Datasets:

AriyanH22

/

data_1

like 0

State television showed Fidel Castro for the first time in three months on Tuesday and the ailing Cuban leader said he was still in the fight to recover from surgery that forced him to relinquish power last July. Castro, 80, looked stronger than he had in a previous video, but still frail, in the images from a two-hour meeting on Monday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, his closest ally in Latin America. "This is far from being a lost battle," Castro said. He spoke slowly in an almost unintelligible voice in footage that showed him sipping orange juice and standing. The new video was shown almost six months to the day since Castro temporarily handed over power to his brother, Defense Minister Raul Castro, last July 31 after emergency surgery for intestinal bleeding. That was the first time he had relinquished control since his 1959 revolution that steered the Caribbean island on a socialist course and made Cuba an enduring ideological foe of the United States. Castro was last seen in an October 28 video clip looking very frail and walking with difficulty. He appeared to have put on weight in the latest images. Cuba has denied Castro has stomach cancer but his precise illness is a state secret. He is thought to be suffering from diverticulitis, a disorder of the large intestine. Chavez, who has built a close economic relationship with Cuba and whom critics accuse of leading the world's fifth largest oil exporter toward Cuban-style communism, told his mentor he brought him "the embrace of millions who admire you, love you, need you and follow you step by step." "There is Fidel standing, in one piece," he said in the five-minute video clip. Chavez said he found Castro in "good humor" and speaking clearly about global issues such as climate change. He said they spoke about "the threats of the empire" -- a reference to their common foe, the United States -- and efforts to forge an anti-US alliance of Latin American countries. They also discussed a joint venture agreed to last week that included a fiber optics cable plan to bypass a US trade embargo and a steelworks in Venezuela using Cuban nickel, Chavez said. The video showed them browsing newspaper clippings together. "Fidel said days ago that the battle (for his health) is not lost. I would say more: we are winning it," Chavez said. They parted with Castro's favorite slogan, "socialism or death." Information about Castro's health has been scarce in the last six months. A Spanish doctor who examined him in December said two weeks ago that Castro is making a "slow but progressive" recovery, although his condition is serious due to his age. The doctor, Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, head of surgery at Madrid's Gregorio Maranon public hospital, said Castro has suffered complications after surgery on his digestive system but may recover. The surgeon largely dismissed reports by Spain's El Pais newspaper that said Castro had undergone three botched operations for diverticulitis. Chavez said on January 19 that the Cuban leader was "fighting for his life". A few days later, he said Castro was up and walking, adding in a light-hearted tone that he was almost jogging.

The study by David Bryngelsson from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden examined various future scenarios to determine how the climate would be impacted if humans were to change their diet. "Cattle ranching is already responsible for 15 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that humans cause," observed Bryngelsson, who recently presented his doctoral thesis on land use, food related greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change. He noted that increased consumption of beef runs counter to the goal of limiting the temperature increase to two degrees Celsius. There might be ethical objections to the current chicken industry, but Bryngelsson believes that climate gains will prevail even with more animal-friendly production methods. Technical improvements in the production chain can to a certain extent also reduce the food industry's climate impact, but cattle are still the biggest problem, he noted. It is difficult to change the fact that they need a lot of feed and that they release methane as they ruminate. Furthermore, forests are being encroached upon to make room for the increasing number of cattle, which also impacts the climate, the study pointed out. "Since around 70 per cent of all agricultural land is currently used to raise cattle, converting to a more energy-efficient diet of poultry would free up land for cultivation of for example bioenergy," Bryngelsson explained. "You could say that chicken is like an electrical car -- it is a better alternative, yet still very similar to what we are accustomed to," he said. How large a space domesticated poultry has to move around in does not impact greenhouse gas emissions to any great extent -- rather, the issue pertains more to cost. For example, if chickens are given a space that is five times larger, the space is still small in relation to the space required for feed production and will probably not noticeably affect the chickens' impact on the environment. The difference between chicken and beef as regards area requirements and greenhouse gas emissions is so great that there is no doubt that the chicken leaves a smaller carbon footprint regardless of production method, the study noted.

Swaraj will lead an Indian delegation to Islamabad for talks on Afghanistan, India's foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said on his Twitter page. Top Pakistani foreign affairs official Sartaj Aziz said Swaraj would meet him and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. "This is a good beginning, that the deadlock that was present has to some extent been removed," Aziz, the prime minister's adviser on security and foreign affairs, told reporters. The visit comes after the collapse of talks in August that raised questions about the ability of the nuclear-armed rivals to overcome animosity that has festered since their independence from British rule almost seven decades ago. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sharif resumed high-level contacts with a brief conversation at climate change talks in Paris last week and their national security advisers met in Bangkok on Sunday. Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, said the foreign minister's visit showed the Modi government had softened its hard-line stance towards Pakistan after realising that the lack of sustained talks yielded no returns. "The countries can agree to disagree, but they will have to start talking," Sibal said. Taken by surprise, Indian opposition parties questioned the government's on-off approach to talks and a former foreign minister from Modi's party said the policy was being conducted in the shadows. Since taking office in 2014, Modi has authorised a more robust approach to Pakistan, giving security forces the licence to retaliate forcefully along their disputed border and demanding an end to insurgent attacks in Indian territory. Swaraj's visit is the first ministerial-level visit to Pakistan since the then foreign minister, SM Krishna, travelled to Islamabad in 2012, which was before Modi became prime minister. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part. India has for years accused Pakistan of backing separatist Muslim rebels in India's part of Kashmir. Despite considerable evidence, Pakistan denies the accusations and blames India violating human rights in Kashmir and fomenting unrest in Pakistan.

When Hillary Clinton made her first trip abroad as secretary of state, she baldly said the United States could not let human rights disputes get in the way of working with China on global challenges. Now that the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is under US protection in Beijing, according to a US-based rights group, the United States will find out if China has made the same calculation. Chen's escape after 19 months of house arrest and apparent request for US protection comes at a vexing time for both countries, with diplomats preparing for annual economic and security talks in Beijing this week, and with China's Communist Party trying to contain a divisive political scandal involving a former senior official, Bo Xilai. Assuming it has Chen, it is inconceivable that the United States would turn him over to the Chinese authorities against his wishes, said current and former US officials. That leaves China with a choice - let the broader relationship suffer in a standoff with the United States, or seek a compromise, a scenario analysts, current and former officials saw as probable though by no means certain. "I can't imagine they will tank the relationship," said a senior Obama administration official who spoke on condition that he not be identified. "This isn't the same as a spy plane incident or Tiananmen Square. I do think they will try to manage it." In 2001, relations between Beijing and Washington suffered a plunge after a collision between a Chinese fighter jet and US surveillance plane. The Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, when Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy protesters who had made the square their base, brought ties with Washington to an even deeper nadir. AWKWARD TIMING As of Sunday, the United States has not publicly confirmed reports that Chen fled from house arrest in his village home in Shandong province into the US embassy. China has also declined direct comment on the dissident's reported escape from his carefully watched home. But Texas-based ChinaAid said it "learned from a source close to the Chen Guangcheng situation that Chen is under US protection and high level talks are currently under way between US and Chinese officials regarding Chen's status." The incident will form an unwelcome backdrop for the visit of the US secretaries of state and treasury to Beijing for their Strategic and Economic Dialogue on Thursday and Friday. The reports of Chen's escape also come nearly three months after a Chinese official Wang Lijun fled into the US consulate in Chengdu for over 24 hours, unleashing the Bo Xilai scandal that has rattled the ruling Communist Party months before a once-in-a-decade leadership handover. Chris Johnson, until earlier this month the CIA's top China analyst, said Sino-US relations were "almost approaching a perfect storm," citing the Bo Xilai case, Chen's apparent escape and reports that the United States is considering selling Taiwan new F-16s in addition to upgrading its existing fleet. "For the conspiracy-minded in Beijing, and there are plenty of them, they will see these things as completing the circle of a US containment strategy designed to stifle China's rise," said Johnson, now a Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst. How China's leadership will try to resolve the problem hinges on the balance between such nationalist sentiments and a more pragmatic desire to avoid further disruptions to the Chinese communist party leadership succession this autumn. For now, the scale tips toward a quick, quiet resolution, said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing who specializes in US-China ties. "China does not want to allow this case to have a lot of influence because it is not good for its foreign relations or its domestic politics," said Shi, adding that the countries have too much at stake to cancel this week's meetings. "I don't think the United States will play this card to embarrass China. They still want to influence China on North Korea and Syria. They want to limit this case's impact because they know it is already embarrassing for China." The US and China have found ways to disentangle knotty problems in the past. On April 1, 2001, a mid-air collision between a US Navy EP-3 signals intelligence plane and a Chinese fighter about 70 miles off Hainan island killed a Chinese pilot and forced the US aircraft to make an emergency landing on Hainan. The 24 US crew-members were detained until April 11, and released after a the United States wrote a letter saying that it was "very sorry" for the death of the Chinese pilot and that the EP-3 entered China's airspace the landed without clearance. NO HANDOVER In February 2009, Clinton said that while the United States would keep pushing China on Taiwan, Tibet and human rights, "our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises." Despite the suggestion that human rights might take a back seat, analysts said it was impossible - for reasons of principle and politics - for the United States to sacrifice Chen. "It's inconceivable that they would hand him over against his will," said Tom Malinowski, who worked in US President Bill Clinton's White House and is now Washington director for the Human Rights Watch advocacy group. "Most people in the administration would recognize that that would be completely wrong," he said. "I don't think you even have to get to the politics of it - but if you do get to the politics of it, that is another argument against it." Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has already accused Obama of being weak on China, an attack that would only intensify if the Democratic president were seen to abandon Chen. Analysts and rights activists sketched out two possible scenarios for resolving Chen's case. Under the first, Chen might be released inside China with guarantees about his own safety as well as that of his family and perhaps those who helped him to escape. Under the second, he would go into exile despite what his associates describe as his reluctance to leave China. "We would not force him out without being very, very confident that he would not suffer for his actions, and it's very hard to be confident about that if he remains in China," said Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. "You never know what happens here, but the odds are sooner or later he will be escorted to the airport with assurances that he will be able to get on a plane and leave," he added. "He will not get back into China - probably never - certainly not anytime soon."

The EU becomes the first major partner with which Mercosur has struck a trade pact, offering EU firms a potential head start. The European Union is already Mercosur's biggest trade and investment partner and its second largest for goods trade. The two regions launched negotiations exactly 20 years ago and stepped up efforts to reach an accord after Donald Trump's presidential victory led the Europeans to freeze talks with the United States and seek other global trading allies. The opening to Europe also offers more avenues for development in South America, which has been tugged in recent years between the ascent of top trading partner China and enduring U.S. influence in the region. "This deal delivers a real message in support of open, fair, sustainable and rule-based trade because trade creates jobs for all concerned," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told a news conference in Japan's western city of Osaka. He was among the European leaders and Argentine President Mauricio Macri, gathered for the Group of 20 summit, who shared a podium at the event. "This deal promotes our values and supports a multilateral, rules-based system," Juncker said, adding that the commitment spoke a "lot, louder than 1,000 communiques". His remarks came as some G20 leaders signalled difficulty in efforts to draft a summit communique, with disagreements ranging from trade to climate change. The deal stands in contrast to the Trump administration's aversion to multilateralism. The EU's drift away from the United States has spurred on a free trade deal with Canada and helped to reach accords with Japan and Mexico. Now, after some 40 rounds of talks, the Europeans have reached a provisional deal with the trade bloc founded by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The EU and Mercosur are together responsible for 720 million people and a quarter of global gross domestic product, says the government of Brazil, whose president, Jar Bolsonaro, hailed the deal on Twitter as historic and one of the most important trade pacts of all time. If ratified, the deal will be a victory for Bolsonaro, whose right-wing politics face a chilly reception in much of the world, as well as Argentine President Mauricio Macri, who is battling for reelection this year amid a steep recession. WINE AND CHEESE In terms of tariff cuts, the trade deal could be the EU's most lucrative to date, with about 4 billion euros ($4.55 billion) of duties saved on exports, four times more than its deal with Japan. Europe has its eyes on greater access for manufactured goods, notably cars, which face tariffs of 35%. It wants its firms freed to compete for public tenders, and to sell more wine and cheese. Mercosur aims to boost exports of farm commodities. Brazil said the pact would remove import tariffs on several farm products, such as orange juice, instant coffee and fruit. It will also get a new 99,000-tonne quota of beef at a 7.5% tariff, phased in over five years, and tariff-free 180,000-tonne quotas each of sugar and poultry. "It is true that the agreement will make us compete with the best, but the agreement gives us room to maneuver," Miguel Braun, Argentina's economic policy secretary, said on Twitter. "Europe will eliminate the bulk of its barriers in five years, and Mercosur will apply a gradual tariff reduction over a period of up to 15 years, which will allow the private sector to adapt." EUROPEAN NERVES OVER BEEF, ENVIRONMENT Before it takes effect, the deal needs final approval from Mercosur, the European Parliament and constituent countries, which Brazil's government has conceded could take years. France is one of the European countries expressing concern about a surge in beef imports, while environmental groups, whose influence is stronger in the new European Parliament, say the pact could worsen deforestation. The parties both committed to adopt the Paris climate change pact and a special chapter on sustainable development will cover issues such as forest conservation and labour rights. EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan said he recognised the concerns of farmers, including those from his country, Ireland, but that the bloc's free trade pacts were opening markets for EU farmers. 

Modi did not elaborate on those fears in his speech delivered virtually to the Sydney Dialogue, a forum focused on emerging, critical and cyber technologies. But authorities in India and elsewhere have flagged the dangers of cryptocurrencies being used by terrorist groups and organised crime, and the destabilising risk they posed to national economies. After extolling the opportunities presented by cyber age technology, Modi sound a note of caution regarding digital currencies. "Take cryptocurrency or Bitcoin, for example. It is important that all democratic nations work together on this and ensure it does not end up in the wrong hands, which can spoil our youth," Modi said. Indian officials currently drafting regulations are likely to propose a ban on all transactions and payments in cryptocurrencies, while letting investors hold them as assets, like gold, bonds and stocks, the Economic Times newspaper reported on Wednesday. Modi chaired a meeting to discuss India's approach to cryptocurrencies on Saturday, and the Economic Times said his cabinet could receive the draft regulations for review within two to three weeks. In September, regulators in China banned all cryptocurrency transactions and mining of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, the world's biggest cryptocurrency, is hovering around the $60,000-level, having more than doubled its value since the start of this year. India's digital currency market was worth $6.6 billion in May 2021, compared with $923 million in April 2020, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis.

Paul Eckert Asia Correspondent WASHINGTON, Dec 27 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The killing of Benazir Bhutto sends the United States back to square one in its search for a Pakistan that is a stable, democratic partner in a fight against Islamic extremism, analysts said on Thursday. Possible consequences of the assassination range from widespread street rioting by her followers to the nightmare scenario for Washington of Pakistan eventually becoming a nuclear-armed, unstable Islamic state. Financial investors, who already factor in Pakistan's considerable political risk, said the killing itself was not surprising but that continuing instability would boost the risk. Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution called Bhutto's death a "blow to the idea of a liberal, moderate Pakistan" that made him fear for that country. "Its further decay will affect all of its neighbors, Europe, and the United States in unpredictable and unpleasant ways," the South Asia expert wrote in an essay. "It is probably too late for the United States to do much either: we placed all of our bets on (President Pervez) Musharraf, ignoring Benazir's pleas for some contact or recognition until a few months ago," Cohen added. The United States invested great energy and political capital to secure the return of the 54-year-old exiled former prime minister to Pakistan in October. It convinced Musharraf to give up his role as military leader and accept elections and a power-sharing arrangement with her. Now, Washington faces "a disaster on every account," from dimmed hopes of a democratic transition to the risk of more attacks by emboldened radicals, said Frederic Grare, a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The leaders of the mainstream parties are being assassinated. That weakens the parties and does not augur well for any reestablishment of democracy in Pakistan," he said. STREET VIOLENCE, NUCLEAR SAFETY U.S. President George W. Bush urged Pakistanis to honor Bhutto "by continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life." Other U.S. officials said Washington hoped Islamabad would stick to plans to hold elections, slated for January 8. Anthony Cordesman, security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Bhutto's death made a very unstable political situation much worse. "There's no figure that we can work with who has the same immediate ability to try to create political stability and a climate in which you can have legitimate elections, bring back the rule of law and bridge the gap that had developed between Musharraf and the Pakistani people," he said. Analysts warned that in a country prone to conspiracy theories and passionate politics, fingers would point in all directions over the assassination amid grief and anger that could spill into violence. "The number one concern right now is to maintain calm in the streets of Pakistan," said Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation. She said it would be unwise for Musharraf to impose emergency rule to accomplish that aim. Other analysts questioned the wisdom of relying on Musharraf to fight terrorism. "If he can't protect a leading politician in a fairly secure garrison city, how can he tackle the problems in the remote tribal areas, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are reportedly thriving?" asked Win Thin, senior currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. A perennial question during crises in Pakistan is the security of the country's nuclear arsenal. U.S. officials said there was no change in an assessment offered last month, amid strife over Musharraf's imposition of emergency rule, that the weapons were secure. Cordesman of CSIS said Islamabad had received U.S. help and studied other country's policies to ensure maximum safety for its nuclear facilities. "But is there transparency that allows anybody on the outside to make some kind of categorical statement about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons? Anybody who did that may discredit themselves," he said.

Earlier harvesting, changes in grape varieties and new wine-making processes have already helped counter the impact of the harsher weather hitting vineyards across the globe, the head of the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) says. "Wine producers all over the world have adapted to the changes and the plant has a capacity of adjustment that you can find in no other plant," OIV Director General Jean-Marie Aurand told Reuters in an interview. He cited the example of the Canary island of Lanzarote where vines are grown in lava which absorbs overnight dew - virtually the sole water they receive in the summer - and releases it during the day. In China, he said, more than 80 percent of production acreage is located in regions where temperatures can drop below minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter. Growers cover vines to protect them and uncover them when spring comes. Some winemakers, meanwhile, are shifting the way they produce wine. Australia's Treasury Wine Estates Ltd (TWE.AX), for example, is testing technology to water vines underground and is expanding fermentation capacity to combat the impact of climate change on its vineyards around the world. "You can adapt to climate change or you can react to it," Treasury Wine Chief Supply Officer Stuart McNab said at a Reuters Global Climate Change Summit earlier this month. "You've got time to react, but you've got to know what's happening." OUTLOOK Despite the worries of many producers, notably in the Champagne region, Aurand was not very concerned for the future of wines sold under protected designation labels that tie them to the soil and viticulture practices of a specific region such as the Appellation d'Origine Controlee (AOC) system in France. "We have today other strains and cultivation techniques, so I'm not worried in the short or mid-term on this question, which does not mean we should not consider the issue of climate change as a whole," Aurand said. It was too early to give an outlook for 2050, he said. The OIV sees global wine output rising 2 percent in 2015 to 275.7 million hectolitres (mhl), Aurand said. A 10-percent rebound in Italy's output meant it would regain its position as leading world producer after losing it to France last year due to a weather-hit grape crop. OIV gave an initial consumption forecast for 2015 at between 235.7 and 248.8 mhl, down from around 240 mhl last year. As opposed to western European countries where consumers are drinking less wine, consumption would rise again in the United States, which became the world's largest consumer in 2013, it said.

"A low point could be in the first quarter," Dudley said in BBC radio interview broadcast on Saturday. Brent crude prices fell by 34 percent last year after shedding 48 percent in 2014. The plunge in global oil prices has pushed inflation close to or below zero in many countries, helping consumers but wrong-footing central banks. Dudley said a more natural balance between supply and demand could come back in the third and fourth quarter of this year, after which stock levels could start to wear off. "Prices are going to stay lower for longer, we have said it and I think we are in this for a couple of years. For sure, there is a boom-and-bust cycle here," Dudley said. Dudley also said he did not agree with Bank of England Governor Mark Carney's use of the term "stranded assets" to describe oil and gas reserves held by companies but which may prove unviable as the world moves to a low-carbon economy. Carney used the phrase in a speech in September in which he called on companies to be more open about their "climate change footprint" to avoid abrupt changes in asset prices that could destabilize markets. "I think the term overstates it quite frankly and I have spoken to the governor about it and I have questioned that term," Dudley said in the interview. BP shareholders were already aware of the viability of the company's assets which were only counted as reserves if they were economic, he said.

To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, world carbon emissions will have to drop to near zero by 2050 and "go negative" after that, the Worldwatch Institute reported on Tuesday. This is a deeper cut than called for by most climate experts and policymakers, including President-elect Barack Obama, who favors an 80 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions by mid-century. Limiting carbon emissions aims to keep global mean temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) over what it was before the Industrial Revolution -- but one Worldwatch author said even this is too dangerous. "Global warming needs to be reduced from peak levels to 1 degree (Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) as fast as possible," co-author William Hare said at a briefing on the "State of the World 2009" report. "At this level you can see some of the risks fade into the background." Global mean temperature has already risen 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1850, so drastic cuts in emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide are needed, according to Hare, now working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Hare said that global greenhouse gas emissions would need to hit their peak by 2020 and drop 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and keep dropping after that. He said carbon dioxide emissions would have to "go negative," with more being absorbed than emitted, in the second half of this century. The burden of cutting greenhouse emissions should fall more heavily on rich countries than poor ones, Hare said, with industrialized nations reducing emissions by 90 percent by 2050, allowing developing nations to let their economies grow and develop new technologies that will ultimately reduce climate-warming gases. 2009: A PIVOTAL YEAR? Even with these dramatic changes, the world may face an additional rise of nearly 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) because the impact of past greenhouse emissions hasn't yet been felt on surface temperatures, the report said. This year could be pivotal in the movement against climate change, said co-author Robert Engelman, with "scientists more certain and concerned, the public more engaged than ever before, an incoming U.S. president bringing to the White House for the first time a solid commitment to cap and then shrink this country's massive injections of greenhouse gases ... into the atmosphere." Engelman also noted this year's deadline for a global agreement to craft a successor pact to the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol. This is set to happen in December at a meeting in Copenhagen. Engelman said the Copenhagen meeting could put in place a new "financial architecture" that discourages greenhouse emissions and rewards actions that take these emissions out of the atmosphere. This could take the form of a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, he said, and could also include "the best terms of trade, investment and credit" for countries that make the transition to a low-carbon economy. "However this turns out, we still have some precious time and a clear shot at safely managing human-induced climate change," Engelman said. "What's at stake is not just nature as we've always known it, but quite possibly the survival of our civilization. It's going to be a really interesting year." Commenting on the report, environmental chemist Stephen Lincoln of the University of Adelaide in Australia said in a statement: "The strongest message from State of the World 2009 is this: if the world does not take action early and in adequate measure, the impacts of climate change could prove extremely harmful and overwhelm our capacity to adapt." The Washington-based Worldwatch Institute is an independent research organization.

As wheat and rice prices surge, the humble potato -- long derided as a boring tuber prone to making you fat -- is being rediscovered as a nutritious crop that could cheaply feed an increasingly hungry world. Potatoes, which are native to Peru, can be grown at almost any elevation or climate: from the barren, frigid slopes of the Andes Mountains to the tropical flatlands of Asia. They require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days, and can yield between two and four times more food per hectare than wheat or rice. "The shocks to the food supply are very real and that means we could potentially be moving into a reality where there is not enough food to feed the world," said Pamela Anderson, director of the International Potato Center in Lima (CIP), a non-profit scientific group researching the potato family to promote food security. Like others, she says the potato is part of the solution. The potato has potential as an antidote to hunger caused by higher food prices, a population that is growing by one billion people each decade, climbing costs for fertilizer and diesel, and more cropland being sown for biofuel production. To focus attention on this, the United Nations named 2008 the International Year of the Potato, calling the vegetable a "hidden treasure". Governments are also turning to the tuber. Peru's leaders, frustrated by a doubling of wheat prices in the past year, have started a program encouraging bakers to use potato flour to make bread. Potato bread is being given to school children, prisoners and the military, in the hope the trend will catch on. Supporters say it tastes just as good as wheat bread, but not enough mills are set up to make potato flour. "We have to change people's eating habits," said Ismael Benavides, Peru's agriculture minister. "People got addicted to wheat when it was cheap." Even though the potato emerged in Peru 8,000 years ago near Lake Titicaca, Peruvians eat fewer potatoes than people in Europe: Belarus leads the world in potato consumption, with each inhabitant of the eastern European state devouring an average of 376 pounds (171 kg) a year. India has told food experts it wants to double potato production in the next five to 10 years. China, a huge rice consumer that historically has suffered devastating famines, has become the world's top potato grower. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the potato is expanding more than any other crop right now. Some consumers are switching to potatoes. In the Baltic country of Latvia, sharp price rises caused bread sales to drop by 10-15 percent in January and February, as consumers bought 20 percent more potatoes, food producers have said. The developing world is where most new potato crops are being planted, and as consumption rises poor farmers have a chance to earn more money. "The countries themselves are looking at the potato as a good option for both food security and also income generation," Anderson said. AFFORDABLE RAINBOW OF COLORS The potato is already the world's third most-important food crop after wheat and rice. Corn, which is widely planted, is mainly used for animal feed. Though most Americans associate potatoes with the bland Idaho variety, they actually come in some 5,000 types. Peru is sending thousands of seeds this year to the Doomsday Vault near the Arctic Circle, contributing to a gene bank for food crops that was set up in case of a global disaster. With colors ranging from alabaster-white to bright yellow and deep purple and countless shapes, textures, and sizes, potatoes offer inventive chefs a chance to create new, eye-catching plates. "They taste great," said Juan Carlos Mescco, 17, a potato farmer in Peru's Andes who says he frequently eats them sliced, boiled, or mashed from breakfast through dinner. Potatoes are a great source of complex carbohydrates, which release their energy slowly, and -- so long as they are not smothered with butter -- have only five percent of the fat content of wheat. They also have one-fourth of the calories of bread and, when boiled, have more protein than corn and nearly twice the calcium, according to the Potato Center. They contain vitamin C, iron, potassium and zinc. SPECULATORS AREN'T TEMPTED One factor helping the potato remain affordable is the fact that unlike wheat, it is not a global commodity, so has not attracted speculative professional investment. Each year, farmers around the globe produce about 600 million metric tonnes of wheat, and about 17 percent of that flows into foreign trade. Wheat production is almost double that of potato output. Analysts estimate less than 5 percent of potatoes are traded internationally, and prices are mainly driven by local tastes, instead of international demand. Raw potatoes are heavy and can rot in transit, so global trade in them has been slow to take off. They are also susceptible to infection with pathogens, hampering export to avoid spreading plant diseases. The downside to that is that prices in some countries aren't attractive enough to persuade farmers to grow them. People in Peruvian markets say the government needs to help lift demand. "Prices are low. It doesn't pay to work with potatoes," said Juana Villavicencio, who spent 15 years planting potatoes and now sells them for pennies a kilo in a market in Cusco, in Peru's southern Andes. But science is moving fast. Genetically modified potatoes that resist "late blight" are being developed by German chemicals group BASF . The disease led to famine in Ireland during the 19th century and still causes about 20 percent of potato harvest losses in the world, the company says. Scientists say farmers who use clean, virus-free seeds can boost yields by 30 percent and be cleared for export. That would generate more income for farmers and encourage more production as companies could sell specialty potatoes abroad, instead of just as frozen french fries or potato chips.

The statement from a spokesman for US President Barack Obama highlighted concerns about the potential fallout from Trump's unusual call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Friday, which prompted a diplomatic protest from Beijing on Saturday. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said senior National Security Council officials spoke twice with Chinese officials over the weekend to reassure them of Washington's commitment to the "One China" policy and to "reiterate and clarify the continued commitment of the United States to our longstanding China policy." The policy has been in place for 40 years and is focused on promoting and preserving peace and stability in the strait separating China and Taiwan, which is in US interests, Earnest said. "If the president-elect's team has a different aim, I'll leave it to them to describe," he said. "The Chinese government in Beijing placed an enormous priority on this situation, and it’s a sensitive matter. Some of the progress that we have made in our relationship with China could be undermined by this issue flaring up," he said. The call with Taipei was the first by a US president-elect or president with a Taiwan leader since President Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition to China from Taiwan in 1979, acknowledging Taiwan as part of "one China." China regards Taiwan as a renegade province. Despite tensions over matters ranging from trade to China's pursuit of territorial claims in the South China Sea, the Obama administration has highlighted cooperation on global issues, such as climate change and Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs. Earlier on Monday, China's Foreign Ministry said Trump was clear about China's position on the Taiwan issue and that China had maintained contacts with his team. Vice President-elect Mike Pence sought to play down the telephone conversation, saying on Sunday it was a "courtesy" call, not intended to show a shift in US policy on China. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, who has been mentioned as a possible secretary of state in the Trump administration, said on Monday he thought reaction to the Taiwan call was being overblown. "He got a call, he took it, and again, he's getting calls from everyone, so I think probably a lot more is being read into it than is the case, really," Corker said. 'Stern representations' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang would not say directly whom China had lodged "stern representations" with about Trump's call, repeating a weekend statement it had gone to the "relevant side" in the United States. "The whole world knows about the Chinese government's position on the Taiwan issue. I think President-elect Trump and his team are also clear," Lu told a daily news briefing. "In fact, China has maintained contacts and communication with the team of President-elect Trump," he added, repeating a previous assertion, although he did not give details. Lu also said he would not speculate on what prompted the call, but described the matter of Taiwan as the most important and sensitive question between China and the United States. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was White House national security adviser when President Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972, told a forum in New York on US-China relations that he had been "very impressed at the calm reaction of the Chinese leadership" to Trump's call. Kissinger, who met with Trump last month, said it suggested Beijing may be looking to develop a "calm dialogue" with the new US administration. Tough rhetoric Trump, who vowed during his campaign to label China a currency manipulator, issued more tough rhetoric on Sunday. "Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn't tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don't think so!" Trump said on Twitter. China is not currently viewed as a currency manipulator by either the Treasury Department or the International Monetary Fund. The World Trade Organization says Chinese tariffs on imported goods are generally higher than US tariffs. China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei claim parts or all of the energy-rich South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes annually. Lu would not be drawn on directly commenting on Trump's tweets but defended the China-US relationship. "The China-US economic and trade relationship has over many years always been a highly mutually beneficial one, otherwise it couldn't have developed the way it has today," he said. The diplomatic contretemps was one of several recently for the Republican president-elect, a real estate magnate who has never held public office and has no foreign affairs or military experience. Trump, who takes office on Jan 20, is still considering his choice for secretary of state. The Global Times, an influential tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily, said in an editorial on Tuesday that China would have to meet Trump's "reckless remarks" head-on. "Trump's China-bashing tweet is just a cover for his real intent, which is to treat China as a fat lamb and cut a piece of meat off it," the paper said.

