A mainstream media that can hold only one thought at a time

I could not agree less with the politics of this article (representing the interests of the Empire as it does).

However it does make an important point. These are all issues that need watching closely

Climate change comes last in his list.

Five big global crises that got worse while the world watched Hurricane Irma

SMH,
12 September, 2017

While Hurricane Irma is a big and important news event, 
the intensive coverage has largely crowded out other 
important developments in the world in the last few 
days. Five world-changing crises advanced while most 
media attention was fixed on the hurricane.



1. North Korean nuclear program



The world edged closer to the inevitable decision point on North Korea's nuclear missile program. Kim Jong-un had been expected to light up another intercontinental ballistic missile to mark the country's Foundation Day on the weekend but preferred to keep the world guessing. He threw a big party for his nuclear scientists instead. "The recent test of the H-bomb [hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb] is the great victory won by the Korean people at the cost of their blood while tightening their belts in the arduous period," said the so-called Dear Marshall, signalling to his people that the half-century-long plan is approaching culmination as he achieves nuclear breakout.The culminating point is approaching for the US, too. US President Donald Trump is asking the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Australian time, to impose an oil embargo on North Korea.This would cripple the sadly small amount of activity that passes for the North Korean economy, possibly forcing national collapse. But, to be successful, this must be supported in the UN Security Council by China and Russia. If one or both decide to wield their veto power, the council cannot act. And that is very likely what's going to happen. It suits Beijing and Moscow to keep North Korea as a buffer holding the US ally of South Korea at arm's length. Unable to impose the killer sanctions, a frustrated Trump will find himself facing this unhappy choice - disarm Kim's regime by force, or accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. To attempt to disarm him leads to war and death of horrific proportions. To accept a nuclear North is to admit a nuclear extortionist to the world. Trump's decision day draws nigh.

2. Persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar



The great civilisational convulsion of South-East Asia escalated. Myanmar under the supposed human rights champion Aung San Suu Kyi is doing what Myanmar's military dictatorship refrained from doing.The Buddhist majority is purging the Muslim minority on a mass scale. It is an unchecked crisis. The UN estimates that 300,000 of the Rohingya Muslims have been chased from Myanmar in less than three weeks, since the violent clashes of August 25. Unknown numbers have been killed. The million or so Rohingya in Myanmar are originally from the Indian subcontinent, but many communities have lived in Myanmar for a century or more. They have long been denied citizenship and treated as second class citizens. Now many face the choice of being killed or fleeing the country. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the weekend spoke for Muslims around the world when he called the purge "genocide". Thousands of Indonesians protested on the streets of Jakarta. The 57 governments of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned Myanmar's brutality. The Rohingya are not blameless. The August 25 violence began when Rohingya militants attacked some 30 police stations. According to Myanmar's government, this attack was funded and aided by the "charities" of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism, one of the cancers that spreads Sunni terrorism internationally.So the ill-treatment of the Rohingya has already won the sympathy of the Sunni terrorist movement; the continuing purge is an invitation to Daesh, which calls itself Islamic State, to take up arms in Myanmar. Myanmar's government says it is trying to head off any UN intervention by negotiating with Russia and China. Like North Korea, Myanmar seeks the political protection of Moscow and Beijing.



3. Daesh in the Philippines


While Daesh is being crushed relentlessly in the territories of its so-called "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq, it is proving exceptionally tenacious on the Philippines island of Mindanao. The Philippines army said it would clear Mindanao's city of Marawi of the 500 Daesh fighters within a week. That was four months ago and the last Daesh forces are still holding out. Australia has sent surveillance planes and is offering military trainers. As the fighting goes on, the island of Mindanao becomes daily more chaotic, more impoverished and more ungoverned. Together with the purge of Muslims in Myanmar, this is helping South East Asia's emergence as a highly prospective new battle zone for Daesh, a potential disaster for Australia.

4. Tension on Russia's western borders 

Russia has begun its huge military manoeuvres along its western border areas. It last mobilised for "Zapad" or West war games four years ago. NATO is on high alert for any Russian provocations or intrusions and has sent military reinforcements into the Russian border states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These Baltic countries are deeply anxious about Russian intentions. Estonia's Defence Minister, Juri Luik, is calling on the European Union to create a military equivalent of the EU's passport-free Schengen zone. The concept is to allow European countries to move forces quickly across national borders to fight any Russian aggression. After its invasions of Georgia and the Crimea and its continuing destabilisation of Ukraine, Europe is increasingly wary of Russian ambitions.



5. Climate change


Climate change gathers force. The evidence of the damage inflicted by man-made global warming grows stronger. "As recently as a decade ago, climate scientists had a motto that 'you can't attribute any single extreme event to global warming'," wrote three climate scientists in the Scientific American this week.


"By the time politicians and journalists started repeating that line, however, the science had moved on, so that we now can attribute individual events in a probabilistic sense," according to Michael Mann, Thomas Peterson and Susan Joy Hassal. "We know that the strongest storms are getting stronger, with roughly 8 meters per second increase in wind speed per degree Celsius of warming.

"And so it is not likely to be a coincidence that almost all of the strongest hurricanes on record (as measured by sustained wind speeds) for the globe, the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere, the Pacific, and now, with Irma, in the open Atlantic, have occurred over the past two years."


The UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres is due to meet Donald Trump next week and is expected to try to persuade him to keep the US committed to the Paris carbon treaty. If the evidence of Irma doesn't make an impression on Trump, it's hard to know what could. After all, it's received a lot of coverage.