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Gareth Evans the 68 year old Australia’s former foreign minister and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group and currently Chancellor of the Australian National University has published an article on Project Syndicate titled ‘Valuing the United Nations’ Evans states “No organization in the world embodies as many dreams, yet provides so many frustrations, as the United Nations.  …The peace plan for Cambodia in the early 1990’s, dragged the country back from hellish decades of horrifying genocide and ugly and protracted civil war. Likewise, the Chemical Weapons Convention, steered through the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, is still the most robust arms-control treaty related to weapons of mass destruction ever negotiated. …In 2005… endorsed the concept of states’ responsibility to protect populations at risk of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. With that vote, the international community began to eradicate the shameful indifference that accompanied the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, and too many similar catastrophes. …the UN system’s total cost is still only around $30 billion a year. That is less than half the annual budget for New York City, and well under a third of the roughly $105 billion that the US military has been spending each year, on average, in Afghanistan. Wall Street employees received more in annual bonuses ($33.2 billion) in 2007, the year before the global financial meltdown. The whole family of the UN Secretariat and related entities, together with current peacekeepers, adds up to around 215,000 people worldwide – not a small number, but less than one-eighth of the roughly 1.8 million staff employed by McDonald’s and its franchisees worldwide! …the UN provides fabulous value for what the world spends on it, and that if it ever ceased to exist, we would have to reinvent it. The downsides are real, but we need to remember the immortal words of Dag Hammarskjold, the UN’s second secretary-general: “The UN was created not to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell.”   Inspired by Gareth Evans, Project Syndicate ow.ly/jyVmH Image source Wikipedia ow.ly/jyUWN Valuing the United Nations (April 15 2013)

 

Gareth Evans the 68 year old Australia’s former foreign minister and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group and currently Chancellor of the Australian National University has published an article on Project Syndicate titled ‘Valuing the United Nations’ Evans states “No organization in the world embodies as many dreams, yet provides so many frustrations, as the United Nations.  …The peace plan for Cambodia in the early 1990’s, dragged the country back from hellish decades of horrifying genocide and ugly and protracted civil war. Likewise, the Chemical Weapons Convention, steered through the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, is still the most robust arms-control treaty related to weapons of mass destruction ever negotiated. …In 2005… endorsed the concept of states’ responsibility to protect populations at risk of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. With that vote, the international community began to eradicate the shameful indifference that accompanied the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, and too many similar catastrophes. …the UN system’s total cost is still only around $30 billion a year. That is less than half the annual budget for New York City, and well under a third of the roughly $105 billion that the US military has been spending each year, on average, in Afghanistan. Wall Street employees received more in annual bonuses ($33.2 billion) in 2007, the year before the global financial meltdown. The whole family of the UN Secretariat and related entities, together with current peacekeepers, adds up to around 215,000 people worldwide – not a small number, but less than one-eighth of the roughly 1.8 million staff employed by McDonald’s and its franchisees worldwide! …the UN provides fabulous value for what the world spends on it, and that if it ever ceased to exist, we would have to reinvent it. The downsides are real, but we need to remember the immortal words of Dag Hammarskjold, the UN’s second secretary-general: “The UN was created not to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell.”

 

Inspired by Gareth Evans, Project Syndicate ow.ly/jyVmH Image source Wikipedia ow.ly/jyUWN

Bjarne Melgaard the 45 year old Norwegian artist born in Sydney Australia by Norwegian parents, raised in Oslo, Norway, and now works and lives in New York has been profiled by Julia Halperin in a Blouin Artinfo article titled "The Most Famous Norwegian Artist Since Munch Brings a Buddy to the Armory Show’. Halperin states “Rising art star Bjarne Melgaard is using his critical clout to introduce a relatively unknown Scandinavian painter to New York audiences. …a series of bright, brash paintings Melgaard created in collaboration with Sverre Bjertnes, a fellow Norwegian a decade his junior. …The artists met 15 years ago, when Melgaard gave Bjertnes his first gallery exhibition at a now-defunct experimental space he founded in Oslo. Now, they often work side-by-side. Bjertnes estimates the two have produced more than 300 artworks together. …The new paintings, made especially for the Armory Show, combine Melgaard’s nihilistic, childlike smears and Bjertnes’s studied, academic figures. (The younger artist’s formal style is informed by years as a student of Norwegian realist Odd Nerdrum.) Text, images of sneakers, and shapeless, abstract shapes dance around portraits of cult individuals like Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, fixtures of New York’s downtown art scene who committed suicide within a week of one another in 2007.  …a series of paintings devoted to New York dealer Mary Boone. “She is the ultimate dealer, and the paintings are about a relationship with her as this sort of unattainable dream,” Bjertnes said. The largest homage is almost nine feet wide and contains dozens of sketches of Boone’s face and close-ups of her eyes. The words, “The beauty of Mary Boone” are scrawled across the front. A yellow Chanel suit hangs primly overtop. Collaborating with Melgaard, who has been called the most famous Norwegian artist since Munch, lends Bjertnes instant legitimacy…”  Inspired by Julia Halperin, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/j4ybs Image source Rolf Aagaard ow.ly/j4y9T This sort of unattainable dream (April 8 2013)

 

