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Deadly decade: UNICEF reports three-fold rise in verified attacks on children since 2010

Conflicts around the world are lasting longer and claiming more young lives, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said on Monday, as the agency reported that over this ‘deadly decade’, there has been a three-fold rise in verified attacks on children since 2010 – an average of 45 violations a day. “Attacks on children continue unabated as…

Some reflections on the old and the new mental landscape

By Petur Gudjonsson A little while ago we wrote about a new mental landscape appearing in Chile. And we said that this positive phenomenon will happen everywhere, within a few years. There are protests all over the planet but they…

Climate change: six positive news stories from 2019

Heather Alberro, Nottingham Trent University; Dénes Csala, Lancaster University; Hannah Cloke, University of Reading; Marc Hudson, University of Manchester; Mark Maslin, UCL, and Richard Hodgkins, Loughborough University for The Conversation The climate breakdown continues. Over the past year, The Conversation…

The 2019 Nobel Prize shows why we need to dump conventional economics

By Dr Ted Trainer The prize has gone to three people studying how the poor can derive more benefit from existing “development” practices. It sees no reason to question the existing market and growth-driven economy and its derivative, development theory.…

In search of a sane economy

Could degrowth, community, and basic income create a sane economy? An interview with one of the godfathers of the basic income movement, Phillippe Van Parijs. Philippe Van Parijs for openDemocracy-Beyond traffic and slavery. Phillippe Van Parijs is a philosopher at…

Biosphere Collapse?

Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut!…

How migrants and their supporters are reviving the ethos of the 19th-century underground railroad

Maurice Stierl, University of Warwick for The Conversation The story of the 19th-century underground railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses helping enslaved African-Americans to escape, has received renewed interest over recent months. The railroad was run by…

2019 – A Devastating Year in Review

By Farhana Haque Rahman By any measure this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating loss of species, and mass forced…

The Real Lesson of Afghanistan Is That Regime Change Does Not Work

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years.…

Our Vanishing World: Birds

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous…

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