“The Amazon now is in an emergency situation,” says Luciana Vanni Gatti, who studies the rainforest at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research. “Deforestation is increasing year by year: 2020 was worse than 2019, 2021 was worse than 2020, and we are sure 2022 will be worse yet.”

Now scientists are racing to figure out if and when the Amazon might reach a dreaded tipping point, a sort of point of no return when the greatest rainforest on earth could dry out and turn into a sprawling savanna. The end result will be the loss of an irreplaceable ecosystem and major player in global climate dynamics.

A paper published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change aims to provide more clarity on that tipping point, which may be rapidly approaching. While prior research used complicated modeling to predict how the decline might unfold, this new research is based on satellite data that shows 75 percent of the Amazon has become less resilient to disturbances like drought.

Source: The Amazon Rainforest May Be Reaching a Point of No Return – Mother Jones

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Monday accused a Russian tycoon of scheming to make $1 million in illegal campaign donations to federal and state political candidates in the United States to gain favorable licensing decisions for a cannabis business venture.

The prosecutors said the donations by the businessman, Andrey Muraviev, 47, were at the heart of an illegal campaign finance scheme conducted in the months before the 2018 midterm elections that also involved two Soviet-born businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and two other co-defendants.

Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were allies of Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, and assisted Mr. Giuliani in his efforts to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was a leading Democratic presidential candidate.

In terms of our response as a city, one area where I do believe that we excelled — both in terms of directly serving New Yorkers, but also being an exemplar for the entire country and in some ways the world — is our vaccination campaign. We just hit 17 million doses administered in New York City. But far more important is what that means with respect to the immense suffering that has been prevented. We estimate that about 48,000 lives were saved, over 300,000 hospitalizations were averted and about 1.9 million cases were prevented.

67 residents of Bucha in the Kyiv oblast were buried in a mass grave on 10 March, with some of the victims of Russia’s unending shelling unidentified.  Like in Mariupol, Russia’s relentless bombing and shelling leave the Ukrainian authorities with no alternative, but to resort to such mass graves, another bitter echo from the Nazi occupation 80 years ago.  Most, if not all, of the victims in both cities were the civilians, mostly women and children, whom Russia is still denying that that it is killing.

The denials are staggering.  Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov claimed on 14 March that Russia’s so-called ‘special operation’ was going to plan and that their sophisticated weapons were “hitting only items of military-informational infrastructure”.  The state-controlled RIA Novosti ends each report by quoting the defence ministry which claims that its armed forces “strike only military infrastructure and Ukrainian soldiers”.

Source: Mass graves of the Ukrainian civilians Russia claims it is not killing

Drought and deforestation: How Madagascar’s children are paying the price – The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world

Source: The New Humanitarian | Drought and deforestation: How Madagascar’s children are paying the price

Source: China’s covid outbreak sealing provinces, threatening supply chains – The Washington Post

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Source: 𝑷𝒉𝒐𝒕𝒐𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒂𝒚 – Tfarhad