According to organizers, over 130,000 marched in the annual pride parade in Taipei on Saturday. Lower turnout had been expected due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and in fact numbers were down from the record 200,000 participants in the October 2019 event.
Warning that without a “seismic shift” in how world governments approach the management of wildlife, land conservation, and public health, the planet could be entering an “era of pandemics,” a United Nations-backed report released this week emphasized that the ability to avoid more public health crises like Covid-19 is entirely within human control.
The world’s largest banks, including three Japanese banks, provided more than US$2.6 trillion in loans and underwriting to economic sectors last year that were linked to the global biodiversity crisis, doing little to monitor, let alone curb, damage to life-sustaining ecosystems.
Repeating his desire for a winner to be declared on the night of November 3, US President Donald Trump told reporters that he doesn’t “believe” tallying votes for weeks after Election Day is lawful, a remark observers interpreted as yet another open signal of the president’s intention to challenge the counting of legally submitted ballots.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s announcement that the Japanese nation will go net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2050 has been widely welcomed as a step in the right direction by environmentalists and others focused on the growing threat of climate change.
Nearly fifty years after a US-backed coup toppled Chile’s democratically-elected President Salvador Allende and paved the way for military dictator General Augusto Pinochet to impose a rightwing constitution, Chileans have voted in a 4-to-1 landslide to approve the creation of a new constitution.
The global movement working to abolish nuclear weapons celebrated a “historic milestone” after Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, pushing the agreement over the threshold required to enter into force.
The Chinese government has begun parading imprisoned Taiwanese on television with the claim that they are Taiwanese spies. Televised confessions of guilt have been broadcast in order to reinforce this claim.
This SNA Speakeasy features Satoko Norimatsu on the theme of “Japan’s War Memory and the Hiroshima A-Bomb.”
Greenpeace has sounded an alarm over the Suga government’s plan to release stored water from the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, releasing a new report warning about the presence of carbon-14, which the group says “has the potential to damage human DNA.”