flango

Wildlife charity backs policy of exploitation of small number of some endangered species for economic purposes – such as trophy hunting.

The wildlife charity WWF has been working to support the trade in polar bear fur at the same time as using images of the bears to raise money, it can be revealed.

Polar bears are severely affected by the loss of Arctic sea ice, which makes seeking prey harder and forces the bears to use more energy. In some regions, polar bears are showing signs of declining physical condition, having fewer cubs, and dying younger.

Despite their endangered status, polar bears are hunted commercially in Canada, the only country that still allows the practice after it was banned by Russia, Greenland, the US and Norway. An annual average of 300–400 skins are exported, primarily to China, where a full pelt sells for an average of $60,000 (£48,000) and is often used for luxury clothing or as a rug.

EU monitor says global temperatures were 1.75C above preindustrial levels, extending run of unprecedented highs

Climate scientists had expected this exceptional spell to subside after a warming El Niño event peaked in January 2024 and conditions shifted to an opposing, cooling La Niña phase. But the heat has lingered at record or near-record levels, prompting debate about what other factors could be driving it to the top end of expectations.

Kennedy’s hearing signifies how close a man with medically racist beliefs is to becoming the US’s leading health official

After calling for the permanent ‘resettlement’ of all Palestinians from Gaza earlier in the day, Trump said the US would 'take over' and 'own' the Gaza Strip. The US president said he envisioned 'long-term' US ownership of Gaza after Palestinians were moved elsewhere

Zygmunt Bauman - individualized society

What most critics fail to discuss as well is that this world, like any other human world, has been human-made; far from being a product of inscrutable and invincible laws of nature or sinful yet irredeemable human nature, it is, to no small extent, a product of what can only be called the political economy of uncertainty.

The major vehicle of this particular political economy of our times is the escape of power from politics; a flight connived with by traditional institutions of political control, above all by the governments of states, and more often than not actively aided and abetted by them through the policies of deregulation and privatization. The overall result of this process is, as Manuel Castells puts it, a world in which power flows, while politics stays tied to the place; power is increasingly global and exterritorial, while all established political institutions stay territorial and find it difficult, nay impossible, to rise above the local level. After two centuries of the modern effort to tame and domesticate blind and erratic forces of nature and replace them with rationally designed, predictable and manageable human order – it is now the outcomes of human activities that confront the actors as eccentric and capricious, wayward and impenetrable, but above all unbridled and uncontrollable ‘natural’ forces. Societies once struggling to make their world transparent, danger-proof and free of surprises now find their capacity to act hanging on the shifting and unpredictable moods of mysterious forces such as world finances and stock exchanges, or watch helplessly, without being able to do much about it, the continuous shrinking of labour markets, rising poverty, the unstoppable erosion of arable land, the disappearance of forests, growing volumes of carbon dioxide in the air and the overheating of the human planet. Things – and the most important things above all – are ‘getting out of control’. As the human ability to cope with problems at hand grows, so do the risks and new dangers which every new move brings, or may bring, in its wake.

The overwhelming feeling of ‘losing a hold on the present’ is the result, which in its turn leads to a wilting of political will; to disbelief that anything sensible can be done collectively, or that solidary action can make any radical change in the state of human affairs. That condition is seen increasingly as a ‘must’ – a supreme necessity which can be interfered with by humans only at their own peril. We hear again and again that the sole medicine for the morbid side-effects of deregulated competitiveness is more deregulation, flexibility and a yet more resolute refusal to meddle. And in case one remains unconvinced, the clinching argument against resistance is the all-too-tangible absence of an agency powerful enough to carry out whatever decisions may be taken by joint deliberation and agreement. Even those who think they know what is to be done throw the towel into the ring when it comes to deciding who – what kind of an effective institution – is going to do it.

This is why, as Cornelius Castoriadis observed, our civilization ‘stopped questioning itself’. This, Castoriadis adds, is our main trouble. When people accept their impotence to control the conditions of their life, if they surrender to what they take to be necessary and unavoidable – society ceases to be autonomous, that is, self-defining and self-managing; or, rather, people do not believe it to be autonomous, and thus lose the courage and the will to self-define and self-manage. Society then becomes heteronomous in consequence – other-directed, pushed rather than guided, plankton-like, drifting rather than navigating. Those on board the ship placidly accept their lot and abandon all hope of determining the itinerary of the vessel. At the end of the modern adventure with a self-governing, autonomous human world, we enter the ‘epoch of universalized conformity’

The Finland-based company's in-wheel motor serves up 650 kilowatts of power

Expanding display rolls out with the touch of a button

“The fascism that we thought we’d left behind is now the third biggest political force in Europe,” said Sánchez. “And, as President Macron [of France] said only a few days ago, the international reactionary movement – or the international far-right movement that we’ve been warning about for years in Spain – which is being led in this case by the richest man on the planet, is openly attacking our institutions, inciting hatred and openly calling for people to support the heirs of nazism in Germany in the forthcoming elections that will be held in Europe’s most important economy.”

