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Deep in central Mali, what was supposed to be harvest season for villagers has become a season of starvation, death and destruction.Mali's health ministry says so far hundreds of people have died from what it describes as a man-made famine, as farmers and herders fight over land.It is an ancestral conflict that takes place at the height of the dry season between the Dogon, who are traditional farmers and hunters, and the Fulani, the semi-nomadic herders of the Sahel.
The Dogon accuse the Fulani of overstepping on their farmland to feed their animals, while the Fulani accuse the Dogon of killing and stealing their cattle. And now they are killing each other.In one of the worst attacks, 160 Fulani villagers were killed in Ogossagou in March. Mamadou Togo, the chief representative of Mali's Dogon people, tells Al Jazeera the attack was not perpetrated by Dogon hunters. He says the Dogon have not attacked any Fulani villages, despite there being tensions between the two communities.However, he admits that "when other people come and attack the Dogon, they retaliate"."We cannot sit and watch people come and kill us and go back without anything. We said no, this is intolerable," he says. "When you come to kill me and I'm not dead, for instance, if I can I will kill you."
The two sides both accuse the other of being the aggressor.Mahmoud Dicko, a Fulani and a powerful leader of the High Islamic Council, blames the mutual mistrust on outside interference."I am convinced that there are other invisible, obscure forces that are planning to destabilise the entire subregion. And to succeed in this destabilisation, it is necessary to create a war between the different ethnic groups," he says.The violence is not limited to Mali, either. In neighbouring Sahelian countries, Fulanis have been in conflict with other tribes as well. Fuelling this conflict are armed groups - including al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates - who are stepping in and taking sides.
Some have been fighting in the war in Libya."This crisis in the centre of Mali started from the occupation of northern Mali by terrorist groups [in 2012]," says Tiebile Drame, the Malian minister of foreign affairs. "The Malian crisis is directly linked to the situation in Libya, to the collapse of Libya in 2011."Since 2013, the United Nations peacekeeping mission MINUSMA has been operating in Mali. There are currently 14,000 UN troops - among them British, Canadian and German soldiers - as well as 4,000 French combat troops and regional G5 Sahel forces in the country.Despite this, the violence is spreading, and spiralling out of control.Insurgent and rebel groups also directly target security forces, launching suicide attacks and car bombings.
MINUSMA is now the deadliest UN peacekeeping mission, with more UN troops dying in Mali than anywhere else, or at any time before. This also adds to the feeling shared by many Malians that the security forces are not a source of protection but a source of danger.Nevertheless, the $1bn a year MINUSMA mission has been renewed for another year, while Mali's government is calling for the creation of a coalition force like the ones seen in Iraq and Afghanistan to intervene in Mali.But the Dogon and Fulani leaders we spoke to are both sceptical about outside actors.
Dogon leader Togo believes France profits from the instability in the country, saying Mali's former colonial master "wants to recolonise again this country because of the wealth underground".Meanwhile, Fulani leader Dicko says the UN mission and international community are failing Mali, spending billions of dollars "for their own comfort"."I say to leave us alone, to leave the Sahelians between us," he says. "We are brothers, we have lived together for millennia. We have a mechanism to settle things between us. If we are left alone, we ourselves will find a solution to this problem."To examine who profits from Mali's state of instability, and how the violence can be brought to an end, Talk to Al Jazeera In The Field meets Dogon and Fulani leaders to try to understand this complex conflict.
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Greening Deserts is an economical, educational, cultural, social, scientific and sustainable project to reduce desertification and global warming. http://www.greening-deserts.com
Greening Deserts sustainable agriculture and greenhouse farming projects using classical greening or gardening methods but also new and alternative techniques like hydroponics, permaculture and vermaculture.
Greening Deserts projects are for arid or dry, hot or cold regions. We offer also professional greening services and solutions for coastal, subtropical, cold and semi-arid areas nearby water sources like lakes, rivers, seas or oceans!
Download the official press releases and media package:
http://www.greeningdeserts.com..../greeningdeserts_med
Feel free to use and share the material.
The project is in development, non profit, NGO (at the moment) and needs any support in this stage! If you can’t spend money but want help a bit, you can share, like and comment, give constructive advises, recommendations or suggestions.
General information:
Greening Deserts or dry areas with sustainable irrigation and renewable energy. Using filtered ocean water, sharing systems overground and underground. Special desert plants can produce fast topsoil and create partwise shadows for plants around. Another great idea is to use bamboo water pipelines to reach dry areas or far regions. We have long time this idea now it is time to realise! We want to start everywhere it’s possible to get back topsoil, especially in dry countries like Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain, Lebanon, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, etc.
