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Vast glaciers make the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region - which is home to the world's highest peaks topped by Mount Everest and K2 - a "third pole" behind Antarctica and the Arctic region, they said. "This is the climate crisis you haven't heard of," said Philippus Wester, who led the report. "Global warming is on track to transform the frigid, glacier-covered mountain peaks of the HKH cutting across eight countries to bare rocks in a little less than a century," said Wester of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). The report, by 210 authors, said that more than a third of the ice in the region will melt by 2100 even if governments take tough action to limit global warming under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. And two-thirds of the ice could vanish if governments fail to rein in greenhouse gas emissions this century. "To me this is the biggest worrying thing,” Wester told Reuters on the sidelines of an event to launch the report in Kathmandu. Glaciers have thinned and retreated across most parts of the region since the 1970s. Ice in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region would push up sea levels by 1.5 metres if it all melted, Eklabya Sharma, deputy director general of ICIMOD, told Reuters. MOUNTAIN CLIMATE HOTSPOTS The region stretches 3,500 km (2,175 miles) across Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan. The study said the thaw will disrupt rivers including the Yangtze, Mekong, Indus and Ganges, where farmers rely on glacier melt water in the dry season. About 250 million people live in the mountains and 1.65 billion people in river valleys below. Changes in river flows could also harm hydropower production and cause more erosion and landslides in the mountains. But more research is needed to gauge exactly how glaciers affect distant crops, said Wouter Buytaert, of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study. "While glacier meltwater propagates downstream, it mixes with water from other sources such as direct rainfall, wetlands, and groundwater, up to a point where the impact of glacier melting may become negligible," he said. The authors said that people living in small island states were often viewed as the most vulnerable to climate change because of rising sea levels. "It's not just occupants of the world's islands that are suffering," said Dasho Rinzin Dorji, an ICIMOD board member from Bhutan. He said in a statement that mountain regions were also extremely vulnerable as "climate hotspots".

Britain says it hasn't decided yet how much energy it aims to get from renewable sources like the wind and sun by 2020, but industry players fear a lack of ambition. European Union leaders signed up in March to a mandatory target to get a fifth of all energy from renewable sources by 2020, to help fight climate change, but didn't decide how the target would be split between the 27 EU member states. Tough talk is expected ahead of a decision due in January, and the renewable energy industry fears Britain is aiming low. "There's an exceptionally defeatist attitude on renewables in the UK," said Leonie Greene, spokeswoman for Britain's Renewable Energy Association (REA). Renewable energy contributes less to global warming but is more expensive than conventional fossil fuels like oil and coal, and so needs support both in research and development and installation to drive investment and bring costs down. Greene cited EU data showing Britain obtained 1.8 percent of all its energy, including heat, transport and electricity, from renewable sources in 2005, versus an EU-27 average of 6.7 percent. "We have signed up to the EU 20 percent target... we haven't changed our position," a UK government spokesman said on Tuesday. "We're going through the process of deciding how that's going to be met." Britain said in May that present policies would enable the country to get 5 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, and described the EU target as "an ambitious goal." According to documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper in August and again on Tuesday, British government officials estimate it would cost up to 4.4 billion pounds ($8.99 billion) annually by 2020 to double that share to 10 percent. The documents suggested Britain wanted as flexible an approach as possible, for example achieving targets using a similar mechanism to carbon offsetting, where you pay someone else to install renewable energy on your behalf. EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said two weeks ago he supported such a trading approach, where richer EU governments invested in renewable energy in the newer, mostly ex-communist members of the bloc. He got a mixed reception from renewable energy companies.

Nuclear power's claim to be the answer to global warming is being questioned by reports suggesting mining and processing of uranium is carbon intensive. While nuclear power produces only one 50th of the carbon produced by many fossil fuels, its carbon footprint is rising, making wind power and other renewable energies increasingly attractive, according to environmental groups and some official reports. The nuclear industry has come under fire over safety concerns for decades, but a growing recognition of the threat of climate change has put a renewed focus on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced throughout the energy chain. "Nuclear is a climate change red herring," said Ben Ayliffe, Senior Climate and Energy Campaigner at Greenpeace. "There are safer, more reliable alternatives, like energy efficiency and renewables as part of a super-efficient decentralised energy system." While the earth's crust still has large resources of uranium -- 600 times more than gold -- much of the highest grade orebodies are already being exploited, forcing miners to develop more technically challenging or lower grade resources. That means uranium mining requires much more energy. CARBON COST One example is Cameco's Cigar Lake project in Saskatchewan, which has been plagued with setbacks caused by floods at the underground mine, which may one day supply over 10 percent of the world's mined uranium. The problems have forced Cameco to push back the production start to 2011 from 2007, and analysts this week said further delays out to 2012 or 2013 were likely. "The potential is that nuclear will increase its carbon footprint due to the lower grade ores that remain," Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth said on the sidelines of a U.N. climate change conference in Bali. The carbon cost at Rio Tinto's Ranger uranium mine Australia has also risen. The mine produced 17.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per tonne of uranium oxide in 2006, from 13 tonnes in 2005, a Rio Tinto spokeswoman said. She added that part of the rise was due to bad weather which restricted access to high grade ore, as well as an expansion in capacity, and the company was trying to reduce emissions again. Uranium output at the mine was 4,748 tonnes last year, resulting in around 84,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Rio produced some 28.3 million tonnes of carbon across its business. Despite these industry figures, Clarence Hardy, secretary of the Australia Nuclear Association and president of the Pacific Nuclear Council, says the environmental groups are wrong in their assumptions and that nuclear power is relatively clean. "Carbon dioxide emissions from the nuclear cycle are very low. They are not zero, but they are low compared to fossil fuels and they are even low compared to hydro," he said. URGENT SOLUTIONS Over the life of a nuclear power plant, carbon emissions are between 10 and 25 grams of C02 per kilowatt, as little as one 100th of that of a coal-fired plant, Hardy added. "Even wind and solar have higher C02 emissions than the entire nuclear fuel cycle from mining through to waste management," Hardy said, arguing that large volumes of steel and concrete -- both energy-intensive products -- were required for those products. But UK data paints a different picture. A UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology document on carbon emissions puts nuclear's footprint was around 5 grams of CO2 per kilowatt, similar to the figure for offshore windpower at 5.25 grams and above onshore wind at 4.64 grams. Scientists at the conference in Bali said the world needed urgent solutions and emissions needed to peak within the next 10 to 15 years. But building a nuclear reactor typically takes decades. "Even if we started scaling up nuclear power tomorrow we couldn't do that because it would take longer than that to get a serious impact from new reactors," Juniper said. "The real answer is more renewable, sustainable energy and greater energy efficiency."

And even when the sun dips below the horizon, temperatures in many places are expected to remain in the 80s. The hottest part of the country? Smack dab in the middle. Everyone living in the region stretching from northern Oklahoma and central Nebraska through Iowa, Missouri and western Illinois should brace for a “prolonged period of dangerously hot temperatures and high humidity,” the warnings say. People in central and south central Kansas should expect to endure highs of about 102 degrees; the temperature in Des Moines, Iowa, was expected to hover around 100. Excessive heat warnings have also been posted farther east, for parts of New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania. All told, at least 15 million people across the United States are being warned of dangerously high temperatures that could affect human health between Wednesday and Friday. By the weekend, what meteorologists are calling a “heat dome” in the middle part of the country is expected to spread into the Great Lakes and the East Coast. Extreme heat can kill. Here’s what you can do to stay safe. “The combination of heat and humidity can take its toll on someone who is outside and overdoing it,” said Richard Bann, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. “It can be life-threatening.” Last year, 108 people died from extreme heat, compared to just 30 who died from cold, according to statistics on weather-related fatalities released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here are four safety recommendations from the National Weather Service: — Drink plenty of fluids. — Stay in an air-conditioned room. — Stay out of the sun. — Check on relatives and neighbors, especially the elderly. Some of the country’s biggest cities can expect to swelter. So far, Philadelphia is the only major city on the East Coast under an excessive heat warning. Meteorologists are predicting highs there of 100 degrees. But New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston are expected to be uncomfortably hot, with temperatures soaring into the high 90s and above; Chicago can expect the same. Saturday’s expected highs are 97 in Boston, 100 in Washington and 98 in New York. Chicago is expected to see a high of 97 degrees Friday and 94 on Saturday. Gentry Trotter, founder of Cool Down St. Louis, a non-profit that provides utility assistance for low-income families and donates air conditioners to people who are elderly or have disabilities, said that the organisation has assisted in more than 1,900 emergency situations over the past three weeks and received 63% more requests this year than it did last year. “It has just been brutal,” he said. “Yesterday we went in a home of an 80-year-old lady, and the heat almost knocked us over.” In Iowa, football practice is off, but the 2020 campaign rolls on. Heat warnings have Iowa farmers worrying about their corn, after planting was delayed by a soggy spring that has not left the plants much time to take root. Despite the scorching heat, Democratic candidates for president have continued to crisscross the state. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota marched 3 miles over the weekend in saunalike heat, and earlier this week, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, sweated through a forum on gun violence. Sen Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is expected to attend an AARP forum in Sioux City But ordinary people are shuffling everything from church picnics to sporting activities. Steven Rogers, director of operations for Eastern Iowa Elite, a middle-school football club, said that two football practices have already been cancelled and the team tryouts this coming Saturday have been moved indoors. “You can’t really expect the kids to perform at the highest level if they are outside in this heat, beyond the fact that its totally dangerous,” he said. “There have been a couple of kids having some pretty bad health issues related to heat and overexertion. It’s just not safe.” Is this heat wave caused by climate change? Hot weather is nothing new, of course, especially in July. But climate change is making heat waves like this one more common. “The meteorological ingredients that make heat waves today are the same ingredients that made them in the past, but climate change is bringing those ingredients together more often, generally speaking,” said Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the National Centres for Environmental Information. The 2018 National Climate Assessment, a major scientific report by 13 federal agencies, notes that while the peak of extreme heat in the United States occurred during the 1930s Dust Bowl, the number of hot days is increasing, and the frequency of heat waves in the United States jumped from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year by the 2010s. Also, the season for heat waves has stretched to be 45 days longer than it was in the 1960s, according to the report. It is all part of an overall warming trend: The five warmest years in the history of accurate worldwide record-keeping have been the past five years, and 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001; worldwide, June was the hottest ever recorded. Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre, noted that the jet stream, which generally helps to move weather systems across the country, has been unusually wavy in June and early July. That “always spells trouble,” she said, and can lead to conditions like heat waves stalling in place. © 2019 New York Times News Service

The aviation industry may be more damaging to the environment than widely thought because aircraft not only release carbon dioxide but they also produce other harmful gases that warm the earth, experts said. A tented camp of about 250 climate protests at London's Heathrow airport this week highlights pressures to include aviation in a global pact to fight global warming. But planes are among the least understood sources of emissions. "Growth is going to continue, but it is complicated to estimate the effect of aviation on the climate," said Ivar Isaksen, a professor at Oslo University who is an expert in how aviation affects the atmosphere. He said that aviation's impact went far beyond carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that many governments rely on for calculations. Aviation accounts for about 2 percent of world emissions of carbon dioxide and projected passenger growth of 5 percent a year will far outstrip efficiency gains from better fuel or plane design, U.N. studies say. Planes' climate impact may be magnified by factors including heat-trapping nitrogen oxides that are more damaging at high altitude. Jet condensation trails may contribute to the formation of a blanket of high-altitude cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds usually warm the earth's surface, increasing the impact of aviation on global warming. A 1999 U.N. report, for instance, estimated that aviation's impact on the climate was two to four times greater than simply the carbon dioxide emitted by burning jet fuel. "The science around this isn't very clear," said Sarah Brown, spokeswoman for CarbonNeutral Co, an offset company that allows travellers to invest in renewable energy projects to soak up emissions from flights. The company uses British Environment Ministry data that excluding climate side-effects of aviation. "The science of radiative forcing is currently uncertain," it said, referring to the effects that go beyond carbon dioxide. Germany's Atmosfair (www.atmosfair.de), whose patrons include former U.N. Environment Programme chief Klaus Toepfer, covers factors such as the release of nitrogen oxide. "We're trying to estimate the overall effect," said Robert Muller at Atmosfair. He said airlines such as British Airways or Scandinavian SAS worked with companies with low estimates when offering customers offsets. Take a one-way flight from Sydney to London, for instance -- CarbonNeutral estimates each passenger is responsible for 1.9 tonnes of greenhouse gases, costing 20.95 euros ($28.46) to offset. The same route with Atmosfair works out at 6.4 tonnes, and a charge of 130 euros to offset. Outside Heathrow, about 250 campaigners are camping in tents on the path of a proposed third runway for the world's busiest international hub. More and more people fly, partly because companies have axed ticket prices despite high fuel costs. International flights are now excluded from the Kyoto Protocol, the main UN plan for curbing climate change to 2012. The European Union is among those aiming to include aviation after 2012 while the United States is opposed. A report by the UN climate panel in May said extra charges for fuel or the inclusion of the aviation sector into a greenhouse gas trading scheme "would have the potential to reduce emissions considerably". "A first possible approach is where initially only carbon dioxide from aviation is included in for example an emission trading system," it said. Parallel measures could be differing airport charges according to nitrogen oxide emissions.

The UN panel of climate experts overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level, according to a preliminary report on Saturday, admitting yet another flaw after a row last month over Himalayan glacier melt. A background note by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said a 2007 report wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level since the figure included areas above sea level, prone to flooding along rivers. The United Nations has said errors in the 2007 report of about 3,000 pages do not affect the core conclusions that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are warming the globe. "The sea level statistic was used for background information only, and the updated information remains consistent with the overall conclusions," the IPCC note dated Feb. 12 said. Sceptics say errors have exposed sloppiness and over-reliance on "grey literature" outside leading scientific journals. The panel's reports are a main guide for governments seeking to work out costly policies to combat global warming. The 2007 report included the sentence: "The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea level rise and river flooding because 55 percent of its territory is below sea level". "A preliminary analysis suggests that the sentence discussed should end with: 'because 55 percent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding'," the IPCC note said. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the original source of the incorrect data, said on Feb. 5 that just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding. The IPCC said the error was widespread -- it quoted a report from the Dutch Ministry of Transport saying "about 60 percent" of the country is below sea level, and a European Commission study saying "about half". The panel expressed regret last month after admitting that the 2007 report exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers, which feed rivers from China to India in dry seasons, in a sentence that said they could all vanish by 2035. The 2035 figure did not come from a scientific journal.

Cameroon launched an emergency plan to raise food production on Friday and neighbouring Gabon suspended import taxes on foodstuffs as West African states rushed to counter price surges that have triggered protests. The two oil producers were the latest countries in the world's poorest continent to introduce measures to offset soaring global prices for foodstuffs and fuel which aid experts say threaten to push 100 million people worldwide into hunger. Anger over the cost of living helped trigger riots in Cameroon in late February in which demonstrators took to the streets to protest against a move by President Paul Biya to extend his 25-year rule over central Africa's biggest economy. Dozens of people were killed and Biya this month signed into law the constitutional change approved by parliament that allows the president, one of Africa's longest serving leaders, to be re-elected for a third term in 2011. Cameroon's Prime Minister Ephraim Inoni said a special fund was being set up to finance development of domestic farming and fisheries, and he called on his country's people to consume more locally-produced products instead of imports. "The government will strive to turn the prevailing crisis into an opportunity to profoundly transform our agriculture, which should meet domestic demands and become a real exporter of foodstuffs," the prime minister said in a statement released after a cabinet meeting. The plan, whose overall cost was not specified, foresaw subsidies to help young farmers start up production. It offered assistance to buy fertilisers, pesticides and equipment and also set up regional pools of farm machinery for their use. In neighbouring Gabon, the government suspended for six months duties and taxes on imported foodstuffs, including VAT paid on cooking oil, fish, milk and flour. It also imposed percentage limits on price margins charged by rice importers and reduced diesel rates by 37 percent for the fisheries sector. NEGLECTED AGRIGULTURE Developments in markets and demand and supply patterns, policy shifts and erratic weather caused by climate change have combined to double prices of cereals since last year, creating what U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon calls "a real global crisis". The economic measures taken by Gabon followed similar steps taken in recent weeks by Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea. Mauritania on Thursday announced the final part of a $160 million emergency programme to combat the rising prices, boost rice and cereal production and cut its dependency on exports. Senegal and Liberia have also started schemes to revive their country's flagging farming sectors which have stagnated and declined during decades of neglect and underinvestment. After years in which development and investment priorities were focused on other areas like infrastructure, international development bodies and humanitarian agencies are now calling for a massive boost to farming programmes to stave off hunger. Cameroon's government also announced measures to revitalise the fisheries industry, which despite the country's 350 km (220 miles) of coastline, has been hit by lack of financing, high costs, depletion of fish stocks and pirate attacks. The government would provide micro-credits to allow fishermen to buy boats and outboard motors.

TIANJIN, China Oct 5 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Greenhouse gas cuts vowed by rich nations remain far from enough to escape dangerous global warming, a top Chinese official said on Tuesday, urging talks over a new climate pact to confront the shortfall. China is the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter and its emissions are sure to keep growing. But Su Wei, the head of the climate change office at China's National Development and Reform Commission, said wealthy countries with their much higher per-capita emissions should make space for emerging economies to grow. "The emissions targets of developed countries should be dramatically raised," he told a news conference at UN climate talks in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. Negotiators from 177 governments are meeting in Tianjin trying to coax agreement on what should follow the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol -- the key UN treaty on fighting global warming -- which expires in 2012. Talks so far this year have focused on trust-building funding goals, with little talk about countries' targets to reduce greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and other sources blamed for heating up the atmosphere. Officials in Tianjin are seeking consensus on climate funding for developing countries, policies and funds to protect carbon-absorbing forests, and transfers of green technology. They hope that a higher level meeting in Cancun, Mexico, late this year can then settle the foundations of a binding pact that could be agreed in 2011. Fraught negotiations last year failed to agree on a binding treaty and culminated in a bitter meeting in Copenhagen, which produced a non-binding accord that later recorded the emissions pledges of participant countries. TOUGH GOAL Su told reporters that the question of wealthy countries' emissions targets could not be avoided at Cancun, although it was good that rich nations had offered emissions cut goals as part of the Copenhagen Accord, he added. "But these goals are certainly still far removed from the expectations of developing countries and from what is required according to science," he added. A negotiator from another big developing country said prospects for Cancun were uncertain. "I don't think it's going particularly fast or well so far," the delegate said of the Tianjin meeting. He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the internal nature of the talks. "It's hard to see how we can get a really substantive outcome from here into Mexico." The United Nations says the current targets would not prevent a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), which the EU and some experts call the threshold of dangerous climate change, such as more extreme droughts, floods and rising sea levels. Under the Copenhagen Accord, supported by more than 110 countries, parties agreed to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels but didn't specify a date. Su did not say what specific demands, if any, China could make over developed economies' emissions goals. President Barack Obama wants to cut the United States' greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, or 4 percent from 1990 levels. But legislation to that end has failed to win the backing of the US Senate. The European Union has offered to cut emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, or 30 percent if others act. Many Western governments want China to take on firmer international commitments eventually to cap emissions. China's emissions could peak some time between 2020 and 2030, with the right mix of green policies, a Chinese government expert on energy policy, Jiang Kejun, told reporters in Tianjin. Jiang, a researcher at the Energy Research Institute in Beijing, did not give a precise estimate of how high China's emissions could rise, but said the Copenhagen Accord yardstick for limiting global emissions would be difficult to achieve. "The two-degrees scenario is very tough for China," he said.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is making a career change, from icon of liberty opposing Myanmar's junta to party boss in a fragile new quasi-democracy. The transition hasn't been easy. At a talk in London in June, a student from the Kachin ethnic minority asked why Suu Kyi (a majority Burman) seemed reluctant to condemn a bloody government military offensive against Kachin rebels. The conflict has displaced some 75,000 people. Suu Kyi's answer was studiously neutral: "We want to know what's happening more clearly before we condemn one party or the other." The Kachin community was livid. The Kachinland News website called her reply an "insult." Kachin protesters gathered outside her next London event. An "open letter" from 23 Kachin groups worldwide said Suu Kyi was "condoning state-sanctioned violence." That a woman so widely revered should arouse such hostility might have seemed unthinkable back in April. A landslide by-election victory propelled Suu Kyi and 42 other members of her National League for Democracy into Myanmar's parliament. Not anymore. Once idolized without question for her courageous two-decade stand against the old junta, Suu Kyi now faces a chorus of criticism even as she emerges as a powerful lawmaker here. She has quickly become an influential voice in the country's newly empowered parliament. Still, ethnic groups accuse her of condoning human-rights abuses by failing to speak out on behalf of long-suffering peoples in Myanmar's restive border states. Economists worry that her bleak public appraisals of Myanmar's business climate will scare foreign investors. Political analysts say her party has few real policies beyond the statements of its world-famous chairperson. She must also contend with conflict within the fractious democracy movement she helped found. International critics have seized upon her ambiguous response to one of Myanmar's most urgent humanitarian issues: the fate of 800,000 stateless Rohingya Muslims in remote western Myanmar. There, clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists have killed at least 77 people and left 90,000 homeless since June. Spurned by both Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh, which hosts 300,000 refugees, many Rohingya live in appalling conditions in Rakhine State. The United Nations has called the Muslim minority "virtually friendless" in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar. The violence erupted in June, days before Suu Kyi's first trip to Europe in 24 years. "Are the Rohingya citizens of your country or are they not?" a journalist asked Suu Kyi in Norway, after she collected the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991 while under house arrest. "I do not know," said Suu Kyi. Her rambling answer nettled both the Rohingya, who want recognition as Myanmar citizens, and the locals in Rakhine, who regard them as invaders. The reply contrasted with the moral clarity of her Nobel speech, in which she had spoken about "the uprooted of the earth ... forced to live out their lives among strangers who are not always welcoming." STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY Suu Kyi's moral clarity helped make the former junta a global pariah. Her new role as political party leader demands strategic ambiguity as well. She must retain her appeal to the majority Burmans and Buddhists, without alienating ethnic minorities or compatriots of other faiths. She must also engage with the widely despised military, which remains by far the most dominant power in Myanmar. Her political instincts have been apparent to Myanmar watchers since 1988, when she returned after spending much of her life abroad. Amid a brutal military crackdown, she emerged as leader of the democracy movement. She spent most of the next two decades in jail or house arrest and yet remained the movement's inspiration. "I don't like to be referred to as an icon, because from my point of view, icons just sit there," she said in a lecture on September 27 at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "I have always seen myself as a politician. What do they think I have been doing for the past 24 years?" Suu Kyi declined multiple interview requests from Reuters for this article. Myanmar's reforms have accelerated since she was freed from house arrest in November 2010, days before an election stage-managed by the military installed a quasi-civilian government. This year, it has freed dissidents, eased media censorship and started tackling a dysfunctional economy. Myanmar's emergence from authoritarianism is often compared to the Arab Spring. Yet its historic reforms were ushered in not by destabilizing street protests, but by former generals such as President Thein Sein. Suu Kyi's role was pivotal. A meeting she held with Thein Sein in the capital of Naypyitaw in August 2011 marked the start of her pragmatic engagement with a government run by ex-soldiers. She pronounced him "sincere" about reforming Myanmar, an endorsement that paved the way for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Naypyitaw last November and, earlier this year, the scrapping of most Western sanctions. A saint-like reputation for unwavering principle can be unhelpful in politics, a murky world of compromise and negotiation. So can adulation, which generates expectations that not even Myanmar's "human rights superstar" - as Amnesty International calls her - can fulfill. Suu Kyi realizes this. "To be criticized and attacked is an occupational hazard for politicians. To be praised and idealized is also an occupational hazard and much the less desirable of the two." She wrote that 14 years ago. Today, she regularly visits her parliamentary district of Kawhmu, a small and impoverished rice-growing area near the commercial capital Yangon. On a recent morning, as she was driven in an SUV along Kawhmu's potholed roads, villagers spilled out of their huts to cheer for "Mother Suu." Kawhmu's problems - household debt, lack of electricity, joblessness - are Myanmar's writ small. "Some villages around here have no young people," says Aung Lwin Oo, 45, a carpenter and member of the National League for Democracy. "They have all left to work in Thailand and Malaysia." UNGLAMOROUS WORK Suu Kyi's first stop that day was the Buddhist monastery. There, she prayed with the monks and met representatives from two villages to settle a money dispute. Then she ate lunch with NLD members at a tin-roofed wooden bungalow - the party's Kawhmu headquarters - and discussed drainage issues with local officials. Her new job is unglamorous, but aides say she relishes it. "She enjoys political life," said Win Tin, an NLD elder and long-time confidant. "She enjoys it to the utmost." She is also adapting to life in Naypyitaw, the isolated new capital built from scratch by the junta, where she lives in a house protected by a fence topped with razor wire. In the Lower House of parliament, the colorful garb worn by many ethnic delegates lends a festive atmosphere. Sitting near Suu Kyi is an MP from Chin State who wears a head-dress of boar's teeth and hornbill feathers. Men in green uniforms, however, dominate one side of the chamber. Myanmar's constitution, ratified after a fraudulent referendum in 2008, reserves a quarter of parliamentary seats for military personnel chosen by armed forces chief Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, a protégé of the retired dictator, Than Shwe. Suu Kyi's mere presence in parliament breathes legitimacy into a political system built by the junta that jailed her. Her party has reversed many long-cherished positions to get here. The NLD boycotted both the constitution-drafting process and the 2010 election. That vote was rigged in favor of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, now the ruling party and the NLD's main electoral rival. Suu Kyi's camp also demanded that the military recognize the results of a 1990 election, which the NLD won easily but the junta nullified. Her party abandoned these stances to take part in April's by-elections. It now holds less than a tenth of the lower house seats, but Suu Kyi ensures the NLD punches above its weight. She led opposition to a higher education bill that she deemed substandard; it was scrapped in July and will now be redrafted by legislators. She also helped kill a clause in a foreign-investment law that would have protected Myanmar's crony businessmen. In August she was named chair of a 15-member parliamentary committee on "rule of law and tranquility," which could further amplify her influence. Her star power has limits, however. Reforming the constitution to dial back the military's influence remains an NLD priority. That requires three-quarters support in parliament, including from some military delegates - a daunting task even for Suu Kyi. "She is very persuasive," said Ohn Kyaing, NLD party spokesman and member of parliament. But "without the military's help, we can't change our constitution. We have no chance." REJUVENATING THE NLD While the NLD's by-election landslide suggests it will win the next general election in 2015, the party hardly seems like a government-in-waiting. The NLD was formed in September 1988 after a military crackdown that killed or injured thousands of pro-democracy protesters. The junta arrested Suu Kyi before the NLD was a year old, and hounded, jailed and tortured its members. In 2003, government thugs attacked Suu Kyi's convoy, killing dozens of her supporters. She was lucky to escape alive. Most NLD offices were shut down. When Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest in 2010, her party was a moribund force with a geriatric leadership. She set about rejuvenating it, personally opening dozens of offices. Two of the party's aging co-founders, Win Tin and Tin Oo, both in their eighties, have been nudged into "patron" roles. The party is booming - it now has a million members, spokesman Ohn Kyaing said. But success is bringing a new set of problems. The NLD plans to hold its first national party conference in late 2012 or early 2013, and protests have erupted in several constituencies, including Suu Kyi's Kawhmu, over who gets to attend. The dispute highlights the friction between old NLD members, who survived two decades of persecution, and new members who joined in reform-era Myanmar. "The old ones don't want to give up their posts because they struggled," said Ohn Kyaing. It also reveals a struggle between the party headquarters and far-flung branches, with local officials accusing their leaders of being bossy or unresponsive. At least five members were suspended for disobeying or protesting against the party leadership. Suu Kyi heads a seven-member Central Executive Committee which, past and present NLD members say, effectively rubber-stamps her decisions. These included the NLD's refusal in April to swear a parliamentary oath to "uphold and abide by" the constitution. Imposing her will might not be democratic, said Aung Kyi Nyunt, an NLD upper house legislator. "But it's not authoritarian, because she never orders (us) to follow her decisions. We already agree." After a two-week stand-off and criticism from supporters, the "Iron Aunty" backed down and her MPs took their seats. The NLD also has a troubled relationship with Myanmar's reinvigorated media. One newspaper said in May that Suu Kyi's bodyguards had assaulted one of its reporters, which the NLD denies. Some Burmese-language websites are dedicated to smearing Suu Kyi. Their unsubstantiated gossip - one falsely claimed that she has a teenage daughter by a Burmese lover - strikingly resembles junta-era propaganda. (The websites, whose owners protect their identities by registering through proxies, couldn't be reached for comment.) ETHNIC UNREST The NLD's parliamentary debut has also highlighted a lack of concrete policies and experts to formulate them, a critical weakness when Myanmar's reformist government is drafting new legislation at a breakneck pace. Pressed by Reuters in Kawhmu to explain the NLD's policy on the Rohingya, for example, Suu Kyi seemed to say the party didn't have one. "It's not a policy that has to be formulated by the NLD," she said. "It's something that the whole country must be involved in. It's not just a party concern." Suu Kyi's popularity in Myanmar is not as universal as many Western admirers assume. She is adored in the lowlands, where fellow ethnic Burmans predominate and her image adorns homes, shops, cars and T-shirts. Burmans, or Bamar, make up two-thirds of Myanmar's 60 million population. That reverence fades in rugged border regions, occupied by ethnic minorities who have fought decades-long wars against Myanmar's Burman-dominated military. In rural Shan State, named after the largest minority, images of Suu Kyi are hard to find. Suu Kyi used her maiden speech in parliament in July to call for greater legal protection of minorities. But this has not inoculated her against criticism from ethnic leaders. Among them is Khun Htun Oo, a leading Shan politician who was jailed for almost seven years by the former junta. Suu Kyi has been "neutralized" by participating in parliament, he told reporters in Washington last month, a day before the two of them picked up awards from a human-rights group. "The trust in her has gone down." In an interview with CNN during her US trip, Suu Kyi stoked the anger with a gaffe. She admitted that she had a "soft spot" for Myanmar's military, which was founded by her father, the independence hero General Aung San. That expression of filial piety ignited a storm of negative comments on Facebook, Myanmar's main forum for popular political discussion. For years, the NLD backed calls for a United Nations Commission of Inquiry into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Myanmar. This push has been quietly dropped since Suu Kyi's release. "What we believe in is not retributive justice but restorative justice," she said in March. Restorative justice, she added, did not mean putting junta members on trial. Western governments take their cue from Suu Kyi on human rights. And they use such equivocations "to justify doing nothing" about issues of justice and accountability, said Mark Farmaner of London-based advocacy group Burma Campaign UK. He noted it took more than two months for British Foreign Secretary William Hague to comment on the violence against the Rohingya minority. Suu Kyi will speak up on the Rohingya issue "when the time comes," said NLD spokesman Ohn Kyaing. "Politics is timing."

"I am proud to be a frequent traveller on the Aditya... I am being part of cleaning the Earth," said Ravindran, who uses the boat most days to travel to the town of Vaikom on Lake Vembanad. The Aditya's green credentials have attracted international attention and earned it a win last month in awards sponsored by international electric boat journal Plugboats. An internal impact study produced in January by the Kerala State Water Transport Department (KSWTD) showed the ferry generates close to zero polluting emissions and is at least 30 times cheaper to run than its diesel counterparts. The state government now plans to put two more solar ferries and a solar-powered cruise ship into service on Kerala's backwaters by the end of the year. Recently, the transport department decided to switch all Kerala's 48 diesel ferries to solar within the next five years. Each day, the Aditya carries about 1,700 passengers on a 3-km (1.9-mile) route across the lake, between Thavanakadavu village and the town of Vaikom, according to the KSWTD study. It runs on 70 kilowatts of electricity, of which 65 is supplied by the boat's solar panels and the rest from the grid. As a result, the Aditya costs about 5,900 rupees ($79) per month to run, compared to the 214,500 rupees the state spends on each of the three diesel ferries operating the same route. They will be replaced by solar-powered boats by the end of 2020. KSWTD director Shaji V Nair told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the Aditya has cut the amount of pollution people living near the water route are exposed to. Along with financial savings, the ferry produces almost none of the air pollutants and heat-trapping carbon emissions characteristic of diesel engines. Burning fossil fuels for power, transport and industry is the main source of the emissions that are heating up the Earth's climate and fuelling high levels of air pollution. Over its three years of operation, the Aditya has saved more than 100,000 litres (26,400 gallons) of diesel and 280 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, the impact study said. Salesman A Mamakutty, who makes regular trips on the Aditya, is happy more solar ferries are due to hit the water. "I am dreaming that a day will come very soon when all passengers on Vembanad Lake will be travelling on this kind of solar ferry - and all of us can breathe fresh air," he said. EARLY SCEPTICISM Dileep Krishnan, chair of the technical committee at the Cochin University of Science and Technology which led the feasibility study for the Aditya project, said that initially no one was confident India could build a solar ferry that was affordable to run and produced no emissions. "We felt that many of (India's) other solar-powered projects were unsuccessful due to high costs and lack of measurable results," said Krishnan. The committee and the Kerala water transport department gave the Aditya project five years to break even on operating and fuel costs - and even that was considered ambitious. "But in the short span of three years, our target with the Aditya has already been achieved," said Krishnan. The Kerala government decided in 2013 to explore the feasibility of bringing a solar ferry to the state's backwaters but when it put out a tender, major Indian boat-making companies were reluctant to respond, according to Nair. As the sole bidder, Sandith Thandasherry, a young naval architect from Kerala, won the contract. With 20 million rupees of funding from the Kerala government, Thandasherry's startup firm, NavAlt Solar & Electric Boats, built the 20-metre-long catamaran ferry boat made from glass-reinforced plastic with photovoltaic panels on its roof. "When we did it, many people in the industry and academia expressed the opinion that a solar ferry carrying 75 passengers was nearly impossible," Thandasherry said. "Now imagine the environmental impacts if the entire water transport system was turned into solar," he said. Other popular solar-powered ferries around the world include the Alstersonne on Hamburg's Alster River in Germany and the Solar Sailor in Australia's Sydney harbour. P Suresh, managing director of state-owned Steel Industrials Kerala Limited (SILK), which manufactures diesel-run ferries, welcomed the Aditya's success but said solar ferries had yet to prove themselves as an established mode of transport. SOLAR SETS SAIL In May 2019, a delegation from the International Solar Alliance (ISA), including ambassadors from 25 countries, visited Vaikom to study the Aditya project, local media reported. After a trip on the solar boat, Upendra Tripathy, director general of the ISA, which was set up by India and France, said the Aditya could serve as a model for other countries where limited resources make solar-powered projects a hard sell. The Aditya offers the same performance and safety standards at less than half the cost of electric ferries operating in Europe, making it easy to replicate in ISA-member countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, said NavAlt's Thandasherry. "Within a very short span of time, the Aditya has turned out to be a replicable model in mitigating climate change," said VS Vijayan, former chairman of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board. The ferry has also debunked the argument that solar initiatives are costlier than other power sources, he noted. "On the contrary, the solar ferry proves how it could be affordable for the common man," he said. Nair at the water transport department noted that the Indian state of West Bengal and authorities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal are now planning to add solar ferries to their waters. "I am still surprised over the relentless calls I am getting from the nooks and corners of the world," he added.

Following are reactions to Saturday's UN-led climate talks agreement in Bali to start negotiations on a new global warming pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. The United States dropped last-minute opposition. UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL BAN KI-MOON: "I am deeply grateful to many member states for their spirit of flexibility and compromise." INDONESIA'S FOREIGN MINISTER HASSAN WIRAJUDA: "Here in Bali we reached a consensus, global consensus for all countries. "No single country was excluded, in a very inclusive processs...we hope it will provide not only a good basis but also the momentum in the coming years." JAMES CONNAUGHTON, CHAIRMAN OF THE WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY: "There is no question that we have opened a new page and are moving forward together. It is a strong commitment jointly reached by all countries to advance negotiations. "This is not a step taken alone by America, this is a step taken by all the countries that the time had come to open a new chapter." "We now have one of the broadest negotiating agendas ever on climate change....The large emerging economies, which also produce large amounts of greenhouse gases, also have to be part of the solution." INDIAN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MINISTER KAPIL SIBAL: "We wanted to make sure the two-track process was maintained that there was no dilution of the Kuyoto Protocol. The developed world has appreciated that they had commitments and the developing world has appreciated that it has responsibilities. "If we understand what the roadmap will be, there will be no complications. "The world community realises that unless the U.S. comes on board we cannot achieve our goal." BRITISH ENVIRONMENT SECRETARY HILARY BENN: "This is a stark breakthrough, it's been a rollercoaster." DUTCH ENVIRONMENT MINISTER JACQUELINE CRAMER: "It was a delicate balance and we were able to really build consensus in this room and indeed the United States was willing to give in. "The G77 was willing to give in, everybody was willing to give in. We could not leave here without a Bali roadmap." JOYASHREE ROY, EXPERT ON THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AT JADHAVPUR UNIVERSITY IN KOLKATA, INDIA: "This is very positive news. Unless the leader is taking the lead then the followers will not follow. But this should not just be a gesture, it must involve commitments, if the United States accepts targets then it will force others to do so." "India should make preparations to come up with timelines by when it can make some sort of a commitment -- it may be a commitment for emissions cuts or for mitigation efforts. EVERTON VARGAS, HEAD OF BRAZIL'S DELEGATION: "We are very happy, we think it's a great success." PAULA DOBRIANSKY, U.S. UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEMOCRACY AND GLOBAL AFFAIRS: "We have our work cut out. Work remains...We joined the consensus...after hearing the comments (from South Africa, Brazil and others) we were assured by their commitment to act."

