AFP

Russia faced mounting diplomatic pressure to end its war in Ukraine Tuesday, as G20 leaders meeting in Indonesia rued the high cost of the eight-month-old conflict.

In a draft communique, countries including Russia deplored the impact of “the war in Ukraine” — a conflict that “most members strongly condemned”.

The group is also expected to declare that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons” is “inadmissible”, a veiled rebuke of President Vladimir Putin who has repeatedly raised the spectre of nuclear conflagration.

Putin was forced to skip the summit as he reckons with a string of embarrassing battlefield defeats and a grinding war that threatens the future of his regime.

Rubbing salt in his wounds, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky — fresh from a visit to liberated Kherson — delivered an impassioned video appeal to G20 leaders.

Zelensky told leaders from China’s Xi Jinping to America’s Joe Biden that they could “save thousands of lives” by pressing for a Russian withdrawal.

“I am convinced now is the time when the Russian destructive war must and can be stopped,” he said, sporting his now-trademark army-green T-shirt.

Putin’s delegate, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, remained in his seat throughout Zelensky’s address, two diplomatic sources told AFP.

The veteran diplomat had preparations for the summit disrupted by two trips to a Bali hospital in as many days for an undisclosed ailment.

– ‘Immense’ suffering –

The United States and its allies sought to use the summit to broaden the coalition against Russia’s invasion and scotch Moscow’s claims of a war of East versus West.

Many “see Russia’s war in Ukraine as the root source of immense economic and humanitarian suffering in the world” said a senior US official.

Russia and its G20 allies China, India and South Africa refrained from criticising Putin’s war explicitly, and the draft joint statement is replete with diplomatic fudges and linguistic gymnastics.

But it gives a growing sense of the worldwide impact of the war.

G20 members Argentina and Turkey are among the nations worst hit by food inflation worldwide, but there was scarcely a country around the table unaffected by high food and fuel prices.

“The war is affecting everyone” said Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero. 

“In the northern hemisphere the merchants of death broker lethal arms sales, but in the southern hemisphere food is costly or scarce — what kills are not bullets or missiles, but poverty and hunger.”

There was also a hint at growing Chinese unease with Russia’s prosecution of the war 

when presidents Xi and Biden met late Monday.

Both men voiced opposition to the “use or threat of use” of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the White House said, although Beijing did not repeat that concern in public.

“It’s clear that the Russians are very isolated,” said one Western official. “I think some countries engaged with Russia but… I did not see any gestures of great solidarity.”

– Grain corridor –

A deal allowing Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea was another focus of conversation.

It expires November 19, and Russia has already threatened to rip it up.

Ukraine is one of the world’s top grain producers, and the Russian invasion had blocked 20 million tonnes of grain in its ports before the United Nations and Turkey brokered the deal in July.

The G20 is expected to urge “full, timely and continued implementation”.

The summit build-up focused heavily on Xi, who is making only his second overseas trip since the pandemic began.

Xi and Biden cooled Cold War rhetoric during three hours of talks on Monday, taking some of the heat out of their simmering superpower rivalry. 

“The world expects that China and the United States will properly handle the relationship,” Xi told Biden.

Former US diplomat Danny Russel described the meeting as broadly positive. 

“We should beware of prematurely declaring the strategic rivalry over. However, we saw a deliberate effort to stabilise a dangerously overheated relationship.”

A baby born somewhere on Tuesday will be the world’s eight billionth person, according to a projection by the United Nations.

“The milestone is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

The UN attributes the growth to human development, with people living longer thanks to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. 

It is also the result of higher fertility rates, particularly in the world’s poorest countries — most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa — putting their development goals at risk.

– How many is too many? –

Population growth has also magnified the environmental impacts of economic development.

But while some worry that eight billion humans is too many for planet Earth, most experts say the bigger problem is the overconsumption of resources by the wealthiest people.

“Some express concerns that our world is overpopulated,” said United Nations Population Fund chief Natalia Kanem. “I am here to say clearly that the sheer number of human lives is not a cause for fear.”

Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Populations told AFP the question of how many people Earth can support has two sides: natural limits and human choices.

Our choices result in humans consuming far more biological resources, such as forests and land, than the planet can regenerate each year. 

