Chad is a country located in central Africa known for its large desert landscape. As clearly shown, by the current state of the country, Chad is a relatively geographically unlucky country. Compared to many other countries, Chad is lacking in the amount of usable food sources compared to many core countries and over 66 percent of its population live in food poverty. This is mainly because they lack a way to trade with wealthy countries since they are landlocked. Similar to Kyrgyzstan, Chad is virtually unreachable in trade due to its distance from a sea or air port. Because of their unlucky position it further hinders their ability as a nation to develop and gain wealth without the key aspect of international trade. On the side of the rights of its people, Chad is faced with much discrimination and abuse amongst its women despite them making up a large percentage of their farming and gathering workforce. Similar to Chad, Ethiopia has issues with discrimination against women and just like Chad, they have laws allowing for people to marry women at ages as early as 15. They are forced out of schools and get much less of an education than men do, causing a sort of loop in the system that forces women into low quality lives and jobs. With all of this we can see how the current state of Chad is in chaos and corruption.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1033822 https://www.wfp.org/countries/chad https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/print_cd.html
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In 1992, JAPAN's attempts to conquer the Western world and become the true powerhouse of computers came to a drastic close. Newspapers wrote about a decade-long project funded by the Japanese government that spent $400 million in an attempt to create the biggest smart machine in the world that integrates state-of - the-art technology and software to enable artificial intelligence systems with "reasoning capability." The failure of the so-called Fifth Generation Computer Systems, a government initiative in the 1980s focused on developing a "super-computer" that ultimately crashed, will scare the Japanese ego profoundly. The technological aspirations of the government not only triggered a heavy Western international response but also failed to prove that the nation was able to develop an in-house computing system that the world could later follow. Today, Japan is the world's top exporter of industrial robots and, according to the International Robotics Federation, ranks second in the world behind China by sales, recording 45,566 units built in 2017. Experts believe that the fourth technological revolution, with super-intelligent robots that aim to displace humans at their workplace, is actually very different from the previous and much more appropriate for what makes Japan good at. While the last wave of disruption centered on computers, electronics and the internet, the next one appears to be much more about changing the physical world through technology.
At their latest summit meeting, the Group of Eight leaders addressed the challenges of globalization, but what the world really needs is a much more inclusive and centered forum to address this issue. Globalization is now a problem too large for the leaders of the G-8. We are no longer ruling the global economy, and they are only part of that important dialogue. What is required is a one-time "globalization conference" of two dozen representative heads of state or government from the old industrial nations, the new economic powers, and the most poor nations. We need to optimize the undoubted gains of globalization, while also buffering its costs to those states that face exclusion from the globalized economy. When the complexities of globalization throw entire economies into a tailspin, we have to react decisively. We saw ad hoc, last-minute action to address Asia's economic crisis but no cohesive, focused political leadership dialogue and no clear plan to prevent another fiasco. The next recession may be just around the corner and the world's unwilling to deal with it. Both the emerging economic powers and the weaker ones are being boosted or weakened by the highs and lows of global swings in the market. Globalization is unavoidable and can be a highly positive trend that can lift all boats with smart policy and tough choices — but we need a system in place to cope with its negative aspects, predict its complexities and leverage those trends to support all nations, not just the' haves.' We need to make sure that the advantages of globalization hit all, creating greater prosperity for everyone. If the poorest countries can not reap the benefits of globalization, then we will all be poorer.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/20/opinion/IHT-a-globalization-summit.html?searchResultPosition=9 https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/42802.html A Catholic nun who was told she could live in a retirement home in France only if she refused to wear religious clothing, French officials claim, in a situation where they say they misinterpreted the laws of the country banning religious clothing in certain public spaces. The nun, who is over 70 years old and has not been publicly identified, had lived in a monastery in south-eastern France when she decided to retire to Haute-Saône, her native region further north. Her proposal was approved in July to live in a unit at a publicly funded retirement home in Vesoul, a town about 55 miles northeast of Dijon. But the home, run by the local authority, claimed that it would have to accommodate other residents by not wearing their religious habits or veils. The retirement home told her in a letter sent to the nun, and seen this week by the news outlet Agence France-Presse, that "such ostentatious signs of belonging to a religious community can not be tolerated to guarantee the serenity of all." The nun did not agree to leave without her habit, and instead, the local parish helped rent her a private apartment. Authorities now say the retirement home misapplied the rules of secularism in France, and Vesoul's mayor, Alain Chrétien, apologized in a statement on Tuesday. By constantly trying to extend neutrality, first by targeting a specific religion, it always winds up extending to other religions and beliefs. It’s a real danger.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/world/europe/france-nun-secularism.html https://www.huffpost.com/entry/french-nun-france-secularism_n_5dd6cb8be4b0fc53f20ff6bb In a nation where most older adults rely heavily on their families, the continuing decline for births in the coming decades could have a seismic impact. The number of children born in China has fallen to almost six decades last year, prolonging the impending demographic crisis that will form and endanger the world's most populous country. