Biden signs Gender Discrimination Order destroying Women’s Sports
In a sad day for women sports, Biden has signed a gender discrimination order paving way for transgender athletes and biological males to compete in female sport events.
Joe Biden’s newly-signed executive order has sparked controversy among many critics, who say it will destroy women’s sports by allowing transgender (male) athletes to participate.
Titled “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation”, the order allows athletes to compete in high school and college sports in accordance with their gender identity, not biological sex.
Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. The order sparked outrage on social media, with many saying the influx of transgender athletes will ruin women’s sports.
While a handful of LGBT activists praised Biden’s decision to battle discrimination, critics said public schools will now be afraid of losing funding if they do not allow transgender female athletes to compete in girls’ sports.
Women must compete against biological males at the risk of injury and loss of title, thanks to a new Biden executive order. Don’t ever tell me this is ‘pro-woman.’ It’s not. It’s destructive and extremely malicious.
We don’t know how to feel about Biden’s executive order on transgender females playing in female sports. It seems like a disadvantage, people tweeted. I don’t think its a good idea to have biological males competing with biological females regardless of what they identify as,” read one comment, while another said.
If you had a daughter competing in sports who wants to get a college scholarship, you might see the other side of the plain reality.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have done more damage to women’s rights in one day than Donald Trump managed in four years with their misguided Executive Order on Gender Identity Discrimination.
Biden’s executive order that prioritizes transgender people is a DISASTER for ordinary women and girls across America. This will be the end of women’s sports indeed. Not only is it completely unfair competition for real females, no male will want to watch either.
It is the policy of the Biden-Harris administration to inflame discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Well he’s successfully done that. Just discriminated against any naturally born female athlete just to appease a minority?
RT. com / ABC Flash Point Discrimination News 2021.
World’s Money is flowing in the Wrong Direction
A new report shows that funding for polluting industries far outstrips support for climate change mitigation. Top banks are funding two of the world’s most polluting industries far more aggressively than governments are funding solutions.
Sp, funding of fossil fuels eclipses climate finance. Banks including HSBC, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase have poured almost €3 trillion into the expansion of fossil fuels in the Global South since the Paris Agreement on Climate Change was adopted seven years ago.
A further €340 billion has been funneled into industrial agriculture, the second major cause of climate change, according to an analysis by NGO ActionAid. This is 20 times more than Global North governments have provided developing nations to mitigate the climate crisis.
The world’s money is flowing in the wrong direction, says Arthur Larok, secretary general at ActionAid International. This is absurd and must stop.
The banks fueling the climate crisis’, reveals the top banks from each region funding fossil fuels and industrial agriculture in the Global South. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China was found to be the largest financier of fossil fuels between 2016 and 2022.
Among European banks, HSBC was the worst offender. But the British bank decided in December last year that it would no longer provide funding for new oil and gas fields.
Other European banks highlighted in the report include BNP Paribas, Societe Generale and Barclays. In the Americas, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America were the worst offenders.
While in Asia, China CITIC Bank, Bank of China and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial were some of the biggest funders of fossil fuels and industrial agriculture.
Global banks often make public declarations that they are addressing climate change but the scale of their continued financing of fossil fuels and industrial agriculture is simply staggering.
German pharmaceutical and agro-chemical company Bayer was found to be the largest recipient of industrial agriculture financing in the Global South, having received over €19 billion since 2016.
Developing nations contribute least to climate change yet often experience its worst effects. As the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, wealthy nations have been called on to help combat the climate crisis abroad.
The report says governments should regulate the financing of fossil fuel expansion, regulate chemical use and deforestation, and support solutions such as renewable energy and sustainable agriculture practices like agro-ecology.
It also urges banks to adopt more sustainable practices. By financing fossil fuel and industrial agriculture in the Global South, banks are condemning communities to the cruel combination of landlessness, deforestation, water pollution and climate change.
Banks need to own up to the harm that they are unleashing on the communities and the planet, and urgently stop financing the destruction wreaked by fossil fuels and industrial agriculture.
Euro News Green / ABC Flash Point News 2023.
Canada’s Indian Land solely Owned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II
The second largest country in the world by total area, Canada, is one of the most highly urbanized globally. However, none of its citizens have the right to own physical land in the country.
