by Admin | Apr 23, 2016 | Initiative
( April 25th, 2016) TOKYO — North Korea appears to be preparing to conduct another nuclear test, South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Monday, citing signs of increased movement near the North’s nuclear test site.
With a much-hyped congress of the communist Workers’ Party to be held early next month, Kim Jong Un appears to be trying to burnish his credentials, and analysts say a fifth nuclear test would be a sure way to do that.
“Recently, signs of preparations for a fifth nuclear test have been detected,” Park said during a meeting with her aides Monday. “We are in a situation in which we cannot predict what provocations North Korea might conduct to break away from isolation and to consolidate the regime.”
This came after the South Korean Defense Ministry said that North Korea’s next underground nuclear test may be of a miniaturized warhead, rather than of the standard atomic devices it is thought to have detonated previously.
“Given the latest developments, North Korea could carry out an underground nuclear warhead test, and we are keeping close tabs on it,” Moon Sang-gyun, a Defense Ministry spokesman, told reporters in Seoul on Monday.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported last month that Kim ordered “a nuclear warhead explosion test and a test-fire of several kinds of ballistic rockets able to carry nuclear warheads” to be carried out “in a short time.”
North Korea claims that it has mastered the technology to make nuclear weapons small and light enough to fit on a missile, but there has been no proof. But an increasing number of military top brass and private-sector analysts think that North Korea either will have made or will be on the brink of making such a technological advance soon.
South Korean officials warned Sunday that they had detected a noticeable increase in vehicles and people moving about the North’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site, particularly near its north portal tunnel.
Analysts at 38 North, a website devoted to watching and analyzing North Korea, said that they also saw, in satellite imagery, increased movement around the north portal but that there was little evidence that Pyongyang was planning an imminent nuclear test.
“Nevertheless, that possibility can not be entirely ruled out since the North may be able to conduct a nuclear test on short notice with few indications that it intends to do so,” Jack Liu, a military analyst, wrote in a note on the site.
A fifth nuclear test would create another conundrum for the international community. Kim’s regime has proved impervious to coordinated efforts to change his calculus when it comes to the country’s nuclear program.
Last month, the U.N. Security Council passed the toughest sanctions yet against North Korea as punishment for its January nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch in February.
Yet Kim has remained defiant, issuing an almost daily barrage of threats and continuing to launch rockets and short-range missiles. An attempt to launch a previously untested intermediate-range ballistic missile last week was deemed to have failed.
At a forum in Seoul, Lim Sung-nam, South Korea’s vice foreign minister, said that more pressure and punishment against North Korea is needed.
“We can no longer afford to be pushed around by North Korea’s deceit and intimidation,” Lim said. “The leadership in Pyongyang must be pressed much harder until it changes its fundamental calculation regarding the value of its nuclear arsenal and delivery capabilities.”
In addition to supporting the tough U.N. resolutions, Park’s government has brought in unprecedented bilateral sanctions against North Korea, closing an inter-Korean industrial park and cutting off all humanitarian aid except to babies and pregnant women.
by Admin | Apr 17, 2016 | World Leaders in AIWS Award Updates
(April 18th, 2016) On July 25-29 the first International Institute on Global Citizenship Education will be held at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. It is being sponsored by the Paulo Freire Institute and the UNESCO Chair in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education at UCLA.
The Boston Global Forum has close links with the UNESCO program.
Prof. Carlos Alberto Torres, a member of the BGF’s Board of Thinkers, is Distinguished Professor of Education and UNESCO Chair in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education at UCLA; director of the Paulo Freire Institute, and president of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies.
Nguyen Anh Tuan, the BGF’s CEO, is Chairman of the International Advisory Committee of the UNESCO Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education program at UCLA
The July 25-29 program is part of the Global Education First Initiative supported by UNESCO that encourages national government agencies, U.N. and other international public- and private-sector sector organizations, scholars and other individuals to pursue policies and practices to promote global citizenship education.
The Institute will address these questions:
· What is Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and how can it address global problems?
· What and whose values and skills should be included in GCE?
· How can GCE reconcile and complement national and local citizenship education?
· To whom is GCE offered and who is providing it?
· What are the best practices of policies, curricula and instruction of GCE?
Professor Torres is the director of the program. Other faculty members in the program include:
- Christopher Castle, UNESCO Global Coordinator for HIV and AIDS.
- Chen Wei Chang, Ph.D., National Academy for Educational Research, Taiwan.