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, about 14.6 million babies were born in China in 2019. This was almost 4% below last year's figure and China's lowest official birth rate since 1961, the last year of a widespread famine in which millions of individuals have died. Only 11.8 million children came into birth that year. Chinese births have now plummeted in a row for three years. A year after the government abandoned its one-child policy and allowed couples to have two babies, they had risen marginally in 2016, a move that officials expected would cause a sustainable increase in the number of newborns. But it didn't materialize. Experts say that the slowdown is rooted in several trends, including the rise of educated women in the workforce who do not see marriage as necessary, at least for themselves, to achieve financial security. Many are unable to afford children for Chinese couples as the cost of living increases and their jobs require more time and energy. Yet attitudes changed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/business/china-birth-rate-2019.html http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2020/01/21/chinas-birthrate-hits-historic-low-in-looming-crisis-for-beijing/ We have worried about overpopulation for centuries, and it's finally taking a turn for the worst.1/12/2020 For almost all of human history, not that many of us have been there. Earth's population is estimated to be 190 million about year zero. It was probably around 250 million, a thousand years later. Then the Industrial Revolution came and the population went into overdrive. It took humans hundreds of thousands of years, in 1800, to reach the 1 billion mark. In 1928 we were adding the next billion. We hit 3 billion in 1960. 4 Billion in 1975. Which sounds like a road to an epidemic of overpopulation, right? This foretold one too many demographers, futurists and science fiction writers of the mid-century. Extending the history, they saw a nightmarish future ahead for humanity: human civilizations continually on the brink of starvation, increasingly cramped under appalling conditions, strict population control regulations enforced worldwide. In his 1968 best-selling book The Population Bomb, Stanford scientist Paul Ehrlich wrote, "In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will be starving to death" because of overpopulation. Despite approaching a population of nearly 8 billion, the world we are living in now looks almost nothing like the one doomsayers had expected. Starting in England in the 19th century and affecting most of the world by the turn of the 20th century, birthrates plummeted — mostly attributable to women's education and access to contraception. With all these changing factors in our society, will they be enough to hit the brakes and stop overpopulation completely in its tracks?
Sources: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/20/20802413/overpopulation-demographic-transition-population-explained https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/07/30/how-big-of-a-problem-is-overpopulation/#54422ac9216a President Trump has given pardons for two Army officials blamed for atrocities in Afghanistan and reestablished the position of a Navy SEAL who was cleared of homicide in Iraq.
"For in excess of 200 years, presidents have utilized their power to offer renewed opportunities to meriting people, incorporating those in uniform who have served our nation," said White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham in an announcement discharged late Friday. "These activities are with regards to this long history." The officials incorporate first Lt. Clint Lorance who has served six years of a 19-year sentence on two charges of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice after ordering his soldiers to open fire on three unarmed men in Afghanistan, killing two of them. He had been convicted in 2013. The other absolved official is Maj. Matthew Golsteyn, a West Point graduate, who was anticipating trial for allegedly killing a presumed Afghan bomb maker in 2010. The trial was booked for one year from now. The president likewise reestablished the position of Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL, who was sentenced for posing with a corpse of an enemy combatant in Iraq. Gallagher had been convicted of homicide and different serious allegations in July 2019. Some present and previous Pentagon authorities state the acquittals, while legitimate, could undermine the military justice system. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy had contended against clearing the three men as an awful guide to different soldiers in the field, as per The New York Times. Without saying whether he bolstered the exemption of the three help individuals, Esper told correspondents a week ago that he had "a robust discussion with the president" about their cases. Unfortunately many people in the military have committed these same crimes and have been able to get away with it. Finally some light has been shed on this issue. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/15/780029994/trump-pardons-2-service-members-accused-of-war-crimes-and-restores-anothers-rank https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/15/politics/trump-war-crimes-intervenes/index.html The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests by scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine government policymaking's scientific underpinnings. A new draft of the policy from the Environmental Protection Agency, called Enhancing Transparency in Regulatory Science, would allow scientists to reveal all of their raw data, including sensitive medical records, before the agency could consider the results of an academic study. “We are committed to the highest quality science,” Andrew Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, told a congressional committee in September. “Good science is science that can be replicated and independently validated, science that can hold up to scrutiny. That is why we’re moving forward to ensure that the science supporting agency decisions is transparent for evaluation.” The bill will make it harder to enact new regulations on clean air and water, as many studies that examine the connection between pollution and disease rely on personal health information collected under confidentiality agreements. For example, the groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University project, which definitively linked polluted air to premature death, currently the foundation of the nation's air quality legislation, could become inadmissible. Scientists signed confidentiality agreements to record the private medical and occupational records of more than 22,000 individuals in six cities while collecting data for their research, known as the Six Cities report. In order to study the correlation between chronic exposure to air pollution and mortality, they combined personal data with home air quality data. But the fossil fuel industry and some Republican lawmakers have long opposed the American Cancer Society's report and a related study, arguing the underlying data sets of both have never been made public, preventing independent analysis of the results. What we need is for the EPA to completely rollback on their intentions so that we can have more thought and logic put into these regulations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/climate/epa-science-trump.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/11/politics/epa-limit-research-public-health-rules/index.html |
AuthorWritten By: Marty Kacin 2023 Archives
May 2020
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