That is because almost the entire land in Canada is solely owned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who is also the head of state.
Canadian law in most provinces evolved from British common law, so instead of directly owning land, Canadians have land tenure. That means they can only own an interest in an estate.
Only 9.7% of the total land is privately owned, while the rest is Crown Land. It is administered on behalf of the Crown by various agencies or departments of the government of Canada.
Of the land owned by the Queen, 50% is managed by the provincial government and the rest by the federal government.
All of those lands are held as public (known as Crown Lands) and mainly used as national parks, forests, private homes, oil exploration and for agriculture.
According to the latest United Nations estimates, the current population of Canada is about 37 million slaves. The citizens of Canada all pay taxes to the Queen of England, in order for the British monarchy to collect profits to get richer.
The British monarchy owns 70% of the entire planet, better known and disguised as the Common Wealth organization. The empire confiscates other countries according western law, neglecting indigenous values, in order to get a hold on the mineral resources worth hundreds of billion.
But still the British state is bankrupted by interest rates charged by the biggest thieves on the planet, being the banks that take and hold the enslaved people’s money with a cover rate set by law of nearly 10%. At the same time charging interest to loans made with the consumer portfolios.
So, the Chinese, which lend trillions of dollars to developing nations with and to get rid off the bankrupted western currencies, took over half of Europe. In order to stop this type of development the west are now handing over their properties and corpses to the gambling and betting empires to safeguard traditions.
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2020.
Labyrinth van de Matrix
Hoe ontsnap je nou uit die MATRIX?
Wanneer we er achter komen, dat tijd anders verloopt, dan wij denken zitten we gevangen in een ringvloek van oneindigheid , door het verkeerde idee over TIJD. Ons tijd ruimte continuüm wordt instabiel.
We leven in een rekenmodel en zitten daar in gevangen…..een matrix……..nu we er achter komen, dat dit model niet klopt, lazert mijn werkelijkheid steeds in elkaar wat ontaarde in psychoses in het verleden, omdat ik bronconflicten kreeg met mijn godsbeeld.
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Nu 21 jaar later is het 6 jaar geleden, dat ik mij laatste psychose had en kan ik het redelijk stabiel houden, omdat entiteiten niet meer met mijn lichaam aan de haal kunnen gaan ……
Iets waar je absoluut niet vrolijk van wordt en niet valt uit te leggen aan de op pillen draaiende reguliere psychiatrische industrie.
We zitten in een paradigma verschuiving, waarin door voortschrijdend inzicht, de mens op een deelpunt gekomen is en er opnieuw scheiding tussen goed en kwaad gemaakt wordt aan het einde van dit era…..het repeterende einde der tijden.
Omdat mijn Christusbeeld niet alleen geijkt is aan de Christus Jezus, maar aan het christus bewustzijn wat tijdloos is en er voor Adam dus al was heb ik een wat ander godsbeeld dan de gemiddelde Nederlander.
Dit maakt, dat ik geen aansluiting meer heb in deze op geld draaiende maatschappij en graag wil afreizen naar gene zijde aan wateren der rust, maar er is iets wat dat tegenhoud en ik weet niet precies wat, want ik kan hier niets meer toevoegen en heb hier gegeten en gedronken.
Geld – geweld hebben een relatie en het geweld is hier dermate hoog op gelopen, dat hier voor mij geen leven meer mogelijk is en ik op een min of meer kunstmatige manier, door mijn onstoffelijke begeleiders in leven gehouden wordt, waar ik het nut niet meer van zie.
Ieder heeft een vrije keuze en mijn keuze is om niet mee aan deze schertsvertoning mee te doen en hier eigenlijk alleen nog maar wat als waarnemer rondloop om straks een volledig beeld aan mijn godvruchtige voorvaderen te geven in een verslag over.
Waar het aanbidden van de geldgod toe leidt en welke desastreuze effecten het heeft op iedere goede menselijke relatie.
Macht is een mechanisme van het ego, die niet los durft te laten en uit angst de controle te verliezen, als de individuele machthebber probeert hij het collectief van het Al, naar eigen hand te zetten.
Dit is nou juist het mechanisme wat schepping vernietigt en daarmee desastreus voor de schepping van onze Lieve Heer.