The overconsumption of fossil fuels, for example, leads to more carbon dioxide emissions, responsible for global warming.

“We are stupid. We lacked foresight. We are greedy. We don’t use the information we have. That’s where the choices and the problems lie,” said Cohen. 

However, he rejects the idea that humans are a curse on the planet, saying people should be given better choices.

– Slowing growth –  

The current population is more than three times higher than the 2.5 billion global headcount in 1950.

However, after a peak in the early 1960s, the world’s population growth rate has decelerated dramatically, Rachel Snow of the UN Population Fund told AFP.

Annual growth has fallen from a high of 2.1 percent between 1962 and 1965 to below 1 percent in 2020.

That could potentially fall further to around 0.5 percent by 2050 due to a continued decline in fertility rates, the United Nations projects.

The UN projects the population to continue growing to about 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and peaking around 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

Other groups have, however, calculated different figures.

The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimated in a 2020 study that the global population would max out by 2064, without ever reaching 10 billion, and decline to 8.8 billion by 2100.

– Black Death – 

Since the emergence of the first humans in Africa over two million years ago the world’s population has ballooned, with only fleeting pauses to the increasing number of people sharing Earth.

Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, who had few children compared to later settled populations in order to maintain their nomadic lifestyle.

The introduction of agriculture in the Neolithic era, around 10,000 BC, brought the first known major population leap.

With agriculture came sedentarization and the ability to store food, which caused birth rates to soar.

From around six million in 10,000 BC, the global population leapt to 100 million in 2,000 BC and then to 250 million in the first century AD, according to the French Institute for Demographic Studies.

As a result of the Black Death, the human population dropped between 1300 and 1400, from 429 to 374 million.

Other events, like the Plague of Justinian, which hit the Mediterranean over two centuries from 541-767, and the wars of the early Middle Ages in western Europe, also caused temporary dips in the number of humans on Earth.

From the 19th century on, the population began to explode, due largely to the development of modern medicine and the industrialization of agriculture, which boosted global food supplies.

Since 1800, the world’s population has jumped eight-fold, from an estimated one billion to eight billion.

The development of vaccines was key, with the smallpox jab particularly helping zap one of history’s biggest killers. 

Russia faced mounting diplomatic pressure to end its war in Ukraine Tuesday, as G20 leaders meeting in Indonesia rued the high cost of the eight-month-old conflict.

In a draft communique, countries including Russia deplored the impact of “the war in Ukraine” — a conflict that “most members strongly condemned”.

The group is also expected to declare that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons” is “inadmissible”, a veiled rebuke of President Vladimir Putin who has repeatedly raised the spectre of nuclear conflagration.

Putin was forced to skip the summit as he reckons with a string of embarrassing battlefield defeats and a grinding war that threatens the future of his regime.

Rubbing salt in his wounds, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky — fresh from a visit to liberated Kherson — delivered an impassioned video appeal to G20 leaders.

Zelensky told leaders from China’s Xi Jinping to America’s Joe Biden that they could “save thousands of lives” by pressing for a Russian withdrawal.

“I am convinced now is the time when the Russian destructive war must and can be stopped,” he said, sporting his now-trademark army-green T-shirt.

Putin’s delegate, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, remained in his seat throughout Zelensky’s address, two diplomatic sources told AFP.

The veteran diplomat had preparations for the summit disrupted by two trips to a Bali hospital in as many days for an undisclosed ailment.

– ‘Immense’ suffering –

The United States and its allies sought to use the summit to broaden the coalition against Russia’s invasion and scotch Moscow’s claims of a war of East versus West.

Many “see Russia’s war in Ukraine as the root source of immense economic and humanitarian suffering in the world” said a senior US official.

Russia and its G20 allies China, India and South Africa refrained from criticising Putin’s war explicitly, and the draft joint statement is replete with diplomatic fudges and linguistic gymnastics.

But it gives a growing sense of the worldwide impact of the war.

G20 members Argentina and Turkey are among the nations worst hit by food inflation worldwide, but there was scarcely a country around the table unaffected by high food and fuel prices.

“The war is affecting everyone” said Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero. 

“In the northern hemisphere the merchants of death broker lethal arms sales, but in the southern hemisphere food is costly or scarce — what kills are not bullets or missiles, but poverty and hunger.”

