Root

In vascular plants, the root is the organ of a plant that typically lies below the surface of the soil. However, roots can also be aerial or aerating (growing up above the ground or especially above water). Furthermore, a stem normally occurring below ground is not exceptional either (see rhizome). Therefore, the root is best defined as the non-leaf, non-nodes bearing parts of the plant's body. However, important internal structural differences between stems and roots exist.

The first root that comes from a plant is called the radicle. The four major functions of roots are 1) absorption of water and inorganic nutrients, 2) anchoring of the plant body to the ground, and supporting it, 3) storage of food and nutrients, 4) vegetative reproduction. In response to the concentration of nutrients, roots also synthesise cytokinin, which acts as a signal as to how fast the shoots can grow. Roots often function in storage of food and nutrients. The roots of most vascular plant species enter into symbiosis with certain fungi to form mycorrhizae, and a large range of other organisms including bacteria also closely associate with roots.

Humanitarianism

Humanitarianism is a moral of kindness, benevolence, and sympathy extended to all human beings. Humanitarianism has been an evolving concept historically but universality is a common theme in its evolution. No distinction is to be made on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, caste, age, religion, ability, or nationality.

Social reform

The historian G. M. Trevelyan viewed humanitarianism as the product of rationalism upon Puritanism. However, in many areas of reform, Christians and rationalists worked together: in the case of slavery, William Wilberforce and the Buxtons, but also Jeremy Bentham and Condorcet; in the case of working conditions, evangelicals such as Lord Shaftesbury, but also Robert Owen and Edwin Chadwick; in the case of punishments, Cesare Beccaria and Samuel Romilly; in the case of the mentally ill, Shaftesbury and Pinel; and in the case of the treatment of animals, Bentham enlisted the aid of Wilberforce. The idea that mankind could be improved by deliberate social change distinct from the conferring of charity was relatively new.

I Am

I Am may refer to:

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United Nations

The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization to promote international co-operation. A replacement for the ineffective League of Nations, the organization was established on 24 October 1945 after World War II in order to prevent another such conflict. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; there are now 193. The headquarters of the United Nations is in Manhattan, New York City, and experiences extraterritoriality. Further main offices are situated in Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states. Its objectives include maintaining international peace and security, promoting human rights, fostering social and economic development, protecting the environment, and providing humanitarian aid in cases of famine, natural disaster, and armed conflict.

During the Second World War, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated talks on a successor agency to the League of Nations, and the United Nations Charter was drafted at a conference in April–June 1945; this charter took effect 24 October 1945, and the UN began operation. The UN's mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades by the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union and their respective allies. The organization participated in major actions in Korea and the Congo, as well as approving the creation of the state of Israel in 1947. The organization's membership grew significantly following widespread decolonization in the 1960s, and by the 1970s its budget for economic and social development programmes far outstripped its spending on peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War, the UN took on major military and peacekeeping missions across the world with varying degrees of success.

Yugoslav Wars

The Yugoslav Wars were ethnic conflicts fought from 1991 to 2001 inside the territory of the former Yugoslavia. These wars accompanied and/or facilitated the breakup of the country, when its constituent republics declared independence, but the issues of ethnic minorities in the new countries (chiefly Serbs in central parts and Albanians in the southeast) were still unresolved at the time the republics were recognized internationally. The wars are generally considered to be a series of separate but related military conflicts which occurred in, and affected, most of the former Yugoslav republics:

The wars mostly resulted in peace accords, involving full international recognition of new states, but with massive economic damage to the region. Initially the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought to preserve the unity of the whole of Yugoslavia by crushing the secessionist governments; however the JNA increasingly came under the influence of the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević that evoked Serbian nationalist rhetoric and was willing to support the Yugoslav state insofar as using it to preserve the unity of Serbs in one state; as a result the JNA began to lose Slovenes, Croats, Kosovar Albanians, Bosniaks, and ethnic Macedonians, and effectively became a Serb army. According to the 1994 United Nations report, the Serb side did not aim to restore Yugoslavia, but to create a "Greater Serbia" from parts of Croatia and Bosnia.