PITY the UN ambassador of a small African country each time a vote is called in the General Assembly. Many of the resolutions will be ones that their president and most of their compatriots neither know nor care about. Take Resolution 70/230, adopted just before Christmas and new year when the world’s mind is on how it will recover from one hangover while bracing for the next. The UN resolved, among other things, to hold a symposium on basic space technology in South Africa and a workshop on “human space technology” in Costa Rica. It passed easily.
