26/02/2020
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 25 2020 (IPS)* – Meeting the President of the Republic of Korea in September 2019, President Donald J Trump bragged that the “US economy is the envy of the world”. Trump reiterated such claims in his State of the Union address in early February, hailing his own policies with typical humility.
Trump touted US economic success at the Davos World Economic Forum in January as “nothing short of spectacular”, asserting “I’m proud to declare the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
Facts hardly matter
To the contrary, US economic growth slowed after Trump started the ‘trade war’ with China, dropping from 3.5% in the second quarter of 2018 to 2.1% in the last quarter of 2019, much less than the 5.5% per annum peak in the second quarter of 2014 during the Obama presidency.
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26/02/2020
25 February 2020 (UN Environment)* — “We know that we cannot continue to use resources as if they were unlimited. We must think about the recycling of materials, the decreasing of our resources use, and we must concretely support the valorisation of materials,” said Willy Borsus, Vice-President of the Belgian Walloon Region.
Photo by Kim Eriksson/Flickr
Worldwide material consumption has expanded rapidly, as has material footprint per capita. In 1990, some 8.1 tonnes of natural resources were used to satisfy a person’s need, while in 2017, almost 12.2 tonnes of resources were extracted per person.
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25/02/2020
There is no scarcity of literature in this field, much of it permutations around the basic core of “I am of course against war, but – -”. So let it be clear from the outset that the present author is against war, there being no “but”.
Johan Galtung
War as an institution to resolve conflict is an abomination, like slavery and colonialism as institutions. Occasional war, slavery and colonialism are probably hard to eliminate.
But the key word is institution, legitimized by social norms and mores.
A doctrine of just war is designed to do exactly that, offer a legitimation, for instance by seeing the evil of war as something that can be outweighed by possible positive consequences. But all human activity carries in its wake something good and something bad, weighing one against the other we can justify anything, like justifying Hitler with the Autobahnen.
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25/02/2020
24 February 2020 (UN News)* — Because the production of everything we eat transforms the environment, the United Nations agriculture chief told a high-level UN meeting on biodiversity that careful discussions are needed to decide on the scale of acceptable transformations.
UNDP | Mayra Monge has dedicated much of her life to researching and planting native trees in the verdant biodiverse powerhouse of Costa Rica.
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25/02/2020
(UN News)* — While a sudden increase in new cases of COVID-19 is of concern, the spread of coronavirus is not yet a pandemic, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 24 February 2020.
Man Yi | The movement of people in Shenzhen in China, is being strictly controlled during t the coronavirus outbreak.
“Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely, it has. Are we there yet? From our assessment, not yet,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva.
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25/02/2020
(UN News)* — Cheap and easily accessible small arms are increasingly becoming the “weapon of choice” for many terrorist groups, the UN counter-terrorism chief told an event on Friday [21 February 2020] aimed to raise awareness of the nexus between terrorism, organized crime and illicit small arms trafficking.
UN Office of Counter-Terrorism | Director of the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism, Under Secretary-General Vladimir Voronkov presents the project “Preventing and combatting the illicit trafficking of small-arms and light weapons and their illicit supply to terrorists” – addressing the terrorism-arms-crime nexus.
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24/02/2020
The Taliban remain strong despite everything the US is throwing at them – but how serious is Trump about a peace deal?
20 February 2020 (openDemocracy)* — The US and the Taliban have agreed that they would like to hold a seven-day ceasefire. The chances of it actually happening varies by the day, and it’s not clear whether Donald Trump and those close to him do genuinely want a deal.
Beyond those hurdles, however, could a short-term ceasefire open into a lasting peace – one that brings stability while ensuring respect for human rights?
From the US perspective, the war is low profile but extraordinarily intense. The country’s armed forces are dropping many more bombs than a decade ago, when they had many more boots on the ground.
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24/02/2020
24 February 2020 (Wall Street International)* — In previous articles, I discussed the importance of eating little or no meat (especially beef)1-3.
Unfortunately, the food industry is a powerful force working against this idea. Clever marketing continues to increase the demand for mass-produced beef throughout the world.
So, it’s especially disappointing when news agencies publish headlines like this one: “Vegan and Plant-Based Diets Worsen Brain Health”4.
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24/02/2020
KATHMANDU, Feb 21 2020 (IPS)* – A major discrepancy between Nepal government and foreign records of the number of Nepali children adopted in North America and Europe has exposed a trafficking ring that involves various child welfare agencies in Kathmandu.
The Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens has records of only 64 children from Nepal sent for adoption to ten western countries from 2010 to 2019. However, a list submitted to the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) by the US Department of State and the nine other countries reveals that 242 Nepali children were taken for adoption in those nine years.
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