body,labels
"The White House summit, part of US
efforts to step up engagement with a region Washington sees as critical to its
efforts to push back against China's growing power, had been expected earlier
in the year, but scheduling was delayed by COVID-19 concerns. White House press secretary Jen Psaki
said the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian leaders (ASEAN) will
commemorate 45 years of US-ASEAN relations. ""It is a top priority for the
Biden-Harris Administration to serve as a strong, reliable partner and to
strengthen an empowered and unified ASEAN to address the challenges of our
time,"" she said in announcing the summit. On a visit to Malaysia in December, US
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the 10-member ASEAN bloc was
""essential to the architecture of the Indo-Pacific region."" He said the summit was expected to
discuss the crisis caused by last year's military takeover in Myanmar and
issues such as pandemic recovery, climate change, investment and
infrastructure. The Biden administration has declared
the Indo-Pacific and competition with China its principal foreign policy focus,
which it is keen to maintain despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden joined ASEAN leaders in a virtual
summit in October, the first time in four years Washington had engaged at top
level with the bloc. He pledged to stand with ASEAN in defending
freedom of the seas and democracy, and said Washington would start talks on
developing a regional economic framework, something critics say US Asia
strategy has lacked since his predecessor Donald Trump quit a regional trade
pact. The Biden administration announced a
12-page strategy for the Indo-Pacific in early February, in which it vowed to
commit more diplomatic and security resources to the region to counter what its
sees as China's bid to create a regional sphere of influence and become the
world's most influential power. Read full story The document reiterated US plans to
launch a regional economic framework in early 2022, but few details of that
have emerged and the Biden administration has been reluctant to offer the
increased market access Asian countries desire, seeing this as threatening
American jobs.",
"The talks aim to spur bigger commitments to start reducing manmade greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and keep the rise in the global average temperature since pre-industrial times to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), to stave off the worst effects of climate change. ""Delegates from the LDC Group remain concerned about the logistics of getting to Glasgow,"" Sonam Phuntsho Wangdi of Bhutan, chair of the group of the 46 Least Developed Countries, said in a statement. ""Our countries and our people are among the worst affected by climate change – we must not be excluded from talks deciding how the world will deal with this crisis, determining the fate of our lives and livelihoods."" Some 20 LDCs such as Ethiopia, Haiti and Bangladesh are on Britain’s coronavirus ""red list"", which means their delegates will have to quarantine in a hotel for up to 10 days before attending the ""COP 26"" talks, which run from Oct 31 to Nov 12. Britain has said it will pay the quarantine costs of delegates from red list countries, and has cut the time to five days from 10 for those who are vaccinated. It has also said it is distributing COVID-19 vaccines to delegates struggling to get them. On Tuesday, Climate Action Network (CAN), a coalition of more than 1,500 environmental groups, called for the talks to be postponed because of delegates' difficulties in obtaining vaccines. CAN said Britain had been slow to provide the vaccines it has promised and many countries were likely to miss out.",
" Southeast Asia is one of the world's most vulnerable regions to climate change and could face conflict over failing rice yields, lack of water and high economic costs, a major Asian Development Bank report shows. The region's economies could lose as much as 6.7 percent of combined gross domestic product yearly by 2100, more than twice the global average loss, according to the ADB's report on the economics of climate change in Southeast Asia. ""By the end of this century, the economy-wide cost each year on average could reach 2.2 percent of GDP, if only market impact is considered...(to) 6.7 percent of GDP when catastrophic risks are also taken into account,"" the British-government funded report said. This compared with an estimated global loss of just under 1 percent of GDP in market impact terms, the Manila-based ADB said. The global economic downturn could delay funding for climate change mitigation measures by regional governments. Yet this was the time to offer incentives for green investment schemes in the energy and water sectors, said the study focusing on Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. These schemes could involve the shift to renewable and clean energy options for the power and transport sectors across Southeast Asia, home to nearly 600 million people. In particular, cutting carbon emissions from forest fires and deforestation was crucial since these were major contributors to the region's total emissions, it said. Renewable energy such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal also offered great potential in slashing emissions. VULNERABLE But if nothing was done globally to fight climate change, Southeast Asia could suffer a decline in rice output potential of about 50 percent on average by 2100 against 1990 levels. The yield drop ranged from 34 percent in Indonesia to 75 percent in the Philippines, with the fall forecast to start in 2020 for the four nations. Southeast Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change because of the high economic activity along its long coastlines, and its heavy dependence on agriculture, forestry and other natural resources. Unless the pace of climate change was checked, millions of people in the region would be left unable to produce or purchase sufficient food. ""More people will be at risk of hunger and malnutrition, which will cause more deaths. The possibility of local conflicts may increase,"" said the report. Annual mean temperature in the four countries could also rise by an average 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100 from 1990 levels if global emissions keep growing. This would intensify water shortages in the dry season and raise flooding risks during wet periods. The report says an increase in extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods and storms, and forest fires arising from climate change would also jeopardize export industries. It said the region, which contributed 12 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions in 2000, had made significant efforts to counter climate change, but most steps were reactive and offered short-term benefits with implementation patchy. Raising public awareness of climate change and its impact, increased funding and enhancing policy coordination, were crucial, it added. Stepping up measures to adapt were also needed. These included scaling up water conservation and management, developing heat-resistant crop varieties, more efficient irrigation systems and enhanced awareness-raising programs to prepare for more forest fires.",
" Chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed leaves for New York on Sept 22 to attend the 62nd United Nations general assembly. Fakhruddin will present a country paper at the general assembly on Sept 27. He will also speak at a climate change conference and highlight the impacts on Bangladesh on Sept 24. Foreign Adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury will also accompany the interim government head. ""The chief adviser will present in his country paper the background of assuming the office by the caretaker government and the ongoing reform measures carried by his government,"" Chowdhury told journalists Thursday at a press briefing at the foreign ministry. The foreign adviser said the Fakhruddin would co-chair the afternoon session on climate change with the prime minister of the Netherlands on September 24. On the sideline of the assembly, the chief adviser would hold talks with Italian prime minister Romano Prodi and Afghan president Hamid Karzai on bilateral issues. ""The chief adviser will also join a reception hosted by the US President George W Bush,"" the foreign adviser said, adding that president Bush would not
attend the function. The chief adviser will fly home on Sept 30. ""I will hold talks with foreign ministers of a number of countries on the sideline of the UN general assembly,"" said Chowdhury, who was scheduled to return on Oct 8.",
" Indian art might be just the solution for investors seeking a safe haven at a turbulent time. Take a vivid landscape by avant-garde artist Francis Newton Souza hanging on a wall in Indian art dealer Ashish Anand's New Delhi gallery. With a price tag of $400,000, the painting might not seem like a bargain but Abnand says it will probably be worth $2 million within the next two years. Art dealers and experts say the Indian art market is still undervalued and there is money to be made for those with the means to pay the six figure prices that works by some of India's leading artists fetch at auctions. ""I think Indian art is a one-way bet in the long term. That's why I will allocate money to it,"" said Philip Hoffman who runs the Fine Art Fund based in London. ""If you look 50 years down the line, what you pay now is peanuts compared to what you will have to pay for the great Indian artists,"" he told Reuters at an Indian art summit in New Delhi in August. The prices of Indian art have gone up considerably but not at the levels of Chinese art, which has seen prices soar due to enormous interest at home and abroad. Dealers believe Indian works have plenty of room to appreciate, especially as South Asian art begins to draw a Western audience. ""The growth potential is huge,"" said Hugo Weihe, Christie's international director of Asian Art. ""The Indian art market is particularly strong within India and that's different from the Chinese contemporary. You have that component plus we are now reaching out to an international component every season."" Often depicting vivid and colourful scenes of Indian life and culture, Indian art has long been popular among wealthy Indians, whose ranks are growing rapidly in a booming economy. Yet until recently Western collectors had not taken much interest in classical and contemporary Indian artists. That is starting to change. Weihe predicts that sales of Indian art at Christie's auctions might reach $30 million this year, compared with $680,000 in 2000. SKYROCKETING VALUATIONS Asia's art scene has blossomed in the past five years driven by the continent's rapid economic growth. Valuations have skyrocketed as Asian art has become an investment for speculators and a symbol of affluence for a growing pool of local collectors. The record for a contemporary Indian art work was set in June when Francis Newton Souza's piece 'Birth' was sold for $1.3 million pounds ($2.3 million). The figure was, nevertheless, significantly lower than the $9.7 million record price for Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi's piece 'Mask Series 1996 No. 6' sold at an auction in Hong Kong in May. Works by famous Indian artists such as Maqbool Fida Husain and Syed Haider Raza currently go under the hammer for anywhere from $200,000 to $1 million. Yet industry players expect prices to shoot up to between $5 million to $10 million in the next few years. Neville Tuli, a manager of a $400 million art fund in India, believes that Indian art will appreciate by between 18 to 25 percent per year in a climate in which art is increasingly seen as a secure investment. ""Financial institutions and their HNIs (high net worth individuals) are recognisrecognizinging the inherent stability in the art object as a capital asset,"" said Neville Tuli, a manager of a $400 million art fund in India. ""Hence given its low correlation to economic circumstances and other related factors, the proportion of art within the alternative asset allocation is increasing significantly,"" he added. HOT MONEY CANVASES ART But as with all investments, there are risks. The Indian market is vastly different from the Western art markets because in India, art is viewed more as a financial investment rather than a collectors item, art fund managers said. ""It has gone up 200 times in five years,"" said Hoffman, of the London-based Fine Art Fund, adding that the Indian market consisted of 70 percent speculators and 30 percent collectors. This trend of rapid buying and selling, makes it difficult to predict long term value. ""Let's say you've got a Gupta,"" Hoffman said, referring to Subodh Gupta, one of India's hot new artists whose pieces sell for between $800,000 to $1 million. ""It's a financial commodity like a stock,"" Hoffman said. ""You need the Bill Gates of this world to say I want a Gupta and I don't give a damn how much it cost. It's going into my collection and it's not for sale,"" he added, saying a growing pool of collectors will give the market stability. Art experts would like to see more people like Kusam Sani, a wealthy fashion consultant based in Delhi, who is one of the few art collectors who keeps the art they buy. ""I have a 40 foot dining room and it's covered with work, but I can't buy anymore because I've got no more space,"" said Sani, who has been collecting paintings since she was a teenager. Greater government investment in art infrastructure and museums will give the market stability in the long term, experts said, although they noted that so far the Indian government has shown little political will to support such projects. There are also bureaucratic hurdles such as permits to export works of art and requirements to register antiques with government bodies that turn acquisitions of Indian art into a headache for dealers and collectors abroad. But despite the market's shortcomings, art dealers, Weihe and Hoffman are bullish on Indian art. ""The Indian market will mature when the real collector base is grown up and put the money is put to one side,"" Hoffman said. ""In the long run, all these artists are going to be global, they just happen to be local at the moment.""",
"Dzekyid's well-built house in Jangdam village has a hall filled with Buddhist scriptures and Thangka paintings, and a row of prayer wheels for his religious 76-year-old father, Tenzin, to spin twice a day. As a member of China's ruling Communist Party, Dzekyid is an atheist. ""This house is possible because of good government policies. My heart is wholly with the party, not even one bit with religion,"" said Dzekyid, whose family was showcased to a group of reporters on a government-organised tour of Tibet, an area where access to foreign journalists is normally barred. Government officials in both Beijing and Tibet vetted the reporters from media organisations who were invited to join the trip. On the closely supervised tour, there was little opportunity to interact with ordinary Tibetans without government officials in attendance. China is pushing to transform the mindsets and values of Tibetans to bring them into the country's modern mainstream, which includes urging the region's devout Buddhists to focus less on religion and more on material prosperity. ""Tibet has some bad old habits, mainly due to the negative influence of religion that emphasises the afterlife and weakens the urge to pursue happiness in the current life,"" said Che Dhala, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region. On the trip to Tibet, officials showcased poverty-relief programmes that include relocation of families to better homes, schooling, vocational training, and business development efforts such as a climate-controlled mushroom farm. The efforts are part of China's push to eradicate rural poverty nationwide by the end of this year. Officials also described efforts to ""manage the minds"" of Tibetans, who for centuries lived in a deeply religious society with a belief in reincarnation and a devotion to their spiritual leader. The head of Caiqutang village, Dekyi Paldron, described how poor households who receive free new government housing ""should not"" set up a family room for worshipping Buddha, a common feature in traditional Tibetan houses, because they ""shouldn't be two-faced"" after benefiting from the atheist Communist Party. ""If space is taken up by the Buddha room, the boy and girl may have to squeeze into one bedroom - this is not ideal for the healthy development of either child,"" another official told the visiting journalists. China seized Tibet after troops entered the region in 1950, in what Beijing calls a ""peaceful liberation."" In 1959, spiritual leader the Dalai Lama fled China after a failed uprising, and the long-impoverished region has been one of the most politically sensitive and restricted parts of China. PRAY LESS, WORK MORE Recipients of poverty relief are told to curb their spending on religion and to instead invest in increasing their earning power and in their children. At a vocational school in Nyingchi, a signboard stated that the school uses ideological and political education to fight against ""separatism"", denounce the Dalai Lama and to prevent religion from making people ""passive"". 
 
 People buy food at a street stall in a market alley in the old city of Lhasa, during a government-organised tour of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, Oct 14, 2020. REUTERS 

""Ten years ago, villagers competed among themselves to see who donates more to temples. Now they compete to see whose son or daughter has a stable government job, or who owns a car,"" Karma Tenpa, deputy propaganda minister for the Tibet Autonomous Region, told Reuters.  People buy food at a street stall in a market alley in the old city of Lhasa, during a government-organised tour of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, Oct 14, 2020. REUTERS  Pictures of the Dalai Lama, once commonly displayed in Tibetans' houses, are banned, but framed posters of President Xi Jinping were visible inside all the homes the journalists were shown. Propaganda slogans urging allegiance to China and the Communist Party are conspicuous along roadsides and billboards in Tibet. Critics say China's efforts linking poverty eradication to an embrace of a secular life and the Communist Party infringe on human rights. ""The Chinese government's efforts to force Tibetans to change their way of life to the one the government approves is a violation of their fundamental human rights, including their freedoms of thought and religion,"" Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch told Reuters. A recent Reuters report based on official documents described how growing numbers of rural Tibetans were being pushed into recently built training centres, where they are trained to be factory workers in a programme that some critics have called coercive - a characterisation China rejects. ""At first we have to go around explaining to the nomads and herders why they should go for skills training to earn higher wages. Now that they see the benefit of doing so, they come to us automatically,"" Lin Bei, a poverty alleviation official, told Reuters. FAME OR SHAME Families who practise good hygiene or have other desirable attributes receive credits for goods such as washing powder or towels, Lin said. The best are listed as ""Five Star Families"" on the village notice board. Those deemed to show undesirable behaviour are named and shamed. ""If someone has been lazy, drunk alcohol, hung out at the teahouse or played games instead of taking care of his family, we will call him out at the village meeting,"" said Lin, who is a member of China's ethnic Han majority. Dzekyid, who like many Tibetans uses only one name, encourages his neighbours to support the party and its programmes. His house was built with a government grant of nearly $20,000. ""Praying to the gods and Buddha can't get me this,"" he told Reuters.",
"“I think we will see a significant pivot in the tourism industry in 2021,” said Gregory Miller, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Responsible Travel, noting that the focus is “not on who is benefiting the travel business, but who’s benefiting the community.” The following are some of the many sustainable initiatives that have been started during the pandemic, awaiting the return of travelers. — A marine heritage site From Dana Point, California, whale-watching operations take visitors on boat trips to see gray whales, blue whales and, on occasion, racing megapods of dolphins. They also pick up discarded, deflated balloons — which might be mistaken for food by sea creatures. “We tell people, don’t celebrate with balloons, because this is where they end up,” said Donna Kalez, the co-president of Dana Wharf Sportfishing & Whale Watching, a recreational guide service. She and Gisele Anderson, a co-president of another whale-watching operation, Captain Dave’s Dolphin & Whale Watching Safari, wanted a way to signal to the world that their region is not just a great place to see whales, but to learn about and protect them. They found it in the Whale Heritage Site programme from the nonprofit conservation association World Cetacean Alliance to which they applied. In late January, Dana Point received the designation a Whale Heritage Site, the first in the United States. The Whale Heritage Site designation is meant to identify to travelers not only whale-rich areas, but those that are engaged in conservation, education and cultural celebrations of whales. An initial pair of sites, The Bluff, South Africa, and Hervey Bay, Australia, were designated in 2019. In addition to Dana Point, a region off Tenerife, Spain, was also named a Whale Heritage Site this year. “It’s a new program but we think it could be what National Parks are to the US,” said Ben Williamson, the programs director for World Animal Protection, US, a global animal welfare nonprofit which is a partner on the heritage site project. “We think rolling out these landmarks for sustainable and responsible tourism gives tourists and the travel industry a marker to show how the wildlife experience should be done.” World Animal Protection promotes viewing animals in the wild rather than in captivity, such as at SeaWorld San Diego, about an hour south of Dana Point. Seven more candidate sites globally are currently under review for certification. A deep coastal canyon below Dana Point draws whales and dolphins close to shore, and the town is home to a whale festival that has been running for 50 years. Its sustainable whale-watching operations will be audited every three years to maintain heritage site status. “This isn’t a designation for life. You need to work to keep it,” Anderson said of plans for future beach cleanups and citizen science initiatives and continuing work to instruct recreational boaters on keeping safe distances from whales. — Colorado electrifies its byways A key component of Colorado Gov Jared Polis’ climate action plan — which calls for the state to obtain 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2040 — is electrifying transportation. More than 30 fast-charging stations for electric vehicles are planned or available on Colorado’s interstates and highways, or highly trafficked “corridors.” Greatly expanding the range of electric cars, charging facilities about 50 miles apart are coming in June to six of the state’s 26 Scenic & Historic Byways, which traverse rural areas and are popular with road trippers. By encouraging drivers to spend time in towns with charging stations while their car is being replenished, the initiative combines economic development and sustainable transportation. Andrew Grossmann, the director of Destination Development for the Colorado Tourism Office, calls the first electrified byways an “initial skeletal installation,” with capacities for a minimum of two cars at each station. While many newer model electric vehicles can go more than 200 miles on a charge, “having them in place more closely helps reduce range anxiety,” he said. To use the new system, travelers would have to arrive by electric vehicle, as few are available from rental car companies. However, the Dollar and Thrifty rental car franchises at the Eagle County Regional Airport near Vail have agreed with the state to add 10 electric vehicles before the end of the year. And Vail has 28 public charging ports and nearly 20 stations at hotels, including Sonnenalp Vail. For local drivers, electrifying remote byways is a passport to travel. “We want to go not just to Vail, but Clear Creek, South Park and places that are less discovered by tourists because we’re the locals, so that’s a game changer for us,” said Don Dulchinos, 64, a technology consultant based in Boulder, who owns a 2012 Chevy Volt and runs a Facebook page for electric vehicle owners in the state. — Biking adventures that start in the city Since 1976, when it organised a cross-country bike ride in celebration of the nation’s bicentennial, the nonprofit Adventure Cycling Association has specialized in mapping long-distance cycling routes across the United States. But this year, the organisation, which encourages bicycle transportation, aims to take travel-by-bike to urban areas in an effort to bridge environmental and social sustainability. Its new Short-Trips Initiative, which will kick off in June, will create maps and suggested itineraries for trips from one to three nights from eight cities — Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Boston; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; San Francisco; Seattle; and Washington, DC — with plans for 30 cities by 2023. “We wanted to focus on letting people know they can have a great adventure even if they’re going for one night,” said Eva Dunn-Froebig, the project director of the initiative. A major programme focus is to diversify the cycling scene, which the association describes as predominantly male and white. In addition to reaching urbanites, the initiative includes recruiting ambassadors from each city, especially among Black, Indigenous and other people of colour to lead occasional short trips and share their bike camping expertise. “I think the ACA is trying to catch up with the social environment,” said Jess Kim, 30, a transportation engineer in Seattle and avid bike camper who is Asian American and plans to apply to become an ambassador for the initiative. She calls it a “step in the right direction” in offering flexible rides to those with constrained schedules, targeting racially diverse communities and partnering with organizers like herself who are working on making cycling more inclusive. As a practical matter, the ACA says anyone can bike camp, which might include having a family member drive a support vehicle with camping gear or fashioning bike carriers from kitty litter containers. “The best bike for your first tour is the bike you already have,” said Dan Meyer, the deputy editor of the association’s Adventure Cyclist Magazine. — Saving pangolins The only fully scale-covered mammal, pangolins curl up in an armoured ball when threatened. It’s those scales, used in traditional Asian medicine practices, that largely make them the quarry of poachers. According to the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, more than 1 million of the small, ant-eating animals have been illegally traded in the last 10 years. Eight species of pangolins, native to Asia and Africa, range from vulnerable to critically endangered. “What we’re looking at here is yet another man-made extinction. And because of the silent and elusive nature of the pangolin, it could be a very silent extinction,” said Les Carlisle, the director of conservation at andBeyond, which runs safari camps and game preserves in Africa, and has started a program to rehabilitate pangolins rescued from illegal trading. The goal is to establish a breeding programme. Last year, a captive pangolin was recovered by authorities, rehabilitated at the Johannesburg Wildlife Veterinary Hospital and eventually relocated to the 70,560-acre andBeyond Phinda Private Game Reserve, a private preserve and safari camp, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where it gave birth to a pup, the first in the area for an estimated 40 years. While the preserve is heavily guarded and the pangolin rehabilitation program is ongoing, its managers won’t say how many pangolins are living on the property for fear of drawing the attention of poachers. Guests at one of the Phinda lodges, which have reopened, can join a researcher from the conservation team during a general health check of a pangolin. But don’t expect to see one of the shy, nocturnal creatures on a game drive. “Rangers who have worked on reserves with pangolins have gone years without seeing one,” Carlisle said. — Carbon capture for the people Travel has a chronic carbon problem. The emissions associated with travel, by car, ship or by air, make sustainable travel a stumbling block right from departure. Carbon offsets have long been a balancing alternative, though most experts agree offsetting isn’t enough to slow or reverse climate change. Tomorrow’s Air, a new climate action group incubated by the Adventure Travel Trade Association, is taking a different tack, both technologically and socially. It champions carbon removal and storage, as done by the Swiss company Climateworks — an expensive process that filters carbon dioxide from the air, sometimes injecting it underground in basalt rock, where it mineralises over time. While the process seems sound, “the question is, is it scalable?” said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied carbon capture for more than 30 years, noting the high cost of running the technology relative to the amount of carbon removed. “It’s a lot cheaper to not emit than to try to capture it later.” Though the emerging technology is indeed costly — one Peruvian tour operator estimated that mitigating a flight between London and Lima with carbon capture technology would cost $5,040 — Tomorrow’s Air aims to excite people about the future of carbon removal, invest in it and create a community of travelers and travel companies around it that will eventually be large enough to sway companies and governments to engage. “We’re providing ways for travellers and travel companies to support the scale-up of carbon removal technology,” said Christina Beckmann, the co-founder of Tomorrow’s Air. “We thought, what if we got travel, which is 10% of global GDP, or some portion of it, united around carbon removal with permanent storage? We could really do something.” Tomorrow’s Air is pursuing that goal by planning online Airbnb Experiences tours of a carbon capture plant. And it has partnered with artists who focus on the climate, showcasing their work on its website. It also sells subscriptions starting at $30, of which 80% is invested in a carbon removal company; 20% funds further educational efforts. The group is holding its first convention (virtual, of course) Friday, bringing together what it calls “climate clever travelers and brands” to talk not just about carbon capture, but where to go and how to be a more sustainable traveler, a step in harnessing consumer demand to climate change action. “It’s practical, it’s affordable and it’s a way to be a part of what will hopefully be a growing traveler’s collective where by eventual size maybe we can take some things to scale,” said Ann Becker, 68, a business and travel consultant living in Chicago and a member of Tomorrow’s Air. c.2021 The New York Times Company",
"Shehabuddin Kislu from New York New York, Sep 26 (bdnews24.com)—Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), has highly appreciated prime minister Sheikh Hasina's leadership during the global economic downturn. Ihsanoglu, on Friday, also greeted Bangladesh's standpoint in the international forum of climate change and environmental movement. Hasina met with him at a reception hosted by the OIC chief, said her press secretary Abul Kalam Azad to bdnews24.com. ""Nothing can be accomplished by a single country,"" she said in the meeting and sought assistance from the OIC. Ihsanoglu assured her of providing assistance. Earlier, Hasina met with the Commonwealth secretary general Kamalesh Sharma and discussed matters that concern Bangladesh, Azad added. Hasina will give her speech in the general assembly in Bangla later on Saturday.",
"BEIJING Oct 22, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A top Chinese official and senior US politicians warned on Thursday that the world must deal with climate change urgently, but said if the two top emitting nations work more closely together they could spur rapid improvements. Vice Premier Li Keqiang, widely touted as the country's prime minister in-waiting, said China was keen to smooth the path to a new global deal on warming and willing to step up consultation ahead of a major summit to be held in Copenhagen in December. ""We should be aware of the severity and urgency of coping with climate change, and we should also seize this precious development opportunity,"" Li told a summit of academics, businessmen and officials from the two countries. Mutual distrust has sometimes hobbled discussions between the two nations about curbing emissions, although there has been plenty of investment and trade in green technology. Beijing says it is still a developing nation and should not be asked to make promises that will hinder its efforts to lift it out of poverty, while many in Washington are wary of making commitments they fear could give China an economic edge. But Li said that the US and China were well positioned to work together on climate change, reinforcing a message President Hu Jintao's gave his US counterpart Barack Obama on Wednesday. ""China and the US have different national situations and we are at different development stages, but we face similar challenges in terms of responding to climate change,"" he added. Hu said closer cooperation on fighting climate change could help improve overall ties between the two, and added that he was optimistic Copenhagen would be successful, even though the latest round of negotiations has run into trouble. Officials have touted climate change as an area where both sides have much to gain from working together, and much to lose if they cannot reach a deal to limit greenhouse gas production. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Beijing meeting that the countries, which often face friction over issues including trade and human rights issues, should take advantage of their combined economic might to push for change. ""As the world's two largest emitters of carbon, the United States and China have a responsibility to lead the world in developing and adopting clean technologies, and as two of the world's largest economies our nations have the power to build a thriving global marketplace for these technologies. ""As always, we are more likely to succeed when we work together,"" she said in a video address. White House Science Adviser John Holdren said that though Obama was facing bruising battles over other major policy issues like health care reform, climate change was still a top priority. ""The President's focus and his administration's efforts on completing energy climate legislation as rapidly as possible have not faded in the slightest,"" Holdren said in a video address. China on Wednesday also signed a deal with India, which it said would improve ties between two developing nations and boost the chances of success in Copenhagen. ""The agreement will certainly benefit international efforts to fight climate change, and will help ensure we reach a positive result in the Copenhagen negotiations,"" Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told a regular news briefing.",
" Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left Dhaka Tuesday night for the Swedish capital Stockholm to participate in the 'European Development Days 2009' from Oct 22 to 24. ""Global climate changes are affecting Bangladesh. I will speak of how Bangladesh can be saved from these adverse effects at the European programme,"" Hasina said of her trip just before her departure, during a visit to the Hajj camp. The annual programme, hosted by the European Commission and EU presidency, aims to make the EU members' development aid and activities more effective. This year's European Development Days is expected to bring together some 4,000 people and 1,500 organisations from the development community. Delegates from 125 countries will be represented, including heads of state, leading world figures and Nobel prize winners among them. The three-day program will address issues of citizenship, responses to the global economic downturn, democracy and its relation to development and climate change. Hasina will visit Qatar on her way home. She is to reach Doha on Oct 26 and meet with Qatar's Ameer on that day. She will fly home the next day. The prime minister left the country on a regular Qatar Airways flight at 9:45pm. Finance minister AMA Muhith, foreign minister Dipu Moni, agriculture minister Matia Choudhury saw her off at the airport.",
"Fuelled by searing temperatures and high winds, more than 200 fires are now burning across the southeastern states of New South Wales and Victoria, threatening several towns. Long queues formed outside supermarkets and petrol stations near high-danger areas and shelves were emptied of staples like bread and milk, as residents and tourists sought supplies to either bunker down or escape. More than 50,000 people were without power and some towns had no access to drinking water, after catastrophic fires ripped through the region over the past few days, sending the sky blood red and destroying towns. Authorities urged a mass exodus from several towns on Australia's southeast coast, an area hugely popular in the current summer peak holiday season, warning that extreme heat forecast for the weekend will further stoke raging fires. ""The priority today is fighting fires and evacuating, getting people to safety,"" Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Sydney. ""There are parts of both Victoria and New South Wales which have been completely devastated, with a loss of power and communications."" -- Eight people have been killed by wildfires in the eastern states of New South Wales and Victoria since Monday, and 18 are still missing, officials said on Thursday. -- A naval ship arrived on Thursday at the southeastern coastal town of Mallacoota, where 4,000 residents and visitors have been stranded on the beach since Monday night. Up to 800 people are expected to be evacuated on the first trip, state Premier Daniel Andrews said. The HMAS Choules is expected to make two or three voyages over coming days, state authorities said. -- ""It is hell on earth. It is the worst anybody's ever seen,"" said Michelle Roberts, owner of the Croajingolong Cafe in Mallacoota, told Reuters by telephone from her cafe in Mallacoota. Roberts hoped to get her 18-year-old daughter out on the ship to get away from the spot fires and thick smoke that continue to engulf the town. -- Five military helicopters were en-route to the south coast to back up firefighters and bring in supplies like water and diesel, the Australian Defence Force said on Thursday. The aircraft will also be used to evacuate injured, elderly and young people. -- Traffic on the main highway out of Batemans Bay on the NSW coast was bumper to bumper after authorities called for the town to be evacuated. Residents of the town reported was no fuel, power or phone service, while supermarket shelves were stripped bare of staples. ""Everyone's just on edge,"" local resident Shane Flanagan told Reuters. -- The New South Wales state government declared a state of emergency, beginning on Friday, giving authorities the power to forcibly evacuate people and take control of services. The state's Kosciuszko National Park, home to the Snowy Mountains, was closed with visitors ordered to leave due to extreme fire danger. -- Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged those waiting for help and those stuck in traffic jams ""to be patient ... help will arrive."" -- Dairies in New South Wales that had lost power were being forced to dump milk. ""That is the tragedy of what is occurring as a result of these disasters,"" Morrison said. -- Temperatures are forecast to soar above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) along the south coast on Saturday, bringing the prospect of renewed firefronts to add to the around 200 current blazes. ""It is going to be a very dangerous day. It's going to be a very difficult day,"" NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said -- PM Morrison said the fires will burn for ""many, many months ... unlike a flood, where the water will recede, in a fire like this, it goes on and it will continue to go on ... until we can get some decent rain."" -- PM Morrison, forced to defend his government's limited action on climate change, blamed a three-year drought and lack of hazard reduction for the unprecedented extent and duration of this year's bushfires. -- Bushfires so far this season have razed more than 4 million hectares of bushland and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, including 381 homes destroyed on the south coast just this week.  ",
" The British government will provide 1 billion pound sterling in aid to Bangladesh for the next four years (2011-15). ""Climate change, poverty and governance are the key areas where the aid will flow in,"" said visiting British state minister for international development Alan Duncan on Wednesday. He was talking to reporters after a meeting with finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith at the planning ministry. The aid is double than the amount Bangladesh is currently receiving, he said. Bangladesh is a wet country and it is vulnerable to climate change, he said adding, ""It's [Bangladesh] playing a leading role in this regard."" DFID country head Chris Austin said social service, economic growth, improved governance and climate change are the four areas where the aid will come in. ""We're working with the government on allocation for each of the sectors,"" he said. Muhtih said the British minister gave him some important suggestions about social security as it is declining. ""We may do something about it,"" The finance minister said the UK minister suggested identifying the problems in exploration of mineral resources. ""They wanted to know why foreign companies are not interested in exploration in the country."" The finance minister said even the UK was facing economic problem and even then they did not reduce the assistance for Bangladesh. Duncan arrived in Dhaka on Monday on a three-day visit. (1 pound sterling = 120.319 Tk)",
"As government and business leaders prepare to meet at the forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, the world's nations are divided over who should pay for lowering emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for a growing number of extreme weather events.Recessions in Western economies since the global financial crisis have slowed carbon emission growth but also left governments with scarcer state funds to channel into green technologies.The Green Growth Action Alliance, which compiled the study on behalf of the WEF, said the extra spending was needed to promote other forms of energy generation and greater efficiency in sectors including building, industry and transport.The $700 billion, part of which would promote cleaner energies such as wind, solar or hydro-power, would be on top of about $5 trillion projected to be spent each year on infrastructure under a scenario of business as usual until 2020.""Shaping a global economy fit for the 21st century is our greatest challenge,"" former Mexican President Felipe Calderon and chair of the Alliance wrote in the report.The Alliance is a public and private group tied to the WEF that was launched at a Group of 20 meeting in Mexico last year.The study said a $36 billion annual rise in global public spending to slow climate change - less than the estimated $50 billion cost of damage by Superstorm Sandy in the United States in October - could unlock far greater private investment.It suggested a $36 billion jump in state spending to $126 billion a year, from a current $90 billion, might trigger $570 billion from private investors if properly managed.It noted that the world population was set to rise to about 9 billion by 2050 from 7 billion now.""Greening the economy is the only way to accommodate 9 billion people by 2050,"" said Thomas Kerr, Director of Climate Change Initiatives at the WEF.COMBINED EFFORTGovernments and the private sector have often failed to work in tandem to mobilise funds to combat climate change.""There is still private sector money going to climate destruction,"" said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the National Resources Defense Council in Washington. ""To deal with climate change, everyone has to be moving in the right direction.""""And the key to all of this is how do you unlock big sources of private finance... Sovereign wealth funds, pension funds have a lot of capital. Mobilizing them would be the holy grail.""The WEF-commissioned report pointed to some hopeful signs -- global investment in renewable energy in 2011 rose to a new record $257 billion, up 17 percent from 2010.But UN climate negotiations in Qatar in December ended with little progress on a global framework for emissions cuts.Instead, governments agreed to devise a new United Nations pact to limit climate change that would enter into force from 2020.A study published in the science journal Nature this month said it would be far cheaper to act now to keep global warming within an agreed UN limit of 2 degrees Celsius than to wait until 2020.",
"Dhaka, Aug 6 (bdnews24.com)— The government on Monday signed a $12.5 million grant agreement with the World Bank 'to build climate change resilient communities' in coastal areas. The grant will be provided from the Multi-Donor Trust Fund titled Bangladesh Climate Change Resilience Fund (BCCRF) built with the development partners' contribution. Additional Secretary of the External Relations Division Arastoo Khan and Christine E Kimes, Acting Head, the World Bank's Dhaka Office signed the agreement. Khan said as per the agreement, of the total US$125 million trust fund, 90 percent will be implemented by the government and 10 percent by the NGOs. ""So this US$12.5 million will be channelled to the NGOs,"" he said and added that Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF) will be the implementing agency for the NGOs as had been decided by the governing council of the fund. Highlighting Bangladesh's climate vulnerabilities, Kimes said two-thirds of its land area were less than 5 metres above sea level and 'highly susceptible to flooding.' She said crops and livelihoods of the rural poor in low-lying coastal areas were 'adversely affected by saline water intrusion into aquifers and groundwater.' Kimes said the goal of the project was to increase the resilience of communities to flood, drought and saline water intrusion risks through 'the implementation of community-based climate change adaptation activities.' PKSF's Deputy Managing Director Fazlul Khader said they would detail their activities 'as per the need of the coastal people.' Additional Secretary Khan said apart from the Trust Fund, there were other two climate change resilience funds in Bangladesh. The government has its own funds where it is injecting $ 100million every year while there is Climate Change Investment Fund of the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, he said.",
"“All our 45 workers are jobless now. The men are driving taxis and women are back to being housewives,” said CEO Farzad Rashidi. Reuters interviews with dozens of business owners across Iran show hundreds of companies have suspended production and thousands of workers are being laid off because of a hostile business climate mainly caused by new US sanctions. The Iranian rial has fallen to record lows and economic activity has slowed dramatically since US President Donald Trump withdrew from the big powers’ nuclear deal with Tehran in May. He imposed sanctions directed at purchases of US dollars, gold trading, and the automotive industry in August. Iran’s vital oil and banking sectors were hit in November. “We have lost around five billion rials ($120,000 at the official rate) in the last few months, so the board decided to suspend all activities for as long as the fluctuations in the currency market continue. It is stupid to keep driving when you see it’s a dead end,” Rashidi said. The country has already experienced unrest this year, when young protesters angered by unemployment and high prices clashed with security forces. Official projections indicate unrest could flare up again as sanctions make the economic crisis worse. Four days before parliament fired him August for failing to do enough to protect the jobs market from sanctions, labor minister Ali Rabiei said Iran would lose a million jobs by the end of year as a direct result of the US measures. Unemployment is already running at 12.1 percent, with three million Iranians unable to find jobs. A parliamentary report in September warned that rising unemployment could threaten the stability of the Islamic Republic. “If we believe that the country’s economic situation was the main driver for the recent protests, and that an inflation rate of 10 percent and an unemployment rate of 12 percent caused the protests, we cannot imagine the intensity of reactions caused by the sharp rise of inflation rate and unemployment.” The report said if Iran’s economic growth remains below 5 percent in coming years, unemployment could hit 26 percent. The International Monetary Fund has forecast that Iran’s economy will contract by 1.5 percent this year and by 3.6 percent in 2019 due to dwindling oil revenues. Iran’s vice president has warned that under sanctions Iran faces two main dangers: unemployment and a reduction in purchasing power. “Job creation should be the top priority ... We should not allow productive firms to fall into stagnation because of sanctions,” Eshaq Jahangiri said, according to state media. But business owners told Reuters that the government’s sometimes contradictory monetary policies, alongside fluctuations in the foreign exchange market, price increases for raw materials, and high interest loans from banks have made it impossible for them to stay in business. Many have not been able to pay wages for months or had to shed significant numbers of workers. A manager at the Jolfakaran Aras Company, one of the biggest textile factories in Iran, told Reuters that the firm was considering halting its operations and hundreds of workers might lose their jobs. “Around 200 workers were laid off in August, and the situation has become worse since. There is a high possibility that the factory will shut down,” the manager said, asking not to be named. Ahmad Roosta, CEO of Takplast Nour, was hopeful that a drought in Iran would provide a boost for his newly launched factory, which produces plastic pipes used in agriculture. “I will wait one or two months, but I will have to shut down if the situation remains the same ... The farmers, who are the main consumers of our products, cannot afford them,” Roosta told Reuters. The sanctions have affected the Iranian car industry, which had experienced a boom after sanctions were lifted two years ago and it signed big contracts with French and German firms. French carmaker PSA Group (PEUP.PA) suspended its joint venture in Iran in June to avoid US sanctions, and German car and truck manufacturer Daimler has dropped plans to expand its Iran business. Maziar Beiglou, a board member of the Iran Auto Parts Makers Association, said in August that more than 300 auto parts makers have been forced to stop production, threatening tens of thousands of jobs in the sector. A spokesperson for Iran’s Tire Producers Association blamed the government’s “changing monetary policies over the last six months” for problems in the sector. “Fortunately tire factories have not slowed down, but the production growth that we had planned for was not achieved,” Mostafa Tanha said in a phone interview from Tehran. YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT Washington says economic pressures on Tehran are directed at the government and its malign proxies in the region, not at the Iranian people. But Iran’s young people, bearing the brunt of unemployment, stand to lose the most. Maryam, a public relations manager in a food import company, lost her job last month.  “The prices went so high that we lost many customers ... In the end the CEO decided to lay off people and started with our department.” She said the company had stopped importing, and people who still worked there were worried that it might shut down after selling off its inventory. Youth unemployment is already 25 percent in a country where 60 percent of the 80 million population is under 30. The unemployment rate among young people with higher education in some parts of the country is above 50 percent, according to official data. Armin, 29, has a mechanical engineering degree but lost his job in the housebuilding industry when the sector was hit by recession following the fall of rial. “The property market is slowing because high prices have made houses unaffordable ... It is getting worse day by day,” he told Reuters from the city of Rasht in northern Iran. Nima, a legal adviser for startups and computer firms, believes sanctions have already affected many companies in the sector that depended on an export-oriented model and hoped to expand in the region. He said even the gaming industry in Iran has felt the sanctions pinch: “The situation has become so severe that many of these teams decided to suspend development of their games and are waiting to see what will happen next. Without access to international markets, they see very little chance of making a profit.” Saeed Laylaz, a Tehran-based economist, was more sanguine. He said youth unemployment was a product of Iran’s demographics and government policies, and sanctions were only adding to an existing problem. “The sanctions, the uncertainty in the market and Rouhani’s zigzag policies have put pressures on the economy and the job market, but I predict that the market will find a balance soon,” Laylaz told Reuters. “We will defeat this round of sanctions as we have done in the past,” said Laylaz who met Rouhani last month with other economists to offer advice on economic policies.",
" On the shores of lake Nahuel Huapi, in the wild mountains of Argentina's Patagonia, live some of the world's most ancient trees. Known in Spanish as the alerce, the Patagonian cypress grows extremely slowly, but can reach heights over 50 metres (165 feet) and live for 2,000 years or more, putting some of them among the oldest living things on earth. For scientists who come from around the world to study them, the alerces give an exciting snapshot of years past. Argentine geoscientist Ricardo Villalba, a contributor to the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations report on climate change last year, studies what the ancient trees say about changing weather patterns. Like other trees, alerces form a new layer of wood under their bark every year. So samples taken straight through the trunk can help gauge what the weather was like in each year of the tree's life. ""This has allowed us to see that in some sectors of Patagonia, the year 1998 was the hottest in the last 400 years,"" Villalba said during a recent expedition. ""The marked tendencies that have occurred over the last few decades have no precedent in the last 400 or 500 years, which is as far as the registers in Patagonia have permitted us to analyze up until now."" The tree rings show that temperatures in the 20th Century were ""anomalously warm"" across the southern Andes. At their worst, mean temperatures over the last century went up 0.86 degree Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) when compared to temperatures in the previous 260 years. REACHING INTO THE PAST At the nearby Puerto Blest Biological Research Station, Villalba has been able to compare his results with those of other leading scientists. Evidence from tree rings is what scientists call proxy data, meaning they know the data is not exact but if it corroborates other proxy data -- like evidence of glacier retreat -- it can be used to draw real conclusions. The scientists have also been able to use their proxy data to test computer models used for predicting climate changes in the future. ""In this part of the world there is a decrease in precipitation in the last decade and a very marked increase in temperature, which is entirely what the computer models predict for global change,"" said researcher Brian Luckman of the University of Western Ontario and the InterAmerican Research Institute. ""So we can use some of the results that we have to verify and to test some of the computer models and to see if they really give realistic pictures of what has happened in the past or what will happen in the future."" Tree rings also provide a long-term perspective in the climate change debate, such as in the question of whether global warming is a result of human activity or is part of a natural earth cycle. The more scientists learn about those natural cycles and about weather patterns in the past, the more they are able to answer that question. And the alerces still have a lot more information to provide. ""The Alerce has the peculiarity of longevity and of being very resistant to wood decay,"" Villalba said. ""So you can find buried material or subfossil material that can be used to extend these chronologies further back into the past."" When these chronologies are fully compiled, they could provide a new source of data currently only available from ice core samples, ocean sediments and ancient pollen. And that would help scientists reach further into the past, far beyond human records, which began in 1856 -- when the British Meteorological Society began collecting data around the world.",
"Parliamentary elections were supposed to happen first under the roadmap unveiled after the army deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in July after mass protests against his rule.But critics have campaigned for a change, saying the country needs an elected leader to direct government at a time of economic and political crisis and to forge a political alliance before a potentially divisive parliamentary election.Opponents say it risks creating a president with unchecked power. Were that Sisi, who is widely tipped to win the vote, it would restore the army's sway over a post controlled by military men until Mursi was propelled to office last year by the Muslim Brotherhood.Sisi's Islamist opponents view him as the mastermind of a military coup and a crackdown that has killed hundreds of Mursi's supporters and jailed thousands more.In further unrest, one person was killed and five others were wounded on Monday in the Mediterranean town of Damietta in clashes between opponents and supporters of Mursi. Such incidents have taken place almost daily since Mursi was removed.In Cairo, a court sentenced 139 Brotherhood members to two years in jail and a fine of 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($720) each for engaging in violent actions, protesting and rioting.The Interior Ministry said it arrested 15 pro-Brotherhood female students in Al-Azhar University for Islamic Learning for causing chaos and inciting violence.The university has been a main stage of violent protests since the start of its fall semester in September. Nine Azhar students have been killed in clashes with the police since then, of whom three died on Friday and Saturday after the government designated the Brotherhood group a terrorist organization.That announcement came after 16 people were killed in a suicide attack on a police station in the Nile Delta last Tuesday, an attack the Brotherhood condemned and blamed on a radical faction based in the Sinai Peninsula.SISI YET TO DECLARE PRESIDENTIAL BIDA draft constitution concluded on December 1 opened the way for a change in the order of the elections by leaving open the question of which should come first.Secular-leaning politicians who want the presidential election before the parliamentary polls lobbied interim head of state Adly Mansour during four recent meetings, according to officials familiar with what was discussed.""The forces that attended the four meetings agreed, with a large percentage, to have the presidential elections first and that means that most likely the presidential elections will be first,"" said one of the officials.An army official added: ""Presidential elections are most likely to be held first, as it seems to be the demand of most parties so far.""Holding the presidential election first would ""accelerate the process of bringing Sisi as head of state"", said Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayid, a professor of political science at Cairo University.""The people who are pushing for a change are doing so because they would like to have him as head of state.""Sisi, 59, has yet to announce his candidacy. An army official familiar with his thinking said last week he was still undecided as he weighs up the manifold problems facing a country in deep economic crisis.But he may have no choice. His supporters see Sisi as the only man able to restore stability after three years of turmoil.And analysts say the powerful security apparatus will be putting pressure on him to run as it presses a crackdown on the Brotherhood and combats militant attacks that have spiraled since Mursi's overthrow.There have been three bombings in the last week, the bloodiest of them an attack on a police station that killed 16 people in the city of Mansoura, north of Cairo. The state blamed the Brotherhood, which condemned the attack. A radical Islamist group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, claimed responsibility.The Brotherhood won five elections after Mubarak's downfall in 2011. It is boycotting the army's political roadmap.In an interview broadcast late on Sunday, interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi sidestepped a question on whether the presidential election would be held ahead of the parliamentary vote, saying the focus should be on the forthcoming referendum.The referendum has been set for January 14-15.The draft says steps towards holding the first of the elections should be begin no later than 90 days from the ratification of the constitution. Mansour said on Sunday the government was committed to holding both presidential and parliamentary elections within six months of its approval.The Islamist Nour Party, which came second to the Brotherhood in the last parliamentary elections, had said secular parties wanted to push back the parliamentary election because they were worried about losing to Islamists again.The Nour, an ultraorthodox Salafi party, supported the removal of Mursi. Sherif Taha, the party spokesman, said the Nour would not object to holding the presidential election first if that was the result of ""consensus"".He also said the government must offer clear guarantees that the parliamentary election would follow.In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel voiced concern about developments in Egypt in a call to Sisi. He stressed the need for political inclusiveness, a Pentagon spokesman said.""Secretary Hagel also expressed concerns about the political climate in advance of the constitutional referendum, including the continued enforcement of a restrictive demonstrations law,"" he said.($1 = 6.9386 Egyptian pounds)",
"“Iraq is between friends who are 5,000 miles away from us and a neighbour we’ve had for 5,000 years,” Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi said in a New Year’s Day telephone call with Trump, according to a close adviser, Abdul Hussain al-Hunain. “We cannot change geography and we cannot change history, and this is the reality in Iraq.” Iraq is caught in a vise. Many Iraqis were furious that the United States violated their country's sovereignty by carrying out airstrikes on Iraqi soil. A spate of strikes in December killed at least two dozen members of a pro-Iranian Iraqi military unit, provoking the assault on the US Embassy. A separate strike last week killed Iran’s top military commander, the deputy chief of a coalition of Iraqi militias and eight other people, leading to a vote by Iraq’s Parliament to expel US forces from the country and a counterstrike by Iran on two US military posts in Iraq early Wednesday. But acceding to the political pressure to rid the country of US troops would be a “disaster” for Iraq, militarily and economically, a senior Iraqi official said. The main mission of the roughly 5,200 US troops stationed at a handful of bases around Iraq is to help the country fight the Islamic State group. If they leave, the official said, it would not only hamper that battle but also have a host of knock-on effects, from the departure of troops from other coalition countries to dire financial hardship if, as Trump has threatened, the United States imposed economic sanctions. 
 
