Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.

The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.

“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”

“This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is,” he said. “This is actually now jeopardising […]

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The recent report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers on the evils of socialism has drawn a great deal of ridicule, and rightly so. It boils down to something along the lines of “You want Medicare for All? But what about the terrible things that happened under Mao Zedong?” That’s barely a caricature.

However, one issue raised by the report has drawn some sympathetic appreciation even from liberals: the discussion of the Nordic economies, which are widely seen by U.S. progressives as role models. The report points out that real gross domestic product per capita in these economies is lower than in the U.S., and argues that this shows the costs of an expansive welfare state.

But is a negative assessment of the Nordic economies really right? That’s not at all clear. That lower G.D.P. number conceals two important points. First, by any measure people in the lower part of the income distribution are much better off in Nordic societies than their U.S. counterparts. That is, there is a lot less misery in Scandinavia — and because everyone has some chance […]

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Credit: Zoë van Dijk

Alexis Templeton remembers January 12, 2014, as the day the water exploded. A sturdy Pyrex bottle, sealed tight and filled with water, burst like a balloon.

Templeton had just guided her Land Cruiser across the bumpy, rock-strewn floor of Wadi Lawayni, a broad, arid valley that cuts through the mountains of Oman. She parked beside a concrete platform that rose from the ground, marking a recently drilled water well. Templeton uncapped the well and lowered a bottle into its murky depths, hoping to collect a sample of water from 850 feet below the surface.

Wadi Lawayni is enclosed by pinnacles of chocolate-brown rock, hard as ceramic yet rounded and sagging like ancient mud-brick ruins. This fragment of the Earth’s interior, roughly the size of West Virginia, was thrust to the surface through an accident of plate tectonics millions of years ago. These exotic rocks—an anomaly on Earth—had lured Templeton to Oman.

Shortly after she hoisted her sample from the well, the bottle ruptured from internal pressure. The water gushed out […]

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U.S. Border Patrol agents take a family into custody near McAllen, Texas.
Credit: John Moore/Getty

Silicon Valley technology corporations including Amazon, Palantir and Microsoft make millions from US immigration enforcement, according to a new report.

They provide tools that aid surveillance, detention and deportation of individuals targeted by Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, according to a paper published Tuesday by a coalition of immigrant rights groups. The report outlined ways Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has expanded its reach, with infrastructure from tech companies that have faced growing internal and external pressure to cancel their contracts.

“During this time of continued escalated abuse by Ice and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we’ve been frustrated, scared and shocked by the level of secrecy around how many of these tech contracts are procured,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with Mijente, one of the not-for-profit groups behind the report. “These technologies are being used in real time, and so many companies are profiting.”

The report – produced by research firm Empower LLC and commissioned […]

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