Lap je de regels die je voorgesteld zijn om met respect voor het leven van de ander met elkaar om te gaan, dan schrijf je zelf de naam, die in de hand palm van de schepper geschreven staat uit het register van het boek van de levenden en de doden en ben je nooit iemand anders geweest dan de praatpaal van de ander.
De slaaf die zijn meester vertolkt, omdat hij zichzelf verslaaft.
Als God een verslavend middel is, vertrouw je niet op de juiste God en zul je het beeld moeten her-ijken aan de bron van leven, die zijn woorden als levend water tot je heeft laten komen, door alle religieuze geschriften heen.
Onze Lieve Heer als schepper loopt iets langer mee dan een paar generaties en laat zich niet knechten of in de kaart kijken door een stel ontspoorde en omhoog gevallen mensen.
Dezen, die net iets te veel geld om handen hebben en daardoor dingen doen, waar onze lieve heer verdrietig van wordt…………zijn tranen hebben in het verleden een zondvloed veroorzaakt………HEBBEN WE ER AL IETS VAN GELEERD?
Wieberen Tjeerdsma / ABC Flash Point Wake Up News 2018.
EU New Copyright Law could Eliminate Free Internet
The EU new copyright law is basically a battle between billionaires Axel Springer SE and Google. But it is ordinary internet users who will fall victim to the EU’s new copyright law, which urgently needs modification.
Internet news and freedom of speech are good to share, but the European Parliament clearly doesn’t think so. Its new copyright legislation, passed last week, clamps down quite severely on sharing things on-line.
The dynamism of the internet is at threat. When Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, warns us of the dangers the new law poses, we should all sit up straight and pay attention.
For a start, the legislation shifts the responsibility for the uploading of copyright material to the internet platforms themselves. Beforehand it was the job of the companies who thought their copyright was infringed to do this.
Many don’t bother, and are happy to see their material uploaded to sites like YouTube as they know it promotes an artist’s work and boosts sales. But all that is likely to change.
Under Article 13, platforms would have to install “upload filters”.YouTube could be shorn of much of its content. Big sites would probably survive but, as smaller sites could easily be put out of business by “copyright trolls”.
Copyright law needs reform for the digital age. There needs to be an easy way for creators of content to receive payment from those who have stolen their work. The trouble is, the EU has used a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Being able to quote freely from other articles, so long as they are credited, is surely a good thing. It’s essential for instance when you are writing a piece dissecting another.
But under the new legislation all but the very briefest quotes may have to be paid for. Think how much that would restrict quality journalism and hinder the free exchange of knowledge.
The EU legislation, bad as it is in its own right, must be seen as part of a wider attempt to clamp down on free expression and the free exchange of ideas in the West at a time when fewer people than ever before believe establishment narratives.
This month a British MP launched a bill in Parliament entitled the ‘Online Forums Bill’ to ban private Facebook groups which promote “hate”, “racism” and “fake news”. But who defines what these terms actually mean?
The authorities will use their powers selectively and hypocritically to silence anyone who poses a threat to those living very comfortable lives inside the castle.
In free societies it should be up to internet users themselves to decide what articles and outlets they read, what Facebook groups they join (closed or otherwise), and what Twitter accounts they follow, and not Big Brother or any other kind of politically correct thought police.
Youth unemployment stood at around 43% in Greece, 33% in Spain and 32% in Italy, the last time I looked. What help will the Copyright Directive be to the young jobless?
Russia Insider / ABC Flash Point Cyber Police News 2018.
DARPA develops a Brain-Computer Interface capable of Electronic Telepathy & Telekinesis
A Brain-Computer Interface has been developed by the USA Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that is capable of laying a heads-up display over a user’s natural vision.
The Cortical Modem also holds the potential to cure sight loss and enable Electronic Telepathy and Telekinesis.
While still a long way from public production, the Direct Neural Interface (DNI) Chip would be shaped like a coin, around 1 cm wide, and could conceivably cost as little as $10 (£6.50).
As outlined at the Biology is Technology conference in Silicon Valley last week, the interface provides a direct link between the brain and an external device or software through manipulation of the visual cortex.
Phillip Alvelda, chief of DARPA’s Biological Technologies, told the conference how the device could replace all virtual reality glasses, such as the Oculus Rift, by bypassing the visual sensory system entirely.