In a 30-minute address in the hall of the General Assembly, Biden called for a new era of global action, making the case that a summer of wildfires, excessive heat and the resurgence of the coronavirus required a new era of unity. “Our security, our prosperity and our very freedoms are interconnected, in my view as never before,” Biden said, insisting that the United States and its Western allies would remain vital partners. But he made only scant mention of the global discord his own actions have stirred, including the chaotic US retreat from Afghanistan as the Taliban retook control 20 years after they were routed. And he made no mention of his administration’s blowup with one of America’s closest allies, France, which was cast aside in a secret submarine deal with Australia to confront China’s influence in the Pacific. Those two foreign policy crises, while sharply different in nature, have led some US partners to question Biden’s commitment to empowering traditional alliances, with some publicly accusing him of perpetuating elements of former President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach, though wrapped in far more inclusive language. Throughout his speech, Biden never uttered the word “China,” although his efforts to redirect US competitiveness and national security policy have been built around countering Beijing’s growing influence. But he laced his discussion with a series of choices that essentially boiled down to backing democracy over autocracy, a scarcely veiled critique of both President Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. “We’re not seeking — say it again, we are not seeking — a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” he said. Yet in describing what he called an “inflection point in history,” he talked about the need to choose whether new technologies would be used as “a force to empower people or deepen repression.” At one point he explicitly referred to the targeting of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of western China. The president’s senior aides, at least publicly, have been dismissing the idea that China and the United States, with the world’s largest economies, were dividing the world into opposing camps, seeking allies to counter each other’s influence, as America and the Soviet Union once did. The relationship with Beijing, they have argued, unlike the Cold War rivalry with Moscow, is marked by deep economic interdependence and some areas of common interests, from the climate to containing North Korea’s nuclear program. But in private, some officials concede growing similarities. The US-British deal to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines is clearly an effort to reset the naval balance in the Pacific, as China expands its territorial claims and threatens Taiwan. The United States has also been attempting to block Chinese access to sophisticated technology and Western communications systems. “The future belongs to those who give their people the ability to breathe free, not those who seek to suffocate their people with an iron-hand authoritarianism,” Biden said, leaving little doubt who he meant. “The authoritarians of the world, they seek to proclaim the end of the age of democracy, but they’re wrong.” People listen to President Joe Biden addresse the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on Sept 21, 2021. Doug Mills/The New York Times A few hours after Biden left the podium, Xi also addressed the General Assembly, in a prerecorded video, rejecting US portrayals of his government as repressive and expansionist, asserting that he supports peaceful development for all people. People listen to President Joe Biden addresse the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on Sept 21, 2021. Doug Mills/The New York Times Xi’s language was restrained, and like Biden he did not name his country’s chief rival, but he made a clear allusion to China’s anger over the Australian submarine pact. The world must “reject the practice of forming small circles or zero-sum games,” he said, adding that international disputes “need to be handled through dialogue and cooperation on the basis of quality and mutual respect.” He also announced that his country would stop building “new coal-fired power projects abroad,’’ ending one of the dirtiest fossil-fuel programmes. China is by far the largest financier of coal-fired power plants. Biden’s debut at the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York was muted by the pandemic. Many national leaders did not attend, and there were few of the big receptions and relentless traffic gridlock that have traditionally marked the September ritual. He stayed only a few hours and met only one ally there: Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia. Later in the day, back in Washington, Biden, met Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, the other partner in the submarine deal. Last week, the three countries revealed the nuclear submarine agreement they had negotiated in secret. Australia said it was abandoning a previous deal to have France build conventionally powered submarines, enraging French leaders who felt betrayed by their allies. The surprise announcements tied Australian defence more closely to the United States — a huge shift for a country that, just a few years ago, aimed to avoid taking sides in the US-Chinese rivalry. Until Tuesday, the last time Biden had seen Johnson and Morrison was at a summit of leading industrial nations in June, when they were deep in negotiations that were hidden from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who was at the same event. On Tuesday there was no conversation between Biden and Macron, who was so infuriated over the submarine deals, and the silence of his closest partners, that he recalled the French ambassador from Washington, a move with no precedent in more than 240 years of relations, as well as the envoy to Australia. It was unclear if there were simply scheduling difficulties preventing the two men from speaking on the phone, or if Macron was being deliberately hard to reach. The speech Biden delivered sounded much like what he would have said before the Taliban took Kabul, Afghanistan, without resistance, and before the pivot to Asia became a hindrance to relations with Europe. The president has bristled, aides say, when the French have compared him to his predecessor, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian did Tuesday, telling reporters that the “spirit” of Trump’s approach to dealing with allies “is still the same” under Biden. Other allies have objected to how Biden set an Aug 31 deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan — with minimal consultation, they contend. (The White House tells a different story, arguing that NATO allies were fully consulted.) The Afghanistan deadline likely would have created only backroom grumbling if the rapid fall of the country to the Taliban had been anticipated. Instead, the August scramble to airlift foreigners, and the Afghans who helped them, created an image of US carelessness. The Taliban nominated an ambassador, Suhail Shaheen, the movement’s spokesperson based in Doha, Qatar, to represent Afghanistan at the United Nations and requested that he be allowed to address this year’s General Assembly, UN officials said Tuesday. The Taliban’s request, which must be evaluated by the General Assembly’s Credentials Committee, sets up a showdown with the current envoy, appointed by Afghanistan’s toppled government. On Afghanistan, Biden tried Tuesday to turn to the larger picture — “We’ve ended 20 years of conflict,” he said — making the case that the United States was now freer to pursue challenges like the climate crisis, cyberattacks and pandemics. And he delivered a far more conciliatory message than his predecessor, who disdained alliances, insulted friends and adversaries alike, and at various moments threatened military action against North Korea and Iran. “US military power must be our tool of last resort, not our first,’’ Biden said, “and it should not be used as an answer to every problem we see around the world.” He ran through a litany of international arrangements and institutions he has rejoined over the past eight months, including the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organisation. He talked of the United States running for a seat on the UN human rights council and reestablishing the Iran nuclear deal, both of which Trump exited. In fact, Iran was the centrepiece of a lot of backroom diplomacy, as its new foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, met with European leaders, who urged a return to the nuclear talks in Vienna that ended in June. Iranian officials indicated that talks are likely to resume in coming weeks. But US and European officials expect the government of Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, to seek a high price for returning to the accord, pressuring the West by moving closer to bomb-grade uranium production than ever before. Raisi did not come to New York, but he delivered a fiery speech by video. “Today, the world doesn’t care about ‘America First’ or ‘America is Back,’ ” he said. He added, “Sanctions are the US’ new way of war with the nations of the world.” Biden cast the coronavirus pandemic as a prime example of the need for peaceful international cooperation, saying, “bombs and bullets cannot defend against COVID-19 or its future variants.” And he pushed back against arguments that the United States, which is moving toward giving booster shots to some vaccinated people, is doing too little for poorer countries where vaccination has barely begun. The United States has “shipped more than 160 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to other countries,” he said. “We need a collective act of science and political will,” he added. “We need to act now to get shots in arms as fast as possible, and expand access to oxygen, tests, treatments, to save lives around the world.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Britain's government should force large companies to provide annual information on their carbon emissions in addition to reporting profits and executive pay, an alliance of businesses and environmental groups has said, backed by public opinion. Environmental groups and companies including PepsiCo, Microsoft and Marks & Spencer, working together as the Aldersgate Group, called on the UK to speed up plans to enforce carbon emissions reporting requirements. Business accounts for nearly a third of Britain's greenhouse gas emissions, and the introduction of mandatory emissions reporting would encourage companies to better manage and reduce their carbon footprints, the alliance said in a statement released on Sunday. Under the Climate Change Act 2008, the British government is required to propose regulation on emissions reporting to help Britain achieve its climate objectives or to explain to Parliament why no such regulation has been made. The Conservative-led coalition missed an April 6 deadline to take a decision, however, saying it needed more time to assess how to proceed after receiving more than 2,000 replies to a public consultation. In a letter to deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the Aldersgate Group urged the government to clarify its position and make a swift decision. "The introduction of mandatory (greenhouse gas) reporting would help to ensure greater accountability and transparency; create a level playing field, and help enable investors and consumers to make meaningful comparisons," it said. Peter Young, chairman of the Aldersgate Group and author of the letter, said mandatory reporting was needed because voluntary efforts had run their course. "Ironically, it would simplify the burdens on responsible businesses for the government to now signal a single mandatory requirement," he said. In an online poll commissioned by the Aldersgate Group, more than 75 percent of 2,044 adults surveyed across the United Kingdom late in April said large businesses should be required to report carbon emissions. Colin Baines, campaigns manager at The Co-operative group, the UK's largest mutual retailer, said mandatory reporting should be introduced as soon as possible, given that it has support from both business and the public. "We have been doing this for over a decade, and if other large businesses still aren't voluntarily reporting, it is unlikely they ever will," he said.

President Barack Obama said on Tuesday "all of us" want an effective exit strategy from Afghanistan in which Afghan authorities are able to take more responsibilities. Obama made the comment after talks with Netherlands Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende that centered on the current situation in Afghanistan as well as the global economy and climate change. "All of us want to see an effective exit strategy where increasingly the Afghan army, Afghan police, Afghan courts, Afghan government are taking more responsibility for their own security," Obama said. Around 4,000 U.S. Marines and hundreds of NATO and Afghan forces are taking part in an offensive in various parts of Helmand province against the Taliban, the biggest by foreign troops since they ousted the Islamist group in 2001. The operation comes ahead of next month's presidential election, which is crucial both for Kabul and for a US administration that has identified Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan as its top foreign policy priority. "If we can get through a successful election in September and we continue to apply the training approach to the Afghan security forces and we combine that with a much more effective approach to economic development inside Afghanistan, then my hope is that we will be able to begin transitioning into a different phase in Afghanistan," Obama said.

In a 90-minute oral argument, extended from 60 minutes because many parties are involved, the justices will examine a relatively narrow challenge by industry groups and Republican-leaning states to one aspect of a suite of regulations issued by Obama's Democratic administration in 2009 and 2010. The regulations represent the first major federal effort to tackle greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are the driving force behind climate change. Obama has been going it alone on climate change, largely because of opposition from Republicans and some Democrats in Congress. The Clean Air Act has been the Environmental Protection Agency's main tool for addressing emissions since the U.S. Senate rejected a cap-and-trade bill in 2010. The nine justices will weigh whether the agency has authority to regulate greenhouse gases under a program for issuing permits for stationary sources of pollution, such as power plants and oil refineries. A decision is expected by the end of June. When it agreed to hear the case in October, the court declined to consider several broader questions that would have more directly attacked the authority of the EPA in its regulation of greenhouse gases. By declining to hear those questions, the court indicated it was unlikely to revisit a landmark 2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA, when it held on a 5-4 vote that carbon was a pollutant that could potentially be regulated under the air pollution law. The ruling is unlikely to have a broad impact on the administration's climate strategy, including plans to introduce greenhouse gas standards for new power plants under a separate provision of the Clean Air Act. The standards were announced in September but have yet to be formally issued. By June the agency is expected to unveil more emissions standards for existing power plants. Power plants account for roughly 40 percent of domestic greenhouse gas emissions. ONE QUESTION The single question the high court agreed to hear was one of many raised by nine different coalitions of industry groups, such as the American Petroleum Institute, and 16 states, including Texas and Virginia. "We remain concerned that if the EPA continues to stretch the boundaries of the Clean Air Act and apply it to greenhouse gases, it could have dire consequences for our members," said Ross Eisenberg, the vice-president for energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, which is one of the challengers. In June 2012, an appeals court in Washington upheld all the regulations, prompting challengers to seek high court review. Although there are various ways the court could rule, a loss for the EPA could remove a whole category of pollutants, not just greenhouse gases, from the so-called "prevention of serious deterioration" or PSD program, which requires any new or modified major polluting facility to obtain a permit before any new construction is done if it emits "any air pollutant." Under the program, the operators have to show they are using the best available technology available to reduce emissions of the covered pollutants. So far, 335 facilities have applied for permits that include greenhouse gas requirements, an EPA official said. The regulations are being defended not just by the administration but also by 15 states and various environmental groups. One utility, Calpine Corp, which operates natural gas and geothermal plants, also backed the government by filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying the regulations are not a heavy and costly burden. Sean Donahue, a lawyer representing environmental groups in the case, said removal of greenhouse gases from the permitting program would lead to more emissions and discourage innovation on new pollution control technology. "It's quite important because we are at this early stage of greenhouse gas regulation and we need to keep forward momentum," Donahue said. The case is Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-1146.

The European Union's executive adopted plans on Wednesday to slash greenhouse gas emissions, seeking to push the world into tough climate action, but delayed key decisions on how to soften the impact on industry. The plans will transform Europe's energy supply by 2020, with a 10-fold increase in renewable energy production in Britain for example, and raise power bills by 10 to 15 percent. The European Commission said the measures were a vital step in the fight against global warming and other countries must now join the effort. "Europe and the rest of the world have to act fast, and act boldly, if we are to prevent this catastrophe," said EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas. The measures would also curb the bloc's rising dependency on imports of fossil fuels. "We do not want to be dependent on regimes that are not our friends and want to protect ourselves from them," Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told the European Parliament in presenting the plan. The renewables targets would wean the 27-nation bloc off coal and oil, as would a decision that power generators must pay from 2013 for all permits to emit carbon dioxide, most of which they now get for free, likely to slash coal plant profits. German utility RWE said it called into question the future of coal -- "Coal is threatened in its economic viability," RWE's head of power generation, Ulrich Jobs, told Reuters. The measures implement an EU-wide target which EU leaders agreed last March to get a fifth of energy from renewable sources and curb greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020. They still need approval by EU leaders and the EU Parliament. Environmentalists urged the EU to cut emissions unilaterally by 30 percent by 2020. The head of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. climate change panel said the EU plans may prove too lax. "I see no reason why some of these targets may not become stronger, may not become more stringent," Rajendra Pachauri told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos. COST The UN panel last year warned that tough climate action required global greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2015 and detailed looming global warming threats including higher sea levels and more floods and droughts. The Commission's proposals included a major overhaul from 2013 of the EU's flagship Emissions Trading Scheme, which allocates a fixed quota of emissions permits to heavy industry. Airlines and oil refineries will have to pay for one-fifth of emissions permits in 2013, rising to 100 percent in 2020. But Brussels delayed until 2010 a key decision on which industries most vulnerable to global competition, such as steel, aluminium and cement, can get all their quota for free. "The conditions for companies to have access to free allowances ... are left uncertain until 2010," Europe's main industry lobby, BusinessEurope, complained in a statement. "Significant electricity price increases will result from this package," it warned. Industry leaders are worried higher energy costs will tilt competitiveness further in favour of China and India, which have no emissions limits, at a time of record oil prices. If there were no global deal to curb emissions, succeeding the Kyoto Protocol on climate change after 2012, the EU said it would also consider forcing importers to buy permits. Power bills for industry and households will rise as the bloc gets more energy from expensive clean technologies, and as the supply of CO2 permits to power generators shrinks from 2013 on. Utilities will pass the extra costs on to consumers. But Barroso dismissed cost concerns, telling parliament: "The additional effort needed to realise the proposals would be less than 0.5 percent of GDP by 2020. That amounts to about 3 euros ($4.39) a week for everyone." Resistance is expected over targets for each country to cut greenhouse gases and install renewable energy, but the EU executive talked up potential business benefits. "(It) gives Europe a head start in the race to create a low-carbon global economy that will unleash a wave of innovations and create new jobs," said Dimas. Brussels tried to shore up the environmental credibility of a target to get one-tenth of transport fuels by 2020 from biofuels made from plants, setting detailed criteria to avoid unwanted side effects such as tropical deforestation. EU carbon prices fell nearly 10 percent earlier this week, mostly on falling oil prices, and slid further by 3 percent on Wednesday, closing at 19.70 euros.

The UAE's Ministry of Climate Change and Environment also notified other local authorities, including the Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority and the municipalities of its emirates, to prevent the entry of any fresh produce from Kerala, it said in a statement. The ministry suspects that fruit bats are the source of the virus. It said it was banning fresh produce, including mangoes, dates and bananas - the bats' preferred fruits. Indian health officials have not been able to trace the origin of the Nipah outbreak and have begun a fresh round of tests on fruit bats from Perambra, the suspected epicentre of the infection. Kerala has sent 116 suspected cases for testing in recent weeks, 15 have been confirmed with the deadly disease and 13 of these people have died, with two patients still undergoing treatment. No confirmed cases of the virus have been found outside the state. There is no vaccine for the virus, which is spread through body fluids and can cause encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. Last week, the UAE consulate in Kerala advised travellers to take precautions and follow safety instructions issued by the Indian authorities. The Gulf state has also banned imports of live animals from South Africa, based on a notification from the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) of the registration of Rift Valley Fever disease, the ministry said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Saturday that developing nations must take "substantial actions" to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and that the world's top emitters must have clear reduction targets. He added in a major speech in Tokyo that there could be no solution to the problems of energy security and climate change without the involvement of the Asia-Pacific region's developing nations, but that these problems could also provide great opportunities. "If we put the right rules and incentives in place, it will unleash the creative power of our best scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. It will lead to new jobs, new businesses, and entire new industries," Obama said. About 190 nations will gather in Copenhagen from December 7-18 to work out a global deal to fight climate change after the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012, but talks so far have been clouded by disputes between rich and developing nations. Obama, who has faced resistance from opposition Republicans and even some fellow Democrats to setting caps on U.S. emissions, has previously acknowledged that the U.S. Senate would not pass climate change legislation in time for Copenhagen. "I have no illusions that this will be easy, but the contours of a way forward are clear. All nations must accept their responsibility," he said in his speech. "America knows there is more work to do -- but we are meeting our responsibility, and will continue to do so." The new government in Japan, the world's fifth-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has promised to reduce emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels in an effort to strengthen its diplomatic clout at the December meeting. Tokyo is the first stop in Obama's nine-day Asian tour, which also takes him to Singapore for an Asia-Pacific economic summit, to China for talks likely to feature climate change and trade imbalances, and to South Korea, where North Korea's nuclear ambitions will be in focus.

The governments should not only honour their national contributions under the Paris Agreement, but also need to substantially increase their ambitions, the prime minister said in her address at the Climate Vulnerable Leaders’ Event on Wednesday. “The idea of climate justice must be established for the sake of climate and the planet. More vigorous provision of finance must be ensured by the major economies, MDBs, and IFIs along with access to technology,” she said. Bangladesh is honoured to be chosen to lead the Climate Vulnerable Forum for the second time, the prime minister said. The CVF represents over one billion people of the world’s most vulnerable countries. CVF countries suffer the most despite their insignificant contribution to global carbon emission. According to the Climate Change Vulnerability Index, 2019 of German Watch, Bangladesh is the seventh most affected countries of the world due to the adverse impacts of climate change. The country has faced recurrent flooding this monsoon causing immense damage to crops and displacing huge people, with super cyclone Amphan and current COVID-19 pandemic aggravating the situation, Hasina mentioned. The 1.1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar given shelter at Cox’s Bazar are also causing serious social and environmental damages, she highlighted. “As president, our focus would be galvanising support for the goal to keep the global temperature-increase up to 1.5 degrees, accelerating financing mechanisms and highlighting the narratives of climate resilience, and ‘loss and damage’ issue. We will also put emphasis on appointing a UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and creating a CVF and V20 Joint Multi-Donor Fund,” Hasina said in her speech. As the chair of CVF, Hasina launched the Climate Vulnerable Forum’s “Midnight Survival Deadline for the Climate” initiative to combat the global impact of climate change. “We urge every leader of every nation to show leadership now. Convening alongside the UNGA, we also declare our call for an international day to be named “Climate Resilience Day” to secure our harmony with the Mother Earth,” Hasina made the call in her address at the Climate Vulnerable Leaders’ Event on Wednesday. The world is at the edge of the cliff of surpassing the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Centigrade limit, Hasina said adding the G20 countries which account for more than three-quarters of global emissions, are expected to have clear and definite NDC for effective reduction of their emission. If the current trend of sea-level rise is continuing, most of the island and coastal countries will go under water making millions of people climate refugees with the world having no capacity to shelter them, she said. “Realising this, Bangladesh parliament declared a “Planetary Emergency” and called on the world to work “on a war-footing’’ to stop climate change. Following COP 26’s postponement, the decisive hour now falls at midnight on December the 31st this year when we declare our extended NDCs. This is practically our “survival deadline,’’ the prime minister said. “We should also ensure that at least 100 billion US dollars a year are available to developing countries for mitigation, adaptation and disaster response and recovery,” Hasina said.

Some of these details, at first glance, are amusing. Trump lamented when Twitter, the social media platform on which he dispenses Pez-sized pellets of discourtesy, raised the maximum size of an individual tweet from 140 to 280 characters because, he is quoted as saying, “I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.” Somewhere in heaven, Papa is wondering if he can’t self-destruct all over again. It is stranger still to learn that Trump orders his most popular tweets printed out, so that he can study them. What lesson has he learned? That his most effective tweets are often the most unhinged. He is a focus group of one, thriving on the smell of his own sulphur. Reince Priebus, his former chief of staff, calls the presidential bedroom, where Trump goes to tweet, “the devil’s workshop,” and early mornings and Sunday nights, when Trump is at loose ends, “the witching hour.” Some in the White House have tried to tone down the president’s online effusions, but that idea seems to have been jettisoned in the havoc. His advisers are viewed in mostly pitiless terms by Woodward. “Trump had failed the President Lincoln test,” he writes. “He had not put a team of political rivals or competitors at the table.” Woodward vividly quotes Priebus on the chaos of the White House’s decision-making. “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.” “Fear” is a typical Woodward book in that named sources for scenes, thoughts and quotations appear only sometimes. Woodward has never been a graceful writer, but the prose here is unusually wooden. It’s as if he wants to make a statement that, at this historical juncture, simple factual pine-board competence should suffice. Critic Clive James once complained that Woodward “checks his facts until they weep with boredom.” Well, fact-checking and boredom seem sexy again. Even weeping is making a comeback. Woodward dispenses in “Fear” with most of the small human details that brightened his earlier books. There is no moment like the one in “Bush at War” (2002) in which George W Bush said to a Navy steward on duty in the West Wing, “Ferdie, I want a hamburger.” Woodward keeps the scene-setting to a minimum. Those he does set tend to be around policy disputes over North Korea, Afghanistan, tax reform, trade and tariffs, and the Paris climate agreement, among other issues. Woodward’s subjects have always been able to trade access for spotlight and some sympathy in his books. Among the primary sources for this book are clearly Priebus; Gary Cohn, Trump’s former chief economic adviser; and Rob Porter, Trump’s former staff secretary. There are terrifying scenes in which Cohn and Porter conspire to keep certain documents out of Trump’s reach. One of these would have withdrawn the United States from a crucial trade agreement with South Korea. Another would have pulled the country from the North American Free Trade Agreement. Describing one of these moments, Woodward writes: “The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.” Trump rarely realises when things go missing, Woodward suggests. Though he does quote him shouting, like a boy king, “Bring me my tariffs!” Cohn is in some ways this book’s moral centre. If this were a first-person novel, he would be its narrator. He is shocked at every turn by Trump’s lack of knowledge and utter lack of interest in learning anything at all. It was pointless to prepare a presentation of any sort for him. Cohn and Jim Mattis, the secretary of defence, had “several quiet conversations” about what they called “The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.” Trump is quoted saying feckless things like, about the war in Afghanistan, “You should be killing guys. You don’t need a strategy to kill people.” Many insults are flung in “Fear,” sometimes behind backs, sometimes right in the kisser. Most are from Trump. He said to Porter about Priebus: “He is like a little rat. He just scurries around. You don’t even have to pay any attention to him.” He calls Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in Porter’s presence, “mentally retarded” and mocks his accent. John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, is quoted as saying about the president, in a meeting, “He is an idiot. It is pointless to try to convince him of anything. He has gone off the rails. We are in crazytown.” Mike Pence, the vice president, comes off as a glorified golf caddy who doesn’t want to rock the boat lest Trump tweet something mean about him. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, simmers frequently in this book’s background. About Melania Trump, Bannon says: “Behind the scenes she is a hammer.” Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are seen by nearly all parties as pointless. “They were like a posse of second-guessers, hovering, watching,” Woodward writes. He does describe how Ivanka got her father to talk to Al Gore about climate change. Robert Mueller’s investigation rattles Trump to his core in “Fear.” Woodward suggests that the president is right, at least in one regard, to be aggrieved. The intelligence report from the CIA, the National Security Agency, the FBI and others about Russian interference in the 2016 election was an airtight document, he says. Why then did James Comey, then the FBI director, also introduce the so-called Steele dossier? “It would be as if I had reported and written one of the most serious, complex stories for The Washington Post that I had ever done,” Woodward writes, “and then provided an appendix of unverified allegations. Oh, by the way, here is a to-do list for further reporting, and we’re publishing it.” There is a strong sense here of the clock ticking. John M Dowd, Trump’s former lawyer, does not think Trump is mentally capable of testifying to the special counsel. “Don’t testify,” he is quoted as saying. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.” Trump declined to be interviewed for this book, Woodward writes in a note to readers. But the book’s title is from a quote Trump delivered in a 2016 interview with Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Robert Costa: “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.” If this book has a single point to drive home, it is that the president of the United States is a congenital liar. I wish “Fear” had other points to make. I wanted more context, more passion, a bit of irony and certainly more simple history. Surely Woodward, of all people, has worthwhile comparisons to make between Trump and Richard Nixon. But this is not Woodward’s way. “Fear” picks up little narrative momentum. It is a slow tropical storm of a book, not a hurricane. You turn the pages because Woodward, as he accumulates the queasy-making details, delivers on the promise of his title. © 2018 New York Times News Service

Cameron wants to launch the strikes as soon as possible against Islamic State in Syria, convinced Britain can no longer "sub-contract" its security to other countries after the group said it was behind last month's Paris attacks. But his push to win approval for the action in the House of Commons on Wednesday, avoiding a repeat of a damaging defeat in 2013 on a motion to strike Syria, has deepened divisions in the Labour Party. New Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accused Cameron of rushing to war, and appealed to those Labour lawmakers who favour the motion to "think again ... and please cast your vote against supporting this government's military endeavours in Syria". Cameron said his cabinet had agreed the motion on extending air strikes to Syria from Iraq, where British warplanes have been bombing targets since Sept. 30 last year. "That motion talked about, yes, the necessity of taking military action against ISIL (Islamic State) in Syria as well as in Iraq but it is part of a broader strategy," he said in a televised statement, adding that the debate in parliament would be thorough and would last 10-1/2 hours. Asked about the prospects for securing a majority, he said: "Let's wait and see." Cameron is all but assured of winning parliamentary approval after Corbyn said he would allow his members of parliament to vote according to their conscience on Wednesday -- breaking with a tradition for leaders to instruct MPs how to vote on big decisions. Media reports say about 50 Labour members of parliament (MPs) will vote with the government, although their leader, a veteran anti-war campaigner, hoped he could still persuade them to change their minds. Corbyn argued that Cameron's case did not meet his party's demands. "I am saying to every MP, you've got to make up your own mind ... on whether we should commit British troops into yet another war in the Middle East with no endgame in sight," he told BBC Radio Two. Many Britons are wary of entering into more costly military action in the Middle East after Western intervention in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan failed to bring stability and, some believe, led to the rise of militants such as Islamic State. British finance minister George Osborne said the cost of extending air strikes into Syria would run into the "low tens of millions of pounds". But after Islamic State claimed responsibility for killing 130 people in Paris, some members of parliament who were reluctant to launch the air strikes now feel they are needed to protect Britain from such attacks. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told MPs on Tuesday there was an "urgent need" for Britain to launch air strikes against Islamic State in Syria for "our own security".

A gunman on Sunday shot interior minister Ahsan Iqbal, a senior member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and ally of ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif, as he was leaving a constituency meeting in Punjab province. Iqbal was recovering in hospital from a bullet wound on Monday. Minister of state for interior affairs Talal Chaudhry said he was stable and in “high spirits”. Leaders from Pakistan’s main opposition parties all condemned the assassination attempt. But a prominent official of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) opposition party said Sharif had created the backdrop for the attack at large rallies protesting his removal by the Supreme Court last July. “We condemn it with full force. But the political climate is being seriously affected by Nawaz’s wild accusations against his opponents and creating tension and anger all over,” said Naeem ul Haq, chief of staff for former cricket star Khan. “So if Nawaz [Sharif] continues to utter poison, such incidents will continue to occur.” Pakistan’s Supreme Court disqualified Sharif as prime minister last July over a small source of unreported income and he is currently on trial before an anti-corruption court, though his party still holds a majority in parliament. Sharif has denounced the court ruling as a conspiracy led by rival Khan, routinely gathering large crowds of his supporters to voice his grievances. Sharif has Sharif has portrayed Khan as a puppet of the powerful military establishment, which has a history of meddling in Pakistani politics. Khan denies colluding with the army and the military denies interfering in politics. Sunday’s attack heightened the sense of unease in the runup to the election, expected by late July. Preliminary reports suggested Sunday’s attacker had links to a new Islamist political party that campaigns on enforcing the death penalty for blasphemy and replacing secular influence on government with strict sharia law. ISLAMISTS DENY LINK A local administrator’s initial report on the attack, seen by Reuters, said the arrested gunman had “showed his affiliation” to the Tehreek-e-Labaik party. “We have got nothing to do with him,” Labaik spokesman Ejaz Ashrafi said on Monday. “We are unarmed. We are in an unarmed struggle. Those conspiring against Tehreek-e-Labaik will not succeed.” Party leader Khadim Hussain Rizvi on Sunday condemned the attack on Iqbal, and said Labaik was in an “unarmed struggle to bring the Prophet’s religion to the throne”. Police said a bullet hit Iqbal in the right arm and entered his groin. They named the suspected shooter as Abid Hussain, 21, but have not officially reported any motive. “Religious radicalism is in his background,” minister of state Chaudhry said, adding that others had been arrested and police were investigating groups that may have influenced the attack. “Such people, on an ideological level, are prepared by others ... radicalism is not an individual issue, it is a social problem,” he said. Labaik was born out of a protest movement supporting Mumtaz Qadri, a bodyguard of the governor of Punjab who gunned down his boss in 2011 over his call to relax Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws. The movement’s protests shut down the country’s capital for three weeks last year over a change to an electoral law which it said amounted to blasphemy. The assassination attempt on Iqbal has stoked fears of a repeat of the pre-election violence by Islamists that blighted the last two polls, including in 2007 when former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed on the campaign trail.

Mankind's closest relatives are teetering on the brink of their first extinctions in more than a century, hunted by humans for food and medicine and squeezed from forest homes, a report on endangered primates said on Friday. There are just a few dozen of the most threatened gibbons and langurs left, and one colobus may already have gone the way of the dodo, warned the report on the 25 most vulnerable primates. "You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium -- that's how few of them remain on earth today," said Russell Mittermeier, president of U.S.-based environmental group Conservation International. Primates include great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas, as well as smaller cousins ranging from gibbons and lemurs to monkeys. They are sought after as food, pets, or for traditional medicines, and a few are still trapped for medical research. Others are victims of competition for living space and resources as forests that make their habitat are chopped down. "In Central and West Africa primate meat ... is a luxury item for the elite," Mittermeier told Reuters in a telephone interview from Cambodia. "Here it's even more for medicinal purposes, with most of the more valuable species going to markets in southeastern China." Sumatran orangutans, one of two great apes on the list along with cross-river gorillas, are also threatened by a pet trade into Taiwan, he added. But just a few thousand dollars could be enough to push up numbers of the most vulnerable animals, said Mittermeier, who hopes publicity from the report will bolster the flow of funds to conservation groups and income from ecotourism. Primates survived the 20th century without losing a single known species -- in fact new ones are rapidly being found -- and should be relatively easy to protect, he added. "With what we spend in one day in Iraq we could fund primate conservation for the next decade for every endangered and critically endangered and vulnerable species out there," he said. CHINA EXAMPLE China's environment and its animals are suffering from its rapid, dirty economic growth that may already have pushed a species of dolphin to extinction, scientists say. But although its Hainan gibbon is thought to be the most endangered of all primates, with fewer than 20 surviving, the country's efforts to save the golden monkeys of remote southwestern Yunnan province have set a global model. "What they have done, which I find really amazing, is they have local villagers following these groups on a daily basis," Mittermeier said. "We are looking now at applying that in Vietnam, in Madagascar and a few other places." He said climate change -- a long-term threat to the most endangered species because it could wipe out the forests they survive in -- could also prove a "magnificent opportunity" if tropical forest protection and regrowth projects were included in UN programmes to cut greenhouse gas emissions. "Most of the primates are tropical forest animals, and tropical forests really have only been under serious decline in the last 50 years," Mittermeier said. "Now we are pushing the idea that if you have so much carbon sequestered in these tropical forests don't cut them down, and compensate those countries which have the largest areas -- which also happen to be the countries that have the most primates."

From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are under extremely high water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have, according to new World Resources Institute data published Tuesday. Many are arid countries to begin with. Some are squandering what water they have. Several are relying too heavily on groundwater, which they should be replenishing and saving for times of drought. In those countries are several big cities that have faced acute shortages recently, including São Paulo; Chennai, India; and Cape Town, South Africa, which in 2018 narrowly beat what it called Day Zero — the day when all its dams would be dry. “We’re likely to see more of these Day Zeros in the future,” said Betsy Otto, who directs the global water program at the World Resources Institute. “The picture is alarming in many places around the world.” Climate change heightens the risk. As rainfall becomes more erratic, the water supply becomes less reliable. And, as the days grow hotter, more water evaporates from reservoirs just as demand for water increases. Water-stressed places are sometimes cursed by two extremes. São Paulo was ravaged by floods a year after its taps nearly ran dry. Chennai had fatal floods four years ago, and now its reservoirs are almost empty. Groundwater is going fast Mexico’s capital, Mexico City, is drawing groundwater so fast that the city is sinking. Dhaka, Bangladesh, relies so heavily on its groundwater for both its residents and its garment factories that it now draws water from aquifers hundreds of feet deep. Chennai’s residents, accustomed to relying on groundwater for years, are now finding there’s none left. Across India and Pakistan, farmers are draining aquifers to grow water-intensive crops like cotton and rice. More stress in the forecast Today, among cities with more than 3 million people, World Resources Institute researchers concluded that 33 of them, with a combined population of over 255 million, face extremely high water stress, with repercussions for public health and social unrest. By 2030, the number of cities in the extremely high stress category is expected to rise to 45 and include nearly 470 million people. How to fix the problem? The stakes are high for water-stressed places. When a city or a country is using nearly all the water available, a drought can be catastrophic. After a three-year drought, Cape Town in 2018 was forced to take extraordinary measures to ration what little it had left in its reservoirs. That crisis only magnified a chronic challenge. Cape Town’s 4 million residents are competing with farmers for limited water resources. Los Angeles has a similar problem. Its most recent drought ended this year. But its water supply isn’t keeping pace with its galloping demand, and a penchant for private backyard swimming pools doesn’t help. For Bangalore, a couple of years of paltry rains showed how badly the city has managed its water. The many lakes that once dotted the city and its surrounding areas have either been built over or filled with the city’s waste. They can no longer be the rainwater storage tanks they once were. And so the city must venture further out to draw water for its 8.4 million residents, and much of it is wasted along the way. A lot can be done to improve water management, however. City officials can plug leaks in the water distribution system. Wastewater can be recycled. Rain can be harvested and saved for lean times: lakes and wetlands can be cleaned up and old wells can be restored. And farmers can switch from water-intensive crops like rice, and instead grow crops like millet. “Water is a local problem and it needs local solutions,” said Priyanka Jamwal, a fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bangalore.   © 2019 New York Times News Service

BEIJING, Nov 29,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A clutch of major emerging economies including China and India have forged a united front to put pressure on developed countries at next month's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. Over two days of quietly arranged talks in Beijing, the countries said they had reached agreement on major issues, including the need for the West to provide finance and technology to help developing nations combat global warming. The meeting was attended by senior officials from China, India, Brazil and South Africa as well as Sudan, the current chairman of the Group of 77 developing countries. China is the world's top greenhouse gas emitter and India is the fourth largest, while Brazil is also a leading emitter, mainly through deforestation. All three, along with South Africa, have come under pressure to curb the pace of their carbon pollution and have announced plans to achieve this. They say steps by rich nations to fight climate change are, collectively, not good enough. "The purpose of the meeting was to prepare for and contribute to a positive, ambitious and equitable outcome in Copenhagen," according to a statement released after the talks, which took place on Friday evening and Saturday. "We believe that this work represents a good starting point and we will continue to work together over the next few days and weeks as our contribution towards a consensus in Copenhagen," the statement said. The meeting in Copenhagen was supposed to yield the outlines of a broader and tougher legally binding climate agreement to expand or replace the Kyoto Protocol, whose first phase ends in 2012. But the troubled negotiations launched two years ago in Bali have failed to bridge the divide between rich and poor nations on efforts to curb emissions, how to measure and report them and who should pay. Talks host Denmark and a number of rich nations have instead backed a plan to seal a comprehensive political deal at Copenhagen and agree the legally binding details in 2010. But some developing nations are demanding a stronger outcome. CALL TO BACK KYOTO PACT Developing nations have also expressed alarm at efforts to try to ditch the Kyoto Protocol by creating an entirely new agreement or cherry-picking from the existing pact and placing the provisions into another agreement. The European Union has said Kyoto has failed in its intended aim of cutting rich nations' emissions and that a new agreement was needed. The Beijing statement said the Kyoto Protocol should remain in force, with rich countries taking responsibility to cut emissions in accordance with the protocol's second commitment period from 2013. Developing economies in return would pledge to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions. The participants, who included Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, worked off a 10-page draft negotiation strategy outlined personally by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the Hindustan Times reported. The newspaper said that Beijing's top climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, would present the strategy in Copenhagen on Tuesday. Global conservation group WWF said the Beijing statement appeared to be a rejection of Denmark's proposal to aim for a political agreement in Copenhagen. "We are not surprised the emerging economies have laid down this challenge for the developed world," said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF's Global Climate Initiative, in a statement. "Quite frankly the Danish proposal is incredibly weak and the developing world governments aren't stupid."

