Those attending the Rio 20 Summit should embrace this promising, if awkward, strategic opportunity.

In some countries, especially those in east Asia, the selection process involves several difficult tests of a difficulty comparable to the IMO itself.

In others, such as the USA, possible participants go through a series of easier standalone competitions that gradually increase in difficulty.

Such prospects make continued diplomacy, however elusive the prospects of success, nothing short of mandatory.

In effect, it indicates the ease or difficulty of using distillation to separate the more volatile components from the less volatile components in a mixture.

It's a very simple experiment where a monkey has been trained in a task that involves it manipulating a tool that's equivalent in its difficulty to a child learning to manipulate or handle a spoon.

The challenges that United Nations activities face and that the 1994 Convention and 2005 Protocol directly address are indeed daunting and have become more so in recent years.

LN Daily we read stories in which the protagonists are those that destroy Syria (be it Assad or ISIS Daesh) yet we hear little of those who resist, construct and reconstruct the country, in an increasingly difficult context.

There is also an urgent need for the Iraqi leadership to redouble its efforts difficult as they may be to prevail over all perpetrators of acts of violence in the country's territory, be they Iraqis or non Iraqis, on the basis of applicable national and international law.

And it could launch attacks on US, European, and Israeli targets on a global basis. Such prospects make continued diplomacy, however elusive the prospects of success, nothing short of mandatory.