International

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…