Monday, June 18, 2007

World Justice News

Japan will join the ICC (International Criminal Court) in October and is hoping to make Nuclear War a crime against humanity. (Yahoo). In a related story, Reuters reported that Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr said that the prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay violates the Geneva Conventions and even the low standards of victor's justice established at the Nazi War Crime Trials (and Tokyo War Crime Trials).

The British Academy of Medical Sciences wants to allow the creation of human-animal interspecies clones by somatic cell nuclear transfer (a human cell nucleus and DNA in a cow cell, for example). (Reuters). Of course, these cells will never be implanted into humans. (Do you believe that?)

Global warming may create one billion new refugees by 2050, dwarfing the 10 million refugees and 25 million IDPs of today. That's easy to believe if you look at the areas that would be submerged by a rise in sea level, such as the Nile delta, large rice-growing areas of Thailand, much of Bangladesh, Cambodia right up to the Tonle Sap, southern Vietnam (the Mekong delta rice-growing area), areas around Shanghai, and most flat areas of Japan --which already can produce only half the calories it consumes. The population which will be displaced or in danger of famine is far larger than the actual number whose homes are submerged. I wonder if the countries responsible for the emission of greenhouse gasses (the United States, 25%, the EU, a similar amount, etc.) will accept their fair share of the refugees that their emissions made (250 million people!) or if they will be too tied up in their own problems to even pretend to care. I predict the G-8 (or whatever number they are) will unanimously agree to dump millions of refugees on the greening crusts of their Antarctic pie slices after 2041 when the treaty expires.

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