 Mourners, some standing on the flags of Israel and the United States, gather for the funeral of the funeral ceremony of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a commander in the Popular Mobilization Forces, at a mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020. He appears on the banner in the background together with Iranian Maj Qasem Soleimani, top. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times) 

“Yes, there is big pressure from our people to have the troops leave,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. “But we can bear this big pressure much better than we can bear the departure of the Americans.”  Mourners, some standing on the flags of Israel and the United States, gather for the funeral of the funeral ceremony of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a commander in the Popular Mobilization Forces, at a mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020. He appears on the banner in the background together with Iranian Maj Qasem Soleimani, top. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)  For now, however, Abdul-Mahdi seems to be moving ahead with plans to implement Parliament’s will. On Friday, he said that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to send a delegation from the United States to discuss steps for withdrawal. Pompeo fired back that the United States would do no such thing, despite the military’s frequent refrain that it is a guest of the Iraqi government and will comply with its host’s demands. “We are happy to continue the conversation with the Iraqis about what the right structure is,” he said at a news conference Friday. But the US mission in Iraq is to train Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State, he said, and “we’re going to continue that mission.” After the Iraqi Parliament vote Sunday, Trump threatened to impose “very big sanctions” on Iraq if it ousted US forces — “sanctions like they’ve never seen before.” He also said that Iraq would have to reimburse the United States for billions of dollars it had invested in a major air base there. But for many Iraqis, booting out the Americans was long overdue. Although many remain grateful that the United States ousted longtime dictator Saddam Hussein and fought alongside Iraqi forces to drive out the Islamic State, they are still pained by US military mistakes and decisions, including massive civilian casualties during the war that followed the US invasion and the humiliating abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The recent US airstrikes killed Iranian proxy fighters who were also members of the Iraqi security forces — and considered heroes by many Iraqis for their role in helping fight the Islamic State. The final straw appears to have been the US drone strike last week that killed the Iranian military leader, Gen Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, the armed groups that have fought against the Islamic State. 
 
 Graffiti on the walls surrounding the US Embassy in Baghdad on Thursday, Jan 9, 2020. As US-Iran tensions flare, Iraq is caught in the middle. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times) 

“We are in a state of enthusiasm in Iraq,” al-Hunain said. “The process of the US withdrawal reclaims a part of Iraq’s dignity after the airstrikes and violations of Iraqi sovereignty.”  Graffiti on the walls surrounding the US Embassy in Baghdad on Thursday, Jan 9, 2020. As US-Iran tensions flare, Iraq is caught in the middle. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)  The feeling is especially strong among Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority in Iraq; many have ties to Iran’s Shiite theocracy. Iran has long sought the ouster of US troops, which it views as a threat on its border. But the unanimous vote in Parliament — taken in the heat of the moment, with no consideration of the potential consequences and costs to the country — suggests more unity than may be the case. Only 170 out of 328 members voted, with most Sunni Muslim and Kurdish members refusing to attend. One of the few Sunni members who did attend the session, Ahmed al-Jarba, raised a red flag, saying that the departure of US troops might benefit Iran. After the Americans leave, he asked, “Are our neighbors our friends or our masters?” referring to Iran. “Are we going to hand the country’s wealth and decisions into the hands of neighboring countries?” Al-Hunain, the senior adviser to the prime minister, said that Abdul-Mahdi’s hope was that if the US forces left, Iran would no longer have security concerns about them and would leave Iraq alone. Senior Iraqi government officials, diplomats and scholars laid out the opposite scenario: Iraq, they said, could be forced into the arms of Iran, deprived of US dollars, and isolated from the West. As worrying — even for Iran — is the risk that the Islamic State might return if there are no Americans to help fight it. The Sunni extremist group no longer controls territory in Iraq and is much diminished, but it still launches near-daily attacks. A second senior Iraqi official and a senior Western diplomat said that if the Americans left, so would European and other coalition forces because they depend on US logistical and technical support. The US hospital at the Baghdad International Airport, for instance, treats the personnel of all 30 countries in the international coalition. The economic sanctions that Trump threatened would be intended not only to punish Iraq but also to effectively extend the administration’s pressure campaign against Iran. The two countries’ economies are closely entwined. Iraq would risk being cut off from its main source of dollars because its account at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York could be frozen. Iraq deposits the proceeds of its oil sales there, withdrawing them to pay government salaries and contracts. The United States could also end the waivers that allow Iraq to buy Iranian gas to fuel its electricity generators in the south, which supply at least 35% of the country’s power. Iraq could seek another source, but it could be difficult to find one on short notice. The other option — making do with less electricity — could spawn unrest in the south as soon as the weather heats up, as electrical shortages did in 2018. American and other foreign companies might reduce or suspend operations if they become concerned about safety. A number of American contractors left in the days after Soleimani’s death because they wanted to stay out of the line of fire. So far, Abdul-Mahdi appears willing to face those potential consequences. If he harbors any thoughts of compromise, he has kept them to himself, perhaps wary of the anti-American political climate. “It looks like the decision making and opinion in the prime minister’s office is turning eastward,” a senior Iraqi official said. “They are almost in denial about what a drastic path they are going down.” The problem, said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group, is that no one in the government is seriously considering possible compromises. “The Iraqis don’t want either the United States or Iran, but if they have to have one, they would rather have both because they balance each other out,” he said. “The US is a counterweight to Iran.” There are a few glimmers of potential ways out. Abdul-Mahdi’s adviser, al-Hunain, said that while the US forces are not welcome now, the government does want other international forces to stay. Talks with other coalition countries could open the door to keeping at least some Americans, those arguably needed to sustain the coalition and help fight the Islamic State. The Europeans, for their part, would like to preserve the ability to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, fearing that any relaxing of pressure would allow the group to reconstitute. A senior Western diplomat said the British and French were working to outline an alternative mission for the international forces relying on a smaller number of troops focused on ensuring that “the gains made against ISIS are not lost.” Perhaps the most promising sign that Abdul-Mahdi might be open to compromise was his request for a briefing paper from Iraq’s National Security Council on the options for proceeding with the parliamentary mandate. Abdul-Mahdi is an economist and has served as finance minister, a background that gives him an understanding of the price of economic isolation even if he now seems more swayed by political concerns. The council provided three options, according to a senior official who works closely with the council: The first was to require US troops to leave as quickly as possible, an approach that could at least deter Iranian-backed armed groups from attacking them. The second option was a negotiated withdrawal, which would slow the drawdown and potentially allow the fight against the Islamic State to go on in some places even as troops were withdrawing from others. The third was a renegotiation of the agreement with the US-led coalition that might allow for some troops to stay, which would open the door to having other international forces stay as well. The National Security Council recommended Option 3. © 2020 The New York Times Company",
"It strongly criticised Blair on a range of issues, saying the threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction had been over-hyped and the planning for the aftermath of war had been inadequate. Blair responded that he had taken the decision to go to war ""in good faith"", that he still believed it was better to remove Saddam, and that he did not see that action as the cause of terrorism today, in the Middle East or elsewhere. 
 
 

 
 

""The intelligence assessments made at the time of going to war turned out to be wrong. The aftermath turned out to be more hostile, protracted and bloody than ever we imagined,"" the former prime minister, looking gaunt and strained, told reporters. ""For all of this, I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you will ever know."" The only Labour prime minister to win three general elections, Blair was in office for 10 years until 2007 and was hugely popular in his heyday, but Iraq has severely tarnished his reputation and legacy. The inquiry report, about three times the length of the Bible, stopped short of saying the war was illegal, a stance that is certain to disappoint Blair's many critics. ""We have, however, concluded that the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for military action were far from satisfactory,"" said John Chilcot, the inquiry's chairman, in a speech presenting his findings. 
 
 

 
 

Blair said the report should exonerate him from accusations of lying, which have been made by relatives of some of the 179 British soldiers who died in the conflict. ""The report should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit,"" he said in a statement. ""Whether people agree or disagree with my decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein; I took it in good faith and in what I believed to be the best interests of the country."" 'Shambolic episode' Relatives of some of the British soldiers who died in Iraq said they would study the report to examine if there was a legal case to pursue against those responsible. ""We all know who the key players are ... who took part in this most shambolic episode in British politics. We would like to see all those key players face some form of accountability,"" said Reg Keys, whose son, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, was one of those killed. ""If that's through the legal channels, then we will look at that and see what's viable and appropriate. It has been passed over to lawyers."" 
 
 

 
 

The report shed light on what happened between Blair and Bush in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, an interaction that has long been the subject of speculation about secret deals and pledges. In a memo dated Jul 28, 2002, eight months before the invasion, Blair told Bush: ""I will be with you, whatever. But this is the moment to assess bluntly the difficulties."" ""The planning on this and the strategy are the toughest yet. This is not Kosovo. This is not Afghanistan. It is not even the Gulf War."" Chilcot said Blair had sought to influence Bush's decisions, offering Britain's support while suggesting possible adjustments to the US position. But the inquiry chairman added that Blair had over-estimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq. His report also said there was no imminent threat from Saddam at the time of the invasion in March 2003, and the chaos in Iraq and the region which followed should have been foreseen. 
 
 

 
 

By 2009 at least 150,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, had died, and more than a million had been displaced. The report said Britain had joined the invasion without exhausting peaceful options and that it had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council by doing so. Flawed intelligence ""It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged and they should have been,"" Chilcot said. He also said that Blair's government's judgments about the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were ""presented with unjustified certainty"". No such weapons were discovered after the war. Chilcot said Blair changed his case for war from focusing on Iraq's alleged ""vast stocks"" of illegal weapons to Saddam having the intent to obtain such weapons and being in breach of UN resolutions. ""That was not, however, the explanation for military action he had given before the conflict,"" Chilcot said.                 Iraq remains in chaos to this day. Islamic State controls large areas of the country and 250 people died on Saturday in Baghdad's worst car bombing since the US-led coalition toppled Saddam. The inquiry's purpose was for the British government to learn lessons from the invasion and occupation that followed. ""We cannot turn the clock back but we can ensure that lessons are learned and acted on,"" Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament in a statement on the inquiry. 
 
 

""It is crucial to good decision-making that a prime minister establishes a climate in which it's safe for officials and other experts to challenge existing policy and question the views of ministers and the prime minister without fear or favour."" Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the Labour Party and a fervent pacifist, told parliament that the war was an act of aggression based on a false pretext that had fuelled and spread terrorism across the Middle East.​      ",
"The inaugural Bangabandhu chair professor at Bangkok’s Asian Institute of Technology talked on multidimensionality of challenges for a fast developing country like Bangladesh in sustainable energy transition at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) in Dhaka on Wednesday. Senior and mid-level faculty members from all departments and centres of the university joined the interactive session presided over by ULAB Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof Shamsad Mortuza, the university said in a media release. Prof Roy, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize 2007-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the coordinating lead author of its WGIII (mitigation), set the tone by explaining the “dire need” for a sustainable energy shift from a fossil-fuel-based one to a renewable-energy one, especially under the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) era. She explained why much focused renewable sources, like solar, wind or bioenergy, would not be sufficient for Bangladesh in the coming decades for such transition. We need a ""just, sustainable, peaceful transition"", and we need it fast, she emphasised. Drawing examples from Nordic countries, she argued how transforming the natural gas and coal-exploitation-centred expertise and infrastructure of Bangladesh could be capitalised on building geothermal and hydrogen fuel capacity, and it has to be started with pilot demonstrations. The talk by Prof Roy was followed by a discussion on pertinent technological, social, economic, and cultural issues. The conversations also explored the opportunities for Bangladeshi academics, researchers, and students to collaborate on joint research, to undertake academic activities, and to join capacity development with the AIT and other institutions and programmes in the region on energy, climate change, SDGs, blue economy, and evidence-informed policy influencing.",
"CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts Aug 7(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The fate of a US climate change bill will send signals to the rest of the world as to whether upcoming global climate talks will be ""serious or not,"" one of the bill's co-authors said on Thursday. The bill, which aims to cut US emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, passed the House of Representatives and Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey said he hopes to see it make its way through Senate by the year's end. ""This bill is a bill the world is waiting for to make a determination as to whether or not the negotiations that we will be undertaking in Copenhagen will be serious or not,"" Markey said in a speech at Harvard University in Cambridge. ""The Chinese are looking at it, the Europeans, the rest of the world ... The bill is now pending in the Senate and my great hope is that we will see passage of that before the end of this year."" Negotiators from about 190 countries are scheduled to meet in the Danish capital of Copenhagen in December for a round of talks aimed at getting rich nations to agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions sharply and to help emerging economies -- which are rapidly becoming major emitters as they consumer more energy -- do the same. The climate bill, written by Markey and Representative Henry Waxman, to reduce US emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. One of the challenges facing the climate bill is the crowded legislative agenda. US President Barack Obama has also made health care reform a top priority -- leaving Congress to take on a thorny and emotional issue that Americans have been debating for decades. ""These are the top two priorities of the President and the Congress and so they're going to be moving along simultaneously this fall within the legislative process,"" Markey told reporters after his speech. ""Each of them will require, to some extent, success on the other. It's important for us to move forward on these together because the opponents of them are using both bills as reasons why President Obama is taking us in the wrong direction and we have to make the counter-argument that it's why he's taking us in the right direction."" The climate bill, which uses a cap-and-trade system to lower emissions, made it narrowly through the House, carrying by just seven votes. The Senate is expected to try to produce its own version of the bill, which if passed would need to be harmonized with the House version.",
"Each of those events would be daunting enough
on its own. Together, they pose a uniquely difficult challenge to Johnson as he
struggles to navigate his nation through the latest treacherous phase of the
pandemic. The electoral defeat exposed the vulnerability
of a prime minister who built his career on his vote-getting skills. Normally
reliable Conservative voters turned on the party in striking numbers, disgusted
by a steady drip of unsavoury ethics disclosures and a growing sense that the
government is lurching from crisis to crisis. The defeat came on top of a mutiny in the
ranks of Conservative lawmakers, around 100 of whom voted against Johnson’s
plan to introduce a form of COVID pass in England earlier in the week. Having
been politically rebuked, he now has less flexibility to impose new
restrictions to curb a virus that is spreading explosively. Johnson is betting he can avert a full-blown
crisis by massively accelerating Britain’s vaccine booster program. But so far,
the rate of infections is outrunning the percentage of people getting their
third shots. With cases of the omicron variant doubling every 2.5 days, public
health researchers warn that some type of lockdown might ultimately be the only
way to prevent an untenable strain on hospitals. “What on earth is the prime minister going to
do if the rising COVID numbers means he is getting strong scientific advice to
take further restrictive measures?” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow
at UK in a Changing Europe, a research institute. Johnson was able to pass his recent measures
thanks to votes from the opposition Labour Party. But that dramatised his
political weakness, Rutter noted, and resorting to it again would further
antagonise his own rank and file. “That’s politically a terrible place for the
prime minister to be,” she added. Indeed, Johnson needs to worry about fending
off a leadership challenge — a once-remote scenario now suddenly plausible as
Conservative lawmakers worry that the calamitous result in North Shropshire, a
district near England’s border with Wales, could translate into defeat in the
next general election. The victorious Liberal Democrat candidate,
Helen Morgan, overturned a majority of almost 23,000 won by former Conservative
lawmaker Owen Paterson at the last general election, in 2019. Paterson, a
former Cabinet minister who had held the seat since 1997, resigned last month
after breaking lobbying rules, despite an unsuccessful effort by Johnson to
save him. About the only reprieve for Johnson is that
Parliament recessed for the Christmas holiday Thursday. That will temper the
momentum behind any possible leadership challenge, at least until Conservative
lawmakers return to Westminster after the New Year and assess the state of
their party and the country. A prime minister who just a week ago was
promising to save Christmas may now need Christmas to save him. “I totally understand people’s frustrations,”
Johnson said Friday. “In all humility, I’ve got to accept that verdict.” But he
also blamed the news media, telling Sky News, “some things have been going very
well, but what the people have been hearing is just a constant litany of stuff
about politics and politicians.” Johnson’s standing has been weakened by
claims, widely reported in the papers, that his staff held Christmas parties in
Downing Street last year at a time when they were forbidden under coronavirus
restrictions. Cabinet Secretary Simon Case had been
investigating those allegations; but Friday evening, he abruptly withdrew after
a report surfaced that he was aware of a separate party held in his own office
last year. Although another civil servant, Sue Gray, will take over the
investigation, the latest disclosure is only likely deepen to public suspicion
about the government’s behaviour. Even before the election loss in North
Shropshire, there was speculation that Johnson could face a formal challenge to
his leadership, little more than two years after he won a landslide election
victory in December 2019. To initiate a no-confidence vote, 54 lawmakers
would have to write to the chair of the committee that represents Conservative
backbenchers, Graham Brady. Such letters are confidential, but analysts do not
believe that prospect is close. Even so, Friday’s result will increase jitters
in Downing Street. North Shropshire was one of the Conservative Party’s safest
seats, in a part of Britain that supported Brexit, Johnson’s defining political
project. Many Labour Party voters and others hostile to the Conservatives
coalesced around the Liberal Democrats, the party deemed most likely to defeat
the Tories in that region — a practice known as tactical voting. Were this to be repeated nationally in the
next general election, it could deprive the Conservatives of perhaps 30 seats
and, in a close contest, affect the outcome, said Peter Kellner, a former
president of the polling firm YouGov. “Tactical voting has a chance to make a
material difference to the politics of Britain after the next general election,”
he said. In recent weeks, Labour has moved ahead of the
Conservatives in several opinion surveys, which also recorded a steep drop in
Johnson’s approval ratings. Political analysts said that could also put the
prime minister in a vulnerable position, given the transactional nature of his
party. “The Tory Party is a ruthless machine for
winning elections,” said Jonathan Powell, a former chief of staff to Prime
Minister Tony Blair. “If that is continuing into an election cycle, the party
will get rid of him quickly.” But while the political climate remains
volatile, most voters are more preoccupied by the effect of the omicron variant
as they prepare for the holiday season. Scientists said it was too soon to say
whether the variant was less severe than previous ones, but they warned that
even if it was, that would not necessarily prevent a swift rise in hospital
admissions, given the enormous number of infections. “If you have enough cases per day, the number
of hospitalisations could pose potentially great challenges for any hospital
system,” said Neil Ferguson, a public health researcher at Imperial College
London, whose frightening projections about the virus prompted Johnson to
impose his first lockdown, in March 2020. Rutter said Johnson could yet emerge unscathed
if the variant is milder than feared, hospitals are not overwhelmed, and the
booster program is effective. Earlier this year, his fortunes revived when
Britain’s vaccination rollout was fast and effective, allowing him to remove
all restrictions in July. By weakening Johnson’s position, however, the
defeat in North Shropshire is also likely to embolden his rivals, among them
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Any
resulting tensions within the Cabinet are likely to erode Johnson’s authority
further. All of that is a dangerous recipe for a prime
minister who may find himself forced to return to Parliament to approve further
restrictions. “In March 2020, he had massive political
capital coming off the back of that fantastic election victory,” Rutter said.
“He’s managed in that time to pretty much squander that political capital,
certainly within his party.” ©2021 The New York Times Company",
"HARARE, Thu Jun 26, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on Thursday there could be no negotiations with President Robert Mugabe if he went ahead with a one-man election on Friday. Tsvangirai said if Mugabe declared himself president and extended his 28 years of uninterrupted rule he would be shunned as an illegitimate leader who killed his own people. Africa's most iconic figure, Nelson Mandela, added his voice to a storm of African and international condemnation of the violence and chaos in Zimbabwe, in a rare political statement that showed the level of concern around the continent. Mugabe and his officials have remained defiant, however, saying the vote is a legal obligation. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga told al Jazeera television: ""People are going to vote tomorrow. There is no going back."" He said Tsvangirai should be out campaigning instead of trying to set conditions for Mugabe. The opposition leader, who withdrew from Friday's run-off last Sunday and took refuge in the Dutch embassy, tried to step up the pressure by telling Mugabe that his chances of negotiating an end to Zimbabwe's catastrophic collapse would end on Friday. ""Negotiations will be over if Mr Mugabe declares himself the winner and considers himself the president. How can we negotiate?"" Tsvangirai told London's Times newspaper. Mugabe, president since independence from Britain, has presided over Zimbabwe's slide from one of the region's most prosperous nations to a basket case with inflation estimated to have hit at least 2 million percent. He blames the crisis on sanctions by Britain and other Western countries. INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN Mugabe is facing a concerted international campaign to push him into calling off the vote by threatening he will be shunned by the world, including African allies once over-awed by his liberation hero status. Mandela said in a speech at a dinner for his 90th birthday in London that there had been a ""tragic failure of leadership in our neighboring Zimbabwe."" Tsvangirai told Mugabe that if he came to him after the vote he would tell the veteran leader: ""I made these offers, I made these overtures, I told you I would negotiate before the elections and not after -- because it's not about elections, it's about transition. ""You disregarded that, you undertook violence against my supporters, you killed and maimed ...How can you call yourself an elected president? You are illegitimate and I will not speak to an illegitimate president."" On Wednesday, a security committee of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) -- urged postponement of the vote, saying Mugabe's re-election could lack legitimacy in the current violent climate. Regional power South Africa added to the pressure, saying a top negotiator was in Harare mediating talks on options including calling off the election. The ruling African National Congress, which has been severely critical of Mugabe, in contrast to President Thabo Mbeki, said it was not too late to call off the vote. ""The ANC is convinced that it is not too late for President Mugabe to cancel the election, the run-off, and lead the country in a dialogue that will be for the good of all Zimbabweans,"" spokeswoman Jesse Duarte told BBC television. The United States said Mugabe's government should talk to Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change. ""That offer obviously ought to be taken up. But it can't be taken up from a position in which the Zimbabwean authorities declare themselves the victors and then believe they can divide the spoils. That's not going to work,"" US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Japan. The SADC security troika, comprising African Union chairman Tanzania, Swaziland and Angola, called at its meeting near the Swazi capital Mbabane for talks between Mugabe's government and the opposition before a new run-off date was set. Zimbabwe's state media on Thursday quoted the SADC poll monitors -- the only large group in the country -- as saying they would stay for the vote despite Tsvangirai's withdrawal. Some 300 opposition supporters who sought refuge at the South African embassy on Wednesday were still in the grounds on Thursday, some wrapped in blankets. Police set up roadblocks on roads leading to the mission.",
" Australian Prime Minister John Howard faces a crushing electoral defeat which could see him lose his own Sydney-based seat, a poll showed on Sunday. Howard, 11 years in power and facing re-election in a national vote tipped for November 10, trailed high-profile former television presenter Maxine McKew, 46 percent to 53 when votes were distributed to the two major parties, a Galaxy poll for The Sunday Telegraph newspaper and SBS television showed. McKew, recruited to the rival Labor Party to take on the conservative Howard, was also level with the veteran prime minister when voters were asked who would do the best job for the seat of Bennelong, held by Howard since 1974. The poll was conducted after Australia's central bank lifted interest rates last week to a decade high of 6.50 percent to head off inflation fuelled by strong domestic demand, unemployment at a 32-year low and rapid global growth. Interest rates have been hurting Howard, who secured his fourth election victory in 2004 on the slogan ""Keeping interest rates low"". The central bank has since lifted rates five times. Rates are also biting into support for Howard's Liberal-National coalition in key fringe suburbs where voters are struggling with large mortgages and a credit binge fuelled in part by the low-interest climate, successive polls show. Also hurting Howard is a charge of boundaries in his own seat, which now has a large Asian community and is in the top 20 electorates for residents who speak a language other than English at home, according to census figures. Howard has angered some immigrant families with policies making it harder for new arrivals, requiring them to adopt vague Australian values of ""mateship"" and ""fair go"" equality, while learning English to speed their assimilation into society. Senior Labor lawmaker Bob McMullan cautioned it would be hard to unseat Howard regardless of poll indications. ""We're very near the end of this three-year term and people are open to the idea of change. But I think their voting intention isn't set in concrete at all, it's quite fluid,"" he told Australian television. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Howard's wisdom and experience would carry him over the line and youthful opposition leader Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat, lacked a plan for Australia's future. ""There's always controversy about the record of the incumbent and so on, it happens everywhere,"" Downer said. ""I don't always want to seem Pollyanna-ish. I'm a person though who's pretty relaxed about the struggle that lies ahead.""",
"But the abbot, the Venerable Ambalangoda Sumedhananda Thero, barely registered the blast. Waving away the mosquitoes swarming the night air in the southern Sri Lankan town of Gintota, he continued his tirade: Muslims were violent, he said, Muslims were rapacious. “The aim of Muslims is to take over all our land and everything we value,” he said. “Think of what used to be Buddhist lands: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Indonesia. They have all been destroyed by Islam.” Minutes later, a monastic aide rushed in and confirmed that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a nearby mosque. The abbot flicked his fingers in the air and shrugged. His responsibility was to his flock, the Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka. Muslims, who make up less than 10% of Sri Lanka’s population, were not his concern. 
 
 File Photo: The Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero at a temple in Gintota, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times 

Incited by a politically powerful network of charismatic monks like Sumedhananda Thero, Buddhists have entered the era of militant tribalism, casting themselves as spiritual warriors who must defend their faith against an outside force.  File Photo: The Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero at a temple in Gintota, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times  Their sense of grievance might seem unlikely: In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, two countries that are on the forefront of a radical religious-nationalist movement, Buddhists constitute overwhelming majorities of the population. Yet some Buddhists, especially those who subscribe to the purist Theravada strain of the faith, are increasingly convinced that they are under existential threat, particularly from an Islam struggling with its own violent fringe. As the tectonic plates of Buddhism and Islam collide, a portion of Buddhists are abandoning the peaceful tenets of their religion. During the past few years, Buddhist mobs have waged deadly attacks against minority Muslim populations. Buddhist nationalist ideologues are using the spiritual authority of extremist monks to bolster their support. “The Buddhists never used to hate us so much,” said Mohammed Naseer, the imam of the Hillur Mosque in Gintota, Sri Lanka, which was attacked by Buddhist mobs in 2017. “Now their monks spread a message that we don’t belong in this country and should leave. But where will we go? This is our home.” Last month in Sri Lanka, a powerful Buddhist monk went on a hunger strike that resulted in the resignation of all nine Muslim ministers in the Cabinet. The monk had suggested that Muslim politicians were complicit in the Easter Sunday attacks by Islamic State-linked militants on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, which killed more than 250 people. 
 
 File Photo: A demonstration organised by a Buddhist monk in support of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s handling of the Rohingya crisis in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 14, 2017. The New York Times 

In Myanmar, where a campaign of ethnic cleansing has forced an exodus of most of the country’s Muslims, Buddhist monks still warn of an Islamic invasion, even though less than 5% of the national population is Muslim. During Ramadan celebrations in May, Buddhist mobs besieged Islamic prayer halls, causing Muslim worshippers to flee.  File Photo: A demonstration organised by a Buddhist monk in support of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s handling of the Rohingya crisis in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 14, 2017. The New York Times  Because of Buddhism’s pacifist image — swirls of calming incense and beatific smiles — the faith is not often associated with sectarian aggression. Yet no religion holds a monopoly on peace. Buddhists go to war, too. “Buddhist monks will say that they would never condone violence,” said Mikael Gravers, an anthropologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who has studied the intersection of Buddhism and nationalism. “But at the same time, they will also say that Buddhism or Buddhist states have to be defended by any means.” The Military-Monastic Complex Thousands of people gathered in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, in May as Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk who was once jailed for his hate speech, praised the nation’s army. Since August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh. Behind it all was a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the army and its allies, with Buddhist mobs and the country’s security forces subjecting Rohingya Muslims to slaughter, rape and the complete erasure of hundreds of their villages. Ashin Wirathu has rejected the nonviolent teachings of his faith. Military-linked lawmakers deserved to be glorified like Buddha, he said at the rally. “Only the military,” he continued, “protects both our country and our religion.” At another protest last October, Ashin Wirathu slammed the decision by the International Criminal Court, or ICC, to pursue a case against Myanmar’s military for its persecution of the Rohingya. Then the monk made a startling call to arms. “The day that the ICC comes here is the day I hold a gun,” Ashin Wirathu said in an interview with The New York Times. 
 
 File Photo: Monks pray in the Bengala monastery in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 4, 2017. The New York Times 

Monks like Ashin Wirathu inhabit the extremist fringe of Buddhist nationalism. But more respected clerics are involved as well.  File Photo: Monks pray in the Bengala monastery in Yangon, Myanmar, Oct 4, 2017. The New York Times  At 82 years old, the Venerable Ashin Nyanissara, known more commonly as Sitagu Sayadaw, is Myanmar’s most influential monk. As hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were fleeing their burned villages, Sitagu Sayadaw sat in front of an audience of army officers and said that “Muslims have almost bought the United Nations.” The army and monkhood, he continued, “could not be separated.” Sitagu Sayadaw was pictured in May on a Facebook page linked to the Myanmar military, grinning among soldiers. He has offered up his faith’s greatest sacrifice: an army of spiritual soldiers for the national cause. “There are over 400,000 monks in Myanmar,” he told the commander of Myanmar’s armed forces. “If you need them, I will tell them to begin. It’s easy.” “When someone as respected as Sitagu Sayadaw says something, even if it is strongly dismissive of a certain group, people listen,” said Khin Mar Mar Kyi, a Myanmar-born social anthropologist at the University of Oxford. “His words justify hatred.” The Buddhist Right Returns When suicide bombers linked to the Islamic State blew up churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, Buddhist nationalists felt vindicated. “We have been warning for years that Muslim extremists are a danger to national security,” said Dilanthe Withanage, a senior administrator for Bodu Bala Sena, the largest of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nationalist groups. “Blood is on the government’s hands for ignoring the radicalisation of Islam,” Withanage said. After a few years of moderate coalition governance, a fusion of faith and tribalism is again on the ascendant in Sri Lanka. The movement’s champion is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former defence chief who is the leading candidate for president in elections due this year. Rajapaksa has pledged to protect religion in the country with the longest continuous Buddhist lineage. He is determined to reconstruct Sri Lanka’s security state, which was built during a nearly three-decade-long civil war with an ethnic Tamil minority. From 2005 to 2015, Sri Lanka was led by Rajapaksa’s brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, an unabashed nationalist who justified the brutal end to the civil war by portraying himself as the nation’s spiritual saviour. 
 
