Новости за 13.04.2024

By Mark Thornton

I do not hear much talk about world population these days, the way I did growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. People were supposedly starving, dying, with tens of millions more sure to die. The problem back then was that there were just too many, well, people.

Population numbers coming out of China and India were unthinkable, and projections indicated many more people were going to be born into this dire situation. There were over twenty thousand people in my hometown and as far as everyone was concerned... Читать дальше...

As the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mohammed al-Sudani, prepares for his upcoming visit to the White House, the global spotlight turns to the evolving dynamics between Iraq and the United States. Against the backdrop of discussions surrounding the withdrawal of US forces in Iraq and the strengthening of bilateral ties, the visit presents a pivotal opportunity to underscore the burgeoning partnership between the two nations and highlight Iraq’s aspirations for economic growth and stability.

 New data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that many governments around the world did not meet public healthcare spending benchmarks amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Human Rights Watch said today. The new information indicates possible violations of countries’ obligations to the human right to health.

Governments have traditionally used targeted interventions known as industrial policy to make domestic producers more competitive or promote growth in selected industries. While some developing countries continued to use it, industrial policy fell out of favor across most of the world for years, because of its complexity and uncertain benefits.

The last seven years have been the hottest on record globally, the European Union’s climate monitoring service reported, raising alarms over sharp increases in record concentrations of methane in Earth’s atmosphere; while the world’s oceans are hotter than ever before.

By Peter Jacobsen

You probably saw the recent headlines. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a new bill that he claims will reduce weekly working hours from 40 to 32. This would move workers from needing to work five 8-hour days to only four.

But you haven’t heard the best part. You’d get paid exactly the same amount as before! Don’t believe me? Just look at what the journalists say:

• Business Insider: “Bernie Sanders wants to bring in a 4-day workweek, which would see... Читать дальше...

By Debby Chan

The legendary soccer player Lionel Messi has fallen from grace in China after not playing in a friendly match between US team Inter Miami and Hong Kong on 4 February 2024.

Inter Miami manager Gerardo Martino claimed that Messi’s absence was due to a hamstring injury. But Messi neither explained his no-show nor interacted with fans in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government and politicians immediately weighed in and demanded answers from the event organiser, Tatler Asia. Читать дальше...

By Pelbar, Tenzin Pema and Gai Tho

Authorities have begun relocating a 19th-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery in China that is expected to be submerged under water after the completion of the world’s tallest 3D-printed hydropower dam, two sources from the region told Radio Free Asia.

The expansion of the Yangqu hydropower station on the Yellow River – known as the Machu River among the Tibetans – in Qinghai province was started in 2022 and will be completed later this year. Читать дальше...

The Congress of the League of Free Nations which took place in Estonia April 6-7 provided not only many insights about the direction such groups are now moving (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/04/conference-in-estonia-brings-together.html) but also an occasion to reflect about some larger issues as well.

It is not often that a best-selling author and correspondent on consumer, food, medical, and health issues comes up with an idea for all Eaters that nobody has thought of before. Jean Carper, with sixty years of experience, has done just that with her brand-new book provocatively titled “100 Life or Death Foods: A Scientific Guide to Which Foods Prolong Life or Kill You Prematurely.”

The American activist and media critic, Norman Solomon, made me think along these lines: do we see India’s opposition parties in general, the Indian National Congress (INC), in particular, on the neoliberal side while placing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led NDA on the neofascist side? This is the distinction Norman Solomon applies to the Democrats under the leadership of Joe Biden as opposed to the Republican Party under someone like Donald Trump. 

The South China Sea is the biggest Sea in Pacific Region and it place on third in the world after Mediterranean Sea and Caribbean Sea. Its floor place covers this region receives a wonderful inflow of freshwater and International dregs mostly from mainland China. The SCS is connected with the Pacific Ocean (Niu, 2016). The importance of the SCS China lies in its contiguity to strategically important shipment ways, and in their significant fishing grounds and oil deposits (O’Rourke, 2015).

By Jason Gutierrez

The Philippines stands to reap an economic windfall through a new security partnership with the U.S. and Japan that their leaders unveiled at a Washington summit Thursday, in seeking to dull the edge of China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific.

Joe Biden, the U.S. president, hosted Philippine and Japanese leaders Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Fumio Kishida at the White House in what was billed as an inaugural tripartite summit. It came on the heels of surging Chinese... Читать дальше...

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear Palestinian and Israeli activists and leaders call out the extremists on both sides, instead of acting like the defenders of one side only.

One of the foremost accomplishments of the industrial age is the “immense progress against extreme poverty.” “Extreme poverty” is defined by the World Bank as a person living on less than $2.15 per day using 2017 prices. This figure has seen a sharp decline over the last two centuries—from almost 80 percent of the world’s population living in extreme poverty in 1820 to only about 10 percent living in these conditions by 2019. This is all the more astounding given that the population of the world is about 750 percent higher. Читать дальше...

Twenty-one years ago, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq in the erroneous belief that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction and was allied with al-Qaida, the terror group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. 

By Jonah McKeown

A new Pew Research study has found that three-quarters of Catholics in the U.S. view Pope Francis favorably, though that figure has dipped 8% since 2021. 

In addition, the Pew report suggests that a majority of Catholics in the U.S. want the Church to change its teaching on a number of key issues, including the all-male priesthood, contraception, and so-called same-sex marriage. But broken down by political affiliation, significant differences in opinion emerge. Читать дальше...

An international group of scientists, co-led by researcher Ariadna Mechó of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), observed 160 species on seamounts off the coast of Chile that had not yet been known to live in the region and suspect that at least 50 of these species are new to science. The recent Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition to the underwater mountains of the Salas y Gómez Ridge, a remote and underexplored area that stretches from offshore Chile to Rapa Nui... Читать дальше...