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Five Years After Obama’s Cuba Opening, Cubans Are Reeling From The “Trump Effect”

By Medea Benjamin Gloria Minor had been preparing her AirBnB in Havana for years, investing every penny her sister sent her from Miami in repairing and refurbishing her apartment.  With President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro re-establishing relations five years…

COP25. Makoma Lekalakala: We must stand up and demand climate justice

In this interview during COP25, Makoma Lekalakala (Goldman Environmental Prize 2018) and member of Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg, talks to Pressenza about the role of women in the climate change debate, the nonsense of using nuclear energy in Africa and what…

Debate. Yoshua Bengio and Gary Marcus on the best way forward for AI

Both Gary Marcus and Yoshua Bengio agree that the field of AI might benefit from an articulation of their agreements and disagreements. The debate will be moderated by Vincent Boucher. Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor, Deep Learning Pioneer and A.M. Turing…

Elections in the United Kingdom. Reflections on a dark moment and on a light of hope

The result of the UK elections was a hard blow to me for various reasons. Despite the negative forecasts and polls, I continued to hope, perhaps naively, for a victory of Jeremy Corbyn until the very end, because it would…

Permafrost Hits a Grim Threshold

For tens of thousands of years, the Arctic’s carbon sink has been a powerful dynamic in the functionality of the Earth System. However, that all-important functionality has been crippled and could be permanently severed. According to new research based upon…

Our Vanishing World: Wildlife

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of…

COP25 Was a Failure, But Activists’ Collective Organizing at the Talks Was Unprecedented

The COP25 United Nations climate summit ended in failure Sunday, after negotiators failed to agree to a deal that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a key goal of the Paris Agreement. Scores of…

Climate Change – Where Are Our Economic Elites Headed?

As William Nordhaus illustrated in his Nobel award address in December last year, the free-rider problem is particularly severe for climate change. Those who do nothing ride free, while those who undertake costly reductions pay dearly. If an important player…

Climate Youth Declare: “We Are Unstoppable! Another World Is Possible!”

This year’s United Nations climate summit, dubbed “COP 25” for the 25th annual “conference of the parties” to the climate negotiations, heated up Wednesday as grassroots activists, youth and indigenous leaders protested en masse outside the main plenary hall. As…

Greta Thunberg Slams COP25, Says Response to Climate Crisis Is “Clever Accounting and Creative PR”

At the U.N. climate summit in Madrid, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed world leaders Wednesday, hours after she was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Thunberg came to the talks after a trip to meet with climate…

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