livus

Government of Christopher Luxon has made sweeping cuts to climate projects in its first budget, with no new significant environmental investments

At a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.

People were told to move to Muwasi, an Israeli-declared humanitarian area near the coast. The announcement signals that a ground invasion is imminent.

The suffering of the Sudanese may be off camera now, but it won't be in a few months when babies are starving en masse.

Fears Israel is influencing location of dock away from the north, where famine threat is most severe. A giant floating dock is nearing completion in the eastern Mediterranean from where it will be pushed towards the Gaza shore, but there is growing uncertainty over how useful the US project will be in containing a famine.

There are concerns in the humanitarian community that Israel has co-opted the pier plan, which Joe Biden touted as a way to bring about a “massive” increase in aid to Gaza, with one aid official saying the project was in danger of becoming a “smokescreen” for the planned invasion of Rafah.

The dock has been built off US naval vessels and is expected to be in position by early May. According to several aid officials, the current plan is to anchor it not off northern Gaza, where the threat of famine is most severe, but at a point halfway up the strip where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have a stronghold.

That would mean that food aid brought in via the dock would still have to pass through an IDF checkpoint at the Netzarim corridor, a military road that bisects the strip, and which has been a choke-point stopping humanitarian deliveries reaching the north.

Some UN and other humanitarian officials fear that the aid will be diverted south to camps set up for the more than 1 million people now sheltering in Rafah. The IDF wants them to move out so that it can conduct an offensive against Hamas units in Gaza’s southernmost city.

Such an offensive would inevitably mean the temporary closure of Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings in southern Gaza, so the US-made floating dock would serve as a substitute, while at the same time diverting pressure on Israel to open northern crossing points to substantial aid traffic.

“One of the key arguments for having a dock was to put it further north so that suppliers could come in more directly to the north,” a UN official said, adding that what was actually being proposed looked more like a “smokescreen to enable the Israelis to invade Rafah”.

In the last few years it is likely that PepsiCo has been using in its production palm oil from deforested land claimed by the Shipibo-Konibo people in eastern Peru, a new investigation has found.

Palm oil from Peru enters PepsiCo’s supply chain via a consortium that shares storage facilities with Ocho Sur, the second largest palm oil producer in the country which has been associated with deforestation and violation of Indigenous peoples’ rights. In the last three years, further deforestation occurred within the company’s land, the investigation found.

Some of the forest loss on company-run oil palm plantations occurred on land claimed by the Santa Clara de Uchunya community of Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous people.

PepsiCo manufactures at least 15 products containing Peruvian palm oil that could be linked to deforestation. The company has pledged to make 100% of its palm oil supply deforestation-free by the end of 2022 and for its operation to be net zero by 2040.

The US seems so preoccupied that officials are barely keeping track of shipments they last week said were a priority

For months, aid groups have struggled to get food to an estimated 300,000 people in northern Gaza, where the world’s global authority on food security recently predicted a famine was either already happening or would begin before July.

The crisis worsened last week when the food charity World Central Kitchen, the only organisation outside the UN regularly providing hot meals, suspended operations after Israeli strikes killed seven staff members.

“WCK was feeding around 500,000 people each day with hot meals,” said Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the UN’s World Food Programme in Cairo. “We are feeding over a million people each month, and Unrwa [the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees] is providing food to people monthly. Between the three of us, we are really trying to push back this famine.

“But this will only work if humanitarian aid workers are operating in a safe environment – there has to be respect for their protection, because of the urgent need to access the most vulnerable throughout the Gaza Strip.”

Via @BrikoX

With man-made famines threatening both Sudan and Gaza, Al Jazeera breaks down how the body succumbs to starvation.

Tesla has canceled the long-promised inexpensive car that investors have been counting on to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters.

Exclusive: Satellite analysis revealed to the Guardian shows farms devastated and nearly half of the territory’s trees razed. Alongside mounting air and water pollution, experts says Israel’s onslaught on Gaza’s ecosystems has made the area unlivable

Really cool article about lost species - ones we lose track of.
#goldenmoles #conservation #lostspecies #ecology

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/29/1198909601/lost-animals-moles-rats-being-rediscovered

#science