The World Bank's Board of Directors have approved a $150 million loan to support the 'Resilient Kerala Program' to continue strengthening the state's preparedness against natural disasters, climate change impacts, and disease outbreaks.This additional financing will further deepen Kerala's resilience in the critical areas of coastal erosion and water resource management.
Kerala is highly vulnerable to natural disasters and prone to the effects of climate change, given its location along the Southern Indian coast. In 2021, floods and landslides in the state led to a number of deaths and damages of around $100 million. Recurring disasters such as these have left devastating impacts on the livelihoods of vulnerable groups, especially women farmers and fisherwomen.
This financing complements the bank's earlier investment of $125 million and the overall support of the two projects is expected to protect nearly 5 million people from the impacts of floods.
Burkina Faso on Sunday hailed the "courageous decision" by Mali's military regime to call on the UN to withdraw its Minusma peacekeeping force, as both countries fight a jihadist insurgency.
Mali's Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop on Friday had called for the immediate withdrawal of the multinational force from the country.
Burkinabe government spokesman Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo said in a statement Ouagadougou "hails this courageous decision taken by the transitional Mali authorities" and "congratulates" Mali for its choice.
The decision was "in conformity with the strategic decision of the Malian state in the fight against terrorism and for the restoration of peace and security in the Sahel", the statement added.
The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, or Minusma, was created in 2013, taking over from an African-led mission as Mali was in the grip of an Islamist rebellion that continues today.
I'm going way out on a limb here, but I'm betting these things, much like the supersonic missiles he was to unleash upon a terrified world, weren't supersonic at all, and were/are probably made out of mostly empty toilet paper rolls and spare parts from X-Ray machines
Reminds me of what's happening with Florida and Cali in the US. Insurers pulling out or limiting the risks covered (the most important parts).
No doubt we'll see major swathes of the North Island be pretty much uninsurable. Which is fair cause we get the sign off to build in the most fucked up places lmao.
Mali has called on the United Nations to withdraw its peacekeeping mission from the country “without delay,” denouncing its “failure” to respond to security challenges.
Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop, who is part of Mali’s interim military authorities, told a UN Security Council meeting on Friday that the peacekeeping force known as MINUSMA should withdraw its troops from the West African nation.
El Ghassim Wane, the head of the UN mission in Mali, said after the meeting of the 15-member council that conducting UN peacekeeping operations was “nearly impossible” without the consent of the host country
Kinshasa has accused the M23 rebel group of attacks in the DRC's mineral-rich North Kivu province, and says Rwanda is backing the Tutsi-led militia. Kigali denies any involvement in the violence. The International Criminal Court said Thursday it will examine allegations of war crimes by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile east.
It looks like the Chinese lab leak conspiracy theory is slowly being revealed to be conspiracy fact?
There's two theories that often get conflated:
Covid was engineered in a lab
Covid was natural but escaped from a lab where it was being studied
During the pandemic, the first was widely debunked, and the second was generally considered possible but unlikely. I find the evidence for a lab leak is compelling but circumstantial, as there are alternate explanations that seem to explain covid without introducing these variables. However, consensus seems to be evolving; in researching this matter it seems there's a lot of disagreement among geneticists and virologists about the possible origins of the Spike Furin Cleavage Site, for example. I'm interested in this, but weighing the various approaches and probabilities is beyond my knowledge set.
Ultimately, though, does it matter? Would punishing China if it was a lab leak accomplish anything, or has the dangers of viral leaks and the necessity of precaution already been made obvious to everyone? Would outlawing gain-of-function genetic engineering even be meaningful, considering the cost of generic engineering is plummeting and becoming decentralized thanks to techniques like CRISPR and PASTE?
The source of this report, Russian state media, is very very suspect. They also very recently tried to paint Ukraine as a country that needed freeing from Nazi influence to justify waging war.
Unless I see this shared and verified by some other news outlets I'm going to think this is just propoganda.
These other baltic states have been supporting Ukraine and offering safe haven to dissidents from Russia and Belarus. This report just looks like a Russian smear campaign to me right now. What do other people think?
That's interesting! I've just gone to check out Yad Vashem and there's a lot of information there. Do you have any specific links to hand about this I could check out?
I'm guessing it's probably hard to get accurate records of this type of thing as they tend to get destroyed, if it's even recorded in the first place.
@Speckle
Hey, unfortunately to send messages between different servers is not yet possible, but OK, here a few links
Documentation blog of the EHRI Project (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure). Here you can find lots of articles. Focus of the blog is publication of research and work in different areas: historiography, archival science, digital humanities and holocaust, etc. https://blog.ehri-project.eu/
The Righteous Among the Nations - Featured Stories: the opposite to the main article of the thread, here are stories of non-Jewish people and families who saved Jews during the Holocaust. It is one of the public presences of one of the main projects at the Yad Vashem. https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories.html
If stories from my immediate family and relations are to believed, that's not the case. People ran from soviets because they were stealing everything and killing anyone they didn't like, including jews. Germans mostly weren't involved at all, except military control wise.
I guess there's always assholes everywhere, some working to advance nazi goals. Some betraying everyone for survival. Some working for soviets because they were too stupid to see they'll eventually lose everything to Stalin, despite the propaganda ("to the people"). "Brother fought brother" as the saying goes. Overall, the idea was to exploit the side less harmful to get rid of the more harmful side, 3rd Reich was ironically the less harmful in this picture. Soviets were just all around inhumane all the time.
Two things can be true at once: the Baltic states did have a depressingly high rate of Nazi collaboration during WWII, which lead to some of the highest percentage of their Jewish populations being slaughtered in all of occupied Europe; AND Russia isn't releasing this report now because they actually care about historical accuracy or honoring the victims, they're cynically using them to further their pro-war propaganda.
World News
Hot