Indonesia & Ethiopia
On Monday, Boeing announced it will start paying $50 million in financial assistance to families of the victims of the two 737 Max crashes. Each family of the 346 victims will receive $144,500. The crashes of a Lion Air flight and an Ethiopian Airlines flight occured in 2018 and have been determined to be due to a combination of pilot error and faulty design, with technical oversights in the planes being the major cause. (CNN)
Brazil
Conservationists blame Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, for causing the devastating fires that blazed through the Amazon this past summer by opening up large tracts of land to logging and farming. Bolsonaro, however, claimed in an address at the United Nations that the rainforests are sovereign territory, and belong solely to Brazil. Bolsonaro has also repeatedly challenged the demarcated indigenous territories across Brazil, claiming that the size is disproportionate to the number of indigenous people in Brazil. (BBC)
World
A new major United Nations (UN) report warns that the global ocean has been warming non-stop since 1970. Ocean waters are also rising now primarily due to the melting of Greenland and Antarctica, when previously they were rising solely due to thermal expansion. The loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheet between 2007 and 2016 has tripled compared to the previous ten years. (BBC)