What's next for environmental peacebuilding? Lessons learned and opportunities from conflict-affected states 17 February 2021 — 3:00PM TO 4:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 8 February 2021 Online

 This event explores lessons and opportunities from conflict-affected states.

In the field of peacebuilding, scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize the importance of environmental restoration, afforestation and infrastructural renewal for creating the sustainable livelihoods necessary for successful peacebuilding efforts.

Featuring academics writing for International Affairs on environmental peacebuilding in Colombia, Yemen and the Sahel, this webinar discusses the policy implications of the turn to environmental peacebuilding.

This event is part of the Chatham House’s Environment and Society Discussion Series in which the Energy Environment and Resources Programme brings together leading academics and policymakers to discuss key issues in environmental policy.

In particular, this event focuses on the role of environmental peacebuilding in creating sustainable livelihoods. From the impact the destruction of infrastructure can have on poverty as a driver of conflict, to the role environmental peacebuilding can play in bringing communities together by creating sustainable shared spaces of employment, the importance of the environmental livelihood creation is difficult to overstate.

Panellists focus on how policymakers can best encourage inclusive and sustainable livelihood creation and on addressing the key challenges such approaches face in the context of environmental peacebuilding efforts.

11 August 2020

Disruptive technologies by nation states and malign cyber actors – the US response 16 February 2023 — 1:00PM TO 2:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 2 February 2023 Chatham House and Online

Lisa Monaco, the US deputy attorney general, discusses how autocratic governments and malign cyber actors use disruptive technologies to project power and engage in illicit activity.

Weaponizing data, ransomware attacks and other illicit cyber activity represent significant threats to national security. 

Governments and malicious cyber actors around the world exploit disruptive technology to engage in criminal activity, track citizens and coerce other countries thereby weakening the rules-based order and fundamental principles of democracy. 

Lisa Monaco discusses how the world is at an inflection point when it comes to meeting this challenge and describes how the US and partner nations are responding to protect their citizens and the broader international community.

Key questions to discuss include:

• What steps does the US government need to take to properly address this threat?
• How are countries coordinating policies to confront the problem?
• To what extent does this challenge go beyond US-China competition?

As with all member events, questions from the audience drive the conversation.

Read the transcript.

The historic ocean liner SS United States, whose fate had been in limbo for years, will begin its transition into the world's largest sunken artificial reef beginning this week in Philadelphia, its owner says.

Pennsylvania's rejection of a formal complaint from the state Catholic Conference over COVID aid and private school students highlights a messy dispute taking place in many states.

Lisa Duty of The Learning Accelerator, a Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) and Highlander Institute funding partner, outlines the Rhode Islands's commitment to a blended learning future. She describes how the state is developing its new five-year strategic plan that's engaging RIDE's Ambas

Not having to negotiate with federal officials on the finer points of teacher evaluation, rigorous standards, or school turnarounds has made it easier to chart their own paths, some education leaders say.

Some states, such as California, Kentucky and North Dakota plan to use the Every Student Succeeds Act to bolster the decision-making powers of their local school boards in the coming years.

Lawmakers in Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Utah have all gave previews this to their 2018 fiscal year budget proposals.

Here are summaries of recent annual addresses by governors around the country.

"We have a responsibility to save lives," Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said on Twitter. "We could have waited to close schools, but based on advice from health experts, this is the time to do it."

Governors in several natural resource-dependent states said recently they will have to continue to cut public education funding because prices for oil and coal have not rebounded.

The political landscape for updating school finance systems won’t be any easier in the 2020 legislative season, despite a surging economy, state flexibility under ESSA, and single-party control in many states.

The political landscape for updating school finance systems won’t be any easier in the 2020 legislative season, despite a surging economy, state flexibility under ESSA, and single-party control in many states.

Several states this year sought to replace their funding formulas, a monumental fiscal and political feat, but only a handful of legislatures have been able to get proposals to their governors' desks.

States are tweaking voter registration laws for teenage voters and schools are busing students to the polls. Will these efforts help young people get in the habit of voting?

Students returning to schools in Virginia and New York this fall will be required to participate in mental-health education as part of their health and physical education courses.

Gov. Dave Heineman used part of his speech to blast the federal Affordable Care Act, saying its mandatory provisions will cost the state.

Gov. Dannel Malloy will seek to dramatically adjust the way Connecticut distributes more than $4 billion of state aid, he told legislators in his annual address, as the legislature gets back to business for the 2017 session.

School administrators in some states are caught up in tensions about who gets the final say about when they can reopen their buildings and what precautions they should take to protect their communities.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has finally OK'd Florida's plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. That means that single state, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, has gotten the go-ahead for its plan.