- Utak Chung, Ph.D., Director, Asia-Pacific Center of Education for International Understanding (APCEIU).
- Anantha Duraiappah, Ph.D., Director, UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute.
- Greg Misiaszek, Ph.D., Beijing Normal University, China.
- Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Ph.D., Beijing Normal University, China.
- Lynette Shultz, Ph.D., University of Alberta, Canada.
- Ana Elvira Steinbach Silva Raposo Torres, Ph.D., Federal University of Brazil.
For further information, please consult this Website
or email: [email protected]
by Admin | Apr 17, 2016 | World Leaders in AIWS Award Updates
(April 18th, 2016) This shows just how much German Chancellor Angela Merkel (and other European leaders) depend on Turkey’s help in helping to stem the flood of refugees into Europe from Syria: Mrs. Merkel is allowing to proceed a criminal investigation of a comic, Jan Bohmermann, for making fun of thin-skinned and increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
The Boston Global Forum has named Mrs. Merkel as a “World Leader for Peace, Security and Development’’.
The investigation is under a previously little noticed German law that allows prosecution of someone for insulting a foreign leader, but only with the government’s consent.
This now quickly unpopular law would seem fly in the face of freedom of speech in a democracy such as Germany. And so Mrs. Merkel is trying to have it both ways in this case: To allow the investigation while supporting repeal of what is in effect a censorship law.
Many Germans felt that her effort to split the difference showed her blinking in a game of chicken with Mr. Erdogan. “We just experienced the beginning of the end of Chancellorship #Merkel,” wrote another satirist, Oliver Kalkofe. “I am ashamed by the lack of spine.”
The same law had also been used to silence critics of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
by Admin | Apr 17, 2016 | Global Citizenship Education
(April 18th, 2016) UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly called the British Commonwealth) have announced a program in which they will step up their cooperation in education, youth, sport, peace-building and dialogues. The agreement will focus on closely collaborative approaches — for example, the Commonwealth’s on-line Education Hub can be used to support UNESCO’s program in Global Citizenship Education.
The Boston Global Forum (BGF) collaborates with UNESCO on global education and citizenship projects, especially through the Global Learning and Global Citizenship program at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Prof. Carlos Alberto Torres, Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education and UNESCO Chair in Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education at UCLA, is a member of the BGF’s Board of Thinkers.
After a signing ceremony with the Commonwealth’s Secretary General, Patricia Scotland, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova underlined the importance of deepening cooperation across the board. “I believe the time has come, indeed to update it, to strengthen cooperation, with a focus on education, on youth empowerment, on promoting intercultural dialogue,”she said.
Ms. Scotland said that by working together, the two organizations can boost their efforts to empower young people to take on some of the world’s most pressing problems, from climate change to ending poverty. ‘’I am confident that this renewed partnership will lead to concrete results in a range of areas, from the development of curricula to support the Sustainable Development Goals to the creation of alternate narratives to those of extremist recruiters, in order to counter violent extremism.’ ‘
Ms. Scotland addressed UNESCO’s Executive Board, briefing them on her priority areas:“ending domestic violence, reducing the impact of climate change and creating opportunities for young people.”
UNESCO and the Commonwealth first signed a memorandum of understanding in 1980. This latest renewal will last for five years.
by Admin | Apr 17, 2016 | World Leaders in AIWS Award Updates
(April 18th, 2016) International cybersecurity leader Mikko Hypponen of Finland now accepts the need to use the word “cyberwar.’’ Not many security experts like the term ‘cyberwar’, and Mikko Hyppönen used to be one of them. But in the wake of recent attacks by Russia on critical infrastructure in Ukraine and a rise in the sophistication of nation-state hacking, he has changed his mind.
Mr. Hypponen, whom The Boston Global Forum has honored with the title of “Practitioner in Cybersecurity,’’ told IBTimes UK: “I have changed my opinion about cyberwar. I used to hate the word and I would always explain to people that whenever you hear or see headlines about ‘cyberwar’ it’s never war – it’s typically spying or espionage – which is not war. Even if its nation states doing it, that’s not war.”
Mr. Hyppönen has been the chief research officer at Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure since the early 1990s.
He told IBTimes UK that it was the Russian hacking in Ukraine last year that changed his mind on the nuances of the much-criticized term. “When you look what happened in Ukraine, when you have two countries that are at war and you have an attack on critical infrastructure that is not stealing anything, but [instead] shutting down power for 200,000 people, that’s not espionage, that’s not spying – in my book that’s cyberwar.”
