LONDON — A colorful street pageant highlighting Britain’s diversity paraded through central London on Sunday, the final day of a long holiday weekend honoring Queen Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the throne. Royal fans were hoping to see another glimpse of the 96-year-old monarch later at Buckingham Palace, where the parade ends.
With the ringing of bells at Westminster Abbey, a spectacular military parade featuring 200 horses began the ceremony as they marched down the Mall to Buckingham Palace. They flanked the gilded gold state coach, a horse-drawn carriage that transported the queen to her coronation 69 years ago.
The queen wasn’t taking part in the pageant — though a virtual version of her, drawn from archival video from her 1953 coronation, was shown at the coach’s windows.
Thousands of performers were scheduled to parade along a three-kilometer (nearly two-mile) route, telling the story of the queen’s life with dance, vintage cars, vibrant costumes, carnival music and giant puppets.
The keenest royal fans braved the wet, chilly weather and camped out on the Mall overnight to secure the best view of the pageant. Some came for the celebrities who will be performing, while others wanted to be part of a historical moment.
“It’s part of history, it’s never going to happen again. It’s something special, so if you are going to do it you’ve got to go big or go home,” said Shaun Wallen, 50.
The queen hasn’t appeared in public for the Platinum Jubilee events since Thursday, when she smiled and waved on Buckingham Palace’s balcony with her family. She has limited her appearances in recent months due to what the palace describes as “episodic mobility issues.” She also had COVID-19 this spring.
Still, she delighted the country when she appeared in a surprise comedy video that opened a concert Saturday staged in front of Buckingham Palace. In the video, the monarch had tea with a computer-animated Paddington Bear — and revealed that, just like the furry character, she was partial to marmalade sandwiches and liked to keep them in her handbag.
Diana Ross and the rock band Queen headlined the star-studded tribute concert Saturday night, which also featured Rod Stewart, Duran Duran, Alicia Keys and Andrea Bocelli.
The celebrities paid tribute to the queen’s decades of service to the U.K. and the Commonwealth. Prince Charles, her eldest son and heir to the throne, highlighted his mother’s role as a symbol of unity and stability through the decades.
Addressing the queen as “Your Majesty, mummy,” Charles said: “You laugh and cry with us and, most importantly, you have been there for us for these 70 years.”
On Sunday, Charles and his wife, Camilla, mingled with crowds at The Oval cricket ground in London for a “Big Jubilee Lunch.” Millions across the country likewise set out long tables, balloons and picnic fare for similar patriotic street parties and barbeques.
Later Sunday, celebrities including singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran will belt out “God Save The Queen” outside Buckingham Palace as a finale to the pageant. Many hope that the monarch will make a second balcony appearance to cap the weekend of celebrations.
RIGA, Latvia — For Russia’s urban middle class, the war on Ukraine has messed up plans, ruined longed-for vacations and stripped away joys like shopping for a favorite foreign clothing brand, turning the key in a new Japanese car, even biting into a Big Mac.
As the war drags on, many yearn for life to go back to normal, before prices went crazy and foreign companies quit the country over Russia’s invasion. But these Russians are equally sure that President Vladimir Putin will keep on fighting until he wins, because that’s what he always does.
After convincing the majority of the population that the war was necessary to “liberate” Ukrainians from “Nazis,” state television propagandists are now doggedly preparing Russians for a long war, ominously warning that it might end in nuclear war.
In Ukraine, that means more civilian casualties, bombed houses and dozens of soldiers killed daily defending the country’s east.
Russian hardships may be trivial by contrast, but the deadening gloom of a long war worries the Kremlin, according to analysts, because of the challenge of dragging the population along as sanctions bite, businesses retrench, prices continue to surge, and it dawns on people that life may never go back to the way it was.
But the old Kremlin playbook, accusing the West of plans to gobble up Russia, is working so far. Denis Volkov of independent polling agency Levada-Center said the latest polling for April showed almost half of Russians unconditionally support the war and about 30 percent support it with reservations, with 19 percent opposed. Many in focus groups saw it as an existential confrontation with the West, not Ukraine.
“People explain that a significant part of the world is against us and it’s only Putin who hopes to hold onto Russia, otherwise we would be eaten up completely. To them it is Russia that is defending itself,” he said.
