Follows a woman who runs a support house in one of the parts of Africa that is both hardest hit by AIDS, and has a child prostitution problem. Her operations will likely cease in September

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34071417

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33813336

Ghislaine Maxwell meets again with Todd Blanche, Trump's former lawyer, as the Epstein case continues. After two days of interrogations, Maxwell reportedly gave up 100 persons of interest. Is another chapter about to begin in this legal drama?

“Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sex-trafficking sentence meets for a second time with Donald Trump's criminal lawyer turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to see if the FBI and the Justice Department might have also needed her to commit suicide. Maxwell's lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, saying after the interrogations, Ghislaine Maxwell gave up 100 persons of interest. But the New York Times cautions that those 100 people could be a combination of victims, accomplices and other men who sexually abuse the victims.

This, as Speaker Mike Johnson, shuts down the entire House of Representatives for the summer insisting he will not be bullied by Democrats into forcing a vote on demanding to see the Epstein files. Instead, Mike Johnson prefers getting bullied by Donald Trump into buying more time before the White House can figure out how to bury this story. Perhaps bombing the Middle East again?”

@news Russia: Navy parade cancelled due to “security reasons"

OK conspiracy theorists get your tin foil hats on and tell me why.

--
rationalreviewnewsdigest@social.freetalklive.com
URL: social.freetalklive.com/@ratio…
RE: social.freetalklive.com/users/…

“Ladies and gentlemen, it's understandable, if not excusable, that the felon-in-chief is trying to distract us, you, me, everybody else, Republicans, Democrats, MAGA people, from the metastasizing story regarding Jeffrey Epstein. But he's trying to distract us with the wrong things.

Clearly, the 2020 election was rigged. Obama was somehow a traitor. He tried that.

These aren't working, because they're old. Much like the fel— No, sorry. That's ageist.

But I'd like to help out by suggesting one thing he could distract us with, if he cared to. There have been reports this week, there was one on CNN, of famine in Afghanistan. There was a report on the BBC this week, of famine in Gaza.

And there have been reports, from several other international media, that there's a famine in South Sudan. There's famine all over the world, ladies and gentlemen, in the 21st century. Our attention could be directed to that.”

archive.is link

In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

The first stage of applications was open from June 16 to July 18. “We received extremely high levels of interest in the ballot with 8,750 registrations, which includes family members of primary registrants,” the Australian High Commission in Tuvalu said in a statement on July 23. The first cohort of 280 people will be drawn via a ballot on July 25, the high commission says.

“When combined with other Pacific pathways to Australia and New Zealand, nearly 4 percent of the population could migrate each year,” says Jane McAdam, a fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, writing in the Conversation. “Within a decade, close to 40 percent of the population could have moved—although some people may return home or go backwards and forwards.”

The ICJ’s advisory opinion for the first time gives the Pacific and all vulnerable communities a legal mechanism to hold states accountable and to demand the climate action long overdue.

In the landmark opinion published on Wednesday, the court said countries must prevent harm to the climate system and that failing to do so could result in their having to pay compensation and make other forms of restitution. It says states are liable for all kinds of activities that harm the climate, but it takes explicit aim at fossil fuels.

For a young Pacific woman at the forefront of this global fight, this win wasn’t just political, it was personal. And it was history.

“We were there. And we were heard,” she said.

The group of students all hailed from Pacific island countries that are among the most vulnerable in the world to the climate crisis. They came up with the idea of changing international law by getting the world’s highest court to issue an advisory opinion on the climate crisis.

The campaign was led by the nation of Vanuatu, a Pacific state of about 300,000 people that sits at the forefront of the climate crisis and has been ranked by the United Nations as the country most prone to natural disasters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/44844533

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5669661

updated as of yesterday (July 21): based on a statistical model developed by a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet, Israel has killed roughly 434,800 people in Gaza since the country’s military started to attack the territory on 8 October 2023. That’s 20.7% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population dead. Over half are women and children.

Communications have been restored and the Freedom Flotilla ship Handala remains en route and on mission to challenge the blockade of Gaza. 19 Human Rights Defenders and 2 Journalists from 12 countries are on board.

Gaza is on the brink of running out of the specialised therapeutic food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children, United Nations and humanitarian agencies say.

”We are now facing a dire situation, that we are running out of therapeutic supplies,” Salim Oweis, a spokesperson for Unicef in Amman, Jordan, told Reuters on Thursday, saying supplies of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a crucial treatment, would be depleted by mid-August if nothing changed.

”That’s really dangerous for children as they face hunger and malnutrition at the moment,” he added.

Oweis said Unicef had only enough RUTF left to treat 3,000 children. In the first two weeks of July alone, Unicef treated 5,000 children facing acute malnutrition in Gaza.

