In 2024, humanity – as a whole – took a purposeful stride towards engineering the collapse of modern civilisation.

While climate, politics, wars and celebrities vied for the headlines, the hard indicators of human management of Planet Earth and our own future were all pointing south. Here is a selection of catastrophic risks for 2024, based on trusted information:

Forest loss: 488 m ha tree cover lost since 2000. Current loss is around 25mha/ year to all causes, including agriculture, development, wildfires and climate.

Early in 2025, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been invited to an informal summit of EU leaders. It's the first such invitation for the UK since the bitter days of the Brexit negotiations.

The focus of the February meeting is future security and defence co-operation. The backdrop: the volatile state of the world from Europe's perspective. 

Wars rage in the Middle East and in Europe - with Russia aided in its assault on Ukraine by Iran, North Korea and China.

Adding to the uncertainty haunting this continent, Donald Trump is poised to re-enter the White House. 

Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands now open to US military
The decision is part of a process that seeks the reestablishment of US military bases in Ecuadorian territory. Several voices have severely criticized the decision as a violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty.

The national government of Daniel Noboa approved a resolution that enables US ships and crews to use the Galapagos Islands for control and patrol activities in the area.

On February 15, 2024, Noboa signed a series military cooperation treaties with the US government, allowing ships, military personnel, armament, equipment, and submarines to be installed in the natural reserve, which UNESCO declared a World Natural Heritage Site in 1978.

In September 2015, President Barack Obama boasted that “greater prosperity and greater security — that’s what American and Chinese cooperation can deliver.” But by the time the Trump administration issued its first national security strategy only two years later, great-power competition with China — not cooperation — guided US foreign policy.

The Bipartisan Origins of the New Cold War
BY
MICHAEL BRENES and VAN JACKSON

The AUKUS Forum continues to amaze. Its latest initiative endeavours to extend AUKUS submarines to rockets. Or at least get on the AUKUS gravy rocket. What’s the scam?

The scam is the many ways a private group of AUKUS enthusiasts is endeavouring to get its hands on some of the $368B earmarked for the AUKUS adventure. It’s all for the common good, of course, supporting Anthony Albanese’s vision of “a transformational movement for our nation.”

    by Kim Wingerei 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, to express condolences for the deadly plane crash that occured in Kazakhstan this week, the Kremlin said on Saturday.

Putin offered an apology for the fact that an incident “took place in Russian airspace,” adding that it occurred during a Ukrainian drone raid, which was being repelled by air defenses.

“The Azerbaijani passenger plane, which arrived on schedule, made repeated attempts to land at the airport in Grozny,” the statement said. The capital of Russia’s Chechen Republic, as well as other cities in the region, “were being attacked by Ukrainian combat drones at the time, and Russian air defences were repelling those attacks.”

Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends on activating contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change within the next few years. Drawing on expert elicitation, an expert workshop, and a review of literature, which provides a comprehensive analysis on this topic, we propose concrete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics and a rapid global transformation to carbon-neutral societies.

These social tipping interventions comprise removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has accused Nigel Farage of “fakery” over claims that Reform UK membership has surpassed that of the Conservatives, making it the second largest political party in the UK.

Ms Badenoch said Reform’s counter was “coded to tick up automatically”, but Mr Farage said he would “gladly invite” a firm to “audit our membership numbers” as long as the Conservatives do the same.

The row comes after a digital counter on the Reform website showed a membership tally before lunchtime on Boxing Day ticking past the 131,680 figure declared by the Conservative Party during its leadership election earlier this year.

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, research shared exclusively with The Guardian reveals.

The tycoons include the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, the tech billionaires Bill Gates, Larry Page and Michael Dell, the inventor and social media company owner Elon Musk and the Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim.

Elon Musk said that if the United States dramatically reigns in its spending and reduces its debt to the central bank, The Federal Reserve, it will go bankrupt. The billionaire tech mogul said that the U.S. has no choice anymore but to fix its rising debt problem.

Musk is going to co-lead a new department tasked with curbing spending under President-elect Donald Trump. However, no ruler will ever cut the debt because doing that will cause a loss of power and all but complete destruction of the economy. But it’ll be interesting to watch the debt continue to spiral out of control while the ruling class claims they’ll be fixing it.

A MintPress News investigation has found hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA working in top newsrooms across the country, writing and producing America’s news – including on Israel-Palestine. These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News.

Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine – a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest. Many key U.S. newsroom staff were also formerly Israeli spies or intelligence agents, standing in stark contrast to journalists with pro-Palestine sentiments, who have been purged en masse since October 7, 2023.

This investigation is part of a series detailing Israel’s influence on American media. A previous report exposed the former Israeli spies and military intelligence officials working in U.S. newsrooms.

From tech and transport to hotels and media, chief executives in almost every industry across the US proclaimed they would take a pay cut during the economically tumultuous times of the pandemic.

But new research has shed light on why many of those cuts might have been better called "redistributions".

Researchers from the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, and University of New South Wales examined the changes to chief executive (CEO) compensation between 2019 and 2020 and found evidence that some shifted their remuneration under the guise of a pay cut.

US President Joe Biden is set to visit the Vatican in January to seek solace and “relief” as his term draws to a close, according to the New York Times, citing sources close to the matter. The White House has confirmed that Biden accepted an invitation from Pope Francis during a phone call last week.

With less than a month remaining in his presidency, Biden will also meet with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and President Sergio Mattarella.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden and Pope Francis will discuss global peace efforts. The New York Times reported, however, that the visit may also serve a more personal purpose, offering comfort as he prepares to leave office.

Pope Francis has reportedly been a confidant for Biden, exchanging occasional phone calls that have been quite casual, including “friendly check-ins.”

Since the famous Time magazine cover of 1995, nation states have been struggling to control access to adult and illegal material on the Internet. In recent years, strategies for such control have shifted from the use of traditional policing- largely ineffective in a transnational medium - to the use of take down and especially filtering applied by ISPs enrolled as “privatized censors” by the state. 

On January 1, Hungary will pass the baton of the European Union's six-month rotating presidency to Poland, drawing a curtain on what has been a turbulent half-year for the bloc.