• Celebrity environmentalist Greta Thunberg is urging media to pay more attention to other young climate activists. The 16-year-old Swede, who first inspired fellow students by skipping school to pressure her country's leaders, has drawn huge crowds at demonstrations and conferences in the past year. Speaking alongside prominent German activist Luisa Neubauer at a U.N. climate meeting in Madrid on Monday, Thunberg said their stories "have been told over and over again." "There is no need to listen to us anymore," she said. Thunberg has been the center of attention at the Madrid talks since she sailed back to Europe last week, having shunned air travel for environmental reasons. On Friday, she left a protest march through the Spanish capital early after being mobbed by protesters and reporters. "It is people especially from the global south, especially from indigenous communities, who need to tell their stories," she said before handing the mic to young activists from the United States, the Philippines, Russia, Uganda, Chile and the Marshall Islands.
• Kosovo and Albania say they will boycott the Nobel Literature Prize ceremony today to protest the award being given to Austrian writer Peter Handke who both countries link to the war in the former Yugoslavia. Handke was an opponent of NATO's airstrikes against Serbia in the Kosovo War of the late 1990s and spoke in 2006 at the funeral of autocratic Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo was part of Serbia until 1999 when NATO intervened to stop Milosevic. Kosovo's outgoing foreign minister, Behgjet Pacolli has instructed the ambassador in Sweden "to boycott the ceremony," adding that "a writer who supported Milosevic and his genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo does not deserve the Nobel Prize." In solidarity with Kosovo Albanians, Albania's ambassador to Sweden won't attend Tuesday's Nobel ceremony, the Foreign Ministry said Monday. The country is boycotting the ceremony because of Handke's support for "Slobodan Milosevic, the 'butcher of the Balkans,' who led so many mass atrocities during the bloody collapse of the former Yugoslavia." Albanian acting foreign minister, Gent Cakaj, who was born in Kosovo, tweeted that the "justification of war atrocities during the Yugoslavia break-up must not be rewarded." More than 10,000 were killed or died in the 1998-99 war. A 78-day NATO air campaign ended Serb rule in Kosovo, and the United Nations governed the province until 2008 when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, which Belgrade hasn't recognized yet.
A Section on 12/10/2019