Thousands of young activists in Australia and New Zealand yesterday launched a global protest demanding that politicians and business leaders move swiftly to curb greenhouse-gas emissions to fight climate change.
Coordinators expect more than 1 million young people to join the protests in at least 110 nations, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s demand for urgent action to slow global warming.
“I’m worried about all the weather disasters. Every time we have huge a bushfire here another animal might go extinct,” said Nina Pasqualini, a 13-year-old at a rally in Melbourne, led by the group Extinction Rebellion.
Photo: Reuters
“The government isn’t doing as much as it should. It’s just scary for younger generations,” she said, holding up a placard seeking to stop a proposed new coal mine in Australia.
Global warming due to greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels has brought more droughts and heat waves, melting of glaciers, rising sea levels and devastating floods, scientists say.
Australia just had its hottest summer on record.
Last year, global carbon emissions hit a record high, despite a warning from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October that output of the gases would have to be slashed over the next 12 years to stabilize the climate.
Against a backdrop of elections to the European Parliament, which began on on Thursday, the Frankfurt school strikers plan to march on the headquarters of the European Central Bank to demand that it stop financing the fossil-fuel industry.
The bank says its mandate is to control inflation and not to favor certain market sectors over others.
Since Thunberg began a single-handed climate protest outside the Swedish parliament in August last year, the Fridays for Future school strike movement has grown exponentially, with groups inspired by her example rapidly clustering into larger, self-organizing networks connected across time zones by social media.
Sophie Hanford, a national organizer in New Zealand, and the Melbourne organizers said they anticipated a huge student-led strike in September that would include adults and workers.
“There’ll definitely be more. This is only the beginning,” Hanford said on New Zealand’s Breakfast television show.
US President Donald Trump on Friday said Washington was “locked and loaded” to respond if Iran killed protesters, prompting Tehran to warn that intervention would destabilize the region. Protesters and security forces on Thursday clashed in several Iranian cities, with six people reported killed, the first deaths since the unrest escalated. Shopkeepers in Tehran on Sunday last week went on strike over high prices and economic stagnation, actions that have since spread into a protest movement that has swept into other parts of the country. If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to
Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96. The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she lived. Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who cofounded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice. “The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding
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PERILOUS JOURNEY: Over just a matter of days last month, about 1,600 Afghans who were at risk of perishing due to the cold weather were rescued in the mountains Habibullah set off from his home in western Afghanistan determined to find work in Iran, only for the 15-year-old to freeze to death while walking across the mountainous frontier. “He was forced to go, to bring food for the family,” his mother, Mah Jan, said at her mud home in Ghunjan village. “We have no food to eat, we have no clothes to wear. The house in which I live has no electricity, no water. I have no proper window, nothing to burn for heating,” she added, clutching a photograph of her son. Habibullah was one of at least 18 migrants who died
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