The first week of 2020 was one of vacationing. We left Tuesday morning for Switzerland visiting dear friends for New Year’s Eve, and spending a few relaxed days. Three former roommates live there, and we all go back 30 years. We returned home on Saturday. I did some invoicing and prepared a laptop for our new colleague who starts coming Monday. We removed the Christmas tree from the living room, and it’s now in the garden waiting to be picked up by the planter who will replant the tree for the coming year. From Monday a full regular week will start.
And I came up with a new scheme to show openly licensed images underneath my Week Notes postings:
This week in … 1942*
On January 1st 1942 26 allied nations signed the ‘declaration of united nations‘ promising to stay fully involved in beating the Axis powers. Those 26 countries were the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, Union of South Africa, and Yugoslavia.
The countries who had signed this declaration by war’s end were the ones invited to the 1946 conference that established the United Nations as an institute.
The current most generally important manifesto by the United Nations in my perception is the set of Sustainable Development Goals, 17 goals with underlying targets, efforts and indicators. Last year I came across an example where someone worded their job description in terms of the SDG’s, which I thought eye opening in terms of making the abstract more tangible in your everyday efforts. Everything you do should be in support of at least one of the SDG’s, or at the very least not actively detrimental to any of the SDG’s.
The image above is of the signing of the 1942 declaration. The image is in the public domain. (I will need to learn to keep the explanations shorter though 😉 )
(* I show an openly licensed image with each Week Notes posting, to showcase more open cultural material. See here why, and how I choose the images for 2020.)