The death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, announced on Feb. 16, 2024, lays bare to the world the costs of political persecutions. Although his cause of death remains unknown, the 47-year-old died while serving a 19-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony.
Months after Amazon was fined more than $30 million for allegedly spying on customers in their homes, a French data watchdog on Monday announced it had ordered the retail giant to pay another $35 million for what it called “excessive” tracking of warehouse employees’ activity.
France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) informed Amazon France Logistique, which runs the U.S. company’s warehouses in the country, of the fine late last month after investigating scanning devices used by employees.
“Shell bosses sacrifice our safety for short-term profits, even their employees see it,” said one campaigner. “No point waiting for them to grow a conscience.”
Anti-fossil fuel campaigners on Friday urged employees of oil and gas giant Shell to speak out as loudly as possible about their objections to the company’s pivot away from renewable energy, after thousands of workers expressed support for an angry open letter penned by two of their colleagues.
On the company’s private platform, a letter published by Lisette de Heiden and Wouter Drinkwaard of Shell’s low-carbon division garnered 1,000 “likes” and 80,000 views earlier this month and was reported on by Reuters Wednesday.
Nearly eight decades after the United States dropped an atomic bomb codenamed “Fat Man” on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday was among the voices around the world renewing calls for eliminating nuclear weapons.
In a message to the Nagasaki Peace Memorial on the 78th anniversary of the 1945 bombing, Guterres said that “this ceremony is an opportunity to remember a moment of unmatched horror for humanity.”
NATO really is on a roll thanks to Vladimir Putin, but even as its immediate prospects look good, the whole future of the alliance should be open to question.
For now, as Finland and Sweden join, Putin finds an enlarged alliance ranged against him. NATO’s reputation is so bound up with the fate of Ukraine that, in the unlikely event that Russia makes substantial military gains in the conflict, Kyiv cannot be allowed to lose. From Putin’s perspective, his warning early last year of the threat posed to Russia from NATO has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This does at least mean he can claim ‘I told you so’ – which is helping maintain some domestic support.
“If the disasters we’re seeing this month aren’t enough to shake us out of that torpor, then the chances of our persevering for another hundred and twenty-five thousand years seem remote.”
Southern Europe faced dangerously high temperatures on Sunday amid a continent-wide heatwave that’s expected to get worse in the coming days, potentially shattering longstanding records as the climate crisis rages.
Reutersreported that a “new anticyclone dubbed Charon, who in Greek mythology was the ferryman of the dead, pushed into the region from north Africa on Sunday and could lift temperatures above 45°C (113°F) in parts of Italy early this week,” prompting Italian officials to issue heat advisories for more than a dozen cities on Sunday.
The world is “drifting into one of the most dangerous periods in human history”, according to a leading security research centre, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). At the root of its concern is that, though the number of nuclear warheads is still far lower than during the Cold War years, nuclear modernisation and development programmes in the nine nuclear-armed states are leading to an expansion in the number of warheads held.
The numbers are small, according to the SIPRI Yearbook 2023: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, just 86 more warheads than in January last year in a global inventory of 12,512. So why the concern? Who has the warheads and why is the number increasing rather than decreasing?
Reports that Iran is constructing a very large, deep bunker as part of its nuclear programme mean there is a renewed risk of an upsurge in tension, and the potential for conflict, most likely involving Israel but always with risk of it spreading much wider.
Context here is important.
During Barack Obama’s second term in the White House, countries including the UK, France and Germany, worked hard with the US to forge an agreement with the Iranian regime to avoid Iran developing nuclear weapons. A powerful motivation was the risk of Israel otherwise taking unilateral action.
“Energy security can only be achieved by rapidly and equitably phasing out fossil fuels and transitioning to renewable energy, not locking in deadly fossil fuels and lining the pockets of oil and gas executives,” said one critic.
Since Group of Seven leaders on Saturday put out a wide-ranging communiqué from a Japan-hosted summit in Hiroshima, climate action advocates from G7 countries and beyond have blasted the statement’s support for future investments in planet-heating gas.
The statement comes after G7 climate, energy, and environment ministers were criticized for their communiqué from a meeting in Sapporo last month as well as protests around the world this week pressuring the summit’s attendees to ditch fossil fuels and “deliver a clear and just renewable energy agenda for a peaceful world.”
A new poll shows that Marine Le Pen would beat French President Emmanuel Macron in a head-to-head rematch, making the left’s struggle against Macron’s pension attack a struggle for democracy in France.
A demonstration on the 11th day of nationwide strikes against the government’s proposal to raise the retirement age in Paris, France on April 6, 2023. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis/Twitter
As French workers intensify their fight against President Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular plan to raise the nation’s retirement age from 62 to 64, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
A poll released Wednesday shows that reactionary lawmaker Marine Le Pen—leader of the far-right National Rally party, the largest opposition force in Parliament—would beat Macron by a margin of 55% to 45% in a head-to-head rematch. The neoliberal incumbent defeated Le Pen in a runoff election last April, but the openly xenophobic and Islamophobic challenger has gained significant ground since their first matchup in 2017.