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“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/44844533

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5669661

updated as of yesterday (July 21): based on a statistical model developed by a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet, Israel has killed roughly 434,800 people in Gaza since the country’s military started to attack the territory on 8 October 2023. That’s 20.7% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population dead. Over half are women and children.

archive.is link

In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

The first stage of applications was open from June 16 to July 18. “We received extremely high levels of interest in the ballot with 8,750 registrations, which includes family members of primary registrants,” the Australian High Commission in Tuvalu said in a statement on July 23. The first cohort of 280 people will be drawn via a ballot on July 25, the high commission says.

“When combined with other Pacific pathways to Australia and New Zealand, nearly 4 percent of the population could migrate each year,” says Jane McAdam, a fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, writing in the Conversation. “Within a decade, close to 40 percent of the population could have moved—although some people may return home or go backwards and forwards.”

Ghislaine Maxwell meets again with Todd Blanche, Trump's former lawyer, as the Epstein case continues. After two days of interrogations, Maxwell reportedly gave up 100 persons of interest. Is another chapter about to begin in this legal drama?

“Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sex-trafficking sentence meets for a second time with Donald Trump's criminal lawyer turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to see if the FBI and the Justice Department might have also needed her to commit suicide. Maxwell's lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, saying after the interrogations, Ghislaine Maxwell gave up 100 persons of interest. But the New York Times cautions that those 100 people could be a combination of victims, accomplices and other men who sexually abuse the victims.

This, as Speaker Mike Johnson, shuts down the entire House of Representatives for the summer insisting he will not be bullied by Democrats into forcing a vote on demanding to see the Epstein files. Instead, Mike Johnson prefers getting bullied by Donald Trump into buying more time before the White House can figure out how to bury this story. Perhaps bombing the Middle East again?”

The ICJ’s advisory opinion for the first time gives the Pacific and all vulnerable communities a legal mechanism to hold states accountable and to demand the climate action long overdue.

In the landmark opinion published on Wednesday, the court said countries must prevent harm to the climate system and that failing to do so could result in their having to pay compensation and make other forms of restitution. It says states are liable for all kinds of activities that harm the climate, but it takes explicit aim at fossil fuels.

For a young Pacific woman at the forefront of this global fight, this win wasn’t just political, it was personal. And it was history.

“We were there. And we were heard,” she said.

The group of students all hailed from Pacific island countries that are among the most vulnerable in the world to the climate crisis. They came up with the idea of changing international law by getting the world’s highest court to issue an advisory opinion on the climate crisis.

The campaign was led by the nation of Vanuatu, a Pacific state of about 300,000 people that sits at the forefront of the climate crisis and has been ranked by the United Nations as the country most prone to natural disasters.

@news Russia: Navy parade cancelled due to “security reasons"

OK conspiracy theorists get your tin foil hats on and tell me why.

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rationalreviewnewsdigest@social.freetalklive.com
URL: social.freetalklive.com/@ratio…
RE: social.freetalklive.com/users/…

“Ladies and gentlemen, it's understandable, if not excusable, that the felon-in-chief is trying to distract us, you, me, everybody else, Republicans, Democrats, MAGA people, from the metastasizing story regarding Jeffrey Epstein. But he's trying to distract us with the wrong things.

Clearly, the 2020 election was rigged. Obama was somehow a traitor. He tried that.

These aren't working, because they're old. Much like the fel— No, sorry. That's ageist.

But I'd like to help out by suggesting one thing he could distract us with, if he cared to. There have been reports this week, there was one on CNN, of famine in Afghanistan. There was a report on the BBC this week, of famine in Gaza.

And there have been reports, from several other international media, that there's a famine in South Sudan. There's famine all over the world, ladies and gentlemen, in the 21st century. Our attention could be directed to that.”

Communications have been restored and the Freedom Flotilla ship Handala remains en route and on mission to challenge the blockade of Gaza. 19 Human Rights Defenders and 2 Journalists from 12 countries are on board.

Gaza is on the brink of running out of the specialised therapeutic food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children, United Nations and humanitarian agencies say.

”We are now facing a dire situation, that we are running out of therapeutic supplies,” Salim Oweis, a spokesperson for Unicef in Amman, Jordan, told Reuters on Thursday, saying supplies of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a crucial treatment, would be depleted by mid-August if nothing changed.

”That’s really dangerous for children as they face hunger and malnutrition at the moment,” he added.

Oweis said Unicef had only enough RUTF left to treat 3,000 children. In the first two weeks of July alone, Unicef treated 5,000 children facing acute malnutrition in Gaza.

Nutrient-dense, high-calorie RUTF supplies, such as high-energy biscuits and peanut paste enriched with milk powder, are critical for treating severe malnutrition.

”Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,” a World Health Organization spokesperson said on Thursday.

Ngl, terrifying stuff. What's gonna be banned?

Being surrounded and yelled at about “misrepresenting reality” is not how serious United Nations-hosted negotiations are meant to proceed. But that is what happened to Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth during talks about a global treaty to slash plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada. The employees of a large US chemicals company “formed a ring” around her, she says.

