nations

Scientists are cautiously optimistic about the new global biodiversity pact that emerged from down-to-the-wire negotiations in Montreal this week. Given the vast amount of disputed text at the start of the conference—spanning 265 pages—observers were surprised and delighted that 190 countries managed to beat the clock on Monday and release a final agreement that sets a wide range of targets for protecting nature. “To me, it’s a miracle,” says Binbin Li, a…

Nearly 200 countries have agreed to protect 30 percent of Earth's lands and oceans by 2030. The deal was reached early this morning at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal following two weeks of negotiations. The only holdouts to the deal were the US and the Vatican, though the Biden administration has a domestic plan to conserve 30 percent of US land and water by 2030.  With the agreement, each participating country agrees to hitting over 20 environmental targets by the end of the decade. A key condition is…

The United Nations rights chief said Saturday that Elon Musk's decision to reinstate the Twitter accounts of several journalists was welcome news, but warned that "serious concerns remain". "Good news that journalists are being reinstated Twitter, but serious concerns remain," Volker Turk said on the platform, insisting "Twitter has a responsibility to respect human rights." Musk had drawn anger and warnings from the European Union and United Nations after suspending the accounts of more than half a dozen prominent…

The Netflix original action movie is a strange beast, seeing as a great number of international productions made on relatively small budgets tend to be vastly superior to their Hollywood counterparts that cost upwards of $100 million, with The Big 4 being the latest case in point. Hailing from the deranged mind of director Timo Tjahjanto, who shouldn’t need an introduction to Netflix subscribers with a penchant for bone-breaking violence having helmed the incredible The Night Comes for Us, the filmmaker’s latest foray…

In theory, the remit of a streaming service is to give subscribers a veritable buffet of content options across film and television, something the current complexion of Netflix’s global charts is pulling off with serious aplomb after God’s Crooked Lines ensured that not only are the platform’s five most-watched films all in-house exclusives, but each plays in a distinctly different genre. Per FlixPatrol, Oriol Paulo’s psychological thriller has become a Top 10 hit in 64 countries around the world, good enough to see it…

HONG KONG— Tesla Inc.’s TSLA -0.34% Shanghai factory had a record month of sales despite China’s auto market shrinking in the grip of a slowing economy and consumer demand under harsh Covid curbs, constraints that Beijing has just moved to start easing. The American EV giant sold more than 100,000 China-made electric vehicles in November even as passenger car retail sales shrunk by more than 9% on the year amid poor market conditions,…

Credit: Adam Sharman, Author provided Despite years of discussion and countless reviews, the incarceration rate of First Nations adults continues to increase in Australia. The federal government has said it will address this via "justice reinvestment". That means funding programs that keep people out of the justice system. Justice…

Credit: Shutterstock In 1989, distinguished Australian geographer Gerard Ward wrote that the Pacific was emptying out. As people on smaller islands left to seek opportunity elsewhere, the region risked becoming Earth's empty quarter. He wrote: "Perhaps 100 years hence, almost all of the descendants of today's Polynesian or Micronesian…

by Madhurjya Chowdhury December 1, 2022 Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have become more prevalent in Central Asian countries in recent years. The region has been gradually arming itself with drones, whether as a result of general shifts in warfare or specific occurrences like the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan or the fighting between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.But not every nation is striving to improve the capabilities of its drones in the same manner. The sort of UAVs they buy and from which suppliers depend…

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration finds itself caught between its domestic-policy goals and some of its closest allies as it races against the clock to set the ground rules for new electric-vehicle subsidies.The Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service faces a year-end deadline to propose a guideline for how to qualify for EV tax incentives of up to $7,500 per vehicle under the tax and climate spending legislation known as the Inflation Reduction Act that President…