Panama’s doomsday warning is not about holiday shopping

 Al Jazeera English

The Panama Canal is in dire straits.

A severe drought is impeding navigation of the United States-dominated trade artery that bisects the isthmus of Panama in Central America.

As of mid-August, more than 200 ships were stuck at the canal. On August 26, CNN warned that the situation is “not a good sign for supply chains – or your holiday shopping”.

To be sure, even before the onset of accelerated anthropogenic climate change, the Panama Canal was never enormously environmentally compatible. The construction of the waterway, which began as a French undertaking in the late 1800s before being appropriated by the US and completed in 1914, encapsulated the recklessness and hubris of man’s efforts to dominate nature.

Thousands upon thousands of workers perished in the quest to bend the earth to imperial will. But at least they enabled future “holiday shopping”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Remember that I love you most

 Al Jazeera English

The day before I found out that my father was dying, a dead cat appeared on the bottom step of the staircase in the apartment building where I was staying. It was late July, and I had rented a summer place in Fethiye, a town on Turkey’s southwestern coast where I had been a regular visitor since 2004.

Fearing that this was probably some sort of apocalyptic omen relating to my own life, I fought the urge to google “what it means when you see a dead cat”. When I finally did, it seemed there were a couple of possibilities. Seeing a dead cat could be “a symbol of death and rebirth”, Google said. Or it could be an apocalyptic omen.

The next day, my mother called to inform me that my dad had commenced in-home hospice care in Washington, DC, and that the end was near. His doctors at the hospital had been dispensed with, having shown themselves to be irremediably committed to the American way of pursuing profit at the expense of human wellbeing. My father’s final two chemotherapy treatments, which he had been reluctant to undergo, had done nothing to deter his prostate cancer and everything to ensure that his remaining moments on earth were spent in pure agony.

I began making preparations to travel to Washington, DC, my birthplace and the command centre of the country I had spent the past 20 years avoiding at all cost, having long ago diagnosed the United States as a downright sick land and disproportionately anxiety-inducing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The murders of Indigenous activists mark the death of the planet

 Al Jazeera English

In January 2022, Breiner David Cucuñame, a 14-year-old Indigenous Colombian activist, was shot dead in Colombia’s southwestern department of Cauca.

He was killed in the company of his father, during a routine unarmed patrol of Indigenous lands for the purpose of deterring incursions by militant groups. While the killing made headlines on account of Cucuñame’s young age, it was pretty much business as usual in the South American nation.

As of September 2021, 611 environmental defenders had already been assassinated in Colombia since the signing of the so-called “peace deal” in 2016, according to the Colombian Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz). Of those 611 people, 332 were Indigenous.

And yet this snapshot of bloodshed in Colombia is but part of a larger, sinister global picture. Last year, the London-based NGO Global Witness released a report documenting no fewer than 1,733 murdered environmental and land-defence activists in the decade since 2012, amounting to one murder approximately every two days.

Even so, the NGO emphasised that its figures were “almost certainly an underestimate”. In 2021 alone, as per the Global Witness report, 200 land and environmental defenders were killed worldwide – nearly four per week. Significantly, more than 40 percent of the documented killings were of Indigenous people, who account for no more than five percent of the global population. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

I hate US sports. The women’s football team is making it more difficult

 Al Jazeera English

When I was in the ninth grade in Austin, Texas, I got it into my head that I wanted to join my high school football team – by which I mean American football and not the sport that most of the rest of the world calls football and the United States calls soccer.

It was not that I had any sort of talent for or even understanding of the game; I was simply irritated that only boys were permitted to play.

The team coach laughed at my proposal and told me I was not physically strong enough, and I became a cheerleader instead.

Jump ahead a few decades to the world of international football – yes, what the world calls football – and the US Women’s National Team (USWNT) has been rather more successful in combating gender discrimination in sport.

The favourites to win the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup currently under way in Australia and New Zealand, the USWNT made headlines last year when the US Soccer Federation agreed to pay both the women’s and men’s national teams equally and to award the women’s team $22m in back pay. The Federation also announced the “equalisation” of World Cup prize money.

Despite consistently outperforming their male counterparts, the female players had been earning considerably less money – business as usual in a country that forever flaunts itself as a bastion of equality and other noble virtues. According to the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute, the gender pay gap in the US widened from 20.3 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2022. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.