At another event in Ottawa, Carney Almroth was “harassed and intimidated” by a plastic packaging representative, who barged into the room and shouted that she was fearmongering and pushing misinformation. That meeting was an official event organised by the UN. “So I filed the harassment reports with the UN,” said Carney Almroth. “The guy had to apologise, and then he left the meeting. He was at the next meeting.”

“That was one example when I filed an official report,” said Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. “But I’ve been harassed and intimidated lots of other times, in lots of other contexts, at off-site meetings, at side events, also at scientific conferences, via email and so on.”

She has also had to take measures to avoid surveillance at the meetings. “I have a privacy screen protector on my phone, because they will walk behind us and try to film what’s on our screens and see what notes we’re taking, or who we’re chatting with. I would never open my computer in the middle of a room without knowing who is behind me. It’s a high-vigilance, high-stress environment.”

Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party that has long served as kingmaker in Israeli politics, announced that it would bolt the government over disagreements surrounding a proposed law that would enshrine broad military draft exemptions for its constituents — the second ultra-Orthodox governing party to do so this week.

“In this current situation, it’s impossible to sit in the government and to be a partner in it,” Shas Cabinet minister Michael Malkieli said in announcing the party’s decision.

But Shas said it would not undermine Netanyahu’s coalition from the outside and could vote with it on some legislation, granting Netanyahu a lifeline in what would otherwise make governing almost impossible and put his lengthy rule at risk.

Once their resignations come into effect, Netanyahu’s coalition will have 50 seats in the 120-seat parliament.

Covers what we know about the Air India 171 accident. Includes information from the interum report.

On July 2, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1518 in British Columbia announced that more than 500 Uber drivers in Greater Victoria have unionized.

This historic decision follows months of organizing among drivers and marks the first ever union certification of app-based drivers in Canada.

Uber only began operating in Victoria in June 2023 and recently expanded its service across B.C.

UFCW 1518 is the province’s largest private sector union local, representing more than 28,000 workers in the retail, grocery, health care and cannabis industries.

The mega-local has made significant organizing breakthroughs over the past several years. After successfully unionizing the B.C. cannabis sector, 1518 also secured representation for nearly 400 temporary foreign agricultural workers at Highline Mushrooms farms in Langley and Abbotsford. This was the largest group of agricultural workers ever to organize in Canadian history and a major development in the struggle for temporary foreign worker rights.

Mar Menor, a 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) lagoon in southern Spain, is the only ecosystem in Europe that can be named a victim in a legal case. In September 2022, the Spanish Senate granted the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean legal personhood. From then on, any human who wanted to help Mar Menor could represent it in court.

For those in the budding Rights of Nature movement, who recognize the planet and all its ecosystems as living beings with inalienable rights, the Mar Menor victory was a breakthrough. The first body of water in Europe granted legal personhood, the move caught the region up to similar legal successes elsewhere, such as with Colombia’s Atrato River in 2016 and New Zealand’s Whanganui River in 2017.

Protection for Mar Menor came after a series of mass die-offs ravaged the ecosystem. In 2016, excessive nutrient runoff triggered a massive algal bloom that turned parts of the lagoon a misty green and killed 85 percent of its marine vegetation. Then in 2019, and again in 2021, nutrient runoff stripped the lagoon of oxygen, suffocating thousands of fish and crustaceans, and littering its shores with creatures gasping for air.

Spurred by the crises, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents banded together. They collected around 640,000 signatures and, in 2022, successfully pushed a citizen initiative through the Spanish parliament’s upper chamber. Their efforts resulted in a new law granting Mar Menor and its surrounding basin rights in every sense of the word: the right to live and flourish; the right to be protected; and the right to recover. The law’s Article 6 was particularly groundbreaking. It stated that any person or relevant legal entity “is entitled to defend the ecosystem of the Mar Menor.”

“The right to recovery is no longer something that depends on a ministry wanting to do it, but it is a right of the Mar Menor,” says Teresa Vicente. A law professor at the nearby University of Murcia, Vicente earned the Goldman Environmental Award, often called the Green Nobel, for the key role she played in driving the initiative and writing the law that gives personhood to Mar Menor.

But three years on, Mar Menor is still waiting for humans to act on their promises. So I visited this famous coastal lagoon—the name of which translates to Minor Sea—and chatted with some of its protectors to find out what was happening on the ground.

Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, has condemned the installation of new plaques in Poland at the site of the Jedwabne pogrom, during which hundreds of Jews were burned alive in World War Two.

It says that the inscriptions – which were installed as part of a crowdfunded alternative memorial and not by any official body – “falsify history” by trying to absolve Poles of blame for the massacre.

On Wednesday, Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish newspaper, reported that seven large boulders had been placed near the official Jedwabne memorial.

The objects had appeared there shortly before today’s commemoration of the 84th anniversary of the pogrom, which occurred when Poland was under Nazi-German occupation.

Official findings by Poland’s state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) have established that the direct perpetrators of the massacre were ethnic Poles who lived in the area. But it also noted that broader responsibility for the crime rested with the German occupiers.

