No Picture

Climate change is the fight of our lives – yet we can hardly bear to look at it

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

We’re products of an industrial project, a project linked to fossil fuels. But humans have changed before and can change again.

This is a story about bad timing.

One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses. read more

Seven Syrians: War Accounts from Syrian Refugees – Book Review

Diego Cupolo’s short collection Seven Syrians: War Accounts from Syrian Refugees is a testimony to the innumerable voices often excluded from conventional coverage of war and conflict. Faces of presidents, generals, and world leaders flash across television screens as Cupolo quietly assembles a collection of flowing narratives of just seven of the estimated 2 million people that have fled the Syrian civil war.

No Picture

Putin must be called to account on surveillance just like Obama

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

On Thursday, I questioned Russia’s involvement in mass surveillance on live television. I asked Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, a question that cannot credibly be answered in the negative by any leader who runs a modern, intrusive surveillance program: “Does [your country] intercept, analyse or store millions of individuals’ communications?”

I went on to challenge whether, even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified. read more