To accelerate the process professional greenhouses will be installed and newest sustainable cultivation techniques like permaculture will be used. The project starts primarily near coasts with building Greening Camps, a kind of farm with greenhouses and containers, tents or huts. We do not just want to build Greening Camps, parks and whole woods, we also doing scientific research and want to develop better irrigation and cultivation techniques in our lab and on site.
Greening Deserts projects are also good for refugee camps. Refugees can be integrated into the greening process, building greenhouses for food, medicine and forestation of parks and woods. They could create their own healthy environment and supply. We wrote detailed articles about this theme.
The fields of horticulture, agriculture and forestry play a special role in the Greening Deserts research projects of the greening camps and research camps, so these areas are not only researched and developed but also documented and mediated. On the basis of practical and theoretical work and examples, old and new possibilities for opencast mining and post-mining landscapes are presented, improved and further developed. The first set-up of the greening campaign in the opencast mine area of Leipzig (opencast mining desert), is to create a multi-layered garden and park with test fields for regional, domestic and country-specific plant species and special species from all over the world. In greenhouses, in addition to plant breeding (young plants, cuttings or seedlings), possible environmental and climatic conditions are also simulated, in separate areas, rooms or boxes.
As also described in other parts of the concept, the focus is on the research and optimization of different types, types of bodies, lighting and irrigation methods. The improvement of soil production, soil quality and plant growth is another important focus.
The processes (irrigation, light and nutrient distribution) can be further optimized through effective and economical energy and resource consumption. These are also tasks and objectives for the sustainable greening and management of all sorts of barren and dry areas or landscapes.
Since pioneer plants populate the landscape relatively quickly in most open-cast mining plants, thus loosening and ventilating the soils, it is easier to create new plantings such as garden plants, parks and mixed forests (mixed forests). This also results in further possibilities for future landscape design, such as, for example, experimental gardening, gardening, creative and artistic design of green areas and landscape parks.
Visit the official pages for more information. Support also other sustainable projects like Desert Rice Cultivation, Desert Bamboo Project und Green Ring Africa.
We can do much more greening services, also in cities, check our connected projects and contact us for more information or if you are really interested to work with us. Maybe you want to join our reseach team?
If you believe the world’s leading physicists, the vast majority of matter in the universe is hiding in plain sight. For nearly a century, evidence has mounted that the gravitational pull necessary to keep clusters of galaxies intact, as well as stars within galaxies from flying apart, requires far more matter than we can see—matter, according to the experts, that has eluded our telescopes, because it does not give off light. Problem is, such “dark matter” has also eluded one specially designed detector after another that researchers have deployed to catch it. Which raises the big question: What if we have failed to find dark matter because it isn’t there? Join leading physicists on a scientific treasure hunt that has proved more challenging than anyone expected, and may ultimately require rethinking some of our most fundamental ideas about the universe.
This program is part of the BIG IDEAS SERIES, made possible with support from the JOHN TEMPLETON FOUNDATION.
PARTICIPANTS: Mariangela Lisanti, Joseph Silk, Erik Verlinde, and Risa Wechsler
MODERATOR: Brian Greene
TOPICS
00:00 - Introduction to dark matter
10:55 - Panelist introductions
12:28 - How do we explain motion in the universe?
16:35 - Is the “dark stuff” ordinary matter?
22:43 - Supersymmetric particles
30:06 - Weakly Interacting Massive Particles
33:14 - Searchng for WIMP dark matter
37:25 - What is the role of dark matter in the structure of the universe?
43:23 - Cold vs warm dark matter
46:54 - The “dark sector” possibility
52:56 - Expanding our understanding of gravity and thermodynamics
1:01:34 - Is there a connection between dark energy and dark matter?
1:07:36 - Why do galaxies rotate?
1:14:25 - Future predictions for the discovery of dark matter
PROGRAM CREDITS
- Produced by Laura Dattaro
- Associate Produced by Peter Goldberg
- Music provided by APM
- Additional images and footage provided by: The Dark Energy Survey, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
- Recorded at the Gerald W. Lynch Theatre at John Jay College
MORE INFO ABOUT THE PROGRAM AND
PARTICIPANTS: https://www.worldsciencefestiv....al.com/programs/phys
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