However, many in Poland – in particular on the political right – question those findings, arguing that the pogrom was entirely the work of the Germans and claiming that the tragedy has been used as part of efforts to falsely shift blame onto Poles for Holocaust crimes.

One of the newly installed plaques reads, in Polish and English, that “evidence and witness accounts disprove the claims of Polish perpetration of the murder of Jews in Jedwabne…In reality, this crime was committed by a German unit”.

Another says that the fact Poland disappeared from the map of Europe for 123 years between 1795 and 1918 was “an unimaginable tragedy for Poles…[but] a source of satisfaction for many Jews”.

A further one says that, in the interwar period, “many Jews openly sympathised with communism, identified with the Soviets, who were hostile to Poland”, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

The newspaper notes that Wojciech Sumliński – an author who has written books questioning the official findings regarding Jedwabne – spoke two years ago about installing such plaques as part of an alternative “monument” that would recognise the “truth” about Jedwabne.

Sumliński himself confirmed on Wednesday in a social media post that he was behind the new installation, which was paid for through a crowdfunding campaign. On Thursday, he and a large crowd of supporters gathered for the official opening of the new memorial, marking the occasion with a Catholic mass.

On Thursday, Yad Vashem issued a statement saying that it is “profoundly shocked and deeply concerned by the desecration of historical truth and memory at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland”.

It says that the new plaques are “an apparent attempt to distort the story of the massacre of Jews” in order to “absolve the perpetrators” through the “blatant falsification of history”.

“Yad Vashem calls on the relevant Polish authorities to remove this offensive installation and to ensure that the historical meaning of the site is preserved and respected,” they wrote.

The new plaques were also condemned by Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who told Gazeta Wyborcza they are a “disgrace” and a “manifestation of the disease that is antisemitism”.

Polish prosecutors have launched an investigation into far-right leader Grzegorz Braun after he declared the gas chambers at Auschwitz to be “fake” and said it is a “fact” that Jews have committed ritual slaughter of Christians. Denial of Nazi crimes is an offence in Poland that carries a jail sentence of up to three years.

Braun, who finished fourth in the recent presidential elections with 6.3% of the vote, made his remarks during an interview today with radio station WNET. The veteran far-right politician, who is a member of the European Parliament, has a long history of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric regarding Jews and other minorities.

During the interview, Braun referred to what he claimed are the “lies of the Talmud, the Haggadah [two Jewish religious texts], and the Holocaust”. He said that Jewish organisations “condemn those who tell the truth that ritual murder is a fact and Auschwitz with its gas chambers is a lie”.

A longstanding antisemitic canard is that Jews murder Christians, in particular children, and use their blood for religious rituals. Meanwhile, many modern antisemites deny the fact that gas chambers were used at Auschwitz and other German-Nazi camps to murder Jews during the Holocaust.

After the interviewer contested Braun’s remarks, he reiterated them, saying that the Auschwitz Museum provides a “pseudo-historical account” about what happened at the camp and blocks research into the gas chambers. He also cited a book by an Israeli historian that he says proves Jews carried out ritual murder.

That led the interviewer to immediately cut short the broadcast, saying that there “are limits to political cynicism and sensationalism when it comes to several million victims and their memory”.

Subsequently, Anna-Maria Żukowska, head of the parliamentary caucus of The Left (Lewica), one of the groups that make up Poland’s ruling coalition, announced that she was filing a complaint to prosecutors regarding Braun’s remarks.

She accused him of violating article 55 of Poland’s law on the Institute of National Remembrance, which criminalises public denial of Nazi and communist crimes. Those found guilty can be punished by up to three years in prison.

Late on Thursday afternoon, the district prosecutor’s office in Warsaw announced that it had initiated an investigation into whether Braun had committed the offence of denying Nazi crimes.

Meanwhile, Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, which is a Polish state institution, issued a statement condemning Braun’s “scandalous” comments, which he said were not only a violation of the law but also “an insult to the memory of the victims of the camp”.

“Grzegorz Braun’s words are not a ‘political provocation’, but a conscious lie and an act of ideological, antisemitic hatred,” said Cywiński. “They cannot remain without a decisive response from the state and all decent people – for whom the memory of Auschwitz is of particular importance.”

The museum director noted that, while it was primarily Jews who were victims of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, ethnic Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma were also murdered in them.

At least 1.3 million prisoners were transported to Auschwitz during the war, with at least 1.1 million of them killed at the camp. Around one million of those victims were Jews, most of whom were murdered in gas chambers immediately after their arrival. The second largest group of victims were ethnic Poles.

Cywiński said that the museum would itself file a notification to prosecutors regarding Braun’s remarks. He also appealed to Polish media to stop giving space to Braun, who “has repeatedly shown that he cannot function in the public space without vandalism, lies, hate speech and racism”.

Last week, Braun was presented by prosecutors with seven sets of charges relating to four incidents, including his attack on a Jewish religious celebration in parliament two years ago.

He is also being investigated over a series of incidents during the recent presidential election campaign, including when he vandalised an LGBT+ exhibition, made antisemitic remarks during a televised debate, and removed a Ukrainian flag from a public building.