Trump has spent the last two weeks hunkered down in the White House, raging about a “stolen” election and refusing to accept the reality of his loss. But in other ways he is acting as if he knows he will be departing soon and showing none of the deference that presidents traditionally give their successors in their final days in office. During the past four years Trump has not spent much time thinking about policy, but he has shown a penchant for striking back at his adversaries. And with his encouragement, top officials are racing against the clock to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, secure oil drilling leases in Alaska, punish China, carry out executions and thwart any plans Biden might have to reestablish the Iran nuclear deal. In some cases, like the executions and the oil leases, Trump’s government plans to act just days — or even hours — before Biden is inaugurated Jan. 20. At a wide range of departments and agencies, Trump’s political appointees are going to extraordinary lengths to try to prevent Biden from rolling back the president’s legacy. They are filling vacancies on scientific panels, pushing to complete rules that weaken environmental standards, nominating judges and rushing their confirmations through the Senate, and trying to eliminate health care regulations that have been in place for years. In the latest instance, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declined to extend key emergency lending programs that the Federal Reserve had been using to help keep credit flowing to businesses, state and local governments and other parts of the financial system. He also moved to claw back much of the money that supports them, hindering Biden’s ability to use the central bank’s vast powers to cushion the economic fallout from the virus. Terry Sullivan, a professor of political science and the executive director of the White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group which has studied presidential transitions for decades, said Trump was not behaving like past presidents who cared about how their final days in office shaped their legacy. “They are upping tension in Iran, which could lead to a confrontation. The economy is tanking, and they are not doing anything about unemployment benefits,” he said. It is one final norm shattered by Trump — and a stark contrast to the last Republican president who handed over power to a Democrat. Former President George W. Bush consciously left it to his successor, Barack Obama, to decide how to rescue the auto industry and whether to approve Afghan troop increases. And when Congress demanded negotiations over the bank bailouts, Bush stepped aside and let Obama cut a deal with lawmakers even before he was inaugurated. Aides to Bush said the outgoing president wanted to leave Obama with a range of policy options as he began his presidency, a mindset clearly reflected in a 2008 email about negotiations over the status of US forces in Iraq from Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff at the time, to John Podesta, who ran Obama’s transition, just a week after the election. “We believe we have negotiated an agreement that provides President-Elect Obama the authorities and protections he needs to exercise the full prerogatives as commander in chief,” Bolten wrote to Podesta on November 11, 2008, in an email later made public by WikiLeaks. “We would like to offer, at your earliest convenience, a full briefing to you and your staff.” That has not been Trump’s approach. President-elect Joe Biden meets with Democratic leaders at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. The president-elect has vowed to move quickly to undo many of President Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times) The president has continued to deny Biden briefings and access to agency officials — delays that the president-elect has said threatened to undermine the country’s response to the pandemic. And far from seeking to help Biden’s team, Trump has spent more than two weeks actively seeking to undermine the legitimacy of his victory. President-elect Joe Biden meets with Democratic leaders at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. The president-elect has vowed to move quickly to undo many of President Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times) Biden and his top aides have not publicly criticised the president’s policy actions at home or abroad, abiding by the tradition that there is only one president at a time. But the president-elect has vowed to move quickly to undo many of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. That will most likely start with a blitz of executive actions in his first days in office as well as an aggressive legislative agenda during his first year. Some of Trump’s advisers make no attempt to hide the fact that their actions are aimed at deliberately hamstringing Biden’s policy options even before he begins. One administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of not being authorised to talk publicly, said that in the coming days there would be more announcements made related in particular to China, with whom Trump advisers believe that Biden would try to improve relations. Judd Deere, a White House spokesperson, defended the administration’s actions, saying the president was elected because voters were “tired of the same old business-as-usual politicians who always pledged to change Washington but never did.” Trump, he said, had rolled back regulations and brought accountability to agencies and “remains focused on that important work.” Some previous transitions have also been rancorous. Incoming Bush administration officials accused the exiting Clinton White House of minor mischief, last-minute pardons to friends and delays because of the disputed 2000 election. Trump has long alleged that after his election, he faced a stealth effort to undermine his transition because of the investigations that were underway into his campaign’s possible connections to Russia. And there were documented instances of Obama officials making last-ditch efforts to put roadblocks in the way of what they expected would be Trump’s policy reversals on immigration and other issues. Still, in his inauguration speech, Trump said Obama and his wife had been “magnificent” in carrying out an orderly transition and thanked them for their “gracious aid” throughout the period. And rarely in modern times have a president and his allies been as deliberate in their desire to hobble the incoming administration as Trump has been toward Biden. “It’s not consistent with anything we experienced,” said Denis McDonough, who served as Obama’s chief of staff and was part of Obama’s team during the transition from Bush’s administration. He said Trump’s actions in the final days of his administration were foreshadowed by his determination to sever agreements Obama had reached on climate change and Iran’s nuclear program — something presidents rarely do. “It’s a breach of that norm,” McDonough said. Some of Trump’s actions are all but permanent, like the nomination of judges with lifetime appointments or the naming of his supporters to government panels with terms that stretch beyond Biden’s likely time in office. Once done, there is little that the new president can do to reverse them. But they are not the only nominees administration officials are trying to rush through. Among the others are two nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who would serve until 2024 and 2030 respectively; a trio of possible members to the Federal Election Commission to serve six-year terms; and nominees to the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who, if confirmed, would prevent Biden from installing majorities on those bodies until well into 2021. Other actions may be possible to reverse but are designed to exact a political price for doing so. Since the election, Trump has ordered the withdrawal of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, where Trump aims to halve an already pared-down force of 4,500 by the time he leaves office, defying the advice of some top generals. President-elect Barack Obama with President George W. Bush at the White House on Monday, Nov. 10, 2008. Aides to Bush said he wanted to leave his successor with a range of policy options as he began his presidency. (Doug Mills/The New York Times) Biden’s vision for US troop deployments is not radically different. He has said that he supports only small numbers of combat forces, mainly tasked with fighting terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. But Trump’s last-minute withdrawals could force Biden into an unwanted confrontation with Democrats in Congress if he decides he needs to return to the modest preelection status quo. President-elect Barack Obama with President George W. Bush at the White House on Monday, Nov. 10, 2008. Aides to Bush said he wanted to leave his successor with a range of policy options as he began his presidency. (Doug Mills/The New York Times) Analysts say that Trump’s withdrawal of troops also deprives the United States of any leverage in the ongoing peace process in Afghanistan between the Taliban and the Afghan government, potentially allowing the Taliban to make important military gains. Trump officials are also working to impose new sanctions on Iran that may be difficult for Biden to reverse, out of a fear of opening himself up to charges that he is soft on one of the country’s most dangerous adversaries. The sanctions could also undermine any move by Biden to return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a step that would require providing Iran with economic breathing room after years of Trump’s constrictions. “I think you’re going to see a pretty rapid clip of new actions before Jan. 20,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who often consults with the Trump administration on Iran. In an Oval Office meeting last week, Trump also asked his senior advisers what military options were available to him in response to Iran’s stockpiling of nuclear material, although he was dissuaded from pursuing the idea. Any military action would undermine attempts by Biden to reset US policy. Similarly, Trump officials continue to take punitive actions against China that are likely to further strain the tense relationship with Beijing that Biden will inherit. Last week, Trump issued an executive order barring Americans from investing in Chinese companies with ties to China’s military. Administration officials say more steps are in the works. Mnuchin’s shutdown of emergency lending programs this past week could also have long-lasting implications for Biden as the new president struggles to contain the economic fallout from the pandemic. The pandemic-era programs are run by the Fed but use Treasury money to insure against losses. Mnuchin defended his decision Friday, insisting that he was following the intent of Congress in calling for the Fed to return unused money to the Treasury. But it will be Biden who will be left to deal with the consequences. And restoring the programs would require new negotiations with a Congress that is already deadlocked over COVID relief. In the summer of 2008, officials in Bush’s White House sent a memo to agency officials warning them to wrap up new regulations — and not to try to rush new ones in right before the next president. Trump is doing the opposite. The Environmental Protection Agency is rushing to try to complete work on a new rule that will change the way the federal government counts costs and benefits, an adjustment that could make it harder for Biden to expand certain air or water pollution regulations. At Health and Human Services, the agency moved just after Election Day to adopt a rule that would automatically suspend thousands of agency regulations if they are not individually confirmed to be “still needed” and “having appropriate impacts.” The agency itself called the plan radical — realising it would tie the hands of the next administration. Brian Harrison, the agency’s chief of staff, called it “the boldest and most significant regulatory reform effort ever undertaken by HHS.” ©2020 The New York Times Company

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, keen to show off her skills as a mediator two months before a German election, achieved her primary goal at the meeting in Hamburg, convincing her fellow leaders to support a single communique with pledges on trade, finance, energy and Africa. But the divide between Trump, elected on a pledge to put "America First", and the 19 other members of the club, including countries as diverse as Japan, Saudi Arabia and Argentina, was stark. Last month Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of a landmark international climate accord clinched two years ago in Paris. "In the end, the negotiations on climate reflect dissent – all against the United States of America," Merkel told reporters at the end of the meeting. "And the fact that negotiations on trade were extraordinarily difficult is due to specific positions that the United States has taken." The summit, marred by violent protests that left the streets of Hamburg littered with burning cars and broken shop windows, brought together a volatile mix of leaders at a time of major change in the global geo-political landscape. Trump's shift to a more unilateral, transactional diplomacy has left a void in global leadership, unsettling traditional allies in Europe and opening the door to rising powers like China to assume a bigger role. Tensions between Washington and Beijing dominated the run-up to the meeting, with the Trump administration ratcheting up pressure on President Xi Jinping to rein in North Korea and threatening punitive trade measures on steel. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time in Hamburg, a hotly anticipated encounter after the former real estate mogul promised a rapprochement with Moscow during his campaign, only to be thwarted by accusations of Russian meddling in the vote and investigations into the Russia ties of Trump associates. Putin said at the conclusion of the summit on Saturday that Trump had quizzed him on the alleged meddling in a meeting that lasted over two hours but seemed to have been satisfied with the Kremlin leader's denials of interference. Trump had accused Russia of destabilizing behavior in Ukraine and Syria before the summit. But in Hamburg he struck a conciliatory tone, describing it as an honor to meet Putin and signaling, through Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, that he preferred to focus on future ties and not dwell on the past. "It was an extraordinarily important meeting," Tillerson said, describing a "very clear positive chemistry" between Trump and the former KGB agent. In the final communique, the 19 other leaders took note of the US decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord and declared it "irreversible". For its part, the United States injected a contentious line saying that it would "endeavor to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently." French President Emmanuel Macron led a push to soften the US language. "There is a clear consensus absent the United States," said Thomas Bernes, a distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. "But that is a problem. Without the largest economy in the world how far can you go?" Jennifer Morgan, executive director at Greenpeace, said the G19 had "held the line" against Trump's "backward decision" to withdraw from Paris. On trade, another sticking point, the leaders agreed they would "fight protectionism including all unfair trade practices and recognize the role of legitimate trade defense instruments in this regard." The leaders also pledged to work together to foster economic development in Africa, a priority project for Merkel. VIOLENT PROTESTS Merkel chose to host the summit in Hamburg, the port city where she was born, to send a signal about Germany's openness to the world, including its tolerance of peaceful protests. It was held only a few hundred meters from one of Germany's most potent symbols of left-wing resistance, a former theater called the "Rote Flora" which was taken over by anti-capitalist squatters nearly three decades ago. Over the three days of the summit, radicals looted shops, torched cars and lorries. More than 200 police were injured and some 143 people have been arrested and 122 taken into custody. Some of the worst damage was done as Merkel hosted other leaders at for a concert and lavish dinner at the Elbphilharmonie, a modernist glass concert hall overlooking the Elbe River. Merkel met police and security force after the summit to thank them, and condemned the "unbridled brutality" of some of the protestors, but she was forced to answer tough questions about hosting the summit in Hamburg during her closing press conference.

Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works. After one diplomatic exchange in December, US officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord — and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said. The previously unreported talks between American and Chinese officials show how the Biden administration tried to use intelligence findings and diplomacy to persuade a superpower it views as a growing adversary to stop the invasion of Ukraine, and how that nation, led by President Xi Jinping, persistently sided with Russia even as the evidence of Moscow’s plans for a military offensive grew over the winter. This account is based on interviews with senior administration officials with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the diplomacy. The Chinese Embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, answered an earlier request for comment a half-day after this article was posted online, saying, “For some time, China has actively promoted the political settlement process of the Ukraine issue.” China is Russia’s most powerful partner, and the two nations have been strengthening their bond for many years across diplomatic, economic and military realms. Xi and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, two autocrats with some shared ideas about global power, had met 37 times as national leaders before this year. If any world leader could make Putin think twice about invading Ukraine, it was Xi, went the thinking of some US officials. But the diplomatic efforts failed, and Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning after recognizing two Russia-backed insurgent enclaves in the country’s east as independent states. In a call Friday, Putin told Xi that the United States and NATO had ignored Russia’s “reasonable” security concerns and had reneged on their commitments, according to a readout of the call released by the Chinese state news media. Xi reiterated China’s public position that it was important to respect the “legitimate security concerns” as well as the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of all countries. Putin told Xi that Russia was willing to negotiate with Ukraine, and Xi said China supported any such move. Some American officials say the ties between China and Russia appear stronger than at any time since the Cold War. The two now present themselves as an ideological front against the United States and its European and Asian allies, even as Putin carries out the invasion of Ukraine, whose sovereignty China has recognized for decades. The growing alarm among American and European officials at the alignment between China and Russia has reached a new peak with the Ukraine crisis, exactly 50 years to the week after President Richard Nixon made a historic trip to China to restart diplomatic relations to make common cause in counterbalancing the Soviet Union. For 40 years after that, the relationship between the United States and China grew stronger, especially as lucrative trade ties developed, but then frayed due to mutual suspicions, intensifying strategic competition and antithetical ideas about power and governance. In the recent private talks on Ukraine, American officials heard language from their Chinese counterparts that was consistent with harder lines the Chinese had been voicing in public, which showed that a more hostile attitude had become entrenched, according to the American accounts. On Wednesday, after Putin ordered troops into eastern Ukraine but before its full invasion, Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a news conference in Beijing that the United States was “the culprit of current tensions surrounding Ukraine.” “On the Ukraine issue, lately the US has been sending weapons to Ukraine, heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare,” she said. “If someone keeps pouring oil on the flame while accusing others of not doing their best to put out the fire, such kind of behavior is clearly irresponsible and immoral.” She added: “When the US drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?” She has refused to call Russia’s assault an “invasion” when pressed by foreign journalists. Hua’s fiery anti-US remarks as Russia was moving to attack its neighbor stunned some current and former US officials and China analysts in the United States. But the verbal grenades echo major points in the 5,000-word joint statement that China and Russia issued Feb 4 when Xi and Putin met at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. In that document, the two countries declared their partnership had “no limits” and that they intended to stand together against US-led democratic nations. China also explicitly sided with Russia in the text to denounce enlargement of the NATO alliance. Last Saturday, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, criticized NATO in a video talk at the Munich Security Conference. European leaders in turn accused China of working with Russia to overturn what they and the Americans say is a “rules-based international order.” Wang did say that Ukraine’s sovereignty should be “respected and safeguarded” — a reference to a foreign policy principle that Beijing often cites — but no Chinese officials have mentioned Ukraine in those terms since Russia’s full invasion began. “They claim neutrality, they claim they stand on principle, but everything they say about the causes is anti-US, blaming NATO and adopting the Russian line,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown University professor who was senior Asia director at the White House National Security Council in the Obama administration. “The question is: How sustainable is that as a posture? How much damage does it do to their ties with the US and their ties with Europe?” The Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach to China to try to avert war began after President Joe Biden and Xi held a video summit Nov 15. In the talk, the two leaders acknowledged challenges in the relationship between their nations, which is at its lowest point in decades, but agreed to try to cooperate on issues of common interest, including health security, climate change and nuclear weapons proliferation, White House officials said at the time. After the meeting, American officials decided that the Russian troop buildup around Ukraine presented the most immediate problem that China and the United States could try to defuse together. Some officials thought the outcome of the video summit indicated there was potential for an improvement in US-China relations. Others were more skeptical but thought it was important to leave no stone unturned in efforts to prevent Russia from attacking, one official said. Days later, White House officials met with the ambassador, Qin Gang, at the Chinese Embassy. They told the ambassador what US intelligence agencies had detected: a gradual encirclement of Ukraine by Russian forces, including armored units. William J. Burns, the CIA director, had flown to Moscow on Nov 2 to confront the Russians with the same information, and Nov 17, American intelligence officials shared their findings with NATO. At the Chinese Embassy, Russia’s aggression was the first topic in a discussion that ran more than 1 1/2 hours. In addition to laying out the intelligence, the White House officials told the ambassador that the United States would impose tough sanctions on Russian companies, officials and businesspeople in the event of an invasion, going far beyond those announced by the Obama administration after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. The American officials said the sanctions would also hurt China over time because of its commercial ties. They also pointed out they knew how China had helped Russia evade some of the 2014 sanctions and warned Beijing against any such future aid. And they argued that because China was widely seen as a partner of Russia, its global image could suffer if Putin invaded. The message was clear: It would be in China’s interests to persuade Putin to stand down. But their entreaties went nowhere. Qin was skeptical and suspicious, an American official said. American officials spoke with the ambassador about Russia at least three more times, both in the embassy and on the phone. Wendy R Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, had a call with him. Qin continued to express skepticism and said Russia had legitimate security concerns in Europe. The Americans also went higher on the diplomatic ladder: Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Wang about the problem in late January and again Monday, the same day Putin ordered the new troops into Russia-backed enclaves of Ukraine. “The secretary underscored the need to preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said a State Department summary of the call that used the phrase that Chinese diplomats like to employ in signaling to other nations not to get involved in matters involving Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, all considered separatist problems by Beijing. American officials met with Qin in Washington again Wednesday and heard the same rebuttals. Hours later, Putin declared war on Ukraine on television, and his military began pummeling the country with ballistic missiles as tanks rolled across the border. © 2022 The New York Times Company

The controversial government proposal follows huge pro-democracy protests last year in one of the greatest challenges to Beijing's Communist Party rule since the former British colony returned to Chinese control in 1997. Analysts said the blueprint, which lawmakers will vote on early in summer, could stir political tensions again after a lull of several months. However, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying told reporters before the blueprint was officially tabled that the political climate in the city could be less accommodating in the future. "As of now, we see no room for any compromise," he said. "To initiate any political reform process is not easy. If this proposal is vetoed, it could be several years before the next opportunity," Leung said. Hundreds of flag-waving protesters gathered outside the Legislative Council. A large group waved Chinese flags in support of the proposal, saying Hong Kong must move forward. A smaller group held yellow umbrellas, which have become a symbol of the democracy movement. They demanded "true universal suffrage" and called for Leung to step down. Democratic lawmakers wearing yellow crosses on black shirts, some carrying yellow umbrellas, walked out of the chamber after the government's presentation. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators blocked major roads in four key districts in the city last year, demanding Beijing grant a truly democratic vote and open nominations for Hong Kong's next chief executive in 2017. Their pleas were ignored and police forcefully cleared away the last of the protest encampments in mid-December. The blueprint for the proposal that the public vote on two or three candidates pre-selected by a 1,200 member pro-Beijing nominating committee was first outlined by China's parliament, the National People's Congress, last August. The Hong Kong government stood by that blueprint, offering no concessions to win over democratic lawmakers who have vowed to veto it when the government seeks formal approval. The opposition camp holds a one-third veto bloc, but Beijing-backed Leung said he remained hopeful that four or five democrats could be persuaded to change their minds. Democracy activists who launched last year's "Occupy" movement describe a vote without open nominations as "fake democracy". While Hong Kong is part of China, it is governed as a special administrative region, which means it has a different legal system and freedoms not permitted in the mainland.

After a bumpy start to relations, the two men both have incentives to improve ties - Macron hoping to elevate France's role in global affairs, and Trump, seemingly isolated among world leaders, needing a friend overseas. Trump comes to France beset by allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Emails released on Tuesday suggest his eldest son welcomed Russian help against his father's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Weeks after Macron hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles, Trump will bask in the trappings of the Bastille Day military parade on Friday and commemorations of the entry 100 years ago of US troops into World War One. Talks will focus on shared diplomatic and military endeavors, but an Elysee official said Macron would not shy away from trickier issues. Trump has made few friends in Europe with his rejection of the Paris accord on climate change and "America First" trade stance. Macron's aides say he does not want Trump to feel backed into a corner. "What Emmanuel Macron wants to do is bring Trump back into the circle so that the United States, which remains the world's number one power, is not excluded," French government spokesman Christophe Castaner told BFM TV. On his arrival in Paris, Trump headed straight to the US ambassador's residence where he will lunch with top US military brass before meeting Macron at the Hotel des Invalides, a grand 17th century complex where Napoleon Bonaparte and other war heroes are buried. They will later dine with their wives at a restaurant on the second floor of Paris' Eiffel Tower. The Elysee official said the symbolism was clear: "Paris is still Paris." During the U.S. election campaign, Trump declared that a wave of militant attacks showed "France is no longer France", urging the French to get tough on immigration and jihadists. This year's July 14 celebrations come a year after a Tunisian man loyal to Islamic State plowed a truck through a crowd of revelers on a seafront promenade in the Riviera city of Nice, killing more than 80 people. A White House official on Tuesday said Trump and Macron would discuss the civil war in Syria, where Islamic State is defending its last major urban stronghold of Raqqa, and counter-terrorism. For Macron, France's youngest leader since Napoleon two centuries ago, the visit is a chance to use soft diplomacy to win Trump's confidence and set about influencing U.S. foreign policy, which European leaders say lacks direction. "I have no doubt that the presidents will talk about the state of military actions in Syria and they will talk about the future," the Elysee official said. "Macron has said before that military action is not enough, we have to plan for development and stabilization." Beyond Syria and the Middle East, the Elysee said Macron would also press Trump for more support in financing a new West African military force to battle Islamic militants in the Sahel, where France wants to wind down its troop presence. In bringing Trump to Paris, Macron has stolen a march on Britain's embattled Prime Minister Theresa May. London's offer of a state visit for Trump met fierce criticism and warnings that he would be greeted by mass protests. An Elabe poll showed that 59 percent of French people approved of Macron's decision to invite Trump.

Wim Wenders and Jane Campion are two of the acclaimed directors behind a collection of short films on the United Nations' fight against poverty, but the UN agency meant to sponsor the project has pulled out of it. "8", which premiered at the Rome film festival on Thursday, brings together eight film-makers to illustrate the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 and aimed at halving the number of extremely poor and hungry people by 2015. Each director takes a different angle to show how poverty, climate change, lack of access to education and basic health facilities are affecting the world's needy but also those living in the rich West. African film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako looks at an 8-year old boy being taught about the U.N. goals in a bare school in Ethiopia; actor-turned-director Gael Garcia Bernal shows a father in Iceland explaining the importance of education to his son; Campion explores the ravages of drought in Australia. Gus Van Sant, author of cult movies like "To Die For" and "Paranoid Park", plays on the contrast between carefree American skateboarders and the dire statistics on child mortality in poor countries. Dutch-born Jan Kounen follows a pregnant woman in Amazonia desperately trying to find a doctor while another of the film's chapters, by Argentinian-born Gaspar Noe, focuses on AIDS. But it is Indian director Mira Nair's take on gender equality that sparked a row with the United Nations Development Programme, which eventually withdrew its support from the project. "AN INSULT TO ISLAM" Nair's short film portrays a Muslim woman living in New York who decides to leave her husband and young son because she is in love with a married man. "In April 2008, the UNDP came to us and demanded that we pull Mira Nair's film or they would withdraw their logo from the project. They said it risked insulting Islam," French producer Marc Oberon said after a press screening in Rome. "We decided we could not take it out, so they pulled out." UNDP spokesman Adam Rogers told Reuters the agency had felt Nair's work "would get caught up in controversy". "We were afraid it would bring the wrong kind of attention to the cause of promoting gender equality," Rogers said by phone from Geneva. He said the European Union had also backed out of the project. Nair, in Rome to promote "8", defended her choice, saying it was about a woman's right to express herself. "It's a storm in a teacup frankly. It's not what the film deserved," she said. "My film is inspired by a true story and was written by the person who lived that story. Freedom does not come neatly packaged. It comes with pain," she said. "I also wanted to make the film because of the reaction in the West to any woman who lives under a hijab or a burqa. They are usually identified as women who have no rights and are submissive ... which is completely untrue." Oberon said the UNDP had put pressure on some film festivals, including Cannes, not to screen "8", but the UNDP denied this. Controversy aside, Wenders said he hoped the film as a whole would raise awareness about poverty, especially as the global financial crisis risks diverting aid and developments funds. "We are full of the best will, but the solution is only with governments," the German director said, speaking in English. "(The crisis) might make some nations even less willing to fulfil what they have promised and signed. I am very much afraid that the bill will again be paid by the poorest."

Loose regulation, now blamed for ills ranging from the US financial crisis to imports of tainted Chinese goods, is drawing increasing fire from opponents of the Bush administration's environment program. In the final months of President George W. Bush's two terms in office, criticism about the use of regulation instead of legislation to craft environmental policy has grown louder. That is amplified by the campaign for the U.S. presidential election on November 4, with both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama staking out environmental positions at odds with the current administration. The environment is important to U.S. voters but ranks far below their top concern, the economy and jobs, according to a sampling on PollingReport.com. A CNN poll in July found 66 percent said the environment was important or very important in choosing a president, compared with 93 percent who said the same about the economy. On a broad range of environmental issues -- climate-warming carbon emissions, protecting endangered species, clean air and water preservation, the cleanup of toxic pollution -- opponents in and out of government have taken aim at the White House for failing to tighten some rules and loosening others. "The Bush administration's long-standing efforts to weaken environmental regulations to benefit narrow special interests come with a terrible cost," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who has led the charge. "If you can't breathe because the air is polluted, you can't go to work. If your kids can't breathe, they can't go to school." Frank O'Donnell, of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch, agreed, saying that "the hallmark of Bush administration policy on the environment is a lack of regulation." One Capitol Hill staffer familiar with legislation on global warming accused the Bush administration of actively seeking to undermine measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change. "They were the biggest obstacle to progress," the staffer said. "They did everything possible to ensure that nothing would happen." James Connaughton, who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality, vehemently disagreed, saying the Bush administration has equaled or exceeded the environmental accomplishments of its predecessors, sometimes through regulation and other times by the use of incentives. Connaughton took aim at states, notably California, for setting high environmental standards but failing to meet them. He specifically faulted Congress for failing to reinstate the Clean Air Interstate Rule, which would have curbed power plant pollution, after a federal appeals court rejected it in July. EMISSIONS AND POLAR BEARS Bush promised to regulate carbon emissions when he ran for president in 2000 but quickly reversed course once in the White House, saying any mandatory cap on greenhouse gases would cost U.S. jobs and give an unfair advantage to fast-developing economies like China and India. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the power to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants if they posed a danger to human health. The EPA delayed a decision on the so-called endangerment finding, making it highly likely that any regulatory action will be left to Obama or McCain when the winner of November's election takes office in January. The Bush administration's record on designating endangered species has drawn widespread scorn from conservation groups. So far, it has listed 58 species under the Endangered Species Act, compared with 522 under President Bill Clinton and 231 under President George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, who served only one term in office. For one high-profile species, the polar bear, the Bush administration waited until May 14, one day before a court-ordered deadline, to list the big white bears as threatened by climate change. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said then that the listing would not curb climate change. He noted he was taking administrative and regulatory action to make sure the decision was not "abused to make global warming policy." The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the decision, calling it a "common sense balancing" between business and environmental concerns. At a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on September 24, Boxer accused the Bush administration of trying to undermine the mission of the EPA and the Interior Department to protect public health and the environment.

Developing nations objected on Wednesday to possible curbs on greenhouse gases produced by industries such as steel or cement, telling U.S. led climate talks that too strict standards could throttle their companies. Other countries expressed worries that such targets, championed by Japan as a possible element of a planned new U.N. climate treaty beyond 2012, should only be a complement to big cuts in emissions of gases led by industrial nations. Seventeen nations, the European Commission and the United Nations will meet in Paris on Thursday and Friday for a third round of a U.S.-led series of meetings to work out ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Wednesday, India led objections at a preliminary workshop reviewing whether industries could take on sectoral goals to help curb more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas predicted by the U.N. Climate Panel. Plans by rich nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases "should not be diluted by a sectoral approach," R. Chidambaram, chief scientific adviser to India's government. He said that there were some Indian industries that were among the cleanest in the world but others with far higher energy use. "You cannot develop a global policy that will throttle these guys," he said. Brazil also told the meeting that the rich nations should focus primarily on cutting their own emissions. The Paris talks are the third in a series trying to end criticism that President George W. Bush is doing too little to fight climate change compared to other industrial allies who have agreed to cut emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the Kyoto Protocol. 2025 GOAL In Washington, an official said that Bush was planning to call for halting the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 -- far short of targets by most nations -- but would offer few details on how to reach the goal before his term ends in 2009. "We believe a sectoral approach is a solution," said Olivier Luneau of cement maker Lafarge, saying that there was huge room for improvement across an industry where greenhouse gas emissions by the best producers are half those of the worst. Richard Baron, of the International Energy Agency, said tougher goals for only part of an industrial sector, such as steel or aluminium, could then favour countries that escaped the curbs. "The concern is whether the efforts... will be partly offset by increasing emissions outside the constrained region," he said. Jean-Paul Bouttes of the World Energy Council said that it would be hard to get a deal covering power producers, ranging from coal-fired power plants to nuclear power. That was partly because of differing national regulations, and a range of national policies. "A transnational sectoral agreement will be difficult to achieve," he said. For steel, Hiroyuki Tezuka, of JFE Steel Corp, said emissions standards had to be global to work since 40 percent of the metal was traded on global markets. With only regional rules "the end result would be disaster. Steel demand would be filled by high-carbon dioxide-dependent steel. This is why we need a sectoral approach," he said.

BONN, Wed Jun 10,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Climate change will force millions of people to leave their homes to flee rising seas and drought over the coming decades, requiring a new plan for mass migration, said a report published on Wednesday. Funds were needed to help migrants escape natural disasters which will worsen, threatening political stability, said the report published by the UN University, CARE International and Columbia University. "Environmentally induced migration and displacement has the potential to become an unprecedented phenomenon -- both in terms of scale and scope," the study said. "In coming decades, climate change will motivate or force millions of people to leave their homes in search of viable livelihoods and safety." The report said that the science of climate change was too new to forecast exact projected numbers of migrants, but it cited an International Organization for Migration estimate of 200 million environmentally induced migrants by 2050. Wednesday's study highlighted especially vulnerable regions of the world including: island states such as Tuvalu and the Maldives, dry areas such as Africa's Sahel and in Mexico, and delta regions in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Egypt. "In the densely populated Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River deltas, a sea level rise of 1 meter could affect 23.5 million people and reduce the land currently under intensive agriculture by at least 1.5 million hectares," it said. Climate scientists say sea levels could rise by at least a meter this century. The world needed to invest to make poor communities and countries more resilient to climate change, the report said. "These funds must be new and additional to existing commitments, such as those for Official Development Assistance," said the report "In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement." For example, investment in irrigation would make farmers less dependent on rains. Education would also help -- for example tilling the soil less leaves a protective mulch, which preserves moisture. Migrants from climate disasters may need new rights, the report said. "Those displaced by the chronic impacts of climate change will require permanent resettlement. At present, people who move due to gradually worsening living conditions may be categorized as voluntary economic migrants and denied recognition of their special protection needs." UN-led talks to extend the Kyoto Protocol after 2012 are taking place in Bonn, and struggling with rich-poor splits on how to share the cost of preparing for and curbing climate change.

As the treaty reached the 50-year landmark, the Franco-German partnership has transcended beyond the European Union space to Bangladesh. The first collocated Franco-German embassy in the world is under construction in Dhaka. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will fly into Dhaka together on Monday on a daylong visit to give the relations a boost. The visit would take place ahead of the November climate conference in Paris. They would also attend the historic topping-off ceremony of the under-construction joint embassy at Baridhara. This would be the first embassy worldwide jointly built and operated by France and Germany, German Ambassador in Dhaka Thomas Prinz told bdnews24.com on Sunday, before the arrival of the ministers. He said with its “interwoven elements of differently coloured facade elements, the external structure of the building will hint at a DNA and symbolise the close ties between the two countries”. Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali, who would receive his two counterparts at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport at around 8am, termed this visit “historic”. “Such a (joint) visit has never taken place before,” he had said earlier. Ali would accompany the two leaders on their visit to the southern Patuakhali district to see ongoing projects to cope with the effects of climate change. The foreign ministry officials said they would attend a working lunch hosted by Ali at the state guest house Padma, before meeting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at Ganabhaban. They would leave Dhaka at night after attending the topping-off ceremony at the new joint embassy. The German ambassador said this embassy project went back to the ‘joint declaration’ on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Elysée Treaty in January 2004. The joint declaration highlighted the decision of building a joint embassy “to have a stronger network of diplomatic and consular services of both countries”. The foundation stone was laid in 2013 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty. The Elysée Treaty as a symbol of reconciliation outlined the future of a Franco-German friendship, cooperation, and partnership. Ambassador Prinz said Germany was “a committed” member of the European Union. “We believe in the shared values of the Union and acknowledge the official motto united in diversity, as an essential principle of our cooperation.” “The Franco-German friendship is particularly strong and is at the core of a functioning European Union,” he said. France and Germany both supported Bangladesh during the 1971 War of Independence from Pakistan. Germany is the biggest single-country trading destination for Bangladesh in the EU where all products enjoy duty-free market access. Both France and it cooperate with Bangladesh on various international issues ranging from sustainable development, climate change preparedness to culture and human rights. The visit also carries significance in the global context as the German envoy said “challenges become more and more complicated and – in a lot of cases – international”. For example, he said, to fight against climate change, only if the international community united “we stand a chance to solve this great challenge – by negotiating an ambitious, comprehensive and legally binding agreement at the climate conference in Paris in December”.

Signalling his determination to take ties to a higher level, Modi broke with protocol to meet and bear-hug Obama as he landed in New Delhi earlier in the day. It was a remarkable spectacle given that, just a year ago, Modi was persona non grata in Washington and denied a visa to the United States.After a working lunch that included kebabs made with lotus stem, figs and spices, the two leaders got down to talks to finalise possible agreements on climate change, renewable energy, taxation and defence cooperation.Indian media reported that negotiators had struck a deal on civilian nuclear trade. The NDTV news channel said they had ironed out differences on suppliers' liability in the event of a nuclear accident and on tracking of material supplied.The White House declined to comment on the reports and the spokesman for India's Ministry of External Affairs said only "we hope for a positive outcome at the end of the day".Obama will be the first US president to attend India's Republic Day parade, an annual show of military might long associated with the anti-Americanism of the Cold War, and will host a radio show with Modi.His presence at Monday's parade at Modi's personal invitation is the latest revival in a roller-coaster relationship between the two largest democracies that just a year ago was in tatters."It's a great honour. We are grateful for this extraordinary hospitality," Obama said during a welcome at the presidential palace, where there was a guard of honour, a 21-gun salute and a stray dog running around the forecourt until it was chased away.Modi greeted Obama and his wife, Michelle, on the tarmac of the airport as they came down the steps from Air Force One on a smoggy winter morning. The two leaders hugged each other warmly.According to protocol, the prime minister does not greet foreign leaders on their arrival, meeting them instead at the presidential palace. Modi made the decision himself to break with tradition and surprised even his own handlers, media reports said.Obama then laid a wreath at Raj Ghat, a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, who is revered as the father of independent India.The roads of New Delhi were lined with armed police and soldiers, part of a highly choreographed plan for the visit.Up to 40,000 security personnel have been deployed for the visit and 15,000 new closed-circuit surveillance cameras have been installed in the capital, according to media reports.New vitalityThe United States views India as a vast market and potential counterweight to China's assertiveness in Asia, but frequently grows frustrated with the slow pace of economic reforms and unwillingness to side with Washington in international affairs.India would like to see a new US approach to Pakistan, New Delhi's arch-foe.Elected last May, Modi has injected a new vitality into the economy and foreign relations and, to Washington's delight, begun pushing back against China's growing presence in South Asia.Annual bilateral trade of $100 billion is seen as vastly below potential and Washington wants it to grow fivefold.Obama will depart slightly early from India to travel to Saudi Arabia following the death of King Abdullah, instead of a planned visit to the Taj Mahal.Like Obama, Modi rose from a modest home to break into a political elite dominated by powerful families. Aides say the two men bonded in Washington in September when Obama took Modi to the memorial of Martin Luther King, whose rights struggle was inspired by India's Mahatma Gandhi.The "chemistry" aides describe is striking because Modi's politics is considerably to the right of Obama's, and because he was banned from visiting the United States for nearly a decade after deadly Hindu-Muslim riots in a state he governed.Obama, the first sitting US president to visit India twice, also enjoyed a close friendship with Modi's predecessor Manmohan Singh, who in 2008 staked his premiership on a controversial deal that made India the sixth "legitimate" atomic power and marked a high point in Indo-US relations.The nuclear deal failed to deliver on a promise of billions of dollars of business for US companies because of India's reluctance to pass legislation shielding suppliers from liability, a deviation from international norms.In a reminder that personal chemistry is not always enough, ties between Washington and India descended into bickering over protectionism that culminated in a fiery diplomatic spat in 2013 and the abrupt departure of the US ambassador from New Delhi, who has only just been replaced.

Reducing coal use is a key part of global efforts to slash climate-warming greenhouse gases and bring emissions down to "net zero" by the middle of the century, and governments, firms and financial institutions across the world have pledged to take action. But banks continue to fund 1,032 firms involved in the mining, trading, transportation and utilisation of coal, the research showed. "Banks like to argue that they want to help their coal clients transition, but the reality is that almost none of these companies are transitioning," said Katrin Ganswind, head of financial research at German environmental group Urgewald, which led the research. "And they have little incentive to do so as long as bankers continue writing them blank checks." The study said banks from six countries - China, the United States, Japan, India, Britain and Canada - were responsible for 86% of global coal financing over the period. Direct loans amounted to $373 billion, with Japanese investment banks Mizuho Financial, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial - both members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance - identified as the two biggest lenders. Neither firm responded immediately to requests for comment. Another $1.2 trillion was channelled to coal firms via underwriting. All of the top 10 underwriters were Chinese, with the Industrial Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in first place, accounting for $57 billion. It did not respond to a request for comment. Institutional investments in coal firms over the period amounted to $469 billion, with BlackRock at the top of the list with $34 billion. The US asset manager did not respond to a request for comment. Comparative figures for previous years were not immediately available. Other research studies, however, have shown that coal investment is on the decline. The coal sector is responsible for nearly half of global greenhouse gas emissions. More than 40 countries pledged to end coal use following climate talks in Glasgow in November, though major consumers such as China, India and the United States did not sign up. But more China-invested overseas coal-fired power capacity was cancelled than commissioned since 2017, according to research from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) last June. Furthermore, nearly all internationally available development financing is now committed to reducing or ending investment in coal-fired power after moves by China and the G20 to stop supporting new projects overseas, research from Boston University's Global Development Policy Center showed in November.

BONN, Germany, Fri Jun 12, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A small reference on page 776 of a mammoth UN scientific report to cuts in greenhouse gases far deeper than those on offer by rich nations has become a main roadblock towards a new UN climate treaty. For developing nations at two-week UN talks in Bonn ending on Friday, the outlined emissions cuts by developed nations of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 have become vital for a deal due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. Many developed nations, however, say such curbs meant to avert the worst of climate change would cripple their economies. "The minus 25 to 40 range has become a sort of beacon," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters. "It is very much in the back of people's minds as something to measure the success of Copenhagen against." The 25-40 range was based on only a handful of studies and did not even make it to the "summary for policymakers" of the three-part report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), drawing on work of 2,500 experts. "Very little progress has been made on setting targets," Shyam Saran, special climate envoy to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said of the Bonn talks. Developing nations led by China and India say the rich should aim for cuts in emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, of at least 40 percent. They say that evidence of global warming, such as melting Arctic ice, has worsened since 2007. And small island states, who fear being washed off the map by rising sea levels, say the rich should cut by at least 45 percent below 1990 levels. "Forty percent by 2020 is a rather reasonable target" if the problem is as big as now widely believed, Saran said. De Boer noted the level was not an agreed target, merely a scenario for avoiding the worst of global warming. OBAMA CUTS Many developed nations led by the United States say the number is out of reach -- President Barack Obama wants to cut U.S. emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020, a 14 percent cut from 2007 levels, and by 80 percent below by 2050. And Japan set a 2020 target this week of just 8 percent below 1990 levels. "A level of minus 25 percent is still possible but it will be quite difficult," said Bill Hare of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who was an author of the IPCC's final summary. He said that recent scientific findings had backed up the range. The 25-40 percent did not make it to the summary more for technical reasons than for doubts about its validity. The 25 to 40 percent gained wide political prominence when a reference to page 776 and other findings were included as a footnote to a document launching talks on a new treaty at a meeting of more than 190 nations in Bali in 2007. So far, offers on the table by rich nations total cuts of between 8 and 14 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, Hare said. The European Union is offering 20 percent cuts, or 30 if other developed nations join in. And the same page 776 says that developing nations should make a "substantial deviation" by 2020 to slow the rise of their emissions from business as usual. That judgment splits rich and poor into two starkly different camps rather than, for instance, setting a sliding scale of cuts with the richest making the deepest. "Both sides feel they are being asked to do too much," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was unclear how deadlock will be broken. The rich might offer deeper cuts or the poor could back down, perhaps in return for clean technologies and far more aid. Hare said that Russia, the main country which has yet to set a greenhouse gas goal and whose emissions are already about 30 percent below 1990 levels after the collapse of the Soviet Union, could make a big difference. A Russian 2020 goal maintaining current levels would deepen overall promised cuts to between 12 and 18 percent. But some countries suggest that cuts do not have to fall within the range, especially if later reductions are deeper. "There are other trends that are possible," Jonathan Pershing, head of the US delegation in Bonn and an IPCC author of the chapter that included the 25-40 percent range, said in a briefing late last month.