The conflict, however, is taking a toll on Russians like Marina, 57, a language teacher, whose friends are so weary of the war, they avoid the topic. She succeeded in changing the minds of a few friends and relatives who supported the war. “But in general, it seems everyone is sick and tired of the war or special operation. People have their own problems and the main problem is survival, especially with the rising prices.”
Marina acknowledged that few Russians are opposed to the war and most are finding a way to “get by somehow.” But she added: “This ‘somehow’ is becoming boring. Most people got tired of it. I want to travel. Others want to be able to plan. We want to get back to our ordinary lives.”
Marina can’t help dreaming wistfully of her old life — just a few months ago. “I want to be able to watch Western movies on Netflix and shop at Uniqlo. I want to travel to Europe on affordable and reliable airlines. I want to be part of the world and not an outcast,” she said.
Many people, still in denial, are struggling to adapt, said Grigory Yudin, professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. “The natural question for Russians is not whether I support it or not — nobody asks you, actually — but how do I adapt to this?”
People want certainty about their incomes, travel plans and mortgages. Part of the Moscow elite, including middle-ranking bureaucrats who feel they are Europeans, are not happy about the war, he said, but tend to believe Putin will fight until he wins.
“I think the majority of Russians still honestly believe that this is going on with military success, or at least this is what people want to believe,” Yudin said. He added: “The more-educated people who are more informed and tend to consume information from different sources are not that certain about that. They have significant doubts.”
Volkov said the latest polling showed interest in watching news about the war is beginning to wane, with people in focus groups wishing their lives could go back to the way they were.
“The best scenario is for this to end as soon as possible and then we hope things will go back to normal,” said Ksenia, 50, a bookkeeper at a firm that sells foreign materials and has been hard hit by Western sanctions.
Most of her work colleagues began strongly supporting the war, but lately they avoid the subject, except to complain that ordinary people in Russia always pay the price of government decisions.
“My colleagues have finally started to realize that things are not great. In general, we try not to discuss it because we start to fight. They’re saying, ‘We didn’t start this war and now we have to pay.’”
Her plan to vacation in the United States or Italy this summer is ruined because she cannot get a visa.
“Now I feel as if there’s no future and it’s very depressing.” She ached when McDonalds’ golden arches were removed not for any love of the burgers or fries, but for the idea it represented.
“I’m really upset about McDonald’s, and I really mean it. McDonald’s has always been a symbol of freedom for me. I remember when the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow,” she said recalling the queues in 1990s months before the Soviet Union collapsed. “It felt like the light at the end of the tunnel.”
For Ksenia and friends opposed to the war, the worst part is thinking of the Ukrainian civilians, including children, being killed and the women raped by Russian soldiers.
“I can survive without certain clothes. And I think I can survive without Western movies. But the main problem for me is that now Russians are outcasts, with whom nobody will want to shake hands. Psychologically, it’s really hard for me to feel that I’m unwanted everywhere.”
Viktor, a 35-year-old carpenter, says his small business has lost most of its clients, as they’ve been forced to economize. He cannot finish building his own house because he says prices for building materials doubled while his income halved.
Viktor thought war would rage about two months. “Now it will take years, and it’s a disaster. It’s not only losing lives. In the years to come we will be living in poverty and we will be hated again like the fascists in Germany in World War II — like we are the new fascists.”
But 43-year-old Andrei from Moscow sees the war as “God’s plan” and believes Russians are willing to make sacrifices to see it through. A yoga-loving, vegetarian computer programmer, he is not the typical elderly, conservative Putin supporter. He gets his news from one pro-Kremlin blogger and shares a common Russian conviction that Western news of Russian war crimes is “fake.” He declined to give his surname.
“The idea is to remove fascism from Ukraine and to return the civilians who want to live in the U.S.S.R., like before the ’90s,” he said echoing the propaganda.
“Right now we don’t feel any meaningful impact from sanctions,” he added, although many of his friends in IT have fled for Armenia and elsewhere, and he can no longer afford to buy a beloved MacBook computer. Nor can he purchase the new Mazda 6 he had his eyes on; he had been hoping pay about 2 million rubles — five months’ salary — but the price went up to 3 million.
