Simultaneously, as awareness over its horrific health and privacy impacts is rising, many places are issuing moratoriums on it or banning it, such as the entire nation of Belgium, the city of Vaud (Switzerland) and San Francisco (USA).
Radiofrequency radiation (RF or RFR) and electromagnetic fields (EMF) are being increasingly recognized as new types of pollution – environmental pollution.
Here are 13 reasons exposing the 5G dangers, which could turn into an unmitigated health and privacy catastrophe if enough people don’t rise up to stop it.
Comprising one-fifth of the earth’s population, China consumes more than a third of the fish pulled from the planet’s waters. With its demand outpacing supply, fisheries from China have joined other nations and set their eyes and their nets on African waters without concern for sovereignty or law.
Africans struggling to emerge from poverty are paying the price for these predations. Mozambique alone has lost 300,000 badly-needed jobs and as much as $3.3 billion in revenue – 10 times the amount East African nations make in legally licensing fishing by foreign vessels, according to the non-profit Stop Illegal Fishing.
Newly published aerial surveys—out just weeks after the country lifted its hunting ban—indicate that poaching is on the rise in Botswana.
Botswana, which has a strong history of wildlife conservation, is home to about a third of Africa’s savanna elephants. Photograph by Beverly Joubert, Nat Geo Image Collection AnimalsWildlife Watch
By Dina Fine Maron (*) - NatGeo - 13. June 2019
Botswana—widely considered a safe haven for elephants in Africa—appears to be suffering from its own surge in poaching, according to aerial survey work published today in the journal Current Biology.“We have a significant poaching problem—let’s deal with it,” says Mike Chase, who, as the director of the Botswana-based nonprofit Elephants Without Borders, led the latest aerial survey study as well as earlier elephant counts, including the 18-country Great Elephant Census.“We were warned by conservationists in other countries that the poachers would eventually come down to Botswana, and now they’re here,” he says.Botswana is estimated to be home to more than 130,000 savanna elephants—about a third of Africa’s remaining population. Until recently, the southern African country had largely escaped the scourge of elephant killings for ivory, still in high demand in China and elsewhere. (Read about how elephants fleeing poaching hotspots went to Botswana.
Study investigates how much climate change affects the risk of armed conflict
Climate-related hazards, such as droughts, can cause economic shocks to agricultural communities, which may heighten the risk of armed conflict, according to a new Stanford-led study. Credit: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam
Intensifying climate change will increase the future risk of violent armed conflict within countries, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. Synthesizing views across experts, the study estimates climate has influenced between 3% and 20% of armed conflict risk over the last century and that the influence will likely increase dramatically.
In a scenario with 4 degrees Celsius of warming (approximately the path we're on if societies do not substantially reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases), the influence of climate on conflicts would increase more than five times, leaping to a 26% chance of a substantial increase in conflict risk, according to the study. Even in a scenario of 2 degrees Celsius of warming beyond preindustrial levels—the stated goal of the Paris Climate Agreement¬ - the influence of climate on conflicts would more than double, rising to a 13% chance.
The Pentagon is the “single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” according to a new study about climate change that accuses the Trump administration of being in “various modes of denial” about it.
The report, from Brown University’s ‘Costs of War’ project, focuses specifically on "post-9/11 wars" and their impact on emissions. It estimates the US military has been responsible for 1,212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017. Emissions from “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria accounted for more than 400 million metric tons of CO2. In 2017 alone, the report says, “the Pentagon's emissions were greater than all emissions from Sweden or Denmark.”
Eight women and men from the Kimadi people stand, crouch or sit on the hard ground, knotty with exposed tree roots, enjoying the relative cool offered by a verdant canopy of leaves overhead. Just a few metres away, the quiet clear waters of a Bismarck Sea lagoon, filled with small schools of striped tropical fish, lap against the grassy bank. The setting is tranquil and bucolic – but not for the Kimadi, who have travelled from their traditional territory in Madang province in Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific to consult with an NGO, the Bismarck Ramu Group (BRG). Founded in 1996 and headquartered just outside the town of Madang, BRG provides consulting services and advice to Indigenous groups like the Kimadi who are fighting ever-growing threats from logging and palm oil development on their lands.
