UNESCO Courier articles from May 2001

UNESCO Courier archives from May 2001

I, Galina Komarnitska, Nurse in Kiev
May 1, 2001... often think back on this day last year. It was May 27, the day after my birthday. I had just turned 28 and didn't really feel like going to work, but, as the Ukrainian expression goes, "Hiba hotchech, mousych!" ("You must, whether you like it or...

Toxic Rain Kills More Than the Coca
May 1, 2001... The so-called "war on coca" in Colombia, backed by the United States, is destroying jungles and forests, and threatening the health of half a million peasants and indigenous peoples At first sight, a coca leaf is nothing more than an ordinary...

When Girls Go Missing from the Classroom
May 1, 2001... Millions of girls are not making it into school, despite a concerted international movement to push the cause forward. In some African countries, the gender gap is even widening. What's gone wrong? In Ethiopia, girls are sometimes abducted...

Community Schools: Egypt's Celebrity Model
May 1, 2001... Two hundred schools in deprived hamlets of Upper Egypt are sending ripples through the country's education system, making girls and women the beacons of a new learning experience When in 1992, community schools came to the ezbah--hamlets...

The Riddle in the Skies
May 1, 2001... A PHOENIX OF HUMAN NATURE Four hundred years ago, Giordano Bruno suffered an unenviable fate: his tongue gagged, the Italian astronomer was burnt at the stake for maintaining, among other things, that each star in the sky is a sun like our own...

From Bang to Eternity
May 1, 2001... The big bang is now the accepted scientific account of how the universe came into being and started to evolve, but there is still much left to discover Cosmology aims to determine the nature of the universe on the largest observable scales, and...

And Then There Was Inflation
May 1, 2001... The hottest theory of cosmology in the last 20 years is that of cosmic "inflation"--a burst of force in the very early universe that expanded a dot into almost boundless space. Professor Andrei Linde of Stanford University, one of the theory's...

What Came Before
May 1, 2001... Do the secrets of the universe lie within the atom? Could a 27-kilometre tunnel reveal the deep truth? Reverse the film of our universe's history, and things seems to get mighty strange in the last reel. What began in physical harmony,...

Mirror, Mirror Up Above
May 1, 2001... Could we be living deep in a cosmic mirage, where rays of light multiply and distort our perceptions of space? Instead of being flat and infinite, might space not in fact be folded up--and our sense of the universe's vastness just an illusion?...

Life against the Odds
May 1, 2001... Cosmology has led us back to the very first second of the universe's existence, yet the more science reveals, the more it leaves unanswered Is science on the verge of explaining the mystery of existence, once and for all? Some prominent...

The Myths of Science
May 1, 2001... Myth, religion and science have more often than not proved inseparable in addressing the eternal imponderable: why something rather than nothing? Since the dawn of civilization, humankind has marvelled at the skies and at Nature's myriad...

The Highest Summit: God Meets the Big Bang
May 1, 2001... "There were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both," declared Georges Lemaitre, one of the fathers of modern cosmology and also a Catholic abbot [1]. "Nothing in my working life, nothing I ever learned in my studies of...

Out of Butter and Water: The Hindu Creation
May 1, 2001... In the classic myths of Hinduism, there is no primeval emptiness: just different stages of gods and the universe, recycling themselves like crops There is no single Hindu myth of origin. There are as many myths as there are texts; sometimes,...

Fresco.(Brief Article)(Short Story)
May 1, 2001... On the day that the blue ones stopped transmitting, the caretaker was doing its rounds of the Eye, humming and pottering among the other, duller maintenance robots. Then, when the news came in, it stopped humming. Near the heart of...

More Than Just the Truth
May 1, 2001... Truth commissions can set in motion a process of grieving and recovery, but they are not the only answer to confronting crimes of the past. Trials are critical, while traditional healing practices can also assuage wounds When nations go...

Revenge in the Making
May 1, 2001... Children in Bosnia are growing up learning that their neighbours are enemies. Civic groups say that a truth commission is the only way to defuse brewing ethnic hatred When truth commissions were set up in Latin American countries such as...

Jean Hatzfeld [*]: "Let the Victims Voice Their Pain"
May 1, 2001... I don't have much trust in the effectiveness of international tribunals. When trials and hearings are held far from the scene of the crime, it doesn't help reconciliation in the least. In the Rwandan town of Nyamata, where I spent six months,...

Weaving Magic with the Spoken Word
May 1, 2001... Storytellers in Latin America have gained a cult following in the past decade. Some are delving into ancient traditions, others are spinning stories with a distinctly post-modern edge Halfway through his performance, Diego Camargo notices...

The World According to Nicolas Buenaventura
May 1, 2001... Early on, Colombian storyteller Nicolas Buenaventura learned that "you have to invent the truth every day." With several storytellers in his family tree, he treats his gift with reverence and warmth of spirit After a few minutes of...

Striking Media Giants with News on the Web
May 1, 2001... The Internet offers an unparalleled chance to spread an alternative to the news served up by the mainstream media, the "second power" of globalization, affirmed the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre The organizers of the World Social Forum...

Mark Anspach
May 1, 2001... Global markets, anonymous victims In the great metropolises of market society, hundreds of homeless people die each year. We don't even know their names. For the American anthropologist Mark Anspach [1], the market economy has not succeeded...