Speaking before a row of flags in his home state of Delaware, Biden urged Americans to have faith that they could “overcome this season of darkness,” and pledged that he would seek to bridge the country’s political divisions in ways Trump had not. “The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long — too much anger, too much fear, too much division,” Biden said. “Here and now, I give you my word: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.” Biden’s appearance was an emphatic closing argument in a four-day virtual convention in which Democrats presented a broad coalition of women, young people and racial minorities while going to unusual lengths to welcome Republicans and independent voters seeking relief from the tumult of the Trump era. The former vice president alluded to that outreach, saying that while he is a Democratic candidate, he will be “an American president.” And in an implicit contrast with Trump, Biden said he would “work hard for those who didn’t support me.” “This is not a partisan moment,” he said. “This must be an American moment.” The party has offered Biden, 77, less as a traditional partisan standard-bearer than as a comforting national healer, capable of restoring normalcy and calm to the United States and returning its federal government to working order. He has campaigned as an apostle of personal decency and political conciliation, and as a transitional figure who would take on some of the worst American crises — not just the coronavirus outbreak but also economic inequality, climate change and gun violence — before handing off power to another generation. That rising generation, defined by its diversity and in many cases by its liberalism, was again in evidence Thursday, as it has been throughout the week, most notably with the introduction Wednesday of Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket. The program leading up to Biden’s address included speakers such as Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Asian American military veteran; Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, one of the country’s most prominent Black mayors; and Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay major presidential candidate. All are younger than Biden by a quarter-century or more. Buttigieg hailed Biden’s leadership on the issue of same-sex marriage in the not-distant past as a sign of how much progress Democrats could quickly make toward building “an America where everyone belongs.” Duckworth, a former helicopter pilot who lost her legs in the Iraq War, used her remarks to denounce Trump’s leadership of the military and singled out for scorn his administration’s tear-gassing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., in June. “Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to call himself commander-in-chief for another four minutes, let alone another four years,” said Duckworth, whom Biden considered seriously for his running mate. The task that faced Biden on Thursday night, and that looms over him for the next 10 weeks, was assuring Americans that he had both the grit and the vision first to topple Trump and then to deliver on a governing agenda that would materially improve their lives. Biden has laid out an ambitious suite of plans for next year, should Democrats win power, but in the daily din of public-health emergencies and presidential outbursts, it is not clear how many voters are familiar with them. The party conveyed its governing priorities throughout the convention, with multiple segments featuring victims of gun violence and people struggling with the immigration system and the cost of health care. Democrats have promised to redraw the country’s energy economy to fight climate change and to build new protections for Americans’ voting rights. Every night of the convention featured front-and-center vows to take on racism in the economy and criminal justice system, and to empower the generation of women whose political mobilization has reshaped the Democratic Party into a powerful anti-Trump coalition. The overarching focus of the party, however, was on defining Trump as an enemy of public health, economic prosperity and democracy itself. More than any other modern political convention, this one situated the greatest threat to Americans’ lives and freedoms not in a foreign capital or a terrorist encampment, or in the executive suite of an insurance company or a Wall Street bank — but rather in the Oval Office, and in the person of the incumbent president. “This,” Biden said, “is a life-changing election. This will determine what America’s going to look like for a long, long time.” If Democrats depicted Trump as an aspiring autocrat, then in their telling Biden took on the role of a sturdy holdover from an earlier government — a chairman of Senate committees, a shaper of laws and a counselor to presidents who is capable of delivering the practical prize of national stability if not a more romantic version of national salvation. For Biden, his speech Thursday night, at a Wilmington, Delaware, event center, was the culmination of nearly five decades in national politics, a career he began in his 20s as a Senate candidate who won a November 1972 election several weeks before he reached the constitutional age of eligibility to serve. After 36 years and two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, Biden finally achieved national office in 2008 as a political sidekick — Barack Obama’s running mate. A child of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, Biden has long emphasized his family’s blue-collar roots in courting a multiracial coalition of working-class voters, as well as more affluent white moderates. In the Senate, he spent decades forging his credentials as an expert on foreign policy and the judiciary, along the way developing a reverence for Washington institutions and old-school Capitol Hill deal-making. Should Biden win in November, he would be the country’s second Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy. He would also be the first since Ronald Reagan not to hold an Ivy League degree. Earlier efforts to win the presidency in his own right ended in defeat and even humiliation. Biden’s campaign for the 1988 nomination collapsed amid plagiarism controversies, and his 2008 bid never gained traction. But this cycle, after eight years as Obama’s vice president, Biden entered the race as the front-runner. He is known to the country as a loyal adviser to a popular president, and as the resilient father of a tragedy-stricken family, possessed of an uncommon capacity to relate to voters experiencing grief. Sen Chris Coons of Delaware, a close ally of Biden’s, paid tribute to his friend Thursday night, describing him as a man of deep faith. “Joe knows the power of prayer, and I’ve seen him in moments of joy and triumph, of loss and despair, turn to God for strength,” Coons said, citing the “nuns and priests right here in Delaware who taught him and inspired in him a passion for justice.” The overt emphasis on faith was striking at the event. But Biden has often cited his Irish Catholic upbringing on the campaign trail, a background that may help him connect with some swing voters in the Midwest in particular. From the start of his 2020 campaign, Biden pitched himself as a sober, seasoned leader who stood the best chance of defeating Trump. It was a message that ultimately resonated with Democratic voters — especially African Americans and white suburban moderates — as he surged to the nomination despite facing great trepidation from younger and more progressive voters, and after stumbling badly in the first two nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Biden enters the general election with a clear upper hand against Trump, leading him by wide margins in most national polls and appearing to hold a clear advantage in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden’s electoral strength is derived mainly from the president’s deep unpopularity: Trump’s negative ratings have climbed and grown more intense since the onset of the coronavirus crisis. And swing voters this year appear far more comfortable with Biden than they were with several of his 2020 primary rivals — or with the Democratic Party’s previous nominee, Hillary Clinton. Yet Biden’s advisers have cautioned that they expect the polls to tighten in the fall, and there is widespread anxiety among Democrats about the possibility that the pandemic may complicate the process of voting in ways that will disadvantage voters of color and others in their urban political base. Even more than on previous nights, reminders to turn out the vote formed an insistent drumbeat throughout Thursday’s program. There were exhortations from, among others, Bottoms; Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the actor and comedian who served as master of ceremonies; and Alex Padilla and Jocelyn Benson, the top election officials in California and Michigan, reflecting Democrats’ concern that limp voter enthusiasm or Republican efforts to obstruct the vote could hinder Biden. “We must pass on the gift that John Lewis sacrificed to give us,” Bottoms said. “We must register, and we must vote.” Up to this point, Biden has taken a less-is-more approach to his campaign against Trump, converting his candidacy into a largely virtual affair and holding only sparse and infrequent public events. And so far that approach has seemed to work for him, much as this week’s stripped-down, long-distance party gathering has appeared to do. While television ratings have been down since the 2016 conventions, the Democratic events have still garnered robust viewership, and the party has avoided any significant technical glitches or eruptions of internal strife. Biden also does not seem imminently inclined to barnstorm the country to make his case. In a briefing with reporters Thursday, Biden’s advisers emphasized that his decisions about travel would continue to be guided by the recommendations of public health experts, and that he and Harris, and their spouses, would campaign virtually in the meantime. Such an approach did not hurt Biden in the polls this summer, but in the final stretch of the campaign those restrictions may complicate efforts to advance an affirmative case for his candidacy. But this week it was Trump who was at times obviously frustrated at his own inability to break into the news cycle: During Obama’s sober address Wednesday night, for instance, Trump posted several tweets entirely in capital letters raging at his predecessor. Shedding the political convention whereby each party defers to the other during the week of its nominating convention, Trump has tried throughout the week to step on Biden’s general-election rollout, so far with little success. On Thursday, he traveled near Biden’s childhood home of Scranton, Pennsylvania, to attack Biden in a speech as “a puppet of the radical left movement” — a label that could scarcely have clashed more with the pragmatic profile Biden’s party has drawn for him in recent days. In his address Thursday night, Biden promised to strengthen the labor movement and roll back Trump’s “tax giveaway.” And he described a “perfect storm” of challenges facing the nation: a pandemic, an economic crisis, climate change and “the most compelling call for racial justice since the ’60s.” “So the question for us is simple: Are we ready?” he said. “I believe we are. We must be.” © 2020 The New York Times Company

Merkel, who is campaigning for a fourth term, can ill afford the images of chaos and disharmony that dominated news coverage of the summit. The summit, which starts in earnest on Friday, is a chance for her to polish her diplomatic credentials but would be disastrous if marred by widespread violence. She met US President Donald Trump for an hour on Thursday evening, but less than an hour later police clashed with anti-capitalist demonstrators near the summit venue, firing water cannons and pepper spray at hundreds of black-clad protesters after they threw bottles. Nearly 75 police officers were injured throughout the evening, with three requiring treatment in hospital, police said. The pilots of a police helicopter sustained eye injuries when laser pointers were directed at them, police said. Protesters damaged cars, set other objects ablaze and threw bottles in roving clashes that lasted until midnight. A Reuters eyewitness saw at least one protester with blood on his face being treated. "Welcome to Hell" was the protesters' greeting for Trump and other world leaders arriving for the two-day meeting. Merkel has taken a high-risk gamble by choosing to hold the summit in the northern port city of Hamburg, partly to show the world that big protests are tolerated in a healthy democracy. Before meeting Trump, she struck a consensual tone, holding out hope for agreement on the divisive issue of climate policy and pledging to broker compromises. She promised to represent German and European interests at the summit, but added: "On the other hand, as hosts we - and I - will do all we can to find compromises." Trump faces a testy confrontation at the summit with leaders of the other big Group of 20 economies after deciding last month to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate deal. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel cited "many commonalities" on foreign policy after a meeting that included Merkel, Trump, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Trump family members and advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. But he told German broadcaster that "clear differences" on climate change and trade continued to divide the two allies. Merkel said there were "various options" that could be discussed, noting that nearly all other G20 countries besides the United States stood by the accord. As the leaders began holding informal meetings, thousands of protesters from around Europe, who say the G20 has failed to solve many of the issues threatening world peace, poured into Hamburg to join the main demonstration. Police expected around 100,000 protesters in the port city, some 8,000 of whom are deemed by security forces to be ready to commit violence. At least 13,000 protesters joined the main march on Thursday, including around 1,000 black-clad and masked anarchists, police said. Up to 20,000 police officers from across Germany are on hand. DELICATE BALANCE As summit host, Merkel must seek consensus among the G20 leaders not only on the divisive issue of climate policy but also on trade - an area fraught with risk as Trump pursues his 'America First' agenda. Indonesian finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said Merkel must be careful not to allow acrimony to undermine the summit. "There is quite a delicate balance that Angela Merkel will have to navigate in a way, because it is not clear that being confrontational won't just create even more of a credibility problem for G20 cooperation," she told Reuters. Merkel earlier said she was committed to an open international trading system, despite fears of US protectionism under the Trump administration. "We're united in our will to strengthen multilateral relations at the G20 summit ... We need an open society, especially open trade flows," Merkel said in Berlin. She and Trump discussed G20 themes, North Korea, the Middle East, and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, according to German and US government officials. Later, Merkel met with Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan, who this week sharply criticised the German government's rejection of his plans to address Turkish citizens outside the G20 event. Trump, who earlier in Poland called again on NATO partners to spend more on defence and said he would confront the threat from North Korea, will also meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time on the sidelines of the summit. Their meeting, scheduled for Friday, will be closely watched at a time when mutual ties remain strained by US allegations of Russian election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and a US dispute over Trump associates' links to Moscow. Ahead of the meeting, Putin threw his weight behind the Paris accord. "We see the Paris Agreement as a secure basis for long-term climate regulation founded on international law and we want to make a comprehensive contribution to its implementation," he told German business daily Handelsblatt.

Malaysia's ruling coalition took 41 of its lawmakers to Taiwan for a study tour on Monday, at a time when opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has been trying to entice MPs to defect in his campaign to unseat the government. Top opposition leaders were meeting on Monday to plot their campaign to oust the government by Anwar's self-imposed deadline of Sept. 16. Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has called for a meeting of his Barisan Nasional coalition on Tuesday to try to deter any defections that could spell the end of its 50-year reign. Anwar's attempt to overturn a political order that has persisted since independence from Britain in 1957 has sharply raised Malaysia's political risks and rattled foreign investors. A ballooning fiscal deficit -- partly a result of spending measures to boost the government's popularity after a general election debacle last March -- has also hit the ringgit currency, the stock market and bond prices. Adding to the climate of uncertainty, Anwar is due in court on Wednesday to face a fresh sodomy charge that he says the government has trumped up to foil his political ambitions. The judge is expected to transfer the case to a higher court. "PSY-WAR GAME" Barisan MPs told reporters before flying off to Taiwan for an eight-day "study mission" that their trip had nothing to do with the Anwar plan. "We are going to Taiwan to study about agriculture," Bung Mokhtar Radin, an MP from the eastern state of Sabah, said at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. "There's nothing political about this trip." He and 40 other MPs left on Monday. Another eight will follow on Tuesday. Barisan has 140 MPs against 82 for the opposition. Lim Kit Siang, a veteran opposition leader, said government MPs were forced to flee Malaysia to ensure that they didn't take part in Sept. 16 "political changes". "The birds have flown," he said, adding that the MPs could be subjected to 24-hour surveillance while in Taiwan with their mobile phones confiscated. A political analyst said the Taiwan trip could provide a handy excuse for Anwar, if he failed to meet his Sept. 16 deadline. "Barisan is playing right into Anwar's psy-war game," columnist Suhaini Aznam wrote in the Star newspaper on Monday. Anwar met leaders of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat alliance on Monday to discuss the takeover plan, his aides said. Anwar was due to issue a statement afterward. Anwar, a former deputy prime minister, was sacked in 1998 during the Asian financial crisis and later jailed for six years on sodomy and corruption charges. He won a by-election last month that allowed him to re-enter parliament, putting him in position to become prime minister if the opposition alliance wins power.

This is the ocean current that takes tropic heat northward, and then grows cold, dives to the ocean floor, and runs southward. And it is the current that delivers the heat that, for example, keeps the British Isles 5°C warmer than their latitude might dictate. Carbon dioxide absorbs heat reflected from the rocks. And the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet will become. For two centuries, humans have been burning fossil fuels and putting ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. The average planetary temperatures, so far, have climbed about 1°C. If CO2 levels double, temperatures will climb a lot higher. For the first 300 years after the carbon dioxide doubling, nothing much will happen. But then there will be a sweeping drop in temperatures over the north Atlantic. New climate models The rain belt will migrate south over the tropical ocean, the sea ice will expand to cover the waters to the south of Greenland, and around Iceland and Norway, and Britain and parts of northern Europe will become much colder. That is what a new climate model predicts. Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, US, and colleagues report in Science Advances journal that the outcome depends on just how computer simulations are framed. At the moment, the standard climate models predict that the paradox of a colder Europe in a warmer world won’t happen. But the new analysis, the authors say, corrects for biases that predict only moderate changes in what climate scientists call the “Ocean Conveyor”. “Prominent cooling over the northern North Atlantic and neighbouring areas . . . has enormous implications for regional and global climate change” And their corrected version suggests a much more apocalyptic outcome: a slow-burning horror story of fire and ice. “In current models, AMOC is systematically biased to be in a stable regime,” says the study’s lead author, Wei Liu, a Yale University postdoctoral associate who began his research as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and continued it at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “A bias-corrected model predicts a future AMOC collapse with prominent cooling over the northern North Atlantic and neighbouring areas. This has enormous implications for regional and global climate change.” This is the scenario painted luridly in the 2004 disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow. Although the film is science fiction, scientists have been worrying about the stability of the Ocean Conveyor for at least a decade. The Arctic is warming rapidly, and the consequences for the continents to the south may not be comfortable. Ocean current weakening Researchers have offered tentative evidence that the Atlantic ocean current could be weakening. There have been warnings in two studies that Europe, in particular, could see a drop in temperatures. Right now, outcomes remain speculative, and there are many more factors to be considered. Even in the worst case scenario, the Atlantic ocean current shutdown will not happen for several hundred years. What the new research really says is that what the computer models predict depends very much on how the data are presented. Or, in the words of the four authors: “Our results highlight the need to develop dynamical metrics to constrain models and the importance of reducing model biases in long-term climate projections.”

Dhaka, Nov 1 (bdnews24.com)—Prime minister Sheikh Hasina sniped at the opposition saying they cared little for the poor people during a parliamentary discussion on poverty reduction strategies on Sunday. Hasina termed the absence of the main opposition BNP 'unfortunate' and said, "They don't have the urge to do something good of poor people. So they did not join. "I'd be happy if they came. They should have participated the discussion on this national issue," she added in her remarks during the general discussion on the draft second Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP-2) in parliament on Sunday. Planning minister A K Khandaker tabled the draft PRSP-2 in the House on Sep 15 for the opinions of the MPs. Hasina spoke the draft for 38 minutes. Twenty-three MPs participated the four-hour discussion presided over by speaker Abdul Hamid. Deputy leader of the House Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury, finance minister AMA Muhith were also present in the discussion. In the beginning of the discussion, the planning minister informed the parliament that the paper would be finalised by December this year. He also asked for specific suggestions from the MPs. "We want to develop the country through the five-year plan. We've already formulated the PRSP and it's been discussed in parliament which is a rare instance," prime minister Hasina said. She said the PRSP will be uploaded on the Internet in Bangla. She touched on measures taken in the strategy paper on development through joint partnership, steps to fight Monga, generate employment for the flood-affected people, tap water resources for environmental development, ensure food security, develop poor-friendly infrastructure and the communication system. The prime minister cited her government's steps of rationing essential commodities for the garment workers, rescheduling school and office times to reduce traffic gridlock and constructing six flyovers and elevated roads in the capital. Power outages have been reduced, but her government still takes the blame due to mismanagement of the previous regimes, she added. Regarding climate change, she said, "The developed countries are to be blamed for this, not us. I presented this before the United Nations and demanded compensation. "We've taken plans to dredge the rivers and allotted Tk 700 crore for the people who may be affected." The prime minister also said about her government's plans to set up multi-purpose cyclone centres in the coastal areas. She asked the people to be alert to ongoing conspiracies and false propaganda against the government, which, she said, can cut poverty if the people cooperate with them. "I want people's assistance. Then I'll be able to build the country as a developed nation overcoming the barriers," Hasina said Referring to the recent bomb attack on AL MP Sheikh Fazle Noor Taposh, she said, "Conspiracies are taking place to plunge the country into chaos by carrying out terrorist acts. "But the people have confidence in us." "I would face any circumstances while working for the people's welfare," she asserted.

The conference president entered the plenary hall to a huge applause as the Cancún climate summit gets close to its end with a 'striking balance'. The no-nonsense Mexican foreign minister had been able to strike the balance that many countries had sought for. Patricia Espinosa was visibly embarrassed when ministers, bureaucrats, activists, journalists and officials refused to stop clapping. She had been able to produce a text that was, more or less, accepted by all parties. Without the pressure o strike a deal, almost all of the 190 countries rallied behind her and extended their support for the text. Even the ever critical Venezuelan delegation could not hold back its pleasure. They said this was an "amazing text" with "striking balance". The main hall reverberated with the sounds of applause as delegations took the floor one after another only to praise or commend Espinosa's efforts and extend their strong support to the text. Greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere which raises temperatures leading to climate change through what are called extreme climate events like more frequent and intense floods and cyclones, rising sea level and causing persistent droughts. Experts say a temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius would result in 'catastrophic' climate change which may not be reversed. Espinosa put an end to the two-hour informal plenary just after Friday midnight and asked delegations to sit in their respective working groups in order to get through the tedious but necessary process. Those meetings will be followed by a closing plenary that will finally adopt the outcome barring any surprises. Mihir Kanti Majumder, Bangladesh's environment secretary, said the draft signified progress from what had come out of the last climate summit at Copenhagen. "This draft is acceptable and I think we can work on it and take it further," he said before hurrying off to the plenary on Friday evening. But another delegate of the Bangladesh contingent said the text was not at all the end and it is just the beginning as Espinosa had suggested during her closing speech. She said, "This conference is not an end but the beginning of a new stage of cooperation on solid basis." The delegate pointed out that there were several things that did not suit Bangladesh's negotiating position or the larger interests of the poor and vulnerable countries. "But all the parties agreed to it in the spirit of compromise." Ziaul Hoque Mukta, policy and advocacy manager for Oxfam Bangladesh who is also on the national delegation, said although not fully complete, "It has much potential to be developed." Mukta agreed that the text had the foundations necessary to launch serious negotiations by next year in Durban, South Africa where the next summit of the UN climate convention is scheduled to be held. Saleemul Huq, a senior researcher for the International Institute for Environmental Development, in his initial reaction to bdnews24.com approved the content of the text and the manner in which it was produced. He echoed points of the minister saying, "Two specific points that could be mentioned are the Adaptation Committee and the Green Climate Fund." Also a lead author of assessment reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top body on climate change, he said these two things were the demands of the poor and vulnerable countries. "We are getting that here." He went on: "It's a clean text. The Mexicans have run the negotiations really well. It was open and transparent." Already having had a cursory look, the long-time insider to complex climate negotiations approvingly said about the 32-page document, "They have been able to remove all the brackets." Huq said the text was a certain progress on Copenhagen and pointed out that it reflects "compromise". "Everybody does not have everything, they all have something." "But more importantly it brings back trust in the process and each other," he said. The glee and delight among participants clearly indicated that they were thankful to Espinosa for that particular reason — for bringing back their trust in the multilateral process.

Now, in part because of the war in Ukraine, Qatar’s clout is set to grow even more. As the United States and its European allies seek to deprive Russia of its oil and gas income, the West has looked to Qatar as an alternative source of fuel to warm European homes, cook food and generate electricity. And although Qatar cannot immediately ship much extra gas to Europe because most of its production is under contract to go elsewhere, it is investing tens of billions of dollars to increase production by about two-thirds by 2027. About half of that gas could go to Europe, Saad Al-Kaabi, Qatar’s minister of state for energy affairs and the head of the state-owned QatarEnergy petroleum company, said in an interview. “The stars are all aligned for Qatar to become a very significant LNG exporter to Europe,” said Cinzia Bianco, a Gulf research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, referring to liquefied natural gas, a shippable form of the commodity. The uptick in interest in Qatar’s gas is a sharp turnaround for a country that in recent years got used to Western leaders bashing fossil fuels for their contribution to climate change. Now, those leaders are scrambling for gas. Countries that were saying, “‘We don’t need oil and gas companies, and these guys are demonized, bad guys,’” Al-Kaabi said, are now saying, “‘Help us, produce more, you are not producing enough,’ and so on.” That shift was driven by President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in February. Suddenly, European countries, which received nearly half of their gas imports from Russia last year, were scrambling to find other fuel sources in order to defund Putin’s war machine. That has given Qatar, which vies with the United States and Australia for the spot of the world’s top LNG exporter, a bump in popularity. In January, as fears rose of a Russian invasion, President Joe Biden declared Qatar a “major non-NATO ally” and hosted Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Qatar’s emir, at the White House, the first Gulf head of state given such a welcome by Biden. Energy issues were high on the agenda. After the war began, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain called Sheikh Tamim to discuss “ensuring sustainable gas supplies” and other issues, and senior European leaders flew to Qatar to discuss energy, including Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat. So did Robert Habeck, Germany’s minister for the economy and climate change, to sound out a gas deal with Qatar. But Qatar’s ability to ease Europe’s gas woes in the near term are limited. About 85% of its current production is locked in to long-term agreements, mostly in Asia, Al-Kaabi said. Skyscrapers in Doha, Qatar, Aug. 26, 2021. The New York Times “These hard-wired contracts I can’t do anything with,” he said. “Sanctity of contracts and our reputation is paramount, so I can’t go to a customer and say, ‘Sorry, I need to help Europeans.’” Skyscrapers in Doha, Qatar, Aug. 26, 2021. The New York Times But in the coming years, Qatar’s investments in LNG are likely to combine with the energy upheaval caused by the war in Ukraine to bind the tiny desert state more closely to Europe, and win plaudits from Washington along the way, analysts said. Years before the war began, Qatar started a project with an estimated cost of $45 billion to build two new gas plants and increase annual output capacity by 64%, Al-Kaabi said. That gas will start entering the market in 2026 and will most likely be split between buyers in Europe and Asia. In the meantime, Qatar has invested in terminals to receive LNG in Belgium, Britain and France. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, had no LNG facilities before the war but has allocated more than $3 billion to acquire four floating terminals. France and Italy are exploring similar options. That natural gas would make Qatar, a wind-swept peninsula in the Persian Gulf about the size of Delaware, one of the world’s richest countries per capita was not always obvious. When it discovered natural gas in its territorial waters in the early 1970s, officials were disappointed it was not oil, which was transforming the economies of nearby Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, said David Roberts, an associate professor of international relations at King’s College London. “For the first 20 years, no one wanted it because no one envisioned a market for it,” Roberts said. So they mostly left it in the ground. Then technological advances provided an opening. In the 1990s, Qatar and international partners poured billions of dollars into creating a LNG industry. Previously, natural gas was transported by pipeline, limiting how far away it could be sold. But when it was cooled to 260 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the gas liquefied and shrank in volume, meaning large quantities could be transported around the globe on ships and converted back into gas at the destination. LNG was seen as a costly, risky bet at the time, but the market for the new fuel, which releases fewer emissions than other fossil fuels, grew, and Qatar hit it big. “You see Qatari dominance in the market just going up and up and up,” Roberts said, “and they built the best and cheapest LNG operation going.” That sent cash gushing into Qatar’s economy, giving its 2.5 million people, only 300,000 of whom are citizens, one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. The capital, Doha, boomed, sprouting crops of steel and glass skyscrapers and an array of luxury hotels and shopping malls. The country’s sovereign wealth fund swelled, snapping up stakes in major companies and key properties in London, New York and other global cities. This year, Qatar will host the soccer World Cup, allowing it to show itself off to an expected 1.5 million soccer fans from around the world. Qatar has used its wealth to play an outsize role in regional politics. It bankrolls Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite network, which has criticised Qatar’s rivals and cheered on protest movements and rebel groups across the region during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. It maintains diplomatic relations with groups and countries that hate one another, allowing it to work as a mediator. In addition to numerous Western energy companies, Qatar hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East but also maintains close ties with Iran, with whom it shares its offshore gas field. Last week, Sheikh Tamim met with Iranian officials in Tehran to push forward negotiations about reviving the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, a priority for the Biden administration. Qatar hosts top officials from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, and the Taliban. Last year, it won praise from the Biden administration for helping with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan by welcoming Americans and American partners exiting Afghanistan. “The Qataris have gotten way more influence than anybody would have imagined,” said Jim Krane, who researches energy politics at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “They have parlayed natural gas into all sorts of soft power.” How Qatar will wield its clout in the future is an open question, but for the moment, it is basking in the international attention earned by its gas. During a visit to Ras Laffan Industrial City in the country’s northeast, QatarEnergy officials proudly pointed out the two plants that had been processing gas for sale since the 1990s and described future expansion plans. On vast plots of empty sand there would be two new plants, they said, and a petrochemical factory. Inside the port, six huge gas tanker ships were docked to load LNG. Many more were waiting out at sea for their turn, said Mohammed Al-Mohannadi, a cargo administration supervisor at the port. “All the magic happens here,” he said. Al-Kaabi, too, was clearly pleased that gas is back in fashion. For years before the war in Ukraine, he said, he had been in talks with major German companies about building terminals to receive LNG in Germany, but the German government had not provided the necessary approvals. After the war started, however, Germany’s energy minister flew into Doha with the companies’ chief executives and said the government would push the projects forward. “The government now has changed 180 degrees,” Al-Kaabi said. If Germany was ready to approve the projects, he recalled telling the minister, “we are ready to tango.” © 2022 The New York Times Company

Within a few years he moved from abstraction to graffiti, which fascinated de Kooning, recalled Haze, 59, who grew up in Manhattan. She told him that artists have to follow their muses in each moment. By the early 1980s, he became part of Soul Artists, an influential New York City graffiti collective, and exhibited alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both friends, at MoMA PS1. He showed at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery and later sent his graphic nonfigurative paintings around the world. Rejecting a life of total artist isolation, he formed a thriving design business with clients including the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and LL Cool J. In recent years he has designed clothes and spaces for Nike and the Standard Hotel. And in 2013 he married actress Rosie Perez and led a highly collaborative and social life. But all that changed when he started his artist’s residency at the Elaine de Kooning house in December. “I came out here with the goal of relearning how to paint,” he said from a studio with a massive window wall looking out at the barren woods in East Hampton. Dozens of his freshly painted views of the studio — in shades of gray — contrasted with de Kooning’s old colour-saturated portrait of Haze and his sister on one wall. His own earliest abstract canvases in rich hues, painted as a child under her tutelage, stood out on another. In between was his striking new portrait of de Kooning, hair as wild as her eyes and one hand holding a cigarette. Over the course of months, with many nights of painting through dawn, “going down a rabbit hole and ending up in such a pure state,” he said, he could feel de Kooning’s spirit — she died in 1989 — guiding him to paint people, starting with himself. “But it wasn’t until now that I felt I deserved to paint Elaine,” he said. “These last few weeks alone I really turned a corner.” Many people have turned all kinds of corners in the weeks since quarantine began, facing isolation with nothing but their own inner creative resources to help shape their days. For many artists, writers and composers who have been awarded prestigious residencies to isolate themselves in remote places and sometimes in punishing climates, it is a coveted situation. But if, as Matisse put it, “creativity takes courage,” the extra isolation during a pandemic can start to wear away at even the most stoic artists. “If you’re not used to it, it can be a little crippling,” said Pat Phillips, who has a painting residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for seven months in the offseason, when the summer resort town can feel like the end zone of a very cold and dark world. “There’s nothing else to do here but get together, so the enforced extra isolation right now is tough.” His long days are, at least, softened by the presence of his wife, artist Coady Brown, who is also a fellow. (They’re called “bedfellows.”) But the usual community interactions and events like readings have been cancelled. Dune walks and potluck dinners made with local clams are out for now too. “The group of residents this year was very social, but now they’re isolated,” said Richard MacMillan, the organisation’s executive director, who decided to keep things running through the quarantine months. Many residency programs have not — the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Vermont Studio Center, Ucross in Wyoming, the American Academy in Rome and Watermill Center, among others, shut down. So did Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Meanwhile, a handful of residency programs — Djerassi in California and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska among them — were able to remain open into April and even beyond with new rules to keep things safe. “The last month became extremely distracting with all the news,” said Paolo Arao, a Brooklyn artist who just returned from a three-month residency at Bemis. “But Nebraska had very few COVID cases, so it felt safer than home.” The Elaine de Kooning House residency seems especially well designed for sheltering in place. It hosts just one artist — Haze the past few months with a single staff member on the other side of the building who left meals and fresh-baked cookies. “Eric often works through the night while I am up during the day,” Katherine McMahon, the director of programming, said in early April before the artist left to go home, “which is helpful in the age of self-quarantine to minimise interactions.” She would wave and chat from a safe distance when Haze, often in a daze from his painting marathons, stepped outside splattered in paint for a cigarette before going back to work. “I promised my wife I’d quit when I get home,” he said at the time. “But right now, it would be too distracting and take me out of the zone.” On an early April Wednesday, as the pandemic was raging in New York City with reports of constant sirens, an open door to de Kooning’s former studio let in the sound of birds and tree branches creaking in the wind. Haze sat on a stool in front of a self portrait he’d only recently completed of his sultry younger self, leaning against a car, cigarette in hand just like de Kooning in the portrait on the other side of him. Across his studio, his collection of Clorox wipes and surgical gloves (“I have boxes of them and plan to give them away to friends like bottles of wine,” he said) was dwarfed by tubes, buckets and cans of paint, rags, thinner and brushes of every size. “I brought enough supplies out here to paint through the apocalypse,” he said. To his left his large painting of de Kooning painting Kennedy, and his interpretation of the one she painted of him and his sister as children, created a hall of mirrors effect that spiralled back decades, bringing the past into the present. Nearby, a portrait of his grandfather as an immigrant boy was in progress. His time alone in residence, he said, inspired him to remember him vividly as he did all kinds of people from the past. “Elaine has been a spiritual guiding force in these months and I’ve really fallen in love with her since I started coming out here,” he said. “Even my wife knows it.” He said he was planning to return to Perez the following day. But a week later he was still painting through the apocalypse. “As Elaine used to say,” he noted, “obsession is part of the process.” c.2020 The New York Times Company

With stars shining overhead and ice crystals glittering in the air, the temperature had dropped to minus 10 Celsius, or 14 Fahrenheit. Conditions were nearly perfect to harvest fruit for this year's icewine, a Canadian specialty.Malivoire, one of the Niagara region's boutique wineries, picks its icewine grapes by hand. For this annual rite of winter it relies on a corps of more than a dozen volunteers, selected by a lottery, to get the grapes off the vine and crushed at just the right moment.One of those chosen for this year's harvest was Susan Smith, 64, a first-time picker who said she was attracted to the mystique of icewine. Reuters "This experience is something I've wanted to have for a long time," she said. "Having those juicy, fragrant little bunches in your hands and being out under the stars."COMPLEX, FRUITYIcewine is almost a nectar that is rich with the flavors of apple, peach and apricot. Its hints of honey, nuts and, maybe, a dash of caramel provide a refreshing counterpoint to a blue cheese or fruit-based dessert."There is nothing else quite like icewine ... It's a guilty pleasure," said Eric Nixon, who works at Malivoire, adding that the wines - which sell for about double the price of most non-vintage Champagnes - are often associated with special occasions.Ontario is Canada's icewine capital, accounting for up to 95 percent of the country's production, according to Wine Country Ontario, which represents the province's winemakers.By provincial law winemakers cannot put the "icewine" label on their product unless the grapes have been picked in temperatures no warmer than minus 8 degrees C (18 degrees Fahrenheit). And the grapes must have sugar level of at least 35 Brix, which is a way of measuring the amount of sugar in a solution. That's close to the sweetness of maple or corn syrup.Most years harvesting must take place in the dead of night in order to achieve those conditions and the winemaker can usually only give the volunteers a few hours notice at most."We have to take the first opportunity," said Molivier's winemaker Shiraz Mottiar. "You can't be casual about it."In the past, he has called off the harvest even as the volunteers gathered along the vineyard's edge because the temperature had inched above the minimum.This year, with the pickers working at about minus 10 degrees C, sugar levels came in at 37.8 Brix. "Perfect," Mottiar said. "Right where I'm always aiming,"Shortly after Malivoire opened, it began to recruit volunteers to help with the 1997 harvest and to its surprise, there was no shortage of candidates. Most years the winery selects just enough people to do the job, leaving others to remain warm and asleep in their beds - and on a waiting list.In return for their hard work, volunteers will see their name on the back label of Malivoire 2012 Gewurztraminer Icewine, expected to be released in mid-2014.RISKY BUSINESSIt is a risky business to make icewine. Leaving the selected vines unharvested for so long means that they could be ravaged by wildlife or mold or rot.Even in the best years, yields are relatively small, making the juice at least four to five times more expensive than that used for table wines.The price also adds another layer of risk for the winery, especially in a tough economy."Icewine is an expensive luxury item. When the economy goes south, those sorts of items aren't a priority for people to buy," Mottiar said.Icewine is big business for Ontario representing 4 percent of the province's total wine output, according to VQA Ontario, the province's wine authority.Canada has become one of the world's major icewine producers competing with Germany and Austria, where it is called Eiswein. New York State's Finger Lakes region and Switzerland are also among the colder climes that make icewine."Icewine is a significant attraction," especially in January when the Niagara-on-the-Lake Icewine Festival takes place, said Magdalena Kaiser-Smit, public relations director for Wine Country Ontario.OBVIOUS CONCERNClimate change is an obvious concern, and some worry that the Niagara region may grow too warm to guarantee a reliable icewine harvest every year.Barry Cooke, 59, a veteran picker since 2004, recalls that Malivoire's 2008 harvest took place over two days, with a large haul of three different varieties of grapes - Gewurztraminer, Riesling and Cabernet Franc.By contrast, this year's icewine harvest produced a relatively small yield from a single variety. The two hours of picking on that January night produced enough grapes to make about 1,000 bottles."We got half of what we wanted," Mottiar said.Even so, the winemaker said the experience is like nothing else."It comes full circle," he said. "People come together for a one-time harvest and have a celebration afterwards. It's all about the process of making it...The flavor that has developed through the process can't be simulated."($1 = 0.9837 Canadian dollars) Reuters

It is in Egypt's interest to show more respect for human rights, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday, hitting a raw nerve in US-Egypt relations ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama. Clinton met representatives of Egyptian pro-democracy groups at the State Department one day after she received Egypt's foreign minister. "It is in Egypt's interest to move more toward democracy and to exhibit more respect for human rights," Clinton told reporters as she was photographed with the activists. Obama is set to deliver what has been billed as a major speech to the Muslim world from Egypt on June 4, a choice that has revived criticism of the country's human rights record. Former US. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a policy speech in Egypt in 2005 and angered her host when she specifically targeted Egypt's human rights record. After meeting Clinton on Wednesday, Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the new administration was "very much different" from the previous one, using less rhetoric when it came to discussing issues such as human rights. "They also listen," he said. Asked specifically whether human rights concerns would be raised when Obama visits next week, Clinton said it was always on the agenda. THANKS EGYPT Clinton said she planned soon to send US Undersecretary of State Bill Burns to Cairo to open what she called a comprehensive discussion on a "whole range of issues." Clinton came under heavy criticism during a visit to China in February when she told reporters that human rights could not be allowed to interfere with other concerns such as climate change and the financial crisis. On Thursday, she was at pains to thank Cairo for its role in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and promised strong US backing to promote economic opportunity in Egypt. "We've spent, as you know, many billions of dollars over the last years promoting NGOs, promoting democracy, good governance, rule of law," she said. "I want to stress economic opportunity because out of economic opportunity comes confidence, comes a recognition that people can chart their own future. So this is all part of what we will be discussing," Clinton added. The group Human Rights First said Obama's first official visit to Egypt was a chance to chart a new course in US efforts to improve human rights in the country. "What President Obama says and does while he is in Egypt will be a key indicator of the importance the new administration will accord to human rights promotion globally," said Neil Hicks, international policy advisor for the group. In recent months, Egypt's government has taken steps to win some goodwill from the Obama administration, including the release in February of opposition politician Ayman Nour, whose detention was a longtime irritant in US-Egypt relations.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in India on Wednesday and said the world was big enough for both Asian giants to prosper as partners, not competitors. "China and India are partners for co-operation, not rivals in competition. There is enough space in the world for the development of China and India," Wen told business leaders at the India-China Business Cooperation Summit in New Delhi. "The fast economic growth between China and India has been an important engine for the world economy." In remarks seen as an effort to soothe tensions between the two rivals, who still distrust each other, Wen said Chinese companies would sign deals with Indian firms worth more than $16 billion ranging from power equipment to telecoms gear. Wen's visit is the first by a Chinese premier in five years and he brings with him more than 400 business executives. The two countries, home to more than a third of the world's population, fought a war in 1962 and relations remain uneasy despite their booming trade relationship and rising global clout. Both have stood together to resist Western demands in world trade and climate change talks, but they have also clashed over China's close relationship with Pakistan, fears of Chinese spying and a longstanding border dispute. "Impressive business delegations have accompanied Barack Obama and David Cameron, but when the Wen circus rolls into town with 100 of China's top tycoons, the red carpet needs to be a bit longer," said a commentary in the Hindustan Times. "Let trade do the talking, other issues that add to the trust deficit will hopefully get addressed on the way." Wen is the latest in a series of world leaders visiting India to seek great access to its economy, set to expand by around 9 percent in 2010/11. U.S., French and Chinese leaders have clinched deals worth almost $50 billion in total with India in the past few weeks. Wen announced more Chinese investments in India to assuage the worries of Indian politicians, peeved that the Sino-Indian trade balance is heavily in China's favour. Wen also said he would discuss with his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh ways to substantially increase trade volumes and may open up the Chinese economy to Indian IT, pharmaceutical and agricultural companies. Wen also asked India to ease restrictions on investments, capital flows and the movement of people. India's deficit with China could reach $24-25 billion this year, analysts said. The deficit rose to $16 billion in 2007-08, from $1 billion in 2001-02, according to Indian customs data. India has sought to diversify its trade basket, but raw materials and other low-end commodities such as iron ore still make up about 60 percent of its exports to China. In contrast, manufactured goods from trinkets to turbines form the bulk of Chinese exports. China is now India's largest trade partner and two-way trade reached $60 billion this year, up from $13.6 billion in 2004. Still, total investment by China in India is small, amounting to only $221 million in 2009, representing only about 0.1 percent of China's total outward foreign direct investment stock in that year. That figure is seven times less than what China has invested in Pakistan, according to data from China's Ministry of Commerce. TIBETAN PROTESTS The Sino-Indian trade relationship is overlaid with political and strategic rifts. Beijing's longest running grudge against India is over its granting of asylum to Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in the 1950s following a failed uprising, setting off a chain of events that led to the war between them. Hundreds of demonstrators wearing orange T-shirts with slogans such as "Free Tibet Now" took to the streets of central Delhi, shouting "Wen Jiabao go back!" and "Tibet's independence is India's security". Six Tibetan protesters were arrested at the Taj Palace hotel, after attempting to enter the main gates waving flags and chanting slogans while the Chinese premier was attending a business event inside. "Don't pull me, India is a free country," shouted Tenzin Deki as she was forced into the vehicle. The Dalai Lama is due to visit Sikkim, an Indian state on the Chinese border, during Wen's visit to Delhi, something that could inflame tensions. FRAGILE RELATIONS The two nations have pursued divergent paths in their development. For India, a democracy, economic reforms began only in 1991. China, a one-party state, implemented market reforms in 1979. Although both India and China have said they are exploring a possible free-trade agreement, no real progress is expected on that front as there is some scepticism in New Delhi that Beijing may only want to dump cheap manufactured goods on India's booming $1.3 trillion economy. While the two are often lumped together as emerging world powers, China's GDP is four times bigger than India's and its infrastructure outshines India's dilapidated roads and ports, a factor that makes New Delhi wary of Beijing's growing might. "Relations are very fragile, very easy to be damaged and very difficult to repair. Therefore they need special care in the information age," China's envoy to India, Zhang Yan, told reporters in New Delhi earlier this week. India fears China wants to restrict its global reach by possibly opposing its bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat or encircling the Indian Ocean region with projects from Pakistan to Myanmar. Long wary of Washington's influence in South Asia, Beijing's overtures toward New Delhi also come just a little over a month after US President Barack Obama's trip to India, during which he endorsed India's long-held demand for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. After Wen's Dec. 15-17 visit he travels straight to Pakistan, India's nuclear armed rival, for another two nights.

