Next Generation Diplomacy

By: Lawrence Liu   At first glance, water accessibility may not seem like a problem: walk into the kitchen, turn the tap, and boom, water. Right? Maybe for most, but for over a quarter of the population,1 going to get water every day might look like an hour-long trek to the nearest well/borehole. Even worse, others might have no choice but to drink water from ponds or puddles, which could be potentially lethal. On top of poor access to water, nearly half the population does not have proper access to sanitation, leading to the transmission of diseases, reducing social and economic development, and over a million deaths per year.1,2 The UN has seen the effects of lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation and now recognizes them as fundamental human rights, calling for efforts to help countries in need. The problem of water scarcity has only gotten worse over time, as can be seen when looking at the past. In hunter-gatherer societies that existed tens of thousands of y...

By: Will Concepcion Thousands of Families in the Philippines are Starving, so Who’s Helping Them? Jomar Fleras, executive director of Rise Against Hunger in the Philippines, said, "I've never seen hunger at this level before. If you go out there, everybody will tell you that they're more afraid of dying from hunger than dying from Covid. They don't care about Covid anymore." As of 2020, almost one-third of all families in the Philippines didn't have sufficient food to eat at least once in the previous three months, as stated in a September 2020 survey. This equates to 7.6 million households, with 2.2 million experiencing "severe hunger," the highest form of hunger. Before Covid, the percentage of people experiencing hunger was on a decline, starting in 2012. Now, numbers are higher than ever, going up ever since the severe lockdown it went through. In 2019, the Global Hunger Index ranked the Philippines with a 20.1 score, which shows that hunger is a...

By: Griffin Hon Hostage diplomacy is the practice of making diplomatic negotiations over human lives taken captive by the involved parties. This barbaric custom traces back to the ancient world, where it was an essential part of guaranteeing armistice or goodwill between foreign relationships after conflicts.1 In ancient China, hostage diplomacy was used to ensure mutual trust between vassal states and the centralized monarchy. The Romans used it to increase the loyalty of conquered nations, and more recently, it was used by the British during their occupation of India.  However, in today's increasingly technologically advanced and interconnected world, it is absurd that such a barbaric practice is still put to use at even the most prominent stages of diplomacy. Foreigners are typically arrested by a government and held on trumped-up charges, which is usually in response to or results in a similar abduction by an opposing nation.  In 1979, the US Embassy in Tehran, comprising ...

By: Brian Li The Lotus Riverside Complex was an entire building project in Minhang District, Shanghai, China. On June 27 of 2009, The Lotus Riverside Complex tipped over because of a mixture of ignorance and poor ethics. Workers were digging an underground garage near NO.7, and at the same time, they were dealing with the excess mud by piling the dirt on the other side of the building. They were supposed to keep the soil at a height beneath 10m. However, there was an error, and the workers kept piling the mud on the same pile. This, along with the wet soil from the rainy season Shanghai experienced and the lack of support from the vacant lot next to NO.7, made all the pressure store up beneath the mud pile. At one point, the pressure under the pile of mud was so great that it pushed the building sideways into the direction of the garage. Imagine a tug of war where the string that both teams tug is the support distributed from the facility to the ground, and when one side won this t...