A recent summit meeting on assessment held in Virginia by Jobs for the Future suggests that that state may have solved some of the political challenges that have held back the advance of performance assessment.

Charter schools are playing a notable role in remarks about education from candidates like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Yet it's not clear what if any role they'll have in important states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

In Arkansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin, educators and advocates will be on this year's ballot for governor, a position that will inevitably have an outsized role in shaping education policy.

Worried that far too many students have weak reading skills, states are passing new laws that require aspiring teachers—and, increasingly, teachers who are already in the classroom—to master reading instruction that’s solidly grounded in research.

Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico have the highest percentages of students who lack adequate home technology for remote learning.

School administrators in some states are caught up in tensions about who gets the final say about when they can reopen their buildings and what precautions they should take to protect their communities.

Gov. Branstad urged lawmakers in his Condition of the State address to pass legislation that would require schools to inform parents if their child is involved in a bullying incident and allow school personnel to intervene in any bullying that takes place off school grounds.

Gov. Dayton used his State of the State address to announce a review of all K-12 assessments with a goal of streamlining and reducing standardized testing, to push for expansion of early-childhood education, and to introduce the idea of extending school days and the school year.

Worried that far too many students have weak reading skills, states are passing new laws that require aspiring teachers—and, increasingly, teachers who are already in the classroom—to master reading instruction that’s solidly grounded in research.

As Oklahoma teachers prepare for day four of their statewide walkout, here's a guide to the larger picture of teacher protests.

Governors in several natural resource-dependent states said recently they will have to continue to cut public education funding because prices for oil and coal have not rebounded.

Human sleep exhibits multiple, recurrent temporal regularities, ranging from circadian rhythms to sleep stage cycles and neuronal oscillations during nonrapid eye movement sleep. Moreover, recent evidence revealed a functional role of aperiodic activity, which reliably discriminates different sleep stages. Aperiodic activity is commonly defined as the spectral slope of the 1/frequency (1/f) decay function of the electrophysiological power spectrum. However, several lines of inquiry now indicate that the aperiodic component of the power spectrum might be better characterized by a superposition of several decay processes with associated timescales. Here, we determined multiple timescales, which jointly shape aperiodic activity using human intracranial electroencephalography. Across three independent studies (47 participants, 23 female), our results reveal that aperiodic activity reliably dissociated sleep stage-dependent dynamics in a regionally specific manner. A principled approach to parametrize aperiodic activity delineated several, spatially and state-specific timescales. Lastly, we employed pharmacological modulation by means of propofol anesthesia to disentangle state-invariant timescales that may reflect physical properties of the underlying neural population from state-specific timescales that likely constitute functional interactions. Collectively, these results establish the presence of multiple intrinsic timescales that define the electrophysiological power spectrum during distinct brain states.

Senior staff at FAO yesterday briefed a delegation of five U.S. Senators on FAO’s work on resilience, nutrition, fisheries, climate change, [...]

The first in a series of Conference side events, the high-level panel on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) was held on Saturday. The aim of this event was to present [...]

The 2009 FAO Agreement on Port State Measures to prevent, deter, and eliminate illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (PSMA) has reached 100 States that are now officially [...]

Sharks have been losing teeth for 400 million years. Here’s a guide to uncovering some of these plentiful fossils across the country

Michelle Frankfurter tells the stories of these young migrants and also those of the thousands who jump aboard “the death train”

SolidWorks Education Edition prepares students for engineering careers with industry standard tools

The change to the Title II program will benefit Southern states, while Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, among others, will see their allocations shrink.

The Education Department wants states to re-submit "equity plans" to ensure that effective teachers are matched with disadvantaged and minority students.

More than 40 states are considering postsecondary and career readiness in school performance in some way in their Every Student Succeeds Act plans.

More than half of the state plans fail to publicly report data on educator equity gaps, the National Council of Teacher Quality found in its analyses.

After handing over almost 3 000 apartments to their owners, residential estates developer, Balwin's revenues surpassed R3 billion for the first time in the company's 26-year history.

Voting for the Jharkhand assembly elections phase 1 is being held today with 43 of the state's 81 seats up for grabs.

India has ambitious plans to set up nuclear reactors across the country, especially in states where thermal power plants have either completed its life, or where access to coal is a challenge.

India has ambitious plans to set up nuclear reactors across the country, especially in states where thermal power plants have either completed its life, or where access to coal is a challenge.

Voting for the Jharkhand assembly elections phase 1 is being held today with 43 of the state's 81 seats up for grabs.