Australia will not be swayed from the new government's pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq by the middle of this year, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said on Friday before a trip to Washington next week. Smith said he did not expect Australia's withdrawal to affect a long-standing alliance with the United States. New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's center-left Labor Party won power in November, ending almost 12 years of conservative rule by John Howard, a close personal and political ally of U.S. President George W. Bush. Rudd promised to pull about 500 Australian combat troops from Iraq by mid-2008 and has ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, breaking with Washington on both issues. Speaking to reporters in New York after meeting U.N. officials, Smith said the Bush administration had already taken into account the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq. "So far as we're concerned there's no capacity or thought of reopening the issue," he said. Making his first visit as foreign minister to the United States, Smith said he would discuss how to implement the withdrawal in an "orderly fashion" with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday. "It's not something which I believe will disturb what to date has been a very good working relationship between the new government and the (U.S.) administration," Smith said. "Administrations come and go, governments come and go. The alliance is a long-term, enduring, fundamental relationship between our two nations." Smith said he would also discuss Afghanistan, to which Australia has committed troops, humanitarian aid and other civilian assistance -- an undertaking he said would continue. Smith said he had "very considerable concerns" about the adverse impact on Afghanistan of events in neighboring Pakistan, especially the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December. "I'm particularly interested to have a conversation with Secretary of State Rice and other officials about developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Smith said.

Trudeau, who had also promised to withdraw Canada from combat in the coalition fight against Islamic State, said he told US President Barack Obama on Tuesday that Canada will pull out of the bombing mission but maintain humanitarian aid and training. The White House had earlier said it hopes the new Canadian government will continue to support the efforts of the US-led coalition to fight Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. "He understands the commitment I've made around ending the combat mission," Trudeau told reporters. Trudeau, who campaigned on a promise of change, toppled Stephen Harper's Conservatives on Monday, giving him the freedom to start implementing his campaign pledges largely unimpeded. He struck a chord with Canadians weary of nine years of Conservative rule. Harper resigned as party leader after the defeat. The 43-year-old son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau swept to victory with 39.5 percent of the popular vote in an election that saw the highest voter turnout since 1993. The Liberal leader will have to quickly start delivering on his promises to change policy, beginning with a UN climate change summit in Paris in December. Trudeau plans to double spending on infrastructure to jump-start anemic growth. In addition, his Liberals plan to begin working on legalizing marijuana "right away," Trudeau said during the campaign. He has said marijuana laws could be changed within the first two years of his government. "To this country's friends all around the world, many of you have wondered that Canada has lost a compassionate and constructive voice in the world over the past 10 years," Trudeau told jubilant supporters in Ottawa. "Well, I have a simple message for you on behalf of 35 million Canadians: we’re back." The win marked a turn in political fortunes that smashed the record for the number of seats gained from one election to the next. The center-left Liberals had been a distant third-place party before the vote. "When the time for change strikes, it's lethal," former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said in a television interview. Trudeau attacked Harper relentlessly for turning Canada into a "pariah" on climate change issues. He pledged to attend the Paris conference, and then convene the country's provincial premiers within 90 days to create national emissions targets under a framework that would allow provinces to set a price on carbon. US Secretary of State John Kerry said Harper's defeat will not affect Kerry's decision on whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline between the two countries. Trudeau backs Keystone and has vowed to repair cool relations between Ottawa and Washington. The Liberal leader said he did not raise Keystone in his conversation with Obama and made "a point of staying much broader in our conversation." Choosing a cabinet will be one of Trudeau's top priorities before he and his ministers are sworn in. Trudeau said he would unveil his cabinet on Nov. 4. Former Canadian Finance Minister Ralph Goodale is among seven top contenders to run that department, a senior adviser to Trudeau said. The Liberals plan to run a C$10 billion annual budget deficit for three years to invest in infrastructure and help stimulate Canada's anemic economic growth. Stock investors cheered the Liberal victory, betting it would loosen government purse strings to kick-start growth. Shares of construction firms and railways rose on the Toronto Stock Exchange along with heavyweight resource and financial stocks. [.TO] Canadian medical marijuana stocks also were higher. Liberals' strong showing removed the uncertainty that could have resulted from a minority government, and while the new administration plans to run deficits, it has also said it would keep corporate tax rates steady. The Canadian dollar strengthened as fiscal policy could limit the need to cut interest rates. "People are breathing a sigh of relief and they are looking for those areas that should show a positive impact from what the Liberals were talking about," said Irwin Michael, portfolio manager at ABC Funds. Trudeau, a telegenic father of three, also returns a touch of glamour, youth and charisma to Ottawa. Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper asked "Is Justin Trudeau the sexiest politician in the world?" while an Australian news website was more direct: "The votes are in and Canada has come out of its election with a super hot new leader." Trudeau kicked off his first morning as prime minister-designate by greeting astonished voters at a Montreal subway station in his home constituency.

ADB President Takehiko Nakao also said the multilateral financial institution's lending to China "is not huge" so it will not crowd out borrowers from poorer countries. "There is merit in lending to China. One we can have influence over such policies like climate change and the environment, which might have a positive impact on developing countries and to the region," Nakao told reporters. The Japanese government, which is a founding member of the ADB, has urged the Manila-based lender to stop lending to China on the grounds that it is rich enough to "graduate" from aid, the Nikkei has reported. But while China's share in ADB lending has been declining, Nakao said there are no plans of "letting China graduate immediately". Nakao said ADB earns from its loans to China and this income could also be used to support its operations in poorer countries. China has been the bank's second-largest sovereign borrower and is a major contributor to the institution's development finance and knowledge sharing initiatives, the ADB said. ADB's committed loans to China have fallen to 12 percent of its total in 2018 from 19 percent in 2013, Nakao said. Founded in 1966 with a mandate to lift hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty, the Japanese-led ADB has 67 member countries ranging from struggling Bangladesh and Pakistan to booming China and India, with its largest donors Japan and the United States.

European Union leaders resolved on Friday to slash greenhouse gas emissions and switch to renewable fuels, challenging the world to follow its lead in fighting climate change. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the bloc's "ambitious and credible" decisions, including a binding target for renewable sources to make up a fifth of EU energy use by 2020, put it in the vanguard of the battle against global warming. "We can avoid what could well be a human calamity," she said after chairing a two-day summit, stressing the 27-nation EU had opened an area of cooperation unthinkable a couple of years ago. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told reporters: "We can say to the rest of the world, Europe is taking the lead. You should join us fighting climate change." The EU package set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming, developing renewable energy sources, boosting energy efficiency and using biofuels. In a move that will affect all of the bloc's 490 million citizens, the leaders called for energy-saving lighting to be required in homes, offices and streets by the end of the decade. Barroso argues Europe can gain a "first mover" economic advantage by investing in green technology but businesses are concerned they could foot a huge bill and lose competitiveness to dirtier but cheaper foreign rivals. The deal laid down Europe-wide goals for cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and developing renewable sources but national targets will require the consent of member states, presaging years of wrangling between Brussels and governments. Merkel scored a diplomatic victory by securing agreement to set a legally binding target for renewable fuels such as solar, wind and hydro-electric power -- the most contentious issue. Leaders accepted the 20 percent target for renewable sources in return for flexibility on each country's contribution. The United Nations, which has coordinated global efforts to tackle climate change, applauded the plan. "In the face of rising greenhouse gas emissions, committing to a substantial decrease for the next decade is ambitious," deputy UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said. "But ambition and leadership are just what is needed to respond to climate change, one of the greatest challenges facing humankind." "GROUNDBREAKING" "These are a set of groundbreaking, bold, ambitious targets for the European Union," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said. "They require an immense amount of work for Europe to secure this but ... it gives Europe a very clear leadership position on this crucial issue facing the world," he told reporters. By pledging to respect national energy mixes and potentials, the summit statement satisfied countries reliant on nuclear energy, such as France, or coal, such as Poland, and small countries with few energy resources, such as Cyprus and Malta. The leaders committed to a target of reducing EU greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and offered to go to 30 percent if major nations such as the United States, Russia, China and India follow suit. The statement also set a 10 percent target for biofuels in transport by 2020 to be implemented in a cost-efficient way. But they did not endorse the executive European Commission's proposal to force big utility groups to sell or spin off their generation businesses and distribution grids. Instead they agreed on the need for "effective separation of supply and production activities from network operations" but made no reference to breaking up energy giants such as Germany's E.ON and RWE and Gaz de France and EDF. Renewables now account for less than 7 percent of the EU energy mix and the bloc is falling short of its existing targets both for renewable energy and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. French President Jacques Chirac insisted at his last formal EU summit that the bloc recognize that nuclear power, which provides 70 percent of France's electricity, must also play a role in Europe's drive to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But several EU states are fundamentally opposed to atomic power or, like Germany, in the process of phasing it out. Poland won a commitment to "a spirit of solidarity amongst member states" -- code for western Europe helping former Soviet bloc states if Russia cuts off energy supplies. Several other new ex-communist member states in central Europe were among the most reluctant to accept the renewables target, fearing huge costs from the green energy revolution. As chair of the Group of Eight industrialized powers, Merkel wants the EU to set the environmental agenda. The summit outcome will form the basis of the EU's position in international talks to replace the UN Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Environmentalists, often critical of EU efforts, hailed the agreement as a breakthrough.

NUSA DUA, Thu Dec 13,Indonesia (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Bali climate talks could collapse "like a house of cards" unless 190 nations quickly settle rows blocking a launch of negotiations on a new global warming pact, the UN's top climate official said on Thursday. "I'm very concerned about the pace of things," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said on the penultimate day of the Dec. 3-14 meeting of more than 10,000 delegates on the Indonesian island. The Bali talks are deadlocked over the exact terms for launching two years of negotiations on a global climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a pact that binds most industrial nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases until 2012. "We are in an all-or-nothing situation in that if we don't manage to get the work done on the future (terms for negotiations) then the whole house of cards basically falls to pieces," de Boer told a news conference. Among disputes, the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia are resisting efforts to include a guideline for rich nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 as a pointer for future negotiations. The European Union, which favours the range to show that the rich countries will lead the way, accused Washington of being the main obstacle in Bali. The range was in a latest draft on Thursday, outlining terms for talks meant to help avert famines, droughts, rising seas and a melt of Himalayan glaciers. BLOCKING "We are a bit disappointed that all the world is still waiting for the United States," said Humberto Rosa, Portugal's Secretary of State for Environment. Portugal holds the rotating EU presidency and Rosa is the EU's chief negotiator at the Bali talks. "The U.S. has been using new words on this -- engagement, leadership -- but words are not enough. We need action. (That's the) one main blocking issue," he told Reuters. Washington, which is outside the Kyoto Protocol, says guidelines would prejudge the outcome of the talks. And it says 25-40 percent range is based on relatively little scientific study. De Boer said the talks had to settle all outstanding disputes by midday (0400 GMT) on Friday to give time for documents to be translated into the six official U.N. languages. U.N. climate talks often stretch long into the night on the last day. Kyoto binds 37 industrialised nations to curb their emissions between 2008 and 2012. Poor nations, led by China and India, are exempt from curbs and President George W. Bush pulled out in 2001, saying Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy and wrongly excluded targets for developing nations. The United Nations wants all nations to agree on a successor to Kyoto by late 2009 to allow governments time to ratify the new deal by the end of 2012 and to give markets clear guidelines on how to make investments in clean energy technology. China wants talks on a new global compact to be extended. "The Chinese want talks to drag on into 2010 to give time for a new American president to come on board. Not many other countries think that's a good idea," one developing nation delegate said. Bush will step down in January 2009. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates the objective must be that global temperatures rise no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) and that global emissions peak no later than 2015. "Future generations will judge us on our actions." He also said that the rich would have to take on the "main part of the cost" of helping poor countries curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warming water could lift sea levels by as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century, displacing tens of millions of people, new research showed on Tuesday. Presented at a European Geosciences Union conference, the research forecasts a rise in sea levels three times higher than that predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year. The U.N. climate panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Britain said the estimate was based on a new model allowing accurate reconstruction of sea levels over the past 2,000 years. "For the past 2,000 years, the sea level was very stable," she told journalists on the margins of the Vienna meeting. But the pace at which sea levels are rising is accelerating, and they will be 0.8-1.5 metres higher by next century, researchers including Jevrejeva said in a statement. Sea levels rose 2 cm in the 18th century, 6 cm in the 19th century and 19 cm last century, she said, adding: "It seems that rapid rise in the 20th century is from melting ice sheets". Scientists fiercely debate how much sea levels will rise, with the IPCC predicting increases of between 18 cm and 59 cm. "The IPCC numbers are underestimates," said Simon Holgate, also of the Proudman Laboratory. The researchers said the IPCC had not accounted for ice dynamics -- the more rapid movement of ice sheets due to melt water which could markedly speed up their disappearance and boost sea levels. But this effect is set to generate around one-third of the future rise in sea levels, according to Steve Nerem from the University of Colorado in the United States. "There is a lot of evidence out there that we will see around one metre in 2100," said Nerem, adding the rise would not be uniform around the globe, and that more research was needed to determine the effects on single regions. Scientists might debate the levels, but they agree on who will be hardest hit -- developing nations in Africa and Asia who lack the infrastructural means to build up flood defences. They include countries like Bangladesh, almost of all of whose land surface is a within a metre of the current sea level. "If (the sea level) rises by one metre, 72 million Chinese people will be displaced, and 10 percent of the Vietnamese population," said Jevrejeva.

Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd may have wowed China with his fluent Mandarin, but his obtuse, jargon-laced native English frequently leaves fellow countrymen scratching their heads in bewilderment. Australian newspapers this week took Rudd to task, calling the former diplomat "policy obsessed", and decrying his reliance on "diplo-babble" and acronyms. "Sometimes, it seems he fabricates a language all of his own. As he speaks, he does unspeakable things to the English language," said Sunday Age newspaper senior columnist Tom Hyland. Rudd won praise on Thursday for giving a speech in perfect Mandarin at an elite Chinese university, where he delivered a sometimes blunt message on human rights and Tibet. But Australian newspapers said the message in Beijing contrasted sharply with his use of the English language. Papers seized on a climate change comment by Rudd after a recent meeting with Britain's prime minister as an example of his "geek talk". "There has to be a greater synergy between, let's call it our policy leadership in this, which has been focused so much, legitimately, on targets and global architecture, almost reverse-engineered back to the means by which you can quickly deliver outcomes," Rudd told perplexed journalists. The Sydney Morning Herald said: "You can take the boy out of the bureaucracy but you cannot take the bureaucrat out of the boy", citing Rudd's frequent use of acronyms like EWS(early-warning system), RTP (right to protect) and CCS (carbon capture and storage).

During these cooler months, the provincial capital Lahore, which is surrounded by rice-growing districts, is covered with thick smog. "It is a health emergency – the air quality monitors in Lahore routinely show hazardous levels in November," said Farah Rashid, a climate and energy programme coordinator for green group WWF-Pakistan. Now the Punjab government hopes to tackle the problem by providing 500 rice farmers around Lahore with a set of machines that together eliminate the need to burn crop stubble. The machines include a shredder that breaks down rice stubble and mulches it into the ground and a seed drill - called the Happy Seeder - that follows to sow wheat through the mulch. "It's a useful technology," said farmer Aaamer Hayat Bhandara, who has used both machines at a friend's large farm, and has pushed the government to subsidise them. "These machines used together could really make life much easier for us farmers," said Bhandara, from Pakpattan in Punjab province. Malik Amin Aslam, climate change advisor to Prime Minister Imran Khan, called air pollution a "silent killer" and said Lahore's smog had increased in intensity and frequency over the last five years. He explained that rice farmers traditionally use combine harvesters to cut their rice in October, leaving behind about four inches of stubble. With less than two weeks before they have to ready their fields to sow wheat, burning is the fastest way to clear the land, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In Pakistan, rice is grown on an area of about 2 million hectares (5 million acres), mainly in the Punjab and Sindh provinces. Many of the fields are cleared by burning every year. In October and November, Lahore's Air Quality Index level can jump to over 300, a number that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says corresponds to a "health warning of emergency conditions". CUTTING EMISSIONS Farmers say the new farm equipment can help combat smog, but note that crop burning produces only a small share of the province's pollution. "The stubble is burned only for a few weeks in the winter. It is a fact that the problem becomes worse during this short period," Bhandara said. "But farmers are not the only reason for this pollution," he added. A 2018 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on the underlying causes of smog in Punjab noted that agriculture - mainly rice residue burning - accounts for 20% of total air pollutant emissions. That puts it behind industry, which produces a quarter of the air pollution in the province, and transport, which contributes more than 40%. Tackling air pollution - and leaving stubble on the soil as mulch, rather than burning it - also has the benefit of reducing carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. In India, where farmers have been using the rice stubble shredder and Happy Seeder for the past few years, a group of scientists published a report last year stating the technology could cut greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 78%. Ejaz Ahmad, an environmental expert with the Institute of Urbanism in Islamabad, said any efforts to curb air pollution will benefit Pakistanis. "The Happy Seeder seems like a useful machine," he said. CHOSEN BY LOTTERY In Mandi Bahauddin district, where famed Basmati rice is grown, Muhammad Afzal, an agriculture officer at Punjab's Government Agriculture Seed Farm, has been experimenting with the Happy Seeder for the past two years. "Stubble management is a serious issue for farmers," said Afzal, who helps farmers adopt new farming techniques. Pakistan has penalties for rice stubble burning, including fines of up to 20,000 Pakistani rupees ($125) per acre - but most farmers have little other choice and simply continue the practice and pay the penalty when they are charged. But a growing number are looking for alternative solutions, Afzal said. The total cost for the stubble shredder and Happy Seeder is about 637,500 rupees ($4,000), and the government this year is paying about 80% of the price for 500 farmers, he noted. "For those who can't afford it, bigger farmers are willing to rent out the machines. In the future, more service providers will come up to rent them out," Afzal said. One drawback to the machines, he noted, is the need to mount them on the back of a tractor - and not just any tractor will do. "It requires a large, 85-horsepower tractor," he noted, something most rice farmers in Pakistan do not have. Bhandara, the farmer in Pakpattan, said the subsidised machines also are only available in certain districts around Lahore, in the so-called smog "red zone". "The subsidised machines should be made available to rice farmers in South Punjab and Sindh as well, otherwise they are too expensive for most farmers," he said. Despite the limitations, the Happy Seeder has proven so popular that the government has had 10 applicants for each of its 500 machines, according to Aslam, the climate change advisor. He said authorities are using a lottery system to decide who gets the subsidised equipment. The government has plans to expand the Happy Seeder programme next year and cover the whole of the Punjab rice belt by 2023, Aslam noted. In the meantime, he added, it is already working on a technology upgrade. "The agriculture extension department has developed a prototype to combine the two shredder (and) seeder machines into one 'Pak Seeder', which will be even more effective and efficient" - plus 30% cheaper, he said.

With the slow pace of international climate negotiations, lawyers from Switzerland to San Francisco are increasingly filing lawsuits demanding action. And they are getting creative -- using new legal arguments to challenge companies and governments before a judge. Two decades ago, only a handful of climate-related lawsuits had ever been filed worldwide. Today, that number is 1,600, including 1,200 lawsuits in the United States alone, according to data reported Friday by the London School of Economics. "The courts are an increasingly important place for addressing the problem of climate change," said Hari Osofsky, the dean of Penn State Law and the School of International Affairs. Already, climate campaigners are seeing glimmers of success. In the Netherlands in December, the country's Supreme Court upheld a ruling in favour of the Urgenda campaign group's demand that the Dutch government move faster to cut carbon emissions. And in January, a judge in Switzerland acquitted a dozen climate protesters from trespassing charges, filed after the group staged a tennis match within a branch of Credit Suisse in 2018 to draw attention to the bank's fossil fuel loans. Defence lawyers had argued that the protesters' actions were necessitated by the "imminent danger" posed by climate change. The ruling was met in court with a standing ovation. "It was an exceptional ruling," one of the defence lawyers, Aline Bonard, told Reuters. Given that the protesters admitted to trespassing, "the infraction is undeniable." But cases like these suggest a shift in how people are understanding the role of the judiciary in mediating cases related to the warming climate. Now, "there is bound to be a new wave of legal proceedings using a similar line of argument," Bonard said. NEW LEGAL TACTICS As rulings that compel governments to cut emissions remain rare, lawyers still see promise in targeting large, polluting companies. Such cases in the past tended to accuse coal-fired power stations or government of failing to limit emissions. Cases now are being fought on arguments such as consumer protections and human rights. This shift been especially pronounced in the United States, where more than a dozen cases filed by states, cities and other parties are challenging the fossil fuel industry for its role in causing climate change and not informing the public of its harms. Last month, both Minnesota state and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits alleging that oil majors had misled consumers on how using their products involved releasing carbon emissions and contributing to climate change. Those cases followed another filed in October by Massachusetts, which also used consumer protection arguments in suing Exxon Mobil Corp. All three accused the oil companies of engaging in deceptive practices and false advertising. "As awareness of climate change grew in the general public to the extent that their disinformation campaigns were no longer acceptable, there was a pivot to greenwashing," Kate Konopka, Washington DC's deputy attorney general, told Reuters. In each case, most of the companies denied the allegations. BP Plc declined to comment. Exxon said the Washington DC lawsuit was part of a "coordinated, politically motivated" campaign against energy companies and was without merit. Chevron Corp also dismissed the DC case, saying the litigation "distracts" from its efforts to address climate change. Royal Dutch Shell Plc said it was "committed to playing our part" in addressing climate change, but that lawsuits "impede the collaboration needed for meaningful change." But companies appear to be worried. The National Association of Manufacturers formed a group in 2017 to push back against "activist lawyers" for trying to scapegoat energy manufacturers. The group, called the Manufacturers' Accountability Project, applauded a December ruling in New York clearing Exxon Mobil of securities fraud charges, after it was accused of failing to inform investors about what it knew about climate change. "Courts are rejecting this misguided and misleading narrative, with a federal judge already calling them 'hyperbolic' last year when New York's attorney general brought claims based on essentially the same allegations," said Phil Goldberg, a lawyer representing the group. PRESSURE CAMPAIGN On the human rights front, there were only five lawsuits using these arguments before 2015. Since then, there have been 40 more, said LSE report co-author Joana Setzer, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Not all of these new tactics have worked out, though. In a high-profile decision in January, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed "Juliana v. United States," in which 21 youths had accused the federal government of infringing on their rights to life and liberty by perpetuating an economic system fuelling dangerous climate change. Judge Andrew Hurwitz said he had "reluctantly" concluded that the issue was a matter for the executive and legislative branches. Whether or not a judge rules in favour of climate interests, legal experts say the momentum of having so many cases before courts is serving to underline the urgency of the climate issue for both the public and policymakers. "We need massive government intervention to get us out of the hole that we're in, which makes government a primary target," said Tim Crosland, director of British climate litigation charity Plan B. The group was part of a campaign that successfully sued to block a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport, with Britain's Court of Appeal agreeing in February that the plan had failed to consider the country's commitments under the 2015 Paris climate accord. That decision is now awaiting a final appeal. Richard Wiles, executive director of the DC-based Center for Climate Integrity, a non-profit organisation supporting climate litigation, said the tumble of climate cases would work toward weakening the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry. "Just as you wouldn't expect tobacco companies to be at the table when we're deciding pubic health policy, the notion that the oil industry would dictate climate policy doesn't hold water," Wiles said. "They are just not going to have the same ability to dictate climate policy that they did in the past."

India's greenhouse gas emissions grew 58 percent between 1994 and 2007, official figures released on Tuesday showed, helped up by a largely coal-reliant power sector that nearly doubled its share in emissions. Total emissions rose to 1.9 billion tonnes in 2007 versus 1.2 billion in 1994, with industry and transport sectors also upping their share in Asia's third largest economy and confirming India's ranking among the world's top five carbon polluters. By way of comparison, between 1994 and 2007, India added more than the entire emissions produced annually by Australia. India is still low on per-capita emissions, about a tenth that of the United States. The power sector accounted for 719.30 million tonnes of emissions against 355.03 million tonnes in 1994, while the transport sector's share jumped to 142.04 million tonnes from 80.28 million tonnes during the same period. Industrial emissions rose a little more than 30 per cent during the same period. With agriculture's share in the Indian economy dropping over the past years, emissions from the sector dipped marginally during 1994-2007. The report highlights India's growing role as a key player in the U.N.-led climate negotiations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol and the need to include big developing nations in global efforts to fight climate change. Figures in the government report, released by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh at a conference in New Delhi, show India closing in on Russia, now the world's third largest greenhouse gas emitter, at nearly 2.2 billion tonnes in 2007. China is the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases blamed for heating up the planet. The United States is second. Russia's emissions have been growing at a slower pace than those of India, whose energy-hungry economy has been expanding at about 8 percent a year as it tries to lift millions out of poverty. This has propelled investment in coal-fired power stations, steel mills, cement plants and mining, as well as renewable energy. "Interestingly, the emissions of the United States and China are almost four times that of India in 2007," Ramesh told the conference. "It is also noteworthy that the energy intensity of India's GDP declined by more than 30 percent during the period 1994-2007 due to the efforts and policies that we are proactively putting into place. This is a trend we intend to continue," he said. Energy intensity refers to the amount of energy used per unit of gross domestic product. COAL REMAINS CRUCIAL India has also set a carbon intensity reduction target of 20 to 25 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Data from 1994 was the last official report to the United Nations on India's emissions because, as a developing country, India is not obliged to make annual emissions declarations to the world body, unlike rich nations. The latest UN emissions data for industrialised nations date to 2007. Although India has announced a new climate plan which identifies renewable energy, such as solar power, as a key element, coal remains the backbone of energy supply in a country where almost half the 1.1 billion population has no access to electricity. The country has 10 percent of the world's coal reserves, and it plans to add 78.7 gigawatts of power generation during the five years ending March 2012, most of it from coal, which now accounts for about 60 percent of the nation's energy mix. Developing nations now emit more than half of mankind's greenhouse gas pollution and that figure is expected to accelerate in the short term even as poorer nations embrace renewable energy and greater energy efficiency. A government-backed report last year projected India's greenhouse gas emissions could jump to between 4 billion tonnes and 7.3 billion tonnes in 2031, but per-capita emissions would still be half the global average.

Dec 5 (bdnews24.com/Reuters)- A new UN report says climate change is impacting Rwanda's gorillas. Polar bears aren't the only animals being impacted by climate change. These gorillas in Rwanda are also. They might seem relaxed but it is harder for these great apes to find food. Climate change is pushing the vegetation further up the mountain where temperatures are cooler. A new study by the UN released at the climate conference in South Africa warns that up to a third of all animals are at risk of extinction. Eduardo Rojas of the UN'S Food and Agriculture Organization says it isn't any coincidence that the Rwanada's mountain gorillas are already feeling the affects. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Eduardo Rojas saying: "With this study, we wanted to focus on the wildlife, showing where the first symptoms show that we are having problems (and) where we are most likely have much bigger (problems) in the future. They are normally related - the most critical cases - to mountains and to coastal lowlands where the effects are very evident even today." More encouraging is the news that communities can take action to minimize the impact of climate change. Outside of Volcano National Park, the Batwa have started planting seeds. In time, they hope the trees will help shelter crops and slow some of the erosion caused by climate change. In South Africa, churches have taken it a step further. They've praying for a positive outcome to a climate conference in Durban. South African Council Of Churches Priest, Reverend Bataki saying: "You see these chimneys of firms and factories with black smoke going up, and white smoke going up. That smoke up and destroys the atmosphere."

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer on Wednesday hailed as a "Marshall Plan" for climate change news that the United States will set up a multi-billion dollar fund to help developing nations acquire clean power technologies. The "clean technology fund" would help the developing nations meet the estimated $30 billion cost of acquiring expensive low carbon emission power technologies in place of cheaper, but far dirtier, old technologies. "This clean technology fund is perhaps a Marshall Plan on climate change beginning to emerge where we stop worrying about the short term woes and focus much more on taking a bold step forward ... towards a clean future," de Boer told Reuters. The Marshall Plan was a major investment project set up by the United States after World War Two to help rebuild Europe's shattered economies. "The notion of this clean technology fund, announced by the United States, represents a sea change in thinking on climate change," de Boer, the head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in a telephone interview from Germany. "Up to now there has been a lot of concern, certainly in the United States, that helping developing countries like China and India on climate change would take jobs away from Americans and give them to the Chinese," he added. Few details are yet available about the proposed new fund, such as whether it would be loans or grants, who would administer it and over what period. Extending the analogy of the Marshall Plan which combined public with private money, de Boer said the clean technology fund would facilitate private investment in clean technologies. "This clean technology fund is seen as a way of mobilising private capital, of opening up new markets," he said. "This is a signal that a solution is beginning to emerge, that the conductor that connects rich country action to poor country action in terms of technology and finance is beginning to be seriously thought about," he added. The fund is expected to draw finance from the major developed nations who have pumped most of the climate warming carbon into the atmosphere in the first place, and who the poorer developing countries insist bear the burden of cost. De Boer said that while the main thrust of the new fund, announced in Washington on Monday, was to promote low carbon economic growth, security was also a serious issue -- as it was with the Marshall Plan which had a sub text of shoring up European democracies against the threat of Communism. "I see a number of economic and security issues emerging as a result of climate change which make it all the more imperative to come to grips with this issue in time," he said. "If I look at the potential impact of sea level rise on metropolitan centres around the world and if I realise that within 20 years time 25 million Africans could be impacted by water stress and looking for somewhere to move," he added.

Prince William spoke of the warm welcome and delicious food they had experienced in Pakistan after arriving on Monday evening and visiting local school children and Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan. "The UK and Pakistan share unique bonds and so it will always be in our best interests for you to succeed," William said at the event hosted by the British High Commission, adding that 1.5 million people living in the UK had Pakistani heritage and the UK was one of Pakistan's top investors. "You can rely on us to keep playing an important role as a key partner and your friend." The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived at the hilltop monument in a rickshaw painted with the Pakistani and UK flags. Prince William wore a teal sherwani suit, a long dresscoat worn over trousers, while the Duchess of Cambridge wore a dress by British designer Jenny Packham in deep green, the colour of Pakistan's flag. Foreign policy experts and officials have said the trip, the first by a British royal family member in more than a decade and made at the request of the British foreign office, represented a soft power push, which may help both sides further their diplomatic aims. It comes as Britain seeks to reinvigorate its foreign relationships as the deadline looms for its departure from the European Union, while Pakistan works to repair its global image to boost tourism and investment. William also mentioned the looming challenge of climate change to Pakistan, as well as the importance of women having access to education, two themes of a trip which has been described by palace officials as the most complex the couple have undertaken due to security issues. Earlier in the day the couple met Khan, a former international cricket star who the prince played cricket with in London as a child, at his official residence. William's mother Princess Diana, a hugely popular figure in Pakistan, visited Pakistan several times in the 1990s and helped Khan raise money for a cancer hospital. "While welcoming the royal couple, Prime Minister Imran Khan recalled the love and affection among the people of Pakistan for Princess Diana, because of her compassion as well as commitment to support charitable causes," Khan's office said in a statement. He had also brought up geopolitical issues such as India's decision to revoke the autonomy of its portion of the disputed region of Kashmir in August and attempts to secure peace in neighbouring Afghanistan. Earlier William and Kate met students at an Islamabad Model College for Girls, discussing education with a group of older students and visiting the classrooms of younger students, admiring their drawings. As they left, a group of girls sang one of Pakistan's national songs and the couple greeted kindergartners who had lined up to chant "bye bye". While visiting the school a 14-year-old student told William she and other students were "big fans" of Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997. "Oh that's very sweet of you. I was a big fan of my mother too," he replied. They then visited the Margalla Hills National Park on the edge of Islamabad, which is under threat from poaching, wildfires, invasive species and littering. For the morning events, Kate wore a periwinkle blue silk shalwar kameez, the national outfit of Pakistan consisting of a loose tunic worn over trousers. Many on social media and in the fashion industry had been hoping she would don the outfit, which Princess Diana had worn during visits. The designer, Maheen Khan, said on Twitter: "It is an honour to have been asked to create this outfit for the Duchess." The Duchess of Cambridge's fashion choices, including a bright green tunic over white pants to meet with the Prime Minister, appeared to echo many of the colours and outfits worn by Diana.

The aim is to inject momentum into global efforts to combat climate change, after this year's planned UN climate summit in Glasgow was postponed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic. At a climate roundtable on Thursday on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders for the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the online summit on Dec 12 would be "an important moment to continue raising climate ambition." Guterres also urged big emitters like China and the European Union – both of which announced tougher climate targets this month - to follow up on those commitments with concrete plans and policies. Nearly 200 signatories to the Paris Agreement pledged to update their 2015 commitments before the end of 2020, but no large emitters have formally submitted new pledges to the UN. On Nov 4, the United States is set to become the only signatory to exit the agreement after President Donald Trump announced his intention to quit in his first year in office. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday that Britain was "going flat out" to upgrade its Paris climate pledge, but he gave no date for when it would be unveiled. Countries' existing pledges would result in global warming far beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Scientists say this much warming would unleash catastrophic impacts including debilitating heat waves, severe flooding and steep sea-level rise. Averting this would require rapid action by governments to wean the global economy off fossil fuels, delegates said on Thursday. Vulnerable countries also say they need financial help to adapt to the climate-related devastation already on their doorsteps. "We need solidarity we can see, reductions in emissions we can measure, and resources vulnerable nations can afford to access now," said Fiji Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama. The scale of ambition unveiled at the December summit may rest on the results of the Nov 3 US presidential election. Trump's Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, has made urgent climate action a pillar of his campaign and has vowed to recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement if elected. Chinese President Xi Jinping's surprise announcement this week to the General Assembly that China will commit to reach carbon neutrality before 2060 could also galvanise action by other countries ahead of December. The online summit will take place a day after EU leaders meet in hopes of clinching a deal on a more ambitious 2030 climate target for the 27-country bloc.

