By Andrew E. Yaw Tchie | – Climate change effects such as droughts, flash floods, erratic rainfall, disruption to the monsoon seasons, strong winds, cyclones, sandstorms, dust storms and increased temperature are being experienced across Somalia. These effects are affecting livelihoods, and contributing to local grievances and community tensions. Some of these insights and conclusions […]
Archives for April 2021
Syrian Missile strikes Near Israel’s Nuclear Facility at Dimona, Which could have Turned into a Dirty Bomb
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli site i24 reports that on early Thursday morning, a Syrian missile slammed into the desert very near to the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, which Israeli authorities have used to produce an arsenal of an estimated two hundred nuclear bombs. Air raid sirens sounded in southern Israel. Explosions […]
New US climate pledge: Cut emissions 50% this decade, but can Biden make it happen?
By Morgan Bazilian and David Victor | – President Joe Biden announced an ambitious new national climate target at a livestreamed summit of world leaders on April 22, 2021. He pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by the end of this decade and aim for net zero emissions by 2050. The new goal […]
Amid Chauvin trial and more police killings, we need to stress Boycotts and the ‘Noncooperation’ in ‘Nonviolent Noncooperation’
By Maria J. Stephan | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – In his March 1956 sermon “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious,” Martin Luther King, Jr. responded to a headline in a local Alabama newspaper that read, “Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama.” The headline was referring […]
Why We Forget Epidemics and Why This One Must Be Remembered
By Nina Burleigh | – The second Moderna shot made me sick — as predicted. A 24-hour touch of what an alarmed immune system feels like left me all the more grateful for my good fortune in avoiding the real thing and for being alive at a time when science had devised a 95% effective […]
A big Effing Deal: On Eve of Climate Summit, news that Biden will cut US C02 Emissions 50% by 2030
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – ( Matthew Daly at the Associated Press reports that President Biden will announce at Thursday’s virtual international Climate Summit that the US will commit to reducing its annual carbon dioxide emissions by half of the 2005 peak by 2030. Joe Biden famously used an expletive to describe the passage of […]
Afghanistan’s Green Future? Earth Minerals and Renewables
( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Can Afghanistan’s mineral wealth finance a transition to a carbon-neutral future? By John Feffer | April 21, 2021 Everyone has a different Doomsday scenario for Afghanistan once U.S. and NATO troops withdraw by September 11. The Taliban will take over and reimpose their repressive social agenda. Al-Qaeda will […]
On Top of Causing Deadly Global Heating, Fossil fuels cause 1 in 5 Adult deaths each year
( Sustainability Times) – Researchers at Harvard University in the United States, working with colleagues at the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London in the United States, estimate in a new study that exposure to airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from fossil fuel emissions resulted in nearly one in five […]
Afghanistan pullout: Nato betrays its own values if interpreters and other local staff are left at risk
By Sara de Jong | – The announcement of the US and Nato military withdrawal from Afghanistan later this year has elicited many responses, not least expressions of concern about the plight of interpreters and other local staff employed by western military forces. These concerns are not new but now have renewed urgency. The release […]