 File Photo: A Sri Lankan Buddhist bows in front of Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered Buddhist leaders, in Delgoda, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times 

Temples decorated their walls with pictures of the Rajapaksa brothers. Money flowed for radical Buddhist groups that cheered on sectarian rioting in which Muslims died. One of the founders of Bodu Bala Sena, or the Buddhist Power Army, was given prime land in Colombo, the capital, for a high-rise Buddhist cultural centre.  File Photo: A Sri Lankan Buddhist bows in front of Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered Buddhist leaders, in Delgoda, Sri Lanka, Nov 18, 2017. The New York Times  Last year, Bodu Bala Sena’s leader, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, was sentenced to six years in prison. But in late May, amid a changing political climate, he received a presidential pardon. On Sunday, he presided over a meeting of thousands of monks intent on making their political presence felt in the upcoming elections. Before his imprisonment last year, Gnanasara Thero placed his campaign in a historical context. “We have been the guardians of Buddhism for 2,500 years,” he said in an interview with The Times. “Now, it is our duty, just as it is the duty of monks in Myanmar to fight to protect our peaceful island from Islam.”   © 2019 New York Times News Service",
" With four times the population of the United States, an economy growing 8-9 percent a year and surging energy demand, India's race to become an economic power has propelled it to No. 3 in the list of top carbon polluters. India's greenhouse gas emissions will keep rising as it tries to lift millions out of poverty and connect nearly half a billion people to electricity grids. But it is also trying to curb emissions growth in a unique way, fearing the impacts of climate change and spiralling energy costs. The government is betting big on two market-based trading schemes to encourage energy efficiency and green power across the country of 1.2 billion people, sidestepping emissions trading schemes that have poisoned political debate in the United States and Australia. ""The policy roadmap India is adopting to curb emissions is innovative -- something that will make industries look at making efficiency the centre-piece rather than some step that follows an ineffective carrot and stick policy,"" said Srinivas Krishnaswamy, CEO of green policy consultants Vasudha India. In the world's first such national market-based mechanism, called Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT), India is starting a mandatory scheme that sets benchmark efficiency levels for 563 big polluting from power plants to steel mills and cement plants, that account for 54 percent of the country's energy consumption. The scheme allows businesses using more energy than stipulated to buy tradeable energy saving certificates, or Escerts, from those using less energy, creating a market estimated by the government to be worth about $16 billion in 2014 when trading starts. The number of Escerts depends on the amount of energy saved in a target year. LEARNING CURVE A three-year rollout phase is set to start in September and will help India curb about 100 million tonnes of carbon emissions, the government estimates. The rollout is aimed at working out hiccups in the process for companies to measure and report their energy use. India has already rolled out a renewable energy certificate (REC) trading scheme for wind, solar and biomass power plants. Green power comprises about 8 percent of energy production in India, while coal generates more than 60 percent, leading to a hefty coal import bill. Trading for the REC scheme, which currently occurs once a month, has picked up as more projects participate, underpinning a government plan to ramp up solar power from near zero to 20 gigawatts by 2022, about one eighth of power generation now. On May 25, a total of 14,002 RECs were traded during the REC trading session on the Indian Energy Exchange valued at $4.6 million, compared with 260 units at the previous session in April. But concerns remain about how both initiatives will evolve because of a lack of data and trained manpower as well as weak penalties for firms that refuse to comply. ""India has an issue of manpower and data. You look at incomes, industrial activities are growing, the share market might boom but hiring manpower, (building up) capacity and institutions is a long-term game,"" said Girish Sant, energy analyst at non-profit think tank Prayas. Some analysts also point to technical gaps in the PAT scheme, including how various units of one company would be graded. There were also limitations that allow REC certificates to be traded only once, limiting the early entry of intermediaries or market makers. ""In order to have an effective cap-and-trade or market mechanism that aids desired reduction in energy use, it is necessary to have targets that are neither too easy nor too difficult to achieve,"" said leading Indian clean energy project developer and advisory Emergent Ventures in a report on PAT. But industry observers said it still makes sense for India to opt for a national energy efficiency scheme rather than carbon emissions trading. ""Because the target is intensity, so you are basically asking people to reduce their intensity and that matches the overall target,"" said Sant of Prayas. The government has pledged to cut carbon intensity -- the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic output -- by between 20 and 25 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels. Emissions trading would need an absolute emissions cap, something India does not want to do, saying it needs to keep its economy growing and competitive. Adapting to the national policy and creating a unique market are a function of time and communication, said Vishwajit Dahanukar, managing director of Managing Emissions, a clean energy project developer, advisory and asset manager. ""That's basically it. It's just early days,"" he told Reuters from Mumbai. Rival China is also looking at promoting energy efficiency but most of the government's planned efforts focus more on carbon emissions trading to achieve national climate and pollution goals. In April, a senior Chinese official said the government would launch pilot emissions trading schemes in six provinces before 2013 and set up a nationwide trading platform by 2015, Thomson Reuters Point Carbon reported. The programme would be based on provincial-level energy consumption targets. The Chinese government is also considering a cap-and-trade scheme for energy savings in its buildings sector, which accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the country's overall emissions. According to a government directive, the mechanism would create energy saving credits but the programme was still in the early planning stages, with trading some years away. ""As Chinese industry is much more organised and the political system allows stringent monitoring, it becomes a little easier for them to use emissions trading,"" said Siddharth Pathak, Greenpeace India's policy officer for climate and energy, told Reuters. ""Also the push back from Indian industry would be much more than China.""",
"Or a chicken, or a salmon fillet, or any of a few hundred items that are hours from their midnight expiration date. Food that is nearly unsellable goes on sale at every one of S-market’s 900 stores in Finland, with prices that are already reduced by 30 percent slashed to 60percent off at exactly 9pm. It’s part of a two-year campaign to reduce food waste that company executives in this famously bibulous country decided to call “happy hour” in the hopes of drawing in regulars, like any decent bar. “I’ve gotten quite hooked on this,” said Kasimir Karkkainen, 27, who works in a hardware store, as he browsed the meat section in the Vallila S-market. It was 9:15 and he had grabbed a container of pork miniribs and 2 pounds of shrink-wrapped pork tenderloin. Total cost after the price drop: the equivalent of $4.63. About one-third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. That equals 1.3 billion tons a year, worth nearly $680 billion. The figures represent more than just a disastrous misallocation of need and want, given that 10 percent of people in the world are chronically undernourished. All that excess food, scientists say, contributes to climate change. From 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are related to food lost during harvest and production or wasted by consumers, a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found. Landfills of rotting food emit methane, a gas that is roughly 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. And to harvest and transport all that wasted food requires billions of acres of arable land, trillions of gallons of water and vast amounts of fossil fuels. For consumers, cutting back on food waste is one of the few personal habits that can help the planet. But for some reason, a lot of people who fret about their carbon footprint aren’t sweating the vegetables and rump steak they toss into the garbage. “There’s been a lot of focus on energy,” said Paul Behrens, a professor in energy and environmental change at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “But climate change is as much a land issue and a food issue as anything else.” Reducing waste is a challenge because selling as much food as possible is a tried, tested and ingrained part of all-you-can-eat cultures. Persuading merchants to promote and profit from “food rescue,” as it is known, is not so obvious. 
 
 Shoppers can choose from a variety of marked-down food items at the S-market in the Vallila neighbourhood in Helsinki, Aug. 22, 2019. Food that is nearly unsellable goes on sale at every one of S-market’s 900 stores in Finland, with prices that are already reduced by 30 percent slashed to 60 percent off at exactly 9pm as part of a two-year campaign to reduce food waste. 

“Consumers are paying for the food, and who wants to reduce that?” said Toine Timmermans, director of the United Against Food Waste Foundation, a nonprofit in the Netherlands composed of companies and research institutes. “Who profits from reducing food waste?”  Shoppers can choose from a variety of marked-down food items at the S-market in the Vallila neighbourhood in Helsinki, Aug. 22, 2019. Food that is nearly unsellable goes on sale at every one of S-market’s 900 stores in Finland, with prices that are already reduced by 30 percent slashed to 60 percent off at exactly 9pm as part of a two-year campaign to reduce food waste.  A growing number of supermarkets, restaurants and startups — many based in Europe — are trying to answer that question. The United States is another matter. “Food waste might be a uniquely American challenge because many people in this country equate quantity with a bargain,” said Meredith Niles, an assistant professor in food systems and policy at the University of Vermont. “Look at the number of restaurants that advertise their supersised portions.” Nine of the 10 USsupermarket chains that were assessed by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity last year were given a C grade or lower on food waste issues. Only Wal-Mart did better, largely for its efforts to standardise date labels and to educate staffers and customers. Some of the most promising food waste efforts are apps that connect food sellers to food buyers. Think Tinder, except one party in this hookup is a person and the other is an aging loaf of bread. Among the most popular is Too Good to Go, a company based in Copenhagen, with 13 million users and contracts with 25,000 restaurants and bakeries in 11 countries. Consumers pay about one-third of the sticker price for items, most of which goes to the retailer, with a small percentage paid to the app. In Denmark, food rescue has attained the scale and momentum of a cultural movement, one with its own intellectual godmother: Selina Juul, a graphic designer who immigrated from Russia at the age of 13. “I came from a country where there was a fear that we wouldn’t have food on the table tomorrow, where there were food shortages,” she said in a phone interview. “When we emigrated, I had never seen so much food. I was shocked. Then I was shocked again when I saw how much food people wasted.” In 2008, at the age of 28, she started a Facebook group called Stop Wasting Food. Within weeks, she was being interviewed on the radio. Soon after that, she came to the attention of Anders Jensen, buying director at REMA 1000, the largest supermarket chain in Denmark. “I was on a business trip to Scotland and I read about Selina in a newspaper,” Jensen recalled. “Around that time, we learned that every Dane was throwing out 63 kilos of food per year” — about 139 pounds — “and I was sitting in this airport thinking, ‘she’s right.’” After the two met in a Copenhagen cafe, REMA 1000 eliminated in-store bulk discounts. As of 2008, there would be no more three hams for the price of two, or any variations on that theme. “It exploded in the media because it was the first time a retailer said, ‘It’s OK if we sell less,’” Jensen said. REMA 1000 and Juul recognise that there is a limit to how much one company can do to reduce waste. Consciousness-raising was necessary. So Juul has enlisted famous Danes to join her cause. She’s co-writing a book on cooking with leftovers with Princess Marie, who worked in advertising and marketing before marrying into the Danish royal family. Celebrity chefs, like Rene Redzepi, have spread the word. Mette Frederiksen, the current prime minister, even made it a campaign issue this year. In Finland, reducing food waste has yet to become a political issue, but it is a selling point for at least one restaurant. Every dish on the menu of Loop, which is housed in a former mental hospital in Helsinki, is made from past-due ingredients donated by grocery stores and bakeries. Donations vary, so Loop’s chefs have no idea what they’ll be making until they walk into the restaurant’s kitchen. “It’s like an episode of ‘Master Chef’ every day,” said Johanna Kohvakka, founder of the nonprofit From Waste to Taste, which operates Loop. “But we try to make every dish look great so that people can share images online and say, ‘This was about to be wasted.’” Kohvakka says Loop turns a profit and could serve as a model for similar ventures. Executives at S-market in Finland make no such claims about their happy hour. Mika Lyytikainen, an S-market vice president, explained that the program simply reduces its losses. “When we sell at 60 percent off, we don’t earn any money, but we earn more than if the food was given to charity,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s now possible for every Finn to buy very cheap food in our stores.” It’s not unusual to find groups of S-market shoppers milling around with soon-to-be-discounted items from the shelves and waiting for the clock to strike at 9. “I’ve done that,” Karkkainen said, as he headed for the exits with his pork miniribs. Other Finns, it seems, haven’t fully embraced S-market’s anti-waste ethos. Harri Hartikainen, 71, was shopping one evening in Vallila and considered a 60percent  off box of Kansas City-style grilled chicken wings. “I’ve never tried these before,” he said, dropping them into his shopping basket. “But it’s so cheap, if I don’t like it, I can just throw it out.” ©2019 The New York Times Company",
"Jiming at an event in Dhaka on Monday termed Quad “anti-China” and warned Bangladesh against any form of participation in the group, saying that it would “substantially damage” bilateral relations. Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen responded to Jiming’s remarks on Tuesday, saying that Bangladesh will take a decision based on ""neutral and balanced"" foreign policy. Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department, was asked by a journalist about the matter during a daily press conference in Washington DC on Tuesday.  “Well, we have taken note of that statement from the PRC ambassador to Bangladesh. What we would say is that we respect Bangladesh’s sovereignty, and we respect Bangladesh’s right to make foreign policy decisions for itself,” Price said. First established in 2007, Quad is an informal strategic dialogue established between the US, Japan, Australia and India. The initiative is widely regarded as a response to the growing economic and military power of China. 
 
 

“We have an incredibly strong relationship with Bangladesh. We work closely with our partners there on a range of issues, from economic growth to climate change to humanitarian issues,” said Price.   “And when it comes to the Quad, we’ve said this before, but the Quad, it’s an informal, essential, multilateral mechanism that right now conveys – convenes likeminded democracies – the United States, India, Australia, and Japan – to coordinate in the Indo-Pacific, and fundamentally, to push forward our goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific region.” Then US deputy secretary of state, Stephen Biegun, had discussed the Indo-Pacific Strategy with Bangladesh officials during his Dhaka visit in October last year. An open Indo-Pacific region will be “enormously” beneficial to Bangladesh as well as to its neighbours to work towards peaceful outcomes in the region, and to the US, he had said. “Unfortunately we are facing other challenges in the Indo-Pacific. I would not deny there are security concerns that affect and concern many of us who are Pacific nations or in the Indo-Pacific,” Biegun had said, in a clear reference to China. Before the Dhaka trip, he had visited India. New Delhi, wary of further antagonising China, has been careful to avoid being drawn into US-led alliances. But Biegun had said the United States had no plans to impinge on India's strategic autonomy, but to forge a relationship based on shared interests. ",
"“It was like walking through a nightmare,” he recalled. Shea Stadium in Queens, then the home of the New York Mets, had been transformed into a staging area. Valentine, then the Mets’ manager, assisted there. On Sept 21, 2001, the Mets hosted the Atlanta Braves in their first game in New York since the attacks. Mike Piazza smacked a home run in the eighth inning that lifted the Mets to a 3-2 victory, providing a level of catharsis for many in a reeling city and country. “It was a spontaneous moment of people coming together,” said Valentine, now 71. “Can that happen again in a nation that is so divisive now that it feels that we’re at war within our boundaries?” Twenty years after 9/11, the United States is at another moment of crisis, but the ties between sports and patriotism have severed for some and tightened for others. The jingoism at sporting events that temporarily surged in 1991 during the Gulf War and roared back after 9/11 now often drives wedges, after the largest social protests in history against systemic racism during a politicised pandemic. The playing of the national anthem and “God Bless America,” giant American flags, military flyovers and patriotic ceremonies are as ubiquitous at sporting events today as first downs, home runs and slam dunks. But the end of the war in Afghanistan, against a backdrop of social change and reflection on the dynamic between this country and its people, stokes debate on how or even whether such displays should continue. “I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with patriotism in sport,” said Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first Muslim American to win an Olympic medal, at the 2016 Olympic Games. “Sport bridges so many different people and in cultures and identities.” But, Muhammad said, it may be time to change how the patriotism is displayed a generation after 9/11. When she sees a military flyover, she wonders how it impacts the climate or whether the money can be better used in underserved communities. “And that’s a better way to celebrate our patriotism and our commitment to this idea of our nationality,” Muhammad said. “Why not try to elevate those who don’t have?” Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, said friendly ribbing between fans, like he saw at a recent baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, is a “very indirect” show of patriotism because of the spirit and energy. “But I also think that during the last two decades, we have all been subject to patriotic manipulation in many ways,” said Kerr, whose father, Malcolm, was the president of the American University of Beirut when he was shot and killed in Lebanon in 1984. “And because it’s directly related to the military and to the wars that we have been engaged in for two decades, it’s a strange dynamic at games, and I’m always conflicted by that dynamic.” In the 1960s, Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner at the time, dispatched players to Vietnam for goodwill tours and mandated that players stand at attention during the national anthem. In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the Olympics in Mexico City. Nearly three decades later, the NBA suspended Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a guard for the Denver Nuggets, for declining to stand during the anthem. In 2015, then-US Sens John McCain and Jeff Flake, both of Arizona, released a report disclosing that the Pentagon had paid the NFL and other sports leagues $6.8 million to host what they described as “paid patriotism.” “Unsuspecting audience members became the subjects of paid marketing campaigns rather than simply bearing witness to teams’ authentic, voluntary shows of support for the brave men and women who wear our nation’s uniform,” the report said. The back-and-forth of protest and compulsory patriotism at sporting events has come to a head over the past five years. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem as a member of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, jump-starting the current wave of peaceful protests of social injustice and police brutality against Black people and other people of colour. At first, Kaepernick sat during the anthem. He decided to kneel after talking to Nate Boyer, a retired Army Green Beret who walked onto the University of Texas football team as a long snapper and signed to the Seattle Seahawks as an undrafted free agent. In this fraught political climate, many Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, have accused Kaepernick and other athletes who kneel during the anthem of disrespecting the military, even though Boyer recommended the gesture and Kaepernick has said repeatedly that that is not his intent. Boyer, on a recent telephone call, said he understood that some people saw it as disrespectful. “But what I don’t understand,” he said, “what really frustrates me, is why people can’t have a different perspective on that, and still respect each other.” He added: “Everything seems so one way or the other, all or nothing, right now. That’s just not what that flag represents to me. I don’t think it represents that to a lot of people.” The NFL did not respond to requests for comment from Commissioner Roger Goodell about shows of patriotism in the sport. Few athletes joined Kaepernick’s initial protest. Bruce Maxwell, a catcher for the Oakland Athletics whose father served in the military, became in 2017 the first MLB player to kneel during the anthem. “I did it because it was what was right,” Maxwell said, adding, “I was standing up for myself. I was standing up for my family. I was standing up for the people who couldn’t be heard and/or haven’t been heard.” By the summer of 2020, when waves of athletes protested after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, kneeling was common in sports and almost universal in the NBA and the WNBA. In a whiplash reversal, athletes such as former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who called kneeling “disrespecting the flag,” received criticism for their support of the patriotic exhibitions. The protests forced organisations such as US Soccer, FIFA and the NFL to reconfigure policies that required athletes to respectfully stand during the national anthem. But although the NBA embraced kneeling in the final months of its 2019-20 season, it pushed back when the Dallas Mavericks, at the direction of team owner, Mark Cuban, did not play the national anthem for several games at the start of the 2020-21 season. “We respect and always have respected the passion people have for the anthem and our country,” Cuban said in a statement through the team at the time. “But we also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them. We feel that their voices need to be respected and heard, because they have not been.” The league required the team to start playing the anthem again. “The ritual of playing the national anthem prior to sporting events reinforces our sense of belonging,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in an interview this week. “For generations in the US, people have turned to sports in difficult times in search of unity and togetherness. We saw that in the days and weeks following the events of 9/11, and we’re seeing it now during this pandemic. People crave that physical coming together because it provides a sense of stability and comfort. With sports, there is a real community aspect to them that is hard to find anywhere else.” But the anthem doesn’t resonate with everyone in the same way, said Charles Ross, chair of the African American Studies Program at the University of Mississippi. Francis Scott Key, the national anthem’s songwriter, owned enslaved people. “When you start talking about the millions of African Americans, their history and what their families have had to probably go through to get the opportunity to sit in that seat at that professional venue and get ready to see this game being played, they’ve got a very different kind of experience than the average white American and looking at America as this kind of holistic monolithic country,” Ross said. The vast majority of players in the NFL, NBA and WNBA are Black. States such Texas and Wisconsin are considering bills that would require that the national anthem be played before any sporting event held at sites financed in part by taxpayer money. Wisconsin state Rep Tony Kurtz, a military veteran, is one of the assembly members who proposed the bill in his state after Cuban did not play the anthem in Dallas. In May, the bill passed the state Assembly with a bipartisan vote, 74-22. “I was called a fascist, a Nazi, just a whole bunch of things,” said Kurtz, a Republican. “I just believe in our country. We are one nation. At the end of the day, we all still got to get along. I think that’s why it resonates so much with sports and why it resonates so much after 9/11. We needed unity in this country.” Wisconsin state Rep Don Vruwink, a Democrat, voted in the bill’s favour. But Vruwink, a longtime high school and youth sports coach, questioned the bill’s practicality, saying that it could not be enforced and that he worried it diluted the spirit of the anthem. “This bill wasn’t about the logistics,” Vruwink said. “It was about a culture war, in my mind. Forcing people to say, is it good or bad, or whatever, which is unfortunate.” Although this tension plays out at arenas, and causes fiery debates from the court to the halls of Congress, several sports commissioners, like Silver, still see a role for patriotic displays at sporting events. “Crisis brings out the best and worst in people and companies,” said MLS Commissioner Don Garber, adding: “I really believe that even during the most polarising times, sports seems to cut through all of that when it needs to most, and I continue to believe that our industry will continue to do so.” Among the major sports, Garber and Gary Bettman of the NHL were the only current commissioners in their roles on 9/11. That morning, Garber was about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel when he looked up and saw the first tower on fire. He spent the night in the office of his brother, Mitch, a longtime attorney for a law firm that represented police officers out of an office near ground zero. Cathy Engelbert, a longtime corporate executive and now the commissioner of the WNBA, worked across the street from the World Trade Center. In a statement, she said she remembered “vividly how sports played such a vital role in bringing our country together.” She added: “Two decades later, I still believe that sports continues to be unifying.” Bud Selig, MLB’s commissioner at the time, described baseball as an institution with important social responsibilities. The two most important instances, Selig said, were when Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier and when baseball returned after 9/11. Then-President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch before Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium that year. “The reaction of the crowd showed that our country was on its way back,” Selig said in a statement. “It is inherent in every level of our game that the welfare of our country comes first.” Muhammad, who won a bronze medal with the US women’s sabre team at the 2016 Games, also became the first US Olympian in any sport to compete while wearing a hijab. After 9/11, hate crimes against Muslims escalated. Muhammad said “being a visible Muslim woman comes with its difficulties.” “I don’t think that my experience as an American and having lived through 9/11 is any different from anyone else’s, other than the Muslim community became, like, literal targets afterward,” Muhammad said. “And I remember just that change in which people saw me, in the way that I was treated even sometimes by teachers, because I was young when it happened.” And being Black, she said, is “10 times harder in this country.” But that, in part, fuels her willingness to show her patriotism, including in sports. “My parents made a very intentional effort to make sure that me and my siblings understood our own history as descendants of an enslaved community,” she said. “And so I am very proud of the country that my ancestors had built for free, and I don’t allow other people to dictate that connection to patriotism. I never have.” ©The New York Times Company",
" Brazil, China, India and South Africa have urged wealthy nations to hand over $10 billion to poor nations this year to help fight climate change. The funds were pledged in a non-binding deal agreed at last December's Copenhagen climate conference. The group - known as BASIC - said the money must be available at once ""as proof of their commitment"" to address the global challenge. The plea was issued after a meeting of the four nations in Delhi on Sunday. The four nations, led by China, also pledged to meet an end-month deadline to submit action plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Environment ministers and envoys from the four nations met in New Delhi in a show of unity by countries whose greenhouse gas emissions are among the fastest rising in the world. The bloc was key to brokering a political agreement at the Copenhagen talks in December and its meeting in India was designed in part to put pressure on richer nations to make good on funding commitments. ""We have sent a very powerful symbol to the world of our intentions,"" the Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said at a joint press conference after seven hours of talks. The group discussed setting up a climate fund to help nations most vulnerable to the impact of global warming, which it said would act as a wakeup call for wealthier countries to meet their pledges on financial assistance and give $10 billion in 2010. Rich countries have pledged $30 billion in climate change funding for the 2010-12 period and set a goal of $100 billion by 2020, far less than what developing countries had wanted. The group in New Delhi said releasing $10 billion this year would send a signal of the rich countries' commitment. The four said they were in talks to set up an independent fund for the same purpose, but gave no timeline or figure. ""When we say we will be reinforcing technical support as well as funds to the most vulnerable countries, we are giving a slap in the face to the rich countries,"" Brazil's Environment Minister Carlos Minc said through a translator. The non-binding accord worked out at the Copenhagen climate summit was described by many as a failure because it fell short of the conference's original goal of a more ambitious commitment to prevent more heatwaves, droughts and crop failures. China is the world's top CO2 emitter, while India is number four. China was blamed by many countries at Copenhagen for obstructing a tougher deal and has refused to submit to outside scrutiny of its plans to brake greenhouse gas emissions. China has pledged to cut the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each unit of economic growth by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. For India, that figure is up to 25 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said the world needed to take immediate action to fight climate change. But in the wake of a controversial exaggeration by the U.N. climate panel on the threat of global warming to the Himalayan glaciers, he called for an ""open attitude"" to climate science. ""(There is a) point of view that the climate change or climate warming issue is caused by the cyclical element of the nature itself. I think we need to adopt an open attitude to the scientific research,"" he said through a translator. ""We want our views to be more scientific and more consistent.""",
"But the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in a public report sent to the White House, has said, in effect: Don’t get your hopes up. After reviewing a variety of research reports, a panel concluded that the studies, of varying quality of evidence, do not offer a basis to believe that summer weather will interfere with the spread of the coronavirus. The pandemic may lessen because of social distancing and other measures, but the evidence so far does not inspire confidence in the benefits of sun and humidity. The report, sent to Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House and acting director of the National Science Foundation, was a brief nine-page communication known as a rapid expert consultation. Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California and a member of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies, said: “Given current data, we believe that the pandemic likely will not diminish because of summer, and we should be careful not to base policies and strategies around the hope that it will.” “We might very well see a reduction in spread in the beginning of the summer,” he added, “but we have to be careful not to put that down to a changing climate — it is plausible that such a reduction could be due to other measures put in place.” Human behaviour will be most important. Dr. David Relman, who studies host-microbe interactions at Stanford, said if a human coughs or sneezes enough virus “close enough to the next susceptible person, then temperature and humidity just won’t matter that much.” The report from the National Academies, independent agencies that advise the government and the public, cited a small number of well-controlled laboratory studies that show that high temperature and humidity can diminish the ability of the novel coronavirus to survive in the environment. But the report noted the studies had limitations that made them less than conclusive. It also noted that although some reports showed pandemic growth rates peaking in colder conditions, those studies were short and limited. A preliminary finding in one such study, by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found fewer cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in warmer climates, but arrived at no definitive conclusion. “Specially in the US, any effect, even in the summer months, may not be highly visible, so our real chance to stop this virus is indeed through taking quarantine measures,” said Qasim Bukhari, a computational scientist at MIT who is a co-author of the study. The report sent to the White House also struck a cautionary note: “Given that countries currently in ‘summer’ climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed,” it said. Pandemics do not behave the same way seasonal outbreaks do. For the National Academies’ report, researchers looked at the history of flu pandemics as an example. “There have been 10 influenza pandemics in the past 250-plus years — two started in the Northern Hemisphere winter, three in the spring, two in the summer and three in the fall,” the report said. “All had a peak second wave approximately six months after emergence of the virus in the human population, regardless of when the initial introduction occurred.” On March 16, Trump said the virus might “wash” through in warmer weather. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, has expressed different opinions about the effect of summer on the virus, some more optimistic than others. In a livestreamed interview on Wednesday, Dr. Howard Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, asked him about the fall, which Fauci said would be very challenging, after a period this summer when “it’s almost certainly going to go down a bit.” On March 26, however, in a conversation on Instagram with Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors, Fauci said that although it wasn’t unreasonable to assume the summer weather could diminish the spread, “you don’t want to count on it.” c.2020 The New York Times Company",
"All those events will take place at the Prime Minister’s Office. He arrived at 10:08am on his first ever Bangladesh visit. Exchange of documents Instrument of ratification of Land Boundary Agreement will be exchanged along with the letters of modalities for implementation of LBA signed in 1974 and its protocol in 2011. Unveiling foundation plaque Khulna-Mongla railway line Rabindra Bhavan at Kuthibarri, Shiliguri Bangladesh-India Friendship Bridge-1 over the Feni River Kulaurha-Shahjadpur railway link Bangladesh-India Friendship Building at Sardah Police Academy Inauguration Upgraded BSTI laboratory Brahmanbarhia-Tripura border haat Exchange of agreements, protocols Agreement on bilateral trade Coastal shipping Protocol on inland waterways Agreement and protocol on two bus services namely Agartala-Kolkata via Bangladesh and Dhaka-Guwahati via Meghalaya’s capital Shillong and Sylhet. Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) MoU signing between Bangladesh and Indian coastguards MoU on prevention of smuggling of fake currency notes MoU on Indian endowment on climate change for SAARC MoU on prevention of human trafficking MoU on cultural exchanges Semi-government MoU MoU between Rajshahi University and New Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia MoU between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research India and Dhaka University’s Department of Oceanography for joint research in the Bay of Bengal MoU for bandwidth leasing between BSNL and BSCCL Document exchanges between the two PMs Modi will hand over a CD containing record of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s speech at Kolkata in 1972, his first official visit after Bangladesh’s independence. He will also hand over the transcripts of the Indian Parliament’s sessions regarding amendment of constitution related to settlement of the Land Boundary Agreement. Hasina will hand him a photograph of “signing instrument of surrender of 1971” that shows Pakistan army surrendering to the joint forces of Bangladesh and India. Private companies of the two countries may sign several agreements between them.",
" Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has called for a meeting of her Awami League party's highest decision-making body ahead of her 10-day trip abroad. The Awami League presidium meeting is due to start at 7pm on Friday at Ganabhaban, her official residence, the party's deputy office secretary Mrinal Kanti Das told bdnews24.com. Awami League general secretary Syed Ashraful Islam urged the presidium members to attend the meeting on time, he said. It will be the third presidium meeting since the new Awami League Central Working Committee was formed on Jul 26, 2009. Hasina is due to set off for New York on Saturday to attend the United Nations General Assembly. She will attend a number of sessions including the special session on Millennium Development Goals, a high-profile meeting of developing countries, UNICEF child affair's session and a session on climate change.",
" A last-ditch attempt at passing a climate change bill begins in the US Senate this week with lawmakers mindful that time is running short and that approaches to the legislation still vary widely, according to sources. ""We will present senators with a number of options when they get back from recess,"" said one Senate aide knowledgeable of the compromise legislation that is being developed. The goal is to reduce US emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say threaten Earth. The options will be presented to three senators -- Democrat John Kerry, independent Joseph Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham -- who are leading the fight for a bill to battle global warming domestically. The aide said the Senate's drive for a bill got a boost last week with President Barack Obama's announcement of an $8.3 billion government loan guarantee to help start expanding the US nuclear power industry, a top Republican priority. ""The administration is really putting their money where their mouth is,"" the aide said. The Senate trio's success or failure likely will have a profound impact on international efforts to reduce carbon emissions and prevent Earth's temperature from exceeding a possibly dangerous 2 degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) increase from pre-industrial times. For Wall Street, the Senate has the power to make or break the start-up of what eventually could be a $1 trillion market for power plant, oil refinery and factory pollution permits traded on a regulated exchange. U.S. congressional elections will be held on Nov. 2 and there is wide agreement that if the Senate cannot pass a climate bill by mid-year, already hard-edged political partisanship will become hyperactive, making it nearly impossible for Congress to move on much of anything. ""We're getting to the point where I think we need to start seeing senators coalesce around an approach,"" said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which wants comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions control. SKEPTICISM ABOUNDS There is plenty of skepticism about whether Kerry, who is spearheading the effort, can pull off passage of such a difficult bill in an election year since the bill would increase future energy prices. But supporters are not giving up as they draw parallels to the last major environmental fight. ""In 1990, we had a midterm president, a Mideast war, a banking crisis following a real estate bubble and a recession, yet Congress still passed updates to the Clean Air Act by overwhelming margins,"" said Representative Edward Markey, the co-author of the Waxman-Markey climate bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last June. Tested over 20 years, those Clean Air Act updates are credited with effectively cutting ""acid rain"" air pollution through a cap-and-trade system that some now want to employ to reduce the carbon emissions blamed for global warming. Under cap and trade, companies need government permits to emit an ever-dwindling amount of pollution. Fuel-efficient firms that end up holding more permits than they need can sell them to companies that are bigger polluters. For carbon dioxide, cap and trade would eventually make the cost of using coal and other dirty-burning fossil fuels so high that cleaner, more expensive energy sources such as wind and solar power would emerge. In recent months, many conservatives who do not want the federal government to mandate pollution reductions, have seized upon newly discovered errors in scientific reports underpinning the link between human activity and climate problems such as drought, flooding and rising sea levels. Republican Senator James Inhofe, a leading critic, said the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had fallen victim to ""outright fraud"" and deceit. It is further evidence Congress should not rush legislation, he has argued. SIDE ISSUES Meanwhile, ""so much political juice"" is now being expended by US environmental groups on a side-issue to the climate bill, said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. He was referring to green groups' attempts to stop Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from advancing her bill blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, starting with vehicles. The Obama administration would prefer to let Congress set climate change policy. But if it is unable to, the White House wants the EPA as a fallback. Graham has talked about cobbling together a ""hybrid system"" for reducing carbon emissions. Claussen said, ""If I was going to guess, it's probably cap and trade for electricity,"" which accounts for about 40 percent of carbon emissions, and maybe a separate oil industry tax or fee, with consumers being protected from price increases. Tackling carbon emissions from factories making steel, cement, paper, glass and other large manufacturers either could be put off ""for much later"" or they could be given options for participating, she said. Such an approach could gain the support of Midwestern senators who fear US factories could be put at a competitive disadvantage against foreign manufacturers under a cap-and-trade program. But it also has risks, others say, underscoring splits among Washington interest groups, politicians and others who want a climate change bill. Robert Shapiro, chairman of the Climate Task Force and an advocate of a carbon tax, said a dual system would not make economic sense and could make for more volatile energy prices.",
"Kuczynski, a 79-year-old former Wall Street banker who once held US citizenship, is guaranteed presidential immunity from prosecution until Congress formally accepts his resignation and Vice President Martin Vizcarra is sworn in to replace him. Luis Galarreta, the president of Congress, said that would probably happen on Friday. Kuczynski denies wrongdoing and has promised to cooperate with a graft probe into his connections to Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company that has acknowledged bribing officials across Latin America. The rightwing opposition party that controls Congress, Popular Force, first sought to force Kuczynski from office in December after revealing he failed to disclose payments Odebrecht made to his Flordia-based consulting firm while he held public office in a previous government. Kuczynski had vowed not to resign for months, blaming the rightwing opposition for constant scandals that he said had made it impossible for him to govern Peru, one of Latin America’s most stable markets and the world’s No. 2 producer of copper. But secret audio and video recordings released this week ensnared Kuczynski in vote-buying allegations that prompted even his staunchest supporters to demand he step down. Kuczynski said the material, in which his allies are heard offering access to lucrative public work contracts in exchange for political support, had been edited as part of a relentless campaign to malign him. But the hostile political climate had become untenable, he added. “I think what’s best for the country is for me to resign...I don’t want to be an obstacle for the nation’s search for a path to unity and harmony,” Kuczynski said in a pre-recorded video televised as he was driven from the presidential palace to his home in Lima’s financial district. MARKETS RALLY Kuczynski’s announcement marked a spectacular downfall for a man elected less than two years ago amid hopes he would turbocharge growth while cleaning up government corruption and modernizing the Andean nation of about 30 million people. Markets that had cheered Kuczynski’s rise to power in 2016 rallied on news of his departure on Wednesday, amid expectations it would end the political uncertainty that had loomed over the nearly $200-billion economy, just as higher copper prices were reviving investor interest. Peru’s sol currency gained 0.5 percent against the dollar on Wednesday, and stocks closed up 1 percent. But Kuczynski’s future looked less bright. Prosecutors in a special anti-corruption unit in the attorney general’s office told a judge Kuczynski should not be allowed to leave the country, the judiciary source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Kuczynski said as a candidate in 2016 that he had renounced his US citizenship in order to launch his bid. Last month, US Ambassador to Peru Krishna Urs declined to confirm that Kuczynski no longer had citizenship. Kuczynski’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. TRUMP TO HEAD TO PERU Peru has a history of jailing former presidents, and of presidents fleeing. Former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori fled Peru for his parents’ native Japan as his decade in power ended in a corruption scandal and protests. Last year, former president Ollanta Humala, Kuczynski’s predecessor, was ordered up to 18 months in pre-trial detention while prosecutors prepare charges related to Odebrecht. Kuczynski had been scheduled to welcome Donald Trump on the US president’s first visit to Latin America next month, when many regional leaders plan to pressure Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to pursue democratic reforms. Kuczynski, who called Maduro a “dictator” in an interview with Reuters last year, had led regional criticism of his government while opening the door to Venezuelan migrants fleeing the country’s economic crisis. A White House official, speaking on background, said Trump still plans to attend the summit and declined to comment on Peru’s domestic political situation. Instead of Kuczynski, Trump will meet Vizcarra at the Summit of the Americas that Peru will host on April 13 and 14. A former governor of a mining region, Vizcarra once helped broker Anglo American Plc secure community support for its copper project, Quellaveco, and has served as Peru’s ambassador to Canada since September. But Vizcarra will take office amid widespread demands for change after constant political crises and corruption scandals have eroded trust in institutions and political leaders. Vizcarra took to Twitter from Canada to call for unity. “I’m outraged by the current situation, like the majority of Peruvians,” Vizcarra said in his first public comments since Kuczynski announced his resignation. “But I’m convinced that together we can show that we can once more push forward.” In recent days, Vizcarra has received public assurances from opposition lawmakers that they will let him govern, something Kuczynski said he had been denied. “I’ve worked for nearly 60 years of my life with complete honesty,” Kuczynski added. “The opposition has tried to depict me as a corrupt person.”",
" India hailed as ""momentous"" a global atomic cartel's decision on Saturday to lift a 34-year-old ban on nuclear trade with New Delhi, a crucial step to sealing a controversial U.S.-India civilian nuclear accord. ""This is a forward-looking and momentous decision,"" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who spoke to U.S. President George W. Bush after the decision, said in a statement. ""It marks the end of India's decades-long isolation from the nuclear mainstream and of the technology denial regime."" The 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), meeting in Vienna, adopted a one-off waiver proposed by the United States, allowing atomic business with India even though it has not signed the non-proliferation treaty and has tested nuclear devices. This followed tough negotiations in which several small NSG states agreed under heavy U.S. pressure to weaker language than they had sought to ensure India does not test atom bombs again. ""I thank the United States and other member countries of the Nuclear Suppliers Group for the role they have played in ensuring this outcome,"" Singh said. ""The opening of full civil nuclear cooperation between India and the international community will be good for India and for the world."" The U.S.-India deal still has one hurdle to clear. The U.S. Congress must ratify it before adjourning later this month for elections, or it will be left to an uncertain fate under a new U.S. administration. The fuel and technology deal would help India meet exploding energy demand in an environmentally sound way and open a nuclear market worth billions of dollars. A top Indian industry lobby welcomed the approval as ""a resounding victory"" for India. ""It would enable India chase its dream of putting up a series of nuclear power plants, said Sajjan Jindal, head of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. Singh said the NSG approval recognised India's impeccable non-proliferation record and its status as a state with advanced nuclear technology. ""We look forward to establishing a mutually beneficial partnership with friendly countries in an area which is important both for global energy security and to meet the challenge of climate change."" NSG critics and disarmament campaigners fear Indian access to nuclear material markets will let it tap into more of its limited indigenous resources, such as uranium fuel, to boost its nuclear arsenal, and spark an arms race in the region. The deal has also been criticised by Indian opposition parties as compromising the country's sovereignty and its right to carry out more nuclear tests. But a beaming foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters that the NSG waiver was a ""unique development"" that was in India's interests. ""The final outcome fully meets our expectation and is consistent with government policy and the national consensus on disarmament and nonproliferation,"" he said.",
" Big emerging countries urged rich nations on Sunday to set ambitious mid-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases, as both sides stressed the need for funds to help developing countries limit their emissions. Ministers and representatives from the Group of Eight advanced nations and major emerging countries are gathered in western Japan to try to build momentum for U.N.-led climate change talks, a key topic for a July leaders' summit. At least one delegate, though, was pessimistic over prospects for any breakthroughs in time for the July 7-9 summit in Hokkaido, northern Japan, where G8 leaders will be joined by big emerging economies such as China for climate change talks. ""I think it is difficult. We have not enough time,"" Mexican Environment Minister Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada told reporters. ""But climate change is not waiting for any of us."" G8 leaders agreed last year in Germany to consider seriously a goal to halve emissions by 2050, a proposal favored by Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada. About 190 nations have agreed to negotiate by the end of 2009 a successor treaty to the Kyoto pact, which binds 37 advanced nations to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. But wide gaps exist within the G8 and between rich and poorer nations over how to share the burden for fighting climate change, blamed for droughts, rising seas and more intense storms. TARGETS, FUNDS, TECHNOLOGY Developing countries are putting priority on growth and balking at targets, while complaining that the United States, which together with China is a top emitter, is not doing enough. Indonesia's deputy environment minister told reporters that G8 countries needed to set their own mid-term targets before asking developing countries make commitments. ""First, they should do a mid-term target,"" said Masnellyarti Hilman. ""Developed countries should take the lead and give their commitment to give transfer of technology, finances and capacity building to developing countries,"" she added. South Africa wants the G8 to set ambitious mid-term targets to cut emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and provide more funds to help developing nations adapt to climate change and limit emissions, Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a prepared statement. ""As developing countries, we are looking at the G8 for leadership. This is a key ingredient towards building trust,"" he said. The European Union has said the bloc aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, but the United States says only that it will halt the growth of its emissions by 2025 and expectations are low for bold moves until a new president takes office in January 2009. Japan, seeking to show leadership as G8 summit host, urged its rich country colleagues to set bold national targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by well over 50 percent by 2050. ""It is also important for global emissions to peak out in the next 10 to 20 years to reach the long-term target, and I hope that a shared view will be come out of the (G8) summit,"" Japanese Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita added. Japan is currently debating its own national target, and domestic media have said it would announce in June a goal of reducing emissions by 60-80 percent by mid-century. Big emerging economies also want rich countries to help finance the clean energy technologies they need to cut emissions. Japan has pledged to pay $10 billion over five years to support developing countries' fight against climate change and intends to create a new multilateral fund with the United States and Britain. Now Washington and Tokyo want other donors to take part too. Mexico is pitching its own proposal for a ""Green Fund"", while the World Bank on Friday said that 40 developing and industrial nations would create two new investment funds to provide financing for developing countries to fight climate change. But the Bank specified no amounts and did not clarify the relationship to existing funding mechanisms. ",
"China's State Councillor and Foreign Minister told US climate envoy John Kerry via video link on Wednesday that the two sides' joint efforts to combat global warming were an ""oasis"", according to a foreign ministry statement published late on Wednesday. ""But surrounding the oasis is a desert, and the oasis could be desertified very soon,"" he said. ""China-US climate cooperation cannot be separated from the wider environment of China-US relations."" ""We have shown our sincerity,"" Wang was quoted by state broadcaster CCTV as saying. ""Everyone who met with you will have to spend two weeks in quarantine, but we're willing to pay that price, to discuss cooperation with the US on affairs of mutual concerns."" Kerry told Wang that Washington remained committed to working with other nations to tackle the climate crisis, and encouraged China to do more to reduce emissions during the meeting, a State Department spokesperson said. ""Secretary Kerry affirmed that the United States remains committed to cooperating with the world to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands, and encouraged the PRC to take additional steps to reduce emissions,"" the spokesperson said. The United States, which has resumed its role in global climate diplomacy after a four-year hiatus under President Donald Trump, has long hoped to keep climate issues separate from its wider disputes with China on issues such as trade, human rights and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kerry is in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin to hold face-to-face talks with Xie Zhenhua, China's special climate envoy, on the countries' joint response to the climate crisis. Climate watchers are hoping that the talks will lead to more ambitious pledges by both countries to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. ""The G2 (China and the United States) need to realise that beyond their bilateral oasis and desert, the whole planet is at stake,"" said Li Shuo, senior climate adviser with the environmental group Greenpeace. ""If they don't make joint climate progress fast enough, it is soon all going to be desert,"" he added. The meeting in Tianjin is the second to be held between Kerry and Xie, with the first taking place in Shanghai in April. Kerry has no remit to discuss anything apart from climate change issues. Though Wang warned that climate change could now be tied to other diplomatic issues, China has insisted that its efforts to curb its emissions and switch to cleaner forms of energy are a vital part of its own ambitious domestic policy agenda. ""Chinese leaders have long said they are engaged in climate action not because of outside pressure, but because it benefits China and the world at large,"" said Alex Wang, climate expert and professor at UCLA. ""If that is so, then US-China tensions should not slow Chinese climate action.""",
" The government will distribute Al Gore's dramatic global warming film to all secondary schools in England in its fight to tackle the climate crisis, Environment Minister David Miliband said on Friday. The announcement came as a panel of the world's top scientists issued a new report blaming mankind for the crisis and predicting that average temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century as a result. ""The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over, as demonstrated by the publication of today's report,"" Miliband said. ""I was struck by the visual evidence the film provides, making clear that the changing climate is already having an impact on our world today, from Mount Kilimanjaro to the Himalayan mountains,"" he added. 'An Inconvenient Truth', a film of the former US vice president's lecture tour illustrating the dramatic change to the environment due to human activities, has already been a box office hit. The film will be part of a global warming information pack distributed to schools as the government strongly pushes the message that everyone has a role to play. Gore, a dedicated climate crusader, has begun a programme of training what he calls climate ambassadors to travel the world. ""As the film shows, there's no reason to feel helpless in the face of this challenge. Everyone can play a part along with government and business in making a positive contribution in helping to prevent climate change,"" Miliband said. The government is drafting a Climate Change Bill to set in law its own self-imposed target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent by 2050. But environmentalists have called for a far tougher target and on Friday the head of a cross-party parliamentary environment committee urged Miliband to raise the figure. ""I will be asking David Miliband to scrap that target and instead introduce a formula which works towards a safe and sustainable concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which minimises the danger of catastrophic climate change,"" said Colin Challen.",
"Around 2009, multiple glaciers along a vast coastal expanse, measuring some 750 km in length, suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean. ""To date, the glaciers added roughly 300 cubic km of water to the ocean. That's the equivalent of the volume of nearly 350,000 Empire State buildings combined,"" said lead study author Bert Wouters at the University of Bristol. The changes were observed using the CryoSat-2 satellite, a mission of the European Space Agency dedicated to remote-sensing of ice. The ice loss in the region is so large that it is causing small changes in the gravity field of the Earth. Such a change can be detected by another satellite mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). Ice shelves in the region have lost almost one-fifth of their thickness in the last two decades, thereby reducing the resisting force on the glaciers. ""To pinpoint the cause of the changes, more data need to be collected. A detailed knowledge of the geometry of the local ice shelves, the ocean floor topography, ice sheet thickness and glacier flow speeds are crucial to tell how much longer the thinning will continue,"" Wouters concluded. The research was published in the journal Science.",
"The anti-graft watchdog brought the accusations without mentioning names of the alleged offenders and the projects at a news conference on Wednesday. “We do not reveal names. We only highlight the irregularities to encourage the offenders to correct themselves,” said Dr Iftekharuzzaman, the Executive Director of TIB. TIB picked six ongoing projects of the BWDB for the research. All of them aim to combat effects of climate change. Out of the six, irregularities were found in four, said TIB executives at the conference titled 'United against Corruption'. A secretary has illegally made recommendations in one of the projects while another project has been manipulated by a central leader of the ruling Awami League, a relative of a former minister and a local MP, the TIB said. The two other projects were influenced by two local lawmakers, according to the organisation. 
 
