Oil, gas exploration and deforestation threaten Africa’s great carbon sink

Oil, gas exploration and deforestation threaten Africa’s great carbon sink

Olivia Rosane writes: In the center of the African continent, an immense and vital forest currently thrives. As the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, the Congo Basin covers six countries and around 500 million acres–an area one-fourth the size of the contiguous U.S. It is a haven for both human and natural diversity, hosting more than 150 different ethnic groups and one-fifth of all Earth’s species. It directly supports the livelihoods of the 60 million people who live in or near…

Read More Read More

Israel-Palestine and Daniel Barenboim’s musical bridges

Israel-Palestine and Daniel Barenboim’s musical bridges

Avi Shlaim writes: In his long and illustrious career, Daniel Barenboim has achieved the rare distinction of staying at the top of his field both as a pianist and as a conductor. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the past half-century. But he is also one of the world’s great public figures, with unique contributions to the advancement of musical education and to exploring pathways to peace in one of the most bitter and intractable…

Read More Read More

The vanishing wild: Life on Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction, scientists say

The vanishing wild: Life on Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction, scientists say

  60 Minutes reports: In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet’s 3 and a half billion people were sustainable. But on this New Year’s Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you’re about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis…

Read More Read More

Nearly 200 countries approve a biodiversity accord enshrining human rights and the ‘rights of nature’

Nearly 200 countries approve a biodiversity accord enshrining human rights and the ‘rights of nature’

Inside Climate News reports: Nearly 200 countries have signed off on an agreement that embeds the promotion of human rights and the “rights of nature” into a plan to protect and restore biodiversity through 2030. The 14-page document, while nonbinding, was adopted on Dec. 19, 2022 at COP15, a 12-day conference convened in Montreal under the auspices of the U.N. Convention of Biological Diversity. It is the first international agreement to give credence to a growing movement that recognizes that…

Read More Read More

Ukraine strikes Russian forces in Donbas in deadliest attack in months

Ukraine strikes Russian forces in Donbas in deadliest attack in months

The Wall Street Journal reports: A Ukrainian strike killed dozens of newly mobilized soldiers in Russian-held territory in the east of the country in the single-deadliest known strike in months, piling pressure on Moscow’s military leadership, while Ukraine said it shot down at least 39 drones during another wave of attacks on Kyiv. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Monday that Ukrainian forces used a U.S.-supplied Himars rocket system to destroy a facility used as a base for mobilized troops in the…

Read More Read More

Brazil will revive fraud case against George Santos for using stolen checkbook and false name

Brazil will revive fraud case against George Santos for using stolen checkbook and false name

The New York Times reports: When Representative-elect George Santos takes his seat in Congress on Tuesday, he will do so under the shadow of active investigations by federal and local prosecutors into potential criminal activity during his two congressional campaigns. But an older criminal case may be more pressing: Brazilian law enforcement authorities intend to revive fraud charges against Mr. Santos, and will seek his formal response, prosecutors told The New York Times on Monday. The matter, which stemmed from…

Read More Read More

Inside the Jan. 6 committee’s massive new evidence trove

Inside the Jan. 6 committee’s massive new evidence trove

Politico reports: The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with then-President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences. The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the…

Read More Read More

The wreckage of Brexit is all around us. How long can our politicians indulge in denial?

The wreckage of Brexit is all around us. How long can our politicians indulge in denial?

John Harris writes: This year will mark the 50th anniversary of a musical masterpiece that continues to speak illuminating truths about the impossibility of the human condition, and how people from these islands tend to cope with it. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon was released in March 1973, as the last traces of postwar optimism gave way to mounting economic strife and international tension. The response it offered was twofold: a call to empathy and mutual understanding, and…

Read More Read More

‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’

‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’

Boris Dralyuk, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, interviewed by Klaus Stimeder: Mr. Dralyuk, we are going into the tenth month of Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. What is your take on the situation? I am no military strategist, but my sense is that the Russian Army’s chances of defeating the Ukrainian Army on the battlefield are nil. Thanks to its allies, the Ukrainian Army is better trained, more experienced, and far better supplied. Also, we must remember…

Read More Read More

The war raging in Europe feels familiar

The war raging in Europe feels familiar

Rolling Stone reports: Dženita Mulabdić hugged the ground, the sound of gunfire fast approaching. The pregnant 20-year-old Bosnian woman and her husband, Muhamed, eyed the locked basement door. Their toddler played close by, unaware of the armed men outside. The commandos from Belgrade, wearing black balaclavas, jumped the fence and entered the house in the ethnically mixed Bosnian city of Bijeljina, a two-hour drive from Serbia’s capital. They trudged downstairs to the basement, encountering a barricade in front of a…

Read More Read More

Leaked Jan. 6 committee report exposes Twitter’s post-insurrection chaos

Leaked Jan. 6 committee report exposes Twitter’s post-insurrection chaos

Rolling Stone reports: In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Twitter employees raged at their own company and its leadership, blaming them for the social media giant’s inept handling of Donald Trump and other top MAGA figures’ incitement to violence. “Do you want to have more blood on your hands?” one staffer asked a top executive, Del Harvey, when she questioned whether Trump could inspire more violence in the insurrection’s aftermath. The exchange, relayed by former Twitter employees…

Read More Read More

The year the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas

The year the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas

Inside Climate News reports: When environmentalists look back on 2022, they might remember it as the year the United States finally passed a major climate change law. Some advocates worry, however, that this significant victory is being undermined by a long-term trend that accelerated while that law—the Inflation Reduction Act—was being negotiated. In the first half of the year, the United States became the world’s top exporter of liquified natural gas, or LNG. Then, in September, crude oil exports hit…

Read More Read More