The US space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jointly issued two reports on 2012 world temperatures. NASA ranked last year the ninth-warmest since record-keeping began in 1880, while NOAA found last year was the tenth-warmest.The difference in the two rankings may be due to NASA's extrapolation of temperatures in areas with no weather stations, particularly near the poles, according to James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.The 2012 global surface temperature, including land and water, was 1 degree F (.56 degree C) warmer than the 1951-1980 average. That was enough to increase extreme high temperatures last year, Hansen reported.Last year was also the 36th consecutive year with a global temperature hotter than the 20th century average, scientists from the two agencies told a media briefing.Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the Senate environment committee, said the reports "make clear that the Earth is warming, and the trend is going in the wrong direction. We cannot afford to ignore these warnings and must make plans to address this serious threat. The health and well-being of our communities and families depends on it."And while the moving five-year mean temperature for the globe has been flat for a decade, that doesn't mean global warming has stalled, according to Hansen, a longtime advocate for action to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change."APPARENT STANDSTILL" IN WARMING?Noting that each of the last three decades has been warmer than the one that preceded it, he said an "apparent standstill" in global warming could be due to weak El Nino patterns, which would normally heat up things in many places, and strong La Nina patterns, which have a corresponding cooling effect.Hansen said it also might be due to fast-developing countries like China and India, where increased particulate air pollution from fossil-fueled vehicles and industries can reflect sunlight and keep temperatures lower.Despite evidence that human activities that emit carbon dioxide contribute to climate change, some skeptics maintain that the rise in global temperatures is due to natural variability or other non-human factors. Others question whether temperatures are in fact rising.NOAA said in its report that most parts of the world were hotter than average over the course of 2012, including most of North and South America, most of Europe and Africa and western, southern and far northeastern Asia.Most of Alaska, far western Canada, Central Asia, parts of the eastern and equatorial Pacific, southern Atlantic and parts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica were cooler than average, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.The two agencies also issued their report on global snow and ice cover, finding that the Northern Hemisphere had its 14th largest winter snow cover in 47 years of record-keeping. By spring, though, Northern Hemisphere snow cover shrank to the sixth-smallest size on record, NOAA said.Arctic sea ice - an important global weather-maker - shrank to its smallest size ever in 2012, 49 percent below the average and 293,400 square miles (760,000 square km) below the previous record smallest, set in 2007.By contrast, Antarctic sea ice was above average for most of 2012.

A summit of major powers in Germany will not agree to any firm targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, a senior US official said on Wednesday as G8 leaders gathered on the Baltic coast. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, chairing the annual meeting of the Group of Eight (G8), had hoped to secure US backing for a pledge to halve emissions by 2050 and limit warming of global temperatures to a key scientific threshold of 2 degrees Celsius. But she is now likely to settle for an expression of US support for United Nations efforts to combat climate change and an agreement to tackle emissions at a later date. "We have opposed the 2 degree temperature target, we are not alone in that -- Japan, Russia, Canada and most other countries that I have spoken with do not support that as an objective for a variety of reasons," James Connaughton, a senior climate adviser to US President George W Bush, told reporters. "At this moment in time on that one particular issue we do not yet have agreement," he added, referring to firm targets for cutting emissions that scientists say will swell sea levels and cause droughts and floods. Separately, French Environment Minister Alain Juppe said G8 powers -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- were far from a final climate deal despite months of negotiations. "We are far from a deal because Germany, supported by France, wants to go further, to lay the groundwork for post-Kyoto and to agree quantifiable targets," Juppe told French television. Europeans are still hoping the summit can send a signal about leaders' desire to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate deal which runs until 2012 and which the US is not a part of. Merkel was expected to press Bush on the climate issue when she lunches with him on Wednesday. She will later meet with Russia's Vladimir Putin before holding a dinner and reception for all the G8 leaders in Heiligendamm, a seaside resort founded in 1793 as an exclusive summer spa for European nobility. On the eve of the meeting, Bush criticised Russia on democracy, escalating a war of words with Putin that Merkel fears could overshadow other key themes like climate change and aid for Africa. "In Russia reforms that once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development," Bush said during a visit to Prague on Tuesday. Differences between Washington and Russia centre on US plans to deploy parts of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Moscow is also resisting a push by Washington and European countries to grant independence to the breakaway Serbian province Kosovo. Leaders from the G8 are expected to discuss other foreign policy issues including Iran's nuclear programme, Sudan and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The world's top industrial powers first gathered in 1975 in Rambouillet, France, to coordinate economic policy following a global oil crisis and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Recently, the club has come under pressure to adapt to shifts in global economic power. Merkel has invited leaders from Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa to address those concerns. A number of African leaders have also been invited for an "outreach" session on Friday. It was unclear on the eve of the summit whether G8 countries would make ambitious pledges on development aid and AIDS funding for Africa. Some 16,000 security personnel are in the area for the summit. The leaders will be shielded from thousands of demonstrators by a 12-km (7.5-mile) fence topped with barbed wire. Almost 1,000 people were injured on Saturday when violence broke out at an anti-G8 protest in the nearby city of Rostock.

Leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada vowed on Monday to fight the spread of the H1N1 swine flu and combat climate change but differed on trade disputes at their "three amigos" summit. US President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met against a backdrop of an economic downturn in each country with a US rebound key to a regional improvement. Obama and Harper said their governments would share information as each faces the possibility of a predicted upsurge in the H1N1 virus this autumn. "H1N1, as we know, will be back this winter," Calderon said at a joint news conference. "We are getting prepared, all three countries, to face in a responsible manner this contingency and abate its impacts for our people." All three leaders vowed to respect the North American Free Trade Agreement that unites their countries in trade, but differed on some issues. Harper raised with Obama Canada's concerns about the "Buy American" provisions in the $787 billion U.S. economic stimulus plan that the Canadians fear could shut out Canadian companies. Canada is the United States' largest trading partner. Obama said it was important to keep in perspective the fact that no sweeping protectionist measures have been imposed and that the "Buy American" provisions were limited to the stimulus and have "in no way endangered the billions of dollars in trade between our two countries." Calderon, who is trying to persuade Obama to resolve a cross-border trucking dispute to allow Mexican trucks to transit into the United States, said all three leaders believe it is essential to abide by NAFTA and to "resolve the pending topics" impeding greater regional competitiveness. Obama had made clear to Calderon that he was working with the US Congress to resolve what he considers to be legitimate safety concerns with Mexican trucks. He said the United States, Mexico and Canada should take steps to avoid protectionism, saying "we need to expand that trade, not restrict it." The three leaders issued a statement on joint efforts to combat climate change with an eye toward a global summit on the topic in Copenhagen in November. "We, the leaders of North American reaffirm the urgency and necessity of taking aggressive action on climate change," they said.

Dallas,Aug 14 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - US presidential rivals Barack Obama and John McCain target religious voters on Saturday when as guests of one of America's foremost evangelists they discuss faith in public life, AIDS, the environment and other issues. Religion plays a big role in US politics despite the traditional separation of church and state and the White House hopefuls are certain to be asked about how faith would fit in their potential presidencies. The candidates won't debate each other at the Civil Forum which will be moderated by mega-pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. He will interview each in turn, although they are expected to share the stage together briefly. "It's quite an extraordinary thing, it's the first time a preacher has convened the two presumptive candidates ... They are both fighting for that vote," said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston. Evangelicals account for one in four U.S. adults and have become a key conservative base for the Republican Party with a strong focus in the past on opposition to abortion and gay rights and the promotion of "traditional" family values. Such issues delivered almost 80 percent of the white evangelical Protestant vote to President George W Bush in 2004 but the movement is more fractured and restless this year though it remains largely in the Republican camp. A survey in June by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 61 percent of white evangelical Protestants supported the Republican McCain while only 25 percent backed the Democrat Obama. But Pew noted that in June of 2004 Bush had the support of 69 percent of those surveyed from this group and other polls this year have shown growing pockets of white evangelical support for the Democratic Party. Other surveys point to solid support for Obama and the Democrats from Hispanic and black evangelicals, making it a key "battleground faith" in the November 4 election. MCCAIN AND ABORTION McCain has not excited conservative evangelicals because of his past support for stem cell research, his blunt criticism of the movement's leaders in 2000 and other political heresies. But the Vietnam veteran and former prisoner-of-war has long been opposed to abortion rights, a trump card with this group. "McCain has a good record on that issue (abortion) and he must show that he will continue it as president," Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative lobby group the Family Research Council, told Reuters. Analysts agreed that this was a big chance for McCain. "For McCain the aim will be to solidify evangelicals as a key constituency," said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. There is opportunity for Obama as well, a devout Christian who many observers say is far more comfortable and eloquent speaking about his faith than McCain, who grew up Episcopalian but who now attends an evangelical Southern Baptist church. Many evangelical leaders including Warren have been pushing their movement to embrace a broader range of biblical concerns such as poverty and climate change, moving beyond though not excluding culture issues such as abortion. Obama, who would be the country's first black president, has linked such issues pointedly to his faith. "For Obama it is significant that he will be participating as an equal on the same stage as McCain in an evangelical church. This signals the shift in the evangelical political landscape since 2004," said David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta. Lindsay said while the setting is California, scene of a looming battle over gay marriage, the target would be politically undecided evangelicals in "swing states" where the White House race is forecast to be close. "This has a lot less to do with what is going on in California and more to do with what is going on in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, the big swing states," he said. "In all of these states there is a sizable evangelical population that does not directly identify with the old 'Religious Right,'" said Lindsay. The discussion will also no doubt be watched closely by Americans of other faiths such as Catholics, mainstream Protestants and Jews -- all voters whom both candidates will want to woo.

That prompted concerns about how the city could effectively respond to any crisis situation, now and in the longer term. Ron Harris, the city's chief resilience officer, said it had faced challenges to faith in government for some time but now people were paying more attention to the consequences. “When you don’t have that trust, you can’t give clear directions on how to respond to COVID-19, (you) can’t tell people to go inside for curfew to separate rioters from protesters,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Across the country, those in similar jobs have focused largely on threats linked to climate change, Harris said, but over the past two years he has sought to expand the scope. “Things that shock a community have to do with climate, but more urgently they have to do with systemic inequities,” he said, pointing to police shootings, civic unrest, the growth of homeless encampments and more. Yet Harris also saw the roots of a solution during last year’s protests: neighbours, businesses and others came together to “raise resources, organise communications, medicine pickups for the elderly - even organise ambulance services”. Grasping the need to nurture such organic responses, a growing group of cities including Minneapolis are experimenting with a strategy for doing that: so-called "resilience hubs". The approach uses a respected local organisation, such as a church or community centre, and bolsters it to help prepare neighbourhoods for crises - hurricanes, heatwaves, pandemics or unrest - as well as to respond and recover from them. Outside emergency situations, the hubs function like usual, as stitches in the local fabric, strengthening community ties. Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht–Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at the Atlantic Council, which is working on building such hubs in Miami, said communities with the most social cohesion tend to bounce back quickest from shocks. “Survival rates are higher in places where neighbours know each other,” she said. Resilience hubs, she added, “offer an opportunity to strengthen that community aspect that’s so essential to survival and recovery”. UNMET SOCIAL NEEDS Low confidence in government is what prompted the creation of the first US resilience hubs, in 2014 in Baltimore. Kristin Baja was then the city’s climate resilience planner, promoting the types of work suggested by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, such as making crisis plans and kits. But she kept running into problems, especially in poorer areas. “People said, ‘We don’t trust government.’ They talked about how disgusting shelters were, how often they weren’t open, how they wouldn’t go there even if they could,” she recalled. So she started studying what people actually needed from such programs. “Folks really wanted the power of self-determination and more of the ability to take care of themselves and their neighbours without having to rely on the government - especially because the government often doesn’t prioritise marginalised communities,” she said. And so the idea for the resilience hubs took hold. Like Harris in Minneapolis, Baja said the key is to get beyond a mentality in which resilience efforts are imposed from the top-down and activated only in a crisis. More important is to actively strengthen social bonds ahead of time. For example, during heatwaves, where neighbours are friendly, they are more likely to make visits that can be critical to the wellbeing of vulnerable groups like the elderly. That has been important during the COVID-19 pandemic too, alongside access to food, water, vaccines and testing, said Baja, now climate resilience programs director at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. Today there are about 40 resilience hubs in various phases in the United States and Canada, she said, with interest bolstered by both the pandemic and the national discussion on racial justice that followed Floyd’s death. Ruth Lindberg, director of the Health Impact Project at The Pew Charitable Trusts, which has supported resilience hubs in Minneapolis and Baltimore, said they can help at-risk people more broadly, beyond emergency situations. “The hubs are positioned on a day-to-day basis to be able to provide childcare, training, food distribution - services that can help respond to unmet social needs and also help prepare, respond and recover in times of crisis,” she said. Therein lies a key difference with many traditional resilience projects, experts said. “What I’ve always liked about the resilience hubs initiative is that they’re setting up things that will matter, no matter what,” said Sam Carter, founding principal at Resilient Cities Catalyst, a nonprofit advisory group. “It’s very understandable to people.” FAMILY NODE The Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory has operated in one of Los Angeles’ oldest neighbourhoods for decades, running activities such as teaching youths radio broadcasting and helping with translation for the local Latino population. “It’s a place where kids and families go to gather and be together,” said Aaron Gross, the city’s chief resilience officer. Now Gross and others are working to turn the site into a resilience hub, part of a vision to seed such projects across the city, particularly in areas seen as most vulnerable. Not only a long-time community focal point, the conservatory houses some potentially important emergency infrastructure: radio broadcasting equipment, a large theatre space and even a commercial kitchen in a ground-floor pizzeria. “I could argue that they were already a resilience hub without the title - and there are places throughout the city where I could say the same thing,” said Gross. The city and partners are now helping bolster the conservatory so it has a power backup, emergency planning classes, cooling and more, and can function as a formal resilience hub, which Gross hopes to announce this year. During the pandemic, its youth programs have already worked on public service announcements, while others bagged supplies and information for the community. It is the type of local response that enthused Harris in Minneapolis, where the city is doing initial work to set up two resilience hubs. One is in an affordable housing community for Native Americans and another at a community centre just blocks from where Floyd was killed. The second site was identified two years before Floyd's death - and the effects could have been significant, said Kelly Muellman, who coordinates the city’s sustainability program. “I think the last 12 months might have looked a little different,” she said. “We might have been able to come together in the tragedy rather than continue to fight.”

Former US Vice President Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, said he was getting straight back to work on the "planetary emergency" of climate change. But he refused to answer reporters' questions on whether the award would make him change his mind and enter the US presidential campaign as a Democratic candidate before the November 2008 election. "We have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing," Gore said, appearing in public nearly nine hours after the award was announced in Oslo. Gore shared the Nobel prize with the UN climate panel for their work helping galvanize international action against global warming. "It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway," said Gore, standing with his wife, Tipper, and four Stanford University faculty members who work with the UN climate panel. "This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now." "I'm going back to work right now. This is just the beginning," Gore added, leaving the 70 journalists hanging by not taking questions. That left unanswered a question on the minds of many in the United States after his Nobel win: would Gore, who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, jump in to join a crowded Democratic field of candidates ahead of the presidential election next year. Gore has made it known he is not interested, although some Democratic activists are campaigning for him to get into the race, and the Nobel award on Friday further fueled their hopes. Gore has campaigned on climate change since leaving office in 2001 after the bruising and disputed election result that put Bush in the White House. BUSINESS AS USUAL Gore, who appeared somber rather than elated over the award, said, "For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency." "It truly is a planetary emergency and we have to respond quickly," he said. Gore carried on with his plans despite the life-changing announcement, attending a scheduled meeting in Palo Alto in the heart of the Silicon Valley, where innovators are eager to jump start the clean technology industry. Stanford biology professor Chris Field said the prize "adds tremendous momentum" to work on conservation, efficiency, new technology and carbon capture and storage. "I think we are seeing there is no single solution ... but there are great opportunities in all four areas," Field said. Gore said in a statement earlier that he would donate all of his share of the Nobel prize winnings to the Alliance for Climate Protection -- a nonprofit group Gore founded last year to raise public awareness of climate change. "This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis -- a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years," Gore said in his earlier written statement.

LOS ANGELES, Mon Jan 26,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - With California facing a $42 billion deficit in the current economic downturn, a glum Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has warned that the Golden State is on the brink of insolvency. More people have left California than any other US state over the past year, some disenchanted with snarled traffic, scarce jobs and some of the highest taxes in the nation. Add the prospect of still higher taxes and fewer public services, and normally sunny Californians have little to celebrate. Still, experts say the most populous US state and the world's eighth-largest economy is well placed to rise again and that this crisis could spur major changes in the economy that will pay dividends in the long term. Abundant natural resources, big ports, access to the Pacific Rim, a large, relatively young work force, entrepreneurial draw and tech-oriented industries augur well for the future, economists and historians say. "The prophets of doom and gloom are just not looking at the reality of California," said Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast. "The government has created kind of a mess and that's a problem to be solved, but the negatives are actually fairly small. I think you can expect a lot of good out of California," he said. The typically upbeat Schwarzenegger made international headlines this month when, instead of delivering his usual cheery "state of the state" speech, he issued a short, bleak message about California's roughly $1.5 trillion economy. "A ROCK UPON OUR CHEST" "California is in a state of emergency," said the former actor and bodybuilder, whose second term ends next year. "Addressing this emergency is the first and greatest thing we must do for the people. The $42 billion deficit is a rock upon our chest and we cannot breathe until we get it off." Controller John Chiang then told Californians he would delay sending out $3.7 billion in tax refunds and other payments because the state was running out of money. The dismal state of the state would have been hard to imagine in California's post-World War Two golden years, when incomes were rising, land was plentiful, homes were affordable and wide-open freeways stretched in all directions. The good times came to a screeching halt with the 1973 OPEC recession, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, and in some ways they have never really returned. At the heart of California's problems, economists say, is the government's heavy reliance on personal income taxes, which produces wild swings in revenue as its coffers overflow in good years and dry up in leaner times. California is a pioneer state famous for its entrepreneurial spirit. But an entrepreneur who might make $2 million in boom times could go bust in a recession. A big reason for the state's reliance on income taxes is Proposition 13, a voter-approved change to the state Constitution that limits property tax increases and requires any plan to boost taxes to receive the approval of at least two-thirds of the legislature. The 1978 measure was credited with sparking anti-tax sentiment in other states and assisting Ronald Reagan's election as U.S. president two years later. Legislators have responded by burdening state residents with some of the highest income and sales taxes in the country. Economists say the state has long needed to fix that revenue roller-coaster ride and are hopeful that this crisis will force leaders to face the music. They also place little long-term significance on the number of people moving out, saying it is misleading to compare absolute numbers with other states when California's population is so much larger. 'LONG OVERDUE REASSESSMENT' Moreover, California's population is actually still growing thanks to immigration and births, and the state's relatively young work force may give it an edge as baby boomers retire. California's population could hit 60 million by 2050, according to some projections, six times 1950's 10.5 million people and 60 percent more than the current 38 million. Hard-hit by the mortgage crisis and foreclosures, home prices dropped 35 percent in 2008 in Southern California -- making home ownership realistic for young families in California for the first time in nearly a decade. The unemployment news has been grim, with the state's jobless rate in December rising to a 14-year high of 9.3 percent, above the national average of 7.2 percent. The rate is approaching the one posted during the recession in the early 1990s, when California's economy suffered from gutted aerospace payrolls and unemployment rose to nearly 10 percent. But the state remains a leader in green energy, biotechnology, aerospace and other industries that are expected to fare well in the world economy and create new job markets. "What people may think is that you can't really solve the problems in California until you totally wreck the train," Myers said. "You have to shake them up, wake them up. The outlook is very hopeful right now because this crisis is forcing a long-overdue reassessment." Jessica Gould, a 25-year-old graduate student at USC who moved from Atlanta and fell in love with the mild climate, natural beauty, health-conscious lifestyle and anything-goes culture, is optimistic. "I am hoping we make some changes," Gould said. "(The budget mess) does concern me, to be honest. But you are going to face problems anywhere and there are so many other things I get from living here, I guess it's a small price to pay."

“I feel like I have come from the Dark Side to become a Jedi warrior,” he joked as he braced against a chill wind blowing across the treeless stretches of cooled lava and distant volcanoes. The 37-year-old service technician from Zurich spent nine years working in the aviation and marine industries before joining Climeworks, a Swiss startup that is trying to undo the damage caused by such heavily polluting industries. “It does give you extra satisfaction to know that you’re helping the planet instead of damaging it,” he said. Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world’s biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik. As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on top of another. Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon dioxide, or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds with a sandlike filtering substance. When heat is applied to that filtering substance it releases the CO2, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to create a drinkable fizzy water. Several other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters down into basalt bedrock. Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks’ DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as props in a space movie. It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms are planning to inject into empty oil and gas fields could eventually leak out, some experts fear, but once carbon turns to rock it is not going anywhere. Orca is billed as the world’s first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft. The rock band Coldplay recently joined those companies in paying Climeworks for voluntary carbon credits to offset some of their own emissions. The firm hopes to one day turn a profit by getting its costs below the selling price of those credits. The problem is that Orca’s output equals just three seconds of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions, which are closer to 40 billion metric tons, but Orca has at least shown that the concept of scrubbing the air clean and putting carbon back underground has moved from science fiction to science. Tarek Soliman, a London-based climate change analyst at HSBC Global Research, said the launch in Reykjavik is not the sort of “quantum leap” that would prove the technology can reach the scale and cost required to have a real impact on climate change. “But it is a step in that direction,” Soliman said. “Given that direct air capture has been seen by many people as a nonsense, this is something you can see and touch that puts it on a pathway to credibility.” Christoph Gebald, Climeworks’ co-founder, is adamant that the technology can grow into a trillion-dollar industry in the next three or four decades, a goal that he says would be helped if the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, called COP26, sees most nations commit to net zero emissions by 2050. “That would be a dream outcome from Glasgow, along with decision-makers recognizing that any approach that leads to net zero must include carbon removal as well as emission reduction,” he said from Zurich. Gebald, a soft-spoken 38-year-old, began working on DAC with a fellow German, Jan Wurzbacher, while they were studying mechanical engineering in Switzerland. They formed their company in 2009, but Gebald said their big breakthrough was the release of the UN-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2018, setting out the need for reaching net zero emissions by 2050 if global warming was to be kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Crucially, it also produced the first scientific consensus that some emissions would be too hard to eradicate so all viable paths to “net zero” would rely on removing some previous emissions. Gebald said machine-based solutions may have to carry half that workload because the potential for most nature-based options are limited by a shortage of arable land. Getting from 4,000 metric tons a year to 5 billion metric tons quickly enough to help limit climate change may seem fanciful, but there is an intriguing comparison with the world’s first commercial wind farm, which opened in 1980 on Crotched Mountain in New Hampshire. That project consisted of 20 turbines with a combined output of 600,000 watts. Forty years later, in 2020, the wind capacity installed around the world was 1.23 million times larger, at 740 gigawatts. Increasing Orca’s annual output at the same rate would yield a CO2 removal capacity of 5 billion metric tons by around 2060. “That is exactly what climate science asks us to do to achieve climate targets,” Gebald said. The challenge will hinge on reducing costs, which Gebald said are now about $600 to $800 a metric ton. Increased output could bring those costs down to $200 to $300 a metric ton by 2030, and $100 to $150 somewhere around 2035, he said. DAC would already be competitive if it received the subsidies that helped electric vehicles and solar panels deploy and flourish, Gebald said. A fundamental difference from wind and solar power is that they were ultimately driven by the profit motive because once subsidies had helped to make them competitive they were producing a valuable asset: cheap electricity. DAC’s main “output” — helping to save the planet — must instead rely on government supports such as emission credits and taxes on carbon emitters, hence the importance of meetings such as the Glasgow conference. While Hitz and his team are monitoring Orca to hone their next plant, which will be 10 times larger and is expected to launch in two to three years, Gebald acknowledged that in many ways Orca, meant to operate for a decade, has already achieved its goal. “We know that the technology works, so the main experiment with Orca really was testing the market interest in carbon removal, and we’re very happy that already a large share of the lifetime capacity of the plant has been contracted.” Carbfix is busily exploring how to adapt its mineralization process to other types of rock and how to use seawater at sites that are short of fresh water. Carbfix was launched as a research project in 2007 after prodding by the then-president of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, who had been told by a local scientist that Iceland’s highly porous basalt could mineralize CO2 without creating any seismic problems. Grimsson consolidated his role as Orca’s “fairy godfather” shortly after ending his 20 years as president in 2016, when he was walking through the bar of a luxury hotel at that year’s UN climate meeting in Marrakech, Morocco. “I happened to overhear this American investor sitting at a table loudly boosting this new Swiss company that he said had the technology to pull carbon straight out of the air,” he said. “So I stopped and said ‘Hey, in Iceland we know how to turn that stuff into rock!’” He put Gebald together with Carbfix “and bingo, that was the missing link.” Despite that lucky accident, Edda Aradottir, the chief executive of Carbfix, said she is not confident that the latest UN climate conference will do enough to help “negative emission technologies” live up to their potential. “Somehow it seems that these events rarely achieve what they set out to do,” she said. Grimsson is also downbeat about Glasgow, saying “the problem is that COPs are primarily about finding ways to reduce emissions.” That is fine, he said, but “we also have to destroy some of the carbon that is already in the air. If we don’t start doing that very, very quickly we are never going to succeed on climate change.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Scientists say that unusually warm Atlantic surface temperatures have helped to increase storm activity. “It’s very likely that human-caused climate change contributed to that anomalously warm ocean,” said James P Kossin, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate change is making it more likely for hurricanes to behave in certain ways.” Here are some of those ways. 1. Higher winds There’s a solid scientific consensus that hurricanes are becoming more powerful. Hurricanes are complex, but one of the key factors that determines how strong a given storm ultimately becomes is ocean surface temperature, because warmer water provides more of the energy that fuels storms. “Potential intensity is going up,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We predicted it would go up 30 years ago, and the observations show it going up.” Stronger winds mean downed power lines, damaged roofs and, when paired with rising sea levels, worse coastal flooding. “Even if storms themselves weren’t changing, the storm surge is riding on an elevated sea level,” Emanuel said. He used New York City as an example, where sea levels have risen about a foot in the past century. “If Sandy’s storm surge had occurred in 1912 rather than 2012,” he said, “it probably wouldn’t have flooded Lower Manhattan.” 2. More rain Warming also increases the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold. In fact, every degree Celsius of warming allows the air to hold about 7% more water. That means we can expect future storms to unleash higher amounts of rainfall. 3. Slower storms Researchers do not yet know why storms are moving more slowly, but they are. Some say a slowdown in global atmospheric circulation, or global winds, could be partly to blame. In a 2018 paper, Kossin found that hurricanes over the United States had slowed 17% since 1947. Combined with the increase in rain rates, storms are causing a 25% increase in local rainfall in the United States, he said. Slower, wetter storms also worsen flooding. Kossin likened the problem to walking around your backyard while using a hose to spray water on the ground. If you walk fast, the water won’t have a chance to start pooling. But if you walk slowly, he said, “you’ll get a lot of rain below you.” 4. Wider-ranging storms Because warmer water helps fuel hurricanes, climate change is enlarging the zone where hurricanes can form. There’s a “migration of tropical cyclones out of the tropics and toward subtropics and middle latitudes,” Kossin said. That could mean more storms making landfall in higher latitudes, like in the United States or Japan. 5. More volatility As the climate warms, researchers also say they expect storms to intensify more rapidly. Researchers are still unsure why it’s happening, but the trend appears to be clear. In a 2017 paper based on climate and hurricane models, Emanuel found that storms that intensify rapidly — the ones that increase their wind speed by 70 mph or more in the 24 hours before landfall — were rare in the period from 1976 through 2005. On average, he estimated, their likelihood in those years was equal to about once per century. By the end of the 21st century, he found, those storms might form once every five or 10 years. “It’s a forecaster’s nightmare,” Emanuel said. If a tropical storm or Category 1 hurricane develops into a Category 4 hurricane overnight, he said, “there’s no time to evacuate people.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Developing countries, including emerging economic giants China and India, are not prepared to take the blame for climate change, the head of the G77 group of developing nations said on Tuesday. Some countries in Europe and North America want developing countries to accept limits on their emissions of greenhouse gases when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012, but the G77 looks likely to oppose that. "Most environmental degradation that's happened has been historically caused by the industrial world," said Munir Akram, Pakistan's permanent representative to the United Nations and chairman of the G77 group in New York. "China, India and others are at the stage where they are now taking off and it's quite natural that their emissions of carbon are increasing," he told a news conference after a two-day meeting of G77 diplomats in Rome. "There's a sort of propaganda effort to try to shift the blame for environmental degradation on to these fast-growing economies, and the motives are not very well disguised." One of the main reasons US President George W. Bush pulled his country out of Kyoto was that the 1997 UN treaty only imposed emissions limits on developed countries. The European Union remained in the pact but wants developing countries included in a second phase treaty which will be discussed at a UN climate change meeting in Bali, Indonesia in December. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest report, released earlier this month, predicted global temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit) this century due to the greenhouse effect. Emissions from industry and transport, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), a by-product of burning fossil fuels like oil and coal, are blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere in a process set to increase disasters like floods and droughts. "The developing countries contribute the least to environmental degradation but are affected the most," read a statement issued by the G77 after the Rome meeting, which covered everything from aid to UN reform. With China's economy growing at 10 percent a year its appetite for fuel is increasing rapidly and the country is believed to be building a coal-fired power station every five days -- a major source of CO2. But Akram said any efforts to limit developing country emissions in the coming years would be viewed with suspicion, especially as most developed nations had made little progress in cutting theirs. "Unless the North comes to grips with its responsibility it will be difficult to come to an international consensus by which all of us can contribute to halting the degradation of the environment, and certainly stopping the development of developing countries is not the answer."

BP last year put $5 million into Finite Carbon, a company that connects forestry owners with companies seeking to offset their climate-warming emissions via-tree planting. The Californian firm expects to generate $1 billion for landowners over the next 10 years, after a 20-40% cut of the proceeds, its chief executive Sean Carney said. And as companies and countries have rushed over the last year to pledge new net-zero global warming pledges, that forecast may be too conservative, Carney said. "When you put it next to all the announcements and all the talk, it's a really small number. We might be thinking too low here given the commitments," he told Reuters. Climate change goals, agreed in Paris in 2016, have fuelled a growing, but still immature, market for carbon offsets as companies and countries seek to fall in line. European oil majors say investing in projects to create more credits is simply good business, offering new revenue streams at a time when oil prices have collapsed and appetite for new exploration evaporates. "Investing in carbon sequestration, at a time when the world is increasingly carbon constrained, over time will prove to make good commercial, business sense," Duncan van Bergen, Shell's head of Nature Based Solutions, told Reuters. Big oil's involvement has split environmentalists. Sarah Leugers at the non-profit Gold Standard Registry welcomed interest from large emitters in nature conservation, but added: "I do worry that they're initiating projects in a market that they can profit from that's attempting to solve a problem that they've largely created," Leugers said. Others note the cash is going toward projects of universal benefit. "Why would it be OK to make money with digging out fossil fuels, but not with saving the planet?" said Renat Heuberger, CEO of the leading climate project developer South Pole, which typically takes a 10% cut from credits it develops and sells. CARBON KLONDIKE Although some industries are covered by carbon-trading schemes enshrined in law, such as in the European Union, California and Australia, most of the world has no such government-backed markets. That leaves most emitters with only a handful of small, voluntary carbon offset markets launched over the last 15 years. And as more seek credits, the price is expected to rise. Shell's budgets, for example, are based on a carbon price of $85, or around 70 euros, a tonne by 2050 which is more than twice the current price of just under 30 euros on the EU carbon-trading scheme. While each "registry", or voluntary market, has its own rules for entry, they generally work by certifying credits for carbon-reducing projects which preserve forests or wetlands or help swap out wood or coal burning stoves with ones using cleaner fuels. The entire voluntary carbon offset market last year was worth around $300 million, trading offsets for around 104 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), according to Ecosystem Marketplace, the main aggregator of these data. However, that compares with the 33 billion tonnes of CO2e emitted by the energy sector alone in 2019, of which 2.1 billion tonnes came from products made by European energy majors, International Energy Agency and Reuters calculations show. A November report by a taskforce of investors and emitters led by former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said the voluntary market would have to grow 15-fold to meet the goal of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Oil majors are playing a growing role in this as they seek to establish themselves in the new carbon neutral world order, with France's Total earmarking $100 million a year for nature-based solutions, including an unspecified amount toward creating credits. Shell plans to spend $100 million on average over the next year or two on nature-based carbon offsets and van Bergen expects emissions cuts from nature-based solutions or carbon sinks will be "material" by 2030 or 2035. In August it bought Select Carbon which helps farmers in Australia modify their land use and certifies credits for use in a government-managed scheme or sold on the secondary market. BP's investment in Finite Carbon went toward software that allows landowners to monetise the planting of new trees or preservation of existing woodlands. Using machine learning, remote sensing and digital payments, the software is aimed at landowners with parcels as small as 40 acres, too small to take part in many carbon markets. For BP's head of ventures Nacho Gimenez, the Finite Carbon investment fits with a responsibility to rein in emissions. "As long as someone is investing in something positive, that's the baseline," Gimenez told Reuters. Such nature-based offsets could remove up to 12 billion tonnes of emissions a year on the back of $120-$360 billion spending by emitters, British bank Barclays estimates. But with no global standard for evaluating the carbon impact of a project or for pricing credits, a credit from the same project can fetch a higher price in one sale than in another.

The United Nations is contemplating a high-level meeting on climate change this year, which could lead to a world summit by 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Financial Times. The high-level meeting, which could involve ministers and other top delegates, was the most "practical and realistic approach", Ban said in an interview published on Wednesday. Such a meeting -- on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in September -- "may be able to give some clear guidelines to the December Bali meeting", he said. Ban was referring to a United Nations conference on climate change to be held on the Indonesian resort island. If September's high-level meeting was a success "a summit level meeting will have to be discussed later on", Ban told the newspaper. "It may be 2008 or 2009." The FT reported there had been calls for a summit level meeting on climate change at the United Nations in September. But Ban said: "One difficulty is whether I can see for sure the participation of all the major countries, including the United States". The UN chief said after attending the annual summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations in June "I may be in a clearer position to propose a certain initiative". Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, told Reuters last month that Ban had agreed at talks in New York to send envoys to probe government willingness for a high-level meeting about global warming.

An American-Saudi firm owned by two members of the Saudi royal family is going to set up 450MW combined cycle power plants in Bangladesh. Houston-based Energy Holdings International, Inc would build the first plant in Bibiyana and the second at Fenchugang at an estimated cost of $200 million each, says a press release of PRNewswire. Saudi Princes Abdullah Al-Saud and Bader Al-Saud, two young entrepreneurs, are the co-owners of the company. EHII has received a number of enquiries from other companies for their desire to participate in these plants and future development in Bangladesh including Siemens, according to the release. The company was in a serious dialogue with Siemens to become a partner and supply turbines, said EHII Vice-Chairman Jalal Alghani. EHII Chairman John W Adair in a letter to shareholders said, "The initial 450mw combined cycle plant is only a stepping stone to other power plant opportunities within the country." Earlier, in June Saudi multi-billionaire Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal had shown interest to invest in Bangladesh's power and tourism sectors. The Saudi tycoon was given Power Point presentation highlighting the investment scenario in Bangladesh, opportunities for investment in the Public Private Partnership projects, and tourism and power sector, and climate change challenges after the meeting. The Prince, owning $18 billion, is currently ranked 29th in the Forbes magazine's list of billionaires. He visited Bangladesh earlier in 2005 when he wished to buy Sonargaon Hotel.