Andrei is convinced that Russia will win the war in a year or so, prices will fall and Apple products will find their way to Russia via the black market. Until then, he says he’ll make sacrifices (but not volunteer to fight.)
“Western people like comfort, they need comfort,” he said. “Russian people may have comfort, or they may not. This is not a problem.”
Political analyst and journalist Fyodor Krasheninnikov said many Russians hope that Ukraine would soon capitulate to Russian military power. “The mood in Russia now is that ‘We want this to be over as soon as possible because we just can’t live like this any longer. We want to get back to normal life,’” he said.
“It’s not that people really like what Putin does,” he continued. “No, but they feel frustration and depression because they cannot change anything. It’s like bad weather. They realize that it’s going to rain every day. But what can they do about it?”
“My name is Agnes Kenderman. I am 19 years old and I live in New Kru Town, Monteserrado County, with my mother and my son. My community selected me for the training programme.
My mother is in poor health, and my father died a long time ago, during the civil war. I have one older brother. We did not have much growing up, we looked here and there for food to eat, and survived in the community, like everyone else did, through hustling.
One afternoon, I think I was about five years old, and I was helping my brother to fry fish which our mother was later going to sell in the market. I don’t know what happened that day but before I knew it,
I had fallen into the hot oil. I’m lucky that my brother saved me before my face got burnt. I don’t know what would have happened to me.
Surviving domestic violence
Our mother was a market woman selling fish, pepper, and other small things like vegetables if she got them. I was cooking and looking after the home when she was away at the market, and my brother and I did not attend school.
She married another man after our father died. He was not kind to us at all and he drunk plenty of alcohol. I can remember how he used to beat our mother many times.
It was painful and I was always quiet and feared him, but my brother would try and stop him from beating our mother, and he would turn and hit my brother badly. Whenever he or anyone tried to harass me, my brother protected me.
After about five years he decided to leave us alone. Then our mother became very sick and she could not support the family, life was hard.
Now, my brother is married with his own wife and children. He had to move out on his own. And now I am the only one looking after our mother here, and also my son.
Helen Mayelle/Spotlight Initiative Liberia
Agnes-Josephine Kenderman and her son stand infront of her house in Liberia.
Cooking up a brighter future
My life has improved since I was selected to take part in this programme. I am much happier, and I get respect from the community.
I learned catering – which involves cooking, making bread, short bread, cookies, pastries and different things. I trained for three months. After the training, they gave us flour, oil, butter, sugar, milk, yeast, flavour, measuring cups, baking powder and milk. These items lasted for one month.
We had to get up very early in the morning to go to the training centre. But when I thought about what the training will make me become tomorrow, the benefits for me and my family, I just quickly got out of bed and ran!
In the future I want to keep learning. I am really interested in making cakes and icing for cakes for weddings and birthdays, and also want to cook special fried rice and salads.
People like to eat and if you make something sweet and tasty, they will come again and again. During Christmas and New Year I made so much money from sales!
This training empowered me to be independent. I can now support my family with money and other expenses”.
The latest: Ukraine has managed to reclaim about 20 percent of the city of Severodonetsk, its last major foothold in Luhansk, the province’s governor Serhiy Haidai said late Friday. Britain forecast earlier in the day that the entire region, which is mostly controlled by Russia, could fall within two weeks. But Haidai struck a bullish note and called that timeline “completely unrealistic,” even as Moscow reportedly rushes more troops to the key eastern city.
The fight: A slowly regenerating Russian army is making incremental gains in eastern Ukraine against valiant but underequipped Ukrainian forces. The United States and its allies are racing to deliver the enormous quantities of weaponry the Ukrainians urgently need if they are to hold the Russians at bay.
More than 286,000 people have been driven from their homes in the region after crops failed and animals died due to the drought and over 1100 schools are either fully or partially closed, leaving young girls especially vulnerable to sexual and physical violence and coercion, child labour and early marriage.
Women, children and survivors of gender-based violence have reduced access to a range of services including medical and reproductive care, support for newborns and their mothers as well as protection services.
Read more here about how UNFPA is providing emergency services to those most in need in the drought-stricken region.
The UNFPA 2022 Humanitarian Response Appeal for Ethiopia is calling for nearly $24 million to strengthen the health system and build back the capacities of maternal and reproductive services in eight crisis-affected regions. To date, just over half of the appeal has been funded.
