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anonymous

Trump pardon of Blackwater Iraq contractors violates international law - UN | Reuters - 0 views

  • U.S. President Donald Trump’s pardon of four American men convicted of killing Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007 violated U.S. obligations under international law
  • U.S. contractors opened fire in busy traffic in a Baghdad square and killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians.
  • worked for the private security firm Blackwater owned by the brother of Trump’s education secretary
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  • By allowing private security contractors to “operate with impunity in armed conflicts”, states will be emboldened to circumvent their obligations under humanitarian law,
  • These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level.
anonymous

UN General Assembly: World must prevent new Cold War, Guterres warns - BBC News - 0 views

  • The world must do all it can to prevent a new Cold War
  • Secretary-General António Guterres said the world was moving in a "dangerous direction"
  • "Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe in a great fracture - each with its own trade and financial rules and internet and artificial intelligence capacities."
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  • "The pandemic is a crisis unlike any we have ever seen. But it is also the kind of crisis that we will see in different forms again and again. Covid-19 is not only a wake-up call, it is a dress rehearsal for the world of challenges to come."
Javier E

Iraq's ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change | Iraq | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Some of the world’s most ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, as rising concentrations of salt in Iraq eat away at mud brick and more frequent sandstorms erode ancient wonders.
  • Iraq is known as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that agriculture was born, some of the world’s oldest cities were built, such as the Sumerian capital Ur, and one of the first writing systems was developed – cuneiform. The country has “tens of thousands of sites from the Palaeolithic through Islamic eras”, explained Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Cambridge.
  • Damage to sites such as the legendary Babylon “will leave gaps in our knowledge of human evolution, of the development of early cities, of the management of empires, and of the dynamic changes in the political landscape of the Islamic era”,
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  • Salt in the soil can aid archaeologists in some circumstances, but the same mineral can also be destructive, and is destroying heritage sites, according to the geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri, who described salt as “aggressive … it will destroy the site – destroy the bricks, destroy the cuneiform tablets, destroy everything”.
  • The destructive power of salt is increasing as concentrations rise amid water shortages caused by dams built upstream by Turkey and Iran, and years of mismanagement of water resources and agriculture within Iraq.
  • “The salinity in Shatt al-Arab river started to increase from the 90s,” said Ahmad N A Hamdan, a civil engineer who studies the quality of the water in Iraq’s rivers. In his observations, the Shatt al-Arab – formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates - annually tests poor or very poor quality, especially in 2018, which he called a “crisis” year when brackish water sent at least 118,000 people to hospital in southern Basra province during a drought.
  • The climate crisis is adding to the problem. Iraq is getting hotter and dryer. The United Nations estimates that mean annual temperatures will rise by 2C by 2050 with more days of extreme temperatures of over 50C, while rainfall will drop by as much as 17% during the rainy season and the number of sand and dust storms will more than double from 120 per year to 300. Meanwhile, rising seawater is pushing a wedge of salt up into Iraq and in less than 30 years, parts of southern Iraq could be under water.
  • “Imagine the next 10 years, most of our sites will be under saline water,” said Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at Al-Qadisiyah University and co-director of the Iraqi-British Nahrein Network researching Iraqi heritage. He started to notice damage from salt at historic sites about a decade ago.
  • One spot suffering significant damage is Unesco-recognised Babylon, the capital of the Babylonian Empire, where a salty sheen coats 2,600-year-old mud bricks. In the Temple of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the base of the walls are crumbling. In the depths of the thick wall, salt accumulates until it crystallises, cracking the bricks and causing them to break apart.
  • Other sites that have been affected are Samarra, the Islamic-era capital with its spiral minaret that is being eroded by sandstorms, and Umm al-Aqarib with its White Temple, palace and cemetery that are being swallowed up by the desert.
  • This year, Iraq lost a piece of its cultural heritage. On the edge of the desert, 150km south of Babylon, is a bed of salt that was once Sawa Lake. The spring-fed water was home to at least 31 species of bird, including the grey heron and the near-threatened ferruginous duck. Now, it is completely dry because of overuse of water by surrounding farms and climate change. Lack of enforcement of regulations over groundwater use means farmers can freely drill wells and plant wheat fields that are an eruption of lush green in the dusty desert landscape.
  • “When I was a child I remembered that Sawa Lake was a big lake, a large lake. It looked like the sea. But now it’s gone. Totally gone. We don’t have any lake any more,” said Jotheri.
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