Now, between the omicron spike and NBC’s decision not to televise the Golden Globes on Sunday because of the ethical issues surrounding the group that hands out the awards, Hollywood’s traditionally frenetic — and hype-filled — first week of the calendar year has been reduced to a whisper. The AFI Awards were postponed. The Critics’ Choice Awards — scheduled to be televised Sunday night in hopes of filling the void left by the Globes’ absence — were pushed back. The Palm Springs Film Festival, an annual stop along the awards campaign trail, was cancelled. And most of those star-driven award favorites bombed at the box office. The Academy Awards remain scheduled for March 27, with nominations Feb 8, but there has been no indication what the event will be like. (The organisation already postponed its annual Governors Awards, which for the past 11 years have bestowed honourary Oscars during a nontelevised ceremony.) Will there be a host? How about a crowd? Perhaps most important, will anyone watch? The Academy hired a producer of the film “Girls Trip” in October to oversee the show but has been mum on any additional details and declined to comment for this article. Suddenly, 2022 is looking eerily similar to 2021. Hollywood is again largely losing its annual season of superficial self-congratulation, but it is also seeing the movie business’s best form of advertisement undercut in a year when films desperately need it. And that could have far-reaching effects on the types of movies that get made. “For the box office — when there was a fully functioning box office — those award shows were everything,” said Nancy Utley, a former co-chair of Fox Searchlight who helped turn smaller prestige films like “12 Years a Slave” and “The Shape of Water” into best-picture Oscar winners during her 21-year tenure. “The recognition there became the reason to go see a smaller movie. How do you do that in the current climate? It’s hard.” Many prestige films are released each year with the expectation that most of their box office receipts will be earned in the crucial weeks between the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. The diminishing of the Globes — which collapsed after revelations involving possible financial impropriety, questionable journalistic ethics and a significant lack of diversity in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which administers the awards — had already hobbled that equation. If the Hollywood hype machine loses its awards season engine, it could prove devastating to the already injured box office. The huge audience shift fueled by streaming may be here to stay, with only blockbuster spectacles like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” drawing theatergoers in significant numbers. “The movie business is this gigantic rock, and we’re close to seeing that rock crumble,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “People have gotten out of the habit of seeing movies on a big screen. Award season is the best single tub-thumping phenomenon for anything in the world. How many years can you go without that?” The Academy Awards were created in 1929 to promote Hollywood’s achievements to the outside world. At its pinnacle, the telecast drew 55 million viewers. That number has been dropping for years, and last year it hit an all-time low — 10.4 million viewers for a show without a host, no musical numbers and a little-seen best picture winner in “Nomadland.” (The film, which was released simultaneously in theaters and on Hulu, grossed just $3.7 million.) Hollywood was planning to answer with an all-out blitz over the past year, even before the awards season. It deployed its biggest stars and most famous directors to remind consumers that despite myriad streaming options, theatergoing held an important place in the broader culture. It hasn’t worked. The public, in large part, remains reluctant to return to theaters with any regularity. “No Time to Die,” Daniel Craig’s final turn as James Bond, was delayed for over a year because of the pandemic, and when it was finally released, it made only $160.7 million in the United States and Canada. That was $40 million less than the 2015 Bond film, “Spectre,” and $144 million below 2012’s “Skyfall,” the highest-grossing film in the franchise. Well-reviewed, auteur-driven films that traditionally have a large presence on the awards circuit, like “Last Night in Soho” ($10.1 million), “Nightmare Alley” ($8 million) and “Belfast” ($6.9 million), barely made a ripple at the box office. And even though Spielberg’s adaptation of “West Side Story” has a 93 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it has earned only $30 million at the domestic box office. (The original grossed $44 million back in 1961, the equivalent of $409 million in today.) According to a recent study, 49 percent of pre-pandemic moviegoers are no longer buying tickets. Eight percent say they will never return. Those numbers are a death knell for the midbudget movies that rely on positive word-of-mouth and well-publicized accolades to get patrons into seats. Some believe the middle part of the movie business — the beleaguered category of films that cost $20 million to $60 million (like “Licorice Pizza” and “Nightmare Alley”) and aren’t based on a comic book or other well-known intellectual property — may be changed forever. If viewing habits have been permanently altered, and award nominations and wins no longer prove to be a significant draw, those films will find it much more difficult to break even. If audiences are willing to go to the movies only to see the latest “Spider-Man” film, it becomes hard to convince them that they also need to see a movie like “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s black-and-white meditation on his childhood, in a crowded theater rather than in their living rooms. “All of this doesn’t just affect individual films and filmmakers’ careers,” Galloway said. “Its effect is not even just on a business. It affects an entire art form. And art is fragile.” Of the other likely best-picture contenders given a significant theatrical release, only “Dune,” a sci-fi spectacle based on a known property, crossed the $100 million mark at the box office. “King Richard” earned $14.7 million, and “Licorice Pizza” grossed $7 million. “The number of non-genre adult dramas that have cracked $50M is ZERO,” film journalist and historian Mark Harris wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “The world of 2019, in which ‘1917’ made $160M, ‘Ford v. Ferrari’ made $120M, and ‘Parasite’ made $52M, is gone.” Still, studios are adjusting. MGM is slowing down its theatrical rollout of “Licorice Pizza” after watching other prestige pictures stumble when they entered more than 1,000 theaters. It is also pushing its release in Britain of “Cyrano,” starring Peter Dinklage, to February to follow the US release with the hope that older female moviegoers will return to the cinema by then. Sony Pictures Classics is redeploying the playbook it used in 2021: more virtual screenings and virtual Q&As to entice academy voters while also shifting distribution to the home faster. Its documentary “Julia,” about Julia Child, hit premium video-on-demand over the holidays. Many studios got out in front of the latest pandemic wave with flashy premieres and holiday parties in early December that required proof of vaccination and on-site testing. But so far in January, many of the usual awards campaigning events like screenings and cocktail parties are being canceled or moved to the virtual world. “For your consideration” billboards are still a familiar sight around Los Angeles, but in-person meet-and-greets are largely on hold. Netflix, which only releases films theatrically on a limited basis and doesn’t report box office results, is likely to have a huge presence on the award circuit this year with films like “Tick, Tick ... Boom,” “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” vying for prizes. Like most other studios, it, too, has moved all in-person events for the month of January to virtual. “Last year was a tough adaptation, and it’s turning out that this year is also going to be about adapting to what’s going on in the moment,” Michael Barker, a co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, said in a telephone interview last week. He spoke while walking the frigid streets of Manhattan instead of basking in the sunshine of Palm Springs, California, where he was supposed to be honoring Penélope Cruz, his leading lady in Oscar contender “Parallel Mothers.” “You just compensate by doing what you can,” he said, “and once this passes, then you have to look at what the new world order will be.” © 2022 The New York Times Company

More than 100 global leaders pledged late on Monday to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by the end of the decade, underpinned by $19 billion in public and private funds to invest in protecting and restoring forests. The commitment - made at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow - included countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which collectively account for the majority of the world's tropical forests. While broadly welcomed, many conservationists noted that similar zero deforestation pledges had repeatedly been made and not met by both governments and businesses. Those include the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), the United Nations sustainability goals and targets set by global household brands. "While the Glasgow Declaration has an impressive range of signatories from across forest-rich countries, large consumer markets and financial centres, it nevertheless risks being a reiteration of previous failed commitments if it lacks teeth," said Jo Blackman, head of forests policy and advocacy at London-based Global Witness. "The question is whether (the) headline-grabbing announcements on deforestation will end up amounting to more of the same empty promises or if they will be followed up with the real regulatory action that is so urgently needed." Cutting down forests has major implications for global goals to curb warming, as trees absorb about a third of the planet-heating carbon emissions produced worldwide, but release the carbon they store when they rot or are burned. Forests also provide food and livelihoods, help clean air and water, support human health, are an essential habitat for wildlife, regulate rainfall and offer flood protection. Last year, an area of tropical forest the size of the Netherlands was lost, according to monitoring service Global Forest Watch. Although deforestation rates have fallen over the last two decades, about 10 million hectares are still lost each year, said Tim Christophersen, who leads the United Nations Environment Programme's nature-for-climate branch. "There is no shortage of these political commitments," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "What there is a shortage of is the money and political will to make them happen." MISSING LAWS - AND RIGHTS The 2014 New York declaration, backed by more than 200 countries, companies and green groups, sought to at least cut in half losses of natural forests by 2020 and then end deforestation by 2030. Kiki Taufik, global head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia's Indonesian forests campaign, said the pledge committed to restoring an area of forests and cropland larger than India by 2030. Instead, forests the size of Spain have been destroyed for commodities like soy and palm oil since 2010. "We need an immediate end to deforestation, backed up by water-tight domestic laws and policies which (can) recognise the land rights of local and indigenous peoples, properly protect forests, eliminate deforestation through supply chains and start to phase out industrial meat and dairy," he added. An additional slew of government and private initiatives were announced on Tuesday in Glasgow to help reach the new declaration's 2030 goal, including billions in pledges for indigenous groups and sustainable agriculture. Fran Raymond Price, global forest practice lead at green group WWF International, welcomed the fresh commitments, saying they acknowledged the important value of forests and other natural ecosystems. But "what we need now is urgent action and implementation of these commitments, coupled with time-bound targets and a common transparent framework for monitoring and verification of such targets. There's no time to waste", she added. Gabonese President Ali Bongo said effectively protecting forest also required overcoming other challenges such as combatting the organised crime rings that help drive deforestation in his African nation. Preventing forest loss "requires consistent vigilance" as well as new technology, cash and skilled forest managers, Bongo said in Glasgow. Ensuring Africans benefit from their forests is also key to their protection, said Bongo, whose country remains 88% forested as a result of concerted conservation efforts. BIG MONEY Under the Glasgow agreement, 12 countries will provide $12 billion of public funding between 2021 and 2025 to help developing countries cut deforestation, restore degraded land and tackle wildfires. At least a further $7 billion will be provided by more than 30 private sector investors. "Funding should ... only reward real and substantial action taken by rainforest countries and those who respect the rights of indigenous people and local communities," said Toerris Jaeger, secretary general of the Oslo-based Rainforest Foundation Norway. He called for immediate action and improved policies to tackle deforestation by all governments involved in the declaration. Globally, about 35% of protected natural areas are owned, managed, used or occupied by indigenous and local communities, yet such groups are rarely considered in the design of conservation and climate programmes, according to researchers at Stanford University. Ray Minniecon, an Australian aboriginal pastor at COP26, said a lack of indigenous representatives in policy planning and negotiations was one reason efforts to protect land often didn't work. "Indigenous peoples know how to look after country, how to care for it and heal it and heal the people. Why aren't we at the table?" he asked. Rod Taylor, global director of forests at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, said that to achieve success the Glasgow pledge would need significant new financing, as well as transparent monitoring, reporting and verification of its goals. Restoring the millions of hectares of land deforested annually would cost an estimated $6 billion per year according to the Center for International Forestry Research. Although having more than 30 financial institutions sign the new pledge is a positive sign, many large banks not involved are among the biggest investors in deforestation-linked firms, said Danny Marks, an assistant professor of environmental politics at Ireland's Dublin City University. "For the pledge to be successful ... these banks must be penalised or even better forbidden to lend to agribusiness companies that drive deforestation and have been implicated in human rights violations," Marks said. LAST DEFENCE To help avoid the new pledge meeting the fate of previously unmet zero-deforestation commitments, governments must implement a step-change in transparency to include full disclosure of forest and land permits and the origins of commodities, WRI's Taylor said. Support for smaller farmers to adopt more sustainable practices is also key, as are trade agreements that promote deforestation-free agriculture and infrastructure, he said. Green groups say production of commodities and minerals drives many natural losses, with carbon-storing forests cleared for plantations, ranches, farms and mines. Environmentalists have also criticised low levels of funding committed by rich countries to help developing nations develop in a green way, leaving many leaders relying on harvesting natural resources to bolster their economies and lift people out of poverty. Gemma Tillack, forest policy director at US-based nonprofit Rainforest Action Network, said inaction by consumer brands, banks, and governments to push forest protection in countries where they procure goods was driving the loss of "our last line of defence against climate change". "The pledge cannot be taken seriously if it does not require all parties to disclose proof of the actions taken to immediately halt deforestation and degradation and respect land rights across all forest-risk commodity sectors," Tillack added.

A co-leader of Germany’s Greens, Baerbock has seen her party steadily strengthen over the past year. But she knows if the Greens are to become a bigger force, they will have to convince voters that climate policy is not an elitist but a common cause, while also addressing their economic concerns. “The lesson from France is that we cannot save the climate at the expense of social justice,” said Baerbock, who at 38 is roughly the same age as her party. “The two things need to go hand in hand.” This is the Greens’ moment in Europe, or at least it could be. The Greens now routinely beat Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives in the polls and are widely expected to be part of the next German government. In recent European elections, Green parties gained significantly in other corners of the Continent, too, winning 63 of 751 seats in the European Parliament, an increase of about 47%. A crop of once radical, single-issue environmental protest parties have emerged as the unlikely beneficiaries of the seismic disruptions to Europe’s politics of recent years. Climate change has vaulted to near the top of voters’ concerns in a Europe encountering record-high temperatures. The collapse of traditional social democratic parties has opened acres of space on the centre left. A generation of younger voters is casting about for new allegiances, and others, for an antidote to the nationalist, populist far right. If nothing else, the Greens now sit astride Europe’s latest culture war. With migration receding in the news, climate change has become a potent new front in the battle between green-minded liberals and populists. As the Greens emerge as the new hope for Europe’s political centre, they have become enemy No. 1 for far-right populists and others who cast their policies as part of an elitist agenda that hurts ordinary people. (Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally, formerly known as the National Front, rages against “climate psychosis.”) In Germany, where the Greens surged to over 20% in the recent European Parliament elections, their campaign posters explicitly attacked the far right: “Hatred is no alternative for Germany.” Britain’s Greens won a striking 12% of the vote, finishing fourth ahead of the governing Conservatives, not only by promoting the environment — but also by opposing Brexit. Even in France, rocked for months by Yellow Vest protests against a higher fuel tax that was ultimately scrapped, the Greens won 13.5% and became the most popular party among voters under 35. With their number of lawmakers rising in the European Parliament, the Greens will have roughly the same influence in the 751-seat assembly as the far-right populists led by Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini. And like the populists, Green parties are networking across the Continent, trying to coordinate campaigns and holding joint party conferences. “The Green idea has been European from the outset, because you can’t solve environmental problems within national borders,” said Baerbock, pointing out that the very first election her party participated in was for the European Parliament in 1979. The battle is playing out not only inside nations but also between them, pitting cities against rural areas, and richer, more liberal northern and western European countries against their poorer counterparts in the south and former Communist East. In southern Europe, with swelling debt and high youth unemployment, Green parties remain marginal. In Italy, the Greens have never won more than 4% of the vote in a national election. In Spain, Equo, an environmental party, has a single seat in Parliament. The same is true in Eastern Europe. Poland did not send a single Green lawmaker to Brussels. Joined by the Czech Republic, Estonia and Hungary, it recently blocked the latest attempt by the European Union to set a target for carbon neutrality by 2050, by appealing to national grievance and historical memory. “Poland could not develop during the 50 years following the Second World War, like France, Austria or the Netherlands did,” said Mateusz Morawiecki, the nationalist prime minister. The proposed deal, he said, was simply “not fair.” Even in Germany, Europe’s biggest and richest country, where the Greens have been the most successful, the Alternative for Germany, commonly known as AfD, accuses Baerbock’s party of being elitist — and hypocritical. “The people who vote for the Greens can afford it,” said Karsten Hilse, a lawmaker for AfD and the party’s environmental spokesman. “They buy themselves a good conscience, because they are the ones who hurt the environment most, they are the ones with the air miles.” “But ordinary people are being told that they are responsible for the impending climate apocalypse because they drive a car,” Hilse said. These accusations play well among far-right voters, not least because for a long time it was true that Green voters were among the wealthiest in the country. But the Greens have been expanding their support. The party won 1 in 5 votes in the European elections. They were not only the most popular among all voters under the age of 60 but for the first time among unemployed voters, too. Still, the accusation of privilege sticks, Baerbock said. The protests in France were a crucial learning moment, she said. The fuel tax, sold as a climate-saving measure, had been perceived as deeply unfair. To those who could least afford it, the tax was seen as a way for them to offset the environmental damage caused primarily by big businesses and the jet-setting urban elites, who increasingly vote Green but whose lifestyles also have the biggest carbon footprint. “There, in a nutshell, lies our challenge,” Baerbock said. “We looked at the Yellow Vests very carefully so we don’t walk into the same trap.” One German Green lawmaker, Franziska Brantner, who had studied in France, met in February with one of the leaders of the Yellow Vests, Ingrid Levavasseur. Like Brantner, Levavasseur is a single mother who grew up in a rural area with poor public transportation. “We discovered that we had a lot in common,” Brantner said. But she also said that she was humbled by Levavasseur’s experience as a nurse who until recently worked in palliative care but could rarely afford new clothes for her two children, let alone a holiday. “We have to make sure that the ecological question does not fire up the social question but that it helps to solve it,” Brantner said. Germany’s Greens recently learned from a study of voter concerns in Europe that the second-most-popular statement among far-right voters, after one on limiting migration, was this: “We need to act on climate change because it’s hitting the poorest first, and it’s caused by the rich.” The second part of that statement in particular resonates, Brantner said. “We need to speak more loudly about this,” she said. Across the French traffic circles where the Yellow Vests gathered and in the streets where they marched, many protesters emphasised that they cared about climate change and “the end of the world” as much as making ends meet at “the end of the month.” “Environmental policies are punitive when they are poorly implemented,” said Damien Carême, the former Green mayor of Grande-Synthe, a struggling industrial area in northern France. “Of course people will shout when gas taxes increase.” “But if we reallocate this money to help people better insulate their homes and reduce their energy bills, everything is fine,” added Carême, who has now been elected to the European Parliament as a Green lawmaker. That is what Germany’s labour unions are preaching, too. For now, the jobs in polluting industries like cars and coal are among the most unionised and best-protected. In the renewables sector, however, unions are still rare and companies often pay little more than minimum wage. “This is a real issue,” said Ralph Obermauer, a longtime Green member who used to work for the party and now works for IG Metall, one of Germany’s most important labour unions. “If you want to achieve an ecological society, you have to take working people with you. That new society,” he said, “has to be fair.” Workers are facing the prospect of job losses and transformation on two fronts: automation and climate policy. Already, automotive parts-makers are cutting jobs as the prospect of transitioning to electric cars looms. “If we don’t take this seriously, we will lose the support of workers,” Obermauer said. And then, union representatives warn, Germany might have its own Yellow Vest revolt. © 2019 New York Times News Service

Japan and China will cooperate in a $300 million project to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from a thermal power plant, a Japanese daily reported on Saturday. Under the plan of the project, emitted carbon dioxide from a thermal power plant will be injected into a major Chinese oil field to extract more crude oil, the Nikkei business daily said. The project, set to start next year, will involve investments from Japanese companies such as Toyota Motor Corp and plant engineering firm JGC Corp, Nikkei said. From China, entities such as China National Petroleum Corp and major power generator China Huadian Corp are expected to take part in the project. The cost is estimated to total about 20-30 billion yen ($190-$285 million), but details on how the costs will be shared have yet to be determined, the daily said. The two countries are expected to sign an accord on the project next week when Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Japan. Hu's five-day trip from Tuesday will be his longest state visit to any one country since he became president in 2003. Nikkei said carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province in northeast China, will be transported to Daqing oil field, located about 100 kilometers west of the plant. The plant emits more than 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year. Daqing produces about 40 million tonnes per year of crude oil, the daily said. CO2 will be used to make crude oil more liquid and easier to extract, resulting in an increase in output in Daqing of about 1.5-2 million tonnes a year, Nikkei said. CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants into the atmosphere can be reduced to essentially zero by using the technology, Nikkei said. Kyodo news agency, quoting government sources, reported on Friday that the two countries will agree to strengthen ties in global warming in developing advanced environmental technology. Kyodo said China will take notice of Japan's proposal for the world to halve greenhouse gases by 2050 and the world's No. 2 emitter was studying measures to help Japan achieve the goal. Japan, the world's fifth largest emitter, is set to host the Group of Eight summit in July. Climate change is expected to be at the top of the summit agenda, with countries across the world working on a new framework to cut global carbon emission beyond the 2012 expiry of the Kyoto Protocol. Japan is promoting the concept of sectoral emission targets for industry, but Europe and some developing nations have questioned the concept. ($1=105.32 Yen)

With oil above $100 a barrel and Arctic ice melting faster than ever, some of the world's most powerful countries -- including the United States and Russia -- are looking north to a possible energy bonanza. This prospective scramble for buried Arctic mineral wealth made more accessible by freshly melted seas could bring on a completely different kind of cold war, a scholar and former Coast Guard officer says. While a U.S. government official questioned the risk of polar conflict, Washington still would like to join a 25-year-old international treaty meant to figure out who owns the rights to the oceans, including the Arctic Ocean. So far, the Senate has not approved it. Unlike the first Cold War, dominated by tensions between the two late-20th century superpowers, this century's model could pit countries that border the Arctic Ocean against each other to claim mineral rights. The Arctic powers include the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway. The irony is that the burning of fossil fuels is at least in part responsible for the Arctic melt -- due to climate change -- and the Arctic melt could pave the way for a 21st century rush to exploit even more fossil fuels. The stakes are enormous, according to Scott Borgerson of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant commander. The Arctic could hold as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits, Borgerson wrote in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Russia has claimed 460,000 square miles (1.191 million sq km) of Arctic waters, with an eye-catching effort that included planting its flag on the ocean floor at the North Pole last summer. Days later, Moscow sent strategic bomber flights over the Arctic for the first time since the Cold War. "I think you can say planting a flag on the sea bottom and renewing strategic bomber flights is provocative," Borgerson said in a telephone interview. SCRAMBLING AND SLEEPWALKING By contrast, he said of the U.S. position, "I don't think we're scrambling. We're sleepwalking ... I think the Russians are scrambling and I think the Norwegians and Canadians and Danes are keenly aware." Borgerson said that now would be an appropriate time for the United States to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which codifies which countries have rights to what parts of the world's oceans. The Bush administration agrees. So do many environmental groups, the U.S. military and energy companies looking to explore the Arctic, now that enough ice is seasonally gone to open up sea lanes as soon as the next decade. "There's no ice cold war," said one U.S. government official familiar with the Arctic Ocean rights issue. However, the official noted that joining the Law of the Sea pact would give greater legal certainty to U.S. claims in the area. That is becoming more crucial, as measurements of the U.S. continental shelf get more precise. Coastal nations like those that border the Arctic have sovereign rights over natural resources of their continental shelves, generally recognized to reach 200 nautical miles out from their coasts. But in February, researchers from the University of New Hampshire and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released data suggesting that the continental shelf north of Alaska extends more than 100 nautical miles farther than previously presumed. A commission set up by the Law of the Sea lets countries expand their sea floor resource rights if they meet certain conditions and back them up with scientific data. The treaty also governs navigation rights, suddenly more important as scientists last year reported the opening of the normally ice-choked waters of the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. "Of course we need to be at the table as ocean law develops," the U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's not like ocean law is going to stop developing if we're not in there. It's just going to develop without us."

China has roared to the front of a green technology race that ultimately could do more to save the planet than the endless hours of UN negotiations, that year after year have failed to deliver an adequate response to climate change. The latest climate talks in the South African port city of Durban, which dragged on in bitter debate on Friday, might manage incremental steps towards a new treaty on limiting global warming. But few expect them to deliver the kind of binding deal that would check a rise in temperature steep enough to turn farmland to desert and sink small island nations. China, meanwhile, has overtaken the United States to become the world's biggest carbon emitter. It has also sped ahead in terms of investment in green technology. "There is an informal green technology race, led by China, that may in the end be even more successful than that formal deal," said European lawmaker Jo Leinen, who is leading the European Parliament's delegation to the Durban talks. "But in order to encourage countries a formal deal may be helpful," he added, reflecting the European Union's view that there is still a need for an international treaty on carbon cuts as the best guarantee of positive change. China invested $54 billion in low carbon energy technology in 2010, compared to the United States' $34 billion, the U.S. Pew Environment Group said. With a pressing need to provide food, fuel and water for the world's biggest population, China more than most can see the value of energy forms that limit the global warming that has already turned tracts of its land to desert. India, the world's third biggest carbon emitter behind China and the United States, has also begun moving towards green development. SUN-POWERED INDIA Like China it is working on market-based trading scheme to encourage energy efficiency and green power and has followed Beijing in setting a domestic goal for curbing its rise in carbon emissions. But India's highest hopes are pinned on a massive solar energy drive. According to the Indian Solar Mission, introduced in 2009, solar power output by 2022 would be equivalent to one-eighth of India's current installed power base, helping Asia's third-largest economy after China and Japan to limit its reliance on carbon-intensive coal. Solar energy is fraught with problems, such as the need for huge initial investment. But that could be a smaller challenge than getting a new binding deal to bring all nations into mandatory carbon cuts under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its companion legislation the Kyoto Protocol. The clause making developed nations commit to emissions cuts expires at the end of next year and debate has raged over how to replace it, with rich and poor nations squabbling over how the cost and burden of climate action should be shared. One obstacle has been the United States, which did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol and has said it will not agree to any new accord unless all emitters are equally bound by it. At state level in the United States progress has been achieved towards emissions trading and green technology. Nationally, environmental legislation has been systematically blocked as President Barack Obama's Democrats and Republicans squabble over green issues. Some observers see that as an argument for an international deal which overrides the whims of short-term governments in favour of the long-term needs of the planet. BROKEN U.N. PROCESS But U.S. academic Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, whose book "The Climate Fix" looks at why the world has failed to address global warming, says the international process is broken. "Today, the pursuit of an international agreement is arguably an obstacle to action," he said. "We have gotten confused about ends and means." The magnitude and urgency of the task called for a business-like response. "Stabilising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere requires that our global energy production becomes more than 90 percent carbon-free. Today it is about 15 percent," he said. "The way to go from 15 percent to more than 90 percent is via technological innovation in energy production and consumption." The UN climate legislation has been designed to encourage green innovation and can continue to do that with or without a new binding agreement on extending binding emissions cuts, he says. But it could manage that without summit meetings, attended by nearly 200 ministers who argue through the night. Even some firm believers in UN agreements accept the UN climate process needs to change. Luis Alfonso de Alba, Mexico's climate special envoy, said he is gathering support for an amendment that would allow nations to force a vote on issues when consensus proves too difficult, in line with procedures in other UN bodies. "It (the UN climate process) is probably one of the worst UN processes in terms of UN efficiency. The UN process can be much better. This is a process which is urgently in need of reform," said de Alba, who is also Mexico's permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. "It takes too much financial and human effort. People meet too frequently all over the world. It has become a modus vivendi for some delegates."

As a winter storm forced the state’s power grid to the brink of collapse, millions of residents were submerged this week into darkness, bitter cold and a sense of indignation over being stuck in uncomfortable and even dangerous conditions. The strain revealed the vulnerabilities of a distressed system and set off a political fight as lawmakers called for hearings and an inquiry into the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the operator managing the flow of electricity to more than 26 million customers. The storm, among the worst in a generation in Texas, led to the state’s grid becoming overwhelmed as supply withered against a soaring demand. Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their electric heaters and pushed the need for electricity beyond the worst-case scenarios planned for by grid operators. At the same time, many of the state’s gas-fired power plants were knocked offline amid icy conditions, and some plants appeared to suffer fuel shortages as natural gas demand spiked nationwide. “No one’s model of the power system envisioned that all 254 Texas counties would come under a winter storm warning at the same time,” said Joshua Rhodes, an expert on the state’s electric grid at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s putting major strain on both the electricity grid and the gas grid that feeds both electricity and heat.” Bill Magness, the president and chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council, said Tuesday that the agency was “trying to get people’s power back on as quickly as possible,” while also balancing the need to “safely manage the balance of supply and demand on the grid” to avoid larger collapses in the power system. Officials said that the council was moving quickly to return power. At one point, 400,000 homes had their electricity restored in a one-hour span. But in a meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, council officials could not give an estimate on how long it would take to fully restore service. The agency “is restoring load as fast as we can in a stable manner,” the council said in a statement Tuesday. “Generating units across fuel types continue to struggle with frigid temperatures.” The sprawling winter storm that has swept across the country this week blanketed much of Texas, with temperatures reaching record lows in many cities. Dallas had the coldest day in more than 70 years Tuesday, with a recorded low of minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The consequences of the frigid weather, and the loss of electricity and natural gas, rippled across the state. In Harris County, which includes Houston, there were more than 200 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, which often occurs when generators are used indoors or without proper ventilation. A woman and a girl died after a car was left running in a garage to generate heat, Houston police said. The operation of farms and ranches was also disrupted, potentially leading to “a food supply chain problem like we’ve never seen before,” said Sid Miller, the state agriculture commissioner. Across the state, highways were iced over and not drivable. Cars slid through intersections in San Antonio, where Interstate 10 was closed, prompting the authorities to redirect 18-wheeler trucks along surface streets. A line of vehicles snaked down the road at one of the few open gas stations. Snacks and bottled water had been sold out, as many grocery stores remained closed. At Alazán-Apache Courts, a public housing complex on San Antonio’s West Side, residents huddled under blankets inside the barrack-style apartment complex. Potted plants wilted under ice on front stoops. Ricardo Cruz, 42, said his family had been without electricity since Monday evening. Calls to the power company, he said, had been fruitless. “I’m kind of angry,” he said as he stepped out of his home to warm up his truck so he could drive his five children and wife around to keep warm. “They can’t do nothing about it.” Electric company officials across the state said the storm had created duelling challenges: the physical damage to infrastructure as trees snapped and power lines fell and also the surge in demand, which prompted rotating blackouts on homes and businesses. Officials said transformers were failing as they were operating with a level of demand usually seen on 100-degree summer days. But instead of a managed package of rolling blackouts intended to be no more than 15 to 45 minutes, millions of Texans went without power for hours or more than a day. Some communities in the Rio Grande Valley, in South Texas, lost power Sunday night and still had not had it restored by Tuesday night. “We know this has been very hard — it’s freezing outside,” Kerri Dunn, a spokesperson for Oncor, the state’s largest electric utility, said in a briefing with Dallas County officials. “But ultimately, we’re doing everything we can to protect the integrity of the grid and make sure this doesn’t come into a cascading blackout or anything with more disastrous proportions.” The crisis in Texas also displayed a costly burden confronting electric utilities and operators across the country as climate change threatens to intensify heat waves, droughts, floods, water shortages and other calamities that stand to further test the nation’s electric systems. Texas’ main electric grid, which largely operates independently from the rest of the country, is primarily designed to handle the state’s most predictable weather extremes: soaring summer temperatures that spur millions of Texans to crank up their air-conditioners all at once. While freezing weather is more rare, grid operators in Texas have long known that electricity demand can also spike in the winter, particularly after severe cold snaps in 2011 and 2018 strained the system. “This is unacceptable,” Gov Greg Abbott said Tuesday as he demanded an investigation into the failures that precipitated the outages this week. For years, energy experts argued that the way Texas runs its electricity system invited a systematic failure. In the mid-1990s, the state decided against paying power producers to hold reserves, discarding the common practice across the United States and Canada of requiring a supply buffer of at least 15% beyond a typical day’s need. Robert McCullough, of McCullough Research in Portland, Oregon, said he and others have long warned about the potential for catastrophe because Texas simply lacked backup for extreme weather events increasingly commonplace as a result of climate change. “What they’ve done is systematic unpreparedness,” McCullough said. “It was not inadvertent. They planned this outcome.” He has debated the issue for years with William W Hogan, the architect of the strategy that was adopted by the state seven years ago. People help a motorist up a snow and ice-covered road on Tuesday, Feb 16, 2021, in Austin, Texas. The New York Times Hogan, a professor of global energy policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, acknowledged that while many Texans have struggled this week without heat and electricity, the state’s energy market has functioned as it was designed. People help a motorist up a snow and ice-covered road on Tuesday, Feb 16, 2021, in Austin, Texas. The New York Times That design relies on basic economics: When electricity demand increases, so too does the price for power. The higher prices force consumers to reduce energy use to prevent cascading failures of power plants that could leave the entire state in the dark, while encouraging power plants to generate more electricity. “It’s not convenient,” Hogan said. “It’s not nice. It’s necessary.” Still, the rules of economics offered little comfort for Andrea Ramos after the lights went out in her home in Austin around 2 am Monday. “We’re living in the pandemic and now we’re also living with a snowstorm,” Ramos, an immigration organiser, said. “I’m angry because we are one of the most powerful states in the country, we have one of the best economies in the country. And yet, we’re not prepared for an emergency like this.” Her discomfort and rising anger mirrored that of thousands of others across Texas who were demanding answers over why they remained in a prolonged blackout when they were expecting to be without power for only a short while, if at all. “I don’t understand how so many people are without power for so long,” said Diana Gomez, who lives in Austin and works for a non-profit group, adding that she questioned how officials decided where to cut off service and what it would mean for her older neighbours or families with small children. “I feel very frustrated,” she said. “I feel very confused — and cold.” c.2021 The New York Times Company

Climate change could bring malaria and other diseases to Britain and trigger more frequent heatwaves that will have huge health impacts, British doctors said on Thursday. With the exception of Lyme disease, insect-borne diseases are largely unknown in Britain. But global warming could change that in a few decades, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA). "Higher temperatures and heavier rainfall may increase the spread of infections like malaria that have previously been virtually non-existent in the UK," the organisation's Head of Science and Ethics, Dr Vivienne Nathanson, said. Hotter weather also poses a significant risk of an increase in skin cancers, sunburn and sunstroke. The BMA said the state-run National Health Service needed to invest in prevention and treatment for serious health implications relating to climate change. Around the world, scientists believe climate change could have potentially devastating consequences for human health. A major study of the global risks by Tony McMichael of Australia's Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health concluded in January that climate change posed a more fundamental threat to health than the economy. McMichael predicted that between 20 million and 70 million more people were likely to be living in malarial regions worldwide by 2080.

Merkel, accompanied by several cabinet colleagues and a business delegation, began talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that will focus on trade, investment, regional security and climate change. Germany is India's largest trading partner in Europe and more than 1,700 German companies operate in the country. German funds will be used to finance several environment friendly projects such as the introduction of electric buses to replace diesel ones used for public transport in urban centres.

“Great historical progress always happens after major disasters,” Xi said during a recent visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University. “Our nation was steeled and grew up through hardship and suffering.” Xi, shaped by his years of adversity as a young man, has seized on the pandemic as an opportunity in disguise — a chance to redeem the party after early mistakes let infections slip out of control, and to rally national pride in the face of international ire over those mistakes. And the state propaganda machine is aggressively backing him up, touting his leadership in fighting the pandemic. Now, Xi needs to turn his exhortations of resolute unity into action — a theme likely to underpin the National People’s Congress, the annual legislative meeting that opens on Friday after a monthslong delay. He is pushing to restore the prepandemic agenda, including his signature pledge to eradicate extreme poverty by this year, while cautioning against complacency that could let a second wave of infections spread. He must do all this while the country faces a diplomatic and economic climate as daunting as any since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. “If you position yourself as a great helmsman uniquely capable of leading your country, that has a lot of domestic political risk if you fail to handle the job appropriately,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of Chinese law and politics at Fordham University. “That’s a risk for Xi going forward.” Xi has cast himself as the indispensable leader, at the ramparts to defend China against intractable threats. The shift has provoked the party cadre — and by all appearances much of the public — to coalesce around his leadership, whatever misgivings they may have about the bungling of the outbreak. “If we had frozen time at Feb 1, this would be very bad for the Chinese leadership,” said Jude Blanchette, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC Xi made his first public appearance in the crisis only two days after ordering Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began, to be locked down in late January. He presided over an unusual televised session of the country’s top political body, the Politburo Standing Committee. By then, thousands of people had been infected and scores had died. According to a lengthy account of the emergency that appeared in People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, he somberly told the committee that he had difficulty sleeping the night before — the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday. Xi also seemed to shrink, temporarily, from his usual monopoly on centre stage. He put the country’s No. 2 leader, Premier Li Keqiang, in charge of the government’s emergency response, possibly to position himself to deflect blame if the crisis worsened. As China got the outbreak under control, the party’s propaganda pivoted again toward Xi, pushing the premier into the background. Li will deliver the keynote report to the National People’s Congress on Friday, but it will be Xi who dominates the acclamatory media coverage, likely dispensing advice to provincial leaders and delegates, and repeating policy priorities. There are few signs that Xi has been chastened by the failures in the beginning of the country’s fight against the disease — nor by the international criticism. “All along, we have acted with openness, transparency and responsibility,” he told the World Health Assembly on Monday. Xi, though, has warned that China faces an increasingly uncertain world. He has often leavened his promises of a bright future with warnings against a possible economic meltdown, foreign crisis or political decay. Last month, he sounded unusually ominous. “Confronted with a grim and complicated international epidemic and global economic developments, we must keep in mind how things could bottom out,” he told a Politburo Standing Committee. “Be mentally and practically prepared to deal with long-lasting changes in external conditions.” Perhaps the greatest challenge involves the economy, which contracted for the first time since China began its remarkable transformation more than four decades ago. The rising prosperity of millions of Chinese has been a pillar of the Communist Party’s legitimacy ever since. In recent weeks during visits to three provinces, Xi has sought to return the focus to the policy agenda that predated the coronavirus. He went to coastal Zhejiang and two inland provinces, Shanxi and Shaanxi. Wearing his trademark dark blue windbreaker and, when indoors, a mask, Xi has visited factories, ports, government offices and scenic spots trying to return to life while enforcing new safeguards against infection. In poorer inland villages, he has lingered over crops of wood ear fungus and chrysanthemum — the kinds of commercial farming crucial to his anti-poverty drive. “Your wood ear fungus here is famous,” he told a clapping crowd of villagers in Shaanxi, Chinese television news showed. “This is your way out of poverty and into prosperity.” But even the Communist Party’s polished propaganda stagecraft showing China overcoming the epidemic can reveal how life remains far from normal. Footage of his visit to Xi’an Jiaotong University indicated that the crowd of cheering students and professors waiting for Xi was arranged while the university remained largely closed. “School hasn’t restarted yet, but here you all are,” Xi deadpanned, drawing scattered laughter from the crowd. c.2020 The New York Times Company

Three people among those injured were in critical condition, according to the Mississippi Highway Patrol. The collapse affected a portion of Highway 26 in George County, about 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Biloxi. "We've had a lot of rain with Ida, torrential," Mississippi Highway Patrol officer Calvin Robertson said. "Part of the highway just washed out." Seven vehicles plunged into the ditch, which was 50 feet (15 metres) long and 20 feet (6 meters) deep, Robertson said on CNN. Ida, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the US Gulf Coast, had weakened to a tropical depression by late Monday as it churned over Mississippi, where the system brought heavy rains overnight. The storm, which deluged Louisiana with rain and killed at least two people in the state, caused widespread power outages across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and prompted rescue operations in flooded communities around New Orleans. Ida is one of a series of powerful storms to pound the US Gulf Coast in recent years. Climate change is fueling deadly and disastrous weather across the globe, including stronger and more damaging hurricanes. On Tuesday, officials warned residents about the hidden dangers of flood waters that might bring wildlife closer to neighborhoods. Sheriff's deputies in St Tammany Parish were investigating the disappearance of a 71-year-old man after an apparent alligator attack in the flood waters brought on by the storm. The man’s wife told authorities that she saw a large alligator attack her husband in the tiny Avery Estates community about 35 miles (55 km) northeast of New Orleans on Monday. She stopped the attack and pulled her husband out of the flood water. Seeing that his injuries were severe, she took a small boat to get help, and came back to find her husband gone, the sheriff’s office said in a statement. POWER, WATER WOES By early Tuesday, about 1.3 million customers remained without power, most of them in Louisiana, according to PowerOutage which gathers data from US utility companies. Entergy Corp, a major power supplier, said it could take weeks before electricity is restored in the hardest-hit areas. Damage to eight high-voltage lines shut off electricity in New Orleans and nearby parishes, and parts of a transmission tower toppled into the Mississippi River on Sunday night. The outages were also straining the major waste disposal systems in the city. As of Monday, 80 of the 84 sewer pumping stations had lost power, raising the risk of backups. The New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board could not be reached for an update on Tuesday morning. Officials in Jefferson Parish in the New Orleans metropolitan area asked residents to conserve water to prevent sewage system backups. At least six large tanker trucks filled with potable water were stationed outside the main campus of Ochsner Medical Centre in New Orleans on Tuesday morning. Compounding the issues in Ida's aftermath, parts of Louisiana and Mississippi were under heat advisories with temperatures forecast to reach up to 105 Fahrenheit (40.6 Celsius) on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. "The heat advisory for today does pose a big challenge," the agency's New Orleans outpost said on Twitter. "While you need to keep hydrated, know if you're under a boil water advisory." Widespread flooding and power outages also slowed efforts on Tuesday by energy companies to assess damages at oil production facilities, ports and refineries. MEMORIES OF KATRINA Ida made landfall on Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane, 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, evoking memories of a disaster that killed more than 1,800 people in 2005 and devastated New Orleans. But a $14.5 billion system of levees, flood gates and pumps designed in the wake of Katrina's devastation largely worked as designed during Ida, officials said, sparing New Orleans from the catastrophic flooding that devastated the area 16 years ago. The state's healthcare systems also appeared to have largely escaped catastrophic damage at a time when Louisiana is reeling from a resurgence of COVID-19 infections that has strained hospitals.

