World News

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>The swarms are massive; one of the largest in Kenya is about 37 miles long and 25 miles wide. For reference, that could cover more than half of Long Island. The swarms, which are dense enough at times to block out the sun, are the worst to hit Ethiopia and Somalia in 25 years, and the worst in Kenya in 70 years.

>Desert locusts eat all the vegetation they encounter, and the finger-length insects consume an amount equal to their body weight each day. Each square kilometer of swarm can include 40 to 80 million locusts and eat as much food as 35,000 people, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

>Even before this outbreak, nearly 20 million people faced high levels of food insecurity across the east African region long challenged by periodic droughts and floods. Some analysts have blamed the locust outbreak on climate change, though a direct link is difficult to establish.

>“We know that cyclones are the originators of swarms – and in the past 10 years there’s been an increase in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean,” said Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), earlier this month.

>Canadian police have made a series of arrests in northern British Columbia as they enforced a court injunction to remove activists who have been blocking the construction of a controversial natural gas pipeline on Indigenous territory.

>“It’s a whole damn army up there,” Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Woos told CBC News as word of the arrests spread. “They’ve got guns on, they’ve got tactical gear on. They look like they’re ready for war.”

>Police previously raided the Gitimd’en checkpoint in January 2019, arresting 14 activists.

>Documents from that raid uncovered by the Guardian suggested that officers were prepared to use lethal force against activists, prompting fierce debate over police tactics. The RCMP have denied they were prepared to shoot protesters.

>According to Ricochet, the RCMP expanded its "exclusion zone" Saturday, taking control of most of the territory of the Gidimt'en, one of the five clans of the Wet'suwet'en.

>"The exclusion zone has been created by the RCMP to force Wet'suwet'en land defenders off our land," the Unist'ot'en Camp said in a statement. "It is a colonial and criminalizing tool to illegally and arbitrarily extend RCMP authority onto our lands. The massive exclusion zone, completely under RCMP authoritarian discretion, falls outside the injunction area. Chiefs and Wet'suwet'en people are illegally being denied access to their own territories."

>While protesters have rightly condemned the RCMP actions, they (and the corporate media) have largely overlooked the role of a major player in this whole debacle: Wall Street titan Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., better known as KKR.

>On December 26, 2019 KKR announced the signing of a “definitive agreement” to acquire – along with Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) – a 65 percent equity interest in the Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project from TC Energy.

>Only days later, on December 31, a B.C. Supreme Court judge extended an injunction to stop Wet’suwet’en members from blocking access to Coastal GasLink’s work camp. The injunction will reportedly be operative until the pipeline project is completed.

>A major anti-pipeline struggle continues in Canada, where protests have broken out across the country in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders whose sovereign land in northern British Columbia was raided last week and over the weekend by Canadian police. Dozens were arrested in the days-long raid of unceded indigenous territories, where hereditary chiefs have been in a protracted battle to protect their land from the construction of TransCanada’s 400-mile, $4.7 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline. The raids took place about 700 miles north of Vancouver and sparked outrage across the country. In Ontario, a Mohawk solidarity protest has shut down the Canadian National Railway for days, halting travel for tens of thousands of passengers. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for a quick resolution to the protests on Wednesday. In New York, protesters on Wednesday gathered for a sit-in outside the United Nations headquarters in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders.

>Otter attacks a family, is promptly dealt with.

>tl;dr you can't beat off, our fairy tales said so!

>Religious minorities in China being persecuted. Daughter helps her father win his freedom.