Extract from the book Ultra-Processed People

[...]He met a British couple Derrick and Patrice Jelliffe, paediatricians who were studying infant malnutrition. In a series of papers, they had meticulously documented aggressive marketing practices by the infant formula industry in low-income settings, with a particular focus on Nestlé. Sales representatives with no certification or training were dressed up as ‘mothercraft nurses’. They advised impressionable new mothers about the benefits of formula and promoted it in such a way that has since been linked to thousands of avoidable deaths.Nestlé and some other formula companies were causing a quadruple jeopardy.First, even formula made with clean water is associated with an increased risk of fatal infection, probably because of effects on the infant microbiome. Second, Nestlé was marketing the formula in communities where the possibility of producing an uncontaminated feed was almost zero. In these low-income settings, parents would typically have only one bottle and no way of cleaning it, would have to use river or well water contaminated with sewage and had low literacy rates, which meant they had great difficulty in making up the feeds correctly. Third, while initial samples were given at low price, or even for free, once the mother had stopped lactating the price went up, creating poverty further and endangering the child and its siblings. In east Africa, for example, to feed an infant properly would take more than a third of a labourer’s salary. Finally, it seemed that to save money mothers diluted the formula so the infants, often already suffering with diarrhoeal disease, were then undernourished: ‘Under these circumstances, almost homeopathic quantities of milk are administered with large quantities of bacteria, the result is starvation and diarrhoea, too often leading to death.’ The Jelliffes catalogued instances of formula companies marketing breastfeeding as being ‘backwards and insufficient’, and in 1972 coined the phrase ‘commerciogenic malnutrition’ – malnutrition caused by companies. Modern obesity is also a commerciogenic disease

working life has been full of uncertainty since time immemorial; but the present-day uncertainty is of a strikingly novel kind. The feared disasters which may play havoc with one’s livelihood and its prospects are not of the sort which can be staved off or at least resisted and mollified by joining forces, making a united stand, jointly debating, agreeing and enforcing measures. The most dreadful disasters strike now at random, picking their victims with a bizarre logic or no logic at all, scattering their blows capriciously, so that there is no way to anticipate who will be doomed and who saved. The present-day uncertainty is a powerful individualizing force. It divides instead of uniting, and since there is no telling who might wake up in what division, the idea of ‘common interests’ grows ever more nebulous and in the end becomes incomprehensible. Fears, anxieties and grievances are made in such a way as to be suffered alone. They do not add up, do not cumulate into ‘common cause’, have no ‘natural address’. This deprives the solidary stand of its past status as a rational tactic and suggests a life strategy quite different from the one which led to the establishment of the working-class defensive and militant organizations.

When the employment of labour has become short term, having been stripped of firm (let alone guaranteed) prospects and therefore made episodic, and when virtually all rules concerning the game of promotions and dismissals have been scrapped or tend to be altered well before the game is over, there is little chance for mutual loyalty and commitment to sprout up and take root. Unlike in the times of long-term mutual dependency, there is hardly any stimulus to take a serious, let alone critical, interest in the wisdom of an arrangement which is bound to be transient anyway. The place of employment feels like a camping site which one visits for but a few nights and which one may leave at any moment if the comforts on offer are not delivered or found wanting when delivered, rather than like a shared domicile where one is inclined to take trouble to work out the acceptable rules of interaction. Mark Granovetter has suggested that ours is a time of ‘weak ties’, while Sennett proposes that ‘fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections.’7The present-day ‘liquefied’, ‘flowing’, dispersed, scattered and deregulated version of modernity does not portend divorce and a final break in communication, but it does augur a disengagement between capital and labour. One may say that this fateful departure replicates the passage from marriage to ‘living together’ with all its corollaries, among which the assumption of temporariness and the right to break the association when need or desire dries out loom larger than most. If the coming together and staying together was a matter of reciprocal dependency, the disengagement is unilateral: one side of the configuration has acquired an autonomy it never seriously adumbrated before. To an extent never achieved by the ‘absentee landlords’ of yore, capital has cut itself loose from its dependency on labour through a new freedom of movement undreamt of in the past. Its reproduction and growth has become by and large independent of the duration of any particular local engagement with labour.

The independence is not, of course, complete, and capital is not as yet as volatile as it would wish and strives to be. Territorial – local – factors still need to be reckoned with in most calculations, and the ‘nuisance power’ of local governments may still put vexing constraints on its freedom of movement. But capital has become exterritorial, light, disencumbered and disembedded to an unprecedented extent, and the level of spatial mobility it has already achieved is quite sufficient to blackmail the territory-bound political agencies into submission to its demands. The threat (even unspoken and merely guessed) of cutting local ties and moving elsewhere is something which any responsible government must treat with all seriousness, trying to shape its own actions accordingly. Politics has become today a tug-of-war between the speed with which capital can move and the ‘slowing down’ capacities of local powers, and it is the local institutions which feel as if they are waging an unwinnable battle. A government dedicated to the well-being of its constituency has little choice but to implore and cajole, rather than force, capital to fly in and once inside to build sky-scraping offices instead of renting hotel rooms. And this can be done or attempted to be done by ‘creating better conditions for free enterprise’, that is, adjusting the political game to the ‘free enterprise rules’; by using all the regulating power at the government’s disposal to make it clear and credible that the regulating powers won’t be used to restrain capital’s liberties; by refraining from everything which might create an impression that the territory politically administered by the government is inhospitable to the preferences, usages and expectations of globally thinking and globally acting capital, or less hospitable to them than the lands administered by the next-door neighbours. In practice, that means low taxes, few or no rules, and above all a ‘flexible labour market’. More generally, it means a docile population, unable and unwilling to put up an organized resistance to whatever decisions capital might take. Paradoxically, governments can hope to keep capital in place only by convincing it beyond reasonable doubt that it is free to move away – at short notice or without notice.

Extract from the book The Individualized Society