Nutrient-dense, high-calorie RUTF supplies, such as high-energy biscuits and peanut paste enriched with milk powder, are critical for treating severe malnutrition.

”Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,” a World Health Organization spokesperson said on Thursday.

Ngl, terrifying stuff. What's gonna be banned?

Being surrounded and yelled at about “misrepresenting reality” is not how serious United Nations-hosted negotiations are meant to proceed. But that is what happened to Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth during talks about a global treaty to slash plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada. The employees of a large US chemicals company “formed a ring” around her, she says.

At another event in Ottawa, Carney Almroth was “harassed and intimidated” by a plastic packaging representative, who barged into the room and shouted that she was fearmongering and pushing misinformation. That meeting was an official event organised by the UN. “So I filed the harassment reports with the UN,” said Carney Almroth. “The guy had to apologise, and then he left the meeting. He was at the next meeting.”

“That was one example when I filed an official report,” said Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. “But I’ve been harassed and intimidated lots of other times, in lots of other contexts, at off-site meetings, at side events, also at scientific conferences, via email and so on.”

She has also had to take measures to avoid surveillance at the meetings. “I have a privacy screen protector on my phone, because they will walk behind us and try to film what’s on our screens and see what notes we’re taking, or who we’re chatting with. I would never open my computer in the middle of a room without knowing who is behind me. It’s a high-vigilance, high-stress environment.”

Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party that has long served as kingmaker in Israeli politics, announced that it would bolt the government over disagreements surrounding a proposed law that would enshrine broad military draft exemptions for its constituents — the second ultra-Orthodox governing party to do so this week.

“In this current situation, it’s impossible to sit in the government and to be a partner in it,” Shas Cabinet minister Michael Malkieli said in announcing the party’s decision.

But Shas said it would not undermine Netanyahu’s coalition from the outside and could vote with it on some legislation, granting Netanyahu a lifeline in what would otherwise make governing almost impossible and put his lengthy rule at risk.

Once their resignations come into effect, Netanyahu’s coalition will have 50 seats in the 120-seat parliament.

Covers what we know about the Air India 171 accident. Includes information from the interum report.

On July 2, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1518 in British Columbia announced that more than 500 Uber drivers in Greater Victoria have unionized.

This historic decision follows months of organizing among drivers and marks the first ever union certification of app-based drivers in Canada.

Uber only began operating in Victoria in June 2023 and recently expanded its service across B.C.

UFCW 1518 is the province’s largest private sector union local, representing more than 28,000 workers in the retail, grocery, health care and cannabis industries.

The mega-local has made significant organizing breakthroughs over the past several years. After successfully unionizing the B.C. cannabis sector, 1518 also secured representation for nearly 400 temporary foreign agricultural workers at Highline Mushrooms farms in Langley and Abbotsford. This was the largest group of agricultural workers ever to organize in Canadian history and a major development in the struggle for temporary foreign worker rights.

Mar Menor, a 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) lagoon in southern Spain, is the only ecosystem in Europe that can be named a victim in a legal case. In September 2022, the Spanish Senate granted the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean legal personhood. From then on, any human who wanted to help Mar Menor could represent it in court.

For those in the budding Rights of Nature movement, who recognize the planet and all its ecosystems as living beings with inalienable rights, the Mar Menor victory was a breakthrough. The first body of water in Europe granted legal personhood, the move caught the region up to similar legal successes elsewhere, such as with Colombia’s Atrato River in 2016 and New Zealand’s Whanganui River in 2017.

Protection for Mar Menor came after a series of mass die-offs ravaged the ecosystem. In 2016, excessive nutrient runoff triggered a massive algal bloom that turned parts of the lagoon a misty green and killed 85 percent of its marine vegetation. Then in 2019, and again in 2021, nutrient runoff stripped the lagoon of oxygen, suffocating thousands of fish and crustaceans, and littering its shores with creatures gasping for air.

Spurred by the crises, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents banded together. They collected around 640,000 signatures and, in 2022, successfully pushed a citizen initiative through the Spanish parliament’s upper chamber. Their efforts resulted in a new law granting Mar Menor and its surrounding basin rights in every sense of the word: the right to live and flourish; the right to be protected; and the right to recover. The law’s Article 6 was particularly groundbreaking. It stated that any person or relevant legal entity “is entitled to defend the ecosystem of the Mar Menor.”

“The right to recovery is no longer something that depends on a ministry wanting to do it, but it is a right of the Mar Menor,” says Teresa Vicente. A law professor at the nearby University of Murcia, Vicente earned the Goldman Environmental Award, often called the Green Nobel, for the key role she played in driving the initiative and writing the law that gives personhood to Mar Menor.

But three years on, Mar Menor is still waiting for humans to act on their promises. So I visited this famous coastal lagoon—the name of which translates to Minor Sea—and chatted with some of its protectors to find out what was happening on the ground.