UPDATE 15. December 2019: COP25 WAS A TOTAL FLOP - The entire purpose of COP25 was for nations to scale up their own ambitions and raise the decarbonization targets established under Paris. After an extra day of contentious negotiation, all language referring to that goal has been stripped from the resolution.
"Never have I seen the almost total disconnection we've seen here (...) between what the science requires and the people of the world demand, and what the climate negotiators are delivering,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
... and Greta Thunberg had to sit on the floor in an overcrowed German train from Basel in the very South of Germany on her way back home. Embarrassed Deutsche Bahn (DB) tried to do some damage-control by finally and after many hours giving the TIMES person of the year a firstclass-seat from Hannover in the North of Germany. DB got a twitterstorm, but Greta cooled the mood of her fans:
"Our train from Basel was taken out of traffic. So we sat on the floor on 2 different trains. After Göttingen I got a seat.This is no problem of course and I never said it was. Overcrowded trains is a great sign because it means the demand for train travel is high!"
Ms Thunberg also stated she needs now a break, but the climate strike will continue unabated and will be scaled up.
Anger erupts at U.N. climate summit as major economies resist bold action
Campaigners and many nations slam Chile, presiding over the talks, for drafting a summit text that they say risks throwing the 2015 Paris Agreement into reverse
Especially First Nations and developing countries decry the abhorrent ignorance shown by the USA, Australia, China, India, Japan and Brazil at COP25
By Matthew Green and Valerie Volcovici - 14. December 2019
MADRID, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Major economies resisted calls for bolder climate commitments as a U.N. summit in Madrid limped towards a delayed conclusion on Saturday, dimming hopes that nations will act in time to stop rising temperatures devastating people and the natural world.
With the two-week gathering spilling into the weekend, campaigners and many delegates slammed Chile, presiding over the talks, for drafting a summit text that they said risked throwing the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle global warming into reverse.
"At a time when scientists are queuing up to warn about terrifying consequences if emissions keep rising, and school children are taking to the streets in their millions, what we have here in Madrid is a betrayal of people across the world," said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a climate and energy think-tank in Nairobi.
13 insights from the front lines of human rights activism
Get ready for school - John Englart, CC BY-SA 2.0. Some rights reserved.
From localising strategies to fostering intersectionality, from taking smart risks to promoting self-care, over fifteen years of experience supporting the front lines is distilled.
Human rights as well as democratic values and institutions are under attack in many countries around the world. This makes it more important than ever that international funders and allies effectively back frontline human rights defenders. How can we do this better?
We at The Fund for Global Human Rights have spent more than fifteen years of helping activists to protect and expand civic space for activism, and to promote the participation of communities in decisions that affect them. Here’s what we have learned.
Indigenous groups rally to protect Latin America's threatened forests
From Guatemala to Peru, forest communities are coming together to find ways to more effectively prevent deforestation
The right-wing regimes in the pockets of transnational corporations as well as the Catholic Church and the numerous competing U.S.American Churches are the greatest threat to the aboriginal peoples and their natural forest habitat.
By Megan Rowling - 13. December 2019
MADRID, Dec 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Central American countries are teaming up to conserve the region's five great forests as part of a regional climate action plan released at U.N. climate talks in Madrid this week, the alliance behind the effort said.
The coalition of governments, indigenous people, green groups and others announced a plan to protect 10 million hectares of forests and degraded land inside those forests - an area roughly the size of Guatemala - by 2030.
In the last 15 years, three of the forests have been reduced by almost one-quarter in size, with illegal cattle ranching responsible for more than 90% of recent deforestation, it said.
Since decades especially healthy living Falun Gong practicioners and Uyghurs have been the target of the organ trafficking Mafia ... and the international community dos NOTHING TO STOP IT!
By Christian Peschken - 12. December 2019
A new report has for the first time named 20 global companies profiting from China’s illegal transplant trade, where innocent people are murdered in a state-sponsored campaign of forced organ harvesting.
The report, entitled the “Economics Of Organ Harvesting In China” finds:
20 western companies are “taking part” in China’s murderous organ transplant industry including Pfizer (US), OrganOx (UK) and Roche (Switzerland)
Report finds that some western pharmaceutical companies used Chinese prisoners for testing transplant products.
Prologue: Since years the work in nature protection and Indignous peopels' rights in the DRC has been nearly impossible due to the resource wars for blood-gold and other rare earth and minerals exploitation to supply the most powerful corporations worldwide. The mercenaries from the UN (MONUSCO), infamous for their sexual exploitation of local populations, thereby always served as spy- and prospecting-contingent for the countries, that send the soldiers, but since 2013 these UN-tugs have become now with their combat mandate a protection force for the exploitation operations and their respective militias. Refugees from the Eastern DRC in Uganda and Kenya bear witness to horrible crimes against humanity. The aboriginal Twa people are on the brink of extinction.