It sounds like a sick joke about global warming, with a series of horrible punch lines: How hot is it? So hot that Inuit people around the Arctic Circle are using air conditioners for the first time. And running out of the hard-packed snow they need to build igloos. And falling through melting ice when they hunt. These circumstances are the current results of global climate change, according to Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit born inside the Canadian Arctic, who maintains this constitutes a violation of human rights for indigenous people in low-lying areas throughout the world. Watt-Cloutier and Martin Wagner, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, argued this case on Thursday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States in Washington. "We weren't going to go to court," Watt-Cloutier said in a telephone interview after her testimony to the commission. "It wasn't about lawsuits and suing for damage or compensation. "It was more about really trying to get the world to pay attention and see this as a human rights issue." Their best hope is that the commission will write a report on this issue, though even getting a hearing in Washington is a victory of sorts. The commission earlier rejected a petition to hear about alleged rights violations based solely on U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases. The human rights commission has scant powers and can do little more than publicize its findings and propose a resolution to the 35-member organization. In her address to the panel, Watt-Cloutier acknowledged the challenge of connecting climate change and human rights, but noted a practical purpose for protecting the people she called "the sentinels of climate change." ENVIRONMENTAL EARLY-WARNING SYSTEM "By protecting the rights of those living sustainably in the Amazon Basin or the rights of the Inuit hunter on the snow and ice, this commission will also be preserving the world's environmental early-warning system." Watt-Cloutier reckons there are millions of such environmental sentinels at risk, ranging from the Inuit to residents of low-lying islands that are subject to sea level rise caused by melting ice sheets. They chose the Organization of American States as a forum because two of the countries where Inuit communities live -- the United States and Canada -- are members. Inuit also live in Russia and Greenland. For Inuit communities, ice and snow are intrinsic to physical and cultural survival, Watt-Cloutier said after the hearing. Even the building of igloos is under threat. "You can just imagine the brilliance and the genius and the ingenuity of building a home out of snow, warm enough to have your baby sleep in," she said. "And now all of that is starting to leave because snow conditions are so changed." Many Inuit live in more conventional buildings, which are constructed mainly to keep the cold out. Unfortunately, with longer and warmer summers with 24-hour-a-day sunlight, this has turned many into ovens, Watt-Cloutier said. For the first time, air conditioners are in use in the Arctic. Seasoned Inuit hunters used to be able to tell where the ice was safe, but because warmer seas have started to melt sea ice from its underside, even the most experienced hunters find it hard to gauge, and some fall through, she said. "The glaciers are melting so quickly that where our hunters used to be able to cross safely, now it's so unsafe that it's become torrent rivers ... and we've had a drowning as a result of that as well," she said. Watt-Cloutier quoted a hunter in Barrow, Alaska, to sum up the impact climate change has had on Inuit life: "There's lots of anxieties and angers that are being felt by some of the hunters that no longer can go and hunt. We see the change, but we can't stop it, we can't explain why it's changing. ... Our way of life is changing up here, our ocean is changing."

WASHINGTON, Thu Mar 12,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The United States sought on Wednesday to play down a confrontation between Chinese and US naval vessels as the two sides held high-level talks on reviving growth and reining in North Korea's nuclear program. Tensions between the two countries rose over a weekend incident in the South China Sea in which five Chinese ships jostled with a US Navy survey vessel off China's southern Hainan island, site of a major submarine base and other naval installations. The United States has said its ship, the Impeccable, was in international waters. Beijing, however, has said the US ship was in the wrong and Chinese navy officers have argued that it had violated their country's sovereignty. There are no signs, however, that the disagreement will derail broader political and economic negotiations as the two countries seek to grapple with the global financial crisis, security challenges like North Korea and climate change. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she raised the issue with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, who was to see US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner later in the day and, in a rare gesture, to meet President Barack Obama on Thursday. "We both agreed that we should work to ensure that such incidents do not happen again in the future," Clinton told reporters after a meeting Yang. They also discussed human rights, North Korea, Iran and the ailing world economy. CLINTON PRAISES CHINESE STIMULUS Obama is scheduled to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao next month on the sidelines of a meeting of the group of 20 rich and developing countries that hope to agree on coordinated steps to spark growth, quell the banking crisis and improve regulation. Clinton described the moves that China has already taken to stimulate its economy as "significant" and praised them as a "very positive step." She said it was important that the G20 meeting yield collective action to spark global recover. On North Korea, Clinton said there was "a range of options," including UN Security Council action, that could be pursued against Pyongyang if it tested a long-range ballistic missile, which she said would be a "provocative" act. North Korea last month said it was preparing to launch a satellite on one of its rockets, which analysts believe could be a test of its longest-range missile, the Taepodong-2. The missile is designed to hit Alaska but it managed just a few seconds of controlled flight and broke apart in less than a minute the only time it has been tested, in 2006. North Korea has been hit with U.N. sanctions for previous ballistic missile tests and is banned from conducting further tests. It argues that the missiles are part of its peaceful space program and it has the right to put satellites in orbit. She also urged North Korea to return to the negotiating table to discuss a multilateral aid-for-disarmament deal in which Pyongyang agreed to abandon its nuclear programs and said she regretted that Pyongyang had not allowed her new envoy, Stephen Bosworth, to visit when he was in Asia recently. HUMAN RIGHTS CRITICISM The U.S. Secretary of State also took pains to try to rebut criticism from rights groups upset by her remark last month that concerns about China's human rights record "can't interfere with" joint work on the economy and other issues. Clinton said that she and Yang spoke about human rights and about Tibet, which this week marks the 50th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule. "Human rights is part of our comprehensive dialogue. It doesn't take a front or a back seat or a middle seat," she told reporters. "It is part of the broad range of issues that we are discussing, but it is important to try to create a platform for actually seeing results from our human rights engagement." The US House of Representatives passed a resolution 422-1 recognizing the 50th anniversary and calling on Beijing to find a lasting solution. "If freedom loving people around the world do not speak out for human rights in China and Tibet, then we lose the moral authority to talk about it any other place in the world," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor before the vote.

The United States will suffer from global warming along with other nations if there is no broader agreement on cutting carbon emissions, the United Nations environment chief Achim Steiner said. He said the United States needed to take significant steps to cut emissions or there would be no solution to climate change, despite an agreement in Bali on negotiations to replace the Kyoto climate pact. Delegates from 190 nations agreed on Dec. 15 to launch negotiations on a new pact to fight climate change after a last-minute reversal by the United States allowed a breakthrough at the talks on the Indonesian resort island. The White House says the deal marked a new chapter in climate diplomacy after six years of disputes with major allies, but it still has "serious concerns" about the way forward. "There is no solution to global warming without the United States, but also the United States will not escape the consequences of global warming without having a global agreement in which all nations are part of reducing CO2 emissions," Steiner told Reuters in an interview late on Thursday. "The bottom line is: there is no alternative to trying to find an agreement in which the U.S., as the major emitter historically speaking and also today, takes significant action." DELIVERING RESULTS Several U.S. cities and the state of California were taking steps to reduce carbon emissions blamed by a U.N. climate panel for warming that could cause seas to rise sharply, glaciers to melt and storms and droughts to become more intense. "It is now really a question of whether the (U.S.) federal administration ... can find a way to see the global framework for reducing emissions being influenced in such a way that is compatible with national interests in America, but also delivers results in terms of actual emissions reduction." The Bali meeting approved a "roadmap" for two years of negotiations to adopt a new treaty to succeed Kyoto beyond 2012. It also widens Kyoto to include the United States and developing nations like China and India. A successor pact is meant to be agreed at a meeting in Copenhagen in late 2009. Agreement by 2009 would give governments time to ratify the pact and give certainty to markets and investors wanting to switch to cleaner energies, like wind and solar power. The deal after two weeks of talks came when the United States dramatically dropped opposition to a proposal by the main developing-nation bloc, the G77, for rich nations to do more to help the developing world fight rising greenhouse emissions. The focus is now on forging an "equitable" framework that works for nations, politically and economically -- which experts say is one of the most complex diplomatic puzzles ever. "Historically speaking, it seems a small hurdle," Steiner said. "But with the politics as they stand, it is still a major hurdle to be overcome."

French President Emmanuel Macron, the summit host, planned the three-day meeting in the Atlantic seaside resort of Biarritz as a chance to unite a group of wealthy countries that has struggled in recent years to speak with one voice. Macron set an agenda for the group - France, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States - that included the defence of democracy, gender equality, education and the environment. He invited Asian, African and Latin American leaders to join them for a global push on these issues. However, in a bleak assessment of relations between once-close allies, European Council President Donald Tusk said it was getting "increasingly" hard to find common ground. "This is another G7 summit which will be a difficult test of unity and solidarity of the free world and its leaders," he told reporters ahead of the meeting. "This may be the last moment to restore our political community." US President Donald Trump had brought last year's G7 summit to an acrimonious end, walking out early from the gathering in Canada and rejecting the final communique. Trump arrived in France a day after responding to a new round of Chinese tariffs by announcing that Washington would impose an additional 5% duty on some $550 billion worth of Chinese imports, the latest escalation of the tit-for-tat trade war by the world's two largest economies. "So far so good," Trump told reporters as he sat on a seafront terrace with Macron, saying the two leaders had a special relationship. "We'll accomplish a lot this weekend." Macron listed foreign policy issues the two would address, including Libya, Syria and North Korea, and said they shared the objective of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Trump later wrote on Twitter that lunch with Macron was the best meeting the pair has yet had, and that a meeting with world leaders on Saturday evening also "went very well." However, the initial smiles could not disguise the opposing approaches of Trump and Macron to many problems, including the knotty questions of protectionism and tax. Before his arrival, Trump repeated a threat to tax French wines in retaliation for a new French levy on digital services, which he says unfairly targets US companies. Two US officials said the Trump delegation was also irked that Macron had skewed the focus of the G7 meeting to "niche issues" at the expense of the global economy, which many leaders worry is slowing sharply and at risk of slipping into recession. French riot police used water cannons and tear gas on Saturday to disperse anti-capitalism protesters in Bayonne, near Biarritz. A police helicopter circled as protesters taunted lines of police. The leaders themselves were gathering behind tight security in a waterfront conference venue, the surrounding streets barricaded by police. SPAT OVER 'MR NO DEAL' BREXIT Macron opened the summit with a dinner at the base of a clifftop lighthouse overlooking Biarritz, where a menu of piperade, a Basque vegetable specialty, tuna and French cheeses awaited the leaders. Adding to the unpredictable dynamic between the G7 leaders are the new realities facing Brexit-bound Britain: dwindling influence in Europe and growing dependency on the United States. New Prime Minister Boris Johnson will want to strike a balance between not alienating Britain's European allies and not irritating Trump and possibly jeopardising future trade ties. Johnson and Trump will hold bilateral talks on Sunday morning. Johnson and Tusk sparred before the summit over who would be to blame if Britain leaves the EU on Oct 31 without a withdrawal agreement. Tusk told reporters he was open to ideas from Johnson on how to avoid a no-deal Brexit when the two men meet. "I still hope that PM Johnson will not like to go down in history as Mr No Deal," said Tusk, who as council president leads the political direction of the 28-nation European Union. Johnson, who has said since he took office last month that he will take Britain out of the bloc on Oct 31 regardless of whether a deal can be reached, later retorted that it would be Tusk himself who would carry the mantle if Britain could not secure a new withdrawal agreement. "I would say to our friends in the EU if they don't want a no-deal Brexit then we've got to get rid of the backstop from the treaty," Johnson told reporters, referring to the Irish border protocol that would keep the border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland open after Brexit. "If Donald Tusk doesn't want to go down as Mr No Deal then I hope that point will be borne in mind by him, too," Johnson said on his flight to France. Johnson is trying to persuade EU leaders to drop the backstop from a withdrawal agreement that was negotiated by his predecessor but rejected three times by the British Parliament as the United Kingdom struggles to fulfill a 2016 referendum vote to leave the bloc. 'NOT THE WAY TO PROCEED' Despite the Brexit tensions, diplomats played down the likelihood of Trump and Johnson joining hands against the rest, citing Britain's foreign policy alignment with Europe on issues from Iran and trade to climate change. "There won't be a G5+2," one senior G7 diplomat said. Indeed, Johnson said he would tell Trump to pull back from a trade war that is already destabilising economic growth around the world. "This is not the way to proceed," he said. "Apart from everything else, those who support the tariffs are at risk of incurring the blame for the downturn in the global economy, irrespective of whether or not that is true." Anti-summit protests have become common, and on Saturday thousands of anti-globalisation activists, Basque separatists and "yellow vest" protesters marched peacefully across France's border with Spain to demand action from the leaders. "It's more money for the rich and nothing for the poor," said Alain Missana, an electrician wearing a yellow vest - symbol of anti-government protests that have rattled France for months. EU leaders piled pressure on Friday on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro over fires raging in the Amazon rainforest. Even so, Britain and Germany were at odds with Macron's decision to pressure Brazil by blocking a trade deal between the EU and the Mercosur group of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said not concluding the trade deal was "not the appropriate answer to what is happening in Brazil now." The UK's Johnson appeared to disagree with Macron on how to respond. "There are all sorts of people who will take any excuse at all to interfere with trade and to frustrate trade deals and I don't want to see that," he said.

The world cannot afford to allow nature's riches to disappear, the United Nations said on Monday at the start of a major meeting to combat losses in animal and plant species that underpin livelihoods and economies. The United Nations says the world is facing the worst extinction rate since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, a crisis that needs to be addressed by governments, businesses and communities. The two-week meeting aims to prompt nations and businesses to take sweeping steps to protect and restore ecosystems such as forests, rivers, coral reefs and the oceans that are vital for an ever-growing human population. These provide basic services such as clean air, water, food and medicines that many take for granted, the United Nations says, and need to be properly valued and managed by governments and corporations to reverse the damage caused by economic growth. More resilient ecosystems could also reduce climate change impacts, such more extreme droughts and floods, as well as help fight poverty, the world body says. "This meeting is part of the world's efforts to address a very simple fact -- we are destroying life on earth," Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, said at the opening of the meeting in Nagoya, central Japan. Delegates from nearly 200 countries are being asked to agree new 2020 targets after governments largely failed to meet a 2010 target of achieving a significant reduction in biological diversity losses. A U.N.-backed study this month said global environmental damage caused by human activity in 2008 totalled $6.6 trillion, equivalent to 11 percent of global gross domestic product. Greens said the meeting needed to agree on an urgent rescue plan for nature. LIFE-SUPPORT "What the world most wants from Nagoya are the agreements that will stop the continuing dramatic loss in the world's living wealth and the continuing erosion of our life-support systems," said Jim Leape, WWF International director-general. WWF and Greenpeace called for nations to set aside large areas of linked land and ocean reserves. "If our planet is to sustain life on earth in the future and be rescued from the brink of environmental destruction, we need action by governments to protect our oceans and forests and to halt biodiversity loss," said Nathalie Rey, Greenpeace International oceans policy adviser. Delegates, to be joined by environment ministers at the end of next week, will also try to set rules on how and when companies and researchers can use genes from plants or animals that originate in countries mainly in the developing world. Developing nations want a fairer deal in sharing the wealth of their ecosystems, such as medicines created by big pharmaceutical firms, and back the draft treaty, or "access and benefit-sharing" (ABS) protocol. For poorer nations, the protocol could unlock billions of dollars but some drug makers are wary of extra costs squeezing investment for research while complicating procedures such as applications for patents. TIPPING POINT Conservation groups say failure to agree the ABS pact could derail the talks in Nagoya, including agreement on the 2020 target which would also set goals to protect fish stocks and phase out incentives harmful to biodiversity. Japan, chair of the meeting, said agreement on an ambitious and practical 2020 target was key. "We are nearing a tipping point, or the point of no return for biodiversity loss," Japanese Environment Minister Ryu Matsumoto told the meeting. "Unless proactive steps are taken for biodiversity, there is a risk that we will surpass that point in the next 10 years." The U.N. Environment Programme says annual losses from deforestation and degradation are estimated at between $2 trillion and $4.5 trillion. Yet this could be tackled with annual investment of $45 billion. Steiner said it was a challenge to have society understand the importance of biodiversity, but to him, it was simple. "It's about your life. It's about life on this planet and it is about what we are doing to this planet with our eyes open today and increasingly being culpable of, being accused by the next generation of having acted irresponsibly and increasingly questionably from an ethical point of view," he said. "Nothing less is at stake in Nagoya."

Not only must Changla Mro and other women of the Mro ethnic group trek for hours along steep paths slicing through trees and bamboo, they must also brave snakes, wild pigs and fishing cats that lurk in the thick undergrowth. But since a water collection and treatment system was installed a year ago, serving about 21 families living in Bandarban district, such dangers have faded into memory. "Two women were victims of snake bites last time they went to collect water at night time," Changla Mro told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Now we have no fear of snake bites or wild animals attacking since we collect our drinking and household water from the water plant." Around the world, deforestation, greater weather extremes linked to climate change and population growth are putting ever larger demands on the world's limited supply of fresh water. Finding innovative ways to capture and conserve it, to keep supplies steady throughout the year, is a growing priority.  Women gather water at the community water treatment plant in Bandarban. Thomson Reuters Foundation Fewer trees, less water Water is a particularly precious commodity in the 5,500 sq mile (14,200 sq km) Hill Tract area of Bangladesh, home to roughly equal numbers of Bengali-speaking settlers and tribal people from 13 ethnic groups. Years of deforestation have stripped away the soil's ability to conserve water, leading to shortages in the dry season when most of the surface water evaporates. This is acutely felt in the districts of Bandarban, Rangamati and Khagrhachharhi where the Mro community live. Kangchag Mro, 50, said she used to spend hours in search of water in springs and streams, and was afraid of catching waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea and cholera. But now clean drinking water gushes from taps at the community's water treatment plant, a small, concrete building topped with a sheet of corrugated iron. "Collecting water in this hilly area is a really hard task. But the water plant makes our job easy," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation with a smile. A hillside reservoir 500 metres away supplies the water plant, which was built with funding from the Arannayk Foundation, a joint forest conservation initiative of the Bangladesh and US governments. The man-made reservoir collects water that flows down from the hills. The water then goes through a pipeline to the treatment facility below where it is purified for household use. The success of the gravity flow water system, which does not require expensive pumps, has prompted plans for a wider rollout. Chief engineer of the Department of Public Health Engineering, Md Wali Ullah, said the government was considering plans to supply water to more indigenous communities in the Hill Tract area. Ullah said his department had already sent a proposal to other related government ministries.  A stream runs in Bandarban. Thomson Reuters Foundation Stepping up forest protection Mro leader Khamchang Mro said his community now realised the importance of forests, which act as a sponge to collect rainfall during the monsoon season and release it slowly into streams and rivers. Community members now have been trying to conserve forested areas to ensure a consistent flow of water to springs and canals all year round. "We reforested the degraded area of our village forests," Khamchang Mro said. "As a result, our village forest has now gained a healthy condition." Farid Ahmed Khan, the executive director of Arannayk Foundation, said local communities had no alternative but to protect their forests. "If forests are degraded, there will be a severe water crisis," Khan warned. Women gather water at the community water treatment plant in Bandarban. Thomson Reuters Foundation A stream runs in Bandarban. Thomson Reuters Foundation

EU countries and European Parliament are negotiating a raft of green measures this year, including a revamp of the EU's carbon market, a 2035 ban on new combustion engine cars, and higher targets to expand renewable energy. The proposals are designed to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels. But their links to energy security have come into the spotlight as the bloc seeks to end its reliance on Russian fuels by 2027 - partly through renewable energy and energy savings - in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Now is the time to be bold and to move ahead with determination with the green transition. Any delay or hesitation will only prolong our energy dependence," 11 EU countries said in a joint statement, seen by Reuters and due to be published on Thursday. "Negotiations on the package should therefore be accelerated and ambitions ramped up," they said, urging countries to get behind the proposals. The statement was led by Denmark and signed by Austria, Germany, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Latvia, the Netherlands, Sweden and Slovenia. Danish climate minister Dan Jorgensen said the countries were calling for a "green road to EU energy independence of Russian fossil fuels as soon as possible." Not all countries agree. Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, said on Wednesday the EU should suspend its carbon market, the bloc's main emissions-cutting tool, in response to high energy prices. Poland has said the climate negotiations should be halted to assess the impact of the war. Russia supplies 40% of Europe's gas. The 11 countries said the dash to replace that with non-Russian gas must avoid locking in emissions, and ensure the EU stays on track to eliminate its net emissions by 2050. Brussels expects the climate proposals, if approved, to cut EU gas use 30% by 2030. A faster expansion of renewable energy and energy savings could also help rein in energy bills, which have soared amid high gas prices in recent months.

The unprecedented fires in the wetland have attracted less attention than blazes in Australia, the western United States and the Amazon, its celebrity sibling to the north. But while the Pantanal is not a global household name, tourists in the know flock there because it is home to exceptionally high concentrations of breathtaking wildlife: jaguars, tapirs, endangered giant otters and bright blue hyacinth macaws. Like a vast tub, the wetland swells with water during the rainy season and empties out during the dry months. Fittingly, this rhythm has a name that evokes a beating heart: the flood pulse. The wetland, which is larger than Greece and stretches over parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, also offers unseen gifts to a vast swath of South America by regulating the water cycle upon which life depends. Its countless swamps, lagoons and tributaries purify water and help prevent floods and droughts. They also store untold amounts of carbon, helping to stabilize the climate. For centuries, ranchers have used fire to clear fields and new land. But this year, drought worsened by climate change turned the wetlands into a tinderbox and the fires raged out of control. “The extent of fires is staggering,” said Douglas C. Morton, who leads the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and studies fire and food production in South America. “When you wipe out a quarter of a biome, you create all kinds of unprecedented circumstances.” His analysis showed that at least 22% of the Pantanal in Brazil has burned since January, with the worst fires, in August and September, blazing for two months straight. A coati burned by fires is treated by an emergency veterinary unit for wildlife in Poconé, Brazil, Oct. 6, 2020. (Maria Magdalena Arrellaga/The New York Times) Naturally occurring fire plays a role in the Pantanal, in addition to the burning by ranchers. The flames are usually contained by the landscape’s mosaic of water. But this year’s drought sucked these natural barriers dry. The fires are far worse than any since satellite records began. A coati burned by fires is treated by an emergency veterinary unit for wildlife in Poconé, Brazil, Oct. 6, 2020. (Maria Magdalena Arrellaga/The New York Times) They are also worse than any in the memory of the Guató people, an Indigenous group whose ancestors have lived in the Pantanal for thousands of years. Guató leaders in an Indigenous territory called Baía dos Guató said the fires spread from the ranches that surround their land, and satellite images confirm that the flames swept in from the outside. When fire started closing in on the home of Sandra Guató Silva, a community leader and healer, she fought to save it with the help of her son, grandson and a boat captain with a hose. For many desperate hours, she said, they threw buckets of river water and sprayed the area around the house and its roof of thatched palm leaves. They succeeded in defending it, but at least 85% of her people’s territory burned, according to Instituto Centro de Vida, a nonprofit group that monitors land use in the area. Throughout the Pantanal, almost half of the Indigenous lands burned, an investigative journalism organization called Agência Pública found. Now Guató Silva mourns the loss of nature itself. “It makes me sick,” she said. “The birds don’t sing anymore. I no longer hear the song of the Chaco chachalaca bird. Even the jaguar that once scared me is suffering. That hurts me. I suffer from depression because of this. Now there is a hollow silence. I feel as though our freedom has left us, has been taken from us with the nature that we have always protected.” Now these people of the wetlands, some still coughing after weeks of smoke, are depending on donations of water and food. They fear that once the rains come in October, ash will run into the rivers and kill the fish they rely on for their food and livelihood. “I couldn’t help but think, our Pantanal is dead,” said Eunice Morais de Amorim, another member of the community. “It is so terrible.” Scientists are scrambling to determine an estimate of animals killed in the fires. While large mammals and birds have died, many were able to run or fly away. It appears that reptiles, amphibians and small mammals have fared the worst. In places like California, small animals often take refuge underground during wildfires. But in the Pantanal, scientists say, fires burn underground too, fueled by dried-out wetland vegetation. One of the hard-hit places was a national park designated as a United Nations World Heritage site. “I don’t want to be an alarmist,” said José Sabino, a biologist at the Anhanguera-Uniderp University in Brazil who studies the Pantanal, “but in a region where 25% has burned, there is a huge loss.” The vast Pantanal wetland in Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has been badly burned in wildfires worsened by climate change. As the worst flames raged in August and September, biologists, ecotourism guides and other volunteers turned into firefighters, sometimes working 24 hours at a time. Fernando Tortato, a conservation scientist with Panthera, a group that advocates for big cats, visited the Pantanal in early August to install cameras for his research monitoring jaguars and ocelots. But he found the camera sites burned. The vast Pantanal wetland in Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has been badly burned in wildfires worsened by climate change. “I said to my boss, I need to change my job,” Tortato said. “I need to be a firefighter.” Instead of returning home to his family, he spent much of the next two months digging fire breaks with a bulldozer in an urgent attempt to protect forested areas. One day in September, working under an orange sky, he and his team finished a huge semicircular fire break, using a wide river along one side to protect more than 3,000 hectares, he said, a vital refuge for wildlife. But as the men stood there, pleased with their accomplishment, they watched as flaming debris suddenly jumped the river, igniting the area they thought was safe. They raced into boats and tried to douse the spread, but the flames quickly climbed too high. “That’s the moment that we lost hope, almost,” Tortato said. “But the next day we woke up and started again.” Tortato knows of three injured jaguars, one with third-degree burns on her paws. All were treated by veterinarians. Now, biologists are braced for the next wave of deaths from starvation; first the herbivores, left without vegetation, and then the carnivores, left without the herbivores. “It’s a cascade effect,” Tortato said. Animal rescue volunteers have flocked to the Pantanal, delivering injured animals to pop-up veterinary triage stations and leaving food and water for other animals to find. Larissa Pratta Campos, a veterinary student, has helped treat wild boar, marsh deer, birds, primates and a raccoon-like creature called a coati. “We are working in the middle of a crisis,” Pratta Campos said. “I have woken up many times in the middle of the night to tend to animals here.” Last week, the O Globo newspaper reported that firefighting specialists from Brazil’s main environmental protection agency were stymied by bureaucratic procedures, delaying their deployment by four months. Given the scope of the fires, their long-term consequences on the Pantanal are unclear. The ecosystem’s grasslands may recover quickly, followed by its shrub lands and swamps over the next few years, said Wolfgang J. Junk, a scientist who specializes in the region. But the forests will require decades or centuries. Even more critical than the impact of this year’s fires, scientists say, is what they tell us about the underlying health of the wetlands. Like a patient whose high fever signals a dangerous infection, the extent of the wildfires is a symptom of grave threats to the Pantanal, both from inside and out. More than 90% of the Pantanal is privately owned. Ranchers have raised cattle there for hundreds of years, and ecologists emphasize that many do so sustainably. But new farmers are moving in, often with little understanding of how to use fire properly, said Cátia Nunes, a scientist from the Brazilian National Institute for Science and Technology in Wetlands. Moreover, cattle farming in the highlands has put pressure on local farmers to increase the size of their herds, using more land as they do so. The vast Pantanal wetland in Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has been badly burned in wildfires worsened by climate change. Eduardo Eubank Campos, a fifth-generation rancher, remembers his family using controlled burns to clear the land when he was a boy. He said they stopped after adding an ecotourism lodge to their 7,000-hectare property, which now includes reserves and fields on which they raise about 2,000 head of cattle and horses. This year, thanks to firebreaks, a water tank truck and workers quickly trained to fight fire, they were able to keep the flames at bay. The worst impact was on his ecotourism business, hit first by the coronavirus and then by the wildfires. It brings in three-quarters of his revenue. The vast Pantanal wetland in Brazil, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has been badly burned in wildfires worsened by climate change. Eubank Campos struggles to understand who would set fires when the land was so dry. “Pantaneiros know this is not the time to do burns,” Eubank Campos said, using a term for the locals that also conveys a culture built up over centuries ranching in the wetland. “They don’t want to destroy their own land.” The Brazilian federal police are investigating the fires, some of which appear to have been illegally targeting forests. Still, when asked about the biggest threat to the Pantanal, Eubank Campos’ answer highlights the region’s political and cultural fault lines. “I fear those organizations that come here wanting to exploit the issue and eventually ‘close’ the Pantanal, turn it into one big reserve and kick out the Pantaneiros,” he said. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned on a promise to weaken conservation regulations, is popular in the region. But Eubank Campos agrees with ecologists on a major threat to the Pantanal that comes from its borders and beyond. Because ecosystems are interconnected, the well-being of the wetland is at the mercy of the booming agriculture in the surrounding highlands. The huge fields of soy, other grains and cattle — commodities traded around the world — cause soil erosion that flows into the Pantanal, clogging its rivers so severely that some have become accidental dams, robbing the area downstream of water. The rampant deforestation and related fires in the neighbouring Amazon also create a domino effect, disrupting the rainforest’s “flying rivers” of precipitation that contribute to rainfall to the Pantanal. Damming for hydroelectric power deflects water away, scientists say, and a proposal to channelize the wetland’s main river would make it drain too quickly. But perhaps the most ominous danger comes from even further afield: climate change. The effects that models have predicted, a much hotter Pantanal alternating between severe drought and extreme rainfall, are already being felt, scientists say. A study published this year found that climate change poses “a critical threat” to the ecosystem, damaging biodiversity and impairing its ability to help regulate water for the continent and carbon for the world. In less than 20 years, it found that the northern Pantanal may turn into a savanna or even an arid zone. “We are digging our grave,” said Karl-Ludwig Schuchmann, an ecologist with Brazil’s National Institute of Science and Technology in Wetlands and one of the study’s authors. To save the Pantanal, scientists offer solutions: Reduce climate change immediately. Practice sustainable agriculture in and around the wetland. Pay ranchers to preserve forests and other natural areas on their land. Increase ecotourism. Do not divert the Pantanal’s waters, because its flood pulse is its life. “Everybody talks about, ‘we have to avoid this and that,’” Schuchmann said. “But little is done.” © 2020 The New York Times Company

The link to his Dec 7 proposal titled: "Donald J. Trump statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration," in which he called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" vanished by Thursday, along with his list of his potential Supreme Court justice picks as president and certain details of his economic, defence and regulatory reform plans. The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment on the website changes. The links, which now redirect readers to a campaign fundraising page, appear to have been removed around Election Day on Tuesday, when Trump won a historic upset against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to a website that records historic snapshots of web pages. Muslims In an appearance on CNBC on Thursday, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal praised Trump for removing the Muslim ban proposal from his website and also said Trump had deleted statements offensive to Muslims from his Twitter account. Several tweets attacking Muslims that Trump sent while campaigning for president remained in his feed on Thursday, however, including a March 22 tweet in which Trump wrote: "Incompetent Hillary, despite the horrible attack in Brussels today, wants borders to be weak and open-and let the Muslims flow in. No way!" A Nov 30, 2015 tweet from a supporter which Trump quoted in a tweet of his own repeated the claim that Muslims celebrated the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and suggested Trump include footage of the celebrations in his political ads. At a news conference with other civil rights leaders on Thursday, Samer Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the group was still worried about Trump's policies' effects on Muslims. "We thank him for removing those words," Khalaf said, referring to the Muslim ban proposal, "but you know what, words are one thing, actions are something totally different." Deletions Most of Trump's core policy positions remained on his website, including his central immigration promise to build an "impenetrable physical wall" on the border with Mexico and make Mexico pay for its construction. It was not the first time the Trump campaign has made unexplained changes to its site. The campaign this year also replaced the part of the site describing Trump's healthcare policy with a different version. When contacted about it by Reuters in September, the campaign put the original page back up.

LONDON, Nov 16, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Agreement in Copenhagen next month on a new pact to fight climate change will encourage long-term investors to move into firms better placed to cope with a likely and eventual rise in the cost of carbon emissions. A strong political deal including targets for emission cuts at the Dec 7-18 summit might be just enough to accelerate moves by investors such as pension funds or sovereign wealth funds to adjust portfolios to better reflect long-term risks from climate change, asset managers reckon. It is also likely to boost growth rates of firms which are either energy self-sufficient or engage in alternative energy such as wind or solar, while pressuring emission-intensive industries such as utilities, aluminium or car makers. And a more concrete deal -- such as a legally binding target to cut emissions -- would likely to prompt funds to start to change their asset allocation now to protect portfolios from the impact on companies hit by a rising cost of emissions. "It's effectively a global treaty to control pollutants. You are intervening in the economy to control and internalise the cost of carbon," said Bruce Jenkyn-Jones, managing director of listed equities at Impax Asset Management. "The idea that... people will pay for carbon right across the economy will have an impact on products and services. Big energy producers, utilities and industrials will be affected." Impax manages a total of 50 million pounds in global equities for the UK Enviornmental Agency's Active Pension Fund. The strength of a Copenhagen deal is still very uncertain. At a preparatory UN meeting in Barcelona last week, developed countries played down expectations of agreement on a legally binding text, saying that would take an additional 6-12 months. But developing countries are suspicious of backtracking on commitments from rich nations which have promised to lead in the fight against climate change. They insisted on a legally binding deal in December. "Politicians have done a good job of lowering expectations. That's exactly why there's real opportunity here. Decisions made in Copenhagen will dramatically influence growth rates of companies you are investing in," said Simon Webber, fund manager at Schroders. He reckons immediately affected industries from a concrete deal included power generation, utilities and transport, citing that some utilities -- such as Germany's RWE -- could face higher carbon costs that are equal to almost a third of operating profits in the next few years. He added the $26 billion deal in November by Warren Buffett to buy railway firm Burlington Northern Santa Fe highlighted the long-term viability of rails. "(An aggressive deal) will mean nuclear power and solar growth rates will take off in these industries. There will be a major shift from combustion engine cars to electric vehicles. There's no other way of meeting tough initial targets," he said. Malcolm Gray, portfolio manager at Investec Asset Management, says energy self-sufficient industries such as sugar can better cope with emission reductions and will attract flows. Some utilities in the traditional thermal space and aluminium producers that are not diversified will be exposed. As the cost of goods will be adjusted to take into account the increased cost of production as a result of high carbon prices, consumers with less disposable income and some high-volume low-margin retail business might also be losers. "We are faced with a world which has a lot more embedded inflation than people currently realise. You could be caught up with a slightly more aggressive inflation cycle globally compared with the deflating world we're currently in," he said. RISK MITIGATION AND OPPORTUNITIES The outcome of Copenhagen talks would enable investors to mitigate portfolio risks by better forecasting the likely pace of the rise in the cost of carbon emissions, and seek new investment in industries which benefit from alternative energy. Long-term investors, such as sovereign funds, are already getting increasingly active in environmental investing, at a time when private sector involvement has been somewhat slow. Norway's $400 billion-plus oil fund, the biggest owner of European stocks, is investing more than $3 billion over five years into firms engaged in environmental technologies. It is also pushing companies it holds to tackle climate change harder. "We're best served by promoting good standards of corporate behaviour. This is something very consistent with pursuing long-term investment objectives," Martin Skancke, director general of Norway's Ministry of Finance Asset Management Department, told Reuters last month. Rabobank says the Copenhagen outcome will clarify the framework for the unlisted Dutch bank which is already taking into account the cost of carbon emissions as a risk factor in granting credit facilities. "We will deal with risk mitigation and business opportunities will come in time," said Ruud Nijs, head of corporate social responsibility at Rabobank. "If the costs of climate change were taxed -- suddenly we will look at the credit portfolio in a different way. If one of our customers now has to pay for the price for climate, then the risk factor to that customer will change dramatically." The bank has been investing in renewables in deals worth over 4 billion euros, with its investments in its credit investment portfolio in the past 18 months all in clean technology. It is a sole debt provider to the Belfuture solar project, worth a couple of hundreds of million euros. It has given project financing of senior debt and equity financing worth 620 million euros for the Belwind offshore wind farm project. "Copenhagen brings us a better framework to do business with. The positive outcome will automatically generate big cleantech deals, investment in solar, wind and biomass technologies. The pipeline will also increase," Nijs said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to push for tougher global action against climate change and ending human rights abuses in Darfur in meetings with top Chinese officials on Monday. The visit to China is Merkel's second as Chancellor and comes four months before world environment ministers meet in Bali, Indonesia to try to launch new talks to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. Merkel said on Saturday she would press China for help in ending human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region. "China has very close ties with Africa and we will obviously talk about what we can do now to combat the appalling human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region," Merkel said in a statement at the weekend. A German government official said the aim of the trip was to deepen relations. "In particular, we have possibilities for closer cooperation on the environment, energy efficiency, green technology and innovation," the official said. Merkel will meet President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and cultural and civil rights groups on Monday. She heads to Japan on Wednesday where she will also address climate change and economic issues. At a June summit, chaired by Merkel, G8 leaders agreed to pursue substantial, if unspecified cuts, in greenhouse gases and work with the UN on a new deal to fight global warming. The Kyoto Protocol obliges 35 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions but developing nations, including China, have no targets. China will overtake the United States by 2008 as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Merkel heads to Japan on Wednesday where she will also address climate change and economic issues. Merkel said she would again touch upon human rights issues in China and protection of intellectual property rights. Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday that top German government ministries, including Merkel's chancellery, had been infected by spying programmes from Chinese computer hackers. Another priority will be business. China is overtaking the United States as the world's second-biggest exporter and steadily catching up with Germany, the world's biggest.

