Chinese Villages, Security Forces Revealed Inside Bhutan's Borders - 0 views
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in a 232-square-mile area claimed by China since the early 1980s but internationally understood as part of Lhuntse district in northern Bhutan. The Chinese officials were visiting to celebrate their success, unnoticed by the world, in planting settlers, security personnel, and military infrastructure within territory internationally and historically understood to be Bhutanese.
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part of a major drive by Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2017 to fortify the Tibetan borderlands, a dramatic escalation in China’s long-running efforts to outmaneuver India and its neighbors along their Himalayan frontiers
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Its aim is to force the Bhutanese government to cede territory that China wants elsewhere in Bhutan to give Beijing a military advantage in its struggle with New Delhi
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Danes see Greenland security risk amid Arctic tensions - BBC News - 0 views
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Denmark has for the first time put mineral-rich Greenland top of its national security agenda, ahead of terrorism and cybercrime.The Defence Intelligence Service (FE) linked its change in priorities to US interest in Greenland, expressed in President Donald Trump's desire to buy the vast Arctic territory.
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The FE's head Lars Findsen said Greenland was now a top security issue for Denmark because a "power game is unfolding" between the US and other global powers in the Arctic.
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Greenland's strategic importance has grown amid increased Arctic shipping and international competition for rare minerals. Arctic waters are becoming more navigable because of melting ice, linked to global warming.
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Human Trafficking and Slavery Help Finance Terrorists and Earn Them Strategic Advantage - 0 views
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despite near-universal pledges to eradicate the crime, human trafficking and modern slavery continue unabated, affecting more than 40 million people worldwide
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this practice supports terrorist and armed groups, bankrolls criminal organizations, enables abusive regimes, and undermines stability, according to a recent Council on Foreign Relations report
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armed and violent extremist groups use trafficking as a direct tactic of war, generating profits and advancing their strategic aims. Insurgent groups—from central Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army to Libyan militias—have used captives to expand military capabilities and support operations, with victims forced to serve as combatants, messengers, cooks, porters, and spies. Other terrorist organizations—including the Islamic State and Boko Haram—engage in sex trafficking. They use enslaved women to attract and mobilize male fighters and generate significant revenue as well. In 2014 alone, ransom payments extracted by the Islamic State amounted to between $35 million and $45 million. In other words, such groups use trafficking to expand their power and capabilities, thereby prolonging conflict.
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Why Do People Flee During War? The Answer Is More Complicated Than You Think. - 0 views
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If humanitarian agencies show they are willing to offset the costs of uprooting civilians, they could perversely incentivize armed groups to engage in these practices. This is not hypothetical. There are multiple instances where international aid, while providing crucial life-saving assistance to people in conflict zones, has also enabled combatants to implement, sustain, or expand policies of forced displacement.
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The widespread use of sorting displaced people demonstrates that fleeing in wartime can be perceived as a political act. But the presumption of guilt by location is often embraced by combatants and civilians alike, and not just in cases where displacement is used as a weapon of war. As Stephanie Schwartz argued in a previous article in Foreign Policy, post-conflict societies commonly experience hostility between people who fled during a conflict and those who stayed.
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Conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts need to treat displacement and return as a political phenomenon, not just a humanitarian one
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Qatar Migrant Workers Battle Coronavirus Outbreak During World Cup Construction - 0 views
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There are more than 2 million migrant workers in Qatar—a significant number given that the country’s overall population is just 2.6 million. In recent years the foreign laborer population in Qatar has swelled as the country has undergone a construction boom ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which is set to be held there.
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Research published last year in the journal Cardiology explored the relationship between heat exposure and the deaths of more than 1,300 Nepali workers over a nine-year period until 2017. The climatologists and cardiologists found a strong correlation between heat stress and young workers dying of cardiovascular problems in the summer months
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abuse—which at times has amounted to forced labor and human trafficking—has been exacerbated by South Asian governments’ inability to successfully lobby for strong protections. (Critics contend there has been scant political will given the huge portion of GDP now made up by remittances from overseas workers.
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Why climate change is a pandemic in slow motion (and what that can teach us) - The Corr... - 0 views
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the really dangerous thing about the coronavirus isn’t that the disease it causes can be very serious – it’s that it’s not all that serious for many people. The fact that many people who catch Covid-19 hardly have any symptoms has been a huge contributing factor in the spread of the virus.A similar problem applies to climate change: most of us simply experience so few of the consequences of the Earth heating up that we hardly even notice it – let alone feel any urgency to do something about it. A planetary temperature increase of 1.5C? For a lot of us, that seems like "just a minor flu" too.
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the incubation period of climate change is truly disastrous
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There’s no such thing as "far away" in a world where Wuhan is just five handshakes from Washington
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In Mexico, Cross-Border Fight Over Water Erupts - The New York Times - 0 views
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longstanding tensions over water between the United States and Mexico that have recently exploded into violence, pitting Mexican farmers against their own president and the global superpower next door
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rising temperatures and long droughts have made the shared rivers along the border more valuable than ever, intensifying the stakes for both nations
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Along the arid border region, water rights are governed by a decades-old treaty that compels the United States and Mexico to share the flows of the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, with each side sending water to the other. Mexico has fallen far behind on its obligations to the United States and is now facing a deadline to deliver the water this month.
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Ethiopia and Egypt Are Already at War Over the Nile Dam. It's Just Happening in Cybersp... - 0 views
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the group calling themselves the Cyber_Horus Group in late June hacked more than a dozen Ethiopian government sites, replacing each page with their own creation: an image of a skeleton pharaoh, clutching a scythe in one hand and a scimitar in the other. “If the river’s level drops, let all the Pharaoh’s soldiers hurry,” warned a message underneath. “Prepare the Ethiopian people for the wrath of the Pharaohs.”
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Rarely have young people been so passionate about an infrastructure project. But the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which will be Africa’s largest, is more than just a piece of infrastructure. It has become a nationalistic rallying cry for both Ethiopia and Egypt—two countries scrambling to define their nationhood after years of domestic upheaval. Many Ethiopians and Egyptians are getting involved in the only way they can—online—and fomenting the first African cyberconflict of its kind, one with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.
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Today, there are several entries for the GERD on Google Maps, most earning middling 3 to 4 stars ratings, buoyed by five-star ratings with feedback such as, “One of the great architectural dam in the World!” but weighed down by one-star complaints including, “You’re gonna make us die from thirst.”
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