In brief:
🏛 Australia votes ‘yes’ at United Nations as Palestinian push for full membership gathers momentum A total of 143 nations — including Australia — voted in favour, while nine were against and 25 abstained. (2024-May-11) [ABC|News]
🏛 US says Israel may have breached international law with American weapons in Gaza (2024-May-11) [BBC]
🏛 Is Australia exporting weapons to Israel? (2024-Apr-15) [The Guardian]
…
❝ Arguably for the first time, a Palestinian perspective on Zionism is taking center stage in mainstream discourse. “A lot more young people, including young Jews, are listening to their Palestinian friends and classmates who are saying: ‘This is what Zionism means to us,’” said Simone Zimmerman, the media director of Diaspora Alliance, an international organization focused on combating antisemitism and its weaponization. This explains how terms like “ethnostate”, “Jewish supremacy” and “settler-colonialism” have become central to the protests. ❞
❝ The failure of the peace process to produce an independent Palestinian state, alongside perpetually expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, became proof for many observers that subsequent Israeli governments were never serious about those negotiations. […] The breakdown of a process toward a Palestinian state has also come as Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented what they have found to be increasingly repressive apartheid policies in the occupied territories, which challenge the very notion that Israel is a democracy. ❞
❝ Making tertiary education free for the most vulnerable, even for everyone, is possible. It is, as economist Richard Denniss says, a matter of choice. In Norway, university is free and the fossil fuel industry is taxed, while in Australia we subsidise the fossil fuel industry and tax students. Denniss is blunt. “The Australian government collects more money from HECS than it does from the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax.” ❞
❝ Over the last few weeks, this debate has taken over TikTok, Instagram, and mainstream media. And the answer – if you’re a woman, at least – isn’t surprising. Many are choosing the bear. Why on earth would women choose a bear over a man? Well… ❞
Philip J Zylstra et al 2024 Environ. Res. Lett. 19 058001 DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ad40c1
❝ Contrary to the objections of Miller et al (2024 Environ. Res.Lett.), removing lower quality data revealed that the mature forests were even less flammable than expected, so that only annual prescribed burning could reduce bushfire likelihood below that in forests unburnt for 56 years or more. Our findings highlight the role of prescribed burning in creating a more flammable landscape. ❞
❝ The pulse of elevated flammability following burning and the subsequent low flammability of long-unburnt forest were not artefacts of poor data as claimed by Miller et al (2024). Instead, poor data obscured the strength of the pulse. ❞
❝ Today’s trail mapping applications are changing how we learn about places to spend time outdoors. Like social media use in the outdoors, trail mapping applications can be a force for good, or they can have the opposite effect. Uploading inaccurate trail data can cause avoidable impacts by directing other people to trails that have not been intentionally put there (designated) by land managers. These “social trails” can cause human safety and environmental impact issues. ❞