Several companies, such as HSBC, Zurich Insurance , Bain & Company and S&P Global, have already announced plans to quickly cut business travel emissions by as much as 70%. Some are considering a "carbon budget" as they come under growing pressure from environmental advocates and investors to reduce indirect emissions that contribute to climate change. Flights account for about 90% of business travel emissions. That makes it the lowest-hanging fruit for companies setting reductions targets. The airline industry last week committed to reach "net zero" emissions by 2050 at a meeting in Boston, decades beyond the corporate travel emissions cut targets. "It's going to be hard on airlines and they're going to need to adapt," Kit Brennan, co-founder of London-based Thrust Carbon, which is advising S&P and other clients on setting up carbon budgets. "I think what we're going to see, funnily enough, is more of an unbundling of business class where you might get all perks of business class without the seat," he said, referring to airport lounges and nicer meals. "Because ultimately it all comes down to the area on the aircraft and it takes up." Flying business class emits about three times as much carbon as economy class because the seats take up more room and more of them are empty, according to a World Bank study. CHANGE ALREADY UNDER WAY Pre-pandemic, about 5% of international passengers globally flew in premium classes, accounting for 30% of international revenue, according to airline group IATA. The pandemic-related drop in travel and a switch to more virtual meetings have led many companies to save money by resetting travel policies. Sam Israelit, chief sustainability officer at consulting firm Bain, said his company was evaluating carbon budgets for offices or practice areas to help cut travel emissions per employee by 35% over the next five years. "I think more broadly, it's something that companies really will need to start to do if they're going to be successful in meeting the aggressive targets that everyone's putting out," he said. Companies and corporate travel agencies are also investing heavily in tools to measure flight emissions based on factors such as the type of plane, the routing and the class of service. "We're not seeing a lot of companies take a very draconian approach like simply cut travel because that impacts their bottom line," said Nora Lovell Marchant, vice president of sustainability at American Express Global Business Travel. "But we are seeing an increased ask for transparency so those travellers can make decisions." Global ratings agency S&P, which plans to reduce travel emissions by 25% by 2025, found that 42% of its business class use was for internal meetings, its global corporate travel leader, Ann Dery, said at a CAPA Centre for Aviation event last month. AIRLINES GOING GREEN US carrier JetBlue plans for about 30% of its jet fuel for flights in and out of New York to be sustainable within two to three years. "Businesses, of course, are going to want to address this climate change issue aggressively," JetBlue Chief Executive Robin Hayes said on the sidelines of the Boston meeting. "But we think they're going to be able to do it in a way that still enables business travel to take place." The emissions target airlines set last week relies on boosting use of sustainable aviation fuel from less than 0.1% today to 65% by 2050 as well as new engine technologies. "If we are getting to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 everybody has got to play their part here," said Air New Zealand Chief Executive Greg Foran. "It is not just the airlines. It is going to be fuel providers, it is going to be governments. And ultimately customers are going to have to buy into this as well." 

Thousands of miles away, in Nairobi or Bogota, the middle classes are more likely to reach for roasted goat or a juicy steak. Later this month, world leaders are set to endorse a UN goal to eliminate hunger by 2030, but they will have to convince their citizens to adopt new eating habits first, experts say. Diets must feature less red meat, which consumes 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions than chicken or pork, according to a 2014 study. The shift, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) themselves, must apply to both wealthy and developing nations, where consumption of ecologically unfriendly foods is growing fastest. "Sustainable and healthy diets will require a move towards a mostly plant-based diet," said Colin Khoury, a biologist at the Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. Other key changes needed are cutting food waste and combating poor nutrition, he added. There are some signs the public is starting to take such advice on board. They include the release of an "EatBy" app that reminds consumers to use up food in the fridge, and a new social network to help people adopt a "climatarian" diet that shuns meat from gassy grazing animals, such as beef and lamb. More than 1 million people have also signed an online petition calling on European ministers to pass laws and launch national action plans aimed at meeting a target in the SDGs to halve global food waste per capita by 2030. Zero hunger possible Achieving the SDGs means the international community will need to find enough food over the next 15 years for the 795 million people who go to bed hungry every night. "I don't think it's all that ambitious to eliminate hunger," said Jomo Sundaram, assistant director-general of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). That is because incomes are rising in much of the world, transport to move food is improving, and new technologies are keeping yields of many key crops on an upward trend, he said. The previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted in 2000, aimed to halve the proportion of hungry people worldwide, a target that was largely achieved. UN officials believe that success can now be extended to put an end to hunger, which is judged according to the number of calories people consume - a system some experts say is too narrow. Despite a rapidly rising world population, there are 216 million fewer hungry people on earth today than in 1990, the FAO reported in May.  But with the global population expected to climb to 8.5 billion by 2030, from 7.3 billion now, and climate change predicted to ravage yields in some nations, ending hunger will require tough choices in the field and on the dinner table. "It's not going to be easy, but if you look at the arithmetic, it is achievable," Sundaram said. Wasted opportunities The world already produces enough food for everyone, but around one third of it is discarded or spoils in transport or storage before reaching consumers, according to the FAO. In rich countries, individuals and grocery stores are responsible for most of the waste when they throw away imperfect vegetables or products they think are no longer safe to eat. Developing countries lose roughly a third of their edibles due to poor refrigeration systems and infrastructure bottlenecks, which prevent food from reaching the market. "Today we could easily feed everyone – it's a distribution issue," said Michael Obersteiner of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, an Austria-based think-tank. Meeting the hunger goal by 2030 may be possible if funding were available to cut waste along the supply chain, and yields continued to climb, he said. But by 2050, climate and population pressures - alongside an expanding global middle-class with an appetite for meat - will make it harder to keep up the momentum on zero hunger. "Diets will have to change," Obersteiner said. Changing climate, shifting diets Today half the world's agricultural land is used for livestock farming, he said, which is far less efficient for feeding people – and worse for the environment – than producing grain, fruit and vegetables for direct human consumption. And as middle-income earners in developing nations rapidly boost their meat consumption, pressure is growing on farmland, forests and water supplies, Obersteiner said. Switching from eating meat four times a week, as recommended by the UK-based Food Climate Research Network in 2008, to just once would reduce commodity prices, as less grain would go to feed animals, making food cheaper for the urban poor, he said. It would also curb greenhouse emissions from the livestock sector, which account for roughly 14 percent of the global total, more than direct emissions from transport, according to a Chatham House paper published in December.    But with around 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature rise already locked in, some regions will have to change what they grow as the climate warms, bringing more extreme weather. "A lot of people in south and east Africa will have to move away from maize, which is the main staple at the moment," said Luigi Guarino, senior scientist with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a plant research organisation. Lower yields for a key food source in a region where one in four still do not get enough to eat could spell disaster. But farmers should be able to maintain or even increase production in the face of climate change if they switch to sorghum, millet and traditional vegetables like African nightshade or spider plant, Guarino said. In addition, new "climate-smart" varieties of maize and other staple crops, bred to withstand hotter, drier weather, will be crucial for meeting the SDGs, he added. Some scientists have also been developing food crops with extra micro-nutrients - such as orange sweet potatoes containing high levels of vitamin A - to tackle malnutrition. Large gene banks, used to breed crops containing the best traits adapted to particular environments, together with public education to shift diets to new and more diverse foods suited to a warmer world, will be crucial, the scientist noted. "There is no silver bullet to reaching the goal (of eliminating hunger)," Guarino said. "But even if we get 80 percent there, it's well worth it."

Rob Taylor Canberra, Oct 28 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A YouTube clip of Australia's Prime Ministerial hopeful Kevin Rudd as a Chairman Mao-figure in a spoof Chinese propaganda film is spearheading a guerrilla video campaign undermining the major parties' election advertising. "Topmost politician Rudd seeks votes from eager and impressionable voteholders," the clip proclaims, as a beaming Rudd in a Mao suit smiles down on cheering supporters and Labour lawmakers holding aloft red books and flags. "Rudd impress and frighten Australian persons with his earnestness offensive. Space travels bless Rudd with control of movements of planets and rising of sun," the clip, subtitled and set to heroic Chinese music and commentary, reads. Rudd, 50, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, is trouncing veteran conservative Prime Minister John Howard in polls ahead of a November 24 parliamentary election, promising generational change and education, health and labour law reform. To attract crucial youth votes, both major parties have embraced the Internet with a slew of online campaign announcements, while voters nationally are bombarded with millions of dollars a day worth of election advertising. But the two-minute Rudd-as-Mao clip, put together by Sydney law student Hugh Atkin and billed as a rejected Labour advertising angle, has been viewed thousands of times since its posting this week, outrating official party material. Other videos show footage of Rudd in parliament, allegedly picking ear wax from his ear and eating it, or re-running a comedy cover of a Led Zeppelin's classic "Stairway to Heaven", re-titled as "Stairway to Kevin". "SCARE TACTICS" Howard, 68, has not escaped YouTube pillory either as he seeks re-election a fifth time in the face of what election pundits believe is near-certain conservative defeat. A bobbing Howard puppet recalls, in a video titled "Search for a scapegoat", how he mounted fear campaigns against refugees and Islamic extremists to secure past victories in 2001 and 2004. "Now it's 2007 and that time again. I need to find something special to scare the people into voting for me. I need to pull that rabbit out of a hat, I need to find the perfect scapegoat," the clip by "Killerspudly" confides to almost 50,000 viewers. The official party Internet fare is far more bland, taking the form of traditional TV advertising without the added cost. The conservatives are targeting Labour and Rudd's union ties and tax policies, while Labour has attacked Howard's refusal to sign the Kyoto climate pact, which surveys show is a major issue, particularly with young voters Smaller parties are also getting in on the act. The Australian Greens have turned to YouTube with a video of Howard in bed and sleeping amid climate change. Howard is joined by Rudd and both are said to be in bed with Australia's world leading coal industry, which is helping fuel China's boom. Atkin, 23, who put together Rudd's Mao clip, said he would actually be voting Labour, despite poking fun at its youthful leader's carefully-guarded and presidential image. "I'd like to see Labour win the election, but I'd like to make fun of them in the process," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

But the riots that raged through the district last month appear to have cleaved lasting divisions in the community, reflecting a nationwide trend as tensions over the Hindu nationalist agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi boil over. Many Hindus in Yamuna Vihar, a sprawl of residential blocks and shops dotted with mosques and Hindu temples, and in other riot-hit districts of northeast Delhi, say they are boycotting merchants and refusing to hire workers from the Muslim community. Muslims say they are scrambling to find jobs at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has heightened pressure on India's economy. "I have decided to never work with Muslims," said Yash Dhingra, who has a shop selling paint and bathroom fittings in Yamuna Vihar. "I have identified new workers, they are Hindus," he said, standing in a narrow lane that was the scene of violent clashes in the riots that erupted on Feb 23. The trigger for the riots, the worst sectarian violence in the Indian capital in decades, was a citizenship law introduced last year that critics say marginalises India's Muslim minority. Police records show at least 53 people, mostly Muslims, were killed and more than 200 were injured. Dhingra said the unrest had forever changed Yamuna Vihar. Gutted homes with broken doors can be seen across the neighbourhood; electricity cables melted in the fires dangle dangerously above alleys strewn with stones and bricks used as makeshift weapons in the riots. Most Hindu residents in the district are now boycotting Muslim workers, affecting everyone from cooks and cleaners to mechanics and fruit sellers, he said. "We have proof to show that Muslims started the violence, and now they are blaming it on us," Dhingra said. "This is their pattern as they are criminal-minded people." Those views were widely echoed in interviews with 25 Hindus in eight localities in northeast Delhi, many of whom suffered large-scale financial damages or were injured in the riots. Reuters also spoke with about 30 Muslims, most of whom said that Hindus had decided to stop working with them. Suman Goel, a 45-year-old housewife who has lived among Muslim neighbours for 23 years, said the violence had left her in a state of shock. "It's strange to lose a sense of belonging, to step out of your home and avoid smiling at Muslim women," she said. "They must be feeling the same too but it's best to maintain a distance." Mohammed Taslim, a Muslim who operated a business selling shoes from a shop owned by a Hindu in Bhajanpura, one of the neighbourhoods affected by the riots, said his inventory was destroyed by a Hindu mob. He was then evicted and his space was leased out to a Hindu businessman, he said. "This is being done just because I am a Muslim," said Taslim. Many Muslims said the attack had been instigated by hardline Hindus to counter protests involving tens of thousands of people across India against the new citizenship law. "This is the new normal for us," said Adil, a Muslim research assistant with an economic think tank in central Delhi. "Careers, jobs and business are no more a priority for us. Our priority now is to be safe and to protect our lives." He declined to disclose his full name for fear of reprisals. Emboldened by Modi's landslide electoral victory in 2014, hardline groups began pursuing a Hindu-first agenda that has come at the expense of the country's Muslim minority. Vigilantes have attacked and killed a number of Muslims involved in transporting cows, which are seen as holy animals by Hindus, to slaughterhouses in recent years. The government has also adopted a tough stance with regard to Pakistan, and in August withdrew semi-autonomous privileges for Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state. In November, the Supreme Court ruled that a Hindu temple could be built at Ayodhya, where a right-wing mob tore down a 16th-century mosque in 1992, a decision that was welcomed by the Modi government. The citizenship law, which eases the path for non-Muslims from neighbouring Muslim-majority nations to gain citizenship in India, was the final straw for many Muslims, as well as secular Indians, sparking nationwide protests. Modi's office did not respond to questions from Reuters about the latest violence. NIGHT VIGILANTES During the day, Hindus and Muslims shun each other in the alleys of the Delhi districts that were hardest hit by the unrest in February. At night, when the threat of violence is greater, they are physically divided by barricades that are removed in the morning. And in some areas, permanent barriers are being erected. On a recent evening, Tarannum Sheikh, a schoolteacher, sat watching two welders install a high gate at the entrance of a narrow lane to the Muslim enclave of Khajuri Khas, where she lives. The aim was to keep Hindus out, she said. "We keep wooden batons with us to protect the entrance as at any time, someone can enter this alley to create trouble," she said. "We do not trust the police anymore." In the adjacent Hindu neighbourhood of Bhajanpura, residents expressed a similar mistrust and sense of insecurity. "In a way these riots were needed to unite Hindus, we did not realise that we were surrounded by such evil minds for decades," said Santosh Rani, a 52-year-old grandmother. She said she had been forced to lower her two grandchildren from the first floor of her house to the street below after the building was torched in the violence, allegedly by a Muslim. "This time the Muslims have tested our patience and now we will never give them jobs," said Rani who owns several factories and retail shops. "I will never forgive them." Hasan Sheikh, a tailor who has stitched clothing for Hindu and Muslim women for over 40 years, said Hindu customers came to collect their unstitched clothes after the riots. "It was strange to see how our relationship ended," said Sheikh, who is Muslim. "I was not at fault, nor were my women clients, but the social climate of this area is very tense. Hatred on both sides is justified."

Political differences loomed over a summit of European and Latin American leaders in Peru on Friday, threatening to undermine their efforts to fight poverty and global warming. Leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales differed with his regional counterparts over free trade in the run-up to the meeting, while Venezuela's Hugo Chavez ratcheted up tensions in a conflict with neighboring Colombia. Free trade proponents like Peru are losing patience with skeptics like Bolivia's Morales, who accused Peru and Colombia this week of trying to exclude his nation from talks between the European Union and Andean countries. "We can advance at different speeds, but let's advance," Peruvian President Alan Garcia said on Thursday, saying his country should be allowed to move faster with the EU. Morales, a former coca grower, fears free trade deals could hurt peasant farmers in his impoverished country. "We want trade, but fair trade," he told reporters in Lima. The EU is also holding negotiations with Mercosur, led by Brazil and Argentina, and Central American countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the first leaders to arrive for the summit, said after meeting Garcia that the EU was "open, and willing to make the path easier" on trade. Merkel made no mention of a spat with Chavez, who this week called her a political descendant of Adolf Hitler for implying he had damaged relations between Europe and Latin America. Chavez frequently insults conservative leaders, especially U.S. President George W. Bush. At a summit in Chile last year, Spain's king told him to "shut up." Chavez is also embroiled in a dispute with Colombia that raised the specter of war in the Andean region in March. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe accuses him of supporting the leftist FARC guerrillas, and soon before leaving for Lima, Chavez said he was reviewing diplomatic ties with Bogota. Such feuds could dominate the fifth such gathering of leaders from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. They may also struggle to find common ground on how to fight cocaine trafficking, as well as the use of food crops to make renewable biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. Brazil is an advocate of the so-called greener fuels, but many poor countries blame them for pushing up food price. However, the poor nations are increasingly worried about climate change and say rich states must cut carbon emissions. Peru created an environment ministry this week to help it cope with the impact of rising global temperatures, which are melting its Andean glaciers. Peruvian delegates to the summit will push for more concrete measures to combat climate change. "Lots of governments have paid lip service to addressing the threat climate changes poses. We want to urge those governments to take real action," British junior Foreign Office minister Kim Howells told Reuters.

The confirmed death toll from the Camp Fire stood at 48 as the footprint of the blaze grew by 5,000 acres to 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares), even as diminished winds and rising humidity allowed firefighters to carve containment lines around more than a third of the perimeter. "Progress is being made," said Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) at a news conference flanked by Governor Jerry Brown, US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and other officials. Late on Wednesday, the Butte County Sheriff's Office released a list of 103 people reported missing by relatives, the majority of them over the age of 65. Initially 230 people were reported missing. Most are from Paradise, California, a town in the Sierra foothills, about 175 miles (280 km) north of San Francisco, that was largely incinerated last Thursday. More than 8,800 buildings, most of them houses, burned to the ground in and around Paradise, a hamlet once home to 27,000 people. An estimated 50,000 people remained under evacuation orders. "This is one of the worst disasters I've seen in my career, hands down," Brock Long, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters in the nearby city of Chico. NO FINGER POINTING After touring some of California's earlier wildfire zones in August, Zinke blamed "gross mismanagement of forests" because of timber harvest restrictions that he said were supported by "environmental terrorist groups." But pressed by reporters on Wednesday, Zinke demurred. "Now is really not the time to point fingers," he said. "It is a time for America to stand together." The killer blaze, fuelled by thick, drought-desiccated scrub, has capped two back-to-back catastrophic wildfire seasons in California that scientists largely attribute to prolonged drought they say is symptomatic of climate change. But lawyers for some of the victims are pointing to lax maintenance by an electric utility as the proximate cause of the fire, which officially remains under investigation. The Butte County disaster coincided with a flurry of blazes in Southern California, most notably the Woolsey Fire, which has killed at least two people, destroyed more than 400 structures and displaced about 200,000 people in the mountains and foothills near the Malibu coast west of Los Angeles. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said the remains of a possible third victim were found in a burned-out dwelling. In northern California, 100 National Guard troops trained to seek and identify human remains are joining dozens of coroner-led recovery teams, cadaver dogs and forensic anthropologists already sifting through the charred, ash-strewn rubble of what was left in Paradise, a spokeswoman for the Butte County Sheriff's office said. 'IT'S UNREAL' Cal Fire investigator Stewart Morrow was assessing property losses in Paradise, comparing piles of scorched rubble where houses once stood with online photos of the structures before the fire. He also was keeping an eye out for human remains. "I’ve been a firefighter for 20 years and I’ve never seen a place so destroyed," Morrow told Reuters on Wednesday. A group of three law firms representing multiple victims of the Camp Fire has filed a lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric alleging PG&E failed to properly maintain and replace its equipment and that "its inexcusable behaviour" contributed to the cause of the Camp Fire. The lawsuit alleges that prior to the Camp Fire, PG&E began warning customers it might turn off power because of the elevated risk of wildfires from high winds but never did so. "It's important to remember that the cause (of the "Camp Fire") has yet to be determined," PG&E said in a statement. Wind-driven flames roared through Paradise so swiftly that residents were forced to flee for their lives. Anna Dise, a resident of Butte Creek Canyon west of Paradise, told KRCR TV her father, Gordon Dise, 66, died when he ran back inside to gather belongings and their house collapsed on him. Dise said she could not flee in her car because the tires had melted. To survive, she hid overnight in a neighbour’s pond with her dogs. "It was so fast," Dise recounted of the fire. "I didn't expect it to move so fast." The fatality count of 48 from the Camp Fire far exceeds the previous record for the greatest loss of life from a single wildfire in California history - 29 people killed by the Griffith Park fire in Los Angeles in 1933.

Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea cannot find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks. Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Although some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments. The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organised — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualisation of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation. “A paradigm shift is necessary,” said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. “Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline.” The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (gender inequality and high living costs). The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about one-third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children. But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception and as the anxieties associated with having children intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy, and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward or are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff. “It becomes a cyclical mechanism,” said Stuart Gietel Basten, an expert on Asian demographics and a professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “It’s demographic momentum.” Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration from the region has compounded depopulation, and in parts of Asia, the “demographic time bomb” that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off. South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 — less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world. Every month for the past 59 months, the total number of babies born in the country has dropped to a record depth. That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialisation that has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can feel like a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it is easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children. Expectant mothers in many areas can no longer find obstetricians or postnatal care centres. Universities below the elite level, especially outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks; the number of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to 500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have even offered iPhones. To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building kindergartens and day care centres by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women. But this month, Deputy Prime Minister Hong Nam-ki acknowledged that the government — which has spent more than $178 billion over the past 15 years encouraging women to have more babies — was not making enough progress. In many families, the shift feels cultural and permanent. “My grandparents had six children, and my parents five, because their generations believed in having multiple children,” said Kim Mi-kyung, 38, a stay-at-home parent. “I have only one child. To my and younger generations, all things considered, it just doesn’t pay to have many children.” Thousands of miles away, in Italy, the sentiment is similar, with a different backdrop. In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a sign in red letters on an 18th-century stone building looking onto the Apennine Mountains reads “Home of School Kindergarten” — but today, the building is a nursing home. Residents eat their evening broth on waxed tablecloths in the old theatre room. “There were so many families, so many children,” said Concetta D’Andrea, 93, who was a student and a teacher at the school and is now a resident of the nursing home. “Now there is no one.” The population in Capracotta has dramatically aged and contracted — from about 5,000 people to 800. The town’s carpentry shops have shut down. The organisers of a soccer tournament struggled to form even one team. About a half-hour away, in the town of Agnone, the maternity ward closed a decade ago because it had fewer than 500 births a year, the national minimum to stay open. This year, six babies were born in Agnone. “Once, you could hear the babies in the nursery cry, and it was like music,” said Enrica Sciullo, a nurse who used to help with births there and now mostly takes care of older patients. “Now there is silence and a feeling of emptiness.” In a speech this month during a conference on Italy’s birthrate crisis, Pope Francis said the “demographic winter” was still “cold and dark.” More people in more countries may soon be searching for their own metaphors. Birth projections often shift based on how governments and families respond, but according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100. Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds. China’s rust belt, in the northeast, saw its population drop by 1.2% in the past decade, according to census figures released Tuesday. In 2016, Heilongjiang province became the first in the country to have its pension system run out of money. In Hegang, a “ghost city” in the province that has lost almost 10% of its population since 2010, homes cost so little that people compare them to cabbage. Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge. In Japan, where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere, older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69. Going further than many other nations, Germany has also worked through a program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000 units from the housing stock since 2002. And if the goal is revival, a few green shoots can be found. After expanding access to affordable child care and paid parental leave, Germany’s fertility rate recently increased to 1.54, up from 1.3 in 2006. Leipzig, which once was shrinking, is now growing again after reducing its housing stock and making itself more attractive with its smaller scale. “Growth is a challenge, as is decline,” said Swiaczny, who is now a senior research fellow at the Federal Institute for Population Research in Germany. Demographers warn against seeing population decline as simply a cause for alarm. Many women are having fewer children because that is what they want. Smaller populations could lead to higher wages, more equal societies, lower carbon emissions and a higher quality of life for the smaller numbers of children who are born. But, said Gietel Basten, quoting Casanova, “There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.” The challenges ahead are still a cul-de-sac; no country with a serious slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate much beyond the minor uptick that Germany accomplished. There is little sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee that a smaller population means less stress on the environment. Many demographers argue that the current moment may look to future historians like a period of transition or gestation, when humans either did or did not figure out how to make the world more hospitable — enough for people to build the families that they want. Surveys in many countries show that young people would like to be having more children but face too many obstacles. Anna Parolini tells a common story. She left her small hometown in northern Italy to find better job opportunities. Now 37, she lives with her boyfriend in Milan and has put her desire to have children on hold. She is afraid her salary of less than 2,000 euros a month would not be enough for a family, and her parents still live where she grew up. “I don’t have anyone here who could help me,” she said. “Thinking of having a child now would make me gasp.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

In a letter to the International Monetary Fund Executive Board released on Thursday, Covington & Burling attorney Lanny Breuer asked directors to consider "fundamental procedural and substantive errors" with the investigation report by WilmerHale, a law firm hired by the World Bank's board to investigate data irregularities in the lender's flagship "Doing Business" rankings of country business climates. The WilmerHale report alleged that while Georgieva was World Bank CEO in 2017, she applied "undue pressure" on World Bank staff to make data changes that boosted China's ranking at a time when the bank was seeking Beijing's support for a major capital increase. Georgieva has denied the allegations. The new claims from Breuer, a former US Justice Department official and special counsel to former President Bill Clinton during his 1999 impeachment trial, come as Georgieva tries to persuade the IMF board to support her. The board interviewed both Georgieva and WilmerHale this week and will deliberate again on the matter on Friday. For its part, France plans to give its support to Georgieva at the board meeting, a French Finance Ministry source told Reuters on Friday. Georgieva on Wednesday called the accusations that she pressured staff to make inappropriate data changes "outrageous and untrue" and said some of her statements were taken out of context by WilmerHale. She publicly released her lengthy statement to the board on Thursday. "Ms Georgieva has never been notified that she is a subject of the investigation, or been given an opportunity, as guaranteed by Staff Rule 3.00 to review and respond to the report's findings," wrote Breuer, her attorney. The rule covers the World Bank Office of Ethics and Business Conduct procedures. The WilmerHale report said the initial part of its investigation focused on board officials pursuant to the Code of Conduct for Board Officials, a different set of rules than the staff rule referenced by Breuer. "We conducted our investigation following all applicable World Bank rules," the WilmerHale firm said in an emailed statement. "Dr Georgieva was notified that our report would be presented to the World Bank Board, and that the World Bank could disclose any information she provided." According to a July email from WilmerHale to Georgieva reviewed by Reuters, a WilmerHale partner said the firm was conducting its review into Doing Business data irregularities and staff misconduct authorized by and pursuant to World Bank Staff Rule 3.00. As World Bank CEO in 2017, Georgieva would have been considered a member of staff, not a board official. "You are not a subject of our review," the email to Georgieva asking her to speak with investigators read. "Instead, we are reaching out to you because we believe you may have information that could be helpful to our review." The World Bank's General Counsel's office said that the investigation into the Doing Business 2018 and 2020 reports "was conducted in full compliance with World Bank rules."

Some 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs were impacted by the country's worst bushfires in decades, the WWF said. When the fires were still blazing, the WWF estimated the number of affected animals at 1.25 billion. The fires destroyed more than 11 million hectares (37 million acres) across the Australian southeast, equal to about half the area of the United Kingdom. "This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history," said WWF-Australia Chief Executive Officer Dermot O'Gorman in a statement. The project leader Lily Van Eeden, from the University of Sydney, said the research was the first continent-wide analysis of animals impacted by the bushfires, and "other nations can build upon this research to improve understanding of bushfire impacts everywhere". The total number included animals which were displaced because of destroyed habitats and now faced lack of food and shelter or the prospect of moving to habitat that was already occupied. The main reason for raising the number of animal casualties was that researchers had now assessed the total affected area, rather than focusing on the most affected states, they said. After years of drought made the Australian bush unusually dry, the country battled one of its worst bushfire seasons ever from September 2019 to March 2020, resulting in 34 human deaths and nearly 3,000 homes lost.

Across the globe, chickens and pigs are doing their bit to curb global warming. But cows and sheep still have some catching up to do. The farm animals produce lots of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that gets far less public attention than carbon dioxide yet is at the heart of efforts to fight climate change. Government policies and a UN-backed system of emission credits is proving a money-spinner for investors, farmers and big polluters such as power stations wanting to offset their own emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2). The reason is simple: methane is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere and it is relatively simple to capture the gas from animal waste, landfills, coal mines or leaky natural gas pipes. "A fifth of all greenhouse gas-induced global warming has been due to methane since pre-industrial times," said climate scientist Paul Fraser of Australia, where ruminant farm animals belch out vast amounts of the gas. Methane concentrations have increased about 150 percent in the air since 1750 and now far exceed the natural range of the past 650,000 years, the UN's climate panel says. And human activities are largely to blame. The panel will be focusing on ways to curb methane and other greenhouse gas emissions when it releases a major report on mitigating the effects of climate change in Bangkok in early May. "It's been argued that the reductions from methane are potentially cheaper than from carbon dioxide," said Bill Hare, climate policy director for Greenpeace and a lead author of the mitigation report. "A lot of policy discussion in the United States has focused on methane rather than more difficult problems such as CO2 from coal," he added. This is because capturing methane from landfills, mines, or from fossil fuel production or natural gas lines is pretty straight forward and makes economic sense. Methane is a major component of natural gas and can be burned to generate power. Agriculture was a greater challenge, Hare said. A MATTER OF BALANCE "There are more difficult areas for methane from livestock and from rice agriculture where, at best, longer time scales are required to change practices in agriculture than you might need in industrial areas," Hare said. Rice paddies and other irrigated crops produce large amounts of methane, as do natural wetlands. Vast amounts of methane are also locked up in deposits under the ice in sub-polar regions, in permafrost or under the sea. Hare said there are lots of options being looked at, such as additives for cattle and sheep to cut the amount of methane in their burps and moving away from intensive livestock feed lots to range-fed animals. "And for example in rice, just changing the timing and when and how you flood rice paddies has great potential to reduce methane emissions." For the moment, the amount of methane in the atmosphere is steady after levelling off around 1999, said Fraser, leader of the Changing Atmosphere Research Group at Australia's government-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. This is thought to be because the drying out of tropical wetlands seems to cancelling out a rise in emissions from the oil and gas industry. But how long this lasts is anyone's guess. "Most people would agree that some time in the future methane is going to start growing again, just because of the world demand for natural gas, rice and cattle," Fraser said. POO POWER All the more reason why chicken manure and pig waste are hot commodities. Under the UN's Kyoto Protocol, a system called the Clean Development Mechanism allows rich countries to keep within their emissions limits by funding projects that soak up greenhouse gases in poor countries, getting carbon credits in return. This has made huge pig farms in South America and poultry farms in India attractive investments. The waste is put into digesters and the methane extracted and burned to generate electricity or simply flared to create CO2 -- not perfect, but a lesser greenhouse gas evil. And interest is growing in these kinds of projects, said N Yuvaraj Dinesh Babu of the Singapore-based Carbon Exchange, which trades Kyoto carbon credits and helps broker emissions off-setting deals. The Kyoto system of emissions credits has proved popular and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which administers it, says dozens of methane-abatement projects have been approved in recent years with more being considered. But Stephan Singer of conservation group WWF thinks this is not the complete solution. He believes more attention should be paid to controlling carbon dioxide emissions and the sources of methane not so easily controlled. Only about 50 percent of all methane emissions are being controlled, namely from landfills, coal mines and the oil and gas industry, said Singer, head of WWF's European Energy and Climate Policy Unit. "What worries me is the increased methane coming out of the stomachs of ruminants, mainly for increased beef consumption within an increasingly wealthy world. The diet of the West has a big impact on the atmosphere." In the United States, cattle emit about 5.5 million tonnes of methane per year into the atmosphere, accounting for 20 percent of US methane emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency says. In New Zealand, emissions from agriculture comprise about half of all greenhouse gas emissions. But what worries Singer most is a rapid release of methane stored in sub-polar permafrost or in huge methane hydrate deposits under the sea. While this has not happened, some scientists suggest it might occur in a warmer world. "If methane hydrates leak, then we're gone, then it's over."

How widespread are the fires in the Amazon? The number of fires identified by satellite images in the Amazon so far this month is the highest since 2010, according to Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research agency, which tracks deforestation and forest fires using satellite images. The number of fires identified by the agency in the Amazon region so far this year, 40,341, is about 35% higher than the average for the first eight months of each year since 2010. The decade before that included several years in which the number of fires identified during the first eight months was far higher. How did the fires start? Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture. Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rainforest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use. How unusual are the fires? How dangerous are they to the rainforest? INPE’s figures represent a 79% increase in fires from the same period in 2018. There have been large numbers of fires in other recent years as well: According to a manager of Global Forest Watch, the number of fires in the Amazon this year is roughly comparable to 2016. Deforestation more broadly is always a cause for concern. Last year, the world lost about 30 million acres of tree cover, including 8.9 million acres of primary rainforest, an area the size of Belgium, according to data from the University of Maryland. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining. While campaigning for president last year, Bolsonaro declared that Brazil’s vast protected lands were an obstacle to economic growth and promised to open them up to commercial exploitation. Less than a year into his term, that is already happening. Brazil’s part of the Amazon lost more than 1,330 square miles of forest cover in the first half of 2019, a 39% increase over the same period last year, according to the government agency that tracks deforestation. The Amazon is often referred to as the Earth’s “lungs,” because its vast forests release oxygen and store carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that is a major cause of global warming. If enough rainforest is lost and can’t be restored, the area will become savanna, which doesn’t store as much carbon and would mean a reduction in the planet’s “lung capacity.” Did climate change cause these fires, and how will they affect climate change? These fires were not caused by climate change. They were, by and large, set by humans. However, climate change can make fires worse. Fires can burn hotter and spread more quickly under warmer and drier conditions. When it comes to the future of climate change, widespread fires contribute a dual negative effect. Trees are valuable because they can store carbon dioxide, and that storage capacity is lost when trees burn. Burning trees also pumps more carbon into the atmosphere. How does deforestation work? Is this different? Deforestation can be caused by natural factors, like insects or blight, or by humans. This is a typical case of human deforestation: Farmers cut down trees to plant or expand a farm, then burn the leavings to clear the ground. Brazil had previously tried to portray itself as a leader in protecting the Amazon and fighting global warming. Between 2004 and 2012, the country created new conservation areas, increased monitoring and took away government credits from rural producers who were caught razing protected areas. This brought deforestation to the lowest level since record-keeping began. But as the economy plunged into a recession in 2014, the country became more reliant on the agricultural commodities it produces — beef and soy, which are drivers of deforestation — and on the powerful rural lobby. Land clearing, much of it illegal, began to tick upward again. Are the fires the fault of President Jair Bolsonaro? There is evidence that farmers feel more emboldened to burn land following the election of Bolsonaro. A New York Times analysis of public records found that enforcement actions intended to discourage illegal deforestation, such as fines or seizure of equipment, by Brazil’s main environmental agency fell by 20% during the first six months of this year. Bolsonaro blames nongovernmental organisations for the fires. He has cited no evidence, and environmental experts dispute the claim. What is Brazil’s government doing to fight the fires? Some local governments have said they are shoring up their fire brigades. The federal government has not offered any major organised effort to fight the fires. On Thursday, Bolsonaro said the Brazilian government lacks the resources to fight the fires, but on Friday he said he would direct the military to enforce environmental laws and to help contain the fires.  2019 New York Times News Service

French President Nicolas Sarkozy meets unions on Wednesday to try to hammer out an agreement on economic stimulus plans and avert fresh protests in the face of rising unemployment and tumbling growth. More than a million people took to the streets across France two weeks ago in protest at Sarkozy's policies, demanding pay rises and protection for jobs in the face of the downturn, and trade unions have penciled in another protest next month. Sarkozy's 26 billion euro (23.4 billion pound) stimulus plan has focused on public spending projects rather than helping consumers and workers directly. Unions and the political left have called on him to change tack. A television appearance after last month's protests, intended to allay public fears, only weakened Sarkozy's support further. "The outcome of my five-year term is at stake," Saturday's edition of Le Figaro newspaper, which is close to Sarkozy, quoted him as telling advisers. French gross domestic product fell 1.2 percent in the last three months of 2008, its biggest drop in 34 years, as exports fell and retailers reduced their stock, and unemployment in December was 11 percent higher than a year earlier. Strikers have crippled the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique and, to a more limited extent, the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, demanding an increase in the minimum wage and lower food and fuel prices. There are fears that in the current tense climate, such protests will spread. An IFOP poll for regional newspaper Sud-Ouest published on Saturday found 63 percent of respondents thought they could soon take place on the mainland. Increasing the pressure on Sarkozy before Wednesday's "social summit," the opposition Socialists have called for a 1 percentage point cut in value-added tax and a 3 percent rise in the minimum wage to give a boost to consumer spending. With Sarkozy so far unwilling to meet national unions' demands on boosting consumer spending, there is little room for a breakthrough to avert further protests. "France is the only country not to act massively and immediately in the direction of purchasing power, while a consensus has been established by economists on the need for such measures alongside those in favor of investment," prominent Socialist Dider Migaud said last week. Sarkozy has said it is only worth increasing France's public debt for stimulus measures that amount to investments for the future rather than funding consumer spending, even though that is traditionally the main driver of French growth. He is likely to cite one of the few bright spots in last week's GDP figures in his defense -- household consumption rose 0.5 percent in the last three months of 2008, suggesting that consumers did not need further encouragement to keep spending. Britain has cut its value-added tax by 2 percentage points but Sarkozy lambasted the move in his television address, saying it "brought absolutely no progress," angering Downing Street. Sarkozy has said he is ready to consider measures such as cutting low-level income tax and boosting unemployment benefits, but his employment minister and his social affairs adviser repeated on Sunday their opposition to a minimum wage increase. "That is an old utopia that will not work," Employment Minister Laurent Wauquiez told France 5 television, adding that such a move could force companies in difficulty out of business.