Capital flight from Russia, which last year was second only in post-Soviet times to outflows in the crisis year of 2008, should reverse once political stability returns after the March presidential election, the World Bank says. Nearly half of $84.2 billion in capital outflows last year occurred in the fourth quarter before and after the December 4 parliamentary election which was won by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party but sparked mass demonstrations against alleged vote-rigging and calls for a re-run. "In a period of perceived instability and an election period, it often happens that capital outflows intensify," Michal Rutkowski, the World Bank's newly appointed country director for Russia, told Reuters in an interview. "Once the elections are over, I think this trend will be over." Relatively high yields on Russian assets and a commodity-exporting economy that is growing by around 4 percent a year make Russia attractive to investors but political tension has created risk. Political tensions deepened in September after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev announced a job swap that could potentially keep Putin in power for another 12 years. Public discontent since last month's election has been the highest since Putin was first elected President in 1999. Rutkowski, who has been with the World Bank for most of the past two decades, said the demonstrations were a sign of change in Russia. "I would see it as proof of the emergence of a responsible civil society and, in this sense, the events show a maturity of the country," Rutkowski said. COSTLY PENSION SYSTEM Putin is still expected to win the March presidential poll by a comfortable margin, but Rutkowski said his government would need to implement tough reforms. "After elections governments worldwide become more ready to take decisions, and we would hope for the same in the Russian Federation," he said. "There are certain decisions that need to be taken that are not popular, for instance changes to the pension system to improve the sustainability of the pension system ... almost any change one could think of has to include the increase in the retirement age." Russia's pension system, which allows men to retire at 60 and women at 55, is heavily subsidized by the state, pressuring government finances and threatening to widen a budget deficit which the government is trying to eliminate. The economic ministry envisages a budget deficit of 0.6 percent of gross domestic product this year, assuming the average price of oil, Russia's chief export, at $100 per barrel. Government plans call for balancing the budget by 2015. The government will also need to introduce a series of structural reforms to improve the business environment - often cited by investors as the main reason to stay away from Russia, Rutkowski said. "Russia would like to attract responsible long-term investors and here, in order to achieve this, Russia should improve the investment climate by reducing lengthy and onerous procedures, and improving the ease of doing business for both existing businesses and new entrants," he said. Russia drew $48.5 billion in foreign direct investment last year, according to central bank data. That was a quarter of the FDI flows that China saw in 2010 and $5 billion less than Brazil, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD data for 2011 was not available.

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, widely credited with bringing democracy to the hideaway resort islands, resigned on Tuesday after weeks of opposition protests erupted into a police mutiny and what an aide said amounted to a coup. Nasheed, the Maldives' first democratically elected president, handed power over the Indian Ocean archipelago to Vice-President Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik, explaining that continuing in office would result in his having to use force against the people. "I resign because I am not a person who wishes to rule with the use of power," he said in a televised address. "I believe that if the government were to remain in power it would require the use of force which would harm many citizens. "I resign because I believe that if the government continues to stay in power, it is very likely that we may face foreign influences." It was not immediately clear to what influences he was referring but Hassan Saeed, leader of the DQP, one of the parties in the opposition coalition, and an Indian diplomatic source in Colombo said Nasheed had requested help from India and been refused. India helped foil a coup on the islands in 1988 by sending a battalion of soldiers to back the government. A spokesman for India's Foreign Ministry, Syed Akbaruddin, said the rebellion was an internal matter of the Maldives "to be resolved by the Maldives." Nasheed swept to victory in 2008, pledging to bring full democracy to the low-lying islands and speaking out passionately on the dangers of climate change and rising sea levels. But he drew opposition fire for his arrest of a judge he accused of being in the pocket of his predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who ruled for 30 years. Protests at the arrest set off a constitutional crisis that had Nasheed defending himself against accusations of acting like a dictator. "It's a coup, I am afraid," an official at Nasheed's office said, asking not to be identified. "The police and Gayoom's people as well as some elements in the military have forced the president Nasheed to resign. According to my book it's a coup." The new president said that Nasheed was in protective police custody for his security. "We will insist Nasheed is tried for his corruption, for his violation of rule of law," said Saeed of the DQP. "...we will provide full support for the new president." Overnight, vandals attacked the lobby of the opposition-linked VTV TV station, witnesses said, while mutinying police attacked and burnt the main rallying point of Nasheed's Maldives Democratic Party before taking over the state broadcaster MNBC and renaming it TV Maldives, as it was called under Gayoom. On Tuesday, soldiers fired teargas at police and demonstrators who besieged the Maldives National Defence Force headquarters in Republic Square. Later in the day, scores of demonstrators stood outside the nearby president's office chanting "Gayoom! Gayoom!." SCRAMBLE FOR POSITION Gayoom's opposition Progressive Party of the Maldives accused the military of firing rubber bullets at protesters and a party spokesman, Mohamed Hussain "Mundhu" Shareef, said "loads of people" were injured. He gave no specifics. An official close to the president denied the government had used rubber bullets, but confirmed that about three dozen police officers defied orders overnight and attacked a ruling party facility. "This follows Gayoom's party calling for the overthrow of the Maldives' first democratically elected government and for citizens to launch jihad against the president," said the official who declined to be identified. The protests, and the scramble for position ahead of next year's presidential election, have seen parties adopting hardline Islamist rhetoric and accusing Nasheed of being anti-Islamic. The trouble has also shown the longstanding rivalry between Gayoom and Nasheed, who was jailed in all for six years after being arrested 27 times by Gayoom's government while agitating for democracy. The vice-president is expected to run a national unity government until the presidential election. The trouble has been largely invisible to the 900,000 or so well-heeled tourists who come every year to visit desert islands swathed in aquamarine seas, ringed by white-sand beaches. Most tourists are whisked straight to their island hideaway by seaplane or speedboat, where they are free to drink alcohol and get luxurious spa treatments, insulated from the everyday Maldives, a fully Islamic state where alcohol is outlawed and skimpy beachwear frowned upon. Nasheed was famous for his pleas for help to stop the sea engulfing his nation and in 2009 even held a cabinet meeting underwater, ministers all wearing scuba gear, to publicize the problem. An Asian diplomat serving in Male told Reuters on condition of anonymity: "No one remembers the underwater cabinet meeting. They remember Judge Abdulla Mohamed," a reference to Nasheed having the military arrest the judge accused of being in Gayoom's pocket. Meanwhile, Twitter user Alexander Brown said he was in the Maldives enjoying life. "Maldives government overthrowing (sic) and im watching a Vogue photo shoot infront of me on Four Seasons ... very strange world."

The United Nations says momentum is building for broader long-term action to fight global warming beyond the UN's Kyoto Protocol and a climate meeting starting in Vienna on Monday will be a crucial test. About 1,000 delegates from more than 100 countries at the Aug 27-31 talks will seek common ground between industrial nations with Kyoto greenhouse gas caps until 2012 and outsiders led by the United States and China, the top two emitters. "Momentum is very much building," for global action, Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, said of the meeting of senior officials, scientists and activists. "And Vienna's going to be crucial." "The coming week will give us an indication of whether the political community ... is willing to move beyond well-intentioned platitudes towards real negotiations," he told a news conference on the eve of the talks. "The fight against climate change must be broadened," Austrian Environment Minister Josef Proell said, welcoming U.S. willingness to take part in a long-term U.N. deal to cut emissions mainly from burning fossil fuels. Vienna will try to break a diplomatic logjam and enable environment ministers to agree at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December to launch formal two-year negotiations to define stiffer long-term curbs on greenhouse gases. But while delegates talk about talks, many worry that climate change is already taking its toll, especially in developing nations heavily dependent on agriculture. "We have a very dangerous situation developing," said Lesotho's Minister of Natural Resources Monyane Moleleki. "For the past 30 years climate change has been spooky to say the least." The number of severe droughts in southern Africa had doubled since 1978 compared to the rest of the 20th century, he said. "And when the rains come they come in deluges, torrents that are useless." "Cape Verde is an island state, hit by all vulnerabilities of climate change," said Cape Verde Environment Minister Madalena Neves, pointing to risks such as rising seas and desertification. Chances of a deal in Bali have risen sharply after UN reports this year blamed human activities, led by use of fossil fuels, for a changing climate set to bring ever more severe heat waves, droughts, erosion, melting glaciers and rising seas. And President George W. Bush, a Kyoto opponent, agreed in June with his industrial allies on a need for "substantial cuts" in greenhouse gas emissions. It is unclear exactly what "substantial" means for Washington. The European Union, Japan and Canada have all talked about a need to halve world emissions by 2050 to slow warming. Many nations want a "Bali road map" agreed in Indonesia -- a two-year plan to work out a deal to succeed Kyoto, which obliges 35 industrial nations to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A road map could include principles that a deal should include major emitters, that it should not undermine economic growth in developing nations and that rich nations should take the lead, delegates say. Even though there are five years left until 2012, many experts say time is already running short. Anyone planning to build a coal-fired power plant, or to invest in carbon markets, wants to know the long-term rules.

This move will ensure “greater well-being of the people of the region”, the foreign ministry said. Mahmud was speaking at the inaugural session of the ‘Water Innovation Summit 2015’ in New Delhi, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries and the Water Institute of India. He stressed on the “centrality” of water in the larger canvass of security and sustainable human development. Bangladesh and India face abundance of water during the monsoon and scarcity during dry season. “If an integrated approach is taken to manage the waters of the entire basin, the region would be able to harness the huge potentials of its water resources,” Mahmud said. The water resources minister also stressed on the need for construction of a barrage in the Ganges inside the Bangladesh territory to ensure availability of fresh water in the southern parts of Bangladesh and to contain the adverse effects of climate change. Calling for early signing of the Teesta water-sharing agreement, the minister said solution to water issues would help achieve development and stability in the region. He also met his Indian counterpart Uma Bharati on Monday, the foreign ministry said. On the interlinking of rivers in India, Bharati said India would not take any projects that might affect Bangladesh. She also accepted invitation to attend the next JRC meeting to be held in Bangladesh.

GENEVA, Tue Aug 7, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months. There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said. "The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Program told journalists in Geneva. While most scientists believe extreme weather events will be more frequent as heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions cause global temperatures to rise, Baddour said it was impossible to say with certainty what the second half of 2007 will bring. "It is very difficult to make projections for the rest of the year," he said. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. umbrella group of hundreds of experts, has noted an increasing trend in extreme weather events over the past 50 years and said irregular patterns are likely to intensify. South Asia's worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region. Heavy rains also doused southern China in June, with nearly 14 million people affected by floods and landslides that killed 120 people, the WMO said. England and Wales this year had their wettest May and June since records began in 1766, resulting in extensive flooding and more than $6 billion in damage, as well as at least nine deaths. Germany swung from its driest April since country-wide observations started in 1901 to its wettest May on record. Mozambique suffered its worst floods in six years in February, followed by a tropical cyclone the same month, and flooding of the Nile River in June caused damage in Sudan. Uruguay had its worst flooding since 1959 in May. Huge swell waves swamped some 68 islands in the Maldives in May, resulting in severe damage, and the Arabian Sea had its first documented cyclone in June, touching Oman and Iran. Temperature records were broken in southeastern Europe in June and July, and in western and central Russia in May. In many European countries, April was the warmest ever recorded. Argentina and Chile saw unusually cold winter temperatures in July while South Africa had its first significant snowfall since 1981 in June. The WMO and its 188 member states are working to set up an early warning system for extreme weather events. The agency is also seeking to improve monitoring of the impacts of climate change, particularly in poorer countries which are expected to bear the brunt of floods, droughts and storms.

In recent months, US exporters, with President Joe Biden’s encouragement, have already maximised the output of terminals that turn natural gas into a liquid easily shipped on large tankers. And they have diverted shipments originally bound for Asia to Europe. But energy experts said that building enough terminals on both sides of the Atlantic to significantly expand US exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to Europe could take two to five years. That reality is likely to limit the scope of a natural gas supply announcement that Biden and European leaders are expected to make Friday. “In the near term, there are really no good options, other than begging an Asian buyer or two to give up their LNG tanker for Europe,” said Robert McNally, who was an energy adviser to former President George W Bush. But he added that once sufficient gas terminals were built, the United States could become the “arsenal for energy” that helps Europe break its dependence on Russia. Any effort to increase natural gas exports could also undermine efforts by Biden and European officials to combat climate change. Once new export and import terminals are built, they will probably keep operating for several decades, perpetuating the use of a fossil fuel much longer than many environmentalists consider sustainable for the planet’s well-being. For now, however, climate concerns appear to be taking a back seat as US and European leaders seek to punish President Vladimir Putin of Russia for invading Ukraine by depriving him of billions of dollars in energy sales. The United States has already increased energy exports to Europe substantially. So far this year, nearly three-quarters of US LNG has gone to Europe, up from 34% for all of 2021. As prices for natural gas have soared in Europe, US companies have done everything they can to send more gas there. The Biden administration has helped by getting buyers in Asian countries like Japan and South Korea to forgo LNG shipments so they could be sent to Europe. The United States has plenty of natural gas, much of it in shale fields from Pennsylvania to the Southwest. Gas bubbles out of the ground with oil from the Permian Basin, which straddles Texas and New Mexico, and producers there are gradually increasing their output of both oil and gas after greatly reducing production in the first year of the pandemic, when energy prices collapsed. But the big problem with sending Europe more energy is that natural gas, unlike crude oil, cannot easily be put on oceangoing ships. The gas has to first be chilled in an expensive process at export terminals, mostly on the Gulf Coast. The liquid gas is then poured into specialized tankers. When the ships arrive at their destination, the process is run in reverse to convert LNG back into gas. A large export or import terminal can cost more than $1 billion, and planning, obtaining permits and completing construction can take years. There are seven export terminals in the United States and 28 large-scale import terminals in Europe, which also gets LNG from suppliers like Qatar and Egypt. Some European countries, including Germany, have until recently been uninterested in building LNG terminals because it was far cheaper to import gas by pipeline from Russia. Germany is now reviving plans to build its first LNG import terminal on its northern coast. “Europe’s need for gas far exceeds what the system can supply,” said Nikos Tsafos, an energy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Diplomacy can only do so much.” In the longer term, however, energy experts say the United States could do a lot to help Europe. Along with the European Union, Washington could provide loan guarantees for US export and European import terminals to reduce costs and accelerate construction. Governments could require international lending institutions like the World Bank and the European Investment Bank to make natural gas terminals, pipelines and processing facilities a priority. And they could ease regulations that gas producers, pipeline builders and terminal developers argue have made it more difficult or expensive to build gas infrastructure. Charif Souki, executive chair of Tellurian, a US gas producer that is planning to build an export terminal in Louisiana, said he hoped the Biden administration would streamline permitting and environmental reviews “to make sure things happen quickly without micromanaging everything.” He added that the government could encourage banks and investors, some of whom have recently avoided oil and gas projects in an effort to burnish their climate credentials, to lend to projects like his. “If all the major banks in the US and major institutions like BlackRock and Blackstone feel comfortable investing in hydrocarbons, and they are not going to be criticised, we will develop $100 billion worth of infrastructure we need,” Souki said. A handful of export terminals are under construction in the United States and could increase exports by roughly one-third by 2026. Roughly a dozen US export terminal projects have been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission but can’t go ahead until they secure financing from investors and lenders. “That’s the bottleneck,” Tsafos said. Roughly 10 European import terminals are being built or are in the planning stages in Italy, Belgium, Poland, Germany, Cyprus and Greece, but most still don’t have their financing lined up. Russia provides about 40% of Europe’s gas, and its biggest customers tend to be in Eastern and Central Europe. Some countries have built up LNG import capacity, but much of it is in Southern Europe, which is not well connected by pipeline to the countries in the north and the east. A month into the war in Ukraine, Russian gas shipments to Europe have remained relatively stable, but that could change. Putin suggested Wednesday that countries hostile to Russia should be required to pay for its energy in roubles rather than euros or dollars. That would force European companies to deal with Russian banks that have been sanctioned by Western governments. There are some signs that European businesses and individuals might reduce their use of natural gas in part because it has become so expensive. For example, Yara International, a major fertiliser manufacturer in Italy and France, has said that it would reduce production because of high costs of raw materials like natural gas. While reducing demand would help, some climate scientists and activists are worried that the Biden administration’s and European Union’s focus on building LNG terminals could deal a grievous blow to the effort to address global warming by encouraging the use of fossil fuels. “There is a risk of locking in 20 or even 30 years of emissions from export infrastructure at a time when you really need to be reducing your overall emissions,” said Clark Williams-Derry, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research organisation. Jason E Bordoff, a co-founding dean of Columbia University’s Climate School and a former energy adviser to President Barack Obama, said that the Biden administration could encourage more shipments of gas to Europe while also promoting cleaner alternatives like wind and solar energy. “In the longer term, US government financing tools and diplomacy can help accelerate Europe’s transition to clean energy to reduce dependence on inevitably volatile hydrocarbons,” he said. Some promoters of natural gas exports say that the fuel could help Europe achieve climate goals by displacing the use of coal at power plants. Burning coal releases more greenhouse gases than burning gas. Gina McCarthy, Biden’s senior climate change adviser, said Thursday that the administration intends to “balance” what she called a “short-term emergency fix” to help Europe with addressing climate change. “We cannot increase our dependence on fossil fuels,” McCarthy told a group of renewable energy executives. “We are making clear distinctions even in our conversations with the European Union.” © 2022 The New York Times Company

Harris issued the warning during a trip that was an early yet pivotal test for a vice president tasked with the complex challenge of breaking a cycle of migration from Central America by investing in a region plagued by corruption, violence and poverty. While President Joe Biden campaigned on unwinding some of the Trump administration’s border restrictions, allowing migrants to apply for asylum at the US border, Harris amplified the White House’s current stance that most of those who crossed the border would be turned away and would instead need to find legal pathways or protection closer to their home countries. She did not shy away from brusque language when it came to discussing corruption with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, who has been criticized for having a political agenda and for persecuting officials who fight corruption. “We will look to root out corruption wherever it exists,” Harris said, adding that the administration would support an anti-corruption unit in the attorney general’s office. “That has been one of our highest priorities in terms of the focus we have put here after the president asked me to take on this issue of focusing on this region.” Harris, whose own aspirations to the presidency are clear, was tapped by Biden to invest in Central America to discourage the vulnerable from making the dangerous journey north. Biden has faced criticism from Republicans and some moderate Democrats in the early months of his term for the soaring number of crossings of unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico border. The vice president’s top aides have sought to differentiate her role from the political land mine of managing the border, instead saying her focus is on working with foreign governments to bolster the Central American economy and create more opportunities for people who now see fleeing to the United States as their best option. Harris announced new steps in the effort Monday. The Biden administration will deploy homeland security officers to Guatemala’s northern and southern borders to train local officials — a tactic similar to one used by previous administrations to deter migration. The State and Justice departments will also establish a task force to investigate corruption cases that have links to Guatemala and the United States, while also training Guatemalan prosecutors. “We did have a very frank conversation about the importance of an independent judiciary,” Harris said. “We had a conversation about the importance of a strong civil society.” The Biden administration also outlined an investment of $48 million in entrepreneurship programs, affordable housing and agricultural businesses in Guatemala, part of a four-year, $4 billion plan to invest in the region. Harris last month touted commitments from a dozen private companies, including Mastercard and Microsoft, to develop the economy in Central America. But hanging over those programs are questions about how to ensure that US aid benefits those who need it most, and not just contractors enlisted by the United States or Guatemalan officials. Guatemala in 2019 expelled a United Nations-backed anti-corruption panel, known as CICIG, which worked alongside Guatemalan prosecutors to bring corruption cases but was also accused by conservatives in the country of having a political agenda. Ricardo Zúñiga, Biden’s special envoy to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, described such independent anti-corruption panels as “very successful efforts.” But Harris’ team stopped short of saying they believed Guatemala needed an independent entity to investigate corruption. “The point is that there’s not one specific model,” Zúñiga said. “The point is to provide support to the people within the government, or within the institutions, judicial institutions, mainly, who have the will and the capacity to drive those cases forward.” Harris made a point in her opening remarks to focus on encouraging would-be migrants to stay closer to home while applying for permission to enter the United States and waiting to receive replies. Days earlier, her top aides announced plans to establish a new centre in Guatemala where people can learn about obtaining asylum protections or refugee status while still in Central America, rather than traveling to the US border. “Most people don’t want to leave the place they grew up. Their grandmother. The place they prayed. The place where their language is spoken, their culture is familiar,” Harris said. “And when they do leave it usually has to do with two reasons: Either they are fleeing some harm or they simply cannot satisfy their basic needs.” In Chex Abajo, a mountainside village 155 miles away from Guatemala City, where Harris spoke, Nicolás Ajanel Juárez, said his community is unable to secure such necessities, despite promises made by various American presidents. The village of Indigenous corn farmers embodies the daunting task facing the vice president. Juárez, a member of the local leadership, said many of the 600 residents watched as their homes were blown away in twin hurricanes. Profits from corn crops are no longer reliable as climate change has extended the dry season. Many families in the village rely on remittances from relatives in the United States. Those whose standard of living has been raised by US wages have larger homes made of cement and iron, marked with stars and American flags. The main road in the village is called “Ohio” because of the number of migrants who have found work landscaping in that state. “It would be best if help can come directly instead of through government because that’s where it gets lost,” Juárez said against music playing for a nearby ceremony memorializing a member of the community who crossed into the United States and died two years ago. “Politicians don’t know because they don’t come here, to see with their own eyes the needs of the people.” After meeting with Giammattei, Harris met with a group of women who have organised development programs for Indigenous communities, or training for those looking to gain business skills. But before that, she acknowledged the symbolic weight of being the first female vice president, and of making Guatemala her first foreign destination in that office. While a group of protesters holding signs opposing Harris’ visit stood near one entrance of the military airport, a line of families, many of them women, stood along another fence hoping to catch a glimpse of Air Force II as it landed in Guatemala. “To the extent I can have any impact based on my gender and the fact I am the first, I welcome that,” Harris said, adding, “You may be the first to do it, but make sure you’re not the last.” ©2021 The New York Times Company

Conceding defeat in his earlier demand that Congress provide him with $5.7 billion in wall money, Trump agreed to sign a government-funding bill that lacks money for his wall, but prevents another damaging government shutdown. The bill, passed overwhelmingly by both the US Senate and House of Representatives on Thursday, contains money for fencing and other forms of border security. But it ignores the wall, which Trump in his 2016 campaign promised Mexico would pay for, arguing it is needed to check illegal immigration and drugs. The bill was expected to go to the White House on Friday for the president’s signature before he flies to his private Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida for a holiday weekend break. “President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action - including a national emergency,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. The top Democrat in Congress denounced the president’s move. Asked by reporters if she would file a legal challenge to an emergency declaration, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “I may, that’s an option.” Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer accused Trump of a “gross abuse of the power of the presidency.” Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would support Trump on the emergency. Earlier this month, McConnell had cautioned Trump that declaring an emergency could divide Senate Republicans, the Washington Post reported. An emergency declaration could infringe on Congress’ authority to make major decisions about taxpayer funds, a fundamental check and balance spelled out in the Constitution. For wees, as the president’s wall-funding demand to Congress went nowhere, even after a historic 35-day partial government shutdown, the White House explored whether an emergency declaration could be invoked to redirect taxpayer funds committed by Congress for other purposes toward the wall. ‘A MISTAKE’ The national emergency strategy, expected to be declared by Trump on Friday, was already dividing Republicans. Senator Susan Collins, a Republican moderate, said in a statement: “Declaring a national emergency for this purpose would be a mistake on the part of the president.” But Representative Mark Meadows, chairman of a right-wing Republican faction in the House, said: “At this point, President Trump must look at taking executive action - and I will stand with him to protect our sovereign borders.” Congressional aides said House Democrats would take various steps to try to block Trump’s emergency, possibly including a lawsuit. The short-term result of that could be a court injunction blocking any diversion of funds while judges weigh the matter, possibly leading to a Supreme Court decision. A senior White House official said the administration had found nearly $7 billion to reallocate to the wall, including $600 million from a Treasury Department forfeiture fund, $2.5 billion from a Defense Department drug interdiction fund and $3.5 billion from a military construction budget. The funds would cover just part of the estimated $23 billion cost of the wall promised by Trump along the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border with Mexico. A source said lawyers from the White House and other agencies had vetted the figures and believed they would withstand a legal challenge. CONGRESSIONAL PASSAGE The Republican-led Senate passed the government funding bill by a vote of 83-16 and the Democratic-led House by a vote of 300-128, with 86 House Republicans voting in favor. The measure would provide more than $300 billion to fund the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies through Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. It also includes $1.37 billion in new money to help build 55 miles (88.5 km) of new physical border barriers. That is the same level of funding Congress appropriated for border security measures last year, including barriers, but not concrete walls. Funding for those agencies was due to expire on Friday, which would trigger another partial federal shutdown on Saturday morning if Trump unexpectedly refuses to sign the bill. Some of Trump’s fellow Republicans have warned him that declaring a national emergency could set a dangerous precedent, opening the door for a future Democratic president to circumvent Congress and declare emergencies on perhaps climate change, gun control or healthcare insurance. Pelosi said: “If the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency - an illusion that he wants to convey - just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people.” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said: “I will pull out all the stops to stop this horrendous, bizarre idea. As people get a chance to sort through what the implications really are, we will have strong bipartisan support for opposing this. ... We are the appropriators, not the president.”

Warnock, a Baptist preacher from Martin Luther King Jr.'s former church, beat Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler to become the first Black senator in the deep South state's history. Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker who at 33 would become the Senate's youngest member, also declared victory with a narrow lead over incumbent David Perdue, although media had yet to declare a winner in that race. If upheld, the results would give Democrats narrow control of both chambers of Congress, making it easier to appoint liberal-leaning judges and advance legislative priorities from coronavirus relief to climate change when Biden takes office on Jan. 20. "Georgia's voters delivered a resounding message yesterday: they want action on the crises we face and they want it right now," Biden said in a statement. He said he would work with both parties to confirm key administration officials quickly. That would amount to a final defeat for outgoing President Donald Trump, who stands to be the first US president since 1932 to lose the White House and both chambers of Congress in a single term. Trump held rallies for both Republican candidates, but overshadowed the campaign with false accusations that his own loss in the November presidential election in Georgia was tainted by fraud, repeatedly attacking Republican officials in the state. With 98% of the vote counted, Warnock led Loeffler by 1.2 percentage points, roughly 54,000 votes, according to Edison Research. Ossoff led Perdue by more than 17,000 votes, just shy of a 0.5 percent threshold to avoid a recount. Most outstanding votes were from Democratic-leaning areas. Winning both contests would hand Democrats narrow control of the Senate by creating a 50-50 split and giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote from Jan. 20. The party already has a thin majority in the US House of Representatives. Republicans would retain control of the Senate if they held on to at least one of the Georgia seats. The campaign's final days were overshadowed by Trump's attempts to pressure Republican Georgia officials to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden's victory in the state, as well as his unfounded fraud accusations. "Rigged Election!" Trump declared on Twitter on Wednesday morning. Democratic US Senate candidates Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are seen in a combination of file photographs as they campaign on election day in Georgia's US Senate runoff election, in Marietta and Atlanta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Pictures taken January 5, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Segar, Brian Snyder 'NOT A GREAT WAY TO TURN OUT YOUR VOTERS' Democratic US Senate candidates Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are seen in a combination of file photographs as they campaign on election day in Georgia's US Senate runoff election, in Marietta and Atlanta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Pictures taken January 5, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Segar, Brian Snyder Some Republicans blamed Trump for the loss. "It turns out that telling the voters that the election is rigged is not a great way to turn out your voters," Senator Mitt Romney, one of Trump's few Republican critics in Congress, told reporters. The election signaled a shift in the politics of Georgia and the wider deep South. At least 4.5 million voters participated, smashing earlier turnout figures for runoff races. Democrats have worked hard to increase turnout among Black voters, their most reliable supporters in the region. In a video message, Warnock, whose Ebenezer Baptist Church is legendary in Georgia because of its role in the civil rights movement under King, recalled his humble upbringing as one of 12 children of a woman who worked in cotton fields. "Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator," he said. Declaring victory, Ossoff said he looked forward "to serving you in the United States Senate with integrity, with humility, with honor". Both Republican senators, following Trump's lead, vowed to fight on. "We will mobilize every available resource and exhaust every legal recourse to ensure all legally cast ballots are counted," Perdue said in a statement. During the campaign, Republicans had painted Ossoff and Warnock as radicals who would pursue a hard-left agenda. That message failed to resonate with many white suburbanites who have increasingly abandoned the Republican party under Trump. Trump's flailing efforts to overturn his own defeat move to Congress later on Wednesday, when Vice President Mike Pence is due to preside over the counting of electoral votes to certify Biden's victory. Trump has called on Pence to throw out the results in states he narrowly lost, although Pence has no authority to do so. Some Republican lawmakers have said they will try to reject some state tallies, a move that stands no chance of success but which could force debate and drag out the certification process. Trump's supporters plan to rally in the streets of Washington, with the city bracing for potential violence. Police banned the leader of a far-right group from the city and made several arrests as protests ramped up on Tuesday. Trump is due to address the crowd.

The European Union should invite Latin America's biggest nation Brazil to join a select group of countries it considers as strategic partners, the EU's executive said on Wednesday. The EU and Brazil share a commitment to multilateral institutions and could help tackle issues such as climate change, poverty and human rights, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. "By proposing stronger ties, we are acknowledging Brazil's qualification as a 'key player' to join the restricted club of our strategic partners," he said in a statement. The partnership plan will be discussed with EU countries and should be launched at an EU-Brazil summit in Lisbon on July 4. The EU has such partnerships with the United States, Japan, Canada, India, China, Russia and South Africa. Brazil, home to most of the Amazon rainforest and a big player in biofuels, could be an important partner for the EU which wants to be a leader in the fight against global warming. Negotiations for a free trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur group of South American countries, including Brazil, are on hold pending the outcome of attempts to strike a global trade deal at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The Commission said it wanted to address specific bilateral trade and investment issues with Brazil "that complement the EU-Mercosur discussions", without providing details. The EU and Brazil are important players in the WTO negotiations which face a make-or-break next few weeks. Brussels is pressing Brasilia to go further with planned cuts to import tariffs on industrial goods while Brazil wants rich countries, especially the EU and the United States, to open up their farm markets.

Algeria, the only country still pumping leaded petrol into vehicles, exhausted its final stocks in July, UNEP said. The agency said the petrol contaminates air, soil and drinking water and can cause heart disease, stroke and cancer. Some studies have shown it harms brain development, especially in children. UNEP worked with governments, businesses and civic groups to eradicate leaded petrol and said ending its use after a century marked a "huge milestone". "Leaded fuel illustrates in a nutshell the kind of mistakes humanity has been making at every level of our societies," Inger Anderson, UNEP executive director, told journalists. Those mistakes had driven climate change, pollution and a loss of biodiversity, she said, but the global response to lead in fuel shows that "humanity can learn from and fix mistakes that we've made". Lead's toxicity has been recognised since Roman times. It nevertheless began being added to gasoline in the early 1920s to make cars more powerful, and from then on was used in all petrol globally until the 1970s when wealthier countries began phasing it out. But in the early 2000s, 86 nations were still using leaded gasoline. The UNEP-led campaign was formed to help them move away from the fuel including by driving investment and overcoming concerns around prices, Anderson said. UNEP warned, however, that the transport industry remained a driver of climate-warming emissions, and 1.2 billion vehicles were set to hit the road in the coming decades. Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General, said the elimination of leaded gasoline showed what could be achieved via collaboration, and called for similar initiatives towards emissions-free transport and tackling climate change. "We must now turn the same commitment to... create a world of peace that works with nature, not against it," he said in a pre-recorded video.

Former UN chief Kofi Annan said on Thursday he would head a new green group bankrolled by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to help reverse Africa's declining food production and double output. "I am honoured today to take up this important post and join with my fellow Africans in a new effort to comprehensively tackle the challenges holding back hundreds millions of small-scale farmers in Africa," Annan told a news briefing. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa said Annan would be its first chairman. The Alliance was set up last year with an initial $150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. The group, which is an African initiative, will help small-scale farmers and their families across Africa fight poverty and hunger through sustainable increases in farm productivity and incomes from its base in Nairobi, Kenya. Annan said the group will work with governments and farmers to strengthen local and regional agricultural markets, improve irrigation, soil health and training for farmers, and support the development of new seed systems better equipped to cope with the harsh African climate. He said the group would not seek to spearhead the use of genetically modified seeds, which have been a controversial subject in some African countries, but would work to boost disease resistance of existing seeds on the continent. "We are going to rely on varieties available in Africa and not rely on genetically modified seeds," he said at the World Economic Forum for Africa in Cape Town. "I hope in 10-20 years it will be possible to double if not triple, agricultural productivity. It is not just a dream, it is a dream that will be backed up with action," he said. The Alliance said it backed the vision laid out in the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which seeks a 6 percent annual growth in food production by 2015. The group said it will try to replicate farms changes that boosted agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America. During his tenure at the United Nations, Annan often drew attention to the link between Africa's failing agriculture systems and its persistent hunger and poverty. In the past five years alone, the number of underweight children in Africa has risen by about 12 percent, he said. Annan, a Ghanaian, last year ended a 10-year term as UN secretary-general.

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will court the "faith vote" at a forum this weekend, seeking support from a sizable constituency with a major influence on US politics. Organizers say the nationally televised forum on Sunday night at Messiah College near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will allow the candidates to discuss how their religious faith informs their positions on issues such as global poverty, AIDS, climate change and abortion. Religion plays a much bigger role in US politics than elsewhere in the developed world, reflecting Americans' comparatively high rates of belief and church attendance. "It would be unlikely anywhere else to find presidential candidates who would feel compelled to answer questions from religious groups," said Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "In many European societies, many politicians are reluctant to discuss their faith convictions publicly but here we expect them to do so." The forum will be closely watched as it comes just over a week before Pennsylvania's crucial Democratic primary election that the Obama camp hopes could clinch the hard-fought contest to pick the party's candidate to run in November's presidential election. It is also aimed at a national audience. Conspicuous in his absence will be the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, whose party has been more closely linked with the "faith vote" -- especially among the evangelical Protestants who account for 1 in 4 U.S. adults. McCain declined an invitation to the forum, which was organized by Faith in Public Life, a non-partisan resource center, and is expected to draw religious activists from across the political spectrum and a range of Christian backgrounds as well as Jewish and Islamic leaders. The evangelical movement has been broadening its agenda beyond "hot-button" issues such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage that helped propel President George W. Bush to the White House by getting conservative Christian Republicans to the polls. The forum's topics reflect this change and some see a missed opportunity for McCain to address liberal evangelicals. Conservative Christians regard McCain with suspicion on many grounds, including his past support for stem cell research. Centrist evangelical activists such as David Gushee, a theology professor at Mercer University in Atlanta, have spoken well of McCain because he has combined a staunch opposition to abortion with concern for climate change and an unflinching condemnation of torture in the US fight against militants. "This is what is so fascinating about his no-show. He is the one apparently who is least comfortable talking about issues of faith and how his faith might intersect with his public vision and this would give him a chance to do so," said Gushee, who will attend the event. Obama and Clinton have both been more comfortable talking about their faith in public. DEMOCRATS AS CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS All three presidential candidates belong to Protestant denominations -- vital credentials in a country where many expect their political leaders to have a religious and preferably Christian affiliation. McCain was raised in the Episcopal Church but now attends a Baptist church, while Obama is with the United Church of Christ and Clinton is a Methodist. Obama is almost sure to face renewed scrutiny at the forum over controversial sermons made by his pastor Jeremiah Wright in which he branded the United States as racist and said the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 were payback for its foreign policy. Obama has largely weathered the storm, thanks partly to a widely lauded speech in which he distanced himself from Wright's comments. But they still roil in the background. Evangelical leaders say they are looking for different things from each party. "We want to determine the Republicans' interest in addressing the needs of the vulnerable," said Joel Hunter, an influential Florida mega-pastor who supported Mike Huckabee when the Baptist preacher and former Arkansas governor made his populist but failed bid for the Republican nomination. "We also want to gauge the Democrats' interest in community and faith-based solutions and not just handing it all off to the government," said Hunter, who will also be at the event. Exit polls in some states have turned up sizable and, to some, surprising numbers of evangelical Democrats. Exit polls from Ohio's primary in early March suggested that 43 percent of white evangelical voters voted Democratic. In 2004, Bush won about 78 percent of this vote nationwide. The issues to be raised on Sunday are also important to Roman Catholics, a large group in Pennsylvania, many of whom have been influenced by the Vatican's social teachings. According to some exit polls in Pennsylvania's closely contested presidential race in 2004, Democratic Sen. John Kerry narrowly won among Catholics. But for the more conservative followers of the faith, Democratic candidates remain a tough sell because of their support for abortion rights. "The first thing I look at is whether they are pro-life or not, so there is not a lot of choice on the Democratic side," said Carolyn Astsalk, a Catholic who lives near Harrisburg.