 

“Bangladesh Water Development Board approved these four projects because they were recommended by the influential figures,” said Golam Mohiuddin, Programme Manager, TIB.   The research aims at finding out the challenges of funds management and recommending ways to overcome them. It was conducted to review the rules and regulations related to the management of projects that are being implemented with funds for climate change. “Developed countries question us while lending funds. If we follow the fair path, they will not question our integrity anymore,” said Dr Iftekharuzzaman. TIB selected 600 people—all residents of areas where the projects are on—through sampling for the survey. “The respondents said illegal recommendations were made for four projects. One secretary, one Awami League leader, relative of a former minister, and local MPs made these recommendations.” Substandard work has been reported from two projects, said Mohiuddin. “The contractors even engaged in clashes with locals when the low quality work was noticed.” Substandard materials were used in building a dam under one project. The dam has already caved in at some points, he said. “One contractor has dredged canal but used the mud at a brick kiln that he owns instead for strengthening the dam. He has cut 10-15 trees for a project but sold them at Tk 28,000 per piece and embezzled the money,” Mohiuddin said. The schedules of none of the projects have been made public, according to TIB. Mohiuddin further said: “Eighty-nine percent of the participants said they had no clue from where they could get information over the projects. Eight percent said BWDB refused to provide them any.” Among the participants, 92 percent said they did not know anything about the projects. “There is no information officer at the local offices of BWDB. No information boards are there for three projects. Two boards contain information about two projects but they were taken down before completion of the project,” Mohiuddin said citing responses gathered through the survey. “One project includes multiple areas but information board is available in only one office. That also has insufficient data.” The website of the BWDB contains a list of more than 700 ongoing and finished projects but lacks any separate list of projects related to climate change. To date, the BWDB has implemented 141 projects worth 40 percent of government’s fund to deal with climate change, he said while presenting the keynote paper.",
"Djordjevic makes combustion engines for Daimler, one of Germany’s flagship carmakers. He has a salary of around 60,000 euros (about $70,000), eight weeks of vacation and a guarantee negotiated by the union that he cannot be fired until 2030. He owns a two-story house and that E-class 250 model Mercedes in his driveway. All of that is why Djordjevic polishes the star on his car. “The star is something stable and something strong: It stands for Made in Germany,” he said. But by 2030 there will be no more combustion engines at Daimler — or people making combustion engines. “I’m proud of what I do,” Djordjevic said. “It’s unsettling to know that in 10 years’ time my job will no longer exist.” Djordjevic is the picture of a new German pride and prosperity — and German anxiety. As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater. To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed. There is the father taking paid parental leave in Catholic Bavaria. The married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin. The woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt, where most students have German passports but few have German parents. There is the coal worker in the former communist East voting for a far-right party that did not exist when Merkel took office. And two young brothers on a North Sea island threatened by rising sea levels who do not remember a time when Merkel was not chancellor and cannot wait to see her gone. “She has known about the danger of climate change for longer than we’ve been alive,” one of the brothers told me while standing on the grassy dike that protects the small island, Pellworm, from flooding. “Why hasn’t she done anything about it?” As Merkel steered her country through successive crises and left others unattended, there was change that she led and change that she allowed. She decided to phase out nuclear power in Germany. She ended compulsory military service. She was the first chancellor to assert that Islam “belongs” to Germany. When it came to breaking down her country’s and party’s conservative family values, she was more timid but ultimately did not stand in the way. “She saw where the country was going and allowed it to go there,” said Roland Mittermayer, an architect who married his husband shortly after Merkel invited conservative lawmakers to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, even though she herself voted against it. No other democratic leader in Europe has lasted longer. And Merkel is walking out of office as the most popular politician in Germany. Many of her postwar predecessors had strongly defined legacies. Konrad Adenauer anchored Germany in the West. Willy Brandt reached across the Iron Curtain. Helmut Kohl, her onetime mentor, became synonymous with German unity. Gerhard Schröder paved the way for the country’s economic success. Merkel’s legacy is less tangible but equally transformative. She changed Germany into a modern society — and a country less defined by its history. She may be remembered most for her decision to welcome more than 1 million refugees in 2015-16 when most other Western nations rejected them. It was a brief redemptive moment for the country that had committed the Holocaust and turned her into an icon of liberal democracy. “It was a sort of healing,” said Karin Marré-Harrak, headmaster of a high school in the multicultural city of Offenbach. “In a way we’ve become a more normal country.” Being called a normal country might seem underwhelming elsewhere. But for Germany, a nation haunted by its Nazi past and four decades of division between East and West, normal was what all postwar generations had aspired to. Almost everywhere, however, there was also a nagging sense that the new normal was being threatened by epic challenges, that things cannot go on as they are. THE GERMAN DREAM Djordjevic lives near Stuttgart, the capital of Germany’s powerful car industry. In 1886, Gottlieb Daimler invented one of the first cars in his garden here. These days the city is home to Daimler, Porsche and Bosch, the world’s biggest car-part maker. Arriving home after his shift one recent afternoon, Djordjevic was still wearing his factory uniform — and, beside the Mercedes logo, the hallmark red pin of the metal worker union. Most Daimler employees are unionized. Worker representatives take half of the seats on the company’s supervisory board. “The success story of German industry is also the story of strong worker representation,” he said. The security, the benefits, the opportunities to build skills — all of that underpins “the loyalty workers feel to the product and the company.” If the American dream is to get rich, the German dream is job security for life. Djordjevic, 38, always knew he wanted to work for Daimler. His father worked there until he died. “It was like an inheritance,” he said. When he got his first job at age 16, he thought he had arrived. “I thought, ‘That’s it,’” he recalled. “‘I’ll retire from here.’” Now he is less sure. Like other German carmakers, Daimler was late to start its transition to electric cars. Its first pure electric model was launched only this year. Daimler’s target is to phase out combustion engines by 2030. No one knows what exactly that means for jobs, but Djordjevic was doing the math. “There are 1,200 parts in a combustion engine,” he said. “There are only 200 in an electric car.” “Sustainable cars are great, but we also need sustainable jobs,” he said. Daimler is still growing. But much of the job growth is in China, said Michael Häberle, one of the worker representatives on the company board. Häberle, too, has been at the company all 35 years of his working life. He started as a mechanic and worked his way up to a business degree and eventually a seat on the board. Standing in one of the factories now churning out batteries for the new EQS line of electric cars, Häberle said he hoped company would not only survive this transformation but come out stronger on the other side. The main question, he said, is: Will Germany? There was a time when he took his country’s export prowess for granted. But now, he said, “Germany is in a defensive crouch.” A GERMAN HIJAB Germany’s car industry helped fuel the country’s postwar economic miracle. And immigrants fuelled the car industry. But they don’t really feature in that story. They were known as “guest workers” and were expected to come, work and leave. Until two decades ago, they had no regular path to citizenship. Among them were the grandparents of Ikbal Soysal, a young high school teacher in the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt, whose father worked in a factory making parts for Mercedes. Soysal’s generation of immigrant Germans do feature in the story of Germany today. Not only do they have German passports, many have university degrees. They are doctors, entrepreneurs, journalists and teachers. Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. When Merkel came into office in 2005, 18% of Germans had at least one parent who was born outside the country. By now it is 1 in 4. In Soysal’s school in Offenbach, 9 in 10 children have at least one parent who emigrated to Germany. Many of the teachers do, too. “When I started teaching here, all teachers were Germans with German roots,” the head teacher, Karin Marré-Harrak, said. “Now, nearly half of them have diverse roots.” Soysal, a Muslim, always wanted to be a teacher, but she knew it was a risk. There had never been a high school teacher with a headscarf in her state. So when she was invited for her first job interview, she called ahead to warn the school. It was 2018. The secretary consulted with the headmaster, who promptly reassured her, “What matters is what’s in your head, not what’s on your head.” She got that job and others since. It wasn’t always easy. “The students forget about the headscarf very quickly,” Soysal said. But some parents complained to the head teacher. Once, a student asked Soysal’s advice. The girl was wearing a headscarf but was unsure about it. “If it doesn’t feel right, you need to take it off,” Soysal told her. For her, that is what freedom of religion, enshrined in the German constitution, is all about. “The thing is, I am German,” she said, “so my headscarf is German, too.” THE ALTERNATIVE TO MERKEL Leaving Offenbach, the next stop is Hanau. It was here, in February last year, that a far-right gunman went into several bars and shot nine mostly young people who had migrant backgrounds. The backlash against the diversification and modernization that Merkel has overseen has turned increasingly violent. Germany suffered three far-right terrorist attacks in less than three years. The ideological breeding ground for that violence is in many ways embodied by a party that chose its name in opposition to the chancellor. Merkel often justified unpopular policies by calling them “alternativlos” — without alternative. The Alternative for Germany, or AfD, was founded in 2013 in opposition to the bailout of Greece that Merkel’s government engineered during Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. When she welcomed more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016, the party adopted a noisy anti-immigrant stance that catapulted it into Germany’s parliament. The AfD is marginalised in the country’s West. But it has become the second-strongest party in the former communist East, the place where Merkel grew up. Politically at least, Merkel’s Germany is more divided between East and West than at any other point since reunification. In Forst, a once-prosperous textile hub on the Polish border that lost thousands of jobs and one-third of its population after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AfD came first in the last election. Downtown, shuttered factories and smoke stacks still dot the skyline. The lingering inequality between East and West three decades after reunification is still evident, even though taxpayers’ money has flowed east and things have gradually improved. With the government planning to phase out coal production by 2038, billions more in funding are promised to help compensate for the job losses. But as Mike Balzke, a worker at the nearby coal plant in Jänschwalde, put it: “We don’t want money — we want a future.” Balzke recalled his optimism when Merkel first became chancellor. Because she was an easterner and a scientist, he expected her to be an ambassador for the East — and for coal. Instead, his village lost one-quarter of its population during her chancellorship. A promised train line from Forst to Berlin was never built. The post office shut down. Balzke, 41, worries that the region will turn into a wasteland. That anxiety runs deep. And it deepened again with the arrival of refugees in 2015. TWO FATHERS AND TWO SONS Merkel’s decision to welcome the refugees was one reason Balzke stopped voting for her. But for plenty of other people, the opposite was true. Mathis Winkler, a development aid worker in Berlin, had never voted for Merkel’s party. As a gay man, he was appalled by its narrow conservative definition of family that until only a few years ago excluded him, his long-term partner and their two foster sons. But after Merkel became the target of far-right anger during the refugee crisis, he joined her party in solidarity. Merkel pushed her own base on several fronts. On her watch, legislation was passed that allows mothers and fathers to share 14 months of paid parental leave. The conservative wing of her party was up in arms, but only a decade later, it has become the new normal. Merkel never backed same-sex marriage outright, but she allowed lawmakers to vote for it, knowing that it would go through. Winkler left the party again in 2019 after Merkel’s successor as conservative leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, disparaged same-sex marriage. But he acknowledged his debt to the chancellor. On June 30, 2017, the day of the vote, he wrote her a letter. “It is a pity that you could not support opening marriage to same-sex couples,” he wrote. “Still, thank you that you ultimately made today’s decision possible.” Then he invited her to visit his family, “to see for yourself.” She never replied. But he and his family used to live just around the corner from Merkel, who never gave up her apartment in central Berlin. They would see her occasionally in the supermarket checkout line. “There she was with toilet paper in her basket, going shopping like everyone else,” Winkler’s partner, Roland Mittermayer, recalled. Even after 16 years, they are still trying to figure the chancellor out. “She is an enigma,” Winkler said. “She’s a bit like the queen — someone who has been around for a long time, but you never feel you really know her.” THE POST-MERKEL GENERATION Six hours northwest of Berlin, past endless green fields dotted with wind farms and a 40-minute ferry ride off the North Sea coast, lies Pellworm, a sleepy island where the Backsen family has been farming since 1703. Two years ago, they took Merkel’s government to court for abandoning its carbon-dioxide emission targets under the Paris climate accord. They lost, but then tried again, filing a complaint at the constitutional court. This time they won. “It’s about freedom,” said Sophie Backsen, 23, who would like to take over her father’s farm one day. Sophie’s younger brothers, Hannes, 19, and Paul, 21, will vote for the first time on Sunday. Like 42% of first-time voters, they will vote for the Greens. “If you look at how our generation votes, it’s the opposite of what you see in the polls,” Paul said. “The Greens would be running the country.” Pellworm is flush with the sea level and in parts even below it. Without a dike ringing the coastline, it would flood regularly. “When you have permanent rain for three weeks, the island fills up like a bath tub inside the dikes,” Hannes said. The prospect of rising sea levels is an existential threat here. “This is one of the most important elections,” Hannes said. “It’s the last chance really to get it right.” “If not even a country like Germany can manage this,” he added, “what chance do we stand?” ©2021 The New York Times Company",
"Hours after the military council sought to calm public anger by promising a new civilian government, Defence Minister Awad Ibn Auf said in a televised speech he was quitting as head of the council. Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan Abdelrahman will be the new head of the council, Ibn Auf said. He also said Chief of Staff Kamal Abdelmarouf al-Mahi was relieved of his position as deputy head of the transitional military council. “In order to ensure the cohesion of the security system, and the armed forces in particular, from cracks and strife, and relying on God, let us begin this path of change,” Ibn Auf said. News of the change sparked joyful celebrations by many thousands in the streets of Khartoum as people chanted, “The second has fallen!” in reference to Bashir, witnesses said. “What happened is a step in the right direction and is a bow to the will of the masses, and we have become closer to victory,” Rashid Saeed, a spokesman for the main protest group, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), told Reuters. “We are committed to our demands that we submitted to the army,” he said. “We call on the masses to stay on the streets until all the demands are met.” The military council said earlier that it expected a pre-election transition to last two years at most or much less if chaos can be avoided. The head of the military council’s political committee, Omar Zain al-Abideen, said the council would hold a dialogue with political entities. The announcement of a future civilian government appeared aimed at reassuring demonstrators who had pressed for months for Bashir’s departure and quickly resumed protests against army rule after his ouster on Thursday, calling for quicker and more substantial change. In a clear challenge to Ibn Auf’s military council, several thousand protesters remained in front of the defence ministry compound, and in other parts of the capital, as a night time curfew Ibn Auf had announced went into effect. The SPA said the military council was “not capable of creating change.” In a statement, the group restated its demand for power to be handed immediately to “a transitional civilian government.” Bashir, 75, himself seized power in a 1989 military coup. He had faced 16 weeks of demonstrations sparked by rising food costs, high unemployment and increasing repression during his three decades of autocratic rule. Worshippers packed the streets around the Defence Ministry for Friday prayers, heeding a call by the SPA to challenge the military council. The numbers swelled in the afternoon, and a Reuters witness estimated hundreds of thousands of protesters thronged areas around the ministry, which was guarded by soldiers. At least 16 people were killed and 20 injured by stray bullets at protests and sit-ins on Thursday and Friday, a Sudanese police spokesman said in a statement on Saturday. Government buildings and private property were also attacked, spokesman Hashem Ali added. He asked citizens to help ensure safety and public order. “We do not reject a military council in principle, but we reject these people because they are from Bashir’s regime,” said Abdelhamid Ahmed, a 24-year-old doctor. Ibn Auf was Bashir’s vice president and defence minister and is among a handful of Sudanese commanders whom Washington imposed sanctions on over their alleged role during atrocities committed in the Darfur conflict that began in 2003. Announcing Bashir’s ouster on Thursday and the creation of the military council, Ibn Auf also announced a state of emergency, a nationwide ceasefire and the suspension of the constitution, as well as the night time curfew from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Those steps were criticised as heavy-handed by rights groups. Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman was the third most senior general in the Sudanese armed forces and is not known in public life. He was the head of Sudan’s ground forces, a role in which he oversaw Sudanese troops that fought in the Saudi-led Yemen war. INCLUSIVE POLITICAL PROCESS Sudan’s deputy UN ambassador, Yasir Abdalla Abdelsalam Ahmed, told the UN Security Council on Friday that any democratic process in the country required time, and he urged the international community to support a peaceful transition. “No party will be excluded from the political process, including armed groups,” he told the council during a meeting on Abyei, a contested border region claimed by Sudan and South Sudan. The 15-member council convened later on Friday behind closed doors to be briefed on the latest developments in Sudan. “Moreover, the suspension of the constitution could be lifted at any point and the transitional period could be shortened depending on developments on the ground and agreements reached between stakeholders,” the Sudanese envoy said. World powers, including the United States and Britain, said they supported a peaceful and democratic transition sooner than two years. China said it would continue to seek cooperation with Sudan regardless of the political situation. Zain al-Abideen said the military council would not interfere with a civilian government. However, he said the defence and interior ministries would be under its control. Burhan, the new head of the transitional military council, was the inspector general of the Sudanese armed forces and its third most senior general. He is little known in public life. He was the head of Sudan’s ground forces, a role in which he oversaw Sudanese troops who fought in the Saudi-led Yemen war. He has close ties to senior Gulf military officials as he was responsible for coordinating Sudan’s military involvement in the war. “NOT GREEDY FOR POWER” Zain al-Abideen said the military council itself had no solutions to Sudan’s crisis and these would come from the protesters. “We are not greedy for power,” he said. “We will not dictate anything to the people. We want to create an atmosphere to manage a peaceful dialogue”. He said the council was to meet on Friday with political entities to prepare a “climate for dialogue,” but that was later postponed. The council said it did not invite Bashir’s National Congress Party to join the dialogue because “it is responsible for what happened.” It warned protesters that the army would not tolerate unrest. Ibn Auf said on Thursday that Bashir was being detained in a “safe place.” Sudanese sources told Reuters he was at the presidential residence under heavy guard. The council said on Friday it would not extradite Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Bashir is facing an arrest warrant over accusations of genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region during an insurgency that began in 2003 and led to the death of an estimated 300,000 people. He denies the allegations.",
" Israel's security cabinet met on Wednesday to consider easing the Gaza blockade, officials said, in the face of world pressure for change since a deadly raid on an aid flotilla to the territory last month. Ministers may approve a plan to expand a list of more than 100 goods Israel permits the Hamas-ruled territory to import across its border, in coordination with Tony Blair, an official said. The former British prime minister is the envoy for the Quartet of international powers -- the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia -- seeking peace in the region. Blair, who held talks last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Monday that Israel had agreed in principle to begin easing the blockade ""in days"". Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog, who has called for the lifting of the blockade, told Army Radio on Wednesday: ""We must understand that the blockade implemented until this time is outdated, and no longer applicable in the current international and diplomatic climate."" Herzog said on Tuesday that Israel had informed Blair, who briefed EU foreign ministers on Monday, that it intends to ""permit an easier passage of goods"" to the Gaza Strip. Israel imposed the blockade soon after Hamas, which has rejected Western calls to recognise the Jewish state's right to exist, won legislative elections in 2006. Restrictions were tightened after Hamas seized power in Gaza the following year. The EU wants Israel to move from a policy of banning the entry of many commercial goods into Gaza, except a few designated items, to accepting all products and prohibiting only those proscribed on a list. Israel has said it wants to prevent the Iranian-backed Hamas from smuggling in any weapons, and officials say Israel would continue to ban the import of building materials to Gaza it says may be used to support military infrastructure. Pressure had built on Israel to end the blockade since its troops shot and killed nine people on board a Turkish-backed vessel of an aid flotilla on May 31, while enforcing its naval blockade on Gaza.",
" When Italian political rivals start being polite to each other, something is up -- especially when one of them is Silvio Berlusconi, who in the last election campaign did not shy from talking of communists eating babies. With only a month to go to the vote and the gloves still on, speculation grows that the twice former prime minister and his centre-left rival Walter Veltroni may form a ""Grand Coalition"" if April's result is too close, despite Veltroni's denials. Suspicious smaller rivals fear a right-left collaboration that would last just long enough to push through electoral reforms to create a two-party system, freezing them out. ""I fear that round the corner is some shady deal, rather than a 'Grand Coalition',"" said Christian Democrat leader Pier Ferdinando Casini, a centrist who, like the far left, has been spurned by allies who used to rely on him to stay in power. ""After April 13 Berlusconi and Veltroni will divide up power for their own convenience,"" said Casini, complaining that former ally Berlusconi was now reserving his ""venomous"" jibes for him. Berlusconi, a 71-year-old media tycoon who finds outrageous quips irresistible, has promised he ""won't attack any rival"" in this campaign. Probably the rudest he has been about Veltroni is to accuse him of ""scrounging meals"" as he tours Italy, accepting invitations to try ""Grandma Gina's lasagna"" in photo calls. While dismissing a post-electoral coalition with Berlusconi as ""impossible"", Veltroni says that if he wins with a ""slender majority in the Senate"" he will ask the opposition to ""create a civil climate"" to discuss political reforms before a new vote. He and Berlusconi had just begun talks when Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition collapsed in January, forcing him to quit as prime minister after 20 months and call an early election. Berlusconi, sensing an opportunity for a third term as prime minister, pulled out of the reform talks and vetoed bids for an interim government to overhaul voting rules. Introduced by his last government, these rules make it impossible to get a strong majority in the upper house or Senate, as Prodi discovered. ""The same people who didn't want this now say the election is likely to produce a tie and the Senate will be ungovernable,"" said Veltroni, referring to Berlusconi without naming him. 
PHOTO FINISH? As Italy stumbles towards yet another vote, after seeing its 61st government since World War Two crumble, Berlusconi has made no secret of his concern that although he leads the polls, there is a serious risk of a dead heat in the Senate. Most polls see Berlusconi's People of Freedom party beating the Democratic Party by about 7 points in the lower house. Polls on voting intentions for the Senate are done rarely since the house is elected on a regional basis, not a national basis like the lower house. So polling has to be done in each of Italy's 20 regions, making it a much more difficult exercise. ""What we are probably going to see is a rather unstable Senate which will create, once again, the kind of difficulty ruling that Prodi's government faced,"" said politics professor Franco Pavoncello at John Cabot University in Rome. ""If the Senate is unmanageable again I think we might have a couple of years of Grand Coalition,"" he told Reuters. His colleague James Walston at the American University in Rome, on the other hand, believes a German-style cross-party alliance is unlikely in Italy, telling Reuters that Berlusconi and Veltroni's ""own supporters would skin them alive"". But he does expect narrower coalition building after the vote -- ""that's one reason why they are being rather polite"". The tone could change if Berlusconi's lead narrows further and there is much scope for movement either way, with a quarter to a third of voters still undecided, according to polls. Berlusconi, greeted around Italy by the song ""Thank goodness for Silvio!"" which even a showman like him calls ""embarrassing"", is targeting such voters and has fielded an unabashed fascist in Lazio region to steal votes from a splinter right-wing group. While Berlusconi's former centrist allies accuse him of moving to the right, Prodi's old leftist allies, spurned by his dauphin Veltroni, accuse the Democratic Party of abandoning the centre-left by fielding a Venetian industrialist as candidate.",
"On Friday, Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou flew home to China from Canada after reaching an agreement with US prosecutors to end the bank fraud case against her, a point of tension between China and the United States. Within hours of the news of the deal, the two Canadians who were arrested shortly after Meng was taken into custody were released from Chinese jails and were on their way back to Canada. Beijing had denied that their arrests were linked. When asked if the White House was involved in brokering a ""prisoner swap,"" White House press secretary Jen Psaki rejected the premise. The deferred prosecution agreement with Meng was ""an action by the Department of Justice, which is an independent Department of Justice. This is a law enforcement matter,"" she said, adding, ""There is no link."" But Psaki also confirmed that in a call on Sept 9, two weeks before the announcements, China's leader Xi Jinping brought up Meng's case and US President Joe Biden pressed for the release of the two Canadians, businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig, who had been held in China for more than 1,000 days. ""These two leaders raised the cases of these individuals but there was no negotiation about it,"" Psaki said. Psaki said she had no information on whether Biden knew about the status of the negotiations between Meng's lawyers and the Justice Department. Meng had been arrested at Vancouver International Airport in Canada on a US warrant, and was indicted on bank and wire fraud charges for allegedly misleading HSBC in 2013 about the telecommunications equipment giant's business dealings in Iran. The years-long extradition drama had been a central source of discord in increasingly rocky ties between Beijing and Washington, with Chinese officials signalling that the case needed to be dropped to help end a diplomatic stalemate. Psaki emphasised the deal announced on Friday did not indicate a softening of US concerns about Chinese behaviour. ""Our policy has not changed, our policy toward China,"" Psaki said. ""We are not seeking conflict. It is a relationship of competition and we are going to continue to hold the PRC to account for its unfair economic practices, its coercive actions around the world and its human rights abuses,"" she said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China. BALL IN THE US COURT Earlier in September, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Biden's climate envoy John Kerry in a virtual meeting that Washington needed to take practical steps to improve relations by responding to a list of demands, which included dropping the case against Meng. ""Right now, the ball is in the United States' court,"" Wang told Kerry, according to a Chinese statement. But US officials have rebutted any suggestion that Kerry or other administration officials had negotiated Meng's release with China for other concessions. Earlier in the week, Xi announced at the United Nations that China would not build new coal-fired power projects abroad, a pledge Kerry had been pressuring Beijing to make to help the world stay on course to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. ""We were not involved in their internal decision-making on it in any way, shape, or form,"" a White House official told Reuters of the Justice Department's process. ""The movement on coal, number one, is, frankly, China acting in its own interest,"" the official said. ""I think they realised that they weren't going to get anything for it. They weren't going to be able to use it as leverage."" Meng arrived to a hero's welcomed in China, and official media there suggested that her release could be a chance to reboot fraught US-China ties. While some Republican senators criticised the Biden administration for giving in to Beijing's demands, analysts said that didn't add up. ""I believe that the deal that the PRC made to get Meng released was on the table during the Trump administration. She had to acknowledge wrongdoing and ultimately that is what she did. I don't see capitulation,"" said Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank. The Justice Department says it is still preparing for trial against Huawei.",
"In an address near his home in Wilmington, Biden made the argument that racial justice is central to his overall policy vision in areas like housing, infrastructure and support for small businesses, while aiming to draw a stark contrast with a president who has regularly inflamed racial tensions. “This election is not just about voting against Donald Trump,” Biden said, standing before four American flags in a community center gym. “It’s about rising to this moment of crisis, understanding people’s struggles and building a future worthy of their courage and their ambition to overcome.” Biden’s plan is the fourth piece of his “Build Back Better” proposal, an economic agenda that also encompasses manufacturing, climate and infrastructure, and caregiving plans, and takes aim at Trump’s stewardship of the economy and his effect on working families, a potential vulnerability that has emerged during the coronavirus crisis. The speech Tuesday came with just under 100 days until Election Day, amid a searing national debate over racism in American society. Biden continues to hold a substantial lead over Trump in national polls, and with each successive economic rollout, he has been trying to counter one of Trump’s enduring sources of voter support. The plan fell short of some of the most ambitious proposals promoted by the left wing of the Democratic Party. Biden, for instance, did not embrace reparations for slavery or endorse “baby bonds,” a government-run savings program for children championed during the primary by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Campaign officials said Biden had not ruled out eventually accepting such a plan, and that he was not opposed to a study of reparations. But the proposal he released on Tuesday did emphasise the importance of closing the racial wealth gap, and outlined multiple prescriptions for doing so. Biden laid out plans for a small-business opportunity fund to help make capital available to minority business owners, and he proposed to triple the goal for awarding federal contracts to small disadvantaged businesses, to at least 15% of the money doled out from 5%. The plan also seeks to improve the opportunity zone program that was created as part of the 2017 tax overhaul. “In good times, communities of color still lag,” Biden said. “In bad times, they get hit first, and the hardest. And in recovery, they take the longest to bounce back. This is about justice.” In recent months, as the country has grappled with devastating public health and economic problems and a growing outcry over racial injustice, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has increasingly called for ambitious measures to address the nation’s challenges. He has sometimes gone far beyond the instincts toward relatively incremental change that guided him in the primary campaign, at least compared with many of his Democratic opponents. As he seeks to unite and energize his party around his candidacy, he has sought input from a broad range of experts and officials, including from a series of task forces assembled with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, his liberal primary rival. But Biden, the former vice president, continues to confront a lack of enthusiasm from some progressive voters, and while he won the primary with strong support from African American voters — in particular, older ones — he faces challenges generating excitement among some younger voters of color. In the primary campaign, he was not the choice of many liberal activists of color, and he still faces skepticism from some of them about whether he can sufficiently address their concerns. Trump has sought to portray Biden as hostage to an extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, whose extravagant spending would wreck the nation’s economy. The plan Biden unveiled touched on a wide range of economic issues. It emphasises support for small-business owners of color, promising that he will “leverage more than $150 billion in new capital and opportunities for small businesses that have been structurally excluded for generations,” including by increasing access to venture capital and low-interest business loans. Biden, who has long faced anger from some voters over his leading role in the 1994 crime bill, which many experts link to mass incarceration, also addressed some criminal justice matters in the plan. He would aim to help states improve their criminal justice data infrastructure so they can automatically seal criminal records for certain nonviolent offenders. The plan also said that he would try to amend the Federal Reserve Act “to require the Fed to regularly report on current data and trends in racial economic gaps — and what actions the Fed is taking through its monetary and regulatory policies to close these gaps.” The Fed, which influences the speed of economic growth and the unemployment rate with its interest rate policies, already regularly discusses racial and ethnic economic outcomes in its reports and testimonies. It has shied away from targeting any specific group’s unemployment rate when setting monetary policy, despite a growing chorus suggesting that it ought to consider targeting the Black jobless rate, which has historically remained higher for longer. The Rev Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, called Biden’s overarching proposal promising, but said he wanted to see Biden call for more far-reaching proposals to ensure that Black Americans frequently do business with the government. “It’s the right direction,” he said. “I just want to see more, and I intend to push for more.” Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a political advocacy group focused on women of color, said that the Biden campaign was taking encouraging steps on issues of economic, racial and gender “justice,” as she put it. “Progressives, we had other candidates in the primary that we would look at as carrying some of these messages,” said Allison, who was often a Biden critic in the primary and said there are still issues he must address. “Now, the Biden campaign has showed an openness and willingness.” A number of the policies highlighted in Biden’s proposal were already announced as part of other plans, like a housing proposal that would provide a tax credit of up to $15,000 for first-time homebuyers, and a goal that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of the benefits of spending on clean energy infrastructure. In contrast to the previous economic plans Biden outlined, which focused on major, transformational changes to certain sectors of the American economy, the proposal he unveiled on Tuesday was a broader effort seeking to emphasise the idea that racial justice is integral to his policy vision. He began his address by invoking two icons of the civil rights era who recently died, Rep John Lewis, D-Ga, and the Rev CT Vivian. Biden recounted the time he walked over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, with Lewis, and a conversation the two men had before Lewis died. “He asked that we stay focused on the work left undone to heal this nation,” Biden said. “To remain undaunted by the public health crisis and the economic crisis that’s taken the blinders off in this crisis and showed the systemic racism for what it is that plagues this nation.” In his speech and in a subsequent question-and-answer session with reporters, Biden repeatedly lashed out at his opponent’s stewardship of the crises facing the country. He also forcefully rebuffed Trump’s attempts to cast him as soft on law enforcement, as protesters clash with federal agents in Portland, Oregon. Peaceful protesters, Biden said, “should be protected and arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted, and local law enforcement can do that.” And Biden accused Trump of “trying to scare the hell out of the suburbs” by suggesting that Obama-era policies were “causing you to end up, by implication, having those Black neighbors next to you.” “That’s supposed to scare people,” Biden said. Asked about his vice-presidential selection process, Biden revealed little, saying he would have a choice in the first week in August. But handwritten notes that Biden held at the event — which were captured by an Associated Press photographer — touched on the subject in more detail. They included talking points about Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who is considered a top-tier vice-presidential contender. “Do not hold grudges,” the notes said. A few lines down, they read, “Great respect for her.”   © 2020 New York Times News Service",
" British leader Tony Blair flew to Libya for talks with Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday as BP sealed a big energy deal with Tripoli in a further boost to the West's ties with the once-isolated north African state. Blair, making the second trip of his prime ministership to Libya, arrived in Gaddafi's home town of Sirte and was due to meet the Libyan leader in a tent in the desert, officials said. Blair was also due to meet representatives of families of hundreds of HIV-infected children at the centre of a case in which five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been sentenced to death by a Libyan court. In a sign of a developing economic relationship between Britain and Libya that Blair's spokesman called ""hugely important"", BP negotiated an agreement to explore for natural gas in Libya, according to a Libyan official. ""There is a natural gas exploration deal worth $900 million,"" Shokri Ghanem, the chairman of state owned National Oil Corporation (NOC), told reporters. The Libya visit marks the start of Blair's last tour of Africa before he resigns as prime minister on June 27 after a decade in power, handing over to finance minister Gordon Brown. Blair will also travel to Sierra Leone and South Africa in preparation for a summit of the Group of Eight industrialised countries in Germany next week, when Africa and climate change will top the agenda, and to push for a global free trade deal. Blair first visited Libya in 2004, sealing Tripoli's return to the international fold after it abandoned efforts to acquire banned weapons and agreed to pay damages for a 1988 airliner bombing over Scotland. Gaddafi complained in a BBC interview in March that Libya had not been properly compensated for renouncing nuclear weapons and said that as a result countries like Iran and North Korea would not follow his lead. 
Blair's spokesman said the prime minister would discuss the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region with Libyan officials. ""Libya has played a useful role in the African Union and has been playing a useful role in regard to Sudan,"" the spokesman said. ""We will want to hear their assessment of where we are."" The U.N. Security Council endorsed plans last Friday for an African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force for Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million made homeless since 2003. Blair has pushed for tough action over Darfur and his spokesman welcomed President George W. Bush's decision to impose new U.S. sanctions on Sudan over Darfur. In Sierra Leone, Blair is expected to win praise for sending British troops to the country in 2000 to help shore up the United Nations peacekeeping operation there and hasten the end of a civil war marked by atrocities against civilians. Sierra Leone has scheduled presidential and legislative elections for July 28, although the poll may be delayed. In South Africa later this week, Blair is expected to discuss Zimbabwe with President Thabo Mbeki, his spokesman said. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, 83, has vowed to seek another presidential term in 2008, dismissing calls to step down despite his country's economic crisis, which critics blame on his policies. Mugabe blames former colonial power Britain.",
"She mocked the toxic masculinity of users imagining themselves as Dong Cunrui, a textbook war hero who, according to Chinese Communist Party lore, died valiantly during the civil war that brought the party to power in 1949. For that passing reference, the woman, 27 and identified in court only by her last name, Xu, was sentenced last month to seven months in prison. Her crime: violating a newly amended criminal code that punishes the slander of China’s martyrs and heroes. Since it went into effect in March, the statute has been enforced with a revolutionary zeal, part of an intensified campaign under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to sanctify the Communist Party’s version of history — and his vision for the country’s future. The Cyberspace Administration of China, which polices the country’s internet, has created telephone and online hotlines to encourage citizens to report violations. It has even published a list of 10 “rumours” that are forbidden to discuss. Was Mao Zedong’s Long March really not so long? Did the Red Army skirt heavy fighting against the Japanese during World War II to save its strength for the civil war against the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek? Was Mao’s son, Mao Anying, killed by a US airstrike during the Korean War because he lit a stove to make fried rice? Asking those very questions risks arrest and, now, prosecution. “It is a sign of the establishment of an absolute political totalitarianism,” said Wu Qiang, an outspoken political analyst in Beijing. China’s Communist Party has long policed dissent, severely restricting public discussion of topics it deems to be politically incorrect, from Tibet to the Tiananmen Square protests. The new law goes further. It has criminalised as slander topics that were once subjects of historical debate and research, including Mao’s rule itself up to a point. Since March, the law has been used at least 15 times to punish slights to party history. The campaign reflects an ambition by Xi to solidify a moral foundation for the Communist Party’s supremacy, a theme the Chinese leader often evokes in speeches and articles. The party once could rely on the financial inducements of a booming economy and coercive control of the security state to cement its rule, but now appears to be using political and historical orthodoxy as a foundation, said Adam Ni, a director of the China Policy Centre in Australia and editor of China Story. “There are limits to these tools,” he said of the economy and security state. “They need the moral — the moral legitimacy to maintain their rule.” A version of the slander law was first adopted in 2018, but an amendment to the country’s criminal code that took effect March 1 allowed prosecutors to seek criminal punishment, including prison sentences of up to three years. In April, a 19-year-old man in Nanjing was charged for disparaging the victims of the Japanese massacre there in 1937. A 63-year-old man in Beijing was charged for mocking a Navy fighter pilot, Lt Cmdr Wang Wei, who crashed in the South China Sea after colliding with a US surveillance aircraft in 2001. At least three people were detained in May for derisive comments after the death of Yuan Longping, a scientist who developed high-yield hybrid strains of rice. Last month, authorities arrested a man in Nanchang after he posted an irreverent comment about the legend surrounding the death of Mao’s son in 1950. “That fried rice was the best thing to come out of the whole Korean War,” he wrote. Officials have defended the law as a necessary tool to fight what one director with the Cyberspace Administration of China, Wen Youhua, called “historical nihilism,” which officials often use to describe deviant views. “These people may be trying to gain clicks or eyeballs, but these behaviours obviously touch moral and legal bottom lines,” Li Liang, a law professor in Beijing, told The People’s Daily in April. Xi, preparing for what is likely to be a third term as Communist Party leader beginning next year, will use a gathering of the party elite in Beijing next week to adopt a new resolution on the party’s history — an official summation of the past and its lessons. Among Chinese leaders, only Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping have enacted such decisions, underscoring the ambition of Xi’s campaign. “We need to educate and guide the whole party to vigorously carry forward the red tradition,” Xi said this year. The tougher slander law took effect shortly after the disclosure by the government in February that four Chinese soldiers had died during a clash with Indian troops along the disputed border in June 2020. Within days, at least seven people were charged for questioning the official version of the death toll, which was reportedly much higher. They included Qiu Ziming, a prominent blogger with 2.5 million followers on Weibo, the country’s Twitter-like social media platform. Although he and the others were arrested under a long-standing article in the criminal code called “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” Qiu, 38, was prosecuted under the new law, even though the changes went into effect 10 days after he made his comments. In May, after being shown confessing on state television, he was sentenced to eight months in prison. The campaign has inspired vigilantism, with internet users calling out potential violations. The Jiangsu branch of China Unicom, a state-owned telecommunications company, came under investigation after a public uproar started when its Weibo account posted a recipe for fried rice on what was Mao Anying’s birthday. It is not clear whether the company faces criminal charges, but its account was suspended. Some of the cases involved historical events that historians in China have previously debated and studied, at least until now. Last month, a former journalist, Luo Changping, was detained in Hainan after he wrote a blog questioning the rationale for China’s intervention in the Korean War — and the catastrophic cost for those “volunteers” sent to fight and die in it. He was responding to a new movie blockbuster that depicts a major Chinese attack known as “The Battle at Lake Changjin.” The movie, which runs 2 hours and 56 minutes, brims with maudlin patriotism for the selfless sacrifice of soldiers who defeated the US-led forces. “Half a century later, few Chinese people have reflected on the justifiability of the war,” Luo wrote on Weibo, before referring specifically to a doomed Chinese military unit “that did not doubt the ‘wise decision’ of the top.” Made with government backing and heavily promoted in state media, it has become the second-highest grossing film in the country’s history, earning the equivalent of $855 million in the month it has been showing, according to Maoyan, the ticketing service. When the film opened, Ni, the researcher, noted on Twitter that the battle it depicts had not previously been a focus of the Communist Party’s propaganda before because it had been seen as a costly strategic blunder, not the resounding victory portrayed on the screen. Now it has become part of a new and unassailable version of history. John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul and author of a forthcoming book about the war, said that even within the limits of political censorship, Chinese scholars have done “a lot of great work” on the war and other historical events since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. With the shifting political climate, that may no longer be safe. “With this, obviously, everyone is going to have to stop what they’re doing,” he said. © 2021 The New York Times Company",
" President Robert Mugabe's party said Zimbabwe would go ahead with a general election next year with or without constitutional reforms seen by many as critical to a free and fair vote. Mugabe, who was forced into a unity government with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) after a disputed 2008 poll, sees no need to extend the life of the coalition. He wants a referendum on a new constitution early next year and a general election by mid-2011, even if the referendum is not held. The election would normally be held in 2013. The next election will be the eighth major vote in Zimbabwe since 2000 and critics say a rushed election without political reforms, including a new constitution guaranteeing basic rights, would only favour Mugabe and ZANU-PF, who have held power since independence from Britain in 1980. ZANU-PF chief spokesman Rugare Gumbo told state media that a Wednesday meeting of the party's politburo (inner cabinet) chaired by Mugabe had endorsed his drive for early elections, and received a report suggesting that international donors were withholding cash to delay the last stages of the constitutional reforms. ""However, that is neither here nor there. As a party we will find ways around it, but we are very clear that elections will be held,"" Gumbo said. ""If they cannot help us write a new constitution we will find ways, but elections will be held before June next year,"" he added. Tsvangirai's MDC is trying to mobilise regional pressure on Mugabe to deliver on outstanding reforms under the power-sharing agreement, while a small MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara says Zimbabwe must continue with a coalition government for at least another two years to complete reforms and to allow economic recovery. On Tuesday, the British ambassador in Harare, Mark Canning, said the political climate in Zimbabwe was not yet conducive to a free and fair general election. The southern African country needed time to work on political reforms, including repealing repressive legislation, opening up the media, introducing new electoral laws, and updating the voter register, Canning said. Gumbo said ZANU-PF was happy that its supporters had turned up in large numbers to give their views on a new constitution, and the party was now discussing ways to overcome what it calls illegal sanctions imposed on the party by Western powers. ZANU-PF is set to officially endorse Mugabe, 86, as its presidential candidate at an annual party conference set for mid December.",
"Kompasu, with maximum sustained winds of 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour, had absorbed remnants of an earlier cyclone before making landfall in the Philippines on Monday evening. Nearly 1,600 people were evacuated. The disaster agency said it was verifying information from its regional units that reported four people killed in landslides in northern Benguet province and five killed in flash floods in Palawan, an island province in the country's southwest. Authorities were conducting search and rescue operations for 11 people missing mostly after landslides. The Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands is hit by about 20 storms or typhoons annually, bringing heavy rains that trigger deadly landslides. President Rodrigo Duterte was monitoring the government's disaster response, his spokesperson, Harry Roque said on Tuesday. Rescue personnel were at the scene, while power and water restoration and road clearing was ongoing, he added. Kompasu, the 13th tropical storm to enter the Philippines, is expected to leave its territory on Tuesday, the state weather agency said.",
