Rolling Stone: Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration

In 2017, a string of climate disasters – six big hurricanes in the Atlantic, wildfires in the West, horrific mudslides, high-temperature records breaking all over the country – caused $306 billion in damage, killing more than 300 people. After Hurricane Maria, 300,000 Puerto Ricans fled to Florida, and disaster experts estimate that climate and weather events displaced more than 1 million Americans from their homes last year. These statistics don't begin to capture the emotional and financial toll on survivors who have to dig through ashes and flooded debris to rebuild their lives. Mental-health workers often see spikes in depression, PTSD and suicides in the months that follow a natural disaster. After Harvey, one study found that 30 percent of residents in flooded areas had fallen behind on their rent or mortgage. One in four respondents said they were having problems paying for food. [...]

One recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change predicts that by 2050, as much as 30 percent of the world's land surface could face desertlike conditions, including large swaths of Asia, Europe, Africa and southern Australia. More than 1.5 billion people currently live in these regions. In the U.S., a recent study by Mathew Hauer, a demographer at the University of Georgia, estimates that 13 million people will be displaced by sea-level rise alone by the year 2100 (about the number of African-Americans who moved out of the South during the Great Migration of the 20th century). In Hauer's study, about 2.5 million will flee the region that includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Greater New Orleans loses up to 500,000 people; the New York City area loses 50,000. The biggest winners are nearby cities on high ground with mild climates, good infrastructure and strong economies: Atlanta; Austin; Madison, Wisconsin; and Memphis. [...]

The likelihood of another catastrophic levee collapse has been greatly reduced, thanks to $14.5 billion spent in the aftermath of Katrina on bigger, stronger barriers against the sea. But the city has other problems. For one thing, the protective coastline around it is vanishing. Louisiana is losing a football field of land to the sea every hour, due to a combination of subsidence, sea-level rise and reduced sediment flow from the Mississippi River. For -another, large parts of New Orleans, which was originally built on a swamp, have been sinking for 100 years – some parts of the city have subsided as much as 15 feet. As a result, even ordinary rainstorms are becoming existential threats. Last August, nine inches of rain fell on the city in three hours, and it looked like Katrina all over again. "The city is like a big bathtub," says Ed Link, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland who led the effort to rebuild after Katrina. "You can build barriers to protect it from storm surges, but when it rains, you still have big problems."

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The Local: Immigration in Itay: Myths and reality ahead of election

Italy's national statistics institute Istat says that there are five million foreign nationals legally residing in Italy. That is 8.3 percent of the country's population of 60.5 million.

The biggest proportion, 23 percent, are from Romania followed by Albanians (9 percent), Moroccans (8 percent), Chinese (5.5 percent) and Ukrainians (4.5 percent) and many of them are employed in retail, farming or domestic work.

More than 690,000 migrants, most from Sub-Saharan Africa, have arrived by boat from Libya since 2013. Migration study foundation ISMU estimates that around 500,000 are living in the country illegally -- equivalent to 0.9 percent of the population. [...]

However Italy's interior ministry says the crime rate has dropped by 8.3 percent in the last 10 years, despite the fact that the number of foreigners in the country has increased from three to five million over the same period.

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Politico: 950 attacks on Muslims recorded in Germany last year

The figures were released by the interior ministry in response to an inquiry made by the far-left Die Linke party, the paper reported Saturday. The government did not previously collect data on anti-Muslim attacks, and therefore has no point of comparison to 2016 data.

According to the data, 33 people were injured in the attacks, which were predominantly perpetrated by far-right extremists. The report also recorded 60 cases vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers, some of which were defaced with Nazi grafitti. [...]

“There is a big blind spot, because the authorities — police and prosecutors — are not yet sensitized, and therefore many cases do not appear in the statistics,” Mazyek told the paper.

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Politico: How Italy does Putin’s work

“Italy is a weird exception [among Western states] because the relationship between Italian politicians and Putin is very open,” said Anna Pellegatta, a digital forensic research assistant at the Atlantic Council, a think-tank monitoring the rise of digital falsities worldwide. “The line between misinformation and officials promoting Russian messages is very blurred.” [...]

But it’s not just Berlusconi’s media empire that has been willing to portray Russia in a more favorable light. Last year, Rai, the country’s national broadcaster, ran uninterrupted a four-hour interview between Putin and Oliver Stone, the U.S. filmmaker, which gave a broadly positive spin to the Russian leader’s aggressive foreign policy. [...]

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Facebook rolled out a series of programs to counter these false narratives, including a clampdown on people making money from advertising connected to fake news. The social network also teamed up with Pagella Politica, a local fact-checking site, to debunk online myths. [...]

Italy’s politicians are divided over how to fight digital misinformation, with some actively embracing and sharing outright lies among their followers. Candidates from the Northern League and 5Star Movement are skeptical that false information is even a problem.

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Al Jazeera: The problem with leftist myths about Syria

A great number of leftist in the West and the East have been buying into regime propaganda for years now. From Australian academic Tim Anderson, who's claimed that Bashar al-Assad has not been involved in mass killings of civilians and was simply demonised by the imperial West to British and US journalists Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh who have claimed the regime did not use chemical weapons in various attacks on civilians, leftist public figures continue to believe that the Assad dictatorship is a bastion of anti-imperialism in the region and needs to be supported. [...]

For me, it is unfathomable how people who have stood up for social justice and human rights across the world remain in support of a regime that has exploited its population economically and tortured and killed innocent civilians in the most horrendous ways possible. Or how people who had seen through US imperial war propaganda cannot see through the Russian equivalent of it. [...]

In schools, we were brainwashed daily. I attended Baathist schools, where the president's portrait adorned every wall. During the flag salute every morning, we called for the immortality of Hafez al-Assad before heading to class. We memorised songs praising him and the Baathist Party, we had to recite his speeches. He was our leader and father. When Hafez died in 2000, I was 9 years old. I cried because the person who I'd always been told was immortal had died like a normal human.  [...]

Bashar's cousin, Rami Makhlouf, is the richest man in Syria. Makhlouf controls the major mobile phone company, TV channels, pro-government newspapers and used to control the oil and gas industry of the country before the war.

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