ANTONIO GUTTERAS
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JAPAN VISIT 2020 - U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday he will visit Hiroshima in August for the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city. The visit will be “a way to demonstrate, not only my solidarity with Hiroshima, but my strong commitment to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation,” Guterres said at a news conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York.
In 2010, then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon attended the Aug. 6 peace memorial ceremony in Hiroshima, becoming the first U.N. chief to do so. In 2018, Guterres became the first U.N. chief to attend the memorial event in the city of Nagasaki, where an atomic bombing took place three days after the attack on Hiroshima.
When he met with Hidehiko Yuzaki, governor of Hiroshima Prefecture, in New York last April, Guterres indicated his wish to visit Hiroshima in 2020. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by the U.S. atomic bombings in August 1945 in the closing days of World War II.
MIDDLE
EAST JANUARY 2020 - UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned "a wind of madness is sweeping the globe", pointing to escalating conflicts from Libya and Yemen to Syria and beyond.
At a wide-ranging news conference on Tuesday, he said: "All situations are different but there is a feeling of growing instability and hair-trigger tensions, which makes everything far more unpredictable and uncontrollable, with a heightened risk of miscalculation."
A weak UN-recognized administration that holds the capital Tripoli and parts of the country's west is backed by Turkey and to a lesser degree Qatar and Italy. On the other side is General Khalifa Hifter, whose forces launched a surprise offensive to capture the capital last April from their base in the country's east and are backed by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt as well as France and Russia.
As for Yemen, Guterres said he was very encouraged recently to see Iranian-backed Houthi Shiite rebels stop attacking Saudi Arabia and the Saudis, who back the country's internationally recognised government, limiting their military actions. But unfortunately, the last few days have seen "a new escalation," he said, adding, "We are doing everything we can for this escalation to be reversed, and everything we can to create the conditions for a true political dialogue to be re-established."
Guterres said militias have sometimes been "the worst perpetrators of violations of human rights" and attacks against protesters. It's critical for the government to ensure that the army and policy regain the monopoly on the use of force to ensure the normal functioning of the state, he said.
Antonio Gutteras is Secretary General of the United Nations, presumably then the person the IMO's, Kitack Lim, reports to. We are concerned at the failure of the IMO to look at ideas that come from outside their administration, where it might not suit the laborious climb to zero carbon shipping, that will never halt global warming, as in tackling the tipping point from where recovery is impossible.
With a closed-shop attitude like that we are presently investigation, what change do we have to stop desertification and acid oceans. Organizations like the IMO and UN, should welcome with open arms, suggestions as to solutions.
RED FLAG STRATEGY - In Britain in 1865, the locomotive and stagecoach companies lobbied politicians to introduce laws to prevent horseless carriages from competing with their businesses. One absurd requirement was that a man had to walk 60 yards ahead of a car carrying a red flag.
Left to their own devices, ship owners would quite happily carry on using dirty bunker fuels forever. They love the oily black substance because it allows them to make huge profits from cheaper transport. You would have thought that responsible operators, faced with global warming, would have been investing their ill gotten gains in clean tech, leading the charge to climate cooling and legitimacy.
But no, it is much easier to keep moaning about costs and confusion as to how to change, where the IMO have been attending meeting after meeting for years on end, achieving very little except a salary and expenses. The ship owners realized their tactics were working and kept playing the same tune, but for how long?
MORAL COMPASS - People don’t generally wake up one morning and decide, “I want to be enslaved by something difficult to manage and seemingly impossible to escape, because that sounds like fun.”
No, the road to depravity is a long one. It’s one traveled with many deliberate steps - steps that become easier and easier to take. Call it a moral compromise, an addiction, a weakness, or a sin - the destination in which they find themselves in poverty is one found by slowly compromising moral values while dancing with the devil.
The
fact is that ship operators have been building bigger and
bigger behemoths, to carry more and more containers, using
heavy diesel oil as the fuel - all the while knowing that we
were in a climate emergency. But also knowing that as they
built their luxury cruise liners, they would use them to
blackmail the IMO into extending the use of dirty fuels, using
an economic argument that would not have existed if they have
looked for alternatives in good time.
And that is how global warming has reached epidemic proportions. We are hooked on fossil fuels and promises of economic growth. All lies spun by corrupt politicians seeking election and businesses raking in the cash, when they should have known better.
And even though we can clearly see from the onset just how disastrous
the destination will be, once we take certain actions, it becomes seemingly easier to pursue a little more and a little more and a little more… The downhill trip to despair is much more effortlessly travelled than the difficult climb back up to higher ground. It’s better to avoid a pushy door-to-door salesman by refusing to open the door in the first place than it is trying to get him to leave once you’ve invited him in.
...
SEXY OR WHAT? - If these pictures turn you on, rehabilitation is going to be a long hard road. What amazes us is that anyone thought this kind of high was morally acceptable. We bit into the apple and ate to the core, without noticing how energy depraved we had become as we worshiped the $dollars that our snake charming political porn stars had promised as the path of righteousness. Salvation will be impossible with corruption in politics.
BLOCKERS TO ADVANCEMENT - Four of the G20, those with high incomes and expectations built on continuous growth and exploitation based on fossil fuels, could be behind the brake that smacks of the Locomotive Act of 1865. Can we expect that clean ships with zero carbon signatures will be forced to have a chap swim ahead of solar and wind powered vessels, carrying a red flag?
LINKS & REFERENCE
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/05/national/u-n-chief-antonio-guterres-visit-hiroshima-august/#.XjuYtm52tPY https://www.dw.com/en/uns-antonio-guterres-warns-of-global-wind-of-madness/a-52258627 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/un-secretarygeneral-antonio-guterres-global-insecurity-a4353756.html http://www.imo.org/
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