"“At the moment we would like to ask them to end their strike,” said Quader, also general secretary of Awami League. “There is no point in causing suffering to the people.” Quader made the statement in response to a question from the media after meeting with the EU ambassador to Bangladesh at the Setu Bhaban in Dhaka on Sunday. “There’s no scope to change the law at the moment,” he said. “It’s not possible. They must wait until the next parliament.” The road transport minister called on the transport workers to be patient. “If there are any legitimate concerns they can be addressed through dialogue.” The Bangladesh Road Transport Workers Federation has declared a 48-hour strike since Sunday morning to press for eight demands and changes to the recently revised road transport law. The strike has halted long-haul bus and freight services nationwide. Commuters are also facing great difficulties due to halts to metropolitan bus service in large cities like Dhaka and Chattogram. The demands include making all accidents under the Road Transport Act ‘bailable’, the cancellation of the provision that allows a worker to be fined Tk 500,000 for involvement in a road crash, lowering minimum educational qualification required for obtaining driving licences from class VIII to class V, for transport worker representation on investigation committees on cases under section 302, an end to harassment by police, to set fines according to the wage scale and to require certification from a Workers Federation representative when vehicles are registered and penalties are overturned. Transport leaders have threatened to go on indefinite strike from Oct 30 if their demands are not met. Quader also discussed the current political climate after his discussion with the EU ambassador. He said that the demands put forward by the Jatiya Oikya Front composed of Kamal Hossain and the BNP leaders were also impossible to meet at the moment. “The Oikya Front is complaining. It is typical for the opposition to be a bit critical. After all, the purpose of the opposition is to criticise. They have made a list of seven demands. Even if we wanted to meet these demands we would have to change the constitution. It is impossible.” “If they strike over the issue, if they are not prepared to be flexible, it could cause some unrest.” The Jatiya Oikya Front has called for the reformation of the Election Commission, the dissolution of parliament, the freeing of jailed BNP leader Khaleda Zia and for elections to be held under an ‘impartial’ government. Oikya Front leader Kamal Hossain has threatened to bring the government to justice if it does not meet these demands.",
" The United States together with its allies and a Syrian opposition group all urged the UN Security Council on Monday to end its ""neglect"" of the violence raging in Syria and rapidly endorse an Arab League plan for a political transition there. ""We have seen the consequences of neglect and inaction by this council over the course of the last 10 months, not because the majority of the council isn't eager to act - it has been,"" said Washington's UN Ambassador Susan Rice. ""But there have been a couple of very powerful members who have not been willing to see that action take place,"" she told reporters. ""That may yet still be the case."" Western officials were discussing the issue on the eve of a meeting by the 15-nation Security Council to consider the Arab plan in the face of reluctance by Russia, an ally of the Syrian government and a veto-holder on the council, which has demanded changes to the proposed resolution. Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby and Qatar's prime minister are due to plead with the council on Tuesday to back the plan for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to transfer powers to his deputy to prepare for elections. Western countries are deploying their big guns to try to overcome Russian objections, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe due to attend the session. Rice's complaint about some countries reluctance to act referred to Russia and China, which vetoed a Security Council resolution in October that would have condemned Syria for its bloody crackdown on anti-government protests and threatened it with possible sanctions. Rice added that there was no need for ""an extended negotiation"" on the new European-Arab draft resolution endorsing the Arab plan aimed at ending the crisis, which has led to thousands of civilian deaths. Clinton also urged the council to act swiftly. ""The Security Council must act and make clear to the Syrian regime that the world community views its actions as a threat to peace and security,"" she said in a statement. ""The violence must end, so that a new period of democratic transition can begin."" In Paris, a French diplomatic source said what Juppe wanted ""is that this visit at least speeds up negotiations."" LAVROV NOT ANSWERING PHONE The head of the opposition Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghalioun, said he had met with Russian officials in New York and would meet with Rice later on Monday. Germany's U.N. mission said Ghalioun also met with Ambassador Peter Wittig in New York. ""Clearly the Russians are not happy with our position asking for Assad to step down before any negotiation, but our position is based on the will of the Syrian people,"" he said. Ghalioun also urged the council to support the European-Arab draft, saying it was high time for it to act. ""The inaction of the international community has only encouraged the Assad regime to continue killing innocent protesters,"" he said. Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said last week that he was willing to engage on the European-Arab draft, which Morocco submitted to the council. But while he did not explicitly threaten to use his veto, he said the text was unacceptable in its current form. Diplomats said Elaraby would be meeting with Churkin in New York to explain to him that vetoing the draft resolution would be tantamount to vetoing the Arab world. A vote on the draft resolution is unlikely before Thursday or Friday, Western diplomats said on condition of anonymity. Russia sought on Monday to avert a swift council vote, saying it wanted to study recommendations from Arab observers in Syria before discussing the league's plan. Russia also said Damascus had agreed to take part in talks in Moscow, but a senior figure in the Syrian opposition said it would not attend. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Clinton had been trying unsuccessfully to connect with Lavrov. ""The secretary, frankly, has been trying to get Foreign Minister Lavrov on the phone for about 24 hours,"" she said in Washington. ""That's proven difficult."" As street battles rage in Syria, Nuland said the suspension of an Arab League monitoring mission over the weekend due to the worsening security climate may have negative consequences. ""We are gravely concerned that as these Arab League monitors have pulled out, the Syrian regime has taken this as an excuse to just let loose in horrific ways against innocents,"" she said. Rice said the resolution was ""quite straightforward"" and made no reference to the use or threat of force. Russia has said NATO countries distorted a March 2011 council resolution on Libya to help rebels topple the government of Muammar Gaddafi. While few expect Russia to support the Syria resolution, Western officials said they were hopeful Moscow might be persuaded to abstain, allowing it to pass. The question was what changes would be needed in the text to secure that outcome.",
" The United Nations says momentum is building for broader long-term action to fight global warming beyond the UN's Kyoto Protocol and a climate meeting starting in Vienna on Monday will be a crucial test. About 1,000 delegates from more than 100 countries at the Aug 27-31 talks will seek common ground between industrial nations with Kyoto greenhouse gas caps until 2012 and outsiders led by the United States and China, the top two emitters. ""Momentum is very much building,"" for global action, Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, said of the meeting of senior officials, scientists and activists. ""And Vienna's going to be crucial."" ""The coming week will give us an indication of whether the political community ... is willing to move beyond well-intentioned platitudes towards real negotiations,"" he told a news conference on the eve of the talks. ""The fight against climate change must be broadened,"" Austrian Environment Minister Josef Proell said, welcoming U.S. willingness to take part in a long-term U.N. deal to cut emissions mainly from burning fossil fuels. Vienna will try to break a diplomatic logjam and enable environment ministers to agree at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December to launch formal two-year negotiations to define stiffer long-term curbs on greenhouse gases. But while delegates talk about talks, many worry that climate change is already taking its toll, especially in developing nations heavily dependent on agriculture. ""We have a very dangerous situation developing,"" said Lesotho's Minister of Natural Resources Monyane Moleleki. ""For the past 30 years climate change has been spooky to say the least."" The number of severe droughts in southern Africa had doubled since 1978 compared to the rest of the 20th century, he said. ""And when the rains come they come in deluges, torrents that are useless."" ""Cape Verde is an island state, hit by all vulnerabilities of climate change,"" said Cape Verde Environment Minister Madalena Neves, pointing to risks such as rising seas and desertification. Chances of a deal in Bali have risen sharply after UN reports this year blamed human activities, led by use of fossil fuels, for a changing climate set to bring ever more severe heat waves, droughts, erosion, melting glaciers and rising seas. And President George W. Bush, a Kyoto opponent, agreed in June with his industrial allies on a need for ""substantial cuts"" in greenhouse gas emissions. It is unclear exactly what ""substantial"" means for Washington. The European Union, Japan and Canada have all talked about a need to halve world emissions by 2050 to slow warming. Many nations want a ""Bali road map"" agreed in Indonesia -- a two-year plan to work out a deal to succeed Kyoto, which obliges 35 industrial nations to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A road map could include principles that a deal should include major emitters, that it should not undermine economic growth in developing nations and that rich nations should take the lead, delegates say. Even though there are five years left until 2012, many experts say time is already running short. Anyone planning to build a coal-fired power plant, or to invest in carbon markets, wants to know the long-term rules.",
"This study revealed that nerve cells existing deep inside the brains of quails, called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)-contacting neurons, respond directly to light.These neurons are involved in detecting the arrival of spring and thus regulate breeding activities in birds.""The mechanism of seasonal reproduction has been the focus of extensive studies, which is regulated by photoperiod,"" said Takashi Yoshimura from the University of Nagoya in Japan.""Small mammals and birds tend to breed during the spring and summer when the climate is warm and when there is sufficient food to feed their young offspring,"" he noted.Light sensitive cell hidden deep in the brains of birds, responds directly to light and regulates photo biological functions.The study was published online in the journal Current Biology.",
"Perhaps most striking is the warning about large productivity losses already being experienced due to heat stress, which can already be calculated for 43 countries. The paper estimates that in South-East Asia alone “as much as 15% to 20% of annual work hours may already be lost in heat-exposed jobs”. And that figure may double by 2030 as the planet continues warming − with poor manual labourers who work outdoors being the worst affected. The release of the papers on July 19 coincided with the start of a conference on disaster risk reduction, held in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, and jointly sponsored by the International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) and the UN Development Programme. The aim was to alert delegates to the already pressing scale of the problem and the need to take measures to protect the health of people, and to outline the economic costs of not taking action. Substantial health risks In an introduction to the six-paper collection, UNU-IIGH research fellows Jamal Hisham Hashim and José Siri write that humanity faces “substantial health risks from the degradation of the natural life support systems which are critical for human survival. It has become increasingly apparent that actions to mitigate environmental change have powerful co-benefits for health.” The author of the paper on heat stress, Tord Kjellstrom, director of the New Zealand-based Health and Environment International Trust, says: “Current climate conditions in tropical and subtropical parts of the world are already so hot during the hot seasons that occupational health effects occur and work capacity for many people is affected.” The worst area for this is problem is South-East Asia, with Malaysia being typical. In 2010, the country was already losing 2.8% of gross domestic product (GDP) because of people slowing or stopping work because of the heat. By 2030, this will rise to 5.9% − knocking $95 billion dollars off the value of the economy. The most susceptible jobs include the lowest paid − heavy labour and low-skill agricultural and manufacturing. Even so, the global economic cost of reduced productivity may be more than US $2 trillion by 2030. India and China are two of the worst affected economies. By 2030, the annual GDP losses could total $450 billion, although mitigation may be made possible by a major shift in working hours, which is among several measures employers will need to take to reduce losses. The list of 47 countries includes many in the hottest parts of the world, but countries in Europe − among them, Germany and the UK − are also on the list, along with the US. One of the side-effects of this increased heat is the demand for cooling, which is placing a major strain on electricity infrastructure. Dr  Kjellstrom notes that the additional energy needed for a single city the size of Bangkok for each 1°C increase of average ambient temperature can be as much as 2,000 MW, which is more than the output of a major power plant. The rising demand for cooling also contributes to warming the world. Air conditioners not only pump heat out directly, the electricity required is typically produced by burning fossil fuels, adding to atmospheric greenhouse gases. People acclimatised to air conditioning also become less heat tolerant, further increasing demand for cooling. But heat stress is only one of the problems addressed by the papers. From 1980 to 2012, roughly 2.1 million people worldwide died as a direct result of nearly 21,000 natural catastrophes, such as floods, mudslides, drought, high winds or fires. The number of people being exposed to disasters has increased dramatically – in cyclone-prone areas, the population has grown in 40 years from 72 million to 121 million. The papers also say: “Disastrously heavy rains can expand insect breeding sites, drive rodents from their burrows, and contaminate freshwater resources, leading to the spread of disease and compromising safe drinking water supplies. “Warmer temperatures often promote the spread of mosquito-borne parasitic and viral diseases by shifting the vectors’ geographic range and shortening the pathogen incubation period. Combination of disasters “Climate change can worsen air quality by triggering fires and dust storms and promoting certain chemical reactions causing respiratory illness and other health problems. They say that central and south China can anticipate the highest number of casualties from this combination of disasters that will befall them as a result of continuing climate change. This knowledge may help to explain why China has been so pro-active in tackling global warning in the last year. The authors underline the fact that fast-rising numbers of people are being exposed to the impacts of climate change, with much of the increase occurring in cities in flood-prone coastal areas or on hills susceptible to mudslides or landslides. Especially vulnerable are people living in poverty, including about one billion in slums. Urban planners, the authors say, can help by designing cities “in ways that enhance health, sustainability, and resilience all at once” – for example, by incorporating better building design, facilitating a shift to renewable energy, and fostering the protection and expansion of tree cover, wetlands and other carbon sinks. The delegates at the conference will be discussing ways to better prepare for and create warning systems to improve disaster response. They will also be recommended to take steps to reduce casualties by enhancing drainage to reduce flood risks and by strengthening healthcare, especially in poor areas.",
" Vladimir Putin took the oath as Russia's president on Monday with a ringing appeal for unity at the start of a six-year term in which he faces growing dissent, economic problems and bitter political rivalries. Parliament is expected to approve to his ally Dmitry Medvedev, 46, as prime minister on Tuesday, completing a job swap that has left many Russians feeling disenfranchised two decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. Outside the Kremlin's high red walls, riot police prevented protests by rounding up more than 120 people, including men and women in cafes wearing the white ribbons symbolising opposition to Putin, a day after detaining more than 400 during clashes. But in the Kremlin, 2,000 dignitaries applauded Putin's every step down the red carpet into a vast hall with gilded columns, the throne room of tsars, where he was sworn in with his right hand resting on the red-bound Russian constitution. ""We will achieve our goals if we are a single, united people, if we hold our fatherland dear, strengthen Russian democracy, constitutional rights and freedoms,"" Putin said in a five-minute speech after taking the oath for the third time. ""I will do all I can to justify the faith of millions of our citizens. I consider it to be the meaning of my whole life and my obligation to serve my fatherland and our people."" The Kremlin's bells pealed, and the national anthem blared at the end of a ceremony which was followed by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church blessing Putin and the president taking charge of the nuclear suitcase. Although he has remained Russia's dominant leader for the past four years as prime minister, Putin, 59, has now taken back the formal reins of power he ceded to Medvedev in 2008 after eight years as president. AUTHORITY WEAKENED Putin is returning with his authority weakened by months of protests that have polarised Russia and left the former KGB spy facing a battle to reassert himself or risk being sidelined by the business and political elites whose backing is vital. ""We want to, and we will, live in a democratic country,"" Putin declared, evoking patriotic images of Russia as a great nation and urging people to show a sense of responsibility and national pride to make the country stronger. Putin made no mention of the protest movement in his speech and no promises of political reform in a series of decrees he signed after the ceremony, most of them focused on economic goals and efforts to improve living standards. Despite his pledge, riot police, nervous after battling protesters at an anti-Putin rally on Sunday, cracked down on the slightest sign of dissent on the streets of central Moscow, many of which were almost empty. At least 22 protesters were led away when a crowd of more than 100 started shouting ""Russia without Putin"" near two luxury hotels 500 metres (yards) from the Kremlin. ""This shows that Putin is scared of dissatisfied citizens. Although there are not so many of us, there are not so few either,"" said 18-year-old student Pavel Kopilkov. Dozens of others were detained by police on a boulevard near the route of Putin's motorcade to the ceremony, including some who had been sitting outside a French bistro wearing the white ribbon of protest on their jackets and coats. A Reuters correspondent saw tables and chairs being overturned as the people were hauled away. ""This is shameful. This is not how you celebrate a holiday - this is how you celebrate seizing power,"" liberal opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said shortly before he was detained. Moscow police said a total of 120 had been detained for staging unsanctioned pickets and most would soon be released, but several more people were detained trying to protest after police gave that number. In Putin's hometown of St Petersburg, police detained a few protesters in a crowd of dozens on the central Palace Square. PUTIN UNDER PRESSURE Although the protests, sparked by allegations of electoral fraud, had lost momentum before Sunday's rally, they have given birth to a civil society that will press on with attempts to undermine Putin's authority by contesting local elections. Many of the protesters are angry that Putin is extending his 12-year domination of Russia and fear he will stifle political and economic reform in his third term as president. He is under pressure to show he can adapt to the new political landscape. Few think he has changed much, if at all. He has eased up on the choreographed macho antics that long burnished his image in Russia, such as riding horseback barechested and shooting a tiger with a tranquiliser gun. Harder to shake off will be his habit of seeking total control, as political rivals begin to gain status and a rising middle class demands more political freedom. He has to quell rivalries between liberals and conservatives battling for positions in the new cabinet under Medvedev, who is swapping jobs with Putin. The outcome of the struggle could help determine how far reforms go to improve the investment climate. The $1.9 trillion economy is in better shape than that of most European countries, but is vulnerable to any drop in the price of oil, the main export commodity. The budget is under pressure from Putin's lavish pre-election spending promises. Putin has said he wants to attract more foreign investment by improving the business climate, reduce corruption and red tape, and end Russia's heavy dependence on energy exports. He called for the creation of a ""new economy"" in the speech and reiterated those goals in economic decrees signed on Monday, but critics say he has had plenty of time to tackle the persistent problems in his years in power. He set out aims on a range of issues in other decrees, from higher wages for teachers and other state workers to better weapons for the military and a decrease in Russia's death rate. As in the past, he is likely to use tough anti-Western rhetoric on foreign policy to drum up support if times get tough in Russia. But he never yielded his strong influence over foreign policy as premier, so a major policy shift is unlikely. Putin struck familiar chords in a decree on foreign policy, emphasising opposition to interferece in the internal affairs of sovereign states and saying Moscow wants ""strategic"" ties with the United States but will not tolerate meddling.",
"A New Year's eve address by Bongo ""reinforced doubts about the president's ability to continue to carry out of the responsibilities of his office,"" said Lieutenant Kelly Ondo Obiang, who described himself as an officer in the Republican Guard and leader of the self-declared Patriotic Movement of the Defence and Security Forces of Gabon. In a video circulating on social media, Ondo Obiang is seen in a radio studio wearing military fatigues and a green beret as he reads the statement, which was broadcast at around 4:30 a.m. local time (0530 GMT). Two other soldiers with large assault rifles stand behind him. Ondo Obiang said the coup was being carried out against ""those who, in a cowardly way, assassinated our young compatriots on the night of August 31, 2016,"" a reference to deadly violence that erupted after Bongo was declared the winner of a disputed election. A source close to the government said there were gunshots around the national television station, but that the plotters appeared to be a small group of soldiers. A spokesman for the presidency told Reuters he would make a statement shortly. Bongo, 59, was hospitalised in October in Saudi Arabia after suffering a stroke. He has been in Morocco since November to continue treatment. In his speech on New Year's, Bongo acknowledged health problems but said he was recovering. He slurred some of his words and did not move his right arm, but otherwise appeared in decent health. The Bongo family has ruled the oil-producing country for nearly half a century. Bongo has been president since succeeding his father, Omar, who died in 2009. His re-election in 2016 was marred by claims of fraud and violent protest. Bongo won re-election in 2016 by fewer than 6,000 votes, sparking deadly clashes between protesters and police during which the parliament was torched. The European Union said it found anomalies during the election in Bongo’s stronghold province of Haut-Ogooue, where he won 95 percent on a 99.9 percent turnout.",
"The ragpicker of Brooklyn sews in the back, behind a makeshift wall sprouting a riot of scraps. Under the pattern-cutting table there are bins of scraps of scraps, sorted by color (red and yellow and blue and black), and on one wall are shelves of Mason jars containing gumball-size scraps of scraps of scraps; up front are clothing rails and a dressing room canopied by a lavish waterfall of castoff cuttings that flows down onto the floor like a Gaudí sandcastle. The ragpicker of Brooklyn, whose name is Daniel Silverstein and whose nom de style is Zero Waste Daniel, looks like a fashion kid, which he is (or was). He is 30 and tends to dress all in black, with a black knit cap on his head; went to the Fashion Institute of Technology; interned at Carolina Herrera; and even was on a fashion reality TV show. And the ragpicker of Brooklyn would rather not be called that at all. “I prefer to think of it as Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold,” Silverstein said one day in early November. He was on West 35th Street, in the garment district, with his partner and husband, Mario DeMarco (also all in black). They were hauling home sacks of cuttings from their own production run at HD Fashion, which also makes clothes for Rag & Bone and Donna Karan’s Urban Zen line. Silverstein’s straw is more formally known as pre-consumer, postproduction waste, which is a fancy way of saying he works with the fabrics that other designers and costume departments and factories would normally throw out. His gold is streetwear: sweatshirts, pants, T-shirts and the occasional anorak, collaged together from rolls of old fabric, mostly black and gray, often containing brightly colored geometric patchwork inserts of smaller, brighter bits, like an exclamation point or an Easter egg. Those patchwork inserts have been put together from the castoffs of the bigger pieces, and then the castoffs from the inserts are saved and pieced together into mosaic appliqués (the hands from the Sistine Chapel and Earth as seen from above, for example). The appliqués can be custom-made and attached to any piece. Leftovers, all the way. As fashion comes to grips with its own culpability in the climate crisis, the concept of upcycling — whether remaking old clothes, reengineering used fabric or simply using what would otherwise be tossed into landfill — has begun to trickle out to many layers of the fashion world. That includes the high end — via the work of designers like Marine Serre, Emily Bode and Gabriela Hearst as well as brands like Hermès — and the outdoor space, with the Patagonia Worn Wear and Recrafted programs (to name a few). And yet, because there are few economies of scale and even fewer production systems, such clothing remains for many designers an experiment rather than a strategy, and for many consumers, a luxury rather than a choice. Silverstein, whose clothes range from $25 for a patch to $595 for an anorak made from what was a New York City Sanitation Department tent and who works only with fabric that would otherwise be thrown away, is one of several new designers trying to change that. How he got there, with lots of false starts and belly flops, is perhaps as representative as anything of the way fashion may be stumbling toward its future. We make too much, and we buy too much, but that doesn’t have to mean we waste too much. Welcome to the growing world of trashion. Saved by the Dumpster “I came to New York for that fashion dream — what I’d been watching on TV,” Silverstein said a few weeks before his garment district scrap-saving trip. “I wanted that life so badly.” He was sitting in the back of what he calls his “make/shop,” which he and DeMarco renovated in 2017 using materials from Big Reuse, a Brooklyn nonprofit. The make/shop has three sewing machines but no garbage can. Silverstein was born in Pennsylvania, and when he was 10, his parents moved to New Jersey so their fashion-aware son could be closer to New York. Silverstein’s father owned a swimming pool and hot tub supply company, and his mother worked part-time in the business. (She is also a therapist.) As a family, they did some recycling but were not particularly attuned to the environment. Silverstein always knew he wanted to be a designer. When he was 4, he started making clothes for his sister’s Barbies out of tissue paper and tinfoil. By the time he was 14, he was taking weekend classes at FIT and making his friends’ prom dresses. His Damascene moment was more like a series of cold-water splashes. For a senior-year competition for the Clinton Global Initiative, he designed a pair of sustainable jeans, which became his first zero-waste pattern. He didn’t win, but his teacher told him to hold onto the idea. “‘You have something there,’” he recalled the teacher saying. After graduating, he found himself working as a temp at Victoria’s Secret making knitwear. He would scroll through style.com looking at recent runway shows, find a sweater he liked, then create a technical design packet for a similar style for Victoria’s Secret. One of the patterns involved an asymmetric cut with a long triangular piece in front. Because of the irregular shape, the fabric “had an insanely poor yield,” Silverstein said, meaning that only a portion of every yard was used for the garment; almost half was waste. He did the math and realised, he said, “that if this is yielding only 47% per each sweater, and we are cutting 10,000 sweaters, then we are knitting, milling, dying and finishing 5,000 yards of fabric just to throw out.” The next day, he said, he left Victoria’s Secret to focus on a business he and a friend had started based on his zero-waste patterns. They were making classic ready-to-wear — cocktail dresses and suits and such — but with no waste left on the cutting-room floor. One of their first customers was Jennifer Hudson, who wore a turquoise dress that ended up in the pages of Us Weekly. Stores like Fred Segal in Los Angeles and e-tail sites like Master & Muse picked up the line, which was called 100% (for the amount of fabric used), and Silverstein spent a season on “Fashion Star,” ending his tenure as second runner-up. Still, the economics of fashion, in which stores pay after delivery, were working against him. In 2015, after American Apparel — which had bought Oak NYC, a store that was known for its edgy choices and was one of his wholesale accounts — declared bankruptcy, he was left with $30,000 worth of unpaid orders. He decided to quit. Silverstein got a part-time job helping students get their art portfolios together and, he said, “lay on the couch for a while.” Finally he boxed up his studio and threw all of his leftover fabric in a garbage bag. He was set to haul it to a dumpster, only to have the bag break, spilling its contents onto the floor. “I thought, ‘I can’t throw this out; it’s the antithesis of my mission,’” he said. “So I took the afternoon and made myself a shirt and put it on my Instagram. I had maybe 2,000 followers, and probably the most likes I had ever gotten was 95. I posted this dumb selfie of a shirt I’d made out of my own trash because I was too poor to go shopping, and it instantly got 200 likes. It was the most popular thing I’d ever done.” It occurred to him this may be a better way to go. He made “a bunch of scrappy shirts” and became Zero Waste Daniel, his Instagram name (which he had chosen because Daniel Silverstein was already taken). He rented a booth at a flea market and sold them all. Johnny Wujek, Katy Perry’s stylist, bought one. Chris Anderson — a mentor who ran Dress for Success in Morris County, New Jersey, where Silverstein had interned during high school — said she would back him. His father put in some money, too, as did Tuomo Tiisala, a professor at New York University who saw his work at a market. Silverstein got a small space at Manufacture New York, a group incubator in the Sunset Park neighborhood (it disbanded after a year), and made a deal with a factory that supplied the Marshalls chain to pick up its scraps. Fabric dumping, although less discussed than the clothes consumers throw out, is just as much a byproduct of fashion production and just as culpable in the landfill crisis. Reverse Resources, a group that has created an online marketplace to connect factories and designers who want to reuse their scraps, released a study in 2016 that estimated that the garment industry creates almost enough leftover textile per year to cover the entire republic of Estonia with waste. That was a best-case scenario. Worst case would be enough to cover North Korea. At that stage, Silverstein was mostly making sweatshirts, piecing them together by hand, but, he said, “people started making little videos about my work and putting up posts, and I started getting more orders than I could keep up with.” In 2017, he met DeMarco, who worked in hospitality. This year he joined the business full-time. In many ways, social media has also been their door to a customer base. Just as it creates pressure to buy new stuff, it can create pressure to buy new old stuff. Message vs Money “My freshman year at FIT, one of my teachers said there are good designers and there are great designers,” Silverstein said. “Good designers have careers and see their stuff in stores, and great designers change the way people dress. And, perhaps, think about dress.” He was driving a small U-Haul truck. He had spent the morning with DeMarco in FabScrap, a concrete loft in the erstwhile Army Terminal complex in Sunset Park filled with trash bags and storage boxes bulging at the seams with fabric waste. They were on the hunt for 400 or so yards of random black remnants with some stretch. Silverstein doesn’t ragpick in the 19th-century way (the way that gave birth to the term), sifting through garbage on the streets. He picks through giant boxes and metal shelves of castoff fabric rolls and then sews his finds together to make new rolls. He doesn’t really have seasons or shows by a traditional definition, although he flirts with the idea. In 2018, the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge invited him to do a show for New York Fashion Week, and instead of a runway, he decided to do a one-man stand-up routine called “Sustainable Fashion Is Hilarious,” which was more about concept than clothes. The hotel sold tickets online, and all of the proceeds went to Fashion Revolution, a nonprofit that advocates industry reform. In September, he did the same at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan. Silverstein is planning a performance for February at Arcadia Earth, the climate installation museum in downtown New York, which also sells some of his work. Last year the Sanitation Department came calling. It had done a collaboration with designer Heron Preston and was looking for another partner. While Preston saw the opportunity as a way to elevate the role of the sanitation worker in a one-off show, Silverstein saw it as a great partnership for raw material. The department’s dead-stock T-shirts, tents and tablecloths have proved something of a treasure trove for him. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Silverstein was one of the star companies in an American Express showcase on Small Business Saturday. He is also teaming up with a former mentor at Swimwear Anywhere for a line of bathing suits made in Taiwan, which will be his first foray into offshore production. (The scraps will be sent back along with the trunks and one-pieces, which are made from recycled ocean fishing nets.) Recently Lin-Manuel Miranda wore a Zero Waste Daniel sweatshirt at an Amex event. Drag queen Pattie Gonia wore a long mosaic gown based on Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” at the Tony Awards in June and made Vogue’s best-dressed slideshow, albeit without identification. The company has been profitable for a year, Silverstein said, and ships across the United States as well as to Canada, Britain, Brazil and Germany. Now Silverstein is at another turning point. Does he get bigger? Does he train other ragpickers to do what he does? Does he open another outlet? Does he really get in the game? He is not sure. “I can’t clothe the world, and maybe the world doesn’t need me to,” he said. Maybe the drive to clothe the world is part of what created the problem he is now trying to solve in the first place. “When I think about what I want in terms of brand recognition, I would love to see this brand as a household name. But I think that’s very different than dollars. And I don’t want to be any bigger than I can guarantee it’s a zero-waste product or that I feel happy.” He was gathering pieces for a Freddie Mercury mosaic. “Right now,” he said, surveying his mountain of scraps, “I am so happy.” © 2019 New York Times News Service",
"In a video posted on Twitter on Saturday, Thunberg said the environmental impact of farming as well as disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which is believed to have originated from animals, would be reduced by changing how food was produced. ""Our relationship with nature is broken. But relationships can change,"" Thunberg said in the video marking the International Day of Biological Diversity. A focus on agriculture and linking the climate crisis to health pandemics is a new angle for Thunberg who has typically focused her ire on policy-makers and carbon emissions from fossil fuels. ""The climate crisis, ecological crisis and health crisis, they are all interlinked,"" she said. Thunberg said the spillover of diseases from animals to humans was caused by farming methods, adding that a move to a plant-based diet could save up to 8 billion tonnes of CO2 each year. The World Health Organisation has said the coronavirus was probably transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, while scientists say 60percent of the infectious human diseases that emerged from 1990 to 2004 came from animals. Meanwhile, demand for alternatives to regular meat is surging worldwide due to concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment. More than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth $140 billion by 2029. The Global Center on Adaptation, which works to accelerate climate resilience, said in January climate change could depress global food production by up to 30 percent, while rising seas and more intense storms could force hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities out of their homes.",
"Four years after Sri Lanka's army crushed the Tamil Tiger guerrilla army and ended a civil war that had lasted nearly three decades, Tamils say they are blatantly repressed in Jaffna, the capital of this Indian Ocean island's northern peninsula.Newspaper printing machines have been burned, former rebels say they face extortion and sexual harassment and army spies keep a close eye on political activity. It all makes ethnic Tamils feel they are still seen as enemies of the state.As a summit of Commonwealth nations opens in Sri Lanka's capital on Friday, the nation is under intense scrutiny after a chorus of warnings from the United Nations and the West that its failure to resolve old enmity means it is losing the peace.President Mahinda Rajapaksa defended his government's human rights record on Thursday, saying Sri Lanka had legal procedures to deal with complaints.He and his government say Sri Lanka is on the path to reconciliation, helped by fast economic growth, and bristle at charges of creeping authoritarianism favouring the Sinhalese majority.But some observers warn that, in the long term, the repressive climate and slow progress towards Tamils' demand for more autonomy risks making Rajapaksa's fears of a resurgence in violence a self-fulfilling prophecy.""If it continues to close off avenues of peaceful change, the risks of violent reaction will grow,"" the International Crisis Group said this week in a report entitled 'Sri Lanka's Potemkin Peace: Democracy Under Fire'.For land activist Somasundaram Sugeerthan, the threat beeped onto his phone one Sunday night. It read: ""Hey dog, do you know what will happen to you if you protest? We'll send your body without the head in front of your home.""In the morning, he found a cow's skull on the gatepost of his house. Cows are worshipped by ethnic Tamils like Sugeerthan who follow the Hindu religion on the Buddhist-majority island.Sugeerthan believes the threat came from the army, which still occupies 6,400 acres (2,400 hectares) of prime farmland outside Jaffna despite promises to return it to deed holders after the war ended in 2009.Military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya said the army had released over 25,000 acres since the war and more than half of the land still occupied is used for an airport and port.""Even out of that, we are trying to release as much land as possible,"" he said, branding claims of threats by military agents ""false allegations simply to serve one or other agenda"".CLIMATE OF FEAR AND SUSPICIONThe war pitted the army against the ruthless Tiger separatists, infamous for popularising the suicide bomb and striking civilian targets. Its bloody stalemate ended after Rajapaksa launched an assault in 2006 that ultimately wiped the rebels out.The United Nations says tens of thousands of civilians died during the assault, mainly due to army shelling but also because many were used by the Tigers as human shields. It has called for an international inquiry into allegations of war crimes in the final months of the conflict.Land is perhaps the most sensitive issue in post-war Sri Lanka. Tamil leaders believe the government has a strategy to give army-occupied land to Sinhala Buddhist settlers to change the demographic mix.""The reason is the ethnic percentage range,"" Sugeerthan said, barefoot and in a white sarong, among a few dozen protesters symbolically fasting under the watchful eye of police and men with cameras whom he suspected were army intelligence. ""They want to settle the area with non-Tamil army families.""The government denies this, but the army presence and the climate of fear and suspicion in Jaffna spreads mistrust and a belief that the Tamil population is still seen as a threat.""We are not insurgents, we want to make peace, we want a settled life like the people of the south,"" said retired teaching assistant B. Murugesu, who was forced off his land in 1990 and has drifted between half a dozen towns ever since.Peacetime has brought new buildings, smooth roads and gleaming consumer showrooms to Jaffna, a watery peninsula that was cut off from the country and the rest of the world until 2009. But it has not changed attitudes towards many Tamils, especially those with links to the former rebels.""It is an occupational army ... everything is being done to repress the rights of the people, take over their lands, take over economic activities,"" said C.V. Wigneswaran, the newly elected chief minister of the northern province.The airy offices of Uthayan, a leading newspaper in Jaffna, are decorated with gruesome photos of six journalists slain in armed attacks since 2006. The walls are riddled with bullet holes. In April, a group of unknown armed men poured gasoline over the central printing press and set it alight.""There is no chance at all for reconciliation, the government is not inclined to seek a solution,"" said E. Saravanapavan, the owner of the newspaper, which represents the views of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the former political proxy for the Tigers that won the September election.Although the TNA won with a landslide, the new chief minister finds his decisions blocked by the governor, a retired general appointed by Rajapaksa.FORMER FIGHTERS VULNERABLEFormer rebel fighters are especially vulnerable. Viewed with suspicion by the army, even after a government rehabilitation programme, many struggle to find work and are ostracised partly because other Tamils fear harassment for associating with them.They are frequently picked up by intelligence agents and taken into custody. Often money changes hands to stop threats.Human Rights Watch and advocacy group Freedom From Torture have recorded dozens of cases of former fighters now living in Britain who claim they were tortured in custody after the war.Ananthi Sasitharan, the wife of a rebel leader who has been missing since he surrendered at the climax of the war, said women whose husbands disappeared or were killed at that time are sometimes coerced into having sex with army officers.No victim of sexual violence was willing to meet Reuters for this story, citing fears of social stigma and reprisals.One ex-rebel glanced nervously out a window as he recounted how he had been ordered to visit a local military base several times in the last year, and was forced each time to pay bribes.Soldiers in civilian dress he recognises from the base also regularly visit his corner store to demand small payments. He said he had paid a total of $35,000 to soldiers since being released from jail in 2011.Wigneswaran, the new chief minister, says that - so long after the war - there is no need for a robust military presence, and worries about where it will lead.""If you allow this to happen it will definitely lead to some form of violence in the future,"" he said.",
" Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad on Saturday renewed his attack on his successor, calling him intolerant and asking the people to reject nepotism. The outspoken 81-year-old, in his first political speech after a lull following a heart attack in November, said Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had created a climate of fear within his ruling UMNO party. Speaking at a forum in the southern city of Johor Baru, he also warned Abdullah, whose son-in-law Khairy Jamaluddin is an ambitious politician, against forming a political dynasty. ""Don't try to make your son or son-in-law as the PM,"" Mahathir, who in September asked Abdullah to resign, told the 400-strong crowd at a function. ""I hope all Malaysians would oppose any attempts to start a dynasty. In our country anybody can become the PM even the fisherman."" The rally could mark the start of a second round of an Abdullah-Mahathir fight which has unsettled Malaysians as well as foreign investors. Mahathir, who led the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and the country for 22 years until he handed power to Abdullah in late 2003, remains a party member. ""I feel very sad because UMNO has now changed. Today it is not ready to hear what it doesn't want to hear,"" he said. ""There's climate of fear."" Abdullah's aides could not be immediately reached for comments.",
" European Union leaders on Friday named former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a past critic of Turkey's EU membership bid, to head a ""reflection group"" to study the long-term future of the 27-nation bloc. The panel was the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a vehement opponent of Turkish accession, who called in August for the EU to create a group of ""wise people"" to consider Europe's final borders. The mandate has since been changed to look at the future of the region in 2020-2030, focusing mostly on the economic challenges of globalisation. Sarkozy said on Friday the group would study the issue of EU borders, not specifically Turkey. But Sarkozy appeared to have scored a point by stealth with the choice of Gonzalez, a socialist who governed Spain from 1982 to 1996. Spanish newspapers quoted the ex-premier in May 2004 as telling a Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona there were limits to the enlargement of Europe, which should ""stop at the borders of Turkey"" because of social and cultural differences. Asked about those comments, Gonzalez's spokesman Joaquin Tagar told Reuters in Madrid on Friday: ""He was just expressing a theoretical opinion, not taking a definite position on the matter. He was just pointing out the difference between European and Turkish culture."" Pressed to say what Gonzalez's position on Turkey's candidacy was now, he said: ""What he has been saying in recent times is that if the European Union has a commitment to Turkey, it should honour it."" WHERE DOES EUROPE END? The reflection group, which will number no more than nine people, is mandated to look at ""the stability and prosperity of the Union and of the wider region,"" touching on the sensitive issue of EU enlargement. The formulation deliberately left open whether Turkey would be part of the Union or the wider region in 2020-2030. ""We cannot talk about the European project without raising the question of its territory,"" a French diplomat said. 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. Former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Jorma Ollila, the chairman of mobile phone giant Nokia , were named as the two vice-chairs of the panel. Some politicians were critical of the choice of a leader from the 1980s to study the EU's future. ""If you ever wanted to see Jurassic Park in reality, then this appointment (of Gonzalez) is just that,"" said Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal Democrat political group in the European Parliament. ""It's not about age, but all three of the panel so far represent old Europe."" But Spain voiced delight at the choice of Gonzalez, who has been canvassed for top European jobs but never received one. ""It's a very happy day for the Spanish people, for Spain, and for Europe,"" Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters.",
"Swaraj will lead an Indian delegation to Islamabad for talks on Afghanistan, India's foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said on his Twitter page. Top Pakistani foreign affairs official Sartaj Aziz said Swaraj would meet him and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. ""This is a good beginning, that the deadlock that was present has to some extent been removed,"" Aziz, the prime minister's adviser on security and foreign affairs, told reporters. The visit comes after the collapse of talks in August that raised questions about the ability of the nuclear-armed rivals to overcome animosity that has festered since their independence from British rule almost seven decades ago. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sharif resumed high-level contacts with a brief conversation at climate change talks in Paris last week and their national security advisers met in Bangkok on Sunday. Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, said the foreign minister's visit showed the Modi government had softened its hard-line stance towards Pakistan after realising that the lack of sustained talks yielded no returns. ""The countries can agree to disagree, but they will have to start talking,"" Sibal said. Taken by surprise, Indian opposition parties questioned the government's on-off approach to talks and a former foreign minister from Modi's party said the policy was being conducted in the shadows. Since taking office in 2014, Modi has authorised a more robust approach to Pakistan, giving security forces the licence to retaliate forcefully along their disputed border and demanding an end to insurgent attacks in Indian territory. Swaraj's visit is the first ministerial-level visit to Pakistan since the then foreign minister, SM Krishna, travelled to Islamabad in 2012, which was before Modi became prime minister. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part. India has for years accused Pakistan of backing separatist Muslim rebels in India's part of Kashmir. Despite considerable evidence, Pakistan denies the accusations and blames India violating human rights in Kashmir and fomenting unrest in Pakistan.",
" Australia said Tuesday it remained in talks with East Timor over a regional asylum-seeker centre, despite a rejection by the country's parliament which dealt the pre-election policy a severe blow. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Timor's government was still discussing processing Australia's poor Asian migrants -- a major plank of her election strategy which has become mired in difficulty. Australia's first woman leader, who is expected to announce polls within days after ousting the once hugely popular Kevin Rudd last month, was speaking after 34 of Timor's 66 lawmakers voted against the plan. ""This was a vote on a resolution in the East Timorese parliament at a time when the parliament was not well attended,"" she told reporters in Canberra. ""We, of course, are dealing with the East Timorese government. We have officials in East Timor, they were involved in discussions with East Timor yesterday. Those discussions will continue. ""Our focus is on discussions with the East Timor government, and the East Timor government continues to confirm to us that it is open to the dialogue about the regional processing centre, and we're in that dialogue now."" Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is also holding talks on the proposal this week in Indonesia, a major transit point, following criticism that Gillard did not consult widely enough before making her announcement. The prime minister was forced to backtrack last week when she said Timor was only one possible location for the centre, despite earlier indicating it would be built there. The controversy has taken some gloss off the straight-talking, Welsh-born lawyer's image, which had gleamed after she settled a damaging mining tax row just days into her premiership. ""The East Timor solution is totally and utterly sunk,"" said opposition leader Tony Abbott. Australia's ruling Labor Party and opposition have both unveiled tough policies on asylum-seekers, with Greens party chief Bob Brown saying the debate reminded him of 1990s anti-immigration firebrand Pauline Hanson. Gillard's ""Timor Solution"" has won favour with about two-thirds of voters, although a similar number also believes the policy was badly thought-out, according to a poll of voters released this week. The prime minister is also expected to announce a new strategy on climate change this week before calling elections. Australia currently processes asylum-seekers at Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, but a steady flow of refugees has overwhelmed facilities and forced the reopening of centres on the mainland. The arrival of asylum-seekers, mainly from war-torn Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, proved a thorn in Rudd's side after he scrapped the harsh mandatory detention policy of his conservative predecessor, John Howard. Some 2,982 asylum-seekers were intercepted this year until May 19, official figures show, putting 2010 on course to beat the 2001 record of 5,516 arrivals. But Gillard has said the asylum-seekers are only a tiny fraction -- 0.6 percent -- of the world's total, and make up just eight percent of Australia's overall migrant intake. East Timor, a mainly Catholic country of just over a million people, remains aid-dependent more than 10 years after its bloody vote to split from Indonesia. Australia is a major donor and has about 400 peacekeeping troops there.",
"It has taken weeks for EU countries to
agree on the contours of the measure, and intensive talks will continue over
the weekend before the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, puts a
finalised proposal on paper for EU ambassadors to approve. The ambassadors will
meet Wednesday and expect to give their final approval by the end of the week,
several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process say. The diplomats and officials spoke on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly on
the progress of the sensitive talks. The oil embargo will be the biggest and
most important new step in the EU’s sixth package of sanctions since Russia
invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The package will also include sanctions against
Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, which has so far been spared, as well as
additional measures against high-profile Russians, officials said. Barring an unlikely last-minute demand
by Hungary, which has been dragging its feet, the process should be completed
without requiring an EU leaders’ meeting — avoiding the time-consuming effort
of dragging all 27 heads of state to Brussels. The embargo is likely to affect Russian
oil transported by tankers more quickly than oil coming by pipeline, which
could take a matter of months. In both cases, however, it is likely that the
bloc will allow its members to wind down existing contracts with Russian oil
companies as it did with its coal ban, which was given four months to be fully
put in place. Germany’s position has been critical in
finalising the new measure. The country, the bloc’s economic leader, was
importing about one-third of its oil from Russia at the time of the Ukraine
invasion. But its influential energy minister, Robert Habeck, said this week
that Germany had been able to cut that to just 12% in recent weeks, making a
full embargo “manageable.” “The problem that seemed very large for
Germany only a few weeks ago has become much smaller,” Habeck told the news
media during a visit to Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday. “Germany has come very,
very close to independence from Russian oil imports,” he added, but he did not
explain how it was able to accomplish that so quickly. Russia is Europe’s biggest oil supplier,
providing about one-quarter of the bloc’s yearly needs, according to 2020 data
— about half of Russia’s total exports. As the oil embargo is phased in,
officials said the bloc would seek to make up the shortfall by increasing
imports from other sources, such as Persian Gulf countries, Nigeria, Kazakhstan
and Azerbaijan. The embargo, even if softened by a
monthslong phase-in period, is likely to put pressure on global oil prices,
compounding already high energy costs around the world. An idea to lessen the
impact, floated by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week, was to impose
tariffs or a price cap on Russia’s oil instead of an outright embargo. But that
did not gain traction with Europeans, officials said. © 2022 The New York Times Company