Fuzzy boundaries that lead to costly and incomplete enforcement and overlapping land and property laws lend common lands to exploitation. | Picture Courtesy: Foundation for Ecological Security (FES)
Opinionanand, india
Inter Press Service
ANAND, India, Jun 03 (IPS) – Common lands are natural resources that are used collectively by a community, such as forests, pastures, ponds, and ‘wastelands’. They act as a resource base for non-cash, non-market economies that provides fodder, fuelwood, water, oils, fish, medicinal herbs, and a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to the local communities.
Variousstudies estimate that common lands contribute between 12 and 23 percent to rural household incomes. They also capture carbon, act as repositories of biodiversity, and relics of indigenous knowledge.
India’s common lands have been steadily declining. Grazing lands alone faced a 31 percent loss in total area between 2005 and 2015. The pressures from rapid industrialisation, over-utilisation, and more perceivable ‘productive’ land uses like agriculture, infrastructure, and extraction are driving the change in the landscape. India’s clean energy transition is the latest addition to the mix.
Common lands are also vulnerable to encroachments and private expropriation as tenure is less likely to be legally recognised in common lands than in private lands. Fuzzy boundaries that lead to costly and incomplete enforcement and overlapping land and property laws compound this issue.
To tackle this problem, on January 28, 2011, the Supreme Court of India pronounced a landmark judgement to set in motion a mechanism for the preservation of common resources across the country. In the case titled Jagpal Singh & Ors vs State of Punjab & Ors, the court recognised the socio-economic importance of common lands and directed state governments to prepare schemes for speedy removal of encroachments. The lands were then to be restored to the gram panchayat for the common use of the village.
This judgement provided hope and momentum for rural communities to reclaim the lands they had lost to encroachments, and prompted state governments to evolve mechanisms for protection, management, and restoration of common resources through programmes like MGNREGA. It also served as an inflection point for lower courts to develop jurisprudence over common lands in the country.
What are public land protection cells?
Common lands cover 36 percent and 37 percent of the total land area of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh respectively, and ensure dignity, security, and livelihoods for millions of rural people. At the same time, the state courts have been inundated with public interest litigations over their encroachments.
Taking this into account and following the footsteps of the Jagpal Singh judgement, the Rajasthan High Court in 2019 and the Madhya Pradesh High Court in 2021 directed the respective state governments to establish permanent institutions known as public land protection cells (PLPCs).
These cells receive complaints on encroachments of rural common lands, follow the due process of law to resolve such disputes, and restore the resources to the gram sabha or gram panchayat.
Today, PLPCs have been constituted in each district of the two states and are headed by the district collector. These institutions are a welcome intervention when more than two-thirds of India’s court litigations relate to land or property and most land conflicts relate to common lands.
At a PLPC, communities can defend their common lands by making a direct representation and avoid navigating through the complex land legislations. This reduces the need to engage professional legal assistance or pay court fees and thus allows a larger section of the population to access legal recourse at a much cheaper cost.
By institutionalising an alternative mechanism for dispute resolution, lengthy and costly court battles can be avoided and the judicial workload can be lowered. At present, the high courts only entertain cases where PLPCs do not intervene; assuming the role of a watchdog allows the judicial processes to monitor conduct and ensure accountability of these cells.
How can PLPCs be made more effective?
Despite being at a nascent stage, PLPCs are already proving to be instrumental in democratising legal information, building access to justice, and providing swift redress in encroachment cases. However, the larger role that PLPCs can play for the management and governance of common lands, beyond just settling issues of encroachments, needs to be explored further.
‘Land’ is a subject that comes under the purview of the states. More often than not, common lands are legally classified as a subset of ‘government lands’, unless the ownership of a governmental department (such as the forest department) is already established.
The responsibility to survey, record, and maintain land records also lies with the state revenue departments. Simultaneously, the Panchayati Raj system assigns the gram panchayats the duty to manage and protect the village common lands.
However, experience from the ground shows that, while access and usage rights are usually recognised at the local level, they are not formally recorded. Even when common lands are entered into permanent land records, they are not routinely updated.
Spatial identification of their boundaries is also missing. Such informational gaps weaken the claim of the community, lead to poor use and neglect of common lands, and encourage private encroachments with little to no defense.