There was also a hint at growing Chinese unease with Russia’s prosecution of the war 

when presidents Xi and Biden met late Monday.

Both men voiced opposition to the “use or threat of use” of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the White House said, although Beijing did not repeat that concern in public.

“It’s clear that the Russians are very isolated,” said one Western official. “I think some countries engaged with Russia but… I did not see any gestures of great solidarity.”

– Grain corridor –

A deal allowing Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea was another focus of conversation.

It expires November 19, and Russia has already threatened to rip it up.

Ukraine is one of the world’s top grain producers, and the Russian invasion had blocked 20 million tonnes of grain in its ports before the United Nations and Turkey brokered the deal in July.

The G20 is expected to urge “full, timely and continued implementation”.

The summit build-up focused heavily on Xi, who is making only his second overseas trip since the pandemic began.

Xi and Biden cooled Cold War rhetoric during three hours of talks on Monday, taking some of the heat out of their simmering superpower rivalry. 

“The world expects that China and the United States will properly handle the relationship,” Xi told Biden.

Former US diplomat Danny Russel described the meeting as broadly positive. 

“We should beware of prematurely declaring the strategic rivalry over. However, we saw a deliberate effort to stabilise a dangerously overheated relationship.”

Donald Trump loyalist and prominent election denier Kari Lake has lost her bid to be governor of Arizona, US networks projected Monday, rounding out a difficult week for the former president as he readies a new run for the White House.

Lake, a former TV anchor, had been seen as one of Trump’s most reliable picks heading into the midterm elections, but her defeat caps a run of results that have raised doubts about the former president’s place in the Republican Party.

The projections by major US TV networks come after a week of intense scrutiny of the vote count in Arizona, where Lake and her supporters have repeatedly cast doubt on the competence and integrity of officials.

“Democracy is worth the wait,” tweeted Lake’s opponent, Democrat Katie Hobbs.

“Thank you, Arizona. I am so honored and so proud to be your next Governor.”

But Lake, who has built her brand on skepticism of the mainstream media and the political establishment appeared to reject the projections.

“Arizonans know BS when they see it,” she tweeted, using a euphemism for nonsense.

– Election denial –

If confirmed by election officials, Hobbs’s victory would mark an end to a bitter election campaign which Lake joined in earnest when she quit local broadcast journalism last year.

The former anchor married her made-for-tv smile to the flame-throwing political style of Trumpism, delighting the Make America Great Again wing of her party.

She made denial of the 2020 presidential election win by Joe Biden a key tenet of her campaign, and said that she would not have validated his victory if she had been in the governor’s mansion at the time.

Her caustic attacks on journalists and election officials, including the Republicans heading key departments in hotly contested Maricopa County, earned her plaudits with the base.

But they also led to warnings that she was stoking trouble in a country still reeling from the January 2021 assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Democratic National Convention chair Jaime Harrison on Monday tweeted his congratulations to Hobbs along with the phrase: “Sanity wins”

Trump, who is expected on Tuesday to announce his entry to the 2024 race for the White House, took to his Truth Social platform to denounce the call.

“Wow! They just took the election away from Kari Lake. It’s really bad out there!” he wrote, without explaining who “they” were.

– Scrutiny –

Lake had declared herself “100 percent confident” that she would prevail, but — in line with Trump’s playbook — had expended a lot of energy sowing doubt about the election system.

Supporters seized upon minor problems with vote tabulation machines in Maricopa County, the home of America’s fifth biggest city, Phoenix, which left some people standing in short lines last Tuesday.

Officials have forcefully insisted that no legitimate vote would be excluded, and mounted a well-organized social media campaign to push back at falsehoods circulating online as the count plodded methodically on.

Arizona has been under intense scrutiny for two years since Biden eked out a narrow win in the state.

Maricopa County became ground zero for election deniers, who made unfounded claims about ballot stuffing, despite repeated investigations that turned up no evidence of wrongdoing.

The slow-moving count in Arizona has been the subject of national — and international — fascination this week as it became increasingly clear that election deniers across the United States had fared badly.

Lake was thought of as a leading light in the movement, and Republican Party insiders — as well as media pundits — have noted that regardless of the result, she could be well placed for a spot on a future White House ticket.