The vault, known as Earth’s Black Box, will be constructed in Tasmania, an Australian island state off the south coast. It will operate much like a plane’s flight recorder, which records an aircraft’s final moments before crashing. But the makers of this new black box — including data researchers from the University of Tasmania, artists and architects — say they hope it won’t have to be opened. “I’m on the plane; I don’t want it to crash,” said Jim Curtis, the executive creative director of an Australian advertising agency where the project was conceived. “I really hope that it’s not too late.” Many questions remain, such as whether Earth really needs a black box and how will future generations decipher it. Curtis said the box would be designed “to hold our leaders to account.” He added, “If civilization does crash, this box will survive with a completely objective data story.” Climate change is one of the gravest threats humanity faces, scientists say. It is exacerbating economic and health inequalities, increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters and, the United Nations has warned, threatens the world’s food supply. In November, negotiators at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, reached a consensus that all countries had to act more swiftly to prevent a catastrophic rise in world temperatures. Scientists have warned that if they rise beyond a threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the risk of disasters like water shortages, deadly heat waves and ecosystem collapse will grow immensely. (The world has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius.) And so some conceived of a black box. The project is not alone in its attempt to jolt humans out of what the creators suggest is short-term thinking about global warming. It is not the first to try to salvage pieces of human civilization for posterity. Scientists have built repositories for everything from essential food crops to glacier ice to frozen animal embryos, some of them already extinct. Others have tried to hide our nuclear waste so that future generations can avoid the deathly toxic material. The box’s creators say it will record leaders’ actions (or inaction) by scraping the internet for keywords relating to climate change from newspapers, social media and peer-reviewed journals. It will collect daily metrics, including average oceanic and land temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and biodiversity loss. The vault — a 33-foot-long box made of 3-inch-thick steel — is not expected to be completed until the middle of next year. But creators say they have already begun to gather information. Eventually, the data will be stored on a giant, automated, solar-powered hard drive with a capacity to collect information for about 50 years. Tasmania was chosen for its relative geopolitical and environmental safety, and the monolith will be designed to be resilient against threats including cyclones, earthquakes and, with its sloped walls, attacks by vandals. David Midson, general manager of the local council overseeing much of Tasmania’s rugged west coast, where the box will be constructed, said the response from residents to the project had been largely positive. “There has been a lot of curiosity and interest around the box,” Midson said, adding that though permits were yet to be approved, he was optimistic. Some scientists doubt that climate change will wipe us out completely. Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, who says that though the effects of climate change are extremely grave, “it would be a real mistake to confuse whether or not climate change poses an extinction risk to humans with whether or not climate change poses a very real, present and intensifying risk to humans and to ecosystems.” “There’s very little evidence,” Diffenbaugh stressed, “that global warming threatens the survival of the human species.” A more likely scenario if humans do not significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he added, would be a world in which some places disappear below sea level, many others become too hot for humans to comfortably inhabit, and hazards like heat waves, droughts and storms become more common. Some also note that climate change data are already being recorded by scientists and other researchers. “It’s not easily accessible or comprehensible to most people,” Daniel Kevles, a historian of science at Yale University, said of the black box. Though it may have some merit as a document for the future, he added, “I’m not all that impressed with regard to its consequential impact for warning us.” Though the information can be found elsewhere, the creators insist, it is not stored for posterity in one immutable place. How future visitors will be able to retrieve the contents of the box also remains unclear. The creators say they are working on it. One option is to encode the contents in various formats, such as in script or binary code that would be unravelled. The creators say that if the planet is nearing cataclysm, instructions for opening the box would be etched on its exterior. The message can’t be included beforehand, they say, because of the risk that vandals would attempt to crack it open. “It’s in beta,” said Michael Ritchie, who runs a production company based in Sydney, that is managing the project. For now, “people are on notice,” Ritchie said, adding, “We want to make sure that we don’t crash this Earth.” ©2021 The New York Times Company

SINGAPORE, Nov 15, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The United States and China sparred over exchange rates at a meeting of Asia Pacific leaders on Sunday, pointing to tricky talks ahead for President Barack Obama when he flies to China to address economic tensions. The discord surfaced at a summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Singapore when a reference to "market-oriented exchange rates" was cut from a communique issued at the end of two days of talks. An APEC delegation official said Washington and Beijing could not agree on the wording. That underscored strains likely to feature when Obama flies to Shanghai later on Sunday following moves by Washington to slap duties on various Chinese-made products and a growing drumbeat of pressure on Beijing to let its yuan currency strengthen. Chinese officials have grown testy about the pressure over the yuan. Chinese banking regulator Liu Mingkang told a forum in Beijing on Sunday that ultra-low interest rates in the United States were fuelling speculation in overseas asset markets and threatened the global economic recovery. Obama pledged on Saturday to deepen dialogue with China rather than seek to contain the rising power, which is set to overtake Japan next year as the world's second largest economy. But issues ranging from the yuan and trade tensions to human rights could complicate what many regard as the most important relationship of the 21st century. "With regards to trade, this is a difficult time for the U.S.-China relationship," said Derek Scissors, trade economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "The signs are actually getting worse instead of better." Chinese President Hu Jintao ignored the yuan issue in several speeches at APEC and focused instead on what he called "unreasonable" trade restrictions on developing countries. An earlier draft pledged APEC's 21 members to maintain "market-oriented exchange rates that reflect underlying economic fundamentals." That statement had been agreed at a meeting of APEC finance ministers on Thursday, including China, although it made no reference to the yuan. Washington says an undervalued yuan is contributing to imbalances between the United States and the world's third-biggest economy. China is pushing for U.S. recognition as a market economy and concessions on trade cases that would make it harder for Washington to take action against Chinese products. China's central bank said last week it would consider major currencies in guiding the yuan, suggesting a departure from an unofficial peg. But Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Chen Jian on Sunday played down talk of a shift in policy as well as mounting expectations of a rise in the yuan's exchange rate. The yuan has effectively been pegged against the dollar since mid-2008 to cushion its economy from the downturn. China is coming under growing international pressure to let it rise because its manufacturers have gained market share at the expense of rivals in countries whose currencies have risen against the falling dollar. GLOBAL IMBALANCE Obama told APEC leaders the world economy was on a path to recovery but warned that a failure to re-balance the global economic system would lead to further crises. He said the world could not return to the same cycles of boom and bust that sparked the global recession. "We cannot follow the same policies that led to such imbalanced growth. If we do, we will continue to drift from crisis to crisis, a failed path that has already had devastating consequences for our citizens, our businesses, and our governments," Obama said. Obama's strategy calls for America to save more, spend less, reform its financial system and cut its deficits and borrowing. Washington also wants key exporters such as China to boost domestic demand. The APEC statement endorsed stimulus measures to keep the world from sliding back into recession and urged a successful conclusion to the Doha Round of trade talks in 2010. APEC is the last major gathering of global decision-makers before a UN climate summit in Copenhagen in three weeks meant to ramp up efforts to fight climate change. Those negotiations have largely stalled, but a US official said Obama had backed a two-step plan by the Danish prime minister to aim for an operational agreement and to leave legally binding details until later. The APEC statement dropped all references to emissions reductions that had been in earlier drafts.

The US Justice Department has recommended reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, which could expose CIA employees and contractors to prosecution for their treatment of terrorism suspects, The New York Times reported on Monday. The recommendation, reversing the Bush administration, came from the Justice Department's ethics office and has been presented to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The development threatens to engulf Washington politics at a time when President Barack Obama is pushing to overhaul healthcare and climate change policy. Obama has said he seeks to look forward rather than launch time-consuming investigations into past events. The Justice Department is due to disclose details on Monday of prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the CIA's inspector general but have never been released, according to the Times report, which cited an unnamed person officially briefed on the matter. When the CIA first referred its inspector general's findings, it decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But when Holder took office as attorney general this year under Obama and saw the allegations included deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he reconsidered, the newspaper said. "With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the CIA," the Times said. The recommendation to review the cases centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some examples of abuse made public at the weekend, the CIA report describes how its officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill -- possible violations of a federal torture statute. The Times quoted a CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, as saying that the Justice Department recommendation to open the closed cases had not been sent to the intelligence agency. "Decisions on whether or not to pursue action in court were made after careful consideration by career prosecutors at the Justice Department. The CIA itself brought these matters -- facts and allegations alike -- to the department's attention," he was quoted as saying. "There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department under President George W. Bush decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors ... and in some instances not even details of the cases have been made public," the Times said.

The UK government is set to unveil plans on Thursday to improve Britain's poor record on recycling its rubbish and reduce its dependency on "environmentally disastrous" landfill sites, Environment Minister Ben Bradshaw said. The government has been looking at a series of positive incentive schemes for residents, such as financial rewards, the minister added. The government's new Waste Strategy, to be revealed by Environment Secretary David Miliband, will outline how it plans to meet tough European Union rules on reducing the amount of rubbish buried in landfill sites in England. A government consultation document last year proposed increasing the level of recycling and composting of household waste from 27 percent today to 40 percent by 2010 and 50 percent by 2020. Britain is near the bottom of Europe's recycling league, with only Greece and Portugal recycling less, according to figures from the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Green Alliance. Campaigners want the government to introduce a rising level of charges for rubbish collections to encourage householders to recycle more. Last year's consultation found strong support among the public for some form of variable charging, but there was also concern that extra costs could lead to a rise in fly-tipping. Bradshaw told the BBC that the "important thing for the government is that we increase our recycling levels and reduce our dependency on landfill which is an environmental disaster if we don't do that". "It wastes things that could be recycled or used to create energy and it creates methane," he said. But the minister said collection times should remain the responsibility of local authorities. Moves by some councils to switch to fortnightly collections has caused widespread anger among householders. The environmental group Friends of the Earth said there should be legally binding recycling targets for businesses. It also said government proposals in the consultation to build more incinerators to burn waste instead of burying it would be a backward move -- incinerators produce more climate-changing carbon dioxide than gas-fired power stations.

WASHINGTON, Apr 29 (bdnews24.com/Reuters)- US President Barack Obama said on Wednesday there may not be an "appetite" in Congress to immediately tackle the divisive issue of US immigration reform. Given the amount of work to do on energy legislation and lawmakers' concerns about congressional elections in November, comprehensive immigration reform might be too much, he told reporters on board Air Force One when asked if he thought immigration reform could be passed this year. "We've gone through a very tough year and I've been working Congress pretty hard, so I know there may not be an appetite immediately to dive into another controversial issue," Obama said. "There's still work that has to be done on energy, midterms are coming up, so I don't want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn't solve the problem," he said. Obama said he still wanted bipartisan effort on comprehensive immigration reform but appeared reluctant to put the issue before climate change legislation. Republicans have made clear they will not cooperate on climate change unless immigration is taken off the table for now. "I think I can get a majority of Democrats to support a comprehensive approach, but I need some help on the Republican side," he said. US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Wednesday he would work to pass energy legislation before tackling immigration, a strategy that might restore the bipartisan coalition behind the climate change bill push. "I am going to move forward on energy first," the Democratic senator told reporters at a news conference. "The bill's ready. I don't see why we can't do that." Republican Senator Lindsey Graham pulled out of the effort to craft legislation addressing global warming with Democrat John Kerry and Independent Joseph Lieberman on Saturday, leaving the future of the climate bill unclear. Graham said he was upset that Senate Democratic leaders and the White House were talking up the possibility of pursuing immigration reform prematurely, and complained it could take away time for a climate debate in the Senate. Obama said his administration is looking into a new immigration law in Arizona that requires state and local police to determine a person's immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" they are undocumented. Critics say it is unconstitutional and opens the door to racial profiling. Republican backers of the law say it is needed to curb crime in the desert state, which is a major corridor for drug and migrant smugglers from Mexico. Obama said he understood concerns about security and the hundreds of thousands of people who enter the country illegally. "Obviously we still have to do more," Obama said. "But we have to do more in the context of a comprehensive plan that maintains our status as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants," he said." "These kinds of short cuts I think we end up polarizing the situation instead of solving the problem." Traveling back from a trip to the Midwest heartland states of Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, Obama said he was confident Americans would support comprehensive reform. "Those folks aren't enthusiastic about illegal immigration, but when you lay out for them a sensible way of doing it, making people who have broken the law responsible, securing our borders but also recognizing we're not going to send millions of people back, many of them who have children here, and that there's a more sensible way of dealing with it, people understand that," he said. "It's a matter of political will."

Nelson Banya Harare, June 7 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Zimbabwean police detained opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai on Friday for the second time this week after blocking him from reaching a campaign rally for the June 27 presidential run-off vote. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change accuses President Robert Mugabe of trying to sabotage Tsvangirai's campaign in order to preserve his 28-year hold on power. Tsvangirai was released from the police station at Esigodini, 40 km (25 miles) southeast of Zimbabwe's second largest city Bulawayo, a few hours after being stopped by armed police at a roadblock. The party called Tsvangirai's detention "a shameless and desperate act." "The regime must let the president do that which the people of Zimbabwe have mandated him and the MDC, to help restore the dignity of the people of Zimbabwe," it said in a statement. It said police had banned several planned campaign rallies because authorities could not guarantee the safety of party leaders, adding that it would lodge a High Court action to prevent police interference in the campaign. Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena blamed the opposition for the incident on Friday, saying the MDC convoy crashed through a roadblock. Tsvangirai, who beat Mugabe in a March 29 election but failed to win the majority needed to avoid a second ballot, was detained on Wednesday and questioned by police for eight hours. On Thursday, police stopped and held five U.S. and two British diplomats for several hours after they visited victims of political violence. Zimbabwe also barred relief agencies from doing work in the country, suffering economic ruin. AID BAN U.S. Ambassador James McGee, among those detained on Thursday, accused the government on Friday of using food aid to try to win votes. "We are dealing with a desperate regime here which will do anything to stay in power," he told a video conference call from Harare. Washington has blamed the diplomats' detention firmly on Mugabe's government. The United States and former colonial power Britain say Zimbabwe is trying to intimidate Tsvangirai's supporters. France's foreign ministry also said on Friday it was "extremely worried by the climate of intimidation and violence." The opposition says 65 people have been killed in violence since the first round of voting. Mugabe blames his opponents. Mugabe's government suspended the work of all international aid agencies in the southern African nation on Thursday, saying some of them were campaigning for the opposition. Britain and the European Union demanded the lifting of the ban. U.N. officials said it would increase suffering and CARE, one of the agencies whose work has been suspended, said millions of aid-dependent Zimbabweans were at risk. EU aid commissioner Louis Michel said: "I am deeply distressed to think that hundreds of thousands of people who depend on aid from the European Commission and others for their very survival now face an even more uncertain future." Zimbabwe, once one of Africa's most prosperous countries, has seen food production plummet since 2000 when Mugabe's government began seizing thousands of white-owned farms as part of a land redistribution program to help poor blacks. Many of the farms have ended up in the hands of Mugabe loyalists, and the country now faces chronic food shortages. It has had to rely on handouts and imports to feed its people. Mugabe blames sanctions imposed by Western countries for the collapse of the once prosperous economy. The opposition says he ruined Zimbabwe through mismanagement. The Southern African Development Community, a regional grouping of 14 nations, including Zimbabwe, is sending observers to monitor the run-off.

a series of anti-poverty targets set at the UN in 2000 – he painted a mixed picture and called for efforts to help those most in need. "Our Millennium Goals remain achievable – so long as we help the poorest nations break free of the traps that ensnare them." The secretary-general also said the UN Human Rights Council must "live up to its responsibilities as the torchbearer for human rights consistently and equitably around the world." Ban, who since last week has been conducting intensive diplomatic activities on key global issues and crises, offered a ringing endorsement of multilateralism. "An increasingly interdependent world recognises that the challenges of tomorrow are best dealt with through the UN. Indeed, they can only be dealt with through the UN," he said. Some 193 speakers are expected to participate in this year's general debate, including more than 70 heads of State and nearly 30 heads of government. The debate is scheduled to continue until 3 October. The opening of the assembly's general debate follows high-level meetings in recent days on climate change, the Darfur conflict, Iraq, Afghanistan and the situation in the Middle East. Ban is also expected to conduct bilateral meetings with over 100 heads of State or government or ministers during the next two weeks.

Billionaire financier George Soros outlined a way to unlock $100 billion (61.5 billion pounds) to help slow global warming on Thursday as talks on a new U.N. climate deal slowed over tough demands by the Pacific island state of Tuvalu. "I've found a way for someone else to pay ... to mobilise reserves that are lying idle," Soros told Reuters on the sidelines of the December 7-18 conference that will end with a summit of 110 world leaders meant to agree a new climate pact. Hungarian-born Soros said green loans to poor nations backed by International Monetary Fund gold reserves could total $100 billion. "This $100-billion fund I think could just turn this conference from failure to success," he said, admitting there were several legal and practical hurdles to unlocking the cash. Poor nations want rich countries to spend 1 percent or more of their national wealth on emissions cuts in the developing world, or at least $300 billion annually, and about double the highest estimates by industrialised countries. The European Commission cautioned against easy sounding solutions. "Money must come from somewhere, not just from a printing machine," Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the Commission delegation, said when asked about Soros' proposal. Part of the U.N. talks were suspended for a second day after Tuvalu, which fears being washed off the map by rising seas, insisted the conference must consider its proposal for a legally binding treaty for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Tuvalu's stance exposed rifts between developing nations, many of which would be required to do far more under its proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels. Nations including India and China spoke out against Tuvalu's plan. INDIA, CHINA Most other nations reckon Copenhagen can only agree a political text to help slow desertification, floods, heatwaves and wildfires, with legal texts to be worked out next year. A Chinese official said Beijing backed Tuvalu's goals of tough action, but: "In our specific understanding of how to achieve such change, we might have some differences." Many aid experts and environmentalists applauded Tuvalu. "A fine sounding political declaration from Copenhagen without a legally binding outcome is like a shark without teeth," said Barry Coates, a spokesman for Oxfam. Tuvalu is "afraid that their very clear treaty proposal will drop off the table while something more ambitious, more substantial, is not yet in sight," said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat. Its proposal for a new protocol would create a new category of "particularly vulnerable countries," such as small island states, that could get more cash and it would make "the survival of all nations" a paramount objective. Small island states feel left out at the talks -- a 5-metre (15ft) globe hanging in the Copenhagen conference centre omits many small island states such as the Cook Islands or the Maldives. "We're not even on the map," said Dessima Williams of Grenada, head of the Alliance of Small Island States. Rich-poor disputes over cash to fund the fight against climate change are one of the main points blocking a new U.N. deal, along with problems in agreeing how to share out the burden of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Williams said more than 100 nations in Copenhagen, including Tuvalu, back a goal of limiting temperature rises to less than 1.5 Celsius over pre-industrial times, far tougher than a 2C goal embraced by major emitters. De Boer said: "I think that is going to be very difficult given where emissions are at the moment. To get down to a maximum 1.5 temperature increase ... it's quite a heavy lift." And some private sector participants said the talks have paid almost no attention to a raft of private sector initiatives meant to mobilise trillions of dollars of pension and sovereign wealth funds and scale up existing carbon markets. "It seems this process is sometimes very disconnected from the way technology is deployed and business transacted," the President of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Lisa Jacobson, told Reuters on the fringe of the Copenhagen talks.

The UN climate panel agreed on Thursday it was 'very likely' that human activities were the main cause of global warming in the past 50 years, stepping up certainty from a 2001 report, delegates said. The wording 'very likely' means at least 90 percent probability by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is meeting in Paris this week and will publish a new report on Friday. The last study, in 2001, said that there was only a 'likely' link, or a 66 percent probability, that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years. "The phrase 'very likely' was approved today," said one delegate at the meeting. "There have been few major changes to the text," another delegate said. IPCC officials declined comment. The conclusion matched those of a draft seen earlier by Reuters and could step up pressure on governments and companies to do more to slow warming that may bring more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels this century. The report is the first of four IPCC reports this year that will outline threats of warming, linked to human activities led by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars. The Paris study will also project a 'best estimate' that temperatures will rise by 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) by 2100 over pre-industrial levels, the biggest change in a century for thousands of years.

Xie Zhenhua, Beijing's senior climate change envoy, said he welcomed what he described as a flawed agreement, echoing a similar summation from US President Barack Obama. On Saturday, the global climate summit in Paris produced a landmark accord that set the course for an historic transformation of the world's fossil fuel-driven economy within decades in a bid to arrest global warming. "This accord isn't perfect," Xie told reporters late on Saturday following the talks. "There are parts of it that need to be improved. But this doesn't affect the fact that history has taken a huge step forward, and so we are satisfied. "It should provide a lot of impetus for China's own green, low-carbon development and as we implement it, it will promote our own domestic sustainable development," he added. Throughout the negotiations, Chinese delegates repeated the mantra of "differentiation, transparency and ambition" as the key interlocking elements of any deal, and also sought to ensure that China's sovereignty remained intact. China, in the midst of a painful economic restructuring programme that has slowed growth, sought to maintain as much policy flexibility at home as it could, particularly on the thorny issue of five-year reviews, arguing that any adjustments to its 2020-2030 climate goals should be voluntary. Beijing helped secure an exception to the five-year review with a multi-track system that said "developing countries shall be provided flexibility" and could make the reviews optional, though Chinese officials said they were still assessing the details. Details such as how national emissions-reduction efforts will be measured and verified, another issue that put the United States and China at odds, are yet to be worked out. In Beijing, foreign minister spokesman Hong Lei said the Paris agreement was a "new starting point for international cooperation on climate change". On financing, regarded as a crucial factor, China was less pleased as the deal in its view did little to meet and extend a previous pledge for the industrialised world to provide at least $100 billion a year to poorer nations by 2020. "On funding, we aren't that satisfied, especially when it comes to pre-2020 funding which is relatively weak," said Zou Ji, deputy director of China's National Centre for Climate Change Strategy, a government think tank. "On post-2020 funding, they have written in the principle that developed countries have to provide support to developing countries but there are a lot of specifics that were impossible to put in the agreement."

The European Commission has delayed for several weeks a package of sensitive proposals on sharing and trading greenhouse gas emissions and on renewable energy, a spokesman for the EU executive said on Friday. "It won't be for December but for January," Commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger said on the sidelines of an EU summit in the Portuguese capital Lisbon. Laitenberger said the postponement would allow further consultations on the proposals between the EU executive and the 27 member states, and let the EU take into account the outcome of a U.N. meeting on climate change due in Bali in December. The proposals were originally due to be published ahead of the Bali conference, where delegates hope to start to shape a global deal for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The EU agreed in March to cut emissions mainly of carbon dioxide blamed for global warming by 20 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels and 30 percent if the rest of the world joins in. But the details of how the EU will achieve its goals are still being worked out, and the most difficult point will be how to divide up the overall target among the 27 member states. The proposals will lay out how the emissions targets should be distributed. That legislation, often referred to as "burden sharing", will then have to be endorsed by national governments. The draft legislation postponed to January will include changes to the bloc's emissions trading scheme and national targets for another EU goal of having 20 percent of power from renewable sources by 2020. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Reuters last month that dividing emissions targets among EU states will be a battle. "For all member states, this is a question of basic interests," he said. Countries that take a bigger share of the EU reduction will have to force their power generators and energy-intensive industries to cut back further carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Many of the newcomers in the EU are former communist countries whose economic catch-up ambitions trump their environmental aspirations. The EU nonetheless sees itself in the vanguard of the battle against climate change and issued a new call for results from the Bali conference, saying it should lay the ground for an accord on a post-2012 climate change framework by 2009. "This agreement must be reached within the United Nations framework and must include binding mandatory targets for developed countries," EU President Portugal said in a closing statement at the end of the Lisbon meeting.

NEW DELHI, Dec 28, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Japan's prime minister, who has promised to forge a new place for east Asia in international diplomacy, opened three days of talks in India on Monday focusing on engineering a further thaw in relations and boosting trade. Yukio Hatoyama took office in September after 50 years of almost uninterrupted rule by the conservative, pro-US Liberal Democratic Party, but has since seen his popularity ratings slide to 50 percent in a survey published on Monday. Japan and India, Asia's largest and third largest economies, have been working at improving ties since Japan slapped sanctions on India in response to its 1998 nuclear tests. Hatoyama launched his visit by meeting Indian industrialists, including Tata group chairman Ratan Tata and Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani, at a Mumbai hotel which was one of the targets attacked by gunmen in November 2008. He was due later to hold talks with his Indian opposite number, Manmohan Singh. India, long a top recipient of Japanese aid, wants details of Hatoyama's foreign policy, particularly Tokyo's attempts to pursue a foreign policy more "independent" of Washington and improve ties with China, New Delhi's longtime rival. New Delhi will want to know more about India's place in Hatoyama's proposed East Asian community with a single currency, inspired by the 27-nation European Union. "Yukio Hatoyama ... is unlike any other Japanese leader that the Indian side has dealt with in the past decade," wrote Siddharth Varadarajan, a senior editor at The Hindu newspaper. "Hatoyama's vision of an East Asian Community and his desire to work with China provides India and Japan with an opportunity to build their bilateral relations on ground firmer than the quicksand of 'balance of power'," he said. That was a reference to a view in New Delhi that looks at Japan as a hedge against a rising China. BOOSTING TRADE, MILITARY TIES Trade, analysts say, is one way of cementing that partnership underscored by closer recent military ties and Japanese support for last year's landmark U.S.-India civilian nuclear deal. "The two sides...are in the process of concluding discussing a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA)," said India's foreign ministry spokesman, Vishnu Prakash. Twelve rounds of talks on the agreement had already taken place, he said. Japan is India's sixth largest investor. Bilateral trade, more than $12 billion in 2008-09, is targetted to climb to $20 billion by next year. Hatoyama's talks in India could also focus on climate change policies -- with the two countries on opposite sides of the debate, particularly on expanding the scope of Japanese support for renewable energy projects in India. Indian officials said the sides would also discuss Japan's offer to train former Taliban fighters as part of a $5 billion Japanese aid package for Afghanistan. India remains uncomfortable about co-opting the Taliban into any power structures in Kabul. Hatoyama's government will likely seek to present the visit as a success as domestic criticism rises. Last week he approved a record trillion dollar budget, which will further inflate Japan's massive debt as the government struggles with the weak economy. Japanese voters are also expressing growing doubts about Hatoyama's ability to make tough foreign policy decisions, and the arrest of two former aides has spurred calls for more explanation of a scandal over false political funding records.

The prime suspect is the sun, which has been peeling away the planet's atmosphere, molecule by molecule, for billions of years.Exactly how that happens is the goal of NASA's new Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, which is scheduled for launch at 1:28 p.m. EST/1828 GMT on Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.Upon arrival in September 2014, MAVEN will put itself into orbit around Mars and begin scrutinising the thin layer of gases that remains in its skies."MAVEN is going to focus on trying to understand what the history of the atmosphere has been, how the climate has changed through time and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability - at least by microbes - of Mars,' said lead scientist Bruce Jakosky, with the University of Colorado at Boulder.Specifically, MAVEN will look at how much and what type of radiation is coming from the sun and other cosmic sources and how that impacts gases in Mars' upper atmosphere.Scientists have glimpsed the process from data collected by Europe's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Curiosity rover, but never had the opportunity to profile the atmosphere and space environment around Mars simultaneously."We'll get a window on what is happening now so we can try and look backward at the evidence locked in the rocks and put the whole story together about Martian history and how it came to be such a challenging environment," said Mars scientist Pan Conrad, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.Earth's lost twin?The evidence for a warmer, wetter, more Earth-like Mars has been building for decades. Ancient rocks bear telltale chemical fingerprints of past interactions with water. The planet's surface is riddled with geologic features carved by water, such as channels, dried up riverbeds, lake deltas and other sedimentary deposits."The atmosphere must have been thicker for the planet to be warmer and wetter. The question is where did all that carbon dioxide and the water go?" Jakosky said.There are two places the atmosphere could go: down into the ground or up into space.Scientists know some of the planet's carbon dioxide ended up on the surface and joined with minerals in the crust. But so far, the ground inventory is not large enough to account for the early, thick atmosphere Mars would have needed to support water on its surface.Instead, scientists suspect that most of the atmosphere was lost into space, a process that began about 4 billion years ago when the planet's protective magnetic field mysteriously turned off."If you have a global magnetic field, it causes the solar wind to stand off. It pushes it away so it isn't able to strip away atmosphere," Jakosky said.Without a magnetic field, Mars became ripe pickings for solar and cosmic radiation, a process that continues today.MAVEN's prime mission is expected to last one year, enough time for scientists to collect data during a variety of solar storms and other space weather events.Afterward, MAVEN will remain in orbit for up to 10 years serving as a communications relay for Curiosity, a follow-on rover slated to launch in 2020 and a lander that is being designed to study the planet's deep interior.If MAVEN is launched as planned on Monday, it is due to reach Mars on September 22 - two days before India's Mars Orbiter Mission, which launched on November 5. India's probe has been raising its orbit around Earth and should be in position on December 1 to begin the journey to Mars.If weather or technical problems prevent Monday's launch, NASA has 20 days to get MAVEN off the ground while Earth and Mars are favourably aligned for the probe to reach Mars.

The latest official data showed that more than 10.3 million hectares (25.5 million acres) of land across the continent - an area the size of South Korea - has been razed by bushfires in recent weeks. Imagery posted online from the Himawari 8 Japanese satellite and NASA's Earth Observatory showed plumes of smoke from the fires reaching as far as South America. Firefighters on the ground were making the most of a few days of cooler temperatures in the southeast of the country to prepare for a forecast return of heat and wind later this week that is expected to spur existing blazes and spark new ones into life. "We need to remain vigilant," Andrew Crisp, Victoria state's Emergency Management Commissioner Emergency Management Commissioner told reporters in an afternoon briefing. "We talk about benign conditions, and the fire is suppressed but it is still there. It is still tinder dry." Australia's bushfire season started earlier than normal this year following a three-year drought that has left much of the country's bushland vulnerable to fires. Thousands of people have been left homeless, while many in rural towns have spent days without electricity, telecommunications and, in some cases, drinking water. Military-coordinated rescue and support efforts were ongoing. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who was due to meet with banking chiefs on Tuesday, has acknowledged the crisis will have a significant economic impact and on Monday pledged A$2 billion ($1.39 billion) to a newly created National Bushfire Recovery Agency. The Insurance Council of Australia increased its estimate for damages claims from the fires to more than A$700 million on Tuesday, with claims expected to jump further when more fire-hit areas are accessible. Following are some highlights of what is happening in the Australian bushfires crisis: * Two men were reported missing in New South Wales on Tuesday, police said. * Forty-eight US firefighters are scheduled to arrive in Australia on Wednesday, officials said, joining 39 of their compatriots already on the ground. A further 18 incident management personnel from the US and Canada will also arrive on Wednesday. * Prime Minister Morrison said he spoke with US President Donald Trump on Tuesday, while British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also offered support. * Morrison attended the funeral for volunteer firefighter Andrew O’Dwyer. who was killed along with colleague Geoffrey Keaton on Dec 19 after a burnt tree fell in the path of their firetruck, causing it to roll. * Data released on Tuesday showed the fires were beginning to have an effect on the economy. The ANZ gauge of consumer confidence fell last week to its lowest level in more than four years, while its job advertisement data recorded the biggest monthly drop in seven months in December. * Australia's military were deployed on Tuesday to help bury an estimated 4,000 dead sheep and cattle, a process authorities want to complete quickly to prevent rotting carcasses from spreading disease. * Authorities said the number of people calling for urgent medical care in Victoria jumped 51% on Monday as hazardous smoke covered the state. * There were 137 fires ablaze across New South Wales state, but all were back at the "advice" level, the lowest alert rating. * Victoria state had 39 fires with 13 "watch and act" alerts. * Almost 1,600 homes have been destroyed in NSW, Australia's most populous state, authorities said. In Victoria state, authorities believe 300 homes have been destroyed. * Insurers have received 8,985 bushfire-related claims in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland since the Insurance Council of Australia declared a bushfire catastrophe on Nov. 8. The claims are estimated to have a loss value of A$700 million. The council recorded the destruction of 1,838 residential properties so far. * A backbencher in PM Morrison's government was criticised for an appearance on the "Good Morning Britain" ITV program during which he said there was no link between climate change and the bushfire crisis. "There is no link, the facts that cause the fires are the drought and the drying of the environment," lawmaker Craig Kelly said. ($1 = 1.4411 Australian dollars)

CHICAGO, Fri Dec 5,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - With his national security and economic teams largely in place, US President-elect Barack Obama is turning his attention to filling top energy and environmental posts, although Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore appears to be out of the mix. Obama, who takes over for President George W Bush on Jan. 20, has made it clear his White House tenure will signal a break from his predecessor on climate change and other environmental policy issues. Two weeks after his victory over Republican John McCain on Nov. 4, the Democrat repeated his intention to cut US greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 despite the economic crisis. The message to potential Cabinet and staff picks? These jobs will have a significantly higher profile than previous administrations. The posts still up for grabs include energy secretary, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a newly created climate "czar." But the most high profile person said to have been in contention for the latter post, former Vice President Al Gore, is not interested. "Vice President Gore has said both prior to President-elect Obama being elected and since he's been elected that he does not have an interest in serving in the administration," said Gore's spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider. Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to combat rising temperatures and boost awareness of climate change. Obama pledged during this year's presidential primaries to make Gore, who made fighting climate change a personal crusade after losing the 2000 election to Bush, a major player on the subject in a potential Obama administration. Kreider said the two speak regularly but those conversations were private. Another potential superstar pick -- Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- is also out of the picture. "He has not been approached and he is not interested," said spokesman Aaron McLear, adding the governor intended to finish out his term, which ends in January 2011. California has been a leader in cutting greenhouse gas emissions under his administration. POTENTIAL PICKS So who is up for the jobs? Obama's transition team is keeping quiet, but industry and environmental sources have focused on a handful of candidates with environmental and executive experience. Carol Browner, who was EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton and currently leads Obama's energy and environment transition task force, is a top contender for the climate chief position, said one source with knowledge of the process, adding a decision was expected in the next 10 days. The source said vetting for those positions was not completed and Obama officials were still working out how a climate official in the White House would affect the roles of other policy players. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a strong supporter of Obama during his campaign, is said to be in the running for a top Cabinet position, with energy secretary being one high-profile possibility. The popular governor, on Obama's short list of potential vice presidential picks earlier this year, has made a big push for renewable energy in Kansas, setting a target for 20 percent of the state's energy needs to be met with wind by 2020. Obama has promised to increase US use of renewable energy sources dramatically to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers of oil. "Governor Sebelius is honored to be mentioned as a potential secretary and will do whatever she can to help the Obama administration," her spokeswoman said in an e-mail, declining to comment on "hypothetical" jobs. Industry sources said Dan Reicher, climate director at Google.org and a former Energy Department official in the Clinton administration, was also a strong contender for energy secretary. He declined to talk about his prospects on Thursday except to tell Reuters he enjoyed being on Obama's transition team. Names mentioned for EPA administrator include Lisa Jackson, who has served as commissioner of the department of environmental protection in New Jersey, and Mary Nichols, an assistant administrator for the EPA under Clinton.

