10 Things Happening In The World Today That Many People Don’t Know About

10 Things Happening In The World Today That Many People Don’t Know About

In spite (and many times because of) all the social media and internet news, we tend to have a skewed view of the world around us. Quite often we think it is actually worse than it really is or we are focused on only a few historically insignificant events like a presidential election. There are other, arguably more important things happening in the world. These are 25 things happening in the world today that many people don’t know about!

Featured Image: https://pixabay.com/en/sunrise-space-outer-globe-world-1756274/

10 Desertification

Source: wikipedia, Image: https://pixabay.com/en/desert-drought-dehydrated-clay-soil-279862/

Many of the world’s deserts are growing larger every year. For example, the Sahara Desert has expanded to the south by another 250 km since 1900. This accounts for nearly 6000 square km.

24

9 Flynn Effect

Source: wikipedia, Image: https://pixabay.com/en/brain-turn-on-education-read-book-770044/

On average, humans appear to be getting smarter by about 3 IQ points per year but scientists aren’t completely sure why.

8 Cancer rates are down

Source: cancer.org, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cancer_button.jpg

Over the last 20 years cancer rates have have fallen by 20% and are still dropping.

7 Palm oil deforestation

Source: wikipedia, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_palm_plantation_in_Cigudeg-03.jpg

Although palm oil isn’t especially healthy for us, large amounts of rainforest are being cleared in order to grow oil palms.

6 Rise of Africa

Source: wikipedia, theguardian, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_View_of_Sea_Point,_Cape_Town_South_Africa.jpg

Africa is the fastest developing region of the world and it’s not nearly as bad as many western NGO’s make it out to be. It’s just hard to solicit funds for starving children without showing you pictures of starving children.

5 Mexican Cartel Wars

 

Source: wikipedia, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:My_Guns_006.jpg

More than 150,000 Mexicans have died since 2000 due to fighting between drug cartels.

4 Deadly construction of FIFA World Cup stadium in Qatar

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33019838, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doha_skyline0001.JPG

More than 1000 people have died building the stadium so far but those numbers don’t typically get published because many of the workers are “immigrants” from Asia. In fact, several foreign news teams have been arrested for reporting on this.
Note: we say “immigrants” because the working conditions have been compared to slave labor

18

3 Facebook’s influence on elections

Source: nature.com, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facebook_New_Logo_(2015).svg

For example, Facebook has been shown to improve voter turnout for certain candidates based on whose “I voted” messages that were displayed.

2 Blood farming

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30273994, https://www.wired.com/2011/06/red-market-excerpt/, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ics-codablock-blood-bag_sample.jpg

It’s just as crazy as it sounds. People are chained up like slaves and “milked” for their blood. This has been a growing problem in poorer countries like India. One particularly famous case came to be known as the Blood Factory by the Indian media. A farmer named Papu Yadhav was found to be holding numerous slaves on his property and bleeding them twice a week for over 2 years. But Papu wasn’t alone. There were even nurses, accountants, and delivery men involved in the blood farming ring. Sadly this type of blackmarket tends to flourish in poverty stricken countries where hospitals are overburdened.

1 Bees

Source: wikipedia, Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Honey_bee_(Apis_mellifera).jpg

They’re dying. Maybe not as fast as the media makes it sound, but their population is nevertheless decreasing at an alarming rate.