An ideal PLPC can attempt to address some of these barriers and focus on preventing encroachments rather than removing them as a corrective measure. For instance, a strong step forward can be to undertake comprehensive identification, survey, and boundary demarcation of common lands and prepare cadastral maps.
The Digital India Land Record Modernization Programme, which seeks to overhaul the management of land records, is also largely focused on private land ownership and titling. Common lands have also been omitted from the latest SVAMITVA Scheme, which uses drone technology to survey inhabited rural areas and formalise land tenure.
PLPCs can undertake a similar exercise to create an open-access, spatially referenced database for common resources and bring them to the foreground of land governance. They can then enable the database to be synchronised with panchayat asset registers, lay the groundwork for social audits, and be the baseline to monitor encroachments.
Recently, in an attempt to deal with rampant encroachments across the state, the Madras High Court directed the Tamil Nadu government to conduct satellite imaging of all water bodies and maintain them for each district as a reference point that these resources were once intact. The PLPCs could assume this responsibility by design.
To achieve responsive governance of common resources, the effectiveness of a top-down rule of law approach, which puts encroachments at the centre stage, needs to be evaluated. Land is a political issue, and thriving common lands characterise social capital, social cohesion, and social harmony.
PLPCs can thus focus on more effective interventions to support panchayats and village institutions in managing these resources. Working to improve social relations, while having conflict resolution as an auxiliary arm, may deliver more just outcomes.
STOCKHOLM, Jun 03 (IPS) – What I have most wanted to do… is to make political writing into an art.
George OrwellWarfare and misinformation are intimately connected. The 29th of May was globally observed as The Day of Communication and due to the ongoing war in Ukraine it was difficult to avoid thinking of affiliated propaganda campaigns, carried out by warring factions and far from indifferent bystanders.
Not only news reporting, but fabrications like movies, novels, fables and legends are part of a web of global communication and just as the broadcasting of news they might provide insights and alternative perspectives to reality, as well as being used as means of deception. One example is George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm.
I was reminded of this when I some weeks ago watched the Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 film Mr Jones, a co-production between Polish and Ukrainian media companies. In Ukrainian the film was named ???? ??????, The Price of Truth. It tells the story of Gareth Jones, an ambitious young Welsh journalist who in 1933, after gaining some fame for an exclusive interview with Adolf Hitler, was able to obtain permission to enter the Soviet Union. A privilege mostly due to the fact that Jones had served as secretary to former British prime minister Lloyd George. Jones’s intention to interview Joseph Stalin could not be realized, though he was offered an exclusive guided tour to pre-selected industries in Donbas. On his way there, Jones double-crossed his “handler”, jumped off the train in the Ukrainian countryside and became a shocked witness to the Ukrainian Holodomor, the catastrophic famine that resulted in at least 3 million deaths.
Gareth Jones documented empty villages, starving people, cannibalism and the enforced collection of grain. On his return to Britain, he struggled to get his story taken seriously and finally succeeded in having his articles published by The Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post, thus revealing the conceit of the Soviet propaganda machine, which had hidden and covered up the enormous scope of the catastrophe and the Soviet Government’s guilt for its origin and development. The film ends by recording how Jones two years after his revelations was murdered while reporting in Inner Mongolia, betrayed by a guide clandestinely connected to the Soviet secret service.
The film Mr Jones emphasised the relevance of a misguided, or even corrupted, journalist corps, foremost among them The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, who from his privileged and pampered existence in Moscow served as a mouthpiece for Stalin’s terror regime. For his “unbiased and well-written” articles, Duranty was in 1932 awarded the U.S. prestigious Pulitzer Prize.
While watching the movie, I became somewhat bewildered by several cameos presenting George Orwell writing his Animal Farm. The film seems to indicate that Orwell met with Gareth Jones and that his Animal Farm was inspired by Jones’s work. To my knowledge Jones and Orwell never met, though this fact does not hinder the possibility of Orwell having read his articles and that the Animal Farm has had a crucial role in Ukrainian politics.