Bjarne Melgaard the 45 year old Norwegian artist born in Sydney Australia by Norwegian parents, raised in Oslo, Norway, and now works and lives in New York has been profiled by Julia Halperin in a Blouin Artinfo article titled “The Most Famous Norwegian Artist Since Munch Brings a Buddy to the Armory Show’. Halperin states “Rising art star Bjarne Melgaard is using his critical clout to introduce a relatively unknown Scandinavian painter to New York audiences. …a series of bright, brash paintings Melgaard created in collaboration with Sverre Bjertnes, a fellow Norwegian a decade his junior. …The artists met 15 years ago, when Melgaard gave Bjertnes his first gallery exhibition at a now-defunct experimental space he founded in Oslo. Now, they often work side-by-side. Bjertnes estimates the two have produced more than 300 artworks together. …The new paintings, made especially for the Armory Show, combine Melgaard’s nihilistic, childlike smears and Bjertnes’s studied, academic figures. (The younger artist’s formal style is informed by years as a student of Norwegian realist Odd Nerdrum.) Text, images of sneakers, and shapeless, abstract shapes dance around portraits of cult individuals like Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, fixtures of New York’s downtown art scene who committed suicide within a week of one another in 2007.  …a series of paintings devoted to New York dealer Mary Boone. “She is the ultimate dealer, and the paintings are about a relationship with her as this sort of unattainable dream,” Bjertnes said. The largest homage is almost nine feet wide and contains dozens of sketches of Boone’s face and close-ups of her eyes. The words, “The beauty of Mary Boone” are scrawled across the front. A yellow Chanel suit hangs primly overtop. Collaborating with Melgaard, who has been called the most famous Norwegian artist since Munch, lends Bjertnes instant legitimacy…”

 

Inspired by Julia Halperin, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/j4ybs Image source Rolf Aagaard ow.ly/j4y9T

Largest marine protected area in the world (July 8th 2012) Largest marine protected area in the world (July 8th 2012)

Anthony Stephen ‘Tony’ Burke the 42 year old Australian politician and the current Minister for Sustainability and Environment announced that Australia is to create an enormous network of marine park reserves to protect waters from oil and gas exploration and limiting commercial fishing. In an article on Aljazeera, Burke states “The Coral Sea marine national park … combined with the Great Barrier Reef area, becomes the largest marine protected area in the world”. The article states Australia’s marine reserves will increase from 27 to 60 under the new scheme, covering more than 3 million sq km, or one third of the island nation’s waters. The announcement of the network was made a week before more than 130 heads of state and government will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations’ sustainable development conference as part of global efforts to curb climate change, one of the biggest conferences in UN history. … The protection plan will ban oil and gas exploration in all marine national parks, including across the Coral Sea and off Margaret River, a popular tourist and wine-growing area in the southwest. Burke acknowledged the plan would also have an impact on the fishing industry. The plan attracted immediate criticism from some environmental groups, as well as independent and opposition politicians and lobby groups.”

 

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/bWcnW image source Adam Carr ow.ly/bWcnb

Michael Donald Kirby the 72 year old retired Justice of the High Court of Australia has told a Sydney forum of Accountants that WikiLeaks has created a world that is more open and transparent. Kirby stated “WikiLeaks has made the world a more open and transparent place, and therefore a bit more just, and that’s where I stand at the moment … It is part and parcel of the new technology … On the whole it’s probably been a good thing for all of us, to hold governments to account.” Kirby after his retirement as a distinguished Justice of Australia’s highest court over a fifteen year period, he has been appointed to numerous academic roles with twelve Australian universities. During his term as Justice, Kirby delivered controversial lectures relating to whether judges have the right to interpret the law in light of its intent or merely just follow the letter of the law.

 

Inspired by Doug Conway http://ow.ly/7rLKn image source newsinfo http://ow.ly/7rLVx

Xavier Ghazi the 60 year old French caricature artist living and working in Australia has won his fourth Bald Archy prize with his spoof art painting of Australian born bad boy WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The work is titled ‘Bad Ass-Ange’, depicting an over proportion headed Assange, with his trousers down to his ankles, and having a leak into Uncle Sam’s top hat ie “pissing off the empire”. The 2011 Bald Archy exhibition that began in Canberra the nation’s capital, is a competition of art works that make fun of Australian politicians, celebrities or other notoriety people with a prize of $5000 for the winning entry. The competition now in its 18th year is claimed to be judged by Maude, a sulphur crested cockatoo. Inspired by ABC News ow.ly/4FPvG image source Resources1 ow.ly/4FPzy Bad Ass-Ange pissing off the empire (April 30 2011)

Xavier Ghazi the 60 year old French caricature artist living and working in Australia has won his fourth Bald Archy prize with his spoof art painting of Australian born bad boy WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The work is titled ‘Bad Ass-Ange’, depicting an over proportion headed Assange, with his trousers down to his ankles, and having a leak into Uncle Sam’s top hat ie “pissing off the empire”. The 2011 Bald Archy exhibition that began in Canberra the nation’s capital, is a competition of art works that make fun of Australian politicians, celebrities or other notoriety people with a prize of $5000 for the winning entry. The competition now in its 18th year is claimed to be judged by Maude, a sulphur crested cockatoo.

 

Inspired by ABC News ow.ly/4FPvG image source Resources1 ow.ly/4FPzy

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