Optogenetics involves the controlling of light-responsive proteins within the brain through targeted light emission.
DARPA has led the way in a number of futurist and trans humanist projects, including a tiny implant that assists the body’s organs in healing themselves when injured.
The secretive military agency was established by the US Government in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik by the USSR, which signaled that the Soviets had beaten the USA into space.
DARPA / ABC Flash Point News 2018.
Philippines sends Thousands of Tons of Trash back to Canada
The Philippines started returning dozens of shipping containers full of garbage to Canada on Friday. The move could possibly end a six-year dispute between the two countries.
Sixty-nine containers holding some 2,500 tons of household waste (including plastic bottles, bags, newspapers and diapers) were loaded overnight onto a vessel at the port of Subic, northwest of Manila.
The containers left on Friday for a month-long journey to the Canadian city of Vancouver.
Three years ago a Philippines court declared the import of 2,400 tons of Canadian waste illegal. It had been mislabeled as plastics for recycling.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte then ordered that the waste be shipped back, threatening to dump it in front of Canada’s embassy in Manila, or personally sail with the waste and leave it in Canadian waters.
Ottawa explained that the waste, exported to the Philippines between 2013 and 2014, was a private commercial transaction done without the government’s consent?
The country took the responsibility of shipping trash back, but failed to meet the deadline. The Philippines then recalled its envoys in Ottawa.
President Duterte’s spokesman Salvador Panelo said he hoped ties with Canada would now return to normal. Philippines Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said diplomats whom he had ordered to leave Canada had now been told to return.
Earlier this year, the Philippines shipped back 6,500 tons of garbage to South Korea, falsely declared as plastic flakes.
The row between developing and developed nations over garbage imports has intensified over recent years. The latter are being forced to rely mostly on themselves in their future waste treatment.
China which had for years received the bulk of scrap plastic from around the world closed its doors to foreign refuse in 2018.
Huge quantities of waste plastic have since been redirected to Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Indonesia and, to a lesser degree, the Philippines.
Washington rushed to blame Beijing while urging it to reconsider its “catastrophic” ban on foreign garbage imports.
The situation got worse when India – another major waste importer – followed China’s example and banned the import of solid plastic waste as well.
Malaysia, the world’s main destination for plastic waste after China, said this week it would return as much as 3,000 tons of waste back to the countries of origin, including Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the USA.
According to statistics from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, around 300 million tons of plastic are produced every year. Much of it is ending up in landfills or polluting the oceans , in what has become a growing international crisis.
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2019.
Scientists think time used to move backwards in Anti-Universe
A new study says that there could be an “anti-universe” where time moves backwards. The idea is based on the fact that nature has basic symmetry, which experts think could be true for the whole universe. In the Annals of Physics article, the idea was talked about.
It talks about a well-known idea in physics called Charge, Parity, and Time (CPT) symmetry. CPT symmetry is one of the laws of physics. It says that after a transformation, things like charge and time can be turned around.
Scientists believe that the Big Bang, which started the universe, was definitely a change, so the CPT theory could be true. Before the Big Bang, the researchers think there was a back-wards universe that was later turned upside down to make the universe we live in now.
We investigate the idea that the universe before the Big Bang is the CPT reflection of the universe after the bang, both classically and quantum mechanically.
The universe before the bang and the universe after the bang may be viewed as a universe/anti-universe pair, emerging directly into the hot, radiation-dominated era we observe in our past.
This, in turn, leads to a remarkably economical explanation of the cosmological dark matter.
The wild theory says that the fact that dark matter exists in our world isn’t so strange after all. Scientists think that dark matter is made up of ghostly particles called right-handed neutrinos. Neutrinos are real, but they can only spin to the left.
Scientists find it strange that they haven’t found one that spins to the right, which is what the laws of physics say should happen.
The researchers think that the right spinning particles may not be visible in our universe and that dark matter is just a stand-in for them.
We don’t know much about dark matter in the universe, except that it is invisible and affects other things in a physical way.
Scientists think that learning more about neutrino particles and dark matter could be a step toward proving the “anti-universe” theory. Scientists don’t think that people will be able to go to the “anti-universe” because it existed before the Big Bang.
Astronomy Daily / ABC Flash Point News 2023.