Famines and governments’ occasional efforts to cover them up is an essential feature in Orwell’s fable. It is hunger that triggers the farm-animals’ revolt. However, when their work and freedom are used to benefit the dictatorial pig Napoleon’s selfish well-being, hunger and suffering return to harass the animals. The megalomaniac Napoleon and his acolytes hide embarrassing facts from a global environment, which the mighty pig manipulates and makes business with:
Starvation seemed to stare them in the face. It was vitally necessary to conceal this fact from the outside world. Napoleon was well aware of the bad results that might follow if the real facts of the food situation were known, and he decided to make use of Mr Whymper to spread a contrary impression.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and February 1944, when Britain was in alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Since the Allies did not want to offend the Stalinists, the manuscript was rejected by British and American publishers. After much hesitation a small book publisher issued the novel by the end of the war in 1945. After Allied relations with the Soviet Union turned into hostilities Animal Farm became a great commercial success.
The novel’s harsh criticism of the Soviet State is obvious to everyone – it is a fable telling the story of talking and thinking farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, with a hope to end hunger and slavery and create a society where all animals are equal, free, and happy. Wistfully, the revolution is betrayed by infighting and self-interest among its leaders – the intellectual pigs. The still food producing farm is by the hard-working animals proudly declared as The Animal Farm, with its own hymns, insignia, myths and slogans, but it eventually ends up in a state of repression and violence just as bad, or even worse, as it was before. The omnipotent pig Napoleon (whose name in the French translation was changed to “Caesar”), is without doubt a caricature of Stalin, with his scared and lying acolytes, fierce watchdogs brought up by himself, show trials, political persecution, murders, Stakhanovites/Super Workers, and ethnic clensing. A nightmarish world Orwell developed further in his next novel – 1984. With its Big Brother watching your every move and where citizens are brainwashed through torture, doublethink, thought-crimes, and newspeak:
The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak… was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
It was as a volunteer during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Orwell obtained his dislike for Stalinism, loathing of Fascism, and anger over “Western indifference”:
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated.
In his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm Orwell wrote that after the Stalinists had gained partial control of the Spanish Government they had begun hunting down and execute socialists with different opinions. Man-hunts which went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR:
It taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries ”the mutability of the past”. Falsification, airbrushing, rewriting history: in short, the memory hole. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.
The English edition of Animal Farm reached refugee camps, where soldiers that had been drafted by the Soviet Army and several civilians occasionally killed themselves, rather than returning to the Soviet Union. 24-year-old Ihor Šev?enko, a refugee of Ukrainian origin was part of a movement for Ukraine’s independence. After having learned English from listening to the BBC he translated Animal Farm into Ukrainian and it was spread in handwritten copies, or read aloud, in refugee camps. In April 11, 1946, Šev?enko wrote to Orwell asking if he could publish his novel in Ukrainian. Orwell agreed to write a preface and refused any royalties.
The translation was published in Munich and shipments of the book were quietly delivered to the refugee camps. Its Ukrainian title was Kolhosp Tvaryn, A Collective Farm of Animals, an obvious reference to Stalin’s forced collectivization implemented by the terror famine. However, only 2,000 copies were distributed; a truck from Munich was stopped and searched by American soldiers, and a shipment of an estimated 1,500 to 5,000 copies was seized and handed over to Soviet repatriation authorities and destroyed.
It was first some years later the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm became appreciated by Western covert operation organizations and was secretley distributed into Ukraine as anti-Soviet propaganda. It is still generally read and in high regard within an Ukraine liberated from Soviet/Russian repression.
If the novel is read today it is easy to discern affinities between the dictatorial pig Napoleon and the current Russian warlord Vladimir Putin. Like Napoleon, Putin appears to want to turn the clock back to an imagined Russian imperial heyday, or as in the title of Masha Gessen’s study of Putin’s Russia, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In Animal Farm Napoleon starts to walk upright on his hind-legs, dresses in human festive clothes and declares that the name Animal Farm has been abolished:
Henceforward the farm was to be known as the Manor Farm – which he believed, was its correct and original name.
Sources: George Orwell – Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Also Including in Two Appendices Orwell´s Proposed Preface and the Preface to the Ukrainian Edition. London: Penguin Classics 2004, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1984. London: Penguin Classics 2015.
The blue helmets were killed, and another injured, when their Armoured Personnel Carrier hit an improvised explosive device outside the town of Douentza, located in the Mopti region in central Mali.
