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15 global challenges that cannot be addressed by any government acting alone

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  The 15 Global Challenges  from t he Millennium Project, a global participatory think tank. 1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global climate change? 2. How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict? 3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance? 4. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes? 5. How can decisionmaking be enhanced by integrating improved global foresight during unprecedented accelerating change? 6. How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone? 7. How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap between rich and poor? 8. How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune micro-organisms be reduced? 9. How can education make humanity more intelligent, knowledgeable, and wise enough to address its global challenges? 10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts,...
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Victorian Derby: Funny facts

By Jim Sheng
Demonic pace

In November 1897 a motorist escaped with a warning from a charge of 'Furious Driving' at Borough Police Court. He denied the allegation of a police constable that he drove 'very fast - at least 12 miles an hour' up the crowded Duffield Road. A key part of his defence was that 'children were following all the way', therefore he could hardly have been guilty of such demonic pace!

Electric Candles

By 1879, the 'magician Edison' invented electric light in the States and in November that year a demonstration of the new phenomenon of electric light took place in Becket Street, directing the public's interest round the corner to the Drill Hall. Inside 'two electric candles placed on pyramidal pedestals' disappointed the local newspaper Mercury reporter compared with the light outside. There was 'every now and then, a sudden variation of colour, or of intensity, caused probably by some unsteadiness of the machinery used in producing the current'. The writer pronounced that the holders of gas shares needn't worry themselves and the Mercury also quoted a medical professor at a London hospital, in a letter to The Times , giving it as his opinion that while electric light might be great for the outdoors 'it can never be used as a room illuminant!'

Shop owners were responsible for the upkeep of adjacent footway

By October 1878 pavements had become the direct responsibility of the city council, but before that, the owners of adjacent properties were responsible for the upkeep of the footway and maintenance depended on the town surveyor's promptness or otherwise in serving them notice to do so.

(Excerpted from Victorian Derby -- A portrait of life in a 19th-century manufacturing townby Harry Butterton, Published by Breedon Books Publishing, 2006.)
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