The Dutch Kingdom controls 20% of South America’s Trade Flow
The Netherlands is currently the largest single investor in South America, accounting for 20% of all attributable inflows, followed by the USA with 17% in 2014.
China is still far from being Latin America’s major source of foreign direct investment (FDI) and represents roughly 6% of the region’s total FDI.
According to Inter-American Dialogue, during the period from 2005-2015, China financed $125 billion (around 2.5% of the regional GDP) to countries and enterprises in Latin America.
About 25% of the global Jewish population lives in Latin America, with another 20% having their domicile in North America. However nobody can beat the Dutch, which are also the biggest foreign investors in China.
The Royal Dutch are very well known by insiders as the Jews from the West, many of them are trading in oil (Shell), food (Unilever), finance (ING) and chemicals (AKZO/DSM).
Also the salvage (Smit-Tak) and cargo sectors (KLM) in transport industry are well covered. The Dutch were the first in the world to establish a stock market, about 400 years ago in Amsterdam.
The Dutch Royals established their wealth dealing in narcotics, like the opium trade. After raking in King William I fortune, they also solely represented and distributed cocaine and other off the record stimulants to the soldiers fighting WW I and WW II.
Some refer to them as the Evil Capitalist Empire, because now they (Dutch & Jews) control the world’s largest XTC industry based in the Netherlands. This concept even comes with world’s most famous Dutch DJ’s in order to keep the dancing crowd busy.
Many Nazi’s outcasts still live in South America and European homeland connection is being represented by the networks of the twisted Dutch monarchy, of which King Willem Alexander was married to an Argentinian bloodline.
If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much is the slogan.
Royal Dutch Radical Anarchy / ABC Flash Point News 2018.
Joe Biden linked to Corruption, Terror attacks, and Political assassinations in Ukraine
Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, there’s been much talk about the family of US President Joe Biden and alleged corruption schemes connected with Ukraine.
The story itself isn’t new, but facts have recently come to light which make it clear why the American leader and his fellow Democrats remain intransigent on the Ukraine issue.
Andrey Derkach, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian who became widely known for publishing recordings of conversations between ex-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko and high-ranking foreign officials, including Biden (who was then US vice president), gave an extensive interview earlier this month to journalist Simona Mangiante.
During this conversation, he disclosed sensational new details about the special ties between the Biden family and the Ukrainian authorities.
President [Vladimir] Zelensky’s office was involved in distributing the Poroshenko-Biden recordings and helped organize the media coverage [of the story]. At the time, Zelensky and his team were interested in exposing his political rival by any means possible.
Everything changed after the start of the 2020 US election campaign and the arrival of Biden as president.
In a situation when Zelensky and [Ukrainian presidential aide Andrey] Yermak are begging Biden and [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken for money, a [news] story about how they had once created problems for Biden’s election campaign is a big problem for them.
So, instead of exposing the corruption in the previous Ukrainian administration, the Bidens (along with Zelensky and his team) turned against anti-corruption fighters.
Derkach, who has been forced to hide in Belarus, was stripped of his citizenship by the Ukrainian authorities and sanctioned by the USA.
But that’s not all. In addition to criminal investigations and sanctions, Derkach says he has faced assassination attempts ordered by top officials in Kiev and Washington.
On January 19, 2022, US Secretary of State Mr Blinken arrived in Ukraine to meet with Zelensky. Quite a lot of people attended this meeting – at least 14 people.
At the meeting, Mr Blinken told Zelensky the following: You urgently need to resolve the issue with Derkach. Zelensky began talking about some people from the opposition.
But Blinken said, if you don’t resolve this issue with Derkach, then we will resolve the Derkach issue with our partners.’
Those who were at the meeting were taken aback, because the position of the US secretary of state was quite harsh. Just think of it, the task for the president of Ukraine is to resolve the issue with Derkach.
It is noteworthy that in 2021, the Ukrainian police discovered plans to assassinate Derkach and the head of the group of prosecutors in the Burisma energy company case, Konstantin Kulik, but did not initiate a criminal case.
The investigation tracked down the criminal gang from Eastern Europe hired to carry out the hit, as well as their base in Transcarpathia. The assassin himself was supposed to be an Albanian, but the information was leaked, and the gang escaped.