Bennett met later in the afternoon with the prince’s father, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, the head of state in Bahrain, a tiny but strategically located Gulf state. Bennett also met with Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain; several Bahraini ministers; and members of Bahrain’s Jewish community, to whom he gave a shofar, a Jewish ceremonial horn. “Our goal in this visit is to turn it from a government-to-government to a people-to-people peace,” Bennett told the crown prince, “and to convert it from ceremonies to substance.” “To substance, exactly,” Prince Salman replied, describing the meeting as “cousins getting together.” The Israeli government simultaneously announced an agreement with Bahrain to finance joint business projects in the fields of climate-related technology, manufacturing and e-commerce. The trip to Bahrain by Bennett, the first official visit by an Israeli prime minister to the country, showcased the growing strength of ties between Israel and several Arab governments over the last 18 months. Since 2020, Israel has established formal diplomatic relations for the first time with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, re-established relations with Morocco, and improved them with Sudan. For years, the vast majority of the Arab world refused to normalize relations with Israel as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained unresolved. Bennett arrived in Bahrain on Monday night, descending from his plane to a red carpet lined by a guard of honor, a greeting that highlights how priorities have changed for some countries in the region. For Bahrain, the containment of Iran and its armed proxies throughout the region — a goal shared with Israel — now appears to be of greater importance than an immediate resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly as Iran accelerates its nuclear enrichment. Bahrain will for the first time host an Israeli military officer as part of a regional alliance, an Israeli official confirmed Tuesday. The goal is to ensure freedom of navigation and international trade in the Persian Gulf, following several attacks by Iran and its proxies on ships in the area. Bahrain’s invitation to Bennett also hinted at growing acceptance of Israel’s role in the region by Saudi Arabia, the most influential state in the Arab world and a major Iranian rival. Officially, Saudi officials deny that the kingdom plans to follow Bahrain by normalizing ties with Israel. The kingdom has also denied that the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, hosted a secret summit meeting in 2020 with Bennett’s predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was still in office at the time. But Saudi support is crucial for Bahrain — Saudi troops rushed to Bahrain in 2011 to help its government crush an uprising, and the Saudi government bailed out the Bahraini economy in 2018 — and analysts say that Bahrain, as a Saudi proxy, does little without its agreement. “Bahrain is always looking up to Saudi Arabia as their big brother that always stands by them in times of difficulties,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist and expert on Gulf politics. Abdulla added, “There is more coordination than many people would assume between Bahrain, Saudi Arabia” and other Gulf States. Leading Saudis have also made statements about Israel and the Palestinians that would have been unthinkable until only recently. In 2018, Prince Mohammed made headlines by asserting that Israelis had a right to their own land. Two years later, another Saudi prince, Bandar bin Sultan, criticized the Palestinian leadership as failing ordinary Palestinians. Saudi movie theaters are currently showing a feature film, “Death on the Nile,” that stars an Israeli actress, Gal Gadot, who was widely criticized in the Arab world for her public support of Israeli military action in Gaza. Ties are also warming between Israel and the two Arab countries with which it had previously forged an uneasy peace, Egypt and Jordan. President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt drew notice in Israel on Monday when he made a show of publicly greeting a visiting Israeli government minister, Karine Elharrar, in front of hundreds of other Arab dignitaries. But if bonds between governments are strengthening, the sentiment among the general public in the Arab world is lagging. Polling suggests a majority of Arabs do not support the recent diplomatic thaw with Israel. In Bahrain, where dissent is carefully contained, photos and videos posted to social media on Tuesday showed small groups of demonstrators protesting against the Bahraini government and Israel. International rights watchdogs say Bahrain has no free news media and that its judges are appointed by the royal family. The Khalifa family is a Sunni Muslim dynasty that has ruled Bahrain since 1783, presiding over a mainly Shia citizenry, whose members say they suffer systemic sectarian discrimination. Exiled Bahraini rights activists noted that Bennett’s visit fell on the 11th anniversary of the 2011 uprising, and they called it a betrayal of the Palestinian national movement and an endorsement of Israel’s policies toward it. “It feels like a damning insult,” said Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, advocacy director at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, a London-based campaign group. “This is the most important date in Bahrain’s recent history, when Bahrainis stood up against an autocracy — and 11 years later they have invited the head of an apartheid state.” © 2022 The New York Times Company

Nearby, sleeves rolled up, suds up to their elbows, women washed plastic jerrycans in rainbow colors, cut into pieces. Around them, piles of broken toys, plastic mayonnaise jars and hundreds of discarded synthetic wigs stretched as far as the eye could see, all ready to be sold and recycled. Plastic waste is exploding in Senegal, as in many countries, as populations and incomes grow and with them, demand for packaged, mass-produced products. This has given rise to a growing industry built around recycling plastic waste, by businesses and citizens alike. From Chinese traders to furniture makers and avant-garde fashion designers, many in Senegal make use of the constant stream of plastic waste. Mbeubeuss — the dump site serving Senegal’s seaside capital of Dakar — is where it all begins. More than 2,000 trash pickers, as well as scrubbers, choppers, haulers on horse-drawn carts, middlemen and wholesalers make a living by finding, preparing and transporting the waste for recycling. It adds up to a huge informal economy that supports thousands of families. Over more than 50 years at the dump, Pape Ndiaye, the doyen of waste pickers, has watched the community that lives off the dump grow, and seen them turn to plastic — a material that 20 years ago the pickers considered worthless. “We’re the people protecting the environment,” said Ndiaye, 76, looking out at the plastic scattered over Gouye Gui, his corner of the dump. “Everything that pollutes it, we take to industries, and they transform it.” Despite all of the efforts to recycle, much of Senegal’s waste never makes it to landfills, instead littering the landscape. Knockoff Adidas sandals and containers that once held a local version of Nutella block drains. Thin plastic bags that once contained drinking water meander back and forth in the Senegalese surf, like jellyfish. Plastic shopping bags burn in residential neighborhoods, sending clouds of chemical-smelling smoke into the hazy air. Senegal is just one of many countries trying to clean up, formalise the waste disposal system and embrace recycling on a bigger scale. By 2023, the African Union says, the goal is that 50% of the waste used in African cities should be recycled. But this means that Senegal also has to grapple with the informal system that has grown up over decades, of which the grand dump at Mbeubeuss is a major part. The recycled plastic makes it to enterprises of all stripes across Senegal, which has one of the most robust economies in West Africa. At a factory in Thies, an inland city known for its tapestry industry to the east of Dakar, recycled plastic pellets are spun out into long skeins, which are then woven into the colorful plastic mats used in almost every Senegalese household. Custom-made mats from this factory lined the catwalk at Dakar Fashion Week in December, focused this time on sustainability and held in a baobab forest. Signs were constructed out of old water bottles. Tables and chairs were made of melted down plastic. The trend has changed the focus of the waste pickers who have worked the dump for decades, gleaning anything of value. “Now everyone’s looking for plastic,” said Mouhamadou Wade, 50, smiling broadly as he brewed a pot of sweet, minty tea outside his sorting shack in Mbeubeuss, where he has been a waste picker for more than 20 years. Adja Seyni Diop, sitting on a wooden bench by the shack in the kind of long, elegant dress favored by Senegalese women, agreed. When she first began waste picking, at age 11 in 1998, nobody was interested in buying plastic, she said, so she left it in the trash heap, collecting only scrap metal. But these days, plastic is by far the easiest thing to sell to middlemen and traders. She supports her family on the income she makes there, between $25 and $35 a week. Wade and Diop work together at Bokk Jom, a kind of informal union representing over half of Mbeubeuss’ waste pickers. And most of them spend their days searching for plastic. A few days later, I bumped into Diop in her workplace — a towering platform made entirely of rancid waste that is so hostile an environment that it is known as “Yemen.” I almost didn’t recognise her, with her face obscured by bandannas, two hats and sunglasses, to protect her against the particles of trash blowing in every direction. Around us, herds of white, long-horned cattle munched on garbage as dozens of pickers descended on each dump truck emptying its load. Some young men even hung from the tops of trucks to catch precious plastic as it spilled out of the trucks, before bulldozers came to sweep what remained to the edge of the trash mountain. Most of the pickers who target plastic, such as Diop, sell it — at about 13 cents a kilogram — to two Chinese plastic merchants who have depots on the landfill site. The merchants process it into pellets and ship it to China to be made into new goods, said Abdou Dieng, manager of Mbeubeuss, who works for Senegal’s growing waste management agency and has brought a little order to the chaos of the landfill. Senegal is flooded with other countries’ plastic waste as well as its own. China stopped accepting the world’s unprocessed plastic waste in 2018. Casting around for new countries to export it to, the US began to ship plastic to other countries, including Senegal. But that is beginning to change, too, as the Senegalese government appears to be cracking down on plastic waste coming from abroad. Last year, a German company was fined $3.4 million when one of its ships was caught trying to smuggle 25 tons of plastic waste into Senegal. In the past two years, the number of trucks coming to Mbeubeuss daily has increased to 500 from 300. The government says that in a few years, the giant landfill will close, replaced by much smaller sorting and composting centers as part of a joint project with the World Bank. Then, most of the money made from plastic waste will go into government coffers. The waste pickers worry about their livelihoods. Ndiaye, the last of the original waste pickers who came to Mbeubeuss in 1970, surveyed what has been his workplace for the past half-century. He remembered the large baobab under which he used to take tea breaks, now long dead, replaced by piles of plastic. “They know there’s money in it,” he said, about the government. “And they want to control it.” But Dieng insisted that the pickers would either be given jobs at the new sorting centers, “or we help them find a job that will allow them to live better than before.” That doesn’t reassure everyone. “There are many changes,” said Maguette Diop, a project officer at WIEGO, a nonprofit organisation focused on the working poor worldwide, “and the place of the waste pickers in these changes is not clear.” For now, though, hundreds of waste pickers have to keep on picking. Dodging bulldozers, piles of animal guts and cattle, with curved metal spikes and trash bags in their hands, they head back into the fray. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Rising seas and water shortages will displace about 125 million people living along the coasts of India and Bangladesh by the turn of the century, Greenpeace said on Tuesday. In a study on rapidly warming South Asia, the global environment group said climate change would also trigger erratic monsoons and break down agricultural systems in the vast and densely populated Gangetic delta. India, whose economy has grown by 8-9 percent annually in recent years, is one of the world's top polluters and contributes around 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions as its consumption of fossil fuels grows. "We cannot wait for the inevitable to happen and hope to adapt to it," Vinuta Gopal, the group's climate and energy campaigner in India said, releasing the report on the ecologically sensitive region, one of the poorest in the world. "We need policies that reduce the risk of destructive climate change, and moves towards economic development through decarbonisation," Gopal said. The UN Development Programme in its latest report has also warned climate change will hit the world's poorest countries, increasing risks of disease, destruction of traditional livelihoods and triggering massive displacement. Together, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have nearly 130 million people living along coastal areas less than 10 metres (33 feet) above sea level, the Greenpeace report said. "We are already seeing the effects," said Sudhir Chella Rajan, the author of the report and a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology. He said the effect of rising temperatures was already apparent in the recurrent floods in coastal Bangladesh. The number of people displaced by global warming could dwarf the nearly 10 million refugees and almost 25 million internally displaced people already fleeing wars and oppression. Christian Aid has predicted there will be one billion people displaced by climate change globally by 2050. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have a total population of about 1.4 billion people.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) should push food-producing countries to maintain exports to prevent a worsening of the international food crisis, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said on Wednesday. Ballooning food prices have sparked riots in Bangladesh and brought down the government of Haiti, while some countries have banned exports of staple foodstuffs in an attempt to avert domestic shortages. Prices of rice, a staple in most of Asia, have risen 68 percent since the start of 2008. U.S. rice futures rose to an all-time high on Wednesday. "If we restrict trade, we're simply going to add food scarcity to the already large problems of food shortages that exist in different countries," Mandelson said in an interview during a visit to Tokyo with an EU delegation. "The WTO stands for free trade. It needs to exert its pressure and influence to reduce tariffs and thereby encourage trade," he added. "It's also got to stand up against export restrictions, export taxes, which too will stop the free flow of trade in foodstuffs and agricultural produce." Mandelson's comments came a day after a concerned Japan, which relies on imports for much of its food, said it would propose the WTO set clear rules on food export restrictions. Trade bans on rice have been put in place by India, the world's second largest exporter in 2007, and Vietnam, the third biggest, in the hopes of cooling domestic prices of the staple food. The export curbs have been criticised by the Asian Development Bank, which said Asian governments were over-reacting to surging food prices by resorting to market-distorting measures. In Thailand, the world's largest rice exporter, farmers have planted a rare third crop and are expected to reap another 1.6 million tonnes of rice paddy this year. An incomplete 500,000 tonne tender by Manila last week has reinforced a perception in the Thai rice industry that demand is far outstripping supply, suggesting prices are set to continue the unprecedented surge of the last four months, exporters said. FOOD SPURS DOHA TALKS Mandelson said concerns over food and global financial turmoil were spurring progress towards an agreement on the Doha round of WTO negotiations, which aims to forge a deal to liberalise world trade. The next ministerial meeting on the Doha round may be held in late May or June, after speculation it could be in the week of May 19, Kyodo news agency quoted Mandelson as saying on Tuesday. European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Wednesday expressed "strong concern" about rising food and fuel prices and agreed on the urgent need to address the issue, especially in developing countries. Mandelson and other European Commission officials leave Japan on Thursday for China, hoping to resolve disagreements over climate change and trade.

Meeting days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a concert in northern England, the leaders did issue a joint statement on fighting terrorism, admonishing internet service providers and social media companies to "substantially increase" their efforts to rein in extremist content. Host Paolo Gentiloni, the prime minister of Italy, said the group was also inching closer to finding common language on trade, a contentious issue between Trump - elected on an "America First" platform - and the six other leaders. But on the issue of climate, there was no breakthrough. "There is one open question, which is the US position on the Paris climate accords," Gentiloni told reporters, referring to a 2015 deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "All others have confirmed their total agreement on the accord." US officials had signalled beforehand that Trump, who dismissed climate change as a "hoax" during his campaign, would not take a decision on the climate deal in Taormina, the cliff-top town overlooking the Mediterranean where G7 leaders met. But other leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President Emmanuel Macron, had hoped to sway the president at his first major international summit since entering the White House four months ago. Merkel described the climate debate as "controversial". There was a "very intensive" exchange of views, she said. Italy's Prime Minister Paolo Gentolini (right) talks to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump while posing for a photo at the start of G7 Summit at Greek Theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy, May 26, 2017. Reuters Trump's economic adviser Gary Cohn said Trump's views on climate were "evolving" and that he would ultimately do what was best for the United States. Italy's Prime Minister Paolo Gentolini (right) talks to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump while posing for a photo at the start of G7 Summit at Greek Theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy, May 26, 2017. Reuters The summit, held at a luxury hotel that was once a Dominican monastery and base for the Nazi air force during World War Two, took place a day after Trump blasted NATO allies for spending too little on defence and described Germany's trade surplus as "very bad" in a meeting with EU officials. His NATO speech shocked allies, who had been expecting him to reaffirm Washington's commitment to Article 5, the part of the military alliance's founding treaty which describes an attack on one member as an attack on all. They were also disappointed that he did not touch on Russia, which was expelled from what was then called the G8 in 2014 because of its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Accusations from US intelligence agencies that Russia intervened in the US election to help Trump, and investigations into his campaign's contacts with Russian officials, have dogged his presidency and prevented him from delivering on a campaign promise to get close to Moscow. War ships The summit kicked off with a ceremony at an ancient Greek theatre overlooking the sea, where war ships patrolled the sparkling blue waters. Nine fighter jets soared into the sky above Taormina, leaving a trail of smoke in the red-white-green colours of the Italian flag. Italy chose to stage the summit in Sicily to draw attention to Africa, which is 225 km from the island at its closest point across the Mediterranean. More than half a million migrants, most from sub-Saharan Africa, have reached Italy by boat since 2014, taking advantage of the chaos in Libya to launch their perilous crossings. Preparations are under way in front of San Domenico Palace Hotel, the venue of the annual G7 summit, in Taormina, Sicily, Italy May 26, 2017. Reuters The deadly attack in Manchester was carried out by a suspected Islamist militant of Libyan descent who grew up in Britain. Preparations are under way in front of San Domenico Palace Hotel, the venue of the annual G7 summit, in Taormina, Sicily, Italy May 26, 2017. Reuters "Today G7 leaders have joined Britain in condemning this barbaric act of violence," said British Prime Minister Theresa May, who left the summit a day early to deal with the aftermath of the attack. Speaking about internet companies, she added: "In particular, I want to see them report this vile content to the authorities and block the users who spread it." The leaders are expected to issue a final communique on Saturday. Italian officials have suggested it will be shorter than 10 pages, compared to 32 pages at the last G7 summit in Japan. As the leaders attended a concert and gala dinner, aides continued to work on the final wording. "On the major theme of global trade, we are still working on the shape of the final communique, but it seems to me the direct discussions today have produced common positions that we can work on," said Gentiloni.

Which side are you on? It is a question that European leaders have studiously sought to avoid since former President Barack Obama first articulated that America should “pivot” resources and attention to Asia as part of its rivalry with China. European leaders hoped that the relationship between the two superpowers could remain stable and that Europe could balance its interests between the two. Then the Trump administration sharply raised the temperature with China with tariffs and other trade barriers. And now the Biden administration Wednesday announced an alliance between the United States, Britain and Australia that would help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines in the Pacific — and, in doing so, also tore up a $66 billion deal for Australia to buy a French fleet of diesel-powered subs. “Europeans want to defer the moment of truth, to not make a choice between the two,” said Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute of International Relations, or IFRI. “The Biden administration, like the Trump one, is provoking the moment of choice.” France was enraged. Yet if it was a humiliation — as well as the cancellation of a lucrative defence deal — it possibly did have a silver lining for France’s broader goals. French President Emmanuel Macron has been Europe’s loudest proponent of “strategic autonomy,” the idea that Europe needs to retain a balanced approach to the United States and China. “We must survive on our own, as others do,” said Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, echoing the French line. The French embarrassment — the Americans also announced the submarine deal with little if any warning — came after the disastrous fall of Afghanistan. European allies were furious with the Biden administration, blaming the Americans for acting with little or no consultation and feeding Macron’s argument that the United States is no longer an entirely reliable security partner. “The submarines and Afghanistan, it reinforces the French narrative that you can’t trust the Americans,” said Ulrich Speck of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. But whether France will succeed in turning this bilateral defeat into a way to promote strategic autonomy is doubtful, analysts suggest. “Many Europeans will see this as a transparent way for the French to leverage their own interests,’’ said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, the London-based research institution. Even so, there seems little doubt that Europe’s balancing act is becoming trickier to maintain. “Europe needs to think hard about where it sits and what it does,” said Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe. A Europe that spends more on defence is to be desired, but it also needs allies — including Britain and the United States, she said. And a Europe that does more to build its own security capacity “is the best way to be listened to more by its partners,” she added. The new alliance, known as AUKUS, is an effort to integrate Australia and Britain into the broader American effort to create a security deterrent to China. For Australia, which has seen its once-strong relations with Beijing deteriorate, America and Britain provide a much stouter deterrent to China in the Indo-Pacific, analysts agree, than could the deal with France. “It’s sending a very big signal to Beijing, which is useful for the US, but especially useful to Australia,” said Ian Lesser, acting director of the German Marshall Fund and head of its Brussels office. “And the weight of that signal is important because of who the partners are.” Lesser also questioned why the American moves in the Pacific have to be interpreted as a zero-sum equation in which Europe’s importance is diminished. “I don’t see any diminution of American interest and commitment to European security in the wake of Afghanistan or the moves in Asia,” he said. The biggest issue for the EU may be finding the political will for strategic autonomy, a point made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her state of the EU address earlier on the day the new Asian alliance was announced. France may be pushing autonomy, but whether the rest of the European bloc has an appetite for it — and for creating greater distance from Washington — is uncertain. “France could end up isolating itself,” Speck of the German Marshall Fund said, noting that in nearly every region where France has security concerns — including Russia, the Sahel and even the Indo-Pacific — the United States continues to be a critical partner. There are deeper questions about America’s future reliability as a security partner, especially if the conflict with China turns kinetic, which is part of Macron’s argument, Lesser said. “For all the US commitment to Europe, if things go wrong in the Indo-Pacific, that would change the force structure in Europe pretty fast.’’ In Poland, a strong American ally in the EU and NATO, the reaction to the new alliance was more positive, focusing not on a pivot away from Europe “but on the US, with the British and the Australians, getting serious about China and also defending the free world,” said Michal Baranowski, who heads the German Marshall Fund office in Poland. At the same time, he said, Poles see another case where the supposedly professional, pro-European Biden administration “again doesn’t consult and shoves European allies under the bus,” he said. “This time the French, but for us, it was Nord Stream 2, when we were thrown under the bus for Germany,” he said. That was a reference to Biden’s decision to allow the completion of a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine and Poland, that was a priority for European powerhouse Berlin. “The US will say again that ‘We’re building strong alliances, with Germany and Australia,’” Baranowski said. “But who suffers? Other allies.” As for relations with China, Europeans would prefer not to have Beijing in a rage, said Balfour of Carnegie Europe. “European allies have been more uncomfortable with more hawkish positions on China” and “keenly aware of the need to talk to China about climate and trade,” she said. So if Europe can keeping talking to Beijing without being portrayed by China as having joined a security pact against it, that could be helpful, she said. “If there is a silver lining to this, it will be if the European Union is capable of playing this card diplomatically, and avoid painting the world as for or against China, which is the rhetoric Beijing is pushing.” ©2021 The New York Times Company

Xi's wide-ranging speech, which ran nearly three-and-a-half hours, laid out a confident vision for an increasingly prosperous China and its place in the world, stressing the importance of wiping out corruption and making clear there were no plans for political reform. "Through a long period of hard work, socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era, this is a new historical direction in our country's development," Xi said, using the term "new era" 36 times. The twice-a-decade congress, a week-long, mostly closed-door conclave, will culminate with the selection of a new Politburo Standing Committee that will rule China's 1.4 billion people for the next five years, with Xi expected to consolidate his grasp on power. Xi addressed more than 2,000 delegates in Beijing's cavernous Great Hall of the People, including 91-year-old former president Jiang Zemin, under tight security on a rainy, smoggy morning. On the economic front, Xi said China would relax market access for foreign investment, expand access to its services sector and deepen market-oriented reform of its exchange rate and financial system, while at the same time strengthening state firms, he said. As expected, the speech was heavy on aspiration and short on specific measures, but during Xi's first term, China disappointed many expecting it to usher in more market-oriented reforms. Xi promised, in what was likely an indirect reference to US President Donald Trump's "America first" policy, that China would be fully engaged with the world, and reiterated pledges to tackle climate change. (Front row, L to R) Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) Zhang Dejiang, former Chinese President Hu Jintao, Chinese President Xi Jinping, former President Jiang Zemin, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, are seen during the opening of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China Oct 18, 2017. Reuters "No country can alone address the many challenges facing mankind; no country can afford to retreat into self-isolation," Xi told the delegates, among them Buddhist monks, Olympic medalists, farmers and at least one astronaut. (Front row, L to R) Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) Zhang Dejiang, former Chinese President Hu Jintao, Chinese President Xi Jinping, former President Jiang Zemin, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, are seen during the opening of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China Oct 18, 2017. Reuters Xi envisioned China developing into a "basically" modernised socialist country by 2035, becoming one of the world's most innovative countries with the income gap between urban and rural residents significantly reduced, and its environmental woes fundamentally eliminated. By 2050, Xi said, China would become a modern socialist "strong power" with leading influence on the world stage. But he signalled there would be no political reforms. China's political system was the broadest, most genuine, and most effective way to safeguard the fundamental interests of the people, said Xi, who has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society, locking up rights lawyers and dissidents. "We should not just mechanically copy the political systems of other countries," he said. "We must unwaveringly uphold and improve party leadership and make the party still stronger." Firm on graft, Taiwan Xi praised the party's successes, particularly his high-profile anti-graft campaign, which has seen more than a million officials punished and dozens of former senior officials jailed, and warned the campaign would never end as corruption was the "gravest threat" the party faces. "We must remain as firm as a rock in our resolve to build on the overwhelming momentum and secure a sweeping victory," Xi said. Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks during the opening session of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China Oct 18, 2017. Reuters On self-ruled Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as its own, Xi said China would never allow the island to separate from China, and said China would strive to fully transform its armed forces into a world-class military by the mid-21st century. Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks during the opening session of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China Oct 18, 2017. Reuters He made no mention of neighbouring North Korea, which has angered Beijing with repeated nuclear and ballistic missile tests in defiance of UN sanctions and which sent a congratulatory message ahead of the meeting. Xi has consolidated power swiftly since assuming the party leadership in 2012, locking up political rivals for corruption, restructuring the military and asserting China's rising might on the world stage. Focus at the congress will be on how Xi plans to put his expanded authority to use. Key questions include whether Xi ally and top corruption-buster Wang Qishan will stay on past traditional retirement age and to what extent Xi will promote allies to senior positions. Close attention will also be paid to any moves that would enable Xi to stay on in a leadership capacity after his second term ends in 2022. That could include resurrecting the position of party chairman, a title that would put him on par with the founding father of modern China, Mao Zedong. Such decisions will be formally announced at the end of the congress next week. "In all aspects he is on the right track to be our next Chairman Mao," Su Shengcheng, a delegate from the northwestern province of Qinghai, told Reuters. "He will lead the party and Central Committee to continue its way to success." As with other major set-piece events held in the capital, Beijing has been blanketed with security, with long lines at some suburban subways stations as passengers waited to go through metal detectors and be patted down. Coverage in state media and across the city has kicked into overdrive, with large red banners plastered around Beijing welcoming the congress, while censors have stepped up already tight monitoring of the internet. Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat, China's top social media platform with more than 960 million users, released a short statement late on Tuesday saying that, due to "system maintenance", users will be unable to modify profile pictures, nicknames and tag lines until the end of the month. The disabled features are sporadically used to show solidarity for popular social and political causes.

Greenpeace urged European Union and African leaders meeting in Lisbon over the weekend to take urgent measures to stop the destruction of African forests which cause carbon emissions responsible for climate change. "Leaders in Lisbon have to exercise political muscle and immediately support a halt to deforestation in Africa," said Stephan Van Praet, coordinator for the Greenpeace International Africa Forest Campaign. Trees soak up carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas -- as they grow and release it when they rot or are burnt. According to the United Nations, deforestation accounts for around 25 percent of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide -- roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide produced by the United States, the world's largest polluter. "It's clear they have to take urgent measures," he said. Greenpeace activists unveiled a banner at Lisbon's Vasco da Gama tower on Friday that read: "Save the Climate-Save African forests." Stephan Van Praet said Greenpeace would continue with its campaign over the weekend in Lisbon. Europe should also adopt legislation to prevent illegal timber from being imported into its market to bolster the continent's credibility in the fight against climate change and forest destruction, he said. "If Europe wants to be responsible in the international market, they should start at home," he said. The EU has set a goal of cutting emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 as part of a drive to mitigate the consequences of climate change, which could mean more heatwaves, more disease, rising seas and droughts.

But set foot in any store where denim is sold, and you’ll find among the racks a panoply of silhouettes and styles: mom, dad, boyfriend, girlfriend, skater, stovepipe, 1990s, sculpted, cigarette, puddle, patchwork, contrast, slim, split. The question of what’s stylish may be better formulated in the negative: What isn’t? The trend cycle is said to complete its journey every 20 years, and while there’s some truth to that — low-rise jeans, for instance, haven’t been popular for about as long — the adage is starting to sound dated. These days, new styles emerge and recycle at dizzying speed. So fast, in fact, that sometimes they seem not to move at all, like a colourful spinning wheel transformed into a blur of brown: everything relevant at the same time. Such a landscape, where nothing is “in” or “out” so much as chosen or not, presents some clear wins for fashion as a form of self-expression. But what else may the smorgasbord of jeans being sold today say about this moment in history? Denim, after all, has always been a cultural weather vane. Jeans for You (and You and You) Classic jeans as we today know them — stiff, pocketed, blue — were patented by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis in 1873. For decades they were worn primarily by laborers and amended to meet their needs: extra stitching for reinforcement, copper rivets to keep the pockets from ripping off, belt loops and zippers for ease of wear. It wasn’t until the 1920s and ’30s that jeans shed their strictly utilitarian associations. By borrowing the so-called edge implied by the garment’s class associations, Hollywood cowboys like John Wayne and Gary Cooper lent denim an air of romanticised rebellion. Trace the history of American denim over the hundred years that followed and you get a rough sketch of 20th-century iconoclasts: greasers, hippies, rock stars, rappers and hipsters. This century has had its share of denim-clad cultural figureheads, but aside from the occasional office dress-code ban, jeans have mostly lost their subversive associations. Everyone wears them. If any strain of rebellion persists, it’s in the suggestion that we ought to refuse to bend to the whims of any one trend: to embrace, through the right purchases, our aesthetic potential as rugged individuals. Wear it your way, the ads suggest, before presenting nearly unlimited SKUs for consumers to choose from. The decline of the universal trend is the result of a confluence of forces, namely social media, e-commerce and globalisation, which have changed everything about the retail experience, from how quickly popular styles turn over, to how quickly they can be manufactured, to how they’re subsequently advertised, distributed, bought, sold and shared. (That is, so fast, your head spins.) The monetary incentive for retailers is clear: “Every time we see some sort of new innovation in the space is when we start to see the category pick up,” Maria Rugolo, an apparel industry analyst with the NPD Group, said in a phone interview. E-commerce changed the game. As Lorraine Hutchinson, a retail analyst for Bank of America, put it: The ability to manufacture new styles and test them in the market requires far less financial risk today than it ever has. So why limit the options? Several rapidly growing retailers seem to have made this their entire business strategy: Shein, a fast-fashion brand popular with Gen Z, has advertised that it adds some 1,000 products to its website every day — a staggering figure that has drawn concern from climate and labour activists. (On Wednesday, there were more than 6,600 styles of women’s jeans available.) Despite lofty pronouncements about sweatpants overtaking “hard pants,” the worldwide denim market is only getting bigger. According to Global Industry Analysts Inc., it was worth more than $60 billion in 2020, and it’s projected to grow another $20 billion by 2026. That leaves us where we are now: every style of jeans we could possibly dream of, available effective immediately. Is More Really More? “Personal” style, as opposed to trend based, is a popular idea today, perhaps because it suggests a kind of social progress — a movement toward a world in which fashion is inclusive, accessible and less dogmatic. That is an especially appealing proposition for consumers who feel ignored by most of the retail market. Lauren Chan, a model and size-inclusive advocate, said that when consumers can’t find well-made, stylish clothes for their bodies, “the message they receive is that they aren’t worthy of that.” Which is why, in 2019, she founded Henning, a clothing line for sizes 12 and up. Unlike, say, Shein, where more is more, Chan is in the business of essentialising: providing access to quality staples, versus access to everything. (For spring, she’s introducing just a single denim jeans design: a stiff, vintage-inspired straight-leg pair.) “The plus-size market is largely made up of pieces that are semitrendy, watered-down versions of what fashion at large has been offering for the past year,” Chan said, “because plus-size fashion is often a little bit late to adapt to those trends.” Plus-size shoppers have a long way to go before their access reflects that of straight-size shoppers — evidence, no doubt, of pervasive fat-phobia. But in the long run, it may be worth asking whether having virtually infinite choices — and infinite trends — actually reflects the average shopper’s ideal. In his 2004 book, “The Paradox of Choice,” psychologist Barry Schwartz proposed that while freedom of choice is crucial to our well-being, having too many choices makes us anxious. “Though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically,” he writes. In a recent study (now under peer review), he and his research associate Nathan Cheek explored a new hypothesis, which Schwartz explained by phone: “When you give people choices from large choice sets, even trivial choice sets, like what kind of drink they’d like, they treat the choice as a statement about who they are.” Imagine, for instance, if you could choose between only two types of moisturiser — for oily skin, or for dry. You’d probably think little of your choice, going with whichever seems like a generally better match. Now imagine you had hundreds to choose from. Your choice between brands, skin types, ingredients and bottle shapes would seem to carry more significance — perhaps, even, feel like an expression of who you are, or what you like. The consequence of too many options, Schwartz said, “is that even low-stakes decisions become high-stakes decisions, because when your identity is on the line, it matters.” As someone who loves clothes, I don’t need his research to know that what he proposes is true for many: The overwhelming opportunities to express ourselves aesthetically are both a gift and a curse, capable of inciting joy as much as dread. Georg Simmel, said to have publicised one of the first official “theories of fashion” in 1895, believed that fashion is defined by the push and pull between the desire to conform and the desire to distinguish oneself. This tension, he said, is critical. “Fashion exists only insofar as one of the two poles does not ultimately prevail in the end,” Sergio Benvenuto, an Italian psychoanalyst, wrote on Simmel’s theory. This may be why, as Anna Wintour once put it, “Fashion can make people very nervous.” To get dressed is to walk a tightrope with ourselves at one end and everyone else on the other. ‘The Lack of Trend Is the Trend’ Katrina Klein has been designing jeans for nearly 20 years — for J Brand, Rag & Bone and now her own label, ASKK NY. She remembers vividly every microtrend she’s witnessed: colourful, patterned, embroidered, destroyed, whiskered. Right now, she said, “The lack of trend is the trend.” And she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. “People don’t really want to be dressed the same as everybody else,” she said. Individualism: It seems like an almost too obvious place for this inquiry to land. As modern technology continues to provide access to abundance while driving us into increasingly isolated corners of existence, it makes sense that fashion — famously a reflection of the zeitgeist — would follow a similar trajectory. “There’s a cynical part of me that wonders if part of this is not about personal style, but that personal style is benefiting in a system that produces so much,” said Haley Mlotek, a fashion critic and an editor for the website Ssense. She also wonders if the emphasis on individualism misses something about the sense of shared meaning bolstered by trends: “This idea,” she said, “that the ultimate expression of style is one that is completely your own feels very lonely to me.” A disruption, maybe, of Simmel’s equilibrium. Much of Mlotek’s work concerns the future of fashion. Rather than assuming ethics, politics and morality are in conflict with fashion’s goals, she’s curious about how they might enrich one another. In the context of trends, their decentralisation may provide an opportunity to approach fashion with more intention. A reproach, of a kind, of the former system whereby a few powerful figures had outsize sway on what was considered cool, and the rest of us were merely meant to fall in line. But the pursuit of personal style as the singular apex of fashion may be taking this ethos too far, and the way it’s currently metabolising has alarming environmental effects. “Just because fashion and consumerism overlap does not mean they are synonymous,” Drew Austin, a writer who covers urbanism, technology and social change, said in an interview last month. “Every culture throughout history has used clothing to express itself, and doing so is arguably even more important in cultures and subcultures where fashion is less captured by consumerism — where it best performs its role as a communication medium and an enhancer of public space.” “Wear it your way” imbues clothing with a social purpose outside the language of status. But as a whole-cloth fashion philosophy, it has clear costs. Unlimited choice is no fashion utopia: not for consumers, not for garment workers or supply chains, and not for the planet. One thousand styles of jeans, in other words, will not save us. Constraints, on the other hand, can present a creative opportunity, Schwartz said: “They’re exhilarating in a way that simple novelty could never be.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

