Africa’s climate is changing. And with El Nino already sweeping through parts of the continent, many nations are bracing themselves. But over and above the weather, climate change is proving to be most detrimental to farmers, with both rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall putting food security at risk on a continent expected to double its population by 2050. So how can this risk be mitigated? And what more can be done to counter Africa’s Changing Climate?
The United States and China recently committed to nearly total bans of the ivory trade, hoping to curb the poaching of elephants who are killed for their tusks. But China still remains the world’s biggest ivory consumer. NewsHour’s Christopher Booker reports.
GHOST FLEET: THE EPIC VOYAGE OF ZHENG HE – THE GREATEST EXPLORER YOU NEVER HEARD OF.
A Muslim castrated as a young boy in China, this man would still serve his nation with total loyalty. Zheng He:
China’s Greatest Admiral who may have discovered America even before Columbus.
A man of peace whose fleet had half the world in his grasp and the other half within easy reach. And a leader whose giant Treasure Fleet suddenly vanished because of a colossal mistake.
600 years ago, China emerges from an age of darkness – with the biggest naval fleet ever assembled. It will forge a new path across unknown oceans, led by a towering Admiral — 100 years before Columbus. And China will stand as the world’s undisputed superpower. But in time, this supreme leader would be brought to an end by a catastrophic decision. What happened?
Join National Geographic photographer Mike Yamashita as he retraces Admiral Zheng He’s epic journeys and discover how China’s internal struggles turned this Admiral’s forces into a ghost fleet, and setback this great nation for hundreds of years.
From the breathtaking opening shots of the African Swahili coast, this film is cinematic celebration of timeless beauty. Medieval Yemeni hilltop towns, ancient martial arts portrayed with balletic artistry, brutal religious piercings and the incomparable majesty of Perahera, all contribute to a pallet of rarely equaled cultural diversity.
From the eerie castration of the young hero to his final faltering steps in the Forbidden City as his enemies close in like vultures around carrion, the historical recreations about the life of Zheng He are executed with the grandeur and distance of a renaissance painting.
In tracing the voyages of the great fleet and its enigmatic leader, ‘Ghost Fleet’ brings the past alive through its observant narrator Mike Yamashita, and brings the documentary film into the realm of the epic feature.
This 2-hour documentary was shot on 16 mm film. Its initial airing: Dec 2005 on National Geographic Channel Asia.
Winner at the Asian TV Awards 2006: Best Cinematography, Best Original Music Score
Zheng He from 1405 to 1433 made 7 voyages with over 1000 soldiers and crew to India and Africa. The great explorer. Their voyages were hidden from history and the records burned. The information of “Zheng He” and his voyages were discovered in 1930. The Chinese invented a magnetic compas giving them the ability to navigate in hostile environments.
Never before have so few children in the world had polio. Yet, as World Polio Day is observed Saturday, those who are trying to wipe out the virus say it’s time to step up polio vaccination campaigns. If that happens,VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, polio could be eradicated by 2019.
Originally published at – http://www.voanews.com/media/video/wo…
Published on Oct 24, 2015
Learn about the discovery that prompted ancient civilizations to dream of one-eyed beasts in this collection of scenes from “Giants and Beasts.”
Beginning in March 2015, The Guardian, one of the world’s most respected and influential news organizations, launched an unprecedented media advocacy campaign—it was asking the richest and largest foundation on Earth, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to remove their investments in the fossil fuel industry. With the help of divestment activists, the Guardian collected the voices of a quarter of a million people across the globe who called on the Gates Foundation to join hundreds of other foundations, institutions, pensions, churches and communities representing trillions of dollars of investments who had taken their investments out of the fossil fuel industry since the fossil fuel divestment movement began just over 3 years ago.
Gates responded by giving a rather dismissive response to divestment, so former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, 350 Seattle, Divest University of Washington and numerous other partners, including leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, launched a local Seattle-based divestment campaign in the hometown of the Gates Foundation. After volunteers delivered a 40-page rebuttal of Gates’ rejection of divestment and then persistently campaigned outside the Gates Foundation every day for over a month, Gates addressed divestment again in an interview with the Atlantic.Gates’ response was once again disappointing—creating straw men out of the divestment movement in order to knock them down, and downplaying the remarkable prospects for a clean energy revolution. As a result, instead of aligning his investments with a clean energy future, Gates is continuing to support the very industries who are lobbying against progress on clean energy and whose business models are deeply out of line with averting the climate crisis. Perhaps not surprisingly, Exxon endorsed the billionaire’s view as part of their attempt to cover up their role in spreading misinformation and holding back climate progress for which they may be held legally liable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It seems Gates is in good company …
Divest-Invest: Two Sides of the Same Coin
To Gates’ credit he got the equation partly right, when he said that “the solution is investment”—a statement he backed up by committing to double his investments in clean energy to $2 billion. However, clean energy investments are only part of the equation: we also need to wind down investments in the fossil fuel industry while breaking the fossil fuel industry’s corrupting stranglehold on politics so that we can unlock the sorts of policies, societal changes and investments needed to tackle the climate crisis. Divestment is a powerful tool in unlocking the latter half of that equation.
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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