There was also an attempt to assassinate former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. According to former US Associate Attorney General and ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Shokin (whose dismissal Joe Biden has openly bragged about) was poisoned with mercury while on a trip to Greece.
Nikolay Korpan – a doctor at the Austrian Rudolfinerhaus private clinic who treated presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 – reportedly confirmed this to Giuliani.
According to Korpan’s findings, while the permissible amount of mercury in the blood is no more than two units, Shokin was found to have 9.2 units and was starting to experience liver failure. It was clearly a murder attempt.
The number of witnesses in the Burisma case – a company though which Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden earned profits via alleged corruption schemes – is also steadily decreasing.
Shortly before she was due to testify as a witness in the case, the wife of Nikolai Lisin – a former partner of Nikolai Zlochevsky – was found dead in her apartment.
She had been responsible for accounting at Burisma and had been aware of transactions carried out in the interests of the Bidens. Lisin himself died in a car accident back in 2011.
In light of this, it seems Derkach is right to say that anyone who talks about Biden’s corruption in Ukraine is in danger of being physically removed.
The same can be said about his opinion that there is a single organized crime group: Biden, Blinken, [Victoria] Nuland, the ‘deep state’ represented by the Department of State.
And then there is their ‘extension’ – either in the form of Poroshenko, or of Zelensky and Yermak. As Derkach says, Zelensky and Yermak attacked the organized crime group headed by former President Poroshenko and took their place.
They have brought their own particular innovations into these matters. They have become even more cynical and cruel.
Meanwhile, on May 12, 2014, Burisma announced that Hunter Biden had joined its board of directors. The energy company was headed by Ukrainian oligarch Nikolay Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s minister of natural resources under Yanukovych.
While he held that post, Zlochevsky’s firm received nine licenses for the development of various energy deposits, thereby increasing its annual production volume sevenfold.
The oligarch’s activities drew the attention of Interpol, since Zlochevsky had ties with Maltese businessman Pierre Pillow.
He was involved in laundering huge sums of money in Maltese banks and helped Zlochevsky open accounts for Hunter Biden in Satabank, known for its dubious operations.
In 2018, Burisma took up the development of shale deposits located in the exact same area where the military conflict between Kiev and Donbass was raging. At least $10 billion – i.e. the sum of the contract with Shell – was at stake.
As a result, the European gas market has undergone a huge transformation in the past couple of years. By the end of 2023, LNG accounted for 42% of the EU’s (including Türkiye’s) gas imports.
This comes down to about 165 billion cubic meters of natural gas, when converted through regasification. Half of it – i.e. 77 billion cubic meters – was supplied by the USA.
According to a report by ship-broker Branchero Costa, the USA is now the largest exporter of LNG, accounting for 21.7% of global shipments. In total, the USA exported 88.9 million tons of LNG last year, which is 12.0% more than in 2022.
To compare, the USA exported 72.5 million tons of LNG in 2021, and just 48.2 million tons in 2020. What more can we say?
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2024.
Taking Flight with Travel and Tourism Pollution
The current landscape, sustainability is an increasingly vital aspect of our daily lives and of businesses’ operations, drawing focus on carbon-intensive industries like aviation, hotel accommodation including food and beverage (F&B) services.
Encouragingly, there has been an uptake of de-carbonisation practices by public and private players of the sector to transform the travel industry – not only reduce its carbon footprint but also contribute to the growth of local economies.
The travel industry, in particular, has long been associated with high levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and waste generation, not to mention the vast amounts of waste, including plastic bottles, food waste and other single-use items generated from tourism activities.
While it’s impossible to provide an exact figure for total waste generated by the tourism industry in Malaysia, available data from aggregate sources of data suggests significant contributions, particularly in plastic waste generation.
On the other hand, aviation accounts for around 2.5% of global CO2 emissions, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
> Contrails and cirrus clouds: These high-altitude clouds trap heat, amplifying the warming effect.
> Nitrogen oxides: These emissions contribute to ozone formation, which also has a warming effect.
> Water vapor: At high altitudes, water vapor from aircraft emissions can contribute to warming.
Experts opine that the common thread tying the challenges of sustainable aviation and tourism lies in overcoming entrenched systems driven by fossil fuels and unsustainable practices.
