Winston Churchill told the Peel Commission in 1937:
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race… has come in and taken their place”.
27 June 2020 (Wall Street International)* — When making an online purchase, any reputable website will require a secure HTTPS connection before requesting payment information and completing the transaction. This is the method used by browsers and websites to securely exchange sensitive data. Its underlying encryption uses digital certificates and strong encryption to create a secure tunnel between a web browser and a web server.
28 June 2020 (Greenpeace International)*— Last month, Russia suffered one of the worst environmental disasters in its history when an oil spill at the Nornickel plant spewed thousands of tonnes of oil into land and water in Taimyr, Siberia, turning the Ambarnaya River red. It is possibly second in scale only to the 1994 Komi pipeline spill, which was by some estimates over eight times bigger in volume than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989.
AYACUCHO, Peru, Jun 29 2020 (IPS)* – A communally built small dam at almost 3,500 meters above sea level supplies water to small-scale farmer Cristina Azpur and her two young daughters in Peru’s Andes highlands, where they face water shortages exacerbated by climate change. | En español
Local residents of Churia, a village of some 25 families at more than 3,100 meters above sea level in the highlands of the Peruvian department of Ayacucho, are building simple dikes to fill ponds with water to irrigate their crops, water their animals and consume at home. CREDIT: Courtesy of Huñuc Mayu
FAO Director-General outlines the path to restore 100 million hectares from Dakar to Djibouti by 2030
A tree nursery in Senegal.
Rome (FAO)* – It is time for coordination and renewed support for the Great Green Wall, Africa’s landmark sustainable development programme, FAO Director-General QU Dongyu on 25 June 2020 stressed.
“We have to promote sustainable eco-economies. Restoration and associated livelihood benefits must be scaled up,” Qu said to heads of United Nations agencies and other multilateral entities at a round table on how to roll out a project that spans 8,000 kilometers and aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded landscapes by 2030.
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Cuba has sent doctors and nurses to over 21 nations across the world including South Africa, Italy, Honduras, Cape Verde, Suriname, and across the Caribbean.
The Henry Reeve International Contingents, specialized in disaster situations and epidemics, are made up of doctors, nurses, and specialists. | Photo: CSC
28 June 2020 (teleSUR)* — The Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom called Sunday for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to the Cuban international medical brigades that are fighting the coronavirus pandemic in many countries across the world.
ILO/Marcel Crozet | Two workers on a construction site in Pokhara, Nepal.
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A project run by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, IFAD, which was already in place before the pandemic, developing enterprises in rural areas of Nepal, is now providing a range of services for migrants, forced to return home..These include repatriation for workers stranded overseas, matching job-seekers with available jobs within the country, helping them to find other income-generating activities, and providing technical and vocational training.
28 June 2020 (IWGIA)* — Spending time with the Baka, as we have both done over several years, is a humbling experience. This group of over 40,000 spread between the forests of Cameroon, the Republic of Congo and Gabon, practice hunting and foraging as a traditional livelihood. Through their long history in the Congo Basin they have accumulated and passed on extensive ecological knowledge and sophisticated cultural mechanisms of egalitarianism, sharing and human-nature conviviality.
Despite (or because of) this rich cultural heritage, the Baka, and hunter-gatherers around the world, have consistently been forced into categories of ‘primitive’ and ‘uncultured’ by neighbouring agriculturalist communities, national governments and some international actors.
Our total human population and economy have imposed on the global environment an excessive weight.
Malthus’ Essay on the principle of population
27 June 2020 (Wall Street International)* — T.R. Malthus’ Essay on the principle of population, the first edition of which was published in 1798, was one of the first systematic studies of the problem of population in relation to resources. Earlier discussions of the problem had been published by Botero in Italy, Robert Wallace in England, and Benjamin Franklin in America.
As academics, we teach about empire, slavery and colonialism because without them, the world makes no sense.
The Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford, UK – 9 Jun 2020 | SOPA Images/SIPA USA/PA Images
27 June 2020 (openDemocracy)* — Observing the protests against racism in the streets of the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere feels like watching not only a mass movement, but also a classroom, crackling with intellectual energy.