save the Children solicitation, does it also occur to us that we are seeing a symptom of a threat that could destroy our way of life? Rarely. In fact, global poverty is far more than solely a humanitarian concern. In real ways, over the long term, it can threaten U.S. national security.
Though far from the television screens of most Americans, some of the fighting in Ethiopia and Eritrea resembles a war with which they might be familiar. At its peak, hundreds of kilometers of trenches snaked their way around the border region of the two neighboring countries in the Horn of Africa, raising frequent comparisons to World War One. And like World War One, the toll of the trench warfare on conscripts has been exacting. Though no one knows for sure, 70,000 people are estimated to have been killed. There have also been as many as 700,000 displaced or made refugees from the war, which at one point cost these desperately impoverished countries $1 million a day to sustain.