From Salon: "I want to vote for Ted Turner for president ... of the world. Turner gave a speech at the World Trade Organization's Public Forum this morning in Geneva that is equal parts inspiring and enlightening, and cuts right to the core of what this blog cares about. It is, in short, a program for making the world work."
"Most young people are unaware" of the world's water crisis, but if they knew about the "staggering numbers" of people affected by lack of clean water, they would be moved to act, Def Jam President and CEO Jay-Z said at United Nations Headquarters in New York on Wednesday.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan welcomed the help of the internationally known recording star and MTV President Christina Norman in raising public awareness of water scarcity through a new global initiative. LINK
From the UN Foundation:
Our post-tsunami water and sanitation reconstruction partnership with The Coca-Cola Company has been selected as a finalist for the US Chamber of Commerce's "Partnership Award." After the tsunami, the UN Foundation partnered with The Coca-Cola Company to find ways to contribute to longer-term recovery efforts, with a focus on community-based water and sanitation needs. Working in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme UNDP), the partnership is responding to long-term water and sanitation needs in remote, tsunami-hit areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Thailand. To learn more about the partnership and to vote click here: http://www.unfoundation.org/features/tsunami_partnership.asp
Warren Buffett is a generous man. His gift of over $30 billion in stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will nearly double the size of the country's largest charitable organization. As media coverage of the gift has noted, $60 billion is roughly five times the annual budget of the United Nations and its agencies. And as Slate points out, the Foundation's future $1.7 billion annual disbursement requirement is roughly equivalent to UNICEF's annual budget.
"When Toshiko Kitahara arrived in Ragh district in Badakhshan province, north-east Afghanistan, two things struck her: its natural beauty and the fact that girls did not attend school.
As a UN Volunteer with the World Food Programme (WFP), Toshiko decided to make girls' education a priority. [She first arrived in Afghanistan in 2002 and started as a UN Volunteer in 2003.] A programme officer with WFP's Food for Education unit in the province, the Japanese national took up her concern directly with department of education officials - and just about anyone else who would listen.