Swiss open war crimes probe into DRC mineral trade
The UN report said Huber had connections with several companies, including in Rwanda, a country that along with Uganda backed several rebel militias that fought in eastern DRC. AFP PHOTO
By AFP - 12. December 2019
In Summary
Millions of lives were lost in the 1998-2003 conflict, which also saw Ugandan and Rwandan troops enter Congolese territory.
Eastern DRC has been devastated by waves of violence, much of it blamed on rival militia, since the conflict.
Switzerland said Thursday that it had opened a war crimes investigation into possible illegal mineral trading in the Democratic Republic of Congo after activist groups filed a complaint against Swiss trader Christoph Huber.
The office of Switzerland's attorney general (OAG) refused to confirm to AFP that Huber was the target of the criminal probe opened in March 2018.
'We Are Unstoppable, Another World Is Possible!': Young Climate Activists Storm COP 25 Stage
Protesters demand world leaders at the global climate summit urgent address the planetary emergency - and were thrown out of the premises in an unprecedented affront against registered observers.
CSO protest at COP25 (Photo: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images) (official protest note below)
Young activists shout slogans on stage after Greta Thunberg (not in the picture) took part in the plenary session during the COP25 Climate Conference on December 11, 2019 in Madrid, Spain. The COP25 conference brings together world leaders, climate activists, NGOs, indigenous people and others for two weeks in an effort to focus global policy makers on concrete steps for heading off a further rise in global temperatures.
Young activists took over and occupied the main stage at the COP 25 climate conference in Madrid, Spain Wednesday and demanded world leaders commit to far more ambitious action to address the ecological emergency.
China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt are World's Worst Jailers of Journalists
A June 5, 2019, photo shows a 'media interview area' for reporters set up near the Idkah mosque on the morning of Eid al-Fitr, when Muslims around the world celebrate the end of Ramadan, in Kashgar, in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. China was the world’s leading jailer of journalists in 2019, with at least 48 in prison. (AFP/Greg Baker)
For the fourth consecutive year, at least 250 journalists are imprisoned globally as authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mohammed bin Salman, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi show no signs of letting up on the critical media.
CPJ special report by Elana Beiser (*) - 11.December 2019
NEW YORK - The number of journalists imprisoned globally for their work in 2019 remained near record highs, as China tightened its iron grip on the press and Turkey, having stamped out virtually all independent reporting, released journalists awaiting trial or appeal. Authoritarianism, instability, and protests in the Middle East led to a rise in the number of journalists locked up in the region -- particularly in Saudi Arabia, which is now on par with Egypt as the third worst jailer worldwide.
In its annual global survey, the Committee to Protect Journalists found at least 250 journalists in jail in relation to their work, compared with an adjusted 255 a year earlier. The highest number of journalists imprisoned in any year since CPJ began keeping track is 273 in 2016. After China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, the worst jailers are Eritrea, Vietnam, and Iran.
But it does not come from the governments or corporations - it comes from the people. The people, who have been unaware, but are now starting to wake up.
And once we become aware, we change. People can change. People are ready for change.
And that is the hope, because we have democracy. And democracy is happening all the time, not just on election day, but every second and every hour.
Colombia's Amazon forest gets boost with $366 million protection fund
As Brazil's government pulls back on forest protection, European money to preserve forests flows to Colombia
The lowland Amazon forest in Colombia is not subjected to the Coca wars that cause much of the deforestation in the highlands.
By Anastasia Moloney - 11. December 2019
BOGOTA, Dec 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Norway, Germany and Britain said on Thursday they would spend up to $366 million over the next five years to help Colombia reduce deforestation in its vast Amazon rainforest.
The three nations have backed Colombia's efforts to preserve forest areas covering almost 60 million hectares since 2015, with about $180 million invested so far.
"The renewal of the declaration is a recognition of Colombia's ability to reverse the deforestation trend, having achieved a 10% reduction in deforestation in 2018 compared to 2017," the countries said in a joint statement.
Urgent UN talks on tackling the climate emergency are still not addressing the true scale of the crisis, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has warned, as high-ranking ministers from governments around the world began to arriving in Madrid for the final days of negotiations.
Talks are focusing on some of the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement, but the overriding issue of how fast the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions has received little official attention.
Climate change: Oceans running out of oxygen as temperatures rise
Sharks are suffering from oxygen depletion - Image copyright IUCN
By Matt McGrath - 07. December 2019
That's the conclusion of the biggest study of its kind, undertaken by conservation group IUCN.Climate change and nutrient pollution are driving the oxygen from our oceans, and threatening many species of fish.
While nutrient run-off has been known for decades, researchers say that climate change is making the lack of oxygen worse.