Both industries require advancements in technology, infrastructure and regulations, while grappling with high costs and changing consumer behavior.
Basically, it’s based on the economic benefits of sustainable tourism and not just about going green.
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With some of the world’s most beautiful beaches paying a heavy price for our plastic addiction, the travel and tourism industry is taking action to reduce its plastic footprint and encourage its customers to do the same.
One of Britain’s biggest tour operators, Thomas Cook, said in November 2018 that it would remove around 70 million single-use plastic items—enough to fill 3,500 suitcases—from domestic operations, planes and branded hotels during the next year.
A pilot scheme in its #noplaceforplastic campaign will run this summer on the Greek island of Rhodes where the company will try out sustainable alternatives and work with the local community and government to improve recycling infrastructure.
Thomas Cook will trial plastic-free toiletries in some of its brand hotels and promote water fountains and other fresh water sources.
The company will also work with sustainable designers Wyatt and Jack to turn broken and discarded inflatables, like lilos and armbands, into bags and holiday accessories.
On its airline, it will remove plastic wrappers on headsets and reduce the size of its duty-free plastic bags.
This is very important because many of the tourist destinations that we travel to do not have appropriate systems for recycling.
Their action is important to create awareness amongst destination stakeholders and, more importantly, to empower them to look for solutions.
While tourism contributes 10 % of global gross domestic product and accounts for one in 10 jobs worldwide.
The UN Environment’s research has shown that the industry’s use of key resources, like energy and water, is growing commensurately with its generation of solid waste, including marine plastic pollution, sewage, loss of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions.
The World Wildlife Fund reported in June 2018 that more than 200 million tourists visiting the Mediterranean every summer cause an almost 40% spike in plastic entering the sea.
With 80% of all tourism taking place in coastal areas, this destructive pattern is repeated elsewhere.
Hotel giant Hilton pledged to get rid of plastic straws in all its 650 locations and eliminate plastic bottles from its conferences. Marriott International is eliminating plastic straws and replacing small bottles of toiletries with dispensers in its North American hotels.
MSC Cruises aims to phase-out single-use plastics by March next year, while Norwegian cruise operator Hurtigruten says it has removed all unnecessary single-use plastic items.
Lindblad Expeditions, an adventure cruise company, has said it is now free of single-use plastics with all such items banned from its 13 ships. Royal Caribbean has said its 50 ships would stop using plastic straws by the end of last year.
P&O Cruises and Cunard are also planning to abolish plastic straws, water bottles and stirrers by 2022, while Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings has launched an anti-plastics initiative, including a ban on straws.
However, while eliminating plastic products is positive, the industry must do more, because all the food and beverage supplies for hotels and airlines are still rapt in single use plastics.
The World Economic Forum noted that degradation of the natural environment was having a serious effect on the tourism sector: as natural capital depletes—because of over-fishing, deforestation or water and air pollution—so tourism revenues decline.
Given the close relationship between natural resources and a very large segment of the tourism industry, then, a lack of progress on fostering sustainability, both from a general and sectoral point of view, will reduce tourism development opportunities.
The UN World Tourism Organization is developing a way to measure the sustainability of tourism to create an international standard for tourism statistics.
The standard will eventually be able to connect tourism indicators to the Sustainable Development Goals, expanding existing measurements beyond primarily economic indicators.
Beyond industry initiatives, individuals can also play a role. The World Travel and Tourism Council has urged travelers to minimize their plastic footprint by doing four simple things.
Bring your own reusable water bottle and purification system, carry a collapsible tote bag, refuse small bottles of toiletries in hotels and find out where you can recycle your plastic waste.
Simple steps, but if taken by every one of the estimated 1.3 billion international tourists, they could make a world of difference.
UN / ABC Flash Point News 2024.
China overtakes Japan as the Planets top-car Exporter
China says it has become the world’s biggest exporter of cars after overtaking Japan in the first three months of the year. Officials figures released in the last week show China exported 1.07 million vehicles in the period, up 58% compared to the first quarter of 2022.
At the same time Japan’s vehicle exports stood at 954,185, after edging up 6% from a year earlier. China’s exports were boosted by demand for electric cars and sales to Russia. Last year, China overtook Germany to become the world’s second largest car exporter.