Zimbabwe May Withdraw From Endangered-Species Deal to Sell $300 Million of Ivory
A Zimbabwe National Parks game ranger holds an elephant ivory tusk in the country's ivory vault in Harare, on June 2, 2016.Photographer: Jekesai Njikizana /AFP via Getty Images
By Ray Ndlovu
Frustration is growing over sales ban, wildlife chief says
Japan has shown interest in buying country’s stockpile
Zimbabwe may consider withdrawing from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) because the organization won’t allow it to sell its ivory stockpile.
The southern African nation with the world second-largest population of elephants has a stockpile of tusks worth an estimated $300 million and needs the revenue, Fulton Mangwanya, director-general of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, told lawmakers in the capital, Harare on Monday.
While CITES has banned international ivory sales to curb poaching, frustration is growing over the fact that “other countries are prescribing how we should handle our animals,” Mangwanya told a parliamentary committee on environment and tourism. Withdrawing from CITES would have the support of neighbors Botswana, Zambia and Namibia, which all have large elephant populations of their own, he said.
President Jair Bolsonaro appears intent on decriminalizing Amazon deforestation, ending most fines, straitjacketing law enforcement, and gutting environmental agencies with mass firings. by Sue Branford and Thais Borges on 10 June 2019
The Bolsonaro administration has launched policies that undermine IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, and ICMBio (The Chico Mendes Institute) which protects the nation’s federal conservation units, by effectively dismantling environmental law enforcement and allowing deforestation to proceed unchecked.
Fines imposed for illegal deforestation between Jan. 1 and May 15 this year were down 34 percent from the same period in 2018, the largest percentage drop ever recorded. It was also smallest number of fines ever imposed (850), compared to 1,290 in the same period last year.
Government seizures of illegally harvested timber fell even more precipitously, with just 40 cubic meters (1,410 cubic feet), equal to 10 large trees, confiscated in the first four months of 2019. By contrast, 25,000 cubic meters (883,000 cubic feet) of illegal timber were seized in 2018. IBAMA is now required to announce in advance the time and location of all its planned raids on illegal loggers.
Bolsonaro has defanged deforestation enforcement further by firing or not replacing top environmental officials. This includes 21 out of 27 IBAMA state superintendents responsible for imposing most of the deforestation fines. Also, 47 of Brazil’s conservation units now lack directors, leaving a combined area greater than the size of England without conservation leadership.
Terrestrial wildlife is being hunted for consumption by humans in the tropics at an unprecedented rate, and the often unsustainable nature of this harvest has profound implications not only for biodiversity and ecosystem function, but also for human livelihoods. Whilst the nature and impacts of this practice have been studied in numerous contexts and localities, a comprehensive treatment of the social, economic, and environmental determinants of both hunter decision-making and hunting outcomes has been lacking. In this review we discuss influences of hunting methods and effort on the types of animals caught, the efficiency of harvest, and the implications of these factors for sustainability. We highlight gaps in current understanding, and identify the most important data requirements. Our approach provides a framework for the design of future studies into wild meat hunting and its impacts, promoting the efficient targeting of priority areas of research.
Consumers should avoid yellowfin tuna caught in the Indian Ocean because the stock is being overfished and is at risk of collapse, campaigners say.
A report from Blue Marine Foundation said nearly 700 tonnes of mostly fresh or frozen yellowfin tuna is being sold in the UK each year, without customers being told that the fish is unsustainably caught.
While yellowfin stocks in the Western and Central Pacific are strong, tuna in the Indian Ocean is "overfished and at risk of collapse", according to the conservation charity.
For months we’ve seen supporters of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks stressing out about the question, “What can I do?” Vos has put together the most thorough answer to that question that we have seen thus far, and everyone should read and be aware of it.
Image Somerset Bean
By Elizabeth Lea Vos - 07. June 2019
One of the most common questions we receive during the weekly Unity4J vigils goes something like: “how can I help? I feel powerless” or “what can I do?”
While it is impossible to provide a comprehensive list of all possible actions, I am creating this basic inventory of examples and ideas to provide some kind of answer for those who ask similar questions now and in the future. The following is my own opinion and is not endorsed by anyone outside of myself.
Join in at a vigil/protest in your area, especially if you are in the UK. You can find vigil times and locations in the UK via Wiseupaction.info, and in locations around the globe via the Socialist Equality Party, Unity4J and many others.