Around 700 ocean sites are now suffering from low oxygen, compared with 45 in the 1960s.
UPDATE 08. December 2019: Hundreds of thousands hit the streets of Hong Kong - see underneath.
In Pictures: Thousands of Hongkongers demand halt to use of tear gas after over 10,000 rounds fired
Thousands of Hongkongers gathered in Central on Friday evening to demand the authorities halt the widespread use of tear gas in the densely populated city. Photo: InMedia.
Around 20,000 people attended the rally at Edinburgh Place, according to organisers. Demonstrators displayed placards saying “Stop tear gas” and held up their mobile phone flashlights as they chanted their demands.
The crowd shouted slogans such as “City of tear, people in fear” and “Respond to our demand, disclose the composition of the tear gas.”
A spokesperson for the movement’s Citizens’ Press Conference said that around 15 percent of 18,000 people surveyed online reported having experienced diarrhoea or stomachache after contact with tear gas.
EPILOGUE: The sick war-games in the Middle-East have destroyed the natural ecosystems in most places - pure Ecocide amid genocidal operations targeting specific ethnicities or religious groups. But the question remains, why Robert Fisk did not also reveal that "Task Force Smoking Gun" of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was overseeing all this? And why did he not also find the omnipresent British and American arms brokers? (- see a parallel line revealed underneath).
When you follow the gun trail, you sometimes end up in unexpected places
120mm mortar shells in al-Nusra propaganda video.
By Robert Fisk - 07. December 2019
I’ve always wanted to find out where the guns came from. Who were the ‘willing accomplices’ to the wars I witnessed?
In 1996, I traced to its Boeing makers in the deep south of the US a missile fired by the Israelis at a Lebanese ambulance. It killed two women and four children. I even went to Georgia and met the developers of the rocket that killed them. And in Syria, deep in the basement of a bombed Nusra-al-Qaeda headquarters in Aleppo, I found hundreds of mortars – along with their shipment documents and factory instructions. They were to be used against the Assad regime. But who had supplied them?
Even as 500,000 March in Madrid, Greta Thunberg Warns Climate Movement Has 'Achieved Nothing' Until Emissions Fall
As Greta Thunberg and other activists spoke at a rally, an estimated 500,000 people took part in a climate justice protest in Madrid on Friday, December 6, 2019. (Photo: @GretaThunberg)
"We cannot afford more days going by without real action being taken."
Before taking part in a 500,000-strong climate march in Madrid, teen activist Greta Thunberg spoke plainly yet forcefully Friday about the impact the global climate strike movement has had thus far and reiterated the demand of the climate justice movement for global leaders to act with the urgency the planet's ecological emergency mandates.
Speaking to reporters at the cultural center La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Spain—where COP 25 is underway—Thunberg called herself "just... a climate activist—a small part of a big movement" that needs even more activists to effect change.
The Plot to Discredit and Destroy Julian Assange (plus videos)
A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange demonstrates in London earlier this year. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)
A day after dozens of doctors around the world released a statement about their mounting concerns regarding Julian Assange’s health as he’s detained in a British prison, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer spoke with Tariq Ali, a renowned British journalist and co-editor of a recent collection of essays titled “In Defense of Julian Assange.” To Scheer, Ali and the book’s many contributors, the case against the WikiLeaks founder boils down to an international effort to suppress press freedoms. Yet as Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States have co-authored Assange’s downfall, many journalists and publishers, including some at The Guardian and The New York Times—two publications that published work based on WikiLeaks—have refused to defend Assange.
UPDATE 11. December 2019: 98% of the People of the Bougainiville nation voted FOR INDEPENDENCE and rejected just to be given greater autonomy from Papua New-Guinea. A wonderful start and now the friends of the Bougainville people must proof that they support the newest state on the world map. Commonwealth Observer Group confirms that Referendum on the political future of Bougainville was credible, transparent and inclusive. Supporters of a massive reforestation campaign to employ local youth, please get in contact with fPcN via .
Polls close in Bougainville referendum on independence from PNG
Two weeks of voting concludes on Pacific island chain that could kick off creation of world's newest country.
The vote is a cornerstone of a 2001 peace deal that ended a brutal decade-long war [Bougainville Referendum Commission via Reuters]
By AFP - 06. December 2019
Polls on the Pacific island chain of Bougainville have closed to end two weeks of voting in a landmark referendum on independence from Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Officials on Saturday anticipated the "vast majority" of 207,000 registered voters cast their ballots across the region and beyond, with polling stations established for Bougainvillean diaspora in Australia, the Solomon Islands and other parts of PNG.
"We won't have turnout figures until the end of the scrutiny process but during polling we witnessed long queues at polling places, we witnessed great enthusiasm," chief referendum officer Mauricio Claudio told AFP news agency. "So we anticipate a high turnout."