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 U.N.'s top climate official said on Thursday. "I'm very concerned about the pace of things," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said on the penultimate day of the December 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 favors 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 industrialized 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.

China and the European Union vowed on Friday to seek balanced trade and foster cooperation in climate change in high-level meetings dogged by tension over Tibet protests and the Olympics. EU officials led by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had intended meetings with senior Chinese officials in Beijing this week to help ease rifts over China's big trade deficit and to foster agreement on "sustainable" growth. Economic tensions have festered as China's trade surplus with the EU bloc surged to nearly 160 billion euros ($251 billion) last year, according to EU data. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the two sides had agreed to enhance cooperation on energy conservation and emissions reduction. "Our mutual benefits by far outweigh the conflicts. As long as we respect, trust and learn from each other, there will surely be a better future for the Sino-EU relationship," Wen told reporters. Barroso said the main focus of the talks was climate change and China had signalled its will to make domestic emissions part of a global agreement to tackle climate change after 2012. He said there were "major imbalances" in trade and both sides had agreed on the necessity for a rebalance. The long-prepared talks have been upstaged by anti-Chinese unrest across Tibetan areas last month, followed by Tibet protests that upset the Beijing Olympic torch relay in London and Paris, and then nationalist Chinese counter-protests. Barroso welcomed China's announcement that it would hold talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama. "While fully respecting the sovereignty of China, we have always advocated the need for dialogue because we believe this is the best way to achieve sustainable, substantive solution to the Tibet issue," Barroso told reporters. "As far as I understand the Chinese position, the Chinese say they are ready to discuss everything except sovereignty for Tibet." EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson on Thursday urged an end to mutual threats of boycotts. The European Parliament has asked EU leaders to boycott the opening ceremony at the Beijing Games in August unless China opens talks with the Dalai Lama. Such calls, and Chinese public counter-campaigns to boycott European companies, especially the French supermarket chain Carrefour, served neither side, Mandelson said on Thursday.

India has criticised a United Nations report for recommending that developing countries cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, newspapers reported on Wednesday. The latest Human Development Report, released by the UN Development Programme on Tuesday, included some of the strongest warnings yet for collective action to avert catastrophic climate change, which would disproportionately affect the poor. "Its recommendations look egalitarian, but they are not," said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, India's national policy making body, according to newspaper reports. "This is the first time I have seen a United Nations report talk of developing nations to take up commitments. I challenge the research team to supplement their research." Ahluwalia was speaking as a guest at the Indian launch of the report, which comes ahead of a UN climate summit next month in Bali, Indonesia, where nations will discuss future commitments to cut the carbon emissions seen as the cause of climate change. The UN report says an agreement without quantitative commitments from developing countries would "lack credibility". COMMITMENTS ARE UNFAIR But India, along with other developing countries, has said it does not want to commit to binding cuts. It says such cuts are unfair and would hinder its efforts to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Rich nations, it points out, only became rich after burning colossal amounts of fossil fuels over 150 years of industrialisation, and the onus should be on them to make cuts. Although Indians account for about a sixth of the world's population, they are responsible for only about a twentieth of total carbon emissions, according to UN figures. India's slow development is partly responsible -- around 500 million Indians, most of them living in the countryside, are still not connected to the grid, instead burning cow dung, wood and kerosene for fuel. But many people argue that it is possible for India to both develop and reduce emissions by investing in more efficient and more renewable energy sources rather than increasing its dependence on coal. One such critic is Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who was a joint winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize as chairman of the UN climate panel and who now sits on India's newly created Council on Climate Change. He has said it would be suicidal if India followed the same path of carbon-heavy development as rich countries.

The Czech Republic took the helm of the European Union on Thursday for a six-month stint in which it must help the bloc tackle its worst economic crisis in generations and deal with renewed conflict in the Middle East. Following the initiative-filled tenure of France -- whose President Nicolas Sarkozy jousted with issues from financial turmoil to climate change -- the Czechs have raised concern among some EU states over their ability to lead. The Czechs have tried to quell those fears, identifying main priorities as the economy, external relations and energy, the last of which may come into play soon as Russia threatens to stop gas supplies to Ukraine, a major transit state to the EU. "Sarkozy has already called Prime Minister Topolanek and he congratulated him," Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra said on live television. He then lit a huge metronome above Prague, the symbol of the Czech presidency, although the ceremony was relatively low key and the official launch will take place on January 7. The ex-communist state of 10 million people has suffered only a glancing blow from the economic crisis that has wreaked havoc across the rest of the bloc's 495 million population in the form of plummeting markets, bank bailouts, and job losses. Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek's minority center-right government has dragged its heels on the Lisbon reform treaty, a charter designed to streamline EU decision making, making the Czechs one of just three EU members who have yet to ratify it. Czech President Vaclav Klaus is a staunch eurosceptic who has campaigned against deeper integration with other EU members, even if his post is largely ceremonial. Topolanek, who will chair the Czech presidency, will have to tackle those issues along with the already long list of challenges he faces in the new year. MIDDLE EAST On Sunday Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg expected to travel to the Middle East to work toward a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has killed nearly 400 and wounded 1,600 in an offensive it says is to halt rocket attacks from Hamas. "As soon as he takes over (for) the presidency, he feels it is his duty to fly there and start handling it," said Schwarzenberg's spokeswoman, Zuzana Opletalova. Schwarzenberg, a close ally of Washington and pro-Israel, defended the strikes on Tuesday. He put the onus of the conflict on Hamas and said Israel had a right to defend itself. That was a different message from France's condemnation of aggression from both sides' and call for an immediate ceasefire. Those stances may be thrown in stark relief when Sarkozy visits Egypt and the Palestinian territories on January 5 and Syria and Lebanon on January 6 in a bid to secure a peace deal. On the economy, the Czechs' expect slight growth next year and see unemployment rising to around 6 percent. They have derided other EU governments for ramping up state spending with big stimulus packages to counter falling private sector growth. That could put them at odds with big euro zone countries that are already fighting recession, or Spain, where some economists say unemployment could hit 20 percent. But pundits said the Czechs' success as EU presidents will depend on whether they use the EU as a platform, and that either the EU's executive Commission or the "big three" -- Germany, France and England -- would take control if Prague does not. "The EU presidency actually has very little formal power," said Charles Grant, director of the London-based Center for European Reform. "With the Commission and the big three, in a way, if some awful crisis emerges, having a more inexperienced country in the EU presidency need not cause too many problems."

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday Washington's relations with India needed an "upgrade" and urged closer cooperation on security, trade and other issues. Clinton is set to visit India next month and she said she hoped the two nations could work together to solve global challenges from climate change to securing Afghanistan. "As we pursue an enhanced bilateral relationship, we should recognize that, compared to other metrics of our cooperation, our official ties are past due for an upgrade," Clinton said in a speech to the U.S.-India Business Council. "We need the bilateral cooperation between our governments to catch up with our people-to-people and economic ties." Last year, India and Washington signed a landmark civil nuclear deal, overturning a 30-year ban on global nuclear commerce with India. That deal will allow India to procure nuclear technology and fuel for its reactors from the international market. To improve ties, she said Washington and New Delhi must overcome mistrust and address what she said were lingering uncertainties in the relationship. She said some Americans feared that greater economic ties with India would mean lost jobs and falling wages, while Indians felt a closer partnership ran counter to the country's strong tradition of independence. She also pledged closer economic and trade ties and said negotiations would begin soon on a bilateral investment treaty, creating more opportunities for trade between the two countries. "President Obama has been clear that the United States has learned the lessons of the past. We will not use the global financial crisis as an excuse to fall back on protectionism," she said. Without providing details, Clinton said the two countries needed to increase cooperation in fighting terrorism and improve intelligence-sharing. "The president and I are committed to enhancing India's ability to protect itself," she said, adding that six Americans died in the November attacks on India's financial capital, Mumbai. She welcomed Tuesday's meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan, their first talks since the Mumbai attacks, which New Delhi blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group. "As Pakistan now works to take on the challenge of terrorists in its own country, I am confident India, as well as the United States, will support that effort," Clinton said.

BAGHDAD, Tue Jan 20, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - In the years since Iraqis last brandished fingers stained with purple ink to show the world they had voted in a free election, their country has plunged deeper into, and slowly climbed out of, brutal sectarian war. So it is with bated breath that Iraq's leaders, citizens and the US officials who still have 140,000 troops stationed there are waiting for the next elections at the end of this month. There is no shortage of enthusiasm for democracy almost six years after the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. More than 400 parties and groups have registered to field 14,431 candidates to contest just 440 provincial council seats. In the weeks since campaigning began, the concrete blast walls that have become an enduring feature of Iraqi life have been quickly plastered with a bewildering array of posters. The biggest achievement of the election may just be the fact of holding it. Western diplomats say a second cycle of elections like this one can be a more challenging milestone for a new democracy than the first. "A single election doesn't make a democracy. A series of elections do," said U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker. The election is an important sign that Iraq has emerged from the worst of the violence that engulfed it after the invasion in 2003 and worsened after the last election in 2005. Just 18 months ago, when monthly death tolls from violence were up to 10 times as high as now, holding a vote might have been impossible. Many Iraqis talk of change, and hope the election will reform regional governments that spend billions of dollars of state funds but are widely seen as corrupt, unaccountable and beholden to the interests of feuding sectarian groups. "There is an acute impression across the board that incumbents have done badly," a senior Western diplomat said. But the high stakes means there may also be violence in a country grown used to settling political scores with guns and bombs. So far, two candidates have been gunned down and the deputy head of a Sunni Arab party was blown up by a suicide bomber who burst into his home during a meeting with candidates. ALTER THE LANDSCAPE The provincial poll will set the political climate for a national election due later this year, in which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will fight to keep his mandate, shaping Iraq's future after U.S. forces are due to leave by the end of 2011. In the south, dominated by the country's Shi'ite majority, the parties that make up Maliki's ruling coalition will be running against each other after last facing voters as a bloc. Most southern provincial governments are controlled by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (ISCI), a religious party founded in exile in Iran during the rule of Saddam and now the strongest group in the ruling coalition. Its grip on the south is likely to hold. But Maliki will be hoping to win an independent base of support for his own smaller Dawa Party, campaigning on promises of more services from a stronger central government. Followers of Moqtada al-Sadr -- an anti-American Shi'ite cleric whose Mehdi Army militia controlled the streets of many southern towns until Maliki cracked down on them last year -- are keeping a low profile. They are not standing as a group, but have backed independent lists of candidates. In Sunni Arab areas in western and central Iraq, tribal groups known as "Awakening Councils" will participate in the election for the first time. The councils helped U.S. troops drive out Sunni militants, including al Qaeda, and are now hoping to win control from traditional Sunni religious parties. Much of the pre-election violence has taken place in the north, especially Nineveh province around Mosul, the part of Iraq where US forces say combat goes on against Sunni militants making a stand after being driven from other areas. Many Sunni Arabs boycotted the last set of polls, allowing Kurds, who make up about a quarter of the province's population, to win control of its provincial government, an imbalance that Western diplomats say has helped fuel unrest. In the long run, the election could ease violence by drawing Sunnis into politics. But with power in the province likely to change hands, militant groups have had something to fight over. Adjacent to Nineveh, one potentially explosive situation has been averted: in Kirkuk, an oil-producing city Kurds claim as their capital, the election has been indefinitely postponed because Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen could not agree rules for voting there.

At 19, Yousafzai is the youngest Messenger of Peace, the highest honor given by the United Nations for an initial period of two years. She was also the youngest person to win the Nobel peace prize in 2014 when she was 17. "You are not only a hero, but you are a very committed and generous person," Guterres told Yousafzai. Other current Messengers of Peace include actor Leonardo di Caprio, for climate change, actor Charlize Theron, whose focus is prevention of HIV and elimination of violence against women, and actor Michael Douglas, whose focus is disarmament. Yousafzai has become a regular speaker on the global stage and visited refugee camps in Rwanda and Kenya last July to highlight the plight of refugee girls from Burundi and Somalia. The Pakistani education activist came to prominence when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012 as she was leaving school in Pakistan's Swat Valley, northwest of the country's capital Islamabad. She was targeted for her campaign against efforts by the Taliban to deny women education. "The extremists tried all their best to stop me, they tried to kill me and they didn't succeed," Yousafzai said on Monday. "Now this is a new life, this is a second life and it is for the purpose of education." She now lives in Britain, where she received medical treatment after she was shot. Yousafzai said that when she finishes secondary school in June, she would like to study philosophy, politics and economics at university.

WASHINGTON, Dec 1, bdnews24.com/Reuters) - US President Barack Obama's decision on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan carries political peril as his Democratic Party gears up for tough midterm congressional elections next year. Obama will unveil the strategy on Tuesday in an address from the West Point military academy. He will significantly bolster US troop levels in Afghanistan and may also outline an exit strategy for the conflict. Republicans have urged Obama to take decisive action, while many Democrats have expressed serious doubts, making a delicate balancing act for a president already battling to deliver on his political promises. WHAT IS AT STAKE? Obama must decide whether to grant a request by his top Afghan commander, Army General Stanley McChrystal, for as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops or to side with more cautious advisers who favor a smaller deployment of 10,000 to 20,000 additional troops and a greater role for Afghan forces. Influential voices in Obama's Cabinet, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates as well as military chiefs, favor a US troop increase of 30,000 or more, and the final number could reach 35,000 once US trainers are factored in. The decision is critical for the future of the US-led war in Afghanistan, where 68,000 US soldiers already anchor a multinational force of about 110,000 troops battling resurgent Taliban militants. Part of a broader campaign against al Qaeda, the conflict carries risks for neighboring countries such as nuclear-armed Pakistan as well as for US allies such as Britain, where public support for the war is flagging. It could also imperil Obama's domestic agenda from healthcare to climate change as politicians in Washington and the voters who put them there weigh the wisdom of a costly US campaign in a country long known as "the graveyard of empires." WHAT DO AMERICANS THINK? Opinion polls show Americans -- exhausted by the long war in Iraq and their own economic problems -- are deeply divided on Afghanistan. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found 46 percent of Americans supported a large influx of troops to fight insurgents and train the Afghan military, while 45 percent favored sending a smaller number of troops. The poll showed 48 percent of Americans disapproved of how Obama was handling Afghanistan, against 45 percent who approved. Most worrisome for Democrats, approval among independents -- swing voters who helped put Obama in the White House in 2008 -- fell to a new low of 39 percent. Doubts over Afghanistan coincide with widespread concern among Americans over high unemployment, huge government bailout programs, a rising federal budget deficit and a divisive debate over reforming the expensive healthcare system. The anti-incumbent mood could cut into Democrats' legislative majorities in November 2010, when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and a third of the seats in the 100-member Senate are up for election. HOW ARE DEMOCRATS REACTING? Many liberal Democrats oppose a major escalation of involvement in a conflict they no longer see as central to U.S. security. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an advocate for other Obama initiatives such as healthcare reform, spoke out against upping the ante in Afghanistan, calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai an "unworthy partner" tainted by corruption who does not merit more U.S. aid. Other top Democrats have urged Obama to outline what the U.S. "exit strategy" will be for Afghanistan. McChrystal, in a briefing to a delegation of U.S. lawmakers last week, suggested the U.S. troop presence could begin to diminish after a post-surge peak by 2013, while an international conference on Afghanistan set for London in January would aim to set conditions for a gradual transfer of security responsibility to Afghan control. Several veteran Democratic lawmakers have proposed a "war tax" -- almost unthinkable in an election year -- on the richest Americans to pay for the conflict. Democrats hope that by reining in Obama on Afghanistan, they can prevent the party from becoming too closely associated with an unpopular war with no clear path to victory. They also hope to regain some credibility as fiscal managers by hitting the brakes on war spending that could rise by $30 billion to $40 billion per year. WHAT DO REPUBLICANS SAY? For Republicans, Obama's Afghanistan quandary has been an opportunity to showcase their traditionally strong views on national security and highlight what some portray as indecisiveness on the part of the Democratic president. Former Vice President Dick Cheney told a conservative talk radio host that Obama's three-month review of the options in Afghanistan had taken too long. "The delay is not cost-free," Cheney said. "Every day that goes by raises doubts in the minds of our friends in the region what you're going to do, raises doubts in the minds of the troops." Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell urged Obama to "keep the pressure on" the Taliban, while 14 House Republicans sent Obama a letter endorsing McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops. Republicans hope the debate will show them as vigilant against threats to the United States and win back voters in swing districts who have grown disillusioned with Obama. Democrats say Republicans are trying to distract Americans from the failure to defeat the Taliban in seven years of military operations under former President George W. Bush, who committed far greater forces to his war in Iraq.

The reduced air quality in New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, has helped slow the company’s production of electricity-generating coal by 11% there, BHP said in a review of its midyear financial results. “We are monitoring the situation, and if air quality continues to deteriorate, then operations could be constrained further in the second half of the year,” said the company, which ends its fiscal year on June 30. The irony was not lost on many in Australia. The country, which just endured its hottest and driest year on record, has been dealing for months with bushfires that have killed at least 29 people, ravaged tens of millions of acres, and left residents in its largest cities wheezing from the most polluted air in the world. “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!” Terry Serio, an actor and musician, said on Twitter. “I did roll my eyes,” Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, a policy institute, said in an interview. The smoke, Hare said, was most likely a minor inconvenience in the supply chain for BHP, the globe’s biggest mining company. But, he added, it served as a “wake-up call” to BHP that the world needs to wean itself off coal to avert the most damaging effects of climate change. “You can see the mood is changing in Australia,” Hare said. “Sooner or later, the companies are going to run out of social license.” A BHP spokesman said that smoke from the bushfires had reduced visibility and made equipment harder to operate at the Mount Arthur coal site 150 miles north of Sydney. In addition, some employees have taken leave from work to protect their properties from fires or to serve as volunteer firefighters. While the fires have affected production, the spokesman said, the slowdown was also the result of a shift to mining higher-quality products. But even as the company investigates options to reduce its climate impact, he said, coal will remain a major part of its energy production mix. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, and the industry wields wide influence on the country’s political leaders. The country has annual coal exports worth 67 billion Australian dollars, or about $45 billion, including to major nations like China, Japan and India. Although Australia emits only about 1.2% of global greenhouse gases, its economic reliance on fossil fuel extraction makes it the sixth-biggest producer of fuels that release carbon. Those emissions are expected to double by 2030, according to a 2019 report from the United Nations Environment Program. Under Australia’s current conservative leadership, emissions have been rising, and renewable energy targets have stagnated, even as the government says it will meet its carbon reduction targets under the Paris climate agreement. Climate scientists say the targets were among the weakest of those proposed by developed nations. ©2020 The New York Times Company

Begum’s family, desperate to save what few possessions they had, chained their only suitcase to their house, a makeshift structure of bamboo and banana leaves constructed after the last devastating flood in the area, just two years ago. As the waters rose, the house was marooned in muddied waters, and the family had to cook meals on a raised area of dry ground nearby. Then tragedy struck. Begum left her 1-year-old daughter, Lamia Khatun, on a patch of higher ground while she washed clothes in floodwaters on Tuesday. But the waters kept rising. “When I came back, she was gone,” Begum, 32, said. “We found her body hours later.” Across southern Asia, more than 4 million people have been hit hard by monsoon floods that have destroyed homes and structures, drowned entire villages and forced people to crouch on rooftops hoping for rescue. The monsoon season — usually June to September — brings a torrent of heavy rain, a deluge that is crucial to South Asia’s agrarian economy. But in recent years, the monsoon season has increasingly brought cyclones and devastating floods, causing the internal displacement of millions of people in low-lying areas, particularly in Bangladesh. Last year, at least 600 people were killed and more than 25 million affected by flooding because of the torrential monsoon rains in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Nepal, according to the United Nations. And in 2017, more than 1,000 people died in floods across South Asia. Rainfall has been heaviest this year in northeast India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and Nepal, according to the Southeast Asia Flash Flood Forecast System, which is affiliated with the United Nations. Bangladeshi authorities say that the flooding started in late June, inundations are expected to continue this month, and more areas will be affected. Enamur Rahman, the Bangladeshi minister for disaster management, said the inundations were the worst in decades and that hundreds of thousands of families had been marooned, forcing the authorities to open more than 1,000 emergency shelters. “We are fighting the catastrophe with every possible resource available,” Rahman said. “It seems rains and floods will be prolonged this year.” Researchers have warned that within a few decades, Bangladesh, with a population of more than 160 million people, may lose more than 10% of its land to sea-level rise, caused by a warming climate, displacing as many as 18 million. India has also suffered immensely. Floods have swept across the states of Assam, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal and other areas in the eastern part of the country. Authorities have said that at least 85 people have died, with more than 3 million affected by the deluge. In the northeastern state of Assam, Kaziranga National Park, a World Heritage site that is a home to the one-horned Indian rhinoceros, a species listed as vulnerable by the WWF, has been completely inundated. Officials said that more than 50 animals had died in the flooding, though some wildlife had been rescued. With more than a dozen rivers and tributaries swelling above the danger mark, rescue operations have been carried out in at least 22 districts across Assam. In Nepal, 67 people have died and 40 others are missing, according to the National Emergency Operation Center. That is in additional to the monsoons that have battered Bangladesh. Low-lying and densely populated, with 165 million people, the country is chronically ravaged by flooding. In Jamalpur, in the north, the flood situation has become critical, with rivers flowing well above the danger level. Muneeb-ul-Islam, 42, who lives in the area with his wife and three children, said he had lost his home several times in 10 years, leaving him with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. Muneeb-ul-Islam and his family are among more than 1 million people in Bangladesh left displaced or homeless by the floods. “It is as if we have committed some sin,” he said. “This is the third time in the last few years that we will have to rebuild our lives from scratch.” Begum, who lost her 1-year-old, said her life had been completely destroyed. She has now moved to a nearby shelter, a school building, where hundreds of people were crammed in. Fear of the coronavirus spreading in such cramped quarters looms large. Begum’s family said there had not been enough warning about the magnitude of the flooding. “I will never go back to the place where we used to live,” she said, “The water has snatched everything from us.”

Google Inc has thrown its financial clout behind an ambitious $5 billion proposed electric transmission line aimed at jump-starting investment in new wind farms off the heavily populated US East Coast. The search giant, which has about $30 billion of cash on its balance sheet, has come under criticism from some investors for investing in ventures outside its core Internet business, such as solar energy and a car that will drive itself. It declined to say how much it had invested to acquire an 37.5 percent stake in the project, the Atlantic Wind Connection, but the developers said the entire initial round of funding came to tens of millions of dollars. About a dozen wind projects have been proposed off the eastern United States but none has been built, largely due to the complicated process of securing regulatory approval. The project would help developers of offshore wind farms surmount a major cost challenge -- connecting their turbines to the grid in a way that allows them to sell to multiple customers. Japan's Marubeni Corp and New York investment firm Good Energies are joining Google in financing the planned 350-mile underwater electric cable project, which would be led by transmission-line developer Trans-Elect. "This will serve as a clean-energy superhighway, with on-ramps for wind farms and the ability to be intelligently expanded," Rick Needham, Google's green business operations director, told a news conference in Washington. "We can help kick-start an industry that can provide thousands of jobs." Trans-Elect expects the first segment of the project, whose construction should begin in 2013, to cost $1.8 billion. Google described its investment as "early stage," leaving open the possibility that other investors or lenders could be brought in to finance construction, which will account for the bulk of the total $5 billion cost. While the renewable energy industry welcomed the move, some pointed out that transmitting power from offshore turbines to the coast is only one of the many roadblocks facing developers. They also face a complex permitting process, which has dragged on for almost a decade for one proposed wind farm off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and unclear energy and environmental policies in Washington, where Congress looks unlikely to pass a comprehensive climate bill for the rest of President Barack Obama's current term in office. "Certainly, transmission is one of the major challenges for offshore, but in the long term a bigger challenge is long-term stable policy," said Matt Guyette, global strategy leader for renewable energy at General Electric Co, one of the top producers of wind turbines. "The one thing that will grow investment the most is a long-term renewable energy standard." Renewable energy standards are regulations that require utilities to buy a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar installations. Several eastern states have them but there is no national standard. "We are pleased to see the private sector taking steps to develop offshore transmission capacity that will help grow the offshore wind and renewable energy industries in the years to come," said Cathy Zoi, acting undersecretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the US Department of Energy. CONCERN ON SPENDING Some investors have raised concerns that Google will misspend its hefty reserves as it expands beyond its core businesses. "I don't think there's a significant amount of money being spent by Google on these projects, but I do think it gets at investor concerns about the use of the company's cash," said Clayton Moran, an analyst at The Benchmark Co who follows Google. "The energy initiatives and the car initiatives are pretty insignificant today, but it's symbolic of potential for them to spend somewhat recklessly and that's a real concern of investors." Google shares closed up less than 1 percent at $541.39 on the Nasdaq. BACKUP TO GRID The project, which would enable offshore wind turbines to transmit their electricity to the coast, would stretch from Virginia to New Jersey and could serve as a backup for the onshore transmission grid. It could help grid operators avoid or more quickly recover after incidents such as the major blackout that plunged parts of the northeastern United States and Canada into darkness for days in 2003, Trans-Elect Chief Executive Bob Mitchell said. Current U.S. wind farms can generate 35.6 gigawatts of electricity, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Texas, Iowa and California have the most installed capacity. The densely populated East Coast has fewer turbines, in part because of a lack of open space for them. Offshore installations, advocates argue, could generate electricity close to major population centers without also producing the greenhouse gases associated with global climate change. The cable would be able to transmit about 6 gigawatts of electricity, which would meet the needs of some 1.9 million households. The project is only a transmission line, meaning other investors would have to finance and build the offshore wind farms it would serve. FAR OFFSHORE The proposed cable would be installed under the seabed, 15 miles to 20 miles offshore. At that distance from the shoreline, turbines would be all but invisible from the coast. Visibility of turbines is an issue that has dogged Cape Wind, the Cape Cod wind farm first proposed in 2001. Opponents of Cape Wind have raised concerns that the turbines could mar the views from the tourist-dependent Cape Cod region of Massachusetts, as well as interfere with fisheries and injure migrating birds. "Having this transmission backbone fairly far offshore means that the wind farms can be put far enough out there that they will be mostly out of sight, barely visible from shore, which I think will eliminate a lot of the objections that people had to things like Cape Wind," Bill Weihl, Google's green energy czar, told the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco. Offshore wind on the East Coast could generate about 127 gigawatts of power, enough to meet half of those states' current electric demand, according to a recent study by ocean conservation group Oceana. The sea floor off the West Coast drops away too quickly to make offshore turbines practical. The grid would save developers who build installations near it the cost and complexity of building their own transmission lines that reach all the way to shore. "It could be a game-changer for offshore wind," said Sheeraz Haji, managing partner at the Cleantech Group, a San Francisco-based research firm. "Offshore transmission is an area that has been very difficult for many investors to get their heads around."

This time, though, Amoussa, who is now 22 and studies at the Université de Montréal, won’t be voting for Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Disappointed by the prime minister’s environmental policies and put off by recent revelations that he dressed in brownface 18 years ago, Amoussa said he planned to vote for the Green Party. “In the last election Justin Trudeau seemed like a real change, but he has let me down,” Amoussa said this week during a lunch break from classes. Trudeau swept to power in 2015, in part thanks to enthusiastic support from young people. But analysts said he could lose the election this time around if disenchanted young voters like Amoussa stay at home on Election Day, or split the vote by turning to another left-leaning party like the Greens or the New Democratic Party. As the Oct 21 election approaches, significant numbers of those voters appear to have already abandoned him. Polling data from this week shows that about 28% of voters under 35 years of age support Trudeau’s Liberals, according to Léger, a leading polling company in Montreal, compared with 37% on the eve of the 2015 election. The drop in youth support is particularly important because the Liberals and the Conservative Party are running neck-and-neck. Even a small shift could decide the election, said Jean-Marc Léger, chief executive of Léger. “Losing the youth vote is a serious threat against Mr Trudeau,” Léger said. Anna Gainey, the former president of the Liberal Party and a major architect of Trudeau’s political rise, said attracting young voters was inevitably harder now because Trudeau, a fresh face in 2015, was an incumbent. “If they don’t show up things can change very quickly,” she said, noting that voters under 35 had surpassed baby boomers to constitute the largest bloc of voters. In 2015, Trudeau presented himself as someone who wouldn’t do politics as usual. He attracted millennials by, among other things, promising to legalise recreational marijuana, which he did. A prime minister ideally suited to Instagram, where he has more than 3 million followers, Trudeau’s penchant for wearing funky socks, doing gravity-defying yoga poses and taking selfies also endeared him to many younger voters. But at 47, he is no longer the youngest contender. Both his rivals — the Conservative Party leader, Andrew Scheer, and the leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh — are 40. And a string of controversies this year has taken a toll. Earlier in the year, Trudeau’s former justice minister and attorney general, who is an indigenous woman, accused him and his mostly male aides of bullying her on how to handle a criminal case against a major Canadian corporation. The months of saturation news coverage left many voters feeling that he and his aides had ganged up on her. Women, in particular, said they were disappointed with him. He also alienated some young voters with his decision to use 4.5 billion Canadian dollars in government money, or $3.4 billion, to buy a pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific. In a reflection of how important environmental issues are to young Canadians, hundreds of thousands of people — many of them under 35 — took to the streets across the country Friday to show their support for the fight against global warming. In Montreal, Trudeau said that if the Liberals were reelected, his government would plant 2 billion trees to fight climate change. But as he marched with the crowd, a group of nearby young protesters chanted: “What about the pipeline? What about the pipeline?” Earlier last week, Trudeau’s campaign was upended by revelations that he had dressed in blackface and brownface on several occasions in his past. Amoussa, the chemistry student, said the pipeline purchase had already altered his perception of Trudeau. He had emigrated to Montreal from the Ivory Coast when he was 9, and said he respected Trudeau’s open approach to immigration. But his concerns about climate change had pushed him to abandon the Liberals. Seeing the photographs of Trudeau wearing brownface makeup and a turban at a 2001 “Arabian Nights” party had also had an impact. “We all do stupid things when we are young, and people can do racist things without being a racist,” Amoussa added. “But it did influence me a little.” Trudeau is an energetic campaigner and appears to be trying to appeal to young voters with proposals to make it easier to buy a house and to cut cellphone bills by 25%. His campaign is also promoting his plan for a national carbon tax and his commitment to ambitious international targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Ultimately, the election results will hinge on voters in Quebec and Ontario, Canada’s most populous provinces, where many young people and immigrants have long gravitated toward the Liberals. Matthew Bator, 18, an aviation technology student at Seneca College in Toronto, is one of the young voters the liberals need to woo. But turned off by what he sees as the Conservatives’ lack of support for student aid and repelled by the blackface episode, he said he wouldn’t be casting a ballot. “None of the candidates are really viable,” he said while rushing to an 8am math class. Audrey Yen-Suin, 23, a political science student at the University of Toronto, voted for the Liberals in the last election, primarily because of her support for cannabis legalisation. Now, she said, she was drawn to the New Democratic Party. Trudeau is “too much of a politician who doesn’t really have a heart behind what he’s saying,” she said. But in Montreal, Loraina Martel, a paramedic, 21 said she would be voting for Trudeau because of his commitment to gender equality, including a Cabinet that was nearly 50% women. “Justin Trudeau is the least worst option,” she said.   © 2019 The New York Times Company

NEW DELHI, Mon Jun 30, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - India unveiled a national climate plan on Monday to deal with the threat of global warming, focusing on renewable energy for sustainable development while refusing to commit to any emission targets that risk slowing economic growth. The National Action Plan identified harnessing renewable energy, such as solar power, and energy efficiency as central to India's fight against global warming and said a climate change fund would be set up to research "green" technologies. The national policy reflected India's current stand on climate change and would not please rich western countries asking for more commitment from one of the world's top polluters, experts said. "Our vision is to make India's economic development energy efficient," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on releasing the national plan. "Our people have a right to economic and social development and to discard the ignominy of widespread poverty." In spite of its pledge to clean technology, coal remains the backbone of India's power sector -- accounting for about 60 percent of generation -- with the government planning to add some 70,000 megawatts in the next five years. In a report released this month, Goldman Sachs said climate change could deplete India's cultivable land area and productivity, reduce labour productivity and increase the threat of toxic and chemical waste in the environment. "Although such dire prognostications are premature, urbanisation, industrialisation and ongoing global climate change will take a heavy toll on India's environment, if not managed better," it said. CLIMATE VS GROWTH But India says it must use more energy to lift its population from poverty and that its per-capita emissions are a fraction of those in rich nations, which have burnt fossil fuels unhindered since the industrial revolution. India's per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, were 1.2 tonnes in 2004, compared with 20.6 tonnes for the United States for the same year, according to U.N. data. India, whose economy has grown by 8-9 percent annually in recent years, contributes around 4 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. "Despite our development imperatives, our per capita GHG emissions will not exceed the per capita GHG emissions of the developed industrialised countries," Singh said. As a developing nation, India is not yet required to cut emissions -- said to be rising by between 2 and 3 percent a year -- under the Kyoto Protocol, despite mounting pressure from environmental groups and industrialised nations. Singh said India was not rigid and would try to make a gradual shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. "Thus the Plan is not a fixity," he said. "It is meant to evolve and change in the light of changing circumstances." At the moment, central to India's climate change plan are energy efficiency, harnessing of solar energy, conserving water, sustainable agriculture, sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem and sustainable habitat to create a "green India". "Our people want higher standards of living," Singh said, "but they also want clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe and a green earth to walk on."

Over the remaining 10 days, as negotiators from nearly 200 countries discuss how to make further progress on climate change, one of the biggest sticking points remains money. On Wednesday, governments and private investors announced a series of initiatives aimed at helping poorer countries avert the dangers of rising temperatures. A group of philanthropic foundations and international development banks announced a $10.5 billion fund to help emerging economies make the switch from fossil fuels to renewable sources. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States would support a financing mechanism that aims to direct $500 million a year for similar efforts through bond sales. And a coalition of the world’s biggest investors, banks and insurers that together control $130 trillion in assets said that they were committing to use that capital to hit net zero emissions targets in their investments by 2050. While those dollar amounts are eye-watering, the challenge is how exactly to use that money to transition energy systems and companies’ supply chains to net-zero targets. “We must be honest about what this means,” Ben Caldecott, the director of the sustainable finance group at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. “It does not mean that $130 trillion is in a war chest promised for deployment into a solutions to climate change today.” “We urgently need to focus on the quality and integrity of promises made by financial institutions, not simply their quantity,” he added. An estimated $100 trillion to $150 trillion in investments would be required over the next three decades to reach net zero, so Wednesday’s announcements could in theory provide the necessary financing. Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said the $130 trillion should not be a surprise but cautioned that the funds would be spent slowly if the public and private sectors don’t work together. “The realities are deploying that capital are going to be far harder than investing in a normal bond, a public equity, a treasury bond,” Fink said on a panel in Glasgow. To invest that money in a “safe and responsible way,” he said, there needs to be a better system than the one that exists today. Poorer countries have long demanded more aid from wealthier ones, whose emissions are principally responsible for temperature rises so far, both to accelerate the shift to cleaner sources of energy and to help them adapt to the dangers of climate change. A decade ago, the world’s richest nations, including the United States and the European Union countries, pledged $100 billion annually in climate finance to developing countries by 2020. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, they are falling short by tens of billions per year. Last month, rich countries outlined a plan to make good on their pledge by 2023. And Tuesday, Japan pledged an additional $10 billion in new financing to help countries in Asia slash their emissions of greenhouse gases. But developing countries have said that is not nearly enough.   © 2021 The New York Times Company

Extreme rainfall, and the extreme lack of it, affects untold numbers of people, taxing economies, disrupting food production, creating unrest and prompting migrations. So, factors that push regions of the world to exceptional levels of flooding and drought can shape the fate of nations. “Climate change will likely continue to alter the occurrence of record-breaking wet and dry months in the future,” the study predicts, “with severe consequences for agricultural production and food security.” Heavy rainfall events, with severe flooding, are occurring more often in the central and Eastern United States, Northern Europe and northern Asia. The number of months with record-high rainfall increased in the central and Eastern United States by more than 25 percent between 1980 and 2013. In those regions, intense rainfall from hurricanes can be ruinously costly. Munich Re, the reinsurance giant, said that the 2018 hurricane season caused $51 billion in losses in the United States, well over the long-term annual average of $34 billion. In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria contributed to a total of $306 billion in damage from extreme weather events in the United States. Parts of Africa, on the other hand, are experiencing more months with a pronounced lack of rain. The number of record-setting dry months increased by nearly 50 percent in sub-Saharan Africa during the study period. Jascha Lehmann, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and lead author of the study, compared extreme weather events to a high roll of a die. “On average, one out of six times you get a six,” he said. “But by injecting huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humankind has loaded the dice. In many regions, we throw sixes much more often with severe impacts for society and the environment.” While much climate research relies on complex models to make projections, this new work interprets already-observed monthly rainfall data from 50,000 weather stations around the world. “That’s not to say models are not good,” Lehmann said in an interview, but his observational data “fits what we expect from physics and what models also show.” Climate models have long predicted that because of the greenhouse gases human activity has pumped into the atmosphere and the warming that results, the world’s wet regions are likely to grow wetter. Warmer air causes greater evaporation from oceans and waterways, and warmer air can hold more moisture. There is also evidence that changes in atmospheric circulation in summer have caused some weather systems to stall. The combination of such factors can lead to torrential rains like those that inundated the Houston area during Hurricane Harvey last year, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during the floods of 2016. Regions that tend to be dry, by contrast, are expected to grow even more parched as higher temperatures dry the soil and air. “Climate change drives both wet and dry extremes,” Lehmann said. To conduct the study, which appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Lehmann’s team searched the databases of an authoritative repository of rainfall measurement, the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre in Germany. Given natural weather variability, some extreme weather events were to be expected, so the researchers tried to determine how many events would have occurred without the influence of global warming. The researchers determined that one-third of the record-dry months recorded in the African regions under study would not have occurred without the influence of climate change. The findings dovetail with another report Monday that detailed the connections between climate change and recent extreme weather events. That report, which was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, presented 17 peer-reviewed analyses of weather events around the world. The researchers evaluated heat waves, droughts, flooding and other phenomena and determined, for example, that marine heat waves off the coast of Australia in 2017 and 2018 would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. The report said that climate change made last year’s drought in the northern Great Plains of the United States and a pounding six-day monsoon in northeast Bangladesh far more likely. Out of 146 research findings in the series of papers, only about 30 percent did not find a substantial link between an extreme event and climate change. The message of the studies is “painfully clear,” said Heidi Cullen, a climate scientist with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “Burning fossil fuels is making our weather worse right now,” with greater likelihood of deadly heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, she said. “And the more we burn coal, oil and gas, the worse it will get.”   © 2018 New York Times News Service

TOKYO, Mon May 11, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Japanese opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa resigned on Monday in a move that is likely to improve his party's prospects in a looming election, after a fundraising scandal dampened its hopes for victory. A political stalemate and voter frustrations with Prime Minister Taro Aso had raised the chances Ozawa would lead his Democratic Party to victory in an election that must be held by October, ending more than 50 years of nearly unbroken rule by Aso's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). But the Democratic Party's lead in polls has narrowed after the scandal, clouding the outlook for the solid opposition victory that would break a deadlock that is stalling policy decisions as Japan struggles with a deep recession. "I have decided to sacrifice myself and resign as party leader to strengthen the unity of the party towards a clear victory in the next election and achieve a change in government," Ozawa told a news conference. The Democrats have vowed to reduce bureaucrats' meddling in policy-making, stress the rights of consumers and workers over corporate interests, and adopt a diplomatic policy less subservient to security ally the United States. Those positions were unlikely to be altered by Ozawa's departure, although a rejuvenated opposition might encourage the LDP to come up with extra stimulus plans to attract voters. A 15 trillion yen ($153 billion) spending package is already on its way through parliament. ] Ozawa's resignation had little impact on financial markets, with the yen trading a touch lower after an initial media report, but broadly unchanged on the day. Aso, who has threatened to call an early election if the Democrats obstruct debate in parliament on the massive extra budget to fight the recession, told reporters Ozawa's resignation would have no direct impact on the election timing. Recent speculation has focused on an August vote. "Now that (Ozawa) is gone, Prime Minister Aso might become more aggressive in economic stimulus to woo voters, rather than dissolving parliament now," said Hidenori Suezawa, chief strategist at Daiwa Securities SMBC. SUCCESSOR QUESTION While replacing Ozawa is likely to improve the Democrats' chances at the polls, not all the damage will be so easily undone, analysts said. "Things had gotten very tough. People were complaining about Ozawa," said independent political commentator Minoru Morita. "This improves the outlook for the Democrats quite a lot." Ozawa's exit could open the way for a younger leader, with possible candidates including former party leaders Katsuya Okada, an advocate of tougher climate policies seen as the frontrunner, and Seiji Maehara, a conservative security policy expert. Two other ex-leaders who are Ozawa's deputies, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan, are also possible successors. Ozawa, a skilled campaign strategist, has been shaking up Japanese politics for almost two decades since bolting the LDP and helping to briefly replace it with a pro-reform coalition. How far his resignation improves the Democrats' chances depends at least in part on who replaces him, and how smoothly. "It is a necessary step toward fixing the image problem. Now the question is whom do they chose, how do they chose him and how does he perform," said Gerry Curtis, a Columbia University professor and expert in Japanese politics. A Democratic Party source said the next leader would likely be chosen by a vote among party lawmakers, possibly within a week or 10 days. A survey by the daily Yomiuri newspaper before Ozawa's announcement and published on Monday showed the Democrats still had a razor-thin lead over the LDP, but that more than two-thirds of respondents questioned his earlier decision to stay on. "If Ozawa had stayed, I was going to submit a blank paper when I cast my vote," said Yukihiro Nakagawa, 44, an executive at a precision machinery company. "I would like to make up my mind after seeing what kind of policies the Democrats will promise after this, but I am leaning towards voting for the Democrats." The poll by the Yomiuri newspaper conducted before Ozawa's announcement showed 30 percent of respondents would vote for the Democrats in the next election against 27 percent for the LDP. Some experts have said Ozawa's resignation would revive calls in the LDP to replace the unpopular Aso, but others said there is no obvious successor and Aso would do his best to hang on.

