World roundup: March 20 2023

Stories from Iraq, Thailand, France, and elsewhere

Nowruz Mobarak to those who are celebrating!

INTERNATIONAL

In today’s global news:

• Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.

• The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.

• A new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that we’re on course to hit 1.5 degree Celsius average global temperature increase by the early 2030s, so congrats to everybody who made that possible. The vaunted 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set the avoidance of that milestone as its stretch goal while adopting a 2 degree increase as its more realistic threshold (SPOILER ALERT: we’re on course to blow through that one too). The report insists there’s still a 50 percent chance to stay below 1.5 degrees “but,” as the New York Times puts it, “it would require industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s.” Needless to say that’s not going to happen.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

Fighters from a Syrian jihadist rebel group called Ahrar Sharqiya reportedly shot and killed at least three Syrian Kurds and wounded four others celebrating the Nowruz holiday in northern Syria’s Aleppo province on Monday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is reporting that the militants argued with the Kurds about celebrating the holiday and decided to cap that argument off with murder. Ahrar Sharqiya is one of several Syrian rebel factions backed by the Turkish military, and its fighters consist largely of former Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham members along with (allegedly) a number of Islamic State defectors.