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.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
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