The world's growing taste for olive oil is pouring new life into parts of rural North Africa, where the golden liquid has been a staple since ancient times. However, drought, archaic production methods and poor marketing are a challenge for local producers facing growing competition as more countries slip into the olive oil market. Tunisia and Morocco lack the big energy reserves of their OPEC-member neighbours Algeria and Libya and their dry, hot climates make olive oil a promising alternative export. All but 5 percent of the world's olive trees grow around the Mediterranean. Spain dominates the industry from its power base in Martos, followed by Italy and Greece. After heavy investment in modern machinery, the quality of Tunisian olive oil has improved and industry officials in Spain say it now fetches prices similar to their own. Attempts by North Africa to narrow the gap have been welcomed by European producers unable to press enough olive oil to meet world demand as growing middle classes from Brazil to Russia acquire a taste. More expensive than other cooking oils, it contains more healthier mono-unsaturated fat and polyphenols. Tunisians, rich or poor, have honed their expertise over centuries, smothering their food in olive oil and using it in medicines, beauty products and soaps or rubbed in as a moisturiser. "I've kept my health as I drink a glass of olive oil every morning and my wife uses it for every meal," said 90-year-old Hamed, a sprightly former night security guard from Tunis. More than 500,000 families rely on the olive oil business in the country of 10 million, where 56 million olive trees grow on 1.6 million hectares (4 million acres). The olive harvest between November and February sets the rhythm of the rural year and many Tunisians return to their native towns and villages to help gather the crop. Women sing traditional songs and exchange jokes as they pick up the olives shaken to the ground by the men. "My whole family is better off when we have a bumper olive harvest like this year," said Haj Smida, a farmer near the eastern Tunisian town of el-Jem. Salem Rhaim, a 68-year-old olive oil producer, postponed his son's wedding last year because of a poor crop. "I think we'll have a good harvest this season," said Rhaim. "If it's as good as we hope, I'll be ready to face the expensive wedding preparations." For all the local know-how, Tunisian producers say a lot of good oil is still sold off cheaply on the local market because they lack the technology to make it export grade. Some complain businessmen have moved into olive oil just to benefit from tax breaks but what they produce is poor, threatening the industry's brand image. Abdelmajid Mahjoub, who owns a century-old olive press in Tbourba, said poor packaging is also holding back exports. "We need to try harder on this so our products can compete with the Spanish, Greeks and Italians," he said. In Morocco, the government is offering financial incentives to increase the area under olive cultivation to 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) by 2010, from just 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) in 1999. Part of the production will go to satisfy local demand in a country that imports 300,000 tonnes of vegetable oils a year. Mohamed, 42, grows just enough olives for his family in Ain Balidan on the edge of the Rif mountains in northern Morocco. He has just planted dozens more trees donated by the government. "I'd love to have more land to plant olive trees -- prices have been shooting up," he said. The grey-green trees have come to symbolise hope for many Moroccans threatened by drought or desertification, and are a potential alternative to lucrative but illegal cannabis growing. "The weather changed in Morocco in the last 10 years and we've been thinking about plants that can save nature and be adapted to it," said Mohamed Badraoui, who heads Morocco's anti-desertification programme. Morocco, like neighbouring Algeria, has a long way to go to bring up to date technology that has changed little since the time of the Phoenicians. Some presses still use a donkey that walks in a circle dragging a stone or wooden mortar. "The world market has plenty of potential to grow because olive oil at the moment represents only 2.8 percent of the fat we consume," said Jose Ramon Diez, olive expert at Spanish farm union ASAJA in Madrid. Spain's olive harvest fell last year and some farmers in northern Morocco said Spanish traders had come to their villages asking to buy olives. Italy, the number-two olive oil producer, buys some oil for re-export under the label "Imported From Italy" and has been helping the Tunisian industry upgrade its machinery. Italian oil buyers say they want more consistent quality standards from North African producers. They also voice frustration at not being able to contact them directly, often having to go through intermediaries. Mauro Miloni, director of Italian olive oil industry group Unaprol's economic observatory, said increasing exports from North Africa would help balance a market dominated by Spain. "It is important to be able to buy olive oil of different origins," he said. "I think in coming years, with the liberalisation of trade, we can have even closer relations with the North African producers."

Pompeo made the announcement during a five-day swing through Asia, where he is visiting countries including India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Vietnam and Indonesia to gain support for his plan to counter China’s growing influence. Speaking from Malé, the capital of the Maldives, Pompeo said the United States would also appoint a resident ambassador for the country. Currently, Washington maintains diplomatic relations through its ambassador to Sri Lanka. The United States also operates a US centre in the capital that funds English lessons and other cultural activities. Pompeo said the US approach toward the Maldives would be “different” from that of Beijing, which has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the archipelago that it is struggling to repay. The Maldives’ foreign minister, Abdulla Shahid, said a “strong partnership between the US and the Maldives is crucial for promotion of security in the Pacific Ocean.” Shahid also said his country needed “more flexibility” in debt relief and, in cooperation with the United States, must “urgently address climate change,” which is an existential threat to the Maldives, according to U.N. reports. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1965, the Maldives — a string of more than 1,100 islands stretched across the Indian Ocean and known for its luxury resorts — has had friendly relations with the United States. But throughout its short history, the Maldives has been subject to influence campaigns by China, India and many Western nations. The country, off the coast of southern India, stretches across maritime routes that are crucial to Beijing. In 2013, Abdulla Yameen, an autocrat, took power and swung the Maldives’ diplomatic relationship closer to China. As a result, the Maldives received hundreds of millions of dollars from Beijing to finance infrastructure projects as part of China’s Belt and Road initiative. As the Maldives struggles to repay these loans, critics have warned that the country could become subject to “debt-trap diplomacy,” meaning it could be pressured to offer security concessions to China as repayment for large loans. This could threaten the nation’s sovereignty, critics say. In 2018, Yameen was defeated by Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, the leader of the Maldivian Democratic Party. In 2019, Solih’s party gained a majority in Parliament and started the process of rebalancing its diplomatic relationships with less emphasis on China. “It’s definitely a sort of geopolitical pendulum swing,” said Alyssa Ayres, the deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia in the Obama administration. “You are seeing the Maldives swinging back and deepening its engagement with India, the United States, Japan and European nations.” In recent months, the United States has focused on the Maldives. In September, the countries signed a defence agreement. India has been historically sceptical of foreign military presence so close to its borders but blessed the deal. “Countries like China, India and others have an active presence already,” said Robert O. Blake Jr., the US ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives from 2006 to 2009. “We’ve been a little behind the curve.” And while it is important for the United States to strengthen diplomatic and military ties with the Maldives, experts also note that more than anything, climate change must be a prime topic of discussion, given that estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that a majority of the Maldives could be under water by the year 2100 because of rising sea levels. Pompeo said that the United States would continue to assist the Maldives “with respect to the risk from changing weather patterns,” but that “human innovation and creativity” were the best solution. “When you’re looking at a place like the Maldives,” Ayres said, “the situation is so dire. The Trump administration has been very clear it simply doesn’t see this as an issue in the same way.”   ©2020 The New York Times Company

BARCELONA, Spain,Tue Oct 7, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Evidence is mounting day by day that mankind is to blame for climate change, and the financial crisis is a temporary setback in the hunt for solutions, the head of the UN Climate Panel said on Tuesday. Rajendra Pachauri, whose panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore, said the downturn could dominate for 2-3 months before politicians return to focus on fixing long-term problems like global warming. "The evidence ... is getting stronger by the day. We have much more evidence available of what the human role is in climate change," he told Reuters by phone from India. "One has every reason to take action on what's already been said." Pachauri's panel, which draws on the work of 2,500 scientists, said last year that it was at least 90 percent sure that mankind was to blame for warming and forecast more droughts, heatwaves, floods and rising sea levels. He said at the moment everything seemed to be "on the back burner" because of worries about the financial system. "I'm absolutely sure that climate change will be the last thing people will think about at this point in time." "But it's not going to go away," he said. "Sooner or later, they will come back to it." Arctic sea ice, for instance, shrank to its smallest ever recorded area in September 2007, and came close to breaking the record last month. SOUL SEARCHING He dismissed some skeptics' view that global warming has stopped because the warmest year since records began in the mid-19th century was 1998. That year was warmed by a strong El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean. "Eleven of the last 12 years have been the warmest ever recorded. The trend is very clear," he said. He predicted that the financial crunch would bring "soul searching about how society might act to reduce dependence on fossil fuels" and shift to renewable energies such as wind, solar or hydropower. More than 190 governments have agreed to work out a new U.N. climate treaty by the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 37 industrialized nations to make cuts in emissions of an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Pachauri said he hoped that the world could agree strong action by the end of 2009. He said that the next US president, whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, would do more to fight climate change. And he expressed optimism that McCain could fight off skepticism by some Republicans. He played down the role of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska who says natural shifts may explain climate change alongside human influences. "I wouldn't really worry too much about her," he said, predicting she would have little influence on the issue. "My feeling is that, in 2-3 months from now, or soon after the new president takes office (in January), he is going to have to look to permanent solutions ... and climate change is going to be an important part of this." He said the next president "really has a tough job on his hands."

Maibam Sharat was second in a line of six friends, walking past a security post with his hands up in the air as ordered by Indian troops, when he says a soldier stepped out of an armoured car and opened fire. He doesn't know how long the shooting lasted but when it stopped he found his friend Ranbir, who was walking in front of him, bleeding from the stomach. The troops, there to fight separatist militants in India's remote northeastern state of Manipur, moved him to their camp instead of getting medical help. When they gave in to pressure from locals and took him to hospital, it was four hours too late -- the farmer had taken seven bullets and lost too much blood to make it. "Maybe they were just venting their frustration and anger after their colleagues close by had come under attack from militants earlier in the evening," said Sharat, a driver from the hamlet of Nongpok Semai. Human rights groups and political parties say Ranbir's killing was the latest in a long list of abuses by the military in insurgency-torn Manipur, abuses committed under the protection of a draconian federal anti-terror law. That law, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or AFSPA, gives soldiers virtual immunity from prosecution, and has taken centre stage as the state of 2.6 million people begins voting this week in a three-stage poll to elect a new legislature. Most parties seem to agree that the law, which only applies to parts of India's northeast and to Kashmir in the northwest, should either be repealed or drastically changed. "If we come to power, we will ensure AFSPA is repealed in the very first session of the new legislature," said Sovakiran Singh, legislator from the Heirok constituency to which Nongpok Sekmai belongs. In theory New Delhi could overrule the state government and reimpose the law. But Singh hopes it will respond to the pressure from Manipur, where 20,000 people have died in a separatist rebellion since the 1960s. AFSPA gives troops sweeping powers to search, arrest and kill suspected militants even when they face no imminent threat. Troops can only be prosecuted with central government permission, -- and that rarely comes. The 1958 law was introduced to combat armed separatist militancy in northeast India, and the army says it offers them vital protection from politically motivated charges. Rights groups say the powers it grants have fostered a climate where security forces commit rights abuses with impunity, including torture, rape and murder. That, they say, has only fuelled more anger and created more insurgents. "AFSPA is the product of the gross paranoia of the state," said Pradip Phanjoubam, editor of the Imphal Free Press daily. A top official of the Border Security Force, whose men were involved in the Nongpok Sekmai shooting, said the soldiers were retaliating against fire from militants. But hardly anyone in the hamlet believes him. Manipur is one of India's most troubled regions, 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from New Delhi but far from the nation's consciousness. Soldiers are everywhere. The state has gone up in flames several times in the last five years when soldiers were accused of killing innocents and people took to the streets in anger. Despite the protests, extra-judicial killings saw a 'slight increase' last year, with 18 documented cases, says Babloo Loitongbam, director of Manipur's Human Rights Alert. Phanjoubam and Loitongbam say New Delhi should be pushing for a political not a military solution to the insurgency in Manipur, to bring development to one of India's most backward states. But whether political parties here will be able to create genuine pressure for change remains to be seen. India's ruling Congress party, which has also been in power in Manipur since 2002, has dilly-dallied on AFSPA. Party chief Sonia Gandhi told Manipuris this week that New Delhi was "seriously and genuinely" looking into the report of an expert panel which is said to have recommended changes to the law 18 months ago. But many Manipuris remain sceptical of change.

WASHINGTON, Mon Mar 23,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The Obama administration wants to build on a US-India civilian nuclear power deal to work with the Indians to strengthen the global non-proliferation system, a senior US diplomat said on Monday. US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg said the 2005 atomic power deal allowing New Delhi to import nuclear technology after a 33-year freeze gave both countries a duty to shore up the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty system. "Both the United States and India have the responsibility to help to craft a strengthened NPT regime to foster safe, affordable nuclear power to help the globe's energy and environment needs, while assuring against the spread of nuclear weapons," he said. India, which is not a signatory to the NPT, is nonetheless "in the position to look at the kinds of commitments it can make to be part of an international approach," Steinberg said at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group agreed in September to lift a ban on nuclear trade with India, imposed after its first nuclear test in 1974 and for its refusal to join the NPT. Washington overcame significant opposition to win the NSG waiver in order to implement the nuclear cooperation pact, a key strategic, clean energy, environmental and commercial goal of the United States. India, Pakistan and Israel are the only countries never to have signed the NPT. India's special envoy for nuclear issues and climate change said the nuclear deal and NSG waiver meant his country was "now accepted as a partner in the global nuclear domain." "Thanks to the civil nuclear agreement, we are now, potentially at a different level of engagement on these hitherto sensitive and even contentious issues," envoy Shyam Saran said at Brookings. "How we deal with bringing India and Pakistan into the NPT world is a critical question," Steinberg said. How Washington and New Delhi would cooperate on non-proliferation issues would be worked out in talks once the Obama administration filled key posts and following India's general elections in April and May, he added.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Australia this week as Washington grapples with a dangerous standoff with Moscow, which has massed some 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s border and stoked Western fears of an invasion. Russia denies it has such plans. The Biden administration wants to show the world its long-term strategic focus remains in the Asia-Pacific and that a major foreign policy crisis in one part of the world does not distract it from key priorities. Asked by reporters on Friday if confrontation with China in the Indo-Pacific was inevitable, Blinken replied "nothing is inevitable". "Having said that, I think we share concerns that in recent years China has been acting more aggressively at home and more aggressively in the region," he said, before meeting with Quad foreign ministers and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on top of cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, climate change and COVID related issues, the two top diplomats will also be discussing China, North Korea and Ukraine. "More than one authoritarian regime is presenting itself in the current world climate as a challenge. DPRK (North Korea), China as well and they will be part of our discussions today. We strongly support US leadership on these challenges," she said before a bilateral meeting with Blinken. "We are going to talk today, I'm sure, about the threats to the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine as well," she added. Britain said the "most dangerous moment" in the West's standoff with Moscow appeared imminent, as Russia held military exercises in Belarus and the Black Sea following the buildup of its forces near Ukraine. On Thursday, Blinken said Washington was working "24/7" on the Ukraine crisis but reaffirmed US focus on the Indo-Pacific — a region he said would be instrumental in shaping much of 21st century. "It's important that we be present, that we be engaged, that we be leading across this region," he said. 'FREE FROM COERCION' Both Blinken and Payne said a key element of the Quad discussion will focus on establishing a regional environment free from "coercion", a thinly veiled swipe at Beijing's expansive economic and military ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad's cooperation on the region's COVID response was "most critical", Payne told parliament, with cyber and maritime security, infrastructure, climate action and disaster relief - especially after the recent Tonga volcanic eruption - also in focus. Speaking to reporters on the plane en route to Melbourne, Blinken described the Quad as a "powerful mechanism" to deliver vaccines worldwide as well as to push back against "aggression and coercion" in the Indo-Pacific, without naming China. New pledges are unlikely to be announced before a May summit of Quad leaders in Japan that President Joe Biden plans to attend. Blinken's trip comes after China and Russia declared last week a "no limits" strategic partnership, their most detailed and assertive statement to work together - and against the United States - to build a new international order based on their own interpretations of human rights and democracy. US-Chinese ties are at their lowest point in decades as the world's top two economies disagree on issues ranging from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the South China Sea and China's treatment of ethnic Muslims. Biden told Asian leaders in October the United States would launch talks on a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. But few details have emerged and his administration has been reluctant to offer the increased market access Asian countries desire, seeing this as threatening American jobs. Critics say the lack of US economic engagement is a major weakness in Biden's approach to the region, where China remains to be the top trading partner for many of the Indo-Pacific nations.

President George W. Bush sought to calm Americans' fears about the economy on Monday while charting a course he hopes will keep him relevant in his final year in office. With the specter of recession supplanting the Iraq war as the top U.S. concern, Bush acknowledged in his final State of the Union address that growth was slowing but insisted the country's long-term economic fundamentals were sound. He prodded Congress to act quickly on a $150 billion economic stimulus package laid out last week and resist the temptation to "load up" the plan with additional provisions. "In the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth. But in the short run, we can all see that growth is slowing," Bush said in a globally televised speech to the U.S. Congress. Politically weakened by the unpopular war in Iraq, eclipsed by the race to choose his successor and scrambling to stave off lame-duck status, Bush presented no bold new ideas. Bush urged Americans to be patient with the mission in Iraq almost five years after the U.S.-led invasion. He touted security gains in Iraq he ascribed to a troop buildup ordered last January but gave no hint of any further troop reductions there, asserting that such decisions would depend on his commanders' recommendations. Calling on Iran to "come clean" on its nuclear program, he issued a stern warning to Tehran, which he had branded part of an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union speech. "Above all, know this: America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf," Bush said. A YEAR TO GO Bush's seventh State of the Union speech was a chance to set the tone for his waning months in the White House and try to salvage his frayed legacy before he leaves office in January 2009. Sandwiched between Saturday's Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina and Tuesday's Republican contest in Florida, Bush will struggle to make himself heard above the growing din of the 2008 election campaign. At the top of his speech agenda was a push for congressional passage of a stimulus package meant to avert recession in an economy suffering from high oil prices and a housing slump. "At kitchen tables across our country, there is concern about our economic future," Bush said, acknowledging rising food and gas prices and increasing unemployment. He is trying to head off attempts by some Senate Democrats to expand the plan beyond the tax rebates and business investment incentives agreed with House of Representatives leaders last week. The impetus for compromise is that no one, least of all an unpopular president nearing the end of his watch, wants to be blamed for an economic meltdown before the November 4 elections. Some economists say the stimulus measures may buy time but will not be enough to solve the woes that have roiled global financial markets. "TEMPORARY FIX" Delivering the Democratic response to Bush, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius called the plan only a "temporary fix" and urged Democrats and Republicans to work together so "we won't have to wait for a new president to restore America's role in the world." On Iraq, Bush was in a better position than a year ago, when he implored skeptical Americans to embrace his plan to send thousands more troops to Iraq. "Our enemies in Iraq have been hit hard," he said. "They have not been defeated, and we can still expect tough fighting ahead." He announced no new troop reductions despite continuing calls from Democrats for a withdrawal timetable, something polls show most Americans want as well. Taking aim at Iran, Bush pressed Tehran not only on its nuclear program but to "cease your support for terror abroad." Bush's ability to rally international support against Iran has been diminished by a U.S. intelligence report that Tehran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Bush, a latecomer to the fight against global warming, also committed $2 billion for a new international fund to promote clean energy technologies and combat climate change. He has faced international criticism for repeatedly rejecting caps on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, the world's biggest polluter.

Poland will propose Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement that led to the fall of communism, to join the EU's Reflection Group looking at the 27-nation bloc's future, a source said. EU leaders want to appoint a group of "wise men" to look at the long-term future of the European Union. The group is to focus on Europe in 2020-2030, mostly on the economic challenges of globalisation. The panel will also look at issues such as energy, climate change and justice matters. It is due to report its findings to EU leaders in June 2010. "Walesa will be our candidate for the Reflection Group," a source close to the government told Reuters. Walesa, former president of Poland who worked as a shipyard electrician in Gdansk, is a symbol of the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. "I think that Lech Walesa has a great chance. I know that there are positive reactions to his possible candidacy from many sides," said Krzysztof Lisek, head of the parliament's foreign policy committee. The European Union will likely decide on who will be part of the group in the second half of the year. Walesa was not immediately available for comment. The group is led by former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales. Former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Jorma Ollila, chairman of mobile phone giant Nokia, have been named as the two vice-chairs of the panel. The group is to consist of nine members in total.

Animals living in patches of rainforest cut off from bigger expanses of jungle by farms, roads or towns are dying off faster than previously thought, according to an academic study published on Tuesday. "We uncovered a staggering rate of local extinctions," the British and Brazilian researchers wrote in the online science journal PLOS ONE. They visited 196 fragments of what was once a giant, intact forest in eastern Brazil on the Atlantic coast, now broken up by decades of deforestation to make way for agriculture. Each isolated forest patch, ranging from less than the size of a soccer pitch to more than 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres), had on average only four of 18 types of the mammals the experts surveyed, including howler monkeys and marmosets. White-lipped peccaries, similar to pigs, "were completely wiped out and jaguars, lowland tapirs, woolly spider monkeys and giant anteaters were virtually extinct," the British and Brazilian scientists said of their findings. Normal estimates of declining wildlife numbers, based on the size of isolated forest fragments, predicted higher survival rates, it said. But they had underestimated continuing human pressures such as hunting and fires. "This is bad news for conservation," Professor Carlos Peres, of Britain's University of East Anglia, told Reuters. Many animals had vanished even in what seemed big areas of forest with intact tree canopy, he said. The rate of species loss in the area studied - the Atlantic Forest region which covers 250,000 sq km (95,000 sq miles), the size of Britain or the U.S. state of Michigan, was likely to be mirrored in other countries such as Indonesia, Ghana or Madagascar, Peres said. PLEA FOR PARKS The scientists urged better conservation. In Brazil, animals survived best in five forest remnants that were protected as parks. "This paper is a very big positive endorsement of more protected areas," Peres said. Measures to place an economic value on forests could help, for instance by making them part of a fight against climate change, he said. Forests absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they burn or rot. Between 12 and 20 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from burning fossil fuels, are caused by deforestation. Almost 200 nations are looking into ways to protect forests through a UN program called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) that would put a price on carbon stored in trees in developing nations, for example by bringing forests into carbon trading systems. Peres said that "degradation" in UN jargon referred mainly to logging but should be expanded to cover threats to wildlife. "My mission is to put wildlife and biodiversity into that second 'D' of REDD," he said.

Gray, a senior Labor party figure in the resource-rich Western Australia state, should ensure an advocate for the resources industry remains in place at a time when investment in the sector is slowing amid signs the mining boom has peaked. Prime Minister Julia Gillard also said the Climate Change Department, which has overseen the introduction of a controversial carbon tax, would now be merged with the Industry Department, and would be overseen by Climate Change Minister Greg Combet. However, Gillard made no changes to the crucial Treasury or Finance Ministry, held by Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan and Penny Wong respectively. The reshuffle was forced on the government after a botched leadership coup last Thursday by forces loyal to former leader Kevin Rudd, with three cabinet ministers and two junior ministers quitting after supporting Rudd. Gillard has set elections for September 14, which opinions polls currently show she is almost to certain to lose, meaning the reshuffle's impact is likely to be limited. Among those to resign was former Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, who was regarded as a business friendly minister and a strong supporter of the mining industry in Gillard's cabinet. Around A$400 billion ($418 billion) has been invested in Australian resources projects over the past decade, with a further A$200 billion in liquefied natural gas projects, but the boom appears to be slowing. The mining employer group Australian Mines and Metals Association (AMMA) said Gray was well known to the industry and should help attract investment to the sector. Gray joined the Labor party in 1974. He quit the party in 2000 to work for conglomerate Wesfarmers and later as a public relations adviser for Woodside Petroleum, in order to help shape its defense in a takeover battle with Royal Dutch Shell. Shell eventually withdrew its bid after it was deemed harmful to the national interest by then Treasurer Peter Costello, thanks in part to Gray's campaign to muster public sentiment against Shell. ($1 = 0.9572 Australian dollars)

Half a kg of salmon; two kg of potatoes; a tonne of greenhouse gas reductions -- shoppers at one Norwegian mall can now buy cuts in their carbon footprint as they pick up their weekly groceries. The Stroemmen Storsenter shopping centre outside Oslo began selling the certificates on Saturday, at 165 Norwegian crowns ($30.58) per tonne, to people who feel bad about contributing to climate change. By midday on Monday, its second day of offering the U.N.-approved Certified Emissions Reductions, it had sold more than a third of the 1,000 CERs on offer and would consider buying more if they sell out, the mall's managers said. They said the certificates were bought by private individuals and by small firms wanting them for their employees. One CER corresponds to a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reductions via the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows those in rich countries to invest in emissions cutting projects in developing nations and count the cuts as their own. Each Norwegian accounts for about 11 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, mainly from burning fossil fuels. "Many people want to buy reductions, but until we started this in the shopping mall, they haven't known where to get them, but now they are available to everybody," said Ole Herredsvela, the shopping centre's technical manager. "We are doing this also to create awareness among people towards the problem (of climate change)," he said. Up until now households have been able to obtain emissions credits mainly when buying airplane tickets, with the airlines buying them on behalf of passengers or through various credit card schemes offsetting the carbon footprint of card purchases. Over-the-counter sales are something new. Norway's third-biggest shopping centre is not making money from the sales, but rather is selling them at cost plus a 10 percent administration fee which goes to its partner, Norwegian carbon management services firm CO2focus, Herredsvela said. CUTS FROM INDIAN WIND POWER CO2focus bought the CERs from Oxford-based EcoSecurities which has obtained them from its involvement in a wind power project in Maharashtra in India, company officials said. "This is an offset where we sell a paper saying that this is proof that you have bought a U.N.-approved emissions credit, a CER, from this specific product," Per Otto Larsen, a partner at CO2focus, told Reuters. One tonne of CO2 is roughly equal the emissions from 5,000 km (3,107 miles) driven in a car or about six average flights within the Nordic region, Larsen said. Larsen said CO2focus has found wide interest in obtaining emissions reductions among its clients -- companies such as taxi and bus services, car leasing companies but also firms marketing consumer goods. "We are working with companies so they can implement credits in their products," he said. But selling directly to retail customers is a fresh idea. "I think this is unique," Larsen said.

Then, on Oct 16, the day they had planned to visit the Terracotta Warriors, the couple tested positive for the coronavirus. Since then, China has locked down a city of 4 million, as well as several smaller cities and parts of Beijing, to contain a fresh outbreak that has infected more than 240 people in at least 11 provinces and regions. The authorities have shuttered schools and tourist sites. Government websites have detailed every movement of the unlucky couple and their sprawling web of contacts, including what time they checked into hotels and on which floors of restaurants they sat. The no-holds-barred response is emblematic of China’s “zero COVID” policy, which has served the country remarkably well: China has reported fewer than 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began. The scale of the new outbreak, while tiny compared to many other countries, is large for China. But the policy has also, increasingly, made China an outlier. The rest of the world is reopening, including New Zealand and Australia, which also once embraced zero tolerance. China is now the only country still chasing full eradication of the virus. “Every locality should firmly adhere to the policy of ‘Defend externally against importation, defend internally against rebound,’ ” Mi Feng, a spokesperson for the National Health Commission, said at a news conference Sunday. “The current control measures cannot be relaxed.” The government’s strict strategy is the product of a uniquely Chinese set of calculations. Its thriving exports have helped to keep the economy afloat. The ruling Communist Party’s tight grip on power enables lockdowns and testing to be carried out with astonishing efficiency. Beijing is set to host the Winter Olympics in February. For many Chinese, the low case numbers have become a source of national pride. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has repeatedly pointed to the country’s success in containment as proof of the superiority of its governance model. But experts — both in China and abroad — have warned that the approach is unsustainable. China may find itself increasingly isolated, diplomatically and economically, at a time when global public opinion is hardening against it. “The regime thinks it needs to maintain a ‘zero COVID’ policy to maintain its legitimacy,” said Lynette Ong, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “At a huge cost, though.” In the early phase of the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party’s very hold on power seemed to hinge on its ability to control the virus. Its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan gave rise to a stunning outpouring of public anger. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and patients begging for help flooded the Chinese internet. As the virus barrelled across the rest of the world, that narrative changed. China’s strict lockdowns and mass testing campaigns, once criticised as heavy handed, became models for other countries. As deaths mounted in western democracies, Xi repeatedly emphasised how quickly China had flattened its caseload. Outrage about the initial response to Wuhan gave way to at-times strident nationalism. Other countries that adopted “zero COVID” policies were hailed as models of competent governance that prioritised saving lives over convenience and economic growth. As the virus has dragged into its second year, and with the onset of the far more contagious delta variant, countries are again reconsidering their strategies. Australia, which was home to the world’s longest lockdown, is scrapping quarantine requirements for vaccinated residents returning from overseas. New Zealand formally abandoned its quest for zero this month. Singapore is offering quarantine-free travel to vaccinated tourists from Germany, the United States, France and several other countries. China has refused to change tack. When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested this summer that China learn to live with the virus, he was attacked viciously online as a lackey of foreigners. A former Chinese health minister called such a mindset reckless. Ong said the government was afraid of any challenge to its narrative of pandemic triumph. “Outbreaks have become so commonplace that it’s really a nonevent,” she said. “But the Chinese authorities want to control any small potential source of instability.” There are also more practical reasons for China’s hesitation. Medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities, and more remote areas could quickly be overwhelmed by an uptick in cases, said Zhang Jun, an urban studies scholar at the City University of Hong Kong. In addition, though China has achieved a relatively high full inoculation rate, at 75% of its population, questions have emerged about the efficacy of its homegrown vaccines. And, at least for now, the elimination strategy appears to enjoy public support. While residents in locked-down areas have complained about seemingly arbitrary or overly harsh restrictions on social media, travel is relatively unconstrained in areas without cases. Wealthy consumers have poured money into luxury goods and fancy cars since they’re not spending on trips abroad. “As long as they can still feel a certain level of freedom of mobility, I think that kind of COVID-zero policy doesn’t strike the domestic audience as too severe,” Zhang said. Other governments that have chosen to live with the virus may yet lose their nerve. After lifting many restrictions this summer, Singapore reinstated them in September amid a spike in infections. (Still, the government is moving forward with travel lanes.) But experts agree that the costs of expecting zero cases will hit eventually. China’s economic growth is slowing, and domestic travel during a weeklong holiday earlier this month fell below last year’s levels, as a cluster of new cases spooked tourists. Retail sales have proven fitful, recovering and ebbing with waves of the virus. The country may also suffer diplomatically. Xi has not left China or received foreign visitors since early 2020, even as other world leaders prepare to gather in Rome for a Group of 20 summit and Glasgow for climate talks. China’s hard-nosed approach is also trickling down to Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous territory and global financial hub. In trying to align their own COVID prevention policies with the mainland’s, Hong Kong’s leaders have introduced the world’s longest quarantine, ignoring escalating warnings from business leaders about an exodus of foreign firms. And even those supportive of the restrictions wonder whether there is an exit strategy. “I think the current policies are still in the right direction,” said Jason Qiu, 27, who grew up in Gansu province, not far from Lanzhou, the city of 4 million now under lockdown. “But if things go on like this for a long time — for example if the pandemic is going to continue for another five or 10 years, or become endemic — maybe it would be time to consider changing some measures.” In a potential nod to those concerns, some officials have broached the idea of loosening restrictions, though cautiously. Gao Fu, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a recent interview with Chinese media that once the country reached an 85% vaccination rate, “why shouldn’t we open up?” But he prefaced his question with a warning: “This is a very good question. But it’s also a very sensitive question.” Until then, those stranded by the lockdowns have tried to make the best of their situations. State news outlets have reported that roughly 10,000 tourists are trapped in Ejin Banner, a region of Inner Mongolia, after the emergence of cases led to a lockdown. As consolation, the local tourism association has promised them free entry to three popular tourist attractions, redeemable within the next three years. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Rich nations have less than a month to go before they must start meeting emissions caps under the Kyoto Protocol that aims to fight global warming. Yet 16 of the 36 industrialised nations bound by Kyoto limits are over their targets set for 2008-2012 and will have to buy carbon offsets to meet these, drawing criticism at a UN meeting in Bali. "There's this quite strong feeling (among poorer countries) that a number of commitments in those areas, commitments from the past, have not been met and will be conveniently forgotten when we switch to a new agenda item called the future," said Yvo de Boer, the UN's head of climate change. About 190 nations are meeting in Bali to try to initiate two years of talks that will lead to a successor pact from 2013. The goal is to agree on a broader climate pact bringing together rich and poor countries because targets under the existing Kyoto Protocol have been deemed too weak for the longer term. Kyoto obliges rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent by 2008-12 from 1990 levels, but allows them to pay developing countries to cut emissions on their behalf through a trade in carbon offsets. Although Kyoto came into force in 2005, its commitment period only begins from Jan 1, 2008 till 2012. Some developing countries, including Brazil, think rich nations should make painful emissions cuts at home, curbing their use of fossil fuels, before devising new ways to fund cheap cuts overseas such as reducing deforestation. Clearing tropical rainforests is a big contributor to climate change. To focus on local action, the European Union has proposed a 10 percent limit on offsetting when meeting its goal to curb emissions by a fifth by 2020, de Boer told Reuters. The EU is due to detail that measure next month and on Wednesday declined to comment on a 10 percent cap. RISING The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying in 2001 it was unfair to exempt developing countries from targets, and this week said that offsetting had allowed EU emissions to rise in spite of Kyoto caps. Emissions of six of the 15 older members of the EU rose in 2005, putting the EU-15 about 2 percent below 1990 levels versus a Kyoto target of 8 percent. "Emissions are rising, within that context (Kyoto) is not doing its job," said Harlan Watson, the head of the US delegation in Bali. "I fully expect the EU will meet its targets through the (carbon offset) mechanisms." The carbon offsetting scheme under Kyoto, called the Clean Development Mechanism, suits rich and many poorer countries by making it cheaper for rich countries to meet their targets and helping developing nations to curb emissions. The UN body supervising the scheme said on Wednesday the current pipeline of offset projects could deliver up to 500 million tonnes of emissions cuts per year from 2008-12, equivalent to the annual emissions of Australia. But many less developed countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia told the conference they were missing out on the benefits. That's partly because carbon offsetting pays companies to cut emissions, and doesn't favour African countries which have few emissions to start with. The UN panel proposed on Wednesday to waive fees for project developers in such states. Outside the main Bali conference centre, three environmental acitivists wearing hard hats waved a placard reading -- "Youth wants hard emissions caps for industrialised countries". "We want a 30 percent cut in domestic emissions (by 2020)," said Stephan Singer, policy officer at WWF, referring to rich countries. "We need offsetting on top of that cap. We need the money going into the South."

A US Senate panel voted on Tuesday to approve the US-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement without a controversial proposal that would give Congress more influence over future deals. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 19-2 in favor of the deal, which would end the three-decade ban on U.S. nuclear trade with India and is seen by the White House as the cornerstone of a new strategic partnership with New Delhi. Critics believe the deal undermines efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and sets a precedent allowing other nations to seek to buy nuclear technology without submitting to the full range of global nonproliferation safeguards. The bill text approved did not include language advocated by an influential congressman to give the U.S. Congress greater say over future such agreements. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman last week proposed changing U.S. law so any future agreements would become effective only if Congress votes to approve them, sources familiar with the matter said. Such agreements now typically go into effect unless Congress rejects them during a 60-day period. As a result, the law is now tilted in favor of the agreements going through. Berman asked for the change in the Atomic Energy Act in exchange for speeding up a vote on the U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement. The fuel and technology deal would help India meet rising energy demand without aggravating climate change and open a market worth billions of dollars. U.S. lawmakers are racing to finish their work this week, including a massive Bush administration financial bailout plan for Wall Street, so they can campaign for the Nov. 4 election. It is unclear whether the measure can get passed during this week and, if it does, whether Berman's proposal may be included. House Foreign Affairs Committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil declined direct comment on the details of Berman's proposal, but stressed that he supported nuclear cooperation with India and was discussing ways to expedite approval of the deal. A senior U.S. official who spoke on condition that he not be named said that the Bush administration was still in negotiations with members of Congress and hoped to assuage their concerns and to secure approval this year. "I don't know where we are going to come out of this but certainly ... the spirit is positive and I think there is a chance we can come through this and win congressional approval in this session in a way that addresses many, if not all, of the concerns that have been raised," said the official.