New Internationalist

The memories of our era are filled with images of its ongoing collapse: forests in flames, seas turned into graveyards, epidemics, famines and murderous invasions… But we could choose to remember something else. We could remember the power of the uprisings that shook the countryside and cities of the world, sparing no continent, no geography. Time and again, in the midst of this suffocating atmosphere of the end of civilization, people have risen against fatalism.

The Israeli occupation doesn’t just happen through laws, military checkpoints, army raids and expanding settlements; it also seeps into and transforms our entire sensory world. On a drive from Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, to Ramallah, in the centre, I had a jarring realization of how much the Palestinian landscape had changed. I was returning from an assignment covering the largest mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.

Tanveer Ahmad Chopan lost his life after jumping into a river in northern India’s Jammu on 13 April. It wasn’t suicide. Chopan, who was Muslim, was being chased by violent goons, over a crime he never committed. His body was found 20 days after the attack. Chopan was being pursued by self-styled ‘cow vigilantes’. The cow is considered sacred by India’s Hindu majority, and killing them is against the law in many states.

The renewed scramble for Africa’s minerals and resources has intensified, powered by debt traps and ‘development’ arrangements involving global powers, and fuelling conflict and genocide, including in Sudan, Sahel and Congo. Our governments’ bartering away of our natural wealth for a chance to survive another election or debt cycle is cementing the neoliberal hold. In the face of this imperialist assault, one might expect African governments to fortify their people.

Predatory online gambling companies are targeting Brazil’s largely low-income and indebted population, many of whom see online casinos as a way of solving their financial problems. Addiction to digital betting has been responsible for the breakdown of families and even deaths among workers burdened with crippling debts, according to the Ministry of Health.

For years, the wealthy have been telling us that our salvation lies in space. ‘There is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary’, billionaire Elon Musk has said, claiming that getting to Mars will prevent human extinction, and is therefore as crucial as tackling poverty.

‘One point five trillion dollars.’ President Donald Trump has a penchant for eyewatering, Dr Evil-style demands from media outlets and others: last year’s filing against the BBC for ‘ten billion dollars’ has been just one of a much longer string. The cheque he’s demanding from the US public for military spending is an order of magnitude higher. Last year the US defence budget topped $1 trillion (£730 million) for the first time.

Diana lives in Huánuco, a part of the Amazon where the fever for illicit gold is running high – with lethal consequences. Rivers and fish are being poisoned with mercury, forests are felled and land devastated as illegal mining, fuelled in part by the soaring price of gold (currently over $4,000 per ounce), is causing havoc within Indigenous communities. Land, health, environment and social fabric are under attack.

In November 1572 a brilliant new star appeared in the sky – initially bright enough to be seen during daylight. Its appearance was recorded worldwide and it stayed visible to the naked eye for over a year. It is now commonly known as Tycho’s supernova, after Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose contemporary measurements, along with those of Spanish scientist Jerónimo Muñoz, proved it was further away than the moon.

The New Space Race We are seeing a dramatic new push into space, including unprecedented levels of private sector involvement and dramatic increases to the number of satellites in orbit – from around 2,000 at the start of this decade to over 14,000 today. The new space race is dominated by US billionaires – infamous titans of the tech industry. The rest of us get left in the dust as Earth’s skies fill with their debris and the stratosphere is scorched by their rockets.