In what is yet again another cowardly attack against our peacekeepers, 2 brave Blue helmets from Egypt lost their lives today while #ServingForPeace with @UN_MINUSMA. These crimes are a blatant violation of international humanitarian law & shall not go unpunished. @EgyptPRNewYork
UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, said the incident also marked the sixth time a Mission convoy has been hit since 22 May.
A ‘very hard week’
“The Secretary-General condemns this new attack on our peacekeepers, who, as you know, are just fulfilling the mandate in Mali given to them by the Security Council in extremely challenging conditions,” he told journalists in New York.
The UN chief also wished a prompt recovery to the injured peacekeepers.
El-Ghassim Wane, head of MINUSMA, took to Twitter to condemn “this new attack by extremist elements.”
On Wednesday, a MINUSMA logistics convoy in Kidal, northern Mali, came under direct fire from suspected members of a terrorist group for roughly an hour.
Four peacekeepers from Jordan were injured, one of whom died from his wounds after being evacuated.
The head of UN Peacekeeping, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, also tweeted his condemnation for what he called “yet again another cowardly attack against our peacekeepers”.
Mr. Lacroix said “these crimes are a blatant violation of international law,” adding that they “shall not go unpunished.”
Commitment to serve
Mali continues to be among the most dangerous places to serve as a peacekeeper.
MINUSMA – the French acronym for the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali – was established in April 2013 in the wake of a military coup and the occupation of the north by radical Islamists.
The Mission supports political processes and carries out numerous tasks related to security and protection of civilians.
Despite the challenging circumstances, MINUSMA personnel continue their mandated work, the UN Spokesperson said.
Mr. Dujarric reported that the Mission recently helped to rehabilitate two bridges in the Mopti region which had been destroyed in earlier attacks.
The development will bring relief to the population, and will also facilitate the resumption of travel, commerce and other economic activity, including between Mopti city and the town of Bandiagara, some 65 kilometres to the southeast.
Meanwhile, peacekeepers have assisted people in two towns in the Kidal and Gao regions, as part of their ongoing support to communities in northern Mali.
“We came to Stockholm 50 years after the UN Conference on the Human Environment knowing that something must change. Knowing that, if we do not change, the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste, will only accelerate,” said Inger Andersen, Secretary-General of Stockholm+50, and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
The UNEP chief urged the participants to “take forward this energy, this commitment to action, to shape our world.”
Shaping tomorrow
General Assembly President Abdulla Shahid reminded that the policies we implement today “will shape the world we live in tomorrow”.
Governments and the private sector have an important role to play in rethinking strategies to target structural barriers that have hindered women’s participation in labour forces, he said.
“The workplace of the future must be rooted in equity and free of discrimination and harmful stereotypes about women’s skills, work ethic, leadership abilities or intellect.”
Success means instilling gender equity practices embodied in legal protections, robust enforcement mechanisms, and deep structural and cultural change, he added.
Mr. Shahid urged everyone to discuss constructively “how we can secure not only a more gender equal recovery – but a gender equal world.”
Goal: Healthy planet
The two-day international meeting concluded with a statement from co-hosts Sweden and Kenya, which recommended placing human well-being at the centre of a healthy planet and prosperity for all; recognizing and implementing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; adopting systemwide changes in the way our current economic system works, and accelerate transformations of high impact sectors.
“We believe that we have – collectively – mobilized and used the potential of this meeting. We now have a blueprint of acceleration to take further,” said Sweden’s Minister for Climate and the Environment, Annika Strandhäll.
“Stockholm+50 has been a milestone on our path towards a healthy planet for all, leaving no one behind.”
Rebuild for future generations
Stockholm+50 featured four plenary sessions in which leaders made calls for bold environmental action to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).
Three Leadership Dialogues, hundreds of side events, associated events and webinars and a series of regional multi-stakeholder consultations in the run-up to the meeting, enabled thousands of people around the world to engage in discussions and put forward their views.
“The variety of voices and bold messages that have emerged from these two days demonstrate a genuine wish to live up to the potential of this meeting and build a future for our children and grandchildren on this, our only planet,” said Keriako Tobiko, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for the Environment.
“We didn’t just come here to commemorate, but to build forward and better, based on the steps taken since 1972.”
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