",
"“Growing up in Oklahoma, wearing the hijab, I had to come to terms with being visibly Muslim,” the Iranian American organizer and activist said. “People would call me a terrorist or pretend to run me over.” And when policymakers held up the hijab and women’s rights as part of the rationale for military action in Afghanistan or economic sanctions on Iran, she said, “that’s when I started really thinking about clothes.” A decade and a half later, Katebi, 27, has become a leading critic of the global garment industry, particularly its fast-fashion sector. Where many of us might avoid peering too closely at our wardrobe’s iffy provenance, Katebi has devoted herself to that hidden world — and to ultimately tearing it down. “Rather than just, say, campaigning to get garment workers paid a dollar more,” she said, “we’re calling for an end to the system that puts workers in these positions to begin with.” The “we” there is Blue Tin Production, a small apparel manufacturing workers’ cooperative in Chicago run by working-class women of colour, which Katebi founded in 2019. Blue Tin executes clothing contracts in ways that are antithetical to the contemporary sweatshop: full equity and transparency, no exploitation, abuse or greenwashing (a term applied when a company exaggerates its eco-consciousness). The goal is to produce high-quality luxury apparel while shining a light on systemic issues stitched into fashion. In addition to running Blue Tin, Katebi works as a community organiser, speaker and writer, all while attending law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “I run on saffron ice cream and coloniser tears,” she said. (The following interview has been condensed and edited.) Q: What does abolitionism mean in the context of your work? A: Fast fashion is a very specific type of manufacturing, basically focused on speed and output. While the rest of the fashion industry usually works on a four-season year, fast fashion works on 52: There’s a new season every week. There’s no way that amount of product can be created in a way that’s ethical or sustainable. The system requires violence in order to function. Assaults on workers by managers are common, on top of the general subjugation and enforced poverty that give people little choice but to do this work. That violence can’t be reformed away. An easy analogy is slavery — you can ask slave owners to be nicer, but the institution is inherently violent. So Blue Tin is an abolitionist response to the fast-fashion industry. Q: How did fashion become your focus? A: I discovered fashion blogs just before college. It was a fun outlet. But some of my favourite people were working with brands on the BDS list, (a list of companies and individuals that support Israel). They weren’t thinking about the politics behind the aesthetics. When I created my first website, it was to push people to think about their clothes in a more complex and nuanced way. Everything relates to fashion. Fashion is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, for example — it contributes more greenhouse gases than all of maritime shipping and air travel combined, (according to figures from the United Nations Environment Program and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation). Then there’s the connection between sustainability and policing, which upholds the ability for cheap labour to exist. That, in turn, allows certain neighbourhoods to be disproportionately impacted by, say, a coal power plant that pollutes the air, which in turn keeps the community there from thriving. Any issue that you care about, you can find in fashion. On top of that, 1 in 6 people in the world works in the fashion industry. No one knows this because the majority of them are working-class women of colour and farmers. Q: Can you provide an example of how this system resists change? A: In Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, factories will intentionally hire undocumented workers and then not pay them for months. When the workers get upset, management calls (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and has a self-reported raid of their own factory. Some of our former Blue Tin members have gone through that process. Q: What are your biggest challenges at Blue Tin? A: Abolition means putting an end to this industry, and it also means thinking about the world we want to create in its place. How can we create clothes in a way that’s not violent? That feels like a low bar, but it’s extremely complicated and stressful. I cry about once a week. Q: How does that play out on a day-to-day basis? A: At Blue Tin we try to prioritise people who are “unhirable” by the labour industry’s standards. That means people who may not speak English, or who have child care needs, or maybe they need to sit and process the trauma that they’ve been through because they’re domestic violence survivors. People who our systems have harmed in different ways. The year we started, one of our members got a call that her uncle and his 8-year-old son were killed in bombings in Damascus, Syria. We asked her, “What do you need in this moment?” We stopped production to go on a walk with her and to build care around her. So we were very behind on our production, and we lost that client. At the end of the day, we live in a capitalist world. We can’t create a utopia — so the question is, how can we create the best of what this can be, even if it’s flawed? Q: I’ve noticed that you tend not to use the word “refugees” when describing the Blue Tin team, though others do. A: For me, the class part is more important than the identity part because I hate identity politics. And “immigrant” and “refugee” have become catchphrases in the fashion industry. People are like, “Aw, a cute sewing circle of immigrant women.” The team didn’t want to be framed by their trauma. We’re trying to completely reimagine the fashion industry and build garment worker power, so brands should work with us because of these incredible skill sets and backgrounds, not because they feel bad. Oh, sure, go for the PR; I don’t care. But really it’s the beautiful clothes, and them bringing art and craftsmanship back to fashion where it belongs. Q: What’s everyone working on now? A: Right now they’re in “panty purgatory,” as they call it. They’ve been making underwear nonstop, for a big client. I think that’s finally done, but we’re basically panty entrepreneurs now. Q: How did your consciousness around these issues take shape? A: A lot of my values come from Islamic values of divine compassion and divine mercy. Those don’t sound radical, but it actually is a radical demand that we instead live in a world of compassion and mercy. So I’m all for an assault on empire and capitalism. But some nurturing is required, too. You have to hold both at the same time. I guess you throw your Molotov, but you also give someone a hug. ©2022 The New York Times Company",
" Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum challenged President Barack Obama's Christian beliefs on Saturday, saying White House policies were motivated by a ""different theology."" A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using ""political science"" in the debate about climate change. Obama's agenda is ""not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,"" Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel. When asked about the statement at a news conference later, Santorum said, ""If the president says he's a Christian, he's a Christian."" But Santorum did not back down from the assertion that Obama's values run against those of Christianity. ""He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I'm not going to,"" Santorum told reporters. A social conservative, Santorum is increasingly seen as a champion for evangelical Christians in fights with Democrats over contraception and gay marriage. ""This is just the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity - a stark contrast with the President who is focused everyday on creating jobs and restoring economic security for the middle class,"" said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. The campaign's response signaled a new respect for Santorum. Until this week, the Obama campaign appeared exclusively focused on Mitt Romney. Republicans are waging a state-by-state contest to pick a candidate to challenge Obama in November's election. At a campaign appearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter who called Obama, a Christian, an ""avowed Muslim."" Santorum told CNN after that incident, ""I don't feel it's my obligation every time someone says something I don't agree with to contradict them, and the president's a big boy, he can defend himself."" QUESTIONS ROMNEY RECORD ON OLYMPICS On Saturday, Santorum also took aim at Romney, his main Republican rival, on one of the central accomplishments of his resume, saying the former Massachusetts governor's rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics required millions of dollars in handouts from the federal government. The attack was a response to the Romney camp trying to portray Santorum as a proponent of big government because of his use of earmarks while he served in the US Senate. ""He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake Olympic Games - in an earmark,"" Santorum said. ""One of his strongest supporters, John McCain called it potentially the worst boondoggle in earmark history. And now Governor Romney is suggesting, 'Oh, Rick Santorum earmarked,' as he requested almost half a billion dollars of earmarks as governor of Massachusetts to his federal congressmen and senators. Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?"" Santorum said. Romney often talks of how he turned around the struggling Olympics organization and is appearing in Utah on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Olympics. In a statement, the Romney campaign said Santorum was in a weak position to challenge its candidate on big spending. ""Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. There is a pretty wide gulf between seeking money for post-9/11 security at the Olympics and seeking earmarks for polar bear exhibits at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Mitt Romney wants to ban earmarks, Senator Santorum wants more 'Bridges to Nowhere,'"" said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.",
" India and China signed on Wednesday a broad agreement to cooperate in the fight against climate change and also underlined a common position on contentious talks for a tougher global climate deal. The sweeping agreement covers cooperation for action to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gases, transfer of technology and in areas of energy efficiency and renewables, among others. It comes weeks before a major climate meeting in Copenhagen in December the United Nations hopes will end with agreement on a broader pact to slow the pace of climate change that scientists say is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Finding ways to get big developing nations to join is crucial, the United Nations says, with China now the world's top greenhouse gas emitter and India the fourth largest. The deal is among several India is sealing with rich and developing nations as proof of its commitment towards sealing a new climate pact meant to expand or replace the existing Kyoto Protocol. ""My clear understanding is that India is in no way signing bilateral deals to undermine multi-lateral negotiations. This is an expression of interest in finding common ground,"" said Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment. Tuesday's agreement, which holds good for five years, was signed by India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and Xie Zhenhua, vice minister at China's National Development and Reform Commission. India signed a similar deal with Japan this week and has spoken of cooperation with South Korea, Brazil and the United States. The India-China agreement said developed countries should take the lead in fighting climate change by reducing emissions and providing finance and technology to poorer nations. It said: ""...that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol are the most appropriate framework for addressing climate change."" The Kyoto Protocol, the first phase of which ends in 2012, obliges 37 rich nations to cut emissions by an average of five percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. A huge gap also exists between rich countries reluctant to pay the fiscal and lifestyle costs of deep cuts in their emissions, and developing states which say they must be allowed to increase emissions so their economies can catch up. Negotiations have stumbled on lack of clarity on the amount, sources and management of any climate funds as well as the legal nature of any new post-2012 pact.",
"“AZD1222 (AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate) contains the genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein, and the changes to the genetic code seen in this new viral strain do not appear to change the structure of the spike protein,” an AstraZeneca representative said in an email. Drugmakers are scrambling to test their COVID-19 vaccines against the new fast-spreading variant of the virus that is raging in Britain, the latest challenge in the breakneck race to curb the pandemic. “Through vaccination with AZD1222, the body’s immune system is trained to recognise many different parts of the spike protein, so that it can eliminate the virus if it is later exposed,” the AstraZeneca representative added. The mutation known as the B.1.1.7 lineage may be up to 70% more infectious and more of a concern for children. It has sown chaos in Britain, prompting a wave of travel bans that are disrupting trade with Europe and threatening to further isolate the island country. The AstraZeneca-Oxford shot is considered vital for lower-income countries and those in hot climates because it is cheaper, easier to transport and can be stored for long periods at normal refrigerator temperatures. Data from AstraZeneca’s late-stage trials in the UK and Brazil released earlier this month showed the vaccine had efficacy of 62% for trial participants given two full doses, but 90% for a smaller sub-group given a half, then a full dose.",
" Developing countries and environmental groups accused the World Bank on Friday of trying to seize control of the billions of dollars of aid that will be used to tackle climate change in the next four decades. ""The World Bank's foray into climate change has gone down like a lead balloon,"" Friends of the Earth campaigner Tom Picken said at the end of a major climate change conference in the Thai capital. ""Many countries and civil society have expressed outrage at the World Bank's attempted hijacking of real efforts to fund climate change efforts,"" he said. Before they agree to any sort of restrictions on emissions of the greenhouse gases fuelling global warming, poor countries want firm commitments of billions of dollars in aid from their rich counterparts. The money will be used for everything from flood barriers against rising sea levels to ""clean"" but costly power stations, an example of the ""technology transfer"" developing countries say they need to curb emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide. As well as the obvious arguments about how much money will be needed -- some estimates run into the trillions of dollars by 2050 -- rich and poor countries are struggling even to agree on a bank manager. At the week-long Bangkok conference, the World Bank pushed its proposals for a $5-10 billion Clean Technology Fund, a $500 million ""adaptation"" fund and possibly a third fund dealing with forestry. However, developing countries want climate change cash to be administered through the existing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which they feel is much less under the control of the Group of 8 (G8) richest countries. ""Generally we have been unpleasantly surprised by the funds,"" said Ana Maria Kleymeyer, Argentina's lead negotiator at the meeting. ""This is a way for the World Bank and its donor members to get credit back home for putting money into climate change in a way that's not transparent, that doesn't involve developing countries and that ignores the UNFCC process,"" she said.",
"Those are hot topics in the news industry right now, and so the program at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy drew an impressive roster of executives at CNN, NBC News, The Associated Press, Axios and other major US outlets. A couple of them, though, told me they were puzzled by the reading package for the first session. It consisted of a Harvard case study, which a participant shared with me, examining the coverage of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign. The story had been pushed by aides and allies of then-President Donald Trump who tried to persuade journalists that the hard drive’s contents would reveal the corruption of the father. The news media’s handling of that narrative provides “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organisations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns,” according to the Shorenstein Center summary. The Hunter Biden laptop saga sure is instructive about something. As you may recall, panicked Trump allies frantically dumped its contents onto the internet and into reporters’ inboxes, a trove that apparently included embarrassing images and emails purportedly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name. The big social media platforms, primed for a repeat of the WikiLeaks 2016 election shenanigans, reacted forcefully: Twitter blocked links to a New York Post story that tied Joe Biden to the emails without strong evidence (though Twitter quickly reversed that decision) and Facebook limited the spread of the Post story under its own “misinformation” policy. But as it now appears, the story about the laptop was an old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign, and describing it with the word “misinformation” doesn’t add much to our understanding of what happened. While some of the emails purportedly on the laptop have since been called genuine by at least one recipient, the younger Biden has said he doesn’t know if the laptop in question was his. And the “media manipulation campaign” was a threadbare, 11th-hour effort to produce a late-campaign scandal, an attempt at an October Surprise that has been part of nearly every presidential campaign I’ve covered. The Wall Street Journal, as I reported at the time, looked hard at the story. Unable to prove that Joe Biden had tried, as vice president, to change US policy to enrich a family member, the Journal refused to tell it the way the Trump aides wanted, leaving that spin to the right-wing tabloids. What remained was a murky situation that is hard to call “misinformation,” even if some journalists and academics like the clarity of that label. The Journal’s role was, in fact, a pretty standard journalistic exercise, a blend of fact-finding and the sort of news judgment that has fallen a bit out of favour as journalists have found themselves chasing social media. While some academics use the term carefully, “misinformation” in the case of the lost laptop was more or less synonymous with “material passed along by Trump aides.” And in that context, the phrase “media manipulation” refers to any attempt to shape news coverage by people whose politics you dislike. (Emily Dreyfuss, a fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at the Shorenstein Center, told me that “media manipulation,” despite its sinister ring, is “not necessarily nefarious.”) The focus on who’s saying something, and how they’re spreading their claims, can pretty quickly lead Silicon Valley engineers to slap the “misinformation” label on something that is, in plainer English, true. Shorenstein’s research director, Joan Donovan, who is leading the program and raised its funding from the John S and James L Knight Foundation, said that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation — it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.” Donovan, a force on Twitter and a longtime student of the shadiest corners of the internet, said she defines “misinformation” as “false information that’s being spread.” She strongly objected to my suggestion that the term lacks a precise meaning. She added that, appearances aside, she doesn’t believe the word is merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like. Instead, she traces the modern practice of “disinformation” (that is, deliberate misinformation) to the anti-corporate activists the Yes Men, famous for hoaxed corporate announcements and other stunts, and the “culture jamming” of Adbusters. But their tools, she wrote, have been adopted by “foreign operatives, partisan pundits, white supremacists, violent misogynists, grifters and scammers.” Donovan is among the scholars who have tried to unravel the knotty information tangle of contemporary politics. She’s currently a compulsive consumer of Steve Bannon’s influential podcast, “War Room.” Like many of the journalists and academics who study our chaotic media environment, she has zeroed in on the way that trolls and pranksters developed tactics for angering and tricking people online over the first half of the last decade, and how those people brought their tactics to the right-wing reactionary politics in the decade’s second half. To the people paying close attention, this new world was riveting and dangerous — and it was maddening that outsiders couldn’t see what was happening. For these information scholars, widespread media manipulation seemed like the main event of recent years, the main driver of millions of people’s beliefs, and the main reason Trump and people like him won elections all over the world. But this perspective, while sometimes revelatory, may leave little space for other causes of political action, or for other types of political lies, like the US government’s long deception on its progress in the war in Afghanistan. What had been a niche preoccupation has now been adopted by people who have spent somewhat less time on 4chan than Donovan. Broadcaster Katie Couric recently led the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. I moderated a panel at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum with a different, somewhat dental, label for the same set of issues, “truth decay.” (The Rand Corp seems to have coined that one, though T Bone Burnett did release an album by that name in 1980.) There, an Australian senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, said she thought the biggest culprit in misleading her fellow citizens about climate change had been Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp — hardly a new issue, or one that needs a new name. The New York Post’s insistence that the emails prove Joe Biden’s corruption, and not just his son’s influence peddling, are part of the same partisan genre. This hints at a weakness of the new focus on misinformation: It’s a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as much about politics as technology. The new social media-fuelled right-wing populists lie a lot, and stretch the truth more. But as American reporters quizzing Trump’s fans on camera discovered, his audience was often in on the joke. And many of the most offensive things he said weren’t necessarily lies — they were just deeply ugly to half the country, including most of the people running news organizations and universities. It’s more comfortable to reckon with an information crisis — if there’s anything we’re good at, it’s information — than a political one. If only responsible journalists and technologists could explain how misguided Trump’s statements were, surely the citizenry would come around. But these well-meaning communications experts never quite understood that the people who liked him knew what was going on, laughed about it and voted for him despite, or perhaps even because of, the times he went “too far.” Harper’s Magazine recently published a broadside against “Big Disinfo,” contending that the think tanks raising money to focus on the topic were offering a simple solution to a political crisis that defies easy explanation and exaggerating the power of Facebook in a way that, ultimately, served Facebook most of all. The author, Joseph Bernstein, argued that the journalists and academics who specialise in exposing instances of disinformation seem to believe they have a particular claim on truth. “However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality,” he wrote. In fact, I’ve found many of the people worrying about our information diets are reassuringly modest about how far the new field of misinformation studies is going to take us. Donovan calls it “a new field of data journalism,” but said she agreed that “this part of the field needs to get better at figuring out what’s true or false.” The Aspen report acknowledged “that in a free society there are no ‘arbiters of truth.’” They’re putting healthy new pressure on tech platforms to be transparent in how claims — true and false — spread. The editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, Sewell Chan, one of the Harvard course’s participants, said he didn’t think the program had a political slant, adding that it “helped me understand the new forms of mischief making and lie peddling that have emerged.” “That said, like the term ‘fake news,’ misinformation is a loaded and somewhat subjective term,” he said. “I’m more comfortable with precise descriptions.” I also feel the push and pull of the information ecosystem in my own journalism, as well as the temptation to evaluate a claim by its formal qualities — who is saying it and why — rather than its substance. Last April, for instance, I tweeted about what I saw as the sneaky way that anti-China Republicans around Trump were pushing the idea that COVID-19 had leaked from a lab. There were informational red flags galore. But media criticism (and I’m sorry you’ve gotten this far into a media column to read this) is skin-deep. Below the partisan shouting match was a more interesting scientific shouting match (which also made liberal use of the word “misinformation”). And the state of that story now is that scientists’ understanding of the origins of COVID-19 is evolving and hotly debated, and we’re not going to be able to resolve it on Twitter. The story of tech platforms helping to spread falsehoods is still incredibly important, as is the work of identifying stealthy social media campaigns from Washington to, as my colleague Davey Alba recently reported, Nairobi. And the COVID-19 pandemic also gave everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to my colleagues at The New York Times a new sense of urgency about, for instance, communicating the seriousness of the pandemic and the safety of vaccines in a media landscape littered with false reports. But politics isn’t a science. We don’t need to mystify the old-fashioned practice of news judgment with a new terminology. There’s a danger in adopting jargony new frameworks we haven’t really thought through. The job of reporters isn’t, ultimately, to put neat labels on the news. It’s to report out what’s actually happening, as messy and unsatisfying as that can be. © 2021 The New York Times Company",
" Chinese President Hu Jintao gave qualified support on Thursday to an Australian initiative on climate change, saying the ""Sydney Declaration"" is fine as long as it is in line with a UN framework. Hu made the comments in a rare news conference after meeting Australian Prime Minister John Howard. ""We very much hope that this Sydney Declaration will give full expression to the position that the UN framework convention on climate change would remain the main channel for international efforts to tackle climate change,"" he said. The declaration should also reflect UN principles of ""common but differentiated responsibilities"" toward lowering harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Australia, as host of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, has put climate change at the top of the agenda. Its draft declaration calls for a new global framework that would include ""aspirational"" targets for all APEC members on lowering greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists say is causing the climate to change. Australia, backed by the United States, says the Kyoto protocol, the main climate change treaty, is flawed because it does not commit big polluters in the developing world, such as India and China, to the same kind of targets as industrialised nations. That approach is getting a decidedly lukewarm response at the APEC meeting from developing countries, which prefer to see the whole issue handled at a U.N. meeting later this month in New York. ""As one of our ministers, (Malaysia Trade Minister) Rafidah said, that E (in APEC) stands for economic, not environment,"" Indonesian Trade Minister Mari Pangestu told reporters, adding ministers should look at how climate change affects business. APEC ministers were grappling with the issue behind closed doors at a two-day meeting ending on Thursday, trying to agree on the wording of the declaration to be issued at a weekend summit. Kyoto's first phase runs out in 2012 and the APEC summit is one of a growing number of efforts to find a formula that brings rich and developing countries together on climate change. Hu has had a warm reception since his arrival in Australia on Monday when he visited the mining-rich state of Western Australia before heading to Canberra and a tour of a sheep farm. But in Sydney, three rallies were scheduled on Thursday to protest against China's human rights record, including one by the religious group Falun Gong that attracted up to 2,000 people in Sydney's Hyde Park. Australia has launched its biggest ever security operation in Sydney to welcome the 21 leaders attending this week's APEC meetings. Newspapers have dubbed the city of more than 4 million people ""Fortress Sydney"". Bush meets Hu later on Thursday and says he expects to have robust discussions on everything from product safety and trade to climate change, jailed dissidents, Beijing's support for Myanamar's junta, the Dalai Lama and Iran. The two men are only scheduled to meet for 20 minutes. At his news conference, Hu said China took international concerns over product safety very seriously. ""The Chinese side is willing and ready to work together with the international community to step up cooperation in quality inspections and examinations and further deepen mutually beneficial economic cooperation and trade,"" he said. On climate change, Bush said China has ""to be a part of defining the goals"". ""Once we can get people to define the goals, then we can encourage people to define the tactics necessary to achieve the goals,"" he said at a news conference on Wednesday. ""I believe this strategy is going to be a lot more effective than trying ... to say, this is what you've got to do."" Bush started his day on Thursday meeting Australia's opposition leader Kevin Rudd, who has vowed to bring back Australian frontline troops from the Iraq war, calling it the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. Rudd holds a commanding lead in opinion poll over Howard -- a staunch supporter of the war -- ahead of a general election expected in the coming weeks, and soon could be in a position to reverse Howard's policies on the war.",
"The investor, which manages in excess of $100 billion, plans
to seek opinions from consultants on whether HSBC Asset Management should help
manage its sustainability funds in the wake of the controversial comments, said
the person with direct knowledge of the matter. Staff inside the bank 0005.HK have also sought reassurances
about its policies amid concerns about how HSBC will be perceived by clients,
two other sources said. The sources declined to be named as they were not
authorised to speak to the media. A spokesperson for HSBC declined to comment. Earlier this month, Stuart Kirk, who is the global head of
responsible investing at HSBC Asset Management, told a conference in London
that ""climate change is not a financial risk we need to worry about"",
comments that prompted the bank to suspend him and conduct an internal
investigation.  Kirk declined to comment when reached by Reuters. Kirk's presentation was met with criticism from campaigners
who have been pressuring the bank and its peers in the financial services
industry to play a bigger role in the fight against climate change.  It also prompted The Pensions Regulator in the UK to warn
that any pension scheme failing to consider the impacts of climate change was
""ignoring a major risk to pension savings"". HSBC is a leading provider of investment services to such
schemes. HSBC Chief Executive Noel Quinn has said that Kirk's
comments were ""inconsistent with HSBC’s strategy and do not reflect the
views of the senior leadership"". Nicolas Moreau, who heads the asset
management division, also distanced the bank from Kirk's remarks. HSBC Asset Management has received a number of inquiries
from institutional clients about Kirk's comments, one of the sources said. Some of the institutions said they felt obligated to seek
more clarity and understand HSBC's official stance, the source added. The possibility of HSBC Asset Management, a division that
oversees some $640 billion, losing business comes as the company invests in the
unit as part of a broader push to grow fee income. Over the last year, HSBC has
bought businesses in Singapore and India as it seeks to expand in Asia in
particular. The unease has also rippled through the bank’s internal
meetings. Employees feeling concerned raised questions to senior management
during a recent town hall, two of the sources said. Still, several industry experts have defended Kirk, saying
that he had sparked a legitimate debate and that there should be room for
dissenting voices in finance. The impact of climate risk on portfolios can indeed be
exaggerated as Kirk claimed, Tariq Fancy, a former head of sustainable
investing at BlackRock Inc., told Financial News in an interview on Monday.",
"He made the appeal after unveiling a research paper on CSR by Management and Research Development Initiative (MRDI) in Dhaka on Wednesday. Addressing bank officials, he said, “You can undertake long-term projects. Providing short-term aid with CSR is not enough; steps should be taken to eradicating poverty.” The Governor urged the scheduled banks to increase participation in confronting the effects of climate change. The resource paper has described the drastic changes in the lives of the inhabitant’s of the Sundarbans and its adjoining areas after cyclones Sidr and Aila increased the region’s salinity level. MRDI Executive Director Hasibur Rahman Mukur said Bangladeshi banks, which together disburse Tk 4.5 billion as CSR funds every year, should work in these areas. He added that if banks could disburse their CSR funds independently, Bangladesh would not need foreign financial assistance to fund social development work.",
" A potentially deadly strain of fungus is spreading among animals and people in the northwestern United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia, researchers reported on Thursday. The airborne fungus, called Cryptococcus gattii, usually only infects transplant and AIDS patients and people with otherwise compromised immune systems, but the new strain is genetically different, the researchers said. ""This novel fungus is worrisome because it appears to be a threat to otherwise healthy people,"" said Edmond Byrnes of Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study. ""The findings presented here document that the outbreak of C. gattii in Western North America is continuing to expand throughout this temperate region,"" the researchers said in their report, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens here ""Our findings suggest further expansion into neighboring regions is likely to occur and aim to increase disease awareness in the region."" The new strain appears to be unusually deadly, with a mortality rate of about 25 percent among the 21 U.S. cases analyzed, they said. ""From 1999 through 2003, the cases were largely restricted to Vancouver Island,"" the report reads. ""Between 2003 and 2006, the outbreak expanded into neighboring mainland British Columbia and then into Washington and Oregon from 2005 to 2009. Based on this historical trajectory of expansion, the outbreak may continue to expand into the neighboring region of Northern California, and possibly further."" The spore-forming fungus can cause symptoms in people and animals two weeks or more after exposure. They include a cough that lasts for weeks, sharp chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, fever, nighttime sweats and weight loss. It has also turned up in cats, dogs, an alpaca and a sheep. bdnews24.com/lq/1604h.",
" Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, said he was getting straight back to work on the ""planetary emergency"" of climate change. But he refused to answer reporters' questions on whether the award would make him change his mind and enter the U.S. presidential campaign as a Democratic candidate before the November 2008 election. ""We have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing,"" Gore said, appearing in public nearly nine hours after the award was announced in Oslo. Gore shared the Nobel prize with the U.N. climate panel for their work helping galvanize international action against global warming. ""It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway,"" said Gore, standing with his wife, Tipper, and four Stanford University faculty members who work with the U.N. climate panel. ""This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now."" ""I'm going back to work right now. This is just the beginning,"" Gore added, leaving the 70 journalists hanging by not taking questions. That left unanswered a question on the minds of many in the United States after his Nobel win: would Gore, who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush, jump in to join a crowded Democratic field of candidates ahead of the presidential election next year. Gore has made it known he is not interested, although some Democratic activists are campaigning for him to get into the race, and the Nobel award on Friday further fueled their hopes. Gore has campaigned on climate change since leaving office in 2001 after the bruising and disputed election result that put Bush in the White House. BUSINESS AS USUAL Gore, who appeared somber rather than elated over the award, said, ""For my part, I will be doing everything I can to try to understand how to best use the honor and recognition of this award as a way of speeding up the change in awareness and the change in urgency."" ""It truly is a planetary emergency and we have to respond quickly,"" he said. Gore carried on with his plans despite the life-changing announcement, attending a scheduled meeting in Palo Alto in the heart of the Silicon Valley, where innovators are eager to jump start the clean technology industry. Stanford biology professor Chris Field said the prize ""adds tremendous momentum"" to work on conservation, efficiency, new technology and carbon capture and storage. ""I think we are seeing there is no single solution ... but there are great opportunities in all four areas,"" Field said. Gore said in a statement earlier that he would donate all of his share of the Nobel prize winnings to the Alliance for Climate Protection -- a nonprofit group Gore founded last year to raise public awareness of climate change. ""This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis -- a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years,"" Gore said in his earlier written statement.",
"The program titled ‘Leadership matters- Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi in the Contemporary World,' was organised by the Indian mission and staged at the UN headquarters. The heads of seven countries, including the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, and the president of South Korea, participated in the programme. Gandhi was a true patriot, a statesman and a saint who dedicated his life for humankind, said the Bangladesh leader. “His brilliant and mesmerising leadership showed the world that an individual could bring earth-shaking social and political change in a non-violent way.” Mahatma Gandhi was an influential politician and spiritual leader of the subcontinent, the Father of the Nation of India, and one of the pioneers of the anti-British movement. Born on Oct 2, 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi on Jan 30, 1948, a year and a half after the creation of two independent states, India and Pakistan.   He was given the title of Mahatma (Great Spirit) because of his selfless love for all people, regardless of social status, customs and creed. Expressing her honour at attending the event, Hasina said, ""We are living in a world, where hatred and bigotry leading to terrorism and violent extremism are dividing the humankind more than ever before."" “Gandhiji’s philosophy of life and his unwavering support for all peoples can unite us today to meaningfully and effectively address formidable challenges of global concerns like hunger, poverty and impacts of climate change.” She continued: “His selfless love and affection for people, regardless of social standing, caste, colour, creed or religion earned him the title ‘Mahatma.’ His principles of tolerance, non-violence and harmonious coexistence would continue to guide us as we seek to build nations. In fact, his ideals of diversity are cherished and celebrated all over the globe, wherever democracy is practised.” Hasina then told the audience that Bangladesh was proud to have the Gandhi Ashram Trust, which followed the Gandhian philosophy of rural development, peace and social harmony, and worked for the rural poor with particular focus on women.  She also revealed that her father Bangabandhu took inspiration from Gandhi during the formative stage of his leadership. ""We are now preparing to celebrate the Birth Centenary of Bangabandhu beginning in March 2020,"" she announced. Hasina underscored Gandhi's love for common people and ideals of non-violence, which contributed to shaping Bangabandhu’s vision of struggle against the oppression and tyranny by the then Pakistani rulers against the peace-loving Bangalis. “In the face of provocations, Bangabandhu remained unmoved and committed to the principles of non-violence. He, however, declared the independence of Bangladesh in the early hours of Mar 26, 1971 and called for armed struggle against the Pakistan occupation military when they unleashed an unprecedented genocide against the unarmed civilians in Bangladesh.”",
"SINGAPORE, Sep 14, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - A team of scientists studying rock samples in Africa has shown a strong link between falling carbon dioxide levels and the formation of Antarctic ice sheets 34 million years ago. The results are the first to make the link, underpinning computer climate models that predict both the creation of ice sheets when CO2 levels fall and the melting of ice caps when CO2 levels rise. The team, from Cardiff, Bristol and Texas A&M Universities, spent weeks in the African bush in Tanzania with an armed guard to protect them from lions to extract samples of tiny fossils that could reveal CO2 levels in the atmosphere 34 million years ago. Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, mysteriously fell during this time in an event called the Eocene-Oligocene climate transition. ""This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago,"" said co-author Bridget Wade from Texas A&M University. The study reconstructed CO2 levels around this period, showing a dip around the time ice sheets in Antarctica started to form. CO2 levels were around 750 parts per million, about double current levels. ""There are no samples of air from that age that we can measure, so you need to find something you can measure that would have responded to the atmospheric CO2,"" Paul Pearson of Cardiff University told Reuters. Pearson, Wade and Gavin Foster from the University of Bristol gathered sediment samples in the Tanzanian village of Stakishari where there are deposits of a particular type of well-preserved microfossils that can reveal past CO2 levels. ""Our study is the first that uses some sort of proxy reconstruction of CO2 to point to the declining CO2 that most of us expected we ought to be able to find,"" Pearson said on Monday from Cardiff. He said that CO2, being an acidic gas, causes changes in acidity in the ocean, which absorbs large amounts of the gas. ""We can pick that up through chemistry of microscopic plankton shells that were living in the surface ocean at the time,"" he explained. Evidence from around Antarctica was much harder to find. ""The ice caps covered everything in Antarctica. The erosion of sediments around Antarctica since the formation of the ice caps has obliterated a lot of the pre-existing evidence that might have been there."" ""Our results are really in line with the most sophisticated climate models that have been applied to this interval,"" Pearson added. The results were published online in the journal Nature. ""Those models could be used to predict the melting of the ice. The suggested melting starts around 900 ppm (parts per million),"" he said, a level he believes could be reached by the end of this century, unless serious emissions cuts were made.",
"But there is nothing he likes less than feeling belittled. Learning that he could not have his large security detail at Glasgow — security has been an obsession since a failed coup against him in 2016 — when the American president was allowed one seems to have enraged Erdogan enough for him to cancel his appearance abruptly. Not going to the climate talks, known as COP26, might have seemed self-defeating, given his recent green pivot, but Erdogan tried to play to his home base and cast his turnaround as a matter of honour. “We never allow our country’s reputation or honour to be damaged anywhere,” he said in remarks to journalists on the flight home from Europe. “One more time we showed that we can establish a fair world only with a more equitable approach.” Unpredictable, combative, politically astute, Erdogan has been in power for 18 years by always knowing which buttons to push. Yet he is politically vulnerable these days, more so perhaps than at any time in his career. The president is sliding in the polls as the economy stumbles. Last month, the lira hit a new low against the dollar. Unemployment among his supporters is rising. Inflation is galloping at nearly 20%. Increasingly, Erdogan finds himself on his back foot in the face of a vibrant, unified opposition. Determined to become modern Turkey’s longest-serving ruler by winning reelection in 2023, Erdogan is showing signs of growing frustration, as his usual tactics are not working, and voters, especially young people eager for a change, grow restless. “I think he is worried and afraid of losing power, and it seems to be a plausibility, even to him, for the first time in many years,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute. “He has been in office for too long, nearly two decades,” Cagaptay added. “He is suffering from establishment fatigue, simply too tired to be on top of his game and of the opposition all the time.” As Erdogan’s grip on power turns shaky, some analysts warn that the Turkish president may become even more unpredictable as elections approach. In particular over the past decade, Erdogan has used foreign policy as a tool to burnish his image at home, said Sinan Ulgen, chair of the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. He has in turn insulted foreign leaders, presented himself as a champion of the Turkish diaspora and of Muslims worldwide, and notably last year projected Turkey’s military muscle in a series of interventions abroad. He pursued military operations in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan and stirred tensions with Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean by sending out drilling ships to explore for gas. Since last November, however, when he fired his son-in-law as finance minister, the dire state of the Turkish economy has led Erdogan to soften his stance internationally, dialling back on the rhetoric, Ulgen said. “The main issue now is to prevent or preempt tension so the economy can rebound,” he said. But Erdogan has accumulated so many powers that his whims carry the day, and he seems not always to be able to help himself. He reverted to his old tactics in the last couple of weeks, ignoring his closest advisers and threatening a diplomatic crisis in a show of strength for his supporters. When 10 Western ambassadors issued a statement calling for the release of a jailed Turkish philanthropist, Erdogan railed against them for interference in Turkey’s affairs and threatened to expel them all. Then, just as suddenly, he backed down. “He went against his own best interests and also against the best counsel from his most trusted advisers, and that’s what makes me think that he is not on top of his game anymore,” Cagaptay said. The expulsion of the ambassadors was narrowly averted after frantic diplomacy, in time for Erdogan to meet President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Rome, only to have Erdogan create another fuss over security protocol at Glasgow. It was yet another display of the impetuousness that has become a hallmark of Erdogan’s relations with the world, risking major upsets with international partners in a sometimes dubious, increasingly desperate effort to lift his domestic standing. Sensing political opportunity, Erdogan had recently made a startling climate conversion after years in which Turkey stood out as an environmental laggard. He renamed his environment ministry as the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change and offered Biden a copy of a book on the green revolution for which he had written the introduction. He had allowed the Paris climate agreement to languish but then had the Turkish Parliament ratify it Oct 6, and he was prepared to announce to the gathering of world leaders that Turkey would aim to be carbon neutral by 2053. “Climate change is a reality and threatens the future of humanity, so Turkey naturally will have a leading role in such a vital matter,” he said in a televised address in Turkey before the COP26 summit. Erdogan’s conversion came after Turkey suffered a bruising summer. The worst forest fires in recorded memory scorched a swath of coastal forestland eight times the size of average annual fires, killing at least eight people. Flash floods killed at least 82 people in the northeast in the heaviest rains seen in hundreds of years. And an outbreak of slime choked sea life in the Marmara Sea. The disasters gave fresh momentum to support for climate action that had been steadily building — in public opinion, in business circles, among civil society groups and across the political spectrum — over the last year or so. “All the public opinion polls are showing that now the political parties in Turkey in the next elections will have to address this issue very seriously,” said Bahadir Kaleagasi, president of the Institut du Bosphore, a French association that encourages Turkish relations with France and Europe. In the end, though, the climate summit went begging. Erdogan apparently saw more benefit in kicking up a diplomatic fuss over the security protocol than in addressing the gathering. Or, as rumours flew about his health, he needed a rest. He had, in any case, already obtained what analysts said he really wanted from the weekend: an hour with Biden on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting, a sign of potential improvement in US-Turkish relations that might lift Turkey’s standing in international markets. After Erdogan had failed to secure a meeting with Biden in New York in September during the United Nations General Assembly, a meeting this month with the American president “became the No. 1 issue of the Turkey-US relations,” said Aydin Sezer, a political analyst and former trade official. The Biden administration, while maintaining pressure on Erdogan over human rights and the rule of law — Turkey has notably not been invited to Biden’s democracy summit in December — has made clear that it regards the country as an important NATO ally and strategic partner. “We may have differences, but we never lose sight of the strategic importance we and our partners hold each to the other,” David Satterfield, the American ambassador to Turkey, said at a reception aboard the command ship Mount Whitney, which called in to Istanbul on Wednesday. But an overriding US concern will be to keep relations with the unpredictable Erdogan on an even keel, said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. That has meant dialling back the close, if stormy, personal relationship that former President Donald Trump had with Erdogan in favour of something a bit more at arm’s length. “Ankara is simultaneously vulnerable and bellicose,” she said. “Washington’s way of dealing with this duality is distancing itself from Turkey. “There is a desire to keep this at this stable level — at least for another year — but given that this is an election year, it may not be so easy,” she added. © 2021 The New York Times Company",
"One of the best-known international NGOs, with aid programmes running across the globe, Oxfam was under threat of losing its British government funding over sexual misconduct allegations first reported by the Times newspaper last week. The scandal was fast escalating into a broader crisis for Britain's aid sector by bolstering critics in the ruling Conservative Party who have argued that the government should reduce spending on aid in favour of domestic priorities. Aid minister Penny Mordaunt, who threatened on Sunday to withdraw government funding from Oxfam unless it gave the full facts about events in Haiti, summoned senior managers from the charity to a meeting on Monday. ""Oxfam made a full and unqualified apology – to me, and to the people of Britain and Haiti - for the appalling behaviour of some of their staff in Haiti in 2011, and for the wider failings of their organisation's response to it,"" Mordaunt said after meeting Oxfam's chief executive, Mark Goldring. ""I told Oxfam they must now demonstrate the moral leadership necessary to address this scandal, rebuild the trust of the British public, their staff and the people they aim to help, and deliver progress on these assurances,"" she added in a statement. The statement did not address the question of funding. There was no immediate comment from Oxfam. The Times newspaper reported on Friday that some staff who were in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there had paid for sex with prostitutes. Oxfam has neither confirmed nor denied that specific allegation but has said an internal investigation in 2011 had confirmed sexual misconduct had occurred. Reuters could not independently verify the allegation. Announcing her resignation on Monday, Deputy Chief Executive Penny Lawrence said Oxfam had become aware over the past few days that concerns were raised about the behaviour of staff in Chad as well as Haiti that the organisation failed to adequately act upon. ""It is now clear that these allegations - involving the use of prostitutes and which related to behaviour of both the country director and members of his team in Chad - were raised before he moved to Haiti,"" she said. ""As programme director at the time, I am ashamed that this happened on my watch and I take full responsibility."" UN target Oxfam has said that as a result of its internal investigation in 2011, four people were dismissed, and three others - including the Haiti country director who had previously held the same role in Chad - had resigned. Reuters was unable to reach any of the Oxfam staff who worked in Haiti at the time. In its last financial year Oxfam received 32 million pounds ($44 million) from Britain's aid ministry, about 8 percent of its overall income. Whether or not it loses that funding, private donations could be hit by the bad publicity. Founded in 1942, Oxfam is one of Britain's best-known charities. Its 650 shops selling second hand clothes and books to raise funds are a familiar sight on the high street. For a sex scandal to hit such a high-profile brand, it risks affecting the wider British charity sector. Britain is one of only six nations to hit the UN target of spending 0.7 percent of gross national income on aid - about 13 billion pounds a year - but there have been increasingly vitriolic attacks on that spending in recent years. Meeting the UN target was a policy championed by former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as part of his efforts to re-brand his party as more compassionate. But with Cameron gone after campaigning on the losing side in the 2016 Brexit referendum, the political climate on aid has changed. Priti Patel, an aid critic despite being Mordaunt's predecessor as international development minister, said the Haiti incidents were just ""the tip of the iceberg"" and there was a ""culture of denial"" in the sector. Jacob Rees-Mogg, a prominent right-wing Conservative lawmaker, delivered to May's office on Friday a petition by readers of the Daily Express newspaper complaining that the aid budget was not well spent and should be cut.",
"LONDON, Jun 26, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai issued a 24-hour deadline to President Robert Mugabe on Thursday to negotiate or face being shunned as an illegitimate leader responsible for the killing of civilians. From the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the top regional body, to former South African President Nelson Mandela, African leaders have piled increasing pressure on Mugabe to call off a presidential election on Friday. Mugabe, 84, who trailed Tsvangirai for the presidency in a first round election in March, has dismissed international condemnation of violence against the opposition and has vowed to extend his 28 years in power. Tsvangirai, who withdrew from Friday's run-off and has taken refuge in the Dutch embassy in Harare since Sunday, said in an interview with Britain's Times newspaper the time for talking to Mugabe would end if he went ahead with the election. ""Negotiations will be over if Mr Mugabe declares himself the winner and considers himself the president. How can we negotiate?"" said Tsvangirai, who insists Mugabe must go so Zimbabwe can end its political turmoil and economic meltdown. If Mugabe approached him afterwards, Tsvangirai said he had this message: ""I made these offers, I made these overtures, I told you I would negotiate before the elections and not after -- because it's not about elections, it's about transition. ""You disregarded that, you undertook violence against my supporters, you killed and maimed, you are still killing and maiming unarmed civilians, the army is still out there. ""How can you call yourself an elected president? You are illegitimate and I will not speak to an illegitimate president."" ""PRIME TARGET"" Tsvangirai said it was too early to say when he would leave the Dutch embassy. ""I am the prime target. I am not going to take chances with my safety. It's not just about Mr Mugabe, it's about the people out there who could take the law into their own hands. There is no rule of law here,"" said Tsvangirai. His Movement for Democratic Change says nearly 90 of its supporters have been killed by militias loyal to Mugabe. On Wednesday, the SADC's security troika urged the postponement of Friday's election, saying the re-election of Mugabe could lack legitimacy in the current violent climate. Regional power South Africa added to the pressure, saying a top negotiator was in Harare mediating talks on options including postponement of the vote. The troika, comprising African Union chairman Tanzania, Swaziland and Angola, called at its meeting near the Swazi capital Mbabane for talks between Mugabe's government and the opposition before a new run-off date was set. It said the group had been briefed by South African President Thabo Mbeki, the designated SADC mediator on Zimbabwe. Mbeki has been widely criticized in the past for taking a soft line with Mugabe and for not using South Africa's powerful economic leverage with landlocked Zimbabwe. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga called on Wednesday for a new mediator. Mandela, revered by many across the world for his role in ending apartheid in South Africa, rarely speaks on political issues these days but used a speech at a dinner in London to condemn a ""tragic failure of leadership"" in Zimbabwe. President George W. Bush said after meeting members of the UN Security Council at the White House Friday's poll had no credibility and that the ""Mugabe government is intimidating people on the ground in Zimbabwe"". But Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission ruled last Sunday's withdrawal from the election by Tsvangirai had no legal force and that the poll would go ahead. Mugabe has presided over a slide into economic chaos, including 80 percent unemployment and inflation estimated by experts at about 2 million percent. He blames sanctions by former colonial power Britain and other Western countries. Millions of Zimbabweans have fled to neighboring countries to escape the economic woes of their once prosperous homeland.",
" Rwanda's President Paul Kagame is expected to win a resounding victory in Monday's election, partly due to the growth and stability he has delivered since the 1994 genocide and partly because of a crackdown on rivals. Rights groups and foreign diplomats say signs of repression have marred the runup to the poll, although donors expect it to be peaceful and say the revised electoral code will make it more transparent than in 2003 when Kagame won 95 percent of the vote. Kagame is applauded locally and internationally for rebuilding institutions, promoting women, boosting agricultural output and tripling household income. His two main rivals in the presidential race offer little genuine alternative, having spent 16 years as part of the ruling coalition led by his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). ""RPF is strong, it is organized, it has planned over a long time, historically it has been with the people to resolve challenging issues and therefore that results in a kind of overwhelming support,"" Kagame told reporters on his last day of campaigning. ""I have no regrets about it, I make no apologies."" Rights group Amnesty International says the poll will take place in a climate of fear. Registration troubles prevented three outspoken parties from fielding candidates. Two party chiefs were arrested on charges including stirring ethnic hatred and genocide ideology. Opponents say they have been threatened and intimidated. Two newspapers were suspended in April, a critical journalist was shot in the head in June and a senior member of the Democratic Green Party was found nearly beheaded in July. Some analysts say that although Rwandans would like more choice, they are haunted by the genocide, in which gangs of Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. ""A lot of Rwandans would want him (Kagame) to be a lot more open, and like to see more choices and feel more consulted but I don't see any evidence that they want radical regime change,"" author Philip Gourevitch told Reuters. ""I'm afraid I can't see how a candidate like Victoire Ingabire, who is clearly identified with the old Hutu Power politics, would be healthy for this country at this time,"" said Gourevitch, who wrote ""We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,"" a book about the genocide. Ingabire, a former accountant who lived in exile in the Netherlands for 16 years, returned to Rwanda earlier this year to run for office. Her name will not appear on the ballot paper. The genocide was spawned, in part, by the surge of radical ethnic politics that followed the birth of multi-party democracy in Rwanda in the early 1990s. ""Kagame is afraid that widening the democratic space would allow in wolves in sheepskins,"" said a western diplomat. Foreign diplomats said Kagame's real challenge comes from within his Tutsi cadres in the ruling party and army and that his war on graft, which has seen former political associates locked up, is a way of sidelining possible threats to his power. Since the beginning of the year top army officials have fled the country, been arrested, demoted or shot in mysterious circumstances. Kagame rejects allegations of a rift with his brothers in arms. ""What I know does not suggest any kind of crisis at all. There are differences in terms of opinions like anywhere else in the world,"" he said. But exiled army and intelligence top brass are sounding increasingly belligerent and say Rwandans should stand up and fight for their freedom. ""It boils down to a struggle for power among the party's inner cabal that could end up becoming very nasty. In private, RPF officials have told me: 'This is probably the biggest challenge we have faced as a party in many years,'"" independent regional analyst Jason Stearns said on his Congo Siasa blog.",
"In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly since his resounding election victory in May, Modi also invoked India's Hindu and ascetic traditions, saying they might provide answers to climate change. Modi appeared to chastise Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had used his own General Assembly address on Friday to blame India for the collapse of the latest talks over Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed in full by both countries. ""By raising this issue in this forum,"" Modi said in Hindi, ""I don't know how serious our efforts will be, and some people are doubtful about it."" Last month, India announced it was withdrawing from the planned peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbors because of plans by Pakistan to consult Kashmiri separatists beforehand. India was willing to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan, Modi said, so long as those talks are in ""an atmosphere of peace, without a shadow of terrorism."" India says Pakistan supports separatist militants that cross from the Pakistan-controlled side of Kashmir to attack Indian forces. Pakistan denies this, saying India's military abuses the human rights of Kashmiris, most of whom are Muslim. Modi is India's first Hindu nationalist prime minister in a decade, embracing a strain of politics that maintains that India's culture is essentially Hindu, although his Bharatiya Janata Party says such a culture is welcoming to other religions. He has said fears that he will favor India's Hindu majority over its large religious minorities, including some 170 million Muslims, are unfounded, and his comments on spirituality in his address are likely to be scrutinized for evidence of this. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat when religious riots raged across the northwestern state in 2002 after a Muslim mob set alight a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people were killed in the riots, most of them Muslims. Critics have accused Modi of allowing or even encouraging the riots to happen, but courts have found no evidence to indict him. In his address on Saturday, Modi invoked the ""ancient wisdom"" of India's Vedic era, during which Hinduism's most sacred texts were written. He also encouraged more people to take up yoga, the spiritual practice that predates the arrival of Islam in India. ""Yoga should not be just an exercise for us, but it should be a means to get connected with the world and with nature,"" he said, calling on the United Nations to adopt an International Yoga Day. ""It should bring a change in our lifestyle and create awareness in us, and it can help fighting against climate change."" 
 
