#united nations

On May 6, the United Nations released a summary of a major new report warning that human destruction of the natural world, including through climate change, now threatens up to a million species with extinction. May 6 was also the day that royal baby Archie was born.

In the week after both events, ABC, CBS, and NBC all spent more time talking about the royal baby than the U.N. biodiversity report. In fact, CBS was the only national broadcast network that ran a segment on the report. Even worse, in that one week, ABC’s World News Tonight spent more time covering the royal baby than the program spent covering climate change during the entire year of 2018.

the-garbanzo-annex-jr:

Source

heyfranhey:

2 weeks ago, 200+ school girls were abducted from a school in Nigeria and sold as brides to militants. There hasn’t been any major news coverage on this story and from what i’m reading online, it seems not much is being done to help these little girls return home. I’m literally sick imagining the things that may be happening to them as we speak.

More information on the abduction here.

More information on the protests here.

Please sign this petition encouraging the UN to step in.

And please reblog so we can get the 100k signatures still needed.

UN soldiers in Korea

(Carl Mydans. 1951)

International Women’s Day is being observed around the world today. The tradition dates back to February 28, 1909, when the Socialist Party of America, acting on the suggestion of party member Theresa Malkiel, held a “National Woman’s Day” in New York City.

The following year, the observance was adopted by the International Socialist Women’s Conference. In the ensuing years, activists for women’s suffrage and other equal rights adopted the date in nations such as Australia, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, though the date varied from nation to nation and was sometimes celebrated as the Women’s International Day of Struggle or by other names. However, the observance became most strongly associated with communist nations and the international communist movement; it was officially adopted by the Soviet Union in 1917 and the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

This remained the case until the mid-1960s, when the second-wave feminist movement embraced the day, still operating under various names and dates, as a means of calling further attention to their calls for equal pay, equal economic opportunity, equal legal rights, reproductive rights, subsidized child care, and the prevention of violence against women. 

The name and date of International Women’s Day was finally formalized in 1977. The United Nations began observing the day in 1975, as part of its declaration that 1975 would be its International Women’s Year. Two years later, the United Nation’s General Assembly invited its member states to observe the date on March 8.

As a small online observance of the day, we’re posting this photograph of a small group of women strolling on a beachside boardwalk, taken by photographer and illustrator Frank E. Schoonover (1877-1972). The photograph is undated, but was likely taken in the 1910s or 1920s, around the same time that International Women’s Day was first being established worldwide. The photograph is from Hagley Library’s collection of Frank E. Schoonover negatives (Accession 2017.239). This collection has not been digitized in its entirety, but you can view a curated selection of materials online now in our Digital Archive. Just click here!

This official image posted by the Secretary-General of the UN back in January gets me every time. Even the UN now thinks +1.5 is baked in.

There is no one fixed future, given the choice between ‘the only solution’ and ‘possible options’ en route to a better world, Solarpunk will always choose the latter - Jay Springett