RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 28 2020 (IPS)* – “We are no longer familiar with the Xingú River,” whose waters govern “our way of life, our income, our food and our navigation,” lamented Bel Juruna, a young indigenous leader from Brazil´s Amazon rainforest.|En español
The main plant of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant has a capacity of 11,000 megawatts, to which 233 more megawatts are added from the secondary plant. The complex cost twice the initial budget, equivalent to more than 10 billion dollars when it was built. It also faces difficulties such as the delay in the construction of the transmission line that will carry energy to the southeast of Brazil, inefficiency in generation and higher than expected social and environmental costs. CREDIT: Marcos Corrêa/PR-Agência Brasil
“The water is no longer at its normal, natural level, it is controlled by the floodgates,” she explained. The giant floodgates are managed by Norte Energia, a public-private consortium that owns the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant whose interest is using the river flow for profit.
There are significant factors directly associated with too much weight gain
Children as young as five years old are getting overweight or obese | Image from Wall Street International.
25 December 2019 (Wall Street International)* — Obesity and overweight were once conditions that concerned only high-income families in developed countries. But, sooner than later, these also became the problem among the middle and low-income groups in developing nations. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of obese and overweight worldwide has increased almost triple times since 1975.
30 December 2020 (UN News)* — Powerful digital tools using artificial intelligence (AI) software are helping in the fight against COVID-19, and have the potential to improve the world in many other ways. However, as AI seeps into more areas of daily life, it’s becoming clear that its misuse can lead to serious harm, leading the UN to call for strong, international regulation of the technology.
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ITU T | The UN is drawing up international rules governing the use of AI
The phrase “artificial intelligence” can conjure up images of machines that are able to think, and act, just like humans, independent of any oversight from actual, flesh and blood people. Movies versions of AI tend to feature super-intelligent machines attempting to overthrow humanity and conquer the world.
“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.” — Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993)
Why Are Economists Addicted to Growth?
John Scales Avery
Economists (with a few notable exceptions) have long behaved as though growth were synonymous with economic health.
If the gross national product of a country increases steadily by 4 percent per year, most economists express approval and say that the economy is healthy. If the economy could be made to grow still faster (they maintain), it would be still healthier. If the growth rate should fall, economic illness would be diagnosed.
However, it is obvious that on a finite Earth, neither population growth nor economic growth can continue indefinitely.
29 December 2020 (UN News)* — In part four of our review of the global impact of COVID-19, UN News considers the new challenges faced by refugees and migrants during 2020; from a heightened risk of catching the COVID-19 virus in crowded camps, to being stranded due to travel restrictions, and becoming the targets of criminal gangs.
28 December 2020 (UN News)* — An increase in violence against women in India during the global COVID-19 outbreak has been described by the United Nations as a “shadow pandemic”.
UNDP | UN officials say that gender-based violence is a “shadow pandemic,” hidden beneath COVID-19.
Many women, who have been forced to stay at home due to lockdown measures, have been cut off from support services and have suffered at the hands of abusive partners.
In Assam, in tea-growing country in the northeast of India, women are now getting help from groups supported by the UN.
Read More e here about how women are empowering themselves to confront gender-based violence.
28 December 2020 (UN News)* — United Nations agencies and humanitarian partners have called on authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to act urgently to help hundreds of migrants, stranded and without shelter, amid freezing winter temperatures.
IOM 2020/Ervin Causevic | A migrant at what remains of the Lipa Emergency Tent Camp in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, after it was destroyed in a fire.
Every day is critical in the pastoralists’ fight to save their ecosystems and way of life from the military training ground.
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Preparation for military training in September 2019, highlands of Sinjajevina | Image: Ministry of the Defense of Montenegro
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(openDemocracy)* — While all eyes were focused on elections in the US, few noticed that a new government was to be sworn in in Montenegro. Shepherds and villagers of the Sinjajevina-Durmitor mountain range, the biggest mountain grassland in the Balkans and second biggest in Europe, looked with hope to the new government as they are fighting to preserve their traditional lands and ways of life.
A military training ground supported and fueled by NATO has been operating since 2019 on their lands, which for millennia have served as pasture to local communities living in the area.
Laetitia Bader, Human Rights Watch’s Horn of Africa Director, recently returned from a research mission in Sudan to interview refugees who fled the fighting that broke out in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in early November 2020. For several weeks, federal government forces, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), and their allies clashed with forces and militia allied to Tigray’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), in response to what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed described as attacks by TPLF forces on federal military bases and forces in the region. The conflict has taken a heavy toll on the region’s civilian population. Here, Bader describes her impressions and some of Human Rights Watch’s initial findings.
What were your first impressions of the impact of this conflict on civilians?
Beverly L. Longid is the Global Coordinator of International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL). Beverly is an indigenous Igorot belonging to the Bontok-Kankanaeys tribe from Sagada, Mountain Province in the Philippines. She is also the International Officer of Katribu – National Alliance of Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines, and Co-Chair of CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness. The IPMSDL Global Secretariat is currently based in Quezon City, Philippines.
Indigenous Peoples, advocates and members of IPMSDL call for continuing struggle for self-determination to combat imperialist plunder and state-terror. Credit: Carlo Manalansan, International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL)
QUEZON CITY, Philippines, Dec 17 2020 (IPS)* – Rights are earned through hard-fought struggles. And for Indigenous Peoples (IP), its fulfillment comes from the collective and continuous defense of ancestral land and territory, and assertion of their ways of life and the right to self-determination.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 