 

Modi is due to have private meetings with the prime ministers of Nepal and Bangladesh and the president of Sri Lanka on Saturday in New York. No meetings are planned with Sharif or other Pakistani officials, according to the Indian delegation.   Next week, less than a decade after the United States banned him from visiting the country in 2005 under a law barring entry to foreigners who have severely violated religious freedoms, Modi is due to meet with US President Barack Obama at the White House. Modi will not eat at the state dinner, however, as he will be fasting for the Hindu festival of Navratri, his delegation has said.",
" The International Monetary Fund should set up an early warning system to prevent crises like the global credit crunch, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday. Proposing sweeping changes to international institutions, Brown called for rapid response teams of police and experts to be set up that could be sent quickly to trouble spots to restore order and begin rebuilding after conflicts. And he called for the creation of a multi-billion-dollar global climate change fund within the World Bank to finance environmentally sustainable development in the poorest countries. Brown believes that the rapid spread of the credit crisis last year after problems with US sub-prime mortgages points to failings in global financial supervision that must be fixed. ""With financial markets and flows transformed by globalisation, I propose that -- acting with the same independence as a central bank -- the IMF should focus on surveillance of the global economic and financial system and thus prevent crises, not just resolve them,"" he said in excerpts of a speech he will deliver to business executives in New Delhi. The IMF, working with the Financial Stability Forum -- a group of central banks, regulators and international bodies -- ""should be at the heart of an early warning system for financial turbulence affecting the global economy,"" he said. The credit crunch claimed a high-profile casualty when British mortgage lender Northern Rock suffered the country's first bank run in more than a century last year. Northern Rock has borrowed about 26 billion pounds ($50.9 billion) from the Bank of England, creating a huge political headache for Brown. CALL FOR CHANGE ""The IMF and World Bank ... have to change to become properly equipped for a world where national problems can quickly become global -- and contagion can move as swiftly as the fastest communication,"" said Brown, who ends a four-day trip to India and China later on Monday. Brown meets the leaders of France, Germany and Italy as well as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in London on January 29 to discuss how to respond to the crisis. Brown said he supported India's bid for a permanent place, with other countries, on an expanded UN Security Council. British officials would not say however how many permanent members they believed a reformed Security Council could have. Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States have been veto-bearing permanent members of the council since the United Nations was created in 1945. But they face growing pressure for reform with Brazil, Germany, India and Japan all demanding permanent seats. Brown said another problem was that there was no mechanism for quickly sending in experts, police and judges to get states back on their feet when peacekeepers intervened in a conflict. ""We must do more to ensure rapid reconstruction on the ground once conflicts are over,"" he said. ""I propose that we constitute rapid response standby teams of judges, police, trainers and other civilian experts who can work on the ground to help put countries on the road to economic recovery and political stability,"" he said. He called for a new UN crisis prevention and recovery fund to provide immediate support for reconstruction in such cases.",
"Johnson will head to India on Thursday with calls for
his resignation ringing in his ears after he was fined for breaking his own
COVID-19 lockdown rules by attending a birthday party for him in Downing Street
in June 2020.  Parliament returns from its Easter vacation on Tuesday
and Johnson has said he would ""set the record straight"" about
gatherings in his office. He had previously told lawmakers there were no
parties and guidance was always followed. In details released late on Saturday, Johnson's office
said the British leader would use his trip to India to deepen relations,
including in-depth talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Mod on the two
nations' ""strategic defence, diplomatic and economic partnership"". He will also push for progress in talks on a free
trade deal, which Britain is hoping to strike as part of its post-Brexit
strategy. His office said such a trade deal was predicted to boost Britain's
total trade by up to 28 billion pounds ($36.5 billion) annually by 2035. But the visit will be overshadowed in part by
disagreement over the Ukraine conflict. Western allies have called for India, which imports
arms from Russia, to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin in stronger
terms, and US President Joe Biden earlier this week told Modi that buying more
oil from Russia was not in India's interest.  British trade minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan also said
last month Britain was very disappointed with India's stance. However,
Johnson's office made no direct reference to the conflict, although a source
said it was expected Ukraine would be discussed ""among other geopolitical
issues"". Johnson said India, as a major economic power, was a
highly valued strategic partner. ""As we face threats to our peace and prosperity from
autocratic states, it is vital that democracies and friends stick
together,"" he said in a statement. Last year, he was forced to cancel a
planned trip to India because of the coronavirus pandemic. Last May, the two countries announced a partnership involving
more than 530 million pounds of Indian investment into Britain, and Downing
Street said Johnson was expected to announce further major investment and new
collaboration on cutting-edge science, health and technology. ",
"The decree's main target is former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan that required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015. The so-called ""Energy Independence"" order also reverses a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, undoes rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and reduces the weight of climate change and carbon emissions in policy and infrastructure permitting decisions. ""I am taking historic steps to lift restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations,"" Trump said at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, speaking on a stage lined with coal miners. The wide-ranging order is the boldest yet in Trump’s broader push to cut environmental regulation to revive the drilling and mining industries, a promise he made repeatedly during the presidential campaign. But energy analysts and executives have questioned whether the moves will have a big effect on their industries, and environmentalists have called them reckless. ""I cannot tell you how many jobs the executive order is going to create but I can tell you that it provides confidence in this administration’s commitment to the coal industry,"" Kentucky Coal Association president Tyler White told Reuters. Trump signed the order with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Vice President Mike Pence by his side. US presidents have aimed to reduce US dependence on foreign oil since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, which triggered soaring prices. But the United States still imports about 7.9 million barrels of crude oil a day, almost enough meet total oil demand in Japan and India combined. While Trump's administration has said reducing environmental regulation will create jobs, some green groups have countered that rules supporting clean energy have done the same. The number of jobs in the US wind power industry rose 32 percent last year while solar power jobs rose by 25 percent, according to a Department of Energy study. 'Assault on American values' Environmental groups hurled scorn on Trump's order, arguing it is dangerous and goes against the broader global trend toward cleaner energy technologies. ""These actions are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American,"" said billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, the head of activist group NextGen Climate. Green group Earthjustice was one of many organizations that said it will fight the order both in and out of court. ""This order ignores the law and scientific reality,"" said its president, Trip Van Noppen. An overwhelming majority of scientists believe that human use of oil and coal for energy is a main driver of climate change, causing a damaging rise in sea levels, droughts, and more frequent violent storms. But Trump and several members of his administration have doubts about climate change, and Trump promised during his campaign to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, arguing it would hurt US business. Since being elected Trump has been mum on the Paris deal and the executive order does not address it. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change who helped broker the Paris accord, lamented Trump's order. ""Trying to make fossil fuels remain competitive in the face of a booming clean renewable power sector, with the clean air and plentiful jobs it continues to generate, is going against the flow of economics,"" she said. The order will direct the EPA to start a formal ""review"" process to undo the Clean Power Plan, which was introduced by Obama in 2014 but was never implemented in part because of legal challenges brought by Republican-controlled states. The Clean Power Plan required states to collectively cut carbon emissions from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Some 85 percent of US states are on track to meet the targets despite the fact the rule has not been implemented, according to Bill Becker, director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a group of state and local air pollution control agencies. Trump’s order also lifts the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management's temporary ban on coal leasing on federal property put in place by Obama in 2016 as part of a review to study the program's impact on climate change and ensure royalty revenues were fair to taxpayers. It also asks federal agencies to discount the cost of carbon in policy decisions and the weight of climate change considerations in infrastructure permitting, and reverses rules limiting methane leakage from oil and gas facilities.",
"Heckling is something Trudeau has always faced, but this time the attacks have new bite. After six years in office, a prime minister who promised “sunny ways” and presented himself as a new face is now the political establishment, with a track record and missteps for opponents to criticise. Even if the Liberal Party clings to its hold on Parliament, as observers expect, this bruising election campaign has done him no favors. Ben Chin, the prime minister’s senior adviser, said that no politician could have sustained Trudeau’s initial popularity. “If you’re in power for six years or five years, you’re going to have more baggage,” Chin said. “You have to make tough decisions that not everybody’s going to agree with.” For much of his time in office, opposition party leaders have accused Trudeau of putting his personal and political interests before the nation’s good — of which the snap election being held Monday is the most recent example. They also have had rich material to attack him on over controversies involving a contract for a charity close to his family, and a finding that he broke ethics laws by pressing a minister to help a large Quebec company avoid criminal sanctions. And for every accomplishment Trudeau cites, his opponents can point to unfulfilled pledges. Anti-vax protesters have thronged his events, some with signs promoting the far-right People’s Party of Canada, prompting his security detail to increase precautions. One rally in Ontario where protesters significantly outnumbered the police was shut down over safety concerns, and at another in the same province, the prime minister was pelted with gravel as he boarded his campaign bus. A local official of the People’s Party later faced charges in that episode of assault with a weapon. Trudeau has many achievements since 2015 to point to. His government has introduced carbon pricing and other climate measures, legalized cannabis, increased spending for Indigenous issues and made 1,500 models of military-style rifles illegal. A new plan will provide day care for 10 Canadian dollars a day per child. Although his popularity has diminished, Trudeau’s star power remains. When he dropped by the outdoor terrace of a cafe in Port Coquitlam, an eastern suburb of Vancouver, for elbow bumps, quick chats and selfies with voters, a crowd soon swelled. “We love you, we love you,” Joy Silver, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher from nearby Coquitlam, told Trudeau. But as Election Day nears, many Canadians are still asking why Trudeau is holding a vote now, two years ahead of schedule, with COVID-19 infections on the rise from the delta variant, taxing hospitals and prompting renewed pandemic restrictions in some provinces or delaying their lifting in others. Also criticized was that he called the vote the same weekend Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, when Canadian troops were struggling to evacuate Canadians as well as Afghans who had assisted their forces. “They’ve been struggling with answering that question the whole campaign,” said Gerald Butts, a longtime friend of Trudeau’s and a former top political adviser. “And that’s part of why they’re having trouble getting the message across.” Trudeau has said that he needs to replace his plurality in the House of Commons with a majority to deal with the remainder of the pandemic and the recovery that will follow — although he avoids explicitly saying “majority.” The Liberal Party’s political calculation was that it was best to strike while Canadians still held favorable views about how Trudeau handled pandemic issues, particularly income supports and buying vaccines. “We’re the party with the experience, the team and the plan to continue delivering real results for Canadians, the party with a real commitment to ending this pandemic,” Trudeau said at a rally in Surrey, another Vancouver suburb, standing in front of campaign signs for candidates from the surrounding area. “Above all, my friends, if you want to end this pandemic for good, go out and vote Liberal.” During much of the 36-day campaign, the Liberals have been stuck in a statistical tie with the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Erin O’Toole, each holding about 30% of the popular vote. The New Democrats, a left-of-center party led by Jagmeet Singh, lies well behind at about 20 percent. Kimberly Speers, a political scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said that Trudeau’s personality and celebrity may be working against him. “The messaging, from the NDP and the Conservatives especially, is that it’s a power grab and it’s all about him,” she said. “And that message has just really seemed to stick with voters.” Some scandals during Trudeau’s tenure have helped the opposition, too. In 2019, Trudeau’s veterans affairs minister, an Indigenous woman, quit amid allegations that when she was justice minister, he and his staff had improperly pressured her to strike a deal that would have allowed a large Canadian corporation to avoid a criminal conviction on corruption charges. Despite his championing of diversity, it emerged during the 2019 election that Trudeau had worn blackface or brownface three times in the past. And last year a charity with deep connections to his family was awarded a no-bid contract to administer a COVID-19 financial assistance plan for students. (The group withdrew, the program was canceled, and Trudeau was cleared by the federal ethics and conflict of interest commissioner.) His opponents have also focused on promises they say he has fallen short on, including introducing a national prescription drug program, creating a new electoral structure for Canada, lowering debt relative to the size of the economy, and ending widespread sexual harassment in the military and solitary confinement in federal prisons. The Center for Public Policy Analysis at Laval University in Quebec City found that Trudeau has fully kept about 45 percent of his promises, while 27 percent were partly fulfilled. Singh has been reminding voters that Trudeau vowed to bring clean drinking water to all Indigenous communities. There were 105 boil-water orders in effect at First Nations when Trudeau took power, with others added later. The government has restored clean water to 109 communities, but 52 boil-water orders remain. “I think Mr Trudeau may care, I think he cares, but the reality is that he’s often done a lot of things for show and hasn’t backed those up with real action,” Singh said during the official English-language debate. O’Toole, for his part, has sought to portray the vote as an act of personal aggrandisement. “Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives: privileged, entitled and always looking out for No 1,” he said at a recent event in rural Ottawa. “He was looking out for No 1 when he called this expensive and unnecessary election in the middle of a pandemic.” Security and secrecy have increased at Trudeau’s campaign stops after several of them were disrupted by protesters angry about mandatory COVID-19 vaccination rules and vaccine passport measures that the prime minister has imposed. At the rally outside a banquet hall in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, Trudeau, sleeves rolled up and microphone in hand, gave an energetic speech before diving into a mostly South Asian crowd eager to pose for pictures with him. In a change from previous practice, the crowd had been gathered by invitation rather than by public announcement, partly to keep its size within pandemic limits, and no signs promoted the event on the formidable gate to the remote location. Up on the hall’s roof, two police snipers in camouflage surveyed the scene. After an earlier rally in Ontario was canceled, Trudeau was asked if U.S. politics had inspired the unruly protests. His answer was indirect. “I think we all need to reflect on whether we do want to go down that path of anger, of division, of intolerance,” he said. “I’ve never seen this intensity of anger on the campaign trail or in Canada.” Translating wider poll results into precise predictions of how many seats the parties will hold in the next House of Commons is not possible. But all of the current polling suggests that Trudeau may have alienated many Canadians with an early election call and endured abuse while campaigning, for no political gain. The most likely outcome is that the Liberals will continue to hold power but not gain the majority he sought. If that proves to be the case, Butts said, “it’s going to end up pretty close to where we left off, which is a great irony.” © 2021 The New York Times Company",
"“Indian Ocean has remained at the centre of interest to the major players of the world because of its strategic location and natural resources,” AH Mahmood Ali said on Friday, speaking at a conference on the Indian Ocean in Singapore. India Foundation, in collaboration with the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies (BIISS), Institute of Policy Studies Sri Lanka and S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore, organised the conference, the foreign ministry said. Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan inaugurated the conference which brought together ministers, senior civil and military bureaucrats, diplomats, academicians, researchers and civil societies of the countries along the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean region has emerged as the most prominent global economic highway with 66 percent of the world’s oil shipments, 33 percent of its bulk cargo and 50 percent of the world’s container traffic passing through its waters. 
 
 

The oil arteries of the world flow through the Indian Ocean, the foreign minister said.   “It is not only trade and economy, competition among some of the major powers in securing visible and credible presence in the Indian Ocean has shaped the dynamics of the Indian Ocean region,” he said. “We see growing interests among countries in the region to develop new infrastructures in the Indian Ocean. Countries also seek to build, expand and strengthen their naval infrastructures in the Indian Ocean. “Overlapping territorial claims and disputes have added new dimension to this evolving security scenario,” he said. Ali noted that countries in Asia and the Pacific are four times more likely to be affected by a natural catastrophe than those in Africa, and 25 times more vulnerable than Europe and North America. The climate change impacts and resultant sea level rise have further enhanced the risks and vulnerabilities of the Indian Ocean countries. A variety of security threats is posing danger to maritime peace and stability. Piracy continues to remain as one of the most worrisome maritime security challenges to date, the foreign minister observed. 
 
 

Maritime terrorism has also surfaced as an omnipresent global and regional threat. Human trafficking and drug smuggling are the twin issues that have lately re-captured global attention.   “It, however, requires strong commitment from all the nations of the Indian Ocean region and beyond towards achieving this shared objective,” he said. “We must follow the path of cooperation and collaboration, not competition and conflict in tapping the full potentials of the Indian Ocean.” Former president of the Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom delivered the keynote address at the session. The session proposed to organise a summit level conference, engaging governments, academicians, civil society and private sectors to find out a “common approach” for cooperation to respond the challenges. The foreign minister said the maritime disputes including the overlapping territorial claims need to be resolved through “peaceful” means. He referred to Bangladesh’s steps in settling the maritime problems with the neighbours -- India and Myanmar. 
 
 

Ali meets Singapore minister, Indian state minister   According to the foreign ministry, Mahmood Ali also held meeting with his Singapore counterpart Balakrishnan on the sidelines and discussed issues of mutual interests and cooperation. Indian State Minister for External Affairs MJ Akbar also called on him. Balakrishnan appreciated the “prompt and bold” actions taken by the Bangladesh government in tracking and eliminating the terrorists including the masterminds. Mahmood Ali briefed him on security, political and social measures adopted in combating terrorism and violent extremism in Bangladesh. During the meeting with MJ Akbar, both sides expressed satisfaction over the current pace of progress of bilateral relations and reaffirmed their commitment to further strengthening and expanding the relations. Akbar renewed India’s support to Bangladesh in fight against terrorism and violent extremism. He conveyed that the prime minister of India is certain in two aspects, as far as Bangladesh is concerned -- Bangladesh has the absolute liberty to decide its own course of actions as an independent nation, and India attaches high importance to building equal partnership for development with Bangladesh. And this was particularly for the advancement of the marginalised and disadvantaged people, Akbar said.",
"SYRACUSE, Italy, April 22(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Environment ministers from rich and poor nations discussed a green technology stimulus on Wednesday to help tackle global warming and overcome the global economic crisis. The three-day meeting of the Group of Eight industrial countries and major developing economies opened in Sicily, with attention focused on how far the new U.S. administration would go in its environmental strategy. The meeting, taking place on Earth Day, marked the first ministerial-level talks this year in negotiations toward a major U.N. deal on climate change, due to be signed in December in Copenhagen to replace the 1997 Kyoto agreement. ""Without leadership from the G8 countries an international response to climate change will not happen. This meeting needs to point the way,"" said Yvo de Boer, the United Nation's top climate change official. ""The new American administration is incredibly important to addressing this issue. Trying to come to a climate change agreement without the United States makes no sense."" U.S. President Barack Obama has already pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, reversing the policies of his predecessor George W. Bush, whose administration refused to sign up to Kyoto. Delegates said they were watching closely for any details of American plans for action. On Wednesday, the meeting discussed ways to reconcile the investment required to cut carbon emissions with the trillions of dollars being spent to stabilize financial markets. Many of the countries present, including the United States and China, have already pledged major investment in green technologies. Wednesday's talks focused on the most efficient ways to focus spending and the best means to promote green technologies in developing countries. ""This G8 aims to spread low-carbon technology in order to allow developing and emerging countries to follow the path to eco-friendly development hand in hand with Western countries,"" Italian Environment Minister Stefania Pestigiacomo said. For the first time, the G8 ministerial meeting included a broad spread of developing countries in the hope of forging a broader consensus, grouping China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, South Korea and Egypt. U.N.-sponsored talks in Germany this month exposed wide differences on emissions, with poor countries saying rich nations that earned their wealth from industrialization must act first and help pay for the cost of their carbon reduction. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has put the price of a ""green revolution"" to halve emissions by 2050 at $45 trillion. De Boer said he would hold talks with developed countries at Syracuse to discuss funding for green technology.",
"Dhaka, Mar 15 (bdnews24.com)—The government is optimistic over fair distribution of Teesta waters between Bangladesh and India, said a minister on Sunday, though co-speakers at a conference highlighted the challenges for managing the country's water resources. Discussion with India is continuing over distribution of waters, said food and disaster management minister Abdur Razzaque at the international conference on water and flood management. He said he hoped the successful resolution in Ganges water sharing would be duplicated in the case of the Teesta. Though 57 rivers of India enter Bangladesh, he said, a water-sharing agreement had been reached for only the Ganges. He said Dhaka and New Delhi would discuss the Tipai Mukh dam project in the Indian state of Manipur, addressing its impact on the Surma, Kushaira and Meghna rivers. The dam has already been given the go-ahead by the Indian government. A.M.M. Shafiullah, vice chancellor of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, said three major rivers of the sub-continent fall into Bangladesh making the water resources system extremely complex and its management a big challenge. Fritz Meijndert, Dutch deputy ambassador and head of development cooperation at the mission, said long term vision and commitment was required to manage water resources. He said it could not be managed without addressing climate change. Bangladesh had a strategy to face climate change, but lacked the broader vision over the next 10 to 50 years, he said. He pledged the Netherlands' support for Bangladesh's water management. The three-day conference, to end Monday, was being held by the BUET Institute of Water and Flood Management at the Bangladesh-China Friendship Centre. A total 135 experts from 13 countries, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, UK, USA, Nepal, Australia, Japan and France, are participating.",
"He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and practiced guitar by watching tutorials online.YouTube had recently installed a powerful new artificial intelligence system that learned from user behavior and paired videos with recommendations for others. One day, it directed him to an amateur guitar teacher named Nando Moura, who had gained a wide following by posting videos about heavy metal, video games and, most of all, politics.In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Dominguez was hooked.As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel.Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office.
 