$180 million DNA ‘barcode’ project aims to discover 2 million new species
On Borneo during a 2018 expedition to find new species, evolutionary biologist Marta Paterno of the University of Verona in Italy prepares samples for a portable DNA sequencer (center, right of laptop). PIERRE ESCOUBAS/TAXON EXPEDITIONS 2018
For centuries biologists have identified new species at a painstakingly slow pace, describing specimens' physical features and other defining traits, and often trying to fit a species into the tree of life before naming and publishing it. Now, they have begun to determine whether a specimen is likely a novel species in hours—and will soon do so at a cost of pennies. It's a revolution driven by short stretches of DNA—dubbed barcodes in a nod to the familiar product identifiers—that vary just enough to provide species-distinguishing markers, combined with fast, cheap DNA sequencers.
"Biodiversity science is entering a very golden era," says Paul Hebert of the University of Guelph in Canada. On 16 June, a team he leads will launch a $180 million global effort to identify more than 2 million new species of multicellular creatures. Other teams are also adopting the approach to comb samples for new species in their labs—or even directly in the field. With the world losing species faster than they are discovered, biologists are welcoming the technology.
Gina Haspel aka "Bloody Gina" is at the core of the U.S.American clandestine atrocities worldwide together with Donald Trump, John Bolton and former CIA-Director and Mike "WeLieWeStealWeCheat" Pompeo - the present Secretary of State - as well as for Venezula convictd but patdoned war-criminal Elliot Abrams.
A Wall Street Journal report (5/25/19) by Warren Strobel whitewashed CIA Director Gina Haspel’s career and put a positive spin on the CIA’s insulation from public accountability with its turn towards its greatest opacity “in decades.”
While one might expect CIA officials to support greater secrecy around the organization, it’s odd that ostensibly independent journalists—with a mission to hold official organizations accountable by informing the public—would treat less information coming from the agency as a positive development.
Yet that’s exactly what the Journal report did, depicting Haspel’s strategy of avoiding backlash from the Trump administration by not publicly contradicting its dubious claims as “protecting the agency” from “the domestic threat of a toxic US political culture.”
“She and her agency have adopted their lowest public profile in decades,” Strobel writes—just before summing her up as a “CIA director who has been warmly received by the workforce she has spent her life among.”
After Assange’s Espionage Act Indictment, Police Move Against More Journalists for Publishing Classified Material
Neo-Imperium consists of 5 Eyes USA, CDN, AU, NZ, UK, whereby additionally through the USA all NATO states and through the UK all Commonwealth states are embedded. First they came for Assange ...
Less than two months after the arrest of journalist Julian Assange, and two weeks after his indictment under the U.S. Espionage Act, emboldened governments have sent the police after journalists who’ve challenged the state. Joe Lauria reports.
If there is only little food or medicine due to an economic blockade, prospects even in good social housing projects can look bleek. A view of Caracas, Venezuela. Aaron Anton / Flickr
As media and political figures cheer on regime change for the sake of the Venezuelan people, they say nothing about the sanctions that are killing ordinary Venezuelans.
CNN correspondent Frida Ghitis had some advice for the Trump administration on Venezuela as she stated her agreement with the president’s policy in the country: “The United States should refrain from intervening militarily,” she affirmed, “but should continue providing decisive diplomatic, and even logistical, support.” Who can argue with that?
Well, for one, the many Venezuelans who have already died from such “diplomatic support.” What Ghitis doesn’t say out loud is that she, like the rest of the political and media establishment, is backing the administration’s economic sanctions, that time-honored tool of diplomacy viewed in the political circles of DC as a “limited,” non-violent alternative to war.
Here’s Why You Should Choose Empathy, Even When It’s Hard
Courtesy of romualdi / Shutterstock
The stress and burnout epidemic impacts our health, our job performance, and even our empathy.
In an excerpt from Jamil Zaki's book, The War for Kindness," he writes how even the most caring people can become "callous when overwhelmed."
Being busy can make us forget what matters. Here’s some perspective.
ByJamil Zaki, Author of The War for Kindness - 04. June 2019
Even when empathy doesn’t feel good, we know it can make us look good. If Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, or Jesus are any indication, compassion and generosity are the clearest signs of virtue. When people must establish their moral bona fides, they turn to empathic actions.
