UNESCO Courier articles from January 1999

UNESCO Courier archives from January 1999

Shanghai Reborn
January 1, 1999... Shanghai was once a colonial gateway into China, then went into eclipse. Today it is a vast building site bidding to rise as high as New York In the nineties, Shanghai has exploded like a Chinese firecracker. Yet this is not its first...

A Time for Hope
January 1, 1999... The International Year for the Culture of Peace proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations will begin at the end of this year. Now is the time to start preparing to take part In twelve months we enter the year 2000: what better...

Soils in Torment
January 1, 1999... The earth's thin coat of soil, which helps to feed us and is vital for planetary ecosystems and climatic balance, is becoming increasingly threadbare "We drink water, we breathe air, but we don't eat soil. It feeds us only indirectly," says...

Building Blocks of Learning
January 1, 1999... In a world of cut-throat competition, Denmark is a European leader in worker training and education. The LEGO group offers its employees courses that are not directly related to their jobs in a bid to educate 'the whole person' "Danish...

The Longevity Revolution
January 1, 1999... In the coming century the human life span may rise as high as 120 years. What are the implications of an aging world? Over the past hundred years a silent and unprecedented revolution in longevity has occurred: people living in the...

Aging Chinese Face a Welfare Gap
January 1, 1999... The state welfare system is being dismantled, but a new pension scheme is not yet ready to take over Liu Cunwa used to be a farmer in Sujiakou Village in north China's Shanxi Province. Now in his seventies, no longer able to work and with no...

Finland's Youthful Oldies
January 1, 1999... Finland's baby-boomers are taking early retirement and there aren't enough youngsters to replace them With a rapidly aging population and a huge proportion of its elderly people opting for early retirement, Finland is facing the prospect of...

Hard Choices for the Third World
January 1, 1999... Developing countries beset with a host of other urgent problems have not yet begun to cope with the needs of aging populations They expected nothing. They were sitting quietly in the garden, in damp wicker chairs.... They gazed at the sea,...

Lebanon: There's No Place like Home
January 1, 1999... Charitable organizations look after the elderly when the family and the state can't cope "Family solidarity still exists in Lebanon, and most elderly people still live with their families," says Abla Sebai, a member of the country's National...

Argentina's Penniless Pensioners
January 1, 1999... Retirees are the front-line victims of economic belt-tightening policies Argentina is a country where old people are poor. Badly treated economically and socially, they are society's cast-offs, forgotten in the dark recesses of memory. ...

Sage or Spoilsport?
January 1, 1999... In Africa the aged are the guardians of knowledge and power; in the West they are all too often regarded as an encumbrance Old age is as much a historical and cultural construct as a natural phenomenon. It is based on biological, demographic,...

Let the Good Times Roll
January 1, 1999... Looking for a carefree lifestyle in the US, the over-50s flock to gated communities which keep youngsters out "Heee-haw!" rips from a row of dyed-blond women, hip-swinging to the "hot tamale" dance step and grinning wide to the twangs of...

African Youth Makes a Takeover Bid
January 1, 1999... The upheavals that have rocked African societies in the past half-century have undermined the elders' traditional power base In Africa gerontocracy is dying. The traditional political, social and economic order dominated by the elders seems...

'When Are We Leaving?'
January 1, 1999... A husband's moving chronicle of his wife's descent into Alzheimer's disease JB is an elderly retired professional man who lives quietly in an English provincial city. Early in 1997 his 77-year-old wife was diagnosed as suffering from...

Old Age's New Horizons
January 1, 1999... At the age of 60 or thereabouts, many people come to the end of their working lives, but this does not mean that they no longer have any urge to learn. According to figures from the Paris-based International Association of Universities of the...

The Stoic Way
January 1, 1999... In a world devoted to the cult of youth and the machine, classical Greek philosophy can help us to grow old gracefully How much goodness and humour do you need to bear the horror of old age? The garden outside and the flowers in the bedroom...

Debt Relief: A Creditable Solution?
January 1, 1999... The suffering caused by Hurricane Mitch and the financial tempests rattling the global economy bring new reasons to lighten the debt of the poorest countries The devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch in November was horrific. In three days,...

Museums Hoist Their New Colours
January 1, 1999... The last two decades have seen an explosion in the number of museums and a transformation of their place in society Museums reached a turning-point at the end of the 1960s. They tried to smarten themselves up, to revive their job of teaching...

Can Papers Net a Profit?
January 1, 1999... More and more newspapers and periodicals are going online. How is electronic technology affecting the production and consumption of the printed word? Of all the attractions, possibilities and uncertainties of the Internet, one of those...

Writers Bloc to Defend Their Rights
January 1, 1999... Print journalists are calling-usually in vain-for additional payment when their articles are reused in the electronic media With Internet spreading like wildfire, authors around the world have been clamouring for protection of their...

Yordan Radichkov: The Improbable Bulgarian
January 1, 1999... The 'Kafka of Sofia' uses the grotesque to expose the world's absurdity in short stories and plays steeped in peasant wisdom You like to say that life is a beautiful sentence full of spelling mistakes. Human lives are sentences written...