13 July 2021 (The Siberian Times) – Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia – or the Sakha Republic, the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerising. There are some separate 300 fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometres – but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose […]
By Svetlana Skarbo 30 June 2021 (The Siberian Times) – More than 2,000 people are deployed in extinguishing wildfires raging around Russia’s coldest inhabited territory, Yakutia, now in the third year of an extremely intense season of wildfires. The first of them ignited as early as the beginning of May right outside the world-famous Pole […]
By Bret Schafer, Amber Frankland, Nathan Kohlenberg, and Etienne Soula 6 March 2021 (ASD) – When Vladimir Putin announced last August that Russia had granted regulatory approval for Sputnik V, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it signaled—albeit perhaps prematurely—not only a potential turning point in the fight to end the coronavirus pandemic but also a new phase in […]
By A. Tarantola 26 March 2021 (Engadget) – The internet was supposed to set us free. Yet in the past two decades, authoritarian regimes have quickly adapted long-held tactics to the digital age, leveraging social mechanisms and mores to maintain their grip on captive populaces. While the internet and social media revolutions may have empowered […]
By Joshua Kurlantzick 25 February 2021 (The Washington Post) – Early this month, Myanmar’s armed forces took control of the country. Moving overnight, they detained most leading politicians and many civil-society activists, barricaded roads, cut off Internet access, arrested people in the darkness, and made an announcement of the coup on state television. In the […]
10 November 2020 (WIL) – The World Inequality Lab releases today a major update of global inequality data for 173 countries, making up 97% of the world population and 7.5 billion people. The data published distributes economic growth within each country making it possible to track inequality and poverty over time, countries and regions. These […]
By Andrew Freedman 21 June 2020 (The Washington Post) – A northeastern Siberian town is likely to have set a record for the highest temperature documented in the Arctic Circle, with a reading of 100.4 degrees (38 Celsius) recorded Saturday in Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle and about 3,000 miles east of Moscow. Records […]
11 June 2020 (Institute for Economics and Peace) – This is the 14th edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI), which ranks 163 independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness. In addition to presenting the findings from the 2020 GPI, this year’s report includes an analysis of the effect of the COVID-19 […]
By Sophie Lewis 22 April 2020 (CBS News) – As humans continue to stay indoors under lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Earth is slowly healing. Wild animals have taken to roaming the streets, clear waters have returned to the Venice canals and the world is literally shaking less. With billions of people quarantined and businesses closed, travel has all but […]
By Bob Henson 13 March 2020 (Weather Underground) – Research groups across the world concur that this past northern winter (December-February) was the second-warmest on record globally, in records going back more than a century. The latest group to confirm this finding is NOAA, in its monthly State of the Climate report issued Friday. The winter result […]