According to China’s General Administration of Customs, China exported 3.2 million vehicles in 2022, compared to Germany’s 2.6 million vehicle exports. The shift away from fossil fuels has helped fuel the rise of China’s motor industry.
First quarter exports of new energy vehicles (NEV’s), which includes electric cars, rose by more than 90%, compared to a year earlier.
Tesla’s China arm, SAIC – the owner of the MG brand – and BYD, which is backed by veteran US investor Warren Buffett, are among China’s top exporters of NEV’s.
Elon Musk’s electric carmaker has a huge manufacturing plant in Shanghai which exports to regions including Japan and Europe. Tesla’s ‘Gigafactory’ is currently capable of producing 1.25 million vehicles a year, and the company is planning to further increase capacity.
Last month, it started making Model Y sport utility vehicles for export to Canada. China has also seen exports to Russia surge since the start of the Ukraine war, as Western countries imposed trade sanctions on Moscow.
Last, year, Chinese carmakers – including Geely, Chery and Great Wall – saw their market share in Russia jump after rivals including Volkswagen and Toyota quit the country following the special operation in Ukraine.
BBC / ABC Flash Point Automobiles News 2023.
Physicists figured out how Wormholes could enable Time Travel
Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow.
Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtouš from Charles University in Prague probably couldn’t get you out of a traffic fine, but they may have uncovered enough wiggle room in the laws of physics to send you back in time to make sure you didn’t speed through that school zone in the first place.
Shortcuts through spacetime known as wormholes aren’t recognized features of the cosmos.
But for the better part of a century, scientists have wondered if the weft and warp instructed by relativity prescribe ways for quantum ripples – or even entire particles – to break free of their locality.
At their most fantastic, such re-configurations in the fabric of the Universe would allow human-sized masses to traverse light-years to cross galaxies in a heartbeat or perhaps move through time as quickly as one might move through their kitchen.
At the very least, exercises that probe the more exotic side of spacetime behavior could guide speculation over the mysterious meeting point of quantum physics and the general theory of relativity.
Wormholes are, in effect, little more than shapes. We’re used to dealing with single-dimensional lines, two-dimensional drawings, and three-dimensional objects in everyday life. Some we can intuitively fold, mold, and poke holes in.
Physics allows us to explore these changes in situations we can’t intuitively explore. On the smallest of levels, quantum effects give distances and time some wiggle room.
On much larger scales, spacetime can shrink and expand in relation to gravity in ways that are impossible to appreciate without a whole bunch of equations to guide you.
For example, cram enough mass in one place (conveniently ignoring any charge it might have, or if it spins around), spacetime will bend in ways that give it two exterior surfaces. What connects them? A wormhole, of course.
Matter wouldn’t be able to move across this mathematical structure, though some suspect objects on either side that happen to be entangled would remain linked.
Over the decades, the search has been on for scenarios – both possible and purely theoretical – that could allow for quantum effects, and even whole particles, to journey through exotic shapes of spacetime unscathed.
Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov’s time warp proposal involves what’s known as a ring wormhole, first described in 2016 by the University of Cambridge theoretical physicist Gary Gibbons and University of Tours physicist Mikhail Volkov.
Distinct from spherical contortions of spacetime we might attribute to black holes, the ring wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects patches of the Universe (or different universes, for that matter) that are what we call flat.
Considering interactions of electrical and magnetic fields called duality rotations and applying some choice transformations, ring-shaped masses could create some interesting distortions in what would otherwise be flat spacetime.
And voilà! A hole in the Universe that connects you to … well, somewhere not nearby.
Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov took this hole and ran it through different scenarios. Like, what effect might another, non-moving mass have on the ring? And what if the entry ring and exit ring are in the same universe?
The solutions they uncovered included what’s known as a closed time-like curve. Just as it sounds, it describes an object or ray of light that travels along a line, returning to the exact same point as before. Not only in space but time as well.
Before you pack for a paradoxical round trip to the future and back, many obstacles could easily prevent such a loop. The late physicist Stephen Hawking certainly thought so.
But who knows? With the right kind of cosmic lawyer, we just might be able to appeal our sentence of a one-way trip into the future with a bit of help from a massive pair of rings.
Science Alert / ABC Flash Point News 2024.
Crickey Amigu di Natura 