'Unseen' News and Views
1 January 2021 (UNEP)*— “Both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are crises that can only be addressed by everyone together – as part of a transition to an inclusive and sustainable future,” says United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in his new year message for 2021.
He goes on to say that that the central ambition of the United Nations for 2021 is to build a global coalition for carbon neutrality – net zero emissions – by 2050.
31 December 2020 (Wall Street International)* — While the Coronavirus has rightly taken much of our attention, a fundamental geopolitical realignment has been taking shape in the world, and it will become clearer in 2021. The realignment is the start of a Second Cold War, which hopefully will not become a ‘hot’ war.
The new Cold War will be between China and the West, but it will be quite different from the one with the Soviet Union. The world has changed significantly since 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
.
On July 4, 2020, the U.S. Navy dispatched an unprecedented two aircraft carriers and four other warships to the South China Sea for naval manoeuvres in waters claimed by China. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo subsequently broke with the official U.S. policy of neutrality in territorial conflicts in the South China Sea and declared that China’s claims to most of the Sea were “completely unlawful,” though many of the disputed territories had been part of China prior to being taken over by Japan in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War.[1]
(UN News)* — The Netherlands has violated a child’s rights by registering children under the category “nationality unknown” as opposed to Stateless – leaving them ineligible to access international protections, the UN Human Rights Committee declared on Tuesday [29 December 2020].
.
“The right to nationality ensures concrete protection for individuals, in particular children”, said Committee member Shuichi Furuya.
In what they called “a ground-breaking decision”, the Committee’s first on the right of a child to acquire a nationality, the members referred to a petition by a boy named Denny, who in 2010 was born in the Dutch city of Utrecht to a 21-year-old mother from China.
The four Blackwater Worldwide contractors were prosecuted and found guilty of multiple criminal acts committed during a 2007 massacre at Nisour Square in Baghdad, which left 14 unarmed civilians dead and at least 17 wounded.
“Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families,” said Jelena Aparac, Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on the use of mercenaries.
Exploitation of workers, corruption and money-laundering, all kept in the shadows by lax regulation. Could Northern Ireland become “the new Panama”?
.
Location of Northern Ireland (dark green) – in Europe (green & dark grey) – in the United Kingdom (green) | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
(openDemocracy)* — Nikolai Sukhanov is used to flags of convenience. The flags of many nations flutter from the stern of ships on the docks and quays of Nakhodka in Russia’s far east. Owners often register their vessels thousands of miles from home, in countries with far looser regulations and restrictions than their own.
– “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.
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.
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)
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.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 