He says he will reenter the Iran nuclear deal, assuming the Iranians are willing to reverse course and observe its limits. He would sign up for another five years of the only surviving nuclear arms treaty with Russia and double down on US commitments to NATO after four years of threats from President Donald Trump to withdraw from the alliance that guided the West through the Cold War. At the same time, Biden says he will make Russia “pay a price” for what he says have been disruptions and attempts to influence elections — including his own. But mostly, Biden said in a statement to The New York Times, he wants to bring an end to a slogan that came to define a United States that built walls and made working with allies an afterthought — and, in Biden’s view, undermined any chance of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has cost more than 1.2 million lives. “Tragically, the one place Donald Trump has made ‘America First’ is his failed response to the coronavirus: We’re 4% of the world’s population, yet have had 20% of the deaths,” Biden said days before the election. “On top of Trump embracing the world’s autocrats and poking his finger in the eye of our democratic allies, that’s another reason respect for American leadership is in free fall.” But it is far easier to promise to return to the largely internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than it is to execute one after four years of global withdrawal and during a pandemic that has reinforced nationalist instincts. The world does not look remotely as it did when Biden last engaged it from the White House four years ago. Power vacuums have been created, and filled, often by China. Democracies have retreated. The race for a vaccine has created new rivalries. So while foreign allies may find Biden reassuring — and smiled when they heard him say in a town-hall meeting that “‘America First’ has made America alone” — they also concede that they may never fully trust that the United States will not lurch back to building walls. In interviews in the past several weeks, Biden’s top advisers began to outline a restoration that might be called the Great Undoing, an effort to reverse course on Trump’s aggressive attempt to withdraw to US borders. “Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organise itself,” said Antony J. Blinken, Biden’s longtime national security adviser. “Until the Trump administration, in Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States did a lot of that organising, and we made some mistakes along the way, for sure.” Now, however, the United States has discovered what happens “when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events.” Blinken acknowledged that for those allies — or opponents of Trump — looking to reset the clock to noon on Jan. 20, 2017, “it’s not going to happen.” Those who have known Biden for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts, starting with a return to the Paris climate accord in the first days of his administration. But substantive rebuilding of US power will proceed far more slowly. “He’ll inherit a situation which both gives him enormous latitude and, oddly, constrains him,” said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime friend of Biden’s. “Clearly, what Trump did by executive order can be undone by executive order.” But “any act that requires Senate approach or any new use of force, absent a clear provocation, will be pretty much off the table,” he added. At 77, Biden has his own back-to-the-future vision of how to dispense with “America First”: “This is the time to tap the strength and audacity that took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in March. Yet in a campaign in which foreign policy was rarely mentioned, Biden was never pressed on how the current iteration of superpower competition differs from what he remembers from early in his political career. He never stated what kind of “price” he had in mind for President Vladimir Putin of Russia to pay, though one of his longtime foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, offered a bit of detail. Just before Election Day, he said that Biden was willing to impose “substantial and lasting costs on perpetrators of the Russian interference,” which could include financial sanctions, asset freezes, counter cyberattacks and, “potentially, the exposure of corruption by the leaders of foreign countries.” That would signify a hardening in US policy. But it would also involve steps that the Obama administration considered taking in its last six months, when Biden was vice president, and never carried out. The sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of the detailed planning that Biden’s transition team, organised late last spring, has engaged in to reverse Trump’s approach to the world. It has built a foreign policy team of formal and informal advisers, largely drawn from midlevel and senior Obama administration officials who are poised to return. There are timelines for opening negotiations, reentering treaties and early summit meetings. But their plans show some notable breaks from the Obama administration’s strategy. Biden is clearly rethinking positions he took in the Senate and in the White House. American soldiers at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on Nov. 28, 2019. President-elect Joe Biden argued during the early days of the Obama administration for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission in the country. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times) The most vivid example, officials say, will come in rethinking China strategy. His own advisers concede that in the Obama years, Biden and his national security team underestimated the speed with which President Xi Jinping of China would crack down on dissent at home and use the combination of its 5G networks and its Belt and Road Initiative to challenge US influence. American soldiers at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on Nov. 28, 2019. President-elect Joe Biden argued during the early days of the Obama administration for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission in the country. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times) “Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted,” Kurt Campbell, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Ely Ratner, one of Biden’s deputy national security advisers, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article in 2018 that reflected this shift. “Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither US military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the US-led system.” China is just one arena — though probably the most important — where Biden’s long-held views will come into first contact with new realities. Afghanistan and the Use of US Force Robert Gates, the defence secretary who served both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, described Biden as “impossible not to like” because he was “funny, profane and humorously self-aware of his motormouth.” But Gates also famously declared that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” That assessment included Biden’s view on Afghanistan — where he argued, in the early days of the Obama administration in 2009, for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission. Gates later recalled in his memoir that Biden was convinced that the military was trying to put the squeeze on the president to send more troops for a war the vice president thought was politically unsustainable. Biden was overruled — by Obama, who nearly doubled the force size in Afghanistan in 2009 before moving to a drawdown. But what was once a setback for Biden has now become something of a political asset: Trump’s effort to cast him as an advocate of “endless wars” fell flat. Biden, according to Sullivan, “wants to convert our presence to a counterterrorism capability” aimed at protecting the United States by keeping al-Qaida forces or the Islamic State group from establishing a base in Afghanistan. “It would be limited and targeted,” Sullivan said. “That’s where he was in 2009, and that is where he is today.” Confronting Russia In the Cold War, Democrats were often portrayed as the party of appeasement to Moscow. Biden is the first Democrat to turn the tables: He is neither dismissive of the Russian threat as Obama was when he debated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, nor is he eager to bring a big red “reset” button to Moscow, as Hillary Clinton did in her opening days as secretary of state. In the campaign, Biden seized on the US intelligence assessment that Russia preferred Trump, telling reporters in Nevada that “Putin knows me, and I know him, and he doesn’t want me to be president.” He is probably right: After details of the extent of the Russian interference in 2016 became clear, followed by Trump’s unwillingness to confront Putin, Democrats have become the party of Russia hawks. For most of the campaign, Biden assailed Trump for “cozying up to dictators” and describing how, if elected, he was prepared to punish Russia. As president, Biden will have to deal with a Russia whose arsenal includes 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and a raft of tactical nuclear weapons that it has been deploying freely, even before Trump exited the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. How would Biden end the downward spiral? He would start with a five-year extension of New START, Blinken said, because the treaty lapses 16 days after inauguration. Then he would seek to expand the treaty to other types of weapons and perhaps more countries. And he would play on Putin’s growing economic fragility. “We will deter, and impose costs for, Mr. Putin’s meddling and aggression,” Blinken said. “But there’s a flip side” to dealing with Moscow, he added. Putin is “looking to relieve Russia’s growing dependence on China,” Blinken said, which has left him in “not a very comfortable position.” That suggests the Biden administration could try to use the suspicions that Moscow and Beijing have of each other to split the two superpowers — just as President Richard Nixon used it, in reverse, to win his opening with China nearly 50 years ago. On Iran, a Resurgent Crisis “Oh, goddamn,” Biden fumed in the Situation Room in the summer of 2010, according to participants in the meeting, as news began to leak that a highly classified effort by the United States and Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear program with a cyberweapon — later called “Stuxnet’’ — was about to be exposed because the computer code was being replicated around the world. “It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.” A decade later, that effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear effort appears to be the birth of a new age of conflict, one in which Biden was a key player. He favored the covert effort, because he was looking for any way to slow Iran’s progress without risking war in the Middle East. He later told colleagues that he believed the covert program helped bring the country to the negotiating table for what became the Iran nuclear deal five years later. Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during a NATO leaders meeting at The Grove hotel and resort in Watford, England on Dec. 4, 2019. President-elect Joe Biden would like to double down on American commitments to NATO. (Al Drago/The New York Times) Now Biden says the first step with Iran is to restore the status quo — which means reentering the deal if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is willing to return to production limits announced in 2015. But it won’t be that simple. The Iranians have indicated there will be a higher price to pay for Trump’s breach. And some of the key restrictions on Iran begin to lift soon: The first phase of an arms embargo expired in October, clearing the way for the Russians and the Chinese to begin resuming sales. And there will soon be a new Iranian president, with unknown effects on potential talks. Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during a NATO leaders meeting at The Grove hotel and resort in Watford, England on Dec. 4, 2019. President-elect Joe Biden would like to double down on American commitments to NATO. (Al Drago/The New York Times) Biden’s aides say that returning to the deal that Trump exited “shifts the burden” back on Tehran. “If Iran decides it’s not going to come back into compliance,” Blinken said, “we’re in a much stronger position to elicit support from allies and partners” who are now blaming Trump for starting the crisis by rejecting an agreement the United States had already made. The China Challenge In 2012, Biden was the host when Xi came to Washington. The vice president praised the guest from Beijing as a rising reformer who was “prepared to show another side of the Chinese leadership.” Biden was among those to celebrate China’s inevitable but “peaceful rise,” followed by assurance that trying to contain its power was a fool’s errand. By this year, he had revised his view. “This is a guy who is a thug,” Biden said. So during the campaign, he went after Trump for “fake toughness” and argued that “Trump lost a trade war that he started.” What he meant was that the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods were ultimately underwritten by American taxpayers in the form of government subsidies to compensate farmers and others who lost sales. Biden has said little about how he would push back. And even if he settles the long-running arguments over agricultural goods and the theft of intellectual property by Beijing, Biden will face challenges never discussed when Xi was visiting eight years ago: managing technological inroads by firms like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and TikTok, the app that has seized the imaginations and phones of 100 million Americans. Biden has suggested that the Trump crackdowns might continue — though surrounded by more skilful diplomacy to bring European and other allies on board. “God only knows what they’re doing with information they’re picking up off of here,” he said of the Chinese. “So as president, I will go into it very deeply. I’ll get the cyberexperts in with me to give me what is the best solution to deal with it.” Complicating the issue is Biden’s insistence that, unlike Trump, he will put values back at the centre of foreign policy, including how to approach the US-China relationship, a milder echo of Bill Clinton’s pledge in the 1992 race to take on “the butchers of Beijing.” Presumably that means making China pay a price for Xi’s controls on dissent, including the national security laws that led to detention camps in Xinjiang, arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong and the ouster of foreign journalists who were the last bastion of independent reporting in China.   ©2020 The New York Times Company

Dec 2 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) -- UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, from November 28-December 9 are aimed at agreeing new measures to stem rising emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. Following is a look at how the world discovered global warming and international steps to try to address it: 300 BC - Theophrastus, a student of Greek philosopher Aristotle, documents that human activity can affect climate. He observes that drainage of marshes cools an area around Thessaly and that clearing of forests near Philippi warms the climate. 17th century - Flemish scientist Jan Baptista van Helmont discovers that carbon dioxide is given off by burning charcoal. 18th century - The Industrial Revolution starts, bringing rising use of fossil fuels. 1820s - French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier suggests something in the atmosphere is keeping the world warmer than it would otherwise be, a hint at the greenhouse effect. 1830s - Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz presents evidence of past changes in Alpine glaciers, pointing to ancient Ice Ages and showing that the climate has not always been stable. 1860s - Irish scientist John Tyndall shows that molecules of gases such as water vapour and carbon dioxide trap heat. He wrote that changes "could have produced all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal." 1896 - Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius becomes the first to quantify carbon dioxide's role in keeping the planet warm. He later concluded that burning of coal could cause a "noticeable increase" in carbon levels over centuries. 1950s - US scientist Charles Keeling sets up stations to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at the South Pole and at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The measurements have shown a steady rise. 1965 - US President Lyndon Johnson tells Congress: "This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through ... a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels." 1988 - British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tells the United Nations: "The problem of global climate change is one that affects us all and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level. It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay." 1988 - The United Nations sets up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess the scientific evidence. 1992 - World leaders agree the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which sets a non-binding goal of stabilising greenhouse gas emissions by 2000 at 1990 levels, a target not met overall. 1995 - The IPCC concludes for the first time that humans are causing global warming, saying: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." 1997 - The Kyoto Protocol is agreed in Japan; developed nations agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions on average by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The United States stays out of the deal. 2001 - The IPCC concludes it is "likely," or at least 66 percent probable, that human activities are the main cause of recent warming. 2001 - President George W. Bush notes the US National Academy of Sciences says greenhouse gases are rising "in large part due to human activity." He adds: "Yet, the Academy's report tells us that we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming. We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future." 2007 - The IPCC says it is "very likely," at least 90 percent certain, that humans are to blame for most of the observed warming trend of the past 50 years. It also said warming of the planet was "unequivocal." 2009 - A conference of 193 countries agree in December to "take note" of a new Copenhagen Accord to fight climate change, after UN talks in Denmark. The accord is not legally binding and does not commit countries to agree a binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol when its first stage ends in 2012. The conference did recognize "the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius" and "deep cuts in global emissions are required." 2010 - A deal among 190 nations to slow climate change throws a lifeline to UN-led talks. 2011 - More than 190 nations meet in Durban, South Africa, to try to agree what to do after the first stage of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and on a Green Climate Fund to channel billions of dollars to poorer nations to green their economies and help them protect against the effects of climate change.

US technology and other companies flooded the government on Tuesday with an estimated 200,000 visa applications for highly skilled foreign workers in what has become an annual lottery for just 65,000 visas. The competition is for so-called H-1B visas, which allow U.S. companies to employ foreign guest workers in highly specialized jobs for three years. The visas can be extended for an additional three years. The U.S. government last year was overwhelmed with about 120,000 applications on the first day that applications were accepted for H-1B visas, leaving many job candidates out of luck. One of those applicants left out in the cold last year was Sven, a German national working as a civil engineer in San Diego. Sven, who asked for his last name to be withheld due to privacy concerns, will try his luck again at the H-1B visa lottery this year but he understands that the odds are long. "It would be like the hitting the jackpot," said the 33-year-old, who studied at a German university for eight years to get a civil engineering degree. "When I found out how many people applied in two days last year, I was shocked." The company he works for has supported his efforts, paying attorney's fees and providing information to the government. Sven is frustrated, however, that the decision about whether he works in America or not comes is determined by luck. This year, the odds of getting an H-1B visa could be even slimmer. Experts said they expected about 200,000 applications on Tuesday, the first day U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) begins accepting the visa petitions for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, 2008. "The people we've offered jobs to are really subject to the whims of a lottery," said Jack Krumholtz, managing director of federal government affairs for Microsoft Corp. Last year, the USCIS closed the application window after two days and pooled the petitions, granting the visas by a computerized lottery system. The agency said the applicants got the same shot at getting selected. But tech companies say the huge demand for the visas shows the need for the industry to tap into foreign resources. "This leaves Cisco and other U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage if we cannot access the best and the brightest workers," said Heather Dickinson, a spokeswoman for network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. Companies who specialize in science, technology, engineering and technology fields say the current system is a Catch 22: the United States is not producing enough homegrown job candidates and won't let companies bring them in, either. "Getting this right is important for the U.S. to maintain competitiveness," Krumholtz said. "It goes to our economic well-being." "A BAD JOKE" Jacob Sapochnick, a San Diego immigration lawyer, said he's submitting about 150 applications this year on behalf of employers and workers in the high tech, scientific and marketing fields, and even one for an executive chef. Last year, Sapochnick submitted about 200 applications and about half were granted visas. This year the situation is even more unknown, he said, because the USCIS has said it won't close the application window for five business days. He said he expects about 300,000 applications to be submitted over the five days. "It's almost like a bad joke," Sapochnick said. The National Association of Manufacturers called for "a permanent fix" to address the need for highly skilled employees in manufacturing and other sectors. There wasn't always such a mismatch in supply and demand. In 2000, the quota for H-1B visas was raised to 195,000 per year and was rarely reached, but as the tech boom faded, the quota was reduced to 65,000. Tech companies have lobbied Congress to raise the quota but labor groups oppose a change, arguing that doing so would hurt U.S. employees' job prospects. Krumholtz said roughly one-third of Microsoft's U.S.-based employees have required some form of visa assistance. Last year, Microsoft submitted about 1,200 applications for H-1B visas and was granted about 900, he said. This year, Microsoft is trying to improve its chances in the lottery by filing about 1,600 applications. "We've got between 3,000 and 4,000 core openings at Microsoft we're trying to find people for," Krumholtz said. But he said the company's internal immigration staff expects it will "at best" get about 40 percent, or 640 visas, approved. Bob Gaynor, a Boston-based attorney who specializes in immigration law, said his clients applying for H-1B visas this year are worried about their chances in the computer selection process. Gaynor, who represents dentists, intellectual property experts, engineers and accountants from India, Australia and Germany, among other countries, said he expected about 200,000 applications to flood the system on Tuesday. "It's sad," Gaynor said. "These people really contribute to the business climate of the country."

Greenpeace celebrated its 40th anniversary in the city of its birth on Saturday with a workshop on civil disobedience and a plea to Canada to better protect the environment. Some 200 activists met in Vancouver for events that also included workshops in banner making and tours on the Zodiac boats that the group uses in some of its high-profile campaigns. "Canada is not the country a lot of people like to remember it as," said Jessica Wilson, acting Greenpeace director for Vancouver's home province of British Columbia, highlighting a poor Canadian record on curbing climate change and the "dirty oil" from the Albertan tarsands. "Not only has Canada not been part of the solution, they are actively working against other countries who are trying to develop meaningful climate targets." Greenpeace, originally called the "Don't Make a Wave Committee," emerged from Vancouver's peace movement and anti-nuclear protests of the early '70s to become a global organization with a 2010 budget of more than $300 million. In its first mission, on Sept 15, 1971, the group set off from Vancouver for the Arctic on a chartered ship that they renamed Greenpeace, protesting against a US underground test of a 5.2-megaton hydrogen bomb. Later campaigns focused on whaling, toxic waste and nuclear power, and in 1985 protests against French nuclear tests culminated in the French sinking of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior ship in Auckland, New Zealand. The ship was later scuttled off the New Zealand coast to provide a spot for divers and the development of marine life.

A powerful storm destroyed about half a billion trees in the Amazon in 2005, according to a study on Tuesday that shows how the world's forests may be vulnerable to more violent weather caused by climate change. Researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans used satellite data, on-site observations and computer models to calculate that between 441 million and 663 million trees were killed by the storm that swept through the region in January 2005. The destruction was equivalent to about 30 percent of the total deforestation caused by humans in the region around the city of Manaus that year, the study found. "In terms of deforestation in the Amazon they're not comparable. They are completely different processes," study co-author Jeff Chambers, who has been studying the Amazon for nearly 20 years, told Reuters. "That being said, it was a huge storm." Chambers said the results of the study showed a widespread drought in the Amazon that year, which had been blamed for the tree loss, was not the main culprit. The trees killed by the storm would have released carbon into the atmosphere equivalent to more than a fifth of the amount that is created each year as the world's largest forest grows, the study found. The destruction of the world's forests is believed to contribute up to 20 percent of the carbon emissions that cause global warming. The biggest drivers of destruction in the Amazon are cattle ranchers and small farmers who clear trees for pasture. The Tulane researchers said as more intense storms are likely to be one consequence of global warming, it is increasingly important to find out the effect of powerful winds on the world's forests. "It's really important that we start establishing some baselines here and understanding how frequently these storms occur," Chambers said. "What fraction of trees in the Amazon every year are being killed by wind? We don't even know that."

Yellen, in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, called for global coordination on an international tax rate that would apply to multinational corporations, regardless of where they locate their headquarters. Such a global tax could help prevent the type of “race to the bottom” that has been underway, Yellen said, referring to countries trying to outdo one another by lowering tax rates in order to attract business. Her remarks came as the White House and Democrats in Congress begin looking for ways to pay for President Joe Biden’s sweeping infrastructure plan to rebuild America's roads, bridges, water systems and electric grid. “Competitiveness is about more than how US-headquartered companies fare against other companies in global merger and acquisition bids,” Yellen said. “It is about making sure that governments have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government.” The speech represented Yellen's most extensive comments since taking over as Treasury secretary, and she underscored the scope of the challenge ahead. “Over the last four years, we have seen firsthand what happens when America steps back from the global stage,” Yellen said. “America first must never mean America alone.” Yellen also highlighted her priorities of combating climate change, reducing global poverty and the importance of the United States helping to lead the world out of the crisis caused by the pandemic. Yellen also called on countries not to pull back on fiscal support too soon and warned of growing global imbalances if some countries do withdraw before the crisis is over. In a sharp break with the administration of former President Donald Trump, Yellen emphasised the importance of the United States working closely with its allies, noting that the fortunes of countries around the world are intertwined. Overhauling the international tax system is a big part of that. Corporate tax rates have been falling around the world in recent years. Under the Trump administration, the US rate was cut from 35% to 21%. Biden wants to raise that rate to 28% and increase the international minimum tax rate that US companies pay on their foreign profits to 21%. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in coordination with the United States, has been working to develop a new international tax architecture that would include a global minimum tax rate for multinational corporations as part of its effort to curtail profit shifting and tax base erosion. Yellen said she is working with her counterparts in the Group of 20 advanced nations on changes to the global tax system that will help prevent businesses from shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions. “President Biden’s proposals announced last week call for bold domestic action, including to raise the US minimum tax rate, and renewed international engagement, recognizing that it is important to work with other countries to end the pressures of tax competition and corporate tax base erosion,” Yellen said. “We are working with G-20 nations to agree to a global minimum corporate tax rate that can stop the race to the bottom.” ©2021 The New York Times Company

The agreements were signed at the Economic Relations Division in Dhaka on Thursday. Kazi Shofiqul Azam, secretary of ERD, and Manmohan Parkash, country director of ADB, signed the agreements. Of $350 million, a $100 million grant will support the displaced people in Cox’s Bazar camps, a $25.44 million grant will enhance the use of solar-powered pumps in irrigation, and $225 million loan will enhance quality and relevance of secondary education, according to the statement. “The grant assistance project has been prepared, processed and approved at an extraordinary speed in two months after ADB received a request for grant assistance from the government of Bangladesh in May 2018,” said Parkash on grant for supporting the displaced people in Cox’s Bazar. On the secondary education project, he said, “The assistance will further support the government’s secondary education reform to prepare youths to meet the requirements of a rapidly developing economy.” “The environment friendly SPV irrigation can replace diesel systems to enhance energy security, reduce environmental pollution, and mitigate climate change,” he said on the solar-power project. The ADB’s $100 million grant project will support the displaced people sheltered in camps in Cox’s Bazar focusing on water supply and sanitation, disaster risk management, energy and roads. The project will rehabilitate roads within the camps to connect essential food distribution and storage centres, and provide emergency access. It will also resurface the road from Cox’s Bazar to Teknaf and other critical sections. The $25.44 million funding will support installation of at least 2,000 off-grid solar photovoltaic pumping systems in areas without electricity access with an estimated 19.3 megawatts-peak of solar capacity. By replacing diesel pumping systems with off-grid solar photovoltaic pumps, the project is expected to result in a reduction of 17,261 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. The secondary education project, scheduled to be completed in 2023, is supporting the government’s comprehensive secondary education development program, backed by development partners in a harmonized manner. The government envisages an increase of about 3.5 million secondary school students by 2023, requiring an additional 145,000 teachers and 10,000 more schools. The $225 million ADB assistance will develop a competency-based curriculum, promote the use of ICT in teaching and strengthen classroom assessment.

Pelosi noted that she was accompanied by a record number of lawmakers attending a UN climate summit and said they had flown to Glasgow, Scotland, “ready to take on the challenge, to meet the moment.” But they have not yet. The stalled legislation includes $555 billion in tax credits and incentives to promote wind and solar power, electric vehicles, climate-friendly agriculture and forestry programmes, and a host of other clean energy programmes. Those measures would bring the country about halfway to President Joe Biden’s goal of cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50%-52% from 2005 levels by 2030. Pelosi said it would be “the most ambitious and consequential climate and clean energy investment of all time.” She said House lawmakers intended to pass that bill next week, but a handful of moderate Democrats have raised concerns about its price tag. Meanwhile, the legislation has been held up in the Senate largely because of objections of one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin’s state is a coal and gas producer, he has personal financial ties to the coal industry, and he has said he opposes policies that would harm fossil fuels. Pelosi noted that last week Congress had approved a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that includes billions of dollars to help fortify communities against the impacts of climate disasters. But the money and policies to cut the emissions that are causing global warming are embedded in the legislation that has yet to pass. In a series of meetings and speeches, lawmakers said they felt the weight of expectations from the rest of the world. Of all nations, the United States has pumped the most carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — pollution that is trapping heat and driving up average global temperatures. It has also promised to act on climate change, only to fall short several times in past decades. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was among the lawmakers traveling with Pelosi, said countries should hold the US to account for its promise to significantly reduce emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas. “We have to actually deliver to get the respect internationally,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We have to draw down emissions in order to get credit for being committed on climate change.” Ocasio-Cortez, a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, was surrounded by security as she walked the cavernous tented hallways of the summit, quickly drawing the attention of a crowd of activists who wore masks declaring themselves “climate feminists.” Rep Sean Casten said Congress had been making “excuses” for inaction on climate change ever since the Clinton administration accepted the world’s first global climate treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, only to see the Senate fail to ratify it. “The rest of the world is sitting there and saying, ‘We’ve heard this story before. Your words are beautiful, but we’re watching your feet,’” Casten said, adding, “All of us are going to be furious if the Senate drops the ball” on the $1.85 trillion package. There is an outsize level of attention in Glasgow to political machinations over the legislation pending in Washington. One activist Tuesday who followed Ocasio-Cortez through the halls at the summit, Pamela Elizarraras, 24, from Mexico, said it had been frustrating to watch the climate legislation founder. “They have so much power,” Elizarraras said of the United States. “It’s really important for them to really step it up.” An earlier wave of lawmakers travelled to Glasgow last week to make a similar argument that the United States was back in the climate fight, after four years of global disengagement under the Trump administration. That group was heavily Democratic but included a handful of Republican House members and a lone Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The Republicans said they may disagree with Biden’s policies but they were concerned about climate change, even if they did not support a move away from fossil fuels, which scientists say is needed to avert climate catastrophe. “Republicans care deeply about this earth,” said Rep John Curtis, R-Utah. “We may not have learned how to talk about it,” he said, “but I promise you we care and we’re serious about being part of the solution.” Other Republican attendees in Glasgow included Reps Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, and representatives from conservative groups. Murkowski, in an interview, said she, like other Republicans, did not intend to vote for the $1.85 trillion bill that contains the president’s climate agenda. But she said she did not object to clean energy tax credits. The presence of Republicans was a shift from 12 years ago when Sen James Inhofe travelled solo to a UN climate conference to object to climate science and declare “there’s not a chance in the world” the United States will pass legislation to tackle global warming. Sen Brian Schatz said at the summit he has been encouraged by the number of Republican lawmakers who are willing to discuss serious climate policy. The bottom line, though, is that United States needs to reduce the use of fossil fuels, he said. “If you don’t agree on that, then you’re playing word games,” Schatz said. Biden has made climate action central to his presidency. If the pending legislation passes, analysts say, it will get the US about halfway to the president’s targets. The rest will depend on a combination of things that are outside of Biden’s control, like the markets and regulations that could be overturned by the courts or reversed by a future administration. Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview Tuesday that he would announce before the end of the year a “suite” of new policies to draw down emissions from electric utilities. After transportation, the power sector is the second-largest source of emissions in the United States. The Supreme Court is poised to weigh whether the EPA has the authority to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases. The decision from the conservative-leaning court could deliver a blow to the agency’s ability to tackle climate change. Regan said he was not planning to wait for a ruling before issuing new power plant regulations. “We have pens to paper right now,” he said. Ocasio-Cortez said the US and other developed nations must take even greater action on global warming. “We’re here to push,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s time for us to reexamine our first-world and global governments, to reexamine their priorities about what is possible, and really try to push them on the boundaries of that.” She credited activists with pressuring the Biden administration to be more ambitious on climate change and talked about her own role protesting the development of gas pipelines. Tuesday was “gender day” at the summit, and Pelosi noted that women faced particular dangers in a warming world. Climate change “is the existential threat of our time,” she said. “It’s a threat multiplier that amplifies and accelerates existing inequities. Eighty percent of people displaced by climate change globally are women.” Outside the climate summit, the streets of Glasgow have been filled with protesters, many of them young women. Ocasio-Cortez said she hoped to spend some time with the activists while in Glasgow and thinks their presence has kept the pressure on the decision-makers. And she had a message for them: “Stay in the streets and keep pushing,” she said with a wink. © 2021 The New York Times Company

ROME, Wed Jul 8,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Rich nations sought to persuade China and India on Tuesday to agree to a goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at a summit of major economies in Italy later this week. Environment ministers or senior officials from the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF) met in Rome, trying to end deadlock over a declaration that could be a step towards a new UN climate pact due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. "Positions have not shifted," a delegate said of the talks, called at the last minute to help leaders agree a united front on climate change on Thursday in L'Aquila, Italy, during a Group of Eight summit. China and India have been opposed to a goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 as part of a declaration by MEF nations, which account for 80 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. The G8 countries -- the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada -- adopted a "vision" of a 50 percent cut in global emissions by 2050 last year and want major developing nations to sign up too. But developing nations say the rich are to blame for most emissions from burning greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution and must set deep 2020 goals for cutting their own emissions before asking for help with 2050 goals. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also told a news conference that China was resisting progress on the climate. VANGUARD "Europe wants to be in the vanguard, the Obama administration is in the same position, but there is strong resistance that I have encountered with the Chinese presidency," said Berlusconi, referring to a meeting on Monday. A June 30 MEF draft drawn up by the United States and Mexico said that: "We support an aspirational global goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050, with developed countries reducing emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050." China and Indian officials have said that poor nations need to be allowed to use more energy to end poverty. China has recently overtaken the United States as top world emitter and India is fourth behind Russia. If the deadlock persists, US President Barack Obama, who sees the MEF as a step towards a UN deal, would end the July 9 meeting with just a "chair's summary" rather than a statement agreed by all 17 MEF leaders. "Only ambitious action by the G8 could break the deadlock in the negotiations," said Tobias Muenchmeyer of environmental group Greenpeace. He noted that China and India want rich nations to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 below 1990 levels and far higher climate investments. A separate climate draft for the G8, dated June 24, indicated progress towards setting a target of limiting a rise in world temperatures to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times. The European Union views 2C as a threshold for "dangerous" climate changes such as ever more heatwaves, floods, droughts and extinctions. The United States, Russia, Canada and Japan have not signed up for such a target at the G8. The G8 draft said "global emissions should peak by 2020 and then be substantially reduced to limit the average increases in global temperature to 2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels."

On Tuesday, Dhaka took over the reins of the "Climate Vulnerable Forum" (CVF) for the next two years, and said it would push for more ambitious climate action despite the global economic strain caused by COVID-19. "The pandemic is one crisis. Climate change could be worse than that, so we have to be aware of it," Bangladesh's Foreign Affairs Minister AK Abdul Momen told journalists in an online briefing. He urged international donors to provide generous financial assistance to CVF countries because "investing in climate (protection) today will be a safeguard for our children tomorrow". The forum's member countries - in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America - regard themselves as at disproportionately high risk from climate change impacts, despite having done little to cause the problem. Bangladesh, however, has become a global model in safeguarding its people from increasingly powerful storms, Momen noted. Cyclone Amphan, which battered coastal areas in May, caused about 30 deaths after large-scale evacuations and community warnings, a mortality rate far lower than in the past. Nonetheless, economic losses from Amphan were a big blow, coming on top of fallout from coronavirus lockdowns, Momen added. "These two together have done serious damage to our economy," he said, adding that other CVF countries were likely to be in a similar position. File Photo: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina accepted Marshall Islands' President Hilda Heine's proposal to lead the CVM at the 25th annual 2019 UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP25, in Madrid. Fekadu Beyene, Ethiopia's commissioner for the environment, forest and climate change, expressed concern that global attention on tackling the COVID-19 pandemic could detract from efforts to deal with a heating planet. File Photo: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina accepted Marshall Islands' President Hilda Heine's proposal to lead the CVM at the 25th annual 2019 UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP25, in Madrid. "We (the CVF) have to be the voice of the voiceless" and make the case that "climate change is happening, so we should work hard and try to address (it)," he said. In its role leading the forum, for the second time this decade, Bangladesh plans to push countries to make faster and deeper emissions cuts to limit the rise in global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, the more ambitious goal set under the 2015 Paris Agreement. The world has already warmed by a little more than 1C and is on track to heat up by at least 3C this century, scientists say. Momen said that while major polluting countries had yet to do their fair share in reducing emissions, there was growing public support for stronger climate action in those nations. Coastal area is seen flooded after the embankment is destroyed as the cyclone Amphan makes its landfall in Satkhira, Bangladesh, May 21, 2020. REUTERS That includes the United States, which is due to exit the Paris accord later this year, soon after November elections. Coastal area is seen flooded after the embankment is destroyed as the cyclone Amphan makes its landfall in Satkhira, Bangladesh, May 21, 2020. REUTERS Pressure from citizens will eventually lead governments "to succumb to the causes of the people", Momen predicted. Under Bangladesh's leadership, the CVF plans to expand a fledgling trust fund to help its members tackle climate change. It will also lobby for international progress on responding to rising "loss and damage" from climate extremes. That could include help for people forced to leave their homes because of floods, droughts, storms or rising seas. Casten Nemra, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which chaired the forum before Bangladesh, said the next two years would be vital for the planet's future, and countries should stick to their commitments under the Paris Agreement. "If pollution is left unchecked, the climate crisis will grow worse - and even more for the vulnerable countries," he said. "If we fail to mobilise support from the international community, to help us adapt and protect ourselves, we will leave millions of people in extreme danger."

L'AQUILA, Italy,Thu Jul 9, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said progress on climate change at the G8 was "not enough" so far. "This is politically and morally (an) imperative and historic responsibility ... for the future of humanity, even for the future of the planet Earth," the UN chief said. BBC said, Ban criticised leaders of the G8 industrial nations for failing to make deeper commitments to combat climate change. On Wednesday, the leaders, meeting in Italy, agreed to cut emissions by 80% by 2050, but Mr Ban said big cuts were needed sooner rather than later. President Barack Obama said Thursday there was still time to close the gap with developing powers on climate change, after the UN chief criticized the G8 for not going hard enough. On the first day of a meeting of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations in L'Aquila in Italy, the G8 failed to get China and India to accept the goal of halving emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Obama, hoping to make his mark on his first G8 summit by chairing a meeting of rich and emerging powers on the environment, said progress could still be made before talks on a new UN climate change treaty in Copenhagen in December. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama told Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that "there was still time in which they could close the gap on that disagreement in time for that important (meeting)." Obama was due to chair the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF), which was likely to agree to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) versus pre-industrial levels but not to agree on the scale of emission cuts. Progress was hampered by the absence of Chinese President Hu Jintao, who left L'Aquila to attend to ethnic clashes in China's northwest that have killed 156 people. SHARING THE BURDEN Temperatures have risen by about 0.7 Celsius since the Industrial Revolution ushered in widespread use of fossil fuels. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he hoped the temperature target would be agreed by "all the countries around the table today" -- the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia, plus emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Mexico. But one G8 source said it was "not realistic" to expect a deal on emissions. India said developing countries first wanted to see rich nation plans to provide financing to help them cope with ever more floods, heatwaves, storms and rising sea levels. They also want to see rich nations make deeper cuts by 2020. G8 countries agreed among themselves on a goal of cutting global emissions by 50 percent by 2050, with the United States accepting this for the first time. They also set a reduction goal of 80 percent in aggregate for developed countries. But G8 member Russia immediately said it could not hit this target by 2050 and Canada's Environment Minister Jim Prentice said 80 percent was an "aspirational goal." ECONOMY, CURRENCIES, TRADE The fragile state of the world economy dominated the first day of the summit, with rich nations acknowledging there were still significant risks to financial stability. China used the broader forum on the second day to make its argument -- backed by Russia, India and Brazil -- for long-term diversification of the global reserve currency system away from reliance on the dollar, a sensitive issue on currency markets. "We should have a better system for reserve currency issuance and regulation, so that we can maintain relative stability of major reserve currencies' exchange rates and promote a diversified rational international reserve currency regime," said State Councilor Dai Bingguo, according to aides. The G8 and G5 did hope for progress on the stalled Doha trade talks, with agreement possible on concluding them by 2010. Launched in 2001 to help poor countries prosper, the Doha round has stumbled on proposed tariff and subsidy cuts. The G5 said it was committed to addressing outstanding problems on Doha which would provide "a major stimulus to the restoration of confidence in world markets." But it urged rich nations to remove trade barriers and restore credit to poor countries.