 Matheus Dominguez, who said YouTube was crucial to shifting his political views to the far right, recording a YouTube video in Niterói, Brazil, April 29, 2019. YouTube built its business on keeping users hooked. This has been a gift to extremist groups. An investigation in the company’s second-biggest market found serious consequences. (Dado Galdieri/The New York Times) 

Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grassroots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.Some parents look to “Dr YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism.As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest — a boon for channels like Moura’s that use pop culture as a gateway to far-right ideas.The system now drives 70% of total time on the platform, the company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in more than $1 billion a month, some analysts believe.Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”Company representatives disputed the studies’ methodology and said that the platform’s systems do not privilege any one viewpoint or direct users toward extremism. However, company representatives conceded some of the findings and promised to make changes.Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman, said YouTube has “invested heavily in the policies, resources and products” to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation, adding, “we’ve seen that authoritative content is thriving in Brazil and is some of the most recommended content on the site.”Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.Though corruption scandals and a deep recession had already devastated Brazil’s political establishment and left many Brazilians ready for a break with the status quo, Boyd called YouTube’s impact a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.“This is happening everywhere,” she said.The Party of YouTubeMaurício Martins, the local vice president of Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another.“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”“It was like that with everyone,” he said.The platform’s political influence is increasingly felt in Brazilian schools.“Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,” said Inzaghi D, a 17-year-old high schooler in Niterói.More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.“It’s the main source that kids have to get information,” he said.Few illustrate YouTube’s influence better than Carlos Jordy.Musclebound and heavily tattooed — his left hand bears a flaming skull with diamond eyes — he joined the City Council in 2017 with few prospects of rising through traditional politics. So Jordy took inspiration from bloggers like Moura and his political mentor, Bolsonaro, turning his focus to YouTube.He posted videos accusing local teachers of conspiring to indoctrinate students into communism. The videos won him a “national audience,” he said, and propelled his stunning rise, only two years later, to the federal legislature.“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”Down The Rabbit HoleA few hundred miles from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Virgilio Almeida at the Federal University of Minas Gerais hunched over computers, trying to understand how YouTube shapes its users’ reality.The team analyzed transcripts from thousands of videos, as well as the comments beneath them. Right-wing channels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audiences expand far faster than others did, and seemed to be tilting the site’s overall political content.In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.A team at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center set out to test whether the Brazilian far right’s meteoric rise on the platform had been boosted by YouTube’s recommendation engine.Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Moura’s.Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them, the researchers concluded.One of those channels belonged to Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies. Though a YouTube early adopter, his online following had done little to expand his political base, which barely existed on a national level.Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity there soared. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.YouTube challenged the researchers’ methodology and said its internal data contradicted their findings. But the company declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for certain statistics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ findings were accurate.‘Dr YouTube’The conspiracies were not limited to politics. Many Brazilians searching YouTube for health care information found videos that terrified them: some said Zika was being spread by vaccines, or by the insecticides meant to curb the spread of the mosquito-borne disease that has ravaged northeastern Brazil.The videos appeared to rise on the platform in much the same way as extremist political content: by making alarming claims and promising forbidden truths that kept users glued to their screens.Doctors, social workers and former government officials said the videos had created the foundation of a public health crisis as frightened patients refused vaccines and even anti-Zika insecticides.The consequences have been pronounced in poorer communities like Maceió, a city in Brazil’s northeast that was among the hardest hit by Zika.“Fake news is a virtual war,” said Flávio Santana, a pediatric neurologist based in Maceió. “We have it coming from every direction.”When Zika first spread in 2015, health workers distributed larvicides that killed the mosquitoes that spread the disease.Not long after YouTube installed its new recommendation engine, Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blaming Zika on vaccines — and, later, on larvicides. Many refused both.Dr Auriene Oliviera, an infectious disease specialist at the same hospital, said patients increasingly defied her advice, including on procedures crucial to their child’s survival.“They say, ‘No, I’ve researched it on Google, I’ve seen it on YouTube,’ ” she said.Medical providers, she said, were competing “every single day” against “Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were losing.Mardjane Nunes, a Zika expert who recently left a senior role in the Health Ministry, said health workers across Brazil have been reporting similar experiences. As more communities refuse the anti-Zika larvicide, she added, the disease is seeing a small resurgence.“Social media is winning,” she said.Brazil’s medical community had reason to feel outmatched. The Harvard researchers found that YouTube’s systems frequently directed users who searched for information on Zika, or even those who watched a reputable video on health issues, toward conspiracy channels.A spokesman for YouTube confirmed the Times’ findings, calling them unintended, and said the company would change how its search tool surfaced videos related to Zika.An ‘Ecosystem of Hate’As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.The very people working to help families affected by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the disease. Backed by shadowy foreigners, their goal was to abolish Brazil’s abortion ban — or even make abortions mandatory.As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Diniz said.Threats of rape and torture filled Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Küster’s videos, she said.Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.When the university where Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’ ”“We need the companies to face their role,” Diniz said. “Ethically, they are responsible.”As conspiracies spread on YouTube, video makers targeted aid groups whose work touches on controversial issues like abortion. Even some families that had long relied on such groups came to wonder if the videos might be true, and began to avoid them.In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.Jordy, Bolsonaro’s tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said.“It’s a culture war we’re fighting,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”‘The Dictatorship of the Like’Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right.But even some people here fear the platform’s impact on democracy. Santos, for example, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some people around Bolsonaro “want to use this weapon to pressure institutions in a way that I don’t see as responsible.”The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings.“I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.  Matheus Dominguez, who said YouTube was crucial to shifting his political views to the far right, recording a YouTube video in Niterói, Brazil, April 29, 2019. YouTube built its business on keeping users hooked. This has been a gift to extremist groups. An investigation in the company’s second-biggest market found serious consequences. (Dado Galdieri/The New York Times) ",
"They already know the answer to one crucial question:
Although it appeared to be the largest eruption in the world in three decades,
the explosion of the Hunga volcano on Saturday will very likely not have a
temporary cooling effect on the global climate, as some past enormous eruptions
have. But in the aftermath of the event, there may be
short-term effects on weather in parts of the world and possibly minor
disruptions in radio transmissions, including those used by global positioning
systems. The shock wave produced by the explosion, as well as
the unusual nature of the tsunamis it generated, will have scientists studying
the event for years. Tsunamis were detected not just in the Pacific, but in the
Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean as well “Not that we weren’t aware of volcanic explosions and
tsunamis,” said Lori Dengler, an emeritus professor of geophysics at Humboldt
State University in California. “But to witness it with the modern array of
instruments we have is truly unprecedented.” The explosion of the underwater volcano, which is
formally known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Haʻapai, rained hazardous ash over the
region, including the Tongan capital, Nuku’alofa, about 40 miles south. The
capital also experienced a 4-foot tsunami and higher wave heights were reported
elsewhere. The government called the eruption an “unprecedented
disaster,” although the full scope of the damage has been difficult to
determine because the explosion severed undersea telecommunications cables and
ash has forced Tonga’s airports to shut down. Beyond Tonga, though, the enormity of the explosion
was readily apparent. Satellite photos showed a cloud of dirt, rock, volcanic
gases and water vapour several hundred miles in diameter, and a narrower plume
of gas and debris soared nearly 20 miles into the atmosphere. Some volcanologists drew comparisons to the
catastrophic explosion of Krakatau in Indonesia in 1883 and to the most recent
huge eruption, of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, in 1991. Pinatubo erupted for several days, sending about 20
million tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, or upper atmosphere
There, the gas combined with water to create aerosol particles that reflected
and scattered some of the sun’s rays, keeping them from hitting the surface. That had the effect of cooling the atmosphere by about
1 degree Fahrenheit (about half a degree Celsius) for several years. (It is
also the mechanism of a controversial form of geoengineering: using planes or
other means to continuously inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to
intentionally cool the planet.) The Hunga eruption “was matching the power of Pinatubo
at its peak,” said Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland
in New Zealand who has studied earlier eruptions at the volcano. But the Hunga eruption lasted only about 10 minutes,
and satellite sensors in the days that followed measured about 400,000 tons of
sulfur dioxide reaching the stratosphere. “The amount of SO2 released is much,
much smaller than, say, Mount Pinatubo,” said Michael Manga, an earth sciences
professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So unless the Hunga eruption resumes and continues at
a similarly strong level, which is considered unlikely, it won’t have a global
cooling effect. Cronin said the power of the eruption was in part
related to its location, about 500 feet underwater. When superhot molten rock,
or magma, hit seawater, the water instantly flashed into steam, expanding the
explosion many times over. Had it been much deeper, water pressure would have
dampened the explosion. The shallower depth created perfect “almost
Goldilocks” conditions, he said, to supercharge the explosion. The blast produced a shock wave in the atmosphere that
was one of the most extraordinary ever detected, said Corwin Wright, an
atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath in England. Satellite readings
showed that the wave reached far beyond the stratosphere, as high as 60 miles
up, and propagated around the world at more than 600 mph. “We’re seeing a really big wave, the biggest we’ve
ever seen in the data we’ve been using for 20 years,” Wright said. “We’ve never
seen anything really that covers the whole Earth like this, and certainly not
from a volcano.” The wave resulted when the force of the blast
displaced huge amounts of air outward and upward, high into the atmosphere. But
then gravity pulled it down. It then rose up again, and this up-down
oscillation continued, creating a wave of alternating high and low pressure
that moved outward from the blast source. Wright said that although the wave occurred high in
the atmosphere, it may potentially have a short-term effect on weather patterns
closer to the surface, perhaps indirectly by affecting the jet stream. “We don’t quite know,” he said. “We’re looking to see
what happens over the next few days. It could just sort of ripple through and
not interact.” Wright said that because the wave was so high, it
could also potentially have a slight effect on radio transmissions and signals
from global positioning systems satellites. The atmospheric pressure wave may have also played a
role in the unusual tsunamis that occurred. Tsunamis are generated by the rapid displacement of
water, usually by the movement of rock and soil. Large underwater faults can
generate tsunamis when they move in an earthquake. Volcanoes can cause tsunamis as well. In this case,
the underwater blast, and the collapse of the volcano’s crater, may have caused
the displacement. Or one flank of the volcano may have become unstable and
collapsed, with the same result. But that would only account for the local tsunami that
inundated Tonga, scientists said. Ordinarily, said Gerard Fryer, an affiliate
researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who formerly worked at the
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. “You’d expect that energy to decay away with
distance,” Fryer said. But this event generated tsunamis of roughly the same
size of the local one, and over many hours, in Japan, Chile and the West Coast
of the United States, and eventually generated small tsunamis in other basins
elsewhere around the world. That’s a sign that as it travelled through the
atmosphere, the pressure wave may have had an effect on the ocean, causing it
to oscillate as well. It will take weeks or months of analysing data to
determine if that’s what happened, but some researchers said it was a likely
explanation. “We know that the atmosphere and the ocean are
coupled,” Dengler said. “And we see the tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean. It
didn’t go around the tip of South America to get there.” “The evidence is very clear that the pressure wave
played a role. The question is how big a part.” © 2022 The New York Times Company",
" UK Environment Secretary David Miliband will unveil plans on Thursday to improve Britain's poor record on recycling its rubbish. The government's new Waste Strategy will outline how it plans to meet tough European Union rules on reducing the amount of garbage buried in landfill sites in England. A government consultation document last year proposed increasing the level of recycling and composting of household waste from 27 percent today to 40 percent by 2010 and 50 percent by 2020. Britain is near the bottom of Europe's recycling league, with only Greece and Portugal recycling less, according to figures from the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Green Alliance. Campaigners want the government to introduce a rising level of charges for rubbish collections to encourage householders to recycle more. Last year's consultation found strong support among the public for some form of variable charging, but there was also concern that extra costs could lead to a rise in fly-tipping. Friends of the Earth said the recycling targets should be set as high as 75 percent of all household waste by 2015. It said Flanders in northern Belgium was already recycling 71 percent. The environmental group said there should also be legally binding recycling targets for businesses. It said government proposals in the consultation to build more incinerators to burn waste instead of burying it would be a backward move. It said incinerators produced more climate-changing carbon dioxide than gas-fired power stations and would face fierce opposition from local communities concerned about other pollutants released into the air.",
"That's the view of some major automakers, including BMW and Audi, which are developing hydrogen fuel-cell passenger vehicle prototypes alongside their fleets of battery cars as part of preparations to abandon fossil fuels. They are hedging their bets, calculating that a change in political winds could shift the balance towards hydrogen in an industry shaped by early-mover Tesla's decision to take the battery-powered road to clean cars. Global auto hub Germany is in sharp focus. It is already betting billions on hydrogen fuel in sectors like steel and chemicals to meet climate targets, and closely-fought elections this month could see the Greens enter the coalition government and further push the technology. BMW is hydrogen's biggest proponent among Germany's carmakers, charting a path to a mass-market model around 2030. The company also has one eye on shifting hydrogen policies in Europe and in China, the world's largest car market. The Munich-based premium player has developed a hydrogen prototype car based on its X5 SUV, in a project already partly funded by the German government. Jürgen Guldner, the BMW vice president who heads up the hydrogen fuel-cell car programme, told Reuters the carmaker would build a test fleet of close to 100 cars in 2022. ""Whether this (technology) is driven by politics or demand, we will be ready with a product,"" he said, adding that his team is already working to develop the next generation vehicles.",
"Often the features of our dystopia are
itemised, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising
inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically
described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty
centre, which is the destruction of the Earth through global warming caused by
humans. This style is native to Twitter, but it has
migrated to earnest slice-of-life Facebook pages, to Netflix, to books. Lauren
Oyler’s coolly funny novel “Fake Accounts” begins in this mode (“Consensus was
the world was ending, or would begin to end soon”) and Bo Burnham’s depressed
drama-kid Netflix special “Inside” ends in it, as Burnham shrugs off the rising
oceans and sings, “You say the world is ending. Honey, it already did.” And it
is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age
positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock
photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and
“Humanity is not doomed.” Ours is a banal sort of apocalypse. Even as it
is described as frightfully close, it is held at a cynical distance. That is
not to say that the rhetoric signals a lack of concern about climate change.
But global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems on such an
extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity. This creates its own
perverse flavour of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly
accept it, at least not enough to urgently act. This paralysis itself is almost
too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our
brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about
humankind — even the apocalyptic ones. This “end of the world” does not resemble the
ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment
culminates in dramatic final spectacles. Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state,
inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end. Faced with
this inexorable decline, the fire-and-brimstone fantasies grow ever more
appealing. The apocalyptic drumbeat of social media gestures at the
hopelessness of our situation while supplying a kind of narcotic comfort for
it. Some plead: Just hit us with the comet already. That brings us to the premise of “Don’t Look
Up,” Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy that he has said is an allegory for
inaction on global warming. In it, an American astronomer (Leonardo DiCaprio)
and a PhD candidate (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling toward Earth.
More chilling than this cosmic snowball is the fact that no one seems
particularly concerned by its approach. Comet denialists hold rallies
instructing people to “don’t look up,” but even those who accept the situation
only gesture lazily at trying to stop it. A pop star (Ariana Grande) stages a
grotesque benefit concert; a daytime television host (Tyler Perry) jokes that
he hopes the comet takes out his ex-wife; his co-host (Cate Blanchett) is more
interested in bedding the astronomer than heeding him. As she paws at him in a
hotel corridor, her subconscious death drive becomes manifest, as she purrs:
“Tell me we’re all gonna die!” “Don’t Look Up” fails as a climate change
allegory, because climate change resists metaphor. Even though I count among
the film’s villains (all its journalists are bad), I do not feel as implicated
as I should. For one thing, humans didn’t make the comet. Global warming is not
approaching from space but oozing all around. My attention is diverted not only
by shiny pop stars but also by taxing responsibilities and traumas, many of
which are themselves related to ecological collapse. I am terrified of how global
warming will affect my son’s generation, but when I learned we would need to
travel regularly to a hospital as COVID spiked in New York City, I bought a
car. But the greatest liberty “Don’t Look Up” takes
with its source material comes at the end: The comet hits Earth at its
appointed time, at which point nearly everybody dies. It is final, dramatic,
easy to understand. So, nothing like our current situation. Global warming is what eco-philosopher Timothy
Morton calls a hyperobject, a concept that is too large to be adequately
comprehended by human beings. (McKay’s production company is called Hyperobject
Industries.) Its scale is not just world-historical but geological, and though
it is already very bad, it will only fulfil its catastrophic potential many
lifetimes from now. Its effects are distributed unequally; what I experience as
an ambient stressor may cause strangers to suffer or die. Global warming suggests that humans are
powerful enough to destroy the world but too weak to stop it. Though we are driven
toward world-changing innovation, we are inflexible, fearful of abandoning the
destructive comforts we once saw as progress: our cars, our meats, our free
next-day deliveries. Knowing all this, isn’t it about time we do
something? Hmmm. “Don’t Look Up” turns on one of the most vexing aspects of the
crisis: Stating the data, shouting it even, often fails to move people, though
the film is largely incurious about why. One of the stories we tell ourselves
about global warming is that we need only “listen to the science.” When this
does not work, we are supplied with more science — more glacier drone shots,
more projections of soaring temperatures, more scary stories about dead bees. In the book “Being Ecological,” Morton calls
this “ecological information dump mode,” in which an expert commences “shaking
your lapels while yelling disturbing facts.” But even this seemingly rational
approach stokes an irrational fantasy: that we have a certain amount of time
“left” to stop global warming — just as soon as we get our heads around what’s
going on. The word “apocalypse” is derived from the
Latin for “revelation,” and our current predicament draws out the irony of that
double meaning, as we mistake obsessing about the “end of the world” for acting
on it. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2020 cli-fi novel “Weather,” is
an information person: a Brooklyn librarian who assists the host of a cult-hit
global warming podcast called “Hell or High Water.” The podcast is “soothing to
me even though she talks only of the invisible horsemen galloping toward us,”
Lizzie says. The more Lizzie doomscrolls about climate change, the more she
turns away from the outside world, lurking on survivalist forums and planning
her family doomstead. “Weather” sketches a scene of intellectual
preppers hoarding information about global warming as if cramming for a cosmic
test. But the more information they find, the more they are able to tailor it
to satisfy their own egos. In “Weather,” a podcast listener waves off talk of
melting glaciers and asks: “But what’s going to happen to the American
weather?” A parable unfolds along these lines in the
final season of “Search Party”: The show’s crew of millennial narcissists
founds a Brooklyn startup called Lyte, which manufactures an “enlightenment”
pill with the unfortunate side effect of turning people into zombies. As the
group’s craven pursuit of consumerist illumination inadvertently hastens the
apocalypse, an egomaniacal imp, Dory (Alia Shawkat), tries to explain that she
just wanted to help people, but all that comes out is this: “I just wanted …” We may not fully comprehend global warming,
but we can feel it, and not just in the weather. A whole lexicon has arisen to
attempt to describe its psychological impact: climate nihilism, climate grief,
climate melancholia, eco-anxiety, pretraumatic stress. A global survey of young
people released last year found that more than half of respondents between the
ages of 16 and 25 “felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty”
about it, and believed that “humanity is doomed.” In the 2020 Hulu documentary “I Am Greta,”
teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg explains how knowledge of global
warming nearly killed her. After watching a film in school featuring “starving
polar bears, flooding, hurricanes and droughts,” she says, she became depressed
and anxious, stopped speaking and “almost starved to death.” We are getting accustomed to the idea that
global warming feels bad, and this provides its own sense of comfort, as if our
psychological distress proves that we are taking the problem seriously. “Civilians love to panic,” says an
epidemiologist in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “To Paradise,” which is partially
set in an unbearably hot, totalitarian future Manhattan ruled by blinkered
scientists. “Survival allows for hope — it is, indeed, predicated on hope — but
it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.” In our response to
global warming, we resemble the frog who does not hop from the heating water
until it’s too late. Except we are aware that the water is boiling; we just
can’t imagine leaving our tumultuous little pot. Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we
must abandon to address global warming is the anaesthetising stream of global
warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book, “The
Uninhabitable Earth,” climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily
represent progress, as “we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by
restaging them in theatres of our own design and control.” Even YouTube videos
of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like
Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities
onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said
that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we
can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us. The internet is often criticised for feeding
us useless information, and for spreading disinformation, but it can enable a
destructive relationship with serious information, too. If you’re a person who
accepts the science, how much more do you really need to hear? The casual
doomsaying of social media is so seductive: It helps us signal that we care
about big problems even as we chase distractions, and it gives us a silly
little tone for voicing our despair. Most of all, it displaces us in time. We are
always mentally skipping between a nostalgic landscape, where we have plenty of
energy to waste on the internet, and an apocalyptic one, where it’s too late to
do anything. It’s the centre, where we live, that we can’t bear to envision.
After all, denial is the first stage of grief. ©2022 The New York Times Company",
" Hollywood celebrities Harrison Ford, Bo Derek and Robert Duvall on Monday threw their support behind a new global initiative by the World Bank to save tigers from extinction. While the global development agency's main mission is to fight poverty in developing countries, it has rarely taken on wildlife conservation efforts of endangered species. The new Tiger Conservation Initiative will bring together wildlife experts, scientists and governments to try to halt the killing and thriving illegal trade in tiger skins, meat and body parts used in traditional Asian medicines. Ford, a long-time environmental activist, said efforts to protect tigers would only succeed if local communities were involved in conservation efforts. ""By committing to help wild tigers, the World Bank is sounding its intention to be a global leader in biodiversity conservation,"" Ford, the star of the latest ""Indiana Jones"" movie, told an event at Washington's Smithsonian National Zoo. World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the decline in the number of tigers was ""shocking"" from over 100,000 a century ago to currently less than 4,000. The clearing of large areas of forest land for urban development has added to their decline and disappearance from Central Asia, the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, and most of China. POACHING AT ALL-TIME HIGH A World Bank report warned that ""if current trends persist, tigers are likely to be the first species of large predator to vanish in historic times."" ""Just as with many other challenges of sustainability, such as climate change, pandemic disease, or poverty, the crisis facing tigers overwhelms local capabilities and it is one that transcends local borders,"" Zoellick said. ""This is a problem that cannot be handled by individual nations alone, it requires an alliance of strong local commitment backed by deep international support,"" he added. Zoellick said the World Bank would convene a series of discussions with countries, conservationists and the private sector to mobilize funding for tiger conservation, and launch studies on how better to protect the cats. The World Bank chief said there were examples of where tigers had been brought back from the brink of extinction, such as in Russia and Nepal, but added that saving the world tiger population would not be an easy task. ""All those concerned may not agree but this does not mean we should stand on the sidelines and do nothing,"" he said. John Seidensticker, chief scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo's Conservation Ecology Center, said tiger poaching and trafficking in tiger parts and meat was at an all-time high and the biggest immediate threat to tigers. ""For wild tigers to live they must have much better security on their home ground,"" he said, also calling on countries to properly enforce laws to protect tigers. This, Seidensticker said, required strong political will. ""We're at a tipping point and we're going to lose wild tigers but with the World Bank initiative wild tigers now have a chance,"" he added Seidensticker said tiger conservation efforts needed to be more coordinated and focused, and the World Bank could help as a global institution.",
" Mankind is to blame for climate change but governments still have time to slow accelerating damage at moderate cost if they act quickly, a draft UN report shows. Underlining the need for speed, it says a European Union goal of holding temperature rises to a maximum 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times is almost out of reach. The 21-page study, due for release in November, lays out possible responses to global warming but cautions that some impacts are already inevitable, such as a gradual rise in sea levels that is set to last for centuries. The report gives a first overview of 3,000 pages of research by the UN's climate panel already published in three instalments this year about the science, the likely impacts and the costs of slowing climate change. The authoritative summary, obtained by Reuters and meant to guide governments in working out how to slow warming, reiterates that humans are to blame for climate change but that clean technologies are available to offset the most harmful emissions. ""Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (from human activities) greenhouse gas concentrations,"" it says. ""Very likely"" means at least 90 percent probability, up from 66 percent in a previous report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 when the link was only judged ""likely"". The IPCC draws on work by 2,500 scientists. The report shows a table indicating worsening damage such as bleached corals, coastal flooding, increasing costs of treating disease, deaths from heatwaves and rising risks of extinctions of species of animals and plants. But it says: ""Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed"" by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Among options to offset warming, blamed mainly on greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are energy efficiency, wider use of renewable energies, carbon markets or burying carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. The report indicates that the cost of such initiatives would be manageable for the world economy. Global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2030 would be reduced by up to 3 percent in the most stringent case that would require emissions to peak within about 15 years. Other less tough goals would mean only a fractional loss of GDP by 2030. The report will be issued in Valencia, Spain, on Nov. 17 after review by governments, along with an even shorter 5-page summary. The draft is dated May 15 -- an updated version has been written this month to take account of government suggestions, scientists said. ""Warming of the climate is now unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global mean sea level,"" the summary begins. The report reiterates best estimates that temperatures will rise by 1.8 to 4.0 Celsius (3 to 7 Fahrenheit) this century and that sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres. But it says ocean levels are likely to keep rising ""for many centuries"" even if greenhouse gases are stabilised, because water expands as it heats up. The deep oceans will keep heating up as warmth filters down from the surface. Under a range of scenarios, such thermal expansion of the oceans alone would bring sea level rises of 0.4 to 3.7 metres in coming centuries, without counting any melting of ice in glaciers or in the vast Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. About 1,000 delegates from 158 nations are meeting in Vienna this week to discuss ways to extend the UN's Kyoto Protocol for fighting warming beyond 2012 and to widen it to include outsiders such as the United States and developing nations. ",
"""In the past – as far back as the 1940s, but continuing for decades – the Department of State was among many public and private employers that discriminated against employees and job applicants on the basis of perceived sexual orientation, forcing some employees to resign or refusing to hire certain applicants in the first place,"" Kerry said in a statement. ""These actions were wrong then, just as they would be wrong today."" He added: ""On behalf of the Department, I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the Department's steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTI community."" US Senator Ben Cardin, the leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from Maryland, wrote Kerry in November referring to the time as a ""deep stain on our national history and that of the State Department."" Cardin told Kerry he intended to ""remedy this injustice"" by introducing legislation to acknowledge the ""lavender scare"" years and offer an apology on behalf of Congress.",
"Laying out his new Cuba policy in a speech in Miami, Trump signed a presidential directive to roll back parts of Obama’s historic opening to the Communist-ruled country after a 2014 diplomatic breakthrough between the two former Cold War foes. But Trump was leaving in place many of Obama’s changes, including the reopened US embassy in Havana, even as he sought to show he was making good on a campaign promise to take a tougher line against Cuba. ""We will not be silent in the face of communist oppression any longer,"" Trump told a cheering crowd in Miami’s Cuban-American enclave of Little Havana, including Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who helped forge the new restrictions on Cuba. ""Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration's completely one-sided deal with Cuba,"" Trump declared as he made a full-throated verbal assault on the government of Cuban President Raul Castro. Trump’s revised approach, which will be contained in a new presidential directive, calls for stricter enforcement of a longtime ban on Americans going to Cuba as tourists, and seeks to prevent US dollars from being used to fund what the Trump administration sees as a repressive military-dominated government. 
 
 

But facing pressure from US businesses and even some fellow Republicans to avoid turning back the clock completely in relations with communist-ruled Cuba, the president chose to leave intact some of his Democratic predecessor's steps toward normalization.   The new policy bans most US business transactions with the Armed Forces Business Enterprises Group, a Cuban conglomerate involved in all sectors of the economy, but makes some exceptions, including for air and sea travel, according to US officials. This will essentially shield US airlines and cruise lines serving the island. ""We do not want US dollars to prop up a military monopoly that exploits and abuses the citizens of Cuba,"" Trump said, pledging that US sanctions would not be lifted until Cuba frees political prisoners and holds free election. However, Trump stopped short of breaking diplomatic relations restored in 2015 after more than five decades of hostilities. He will not cut off recently resumed direct US-Cuba commercial flights or cruise-ship travel, though his more restrictive policy seems certain to dampen new economic ties overall. The administration, according to one White House official, has no intention of “disrupting” existing business ventures such as one struck under Obama by Starwood Hotels Inc, which is owned by Marriott International Inc, to manage a historic Havana hotel. Nor does Trump plan reinstate limits that Obama lifted on the amount of the island’s coveted rum and cigars that Americans can bring home for personal use. While the changes are far-reaching, they appear to be less sweeping than many US pro-engagement advocates had feared. Still, it will be the latest attempt by Trump to overturn parts of Obama's presidential legacy. He has already pulled the United States out of a major international climate treaty and is trying to scrap his predecessor's landmark healthcare program. Trump justified his partial reversal of Obama’s Cuba measures to a large extent on human rights grounds. His aides contend that Obama’s efforts amounted to ""appeasement"" and have done nothing to advance political freedoms in Cuba, while benefiting the Cuban government financially. Trump’s critics have questioned why his administration is now singling out Cuba for its human rights record but downplaying the issue in other parts of the world. Citing the lack of human rights concessions from Cuba in the detente negotiated by Obama, Trump said, ""It's hard to think of a policy that makes less sense than the prior administration's terrible and misguided deal with the Castro regime."" International human rights groups say, however, that again isolating the island could worsen the situation by empowering Cuban hard-liners. The Cuban government has made clear it will not be pressured into reforms in exchange for engagement. The Cuban government had no immediate comment, but ordinary Cubans said they were crestfallen to be returning to an era of frostier relations with the United States with potential economic fallout for them.",
"By Steve Holland WASHINGTON June 4 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama had a blunt, ""tough-love"" message for Arabs and Israelis that thrust him deeper into Middle East peacemaking -- a tangled web that bedeviled his predecessors and carries risks for him. Quoting a Koran passage to ""speak always the truth,"" Obama set aside diplomatic niceties in a speech in Cairo demanding that Israel stop building Jewish West Bank settlements that antagonize Palestinians, that Palestinians work for peace and accept Israel's right to exist and for Palestinian militants to halt violence. ""We cannot impose peace,"" Obama said in Thursday's speech to the world's Muslims. ""But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true."" His foray into the Middle East comes far earlier in his presidency than that of his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who waited until late in their terms to make a major push and found themselves disappointed at the outcome. Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said taking the initiative on Middle East peace this early means Obama's ability to deliver will become a test of his credibility. ""This administration three years from now when we're in the middle of an election campaign will in part be measured on the extent to which it brings Arabs and Israelis closer to a two-state solution,"" he said. The president, who is a Christian but whose Kenyan father came from a family that includes generations of Muslims, stressed his Muslim roots in a way that he never did during his presidential campaign last year, when it might have been seen as a political liability. 'CHANGED THE CLIMATE' That may have helped him in delivering a speech which Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called a blunt, honest address that was critical to signaling ""a new era of understanding with Muslim communities worldwide."" ""He said things that if previous presidents had said them, it wouldn't have mattered, but because he is who he is, it changed the climate in which he said them, made it more meaningful,"" said Ron Kaufman, who was a political adviser to former President George H.W. Bush. ""The fact that a Barack Hussein Obama said these things, he can say them in a way that the moderate Muslims would listen,"" Kaufman said. While direct and frank, Obama struck an empathetic tone with Muslims in seeking what he called a ""new beginning"" with them, trying to move beyond tensions left by the Bush administration's war in Iraq. A former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk of the Saban Center for Middle East policy, said Obama presented ""a dramatic and persuasive American manifesto for a new relationship with the Muslim world."" Obama's demand for Israel to freeze settlements represented a challenge for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has defiantly resisted taking that step, and raises the possibility of frictions with pro-Israeli members of the U.S. Congress, many from Obama's own Democratic Party. ELUSIVE GOAL The top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, said he was concerned that Obama had seemed to place ""equal blame"" on the Israelis and the Palestinians."" ""Because Hamas is a terrorist organization, they've been funded by the Syrians and the Iranians, and I just don't think the Israelis deserve to be put in the same playpen with terrorists,"" he said. History shows tangling with Israel can at times prove costly for U.S. presidents. George H.W. Bush, president from 1989 to 1993, angered Israel and its U.S. backers by saying he would not support new money for Israel to use for settlements. He has since told former aides he believed a loss of Jewish support was one reason he lost his 1992 re-election bid. Given that Middle East peace has been an elusive goal of every president of the past 50 years, it would come as a surprise to most Americans if Obama were to succeed in bringing Arabs and Israelis together. A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted late in May found that only 32 percent of Americans believed there would come a time when the two sides would be able to settle their differences and live in peace. And 66 percent doubted it would happen.",
" Australia's deadliest bushfire has killed at least 84 people, some as they fled in cars or as they huddled in houses when the inferno engulfed rural towns in the country's south east, police said on Sunday. The fire storm tore through several small towns north of Melbourne on Saturday night destroying everything in its path. One family was forced to dive into a farm reservoir to survive while others took refuge in a community shed with firefighters standing between them and a wall of flames. A badly burned man in the town of Kinglake, where there were many fatalities, was kept alive for six hours by being partially submerged by friends in a pool until help arrived. ""It rained fire,"" said one survivor, showing his singed shirt. ""We hid in the olive grove and watched our house burn."" On Sunday, the remains of charred cars littered the smoldering towns, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Melbourne. Some vehicles had crashed into each other as their drivers frantically tried to escape the fire. ""Out there it has been hell on earth,"" Victoria state Premier John Brumby said in a television address. Police said the toll could continue to rise as they search the ruins of the wild fires and with 20 people with serious burns in hospital. Thousands of firefighters were still battling scores of fires in Victoria and New South Wales state on Sunday night. ""We will find more bodies as we gain access to different parts of the fire areas,"" Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon told a news conference. ""We have found people in cars, it looks like they have decided late to leave their premises. We have found people who have been in properties, in their paddocks. We've found others in their houses. And the sad part is that we found children."" Nixon said some of the fires may have been deliberately lit. The previous worst bushfire tragedy was in 1983 when 75 people were killed in the ""Ash Wednesday"" fires. Survivors said the Victorian inferno reached four storeys high and raced across the land like speeding trains. ""It went through like a bullet,"" Darren Webb-Johnson, a resident of the small rural town of Kinglake, told Sky TV. TOWNS DESTROYED ""Hell and its fury have visited the good people of Victoria,"" said Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who announced a A$10 million aid package. ""The nation grieves with Victoria. Many good people now lie dead. Many others lie injured,"" said Rudd. The government also put the army on standby. Firefighters said more than 700 homes have been destroyed in the fires across Victoria state so far this weekend, the vast majority in the worst-affected areas north of Melbourne. Wildfires are a natural annual event in Australia, but this year a combination of scorching weather, drought and tinder-dry bush has created prime conditions for blazes to take hold. Green lawmakers have been urging stiffer climate-change policies to reduce the risk of more such summer disasters. Dazed survivors, wrapped in blankets, wandered through twisted and charred remains on Sunday, some crying, not knowing whether friends of family had survived. At the town of Wandong, about 50 km (30 miles) north of Melbourne, one survivor said he had found the body of a friend in the laundry of a burned-out house. ""Another 20 seconds and we were gone. We lost our dogs. There have been a lot of dead people. My next door neighbor didn't make it,"" said one survivor.",
" Food and Agricultural Organisation director general Jacques Diouf has lauded the achievements of Bangladesh in enhancing food production in recent months in the face of adverse conditions. Diouf said Bangladesh's experience and expertise were appreciated and that it was in a position to share them with others in facilitating the sustainable food security, the UN organisation said in a press statetement on Friday. His comments came from a meeting with agriculture adviser CS Karim who is leading a Bangladesh delegation to the 35th special session of the FAO conference at FAO headquarters in the Italian capital of Rome. Diouf assured Karim of continued FAO support to bolster the efforts of Bangladesh in the coming months. During the meeting Karim appreciated the role of the FAO in meeting the challenges of global food security. He hoped a renewed and revitalised FAO would be able to cope with the emerging challenges including those emanating from climate change. Karim was accompanied by the Bangladesh ambassador in Rome and permanent representative to the FAO, Masud Bin Momen, and other members of the delegation. Karim also held talks with heads of delegations of other member states including the Netherlands to discuss enhancing the bilateral cooperation in the agriculture sector.",
"The first day of the Rome summit - the leaders' first face-to-face gathering since the start of the COVID pandemic - focused mainly on health and the economy, while climate and the environment is front and centre of Sunday's agenda. Climate scientists and activists are likely to be disappointed unless late breakthroughs are made, with drafts of the G20's final communique showing little progress in terms of new commitments to curb pollution. The G20 bloc, which includes Brazil, China, India, Germany and the United States, accounts for an estimated 80% of the global greenhouse gas emissions which scientists say must be steeply reduced to avoid climate catastrophe. For that reason, this weekend's gathering is seen as an important stepping stone to the UN's ""COP26"" climate summit attended by almost 200 countries, in Glasgow, Scotland, where most of the G20 leaders will fly directly from Rome. ""The latest reports are disappointing, with little sense of urgency in the face of an existential emergency,"" said Oscar Soria of the activist network Avaaz. ""There is no more time for vague wish-lists, we need concrete commitments and action."" A fifth draft of the G20's final statement seen by Reuters on Saturday did not toughen the language on climate action compared with previous versions, and in some key areas, such as the need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, it softened it. This mid-century target date is a goal that United Nations experts say is needed to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, seen as the limit to avoid a dramatic acceleration of extreme events such as droughts, storms and floods. UN experts say even if current national plans to curb emissions are fully implemented, the world is headed for global warming of 2.7C. The planet's largest carbon emitter China, is aiming for net zero in 2060, while other major polluters such as India and Russia have also not committed to the mid-century deadline. G20 energy and environment ministers who met in Naples in July failed to reach agreement on setting a date to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and end coal power, asking the leaders to find a resolution at this weekend's summit. Based on the latest draft, they have made little progress, pledging to ""do our utmost"" to stop building new coal power plants before the end of the 2030s and saying they will phase out fossil fuel subsidies ""over the medium term."" On the other hand, they do pledge to halt financing of overseas coal-fired power generation by the end of this year. Some developing countries are reluctant to commit to steep emission cuts until rich nations make good on a pledge made 12 years ago to provide $100 billion per year from 2020 to help them tackle the effects of global warming. That promise has still not been kept, contributing to the ""mistrust"" which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Friday was blighting progress in climate negotiations.  The draft stresses the importance of meeting the goal and doing so in a transparent way.",
" Farmers who lost their homes and crops when the devastating Cyclone Sidr battered Bangladesh's low-lying southern coasts on Nov 15 face a new problem from migratory birds that swarm into the country by the thousands every winter. ""They are welcome guests and we do usually enjoy their presence,"" said Mohammad Shahabuddin, a local council chairman in the Bhola district on the coast. ""But this year the birds are making our struggle to survive following the cyclone more difficult,"" he said. ""The birds are destroying our seedbeds by eating the soft and tender saplings before we can replant them in the croplands."" As the winter that started late last month gets chillier by the day, the number of migratory fowl is increasing. ""We really don't know what to do and how to drive them away,"" Shahabuddin said. Tens of thousands of birds of various species fly from as far as Siberia to escape bitter cold and bask in a warmer climate in Bangladesh. Species include hawks, swallows, shrikes, loons, ducks and geese. They take temporary refuge in the country's vast rivers, lakes and marshes, and feed on fish, green leaves and grasses. But Cyclone Sidr, which struck Bangladesh with winds of 255 kph (150 mph) and a 5-metre surge had washed away almost everything, including rice and other crops in the fields. It also killed more than 3,300 people, made millions homeless and left a trail of devastation that officials and aid agencies say will need months or a year to be healed. Cyclone survivors on the islands and in riverside villages said they faced an immediate problem of food and were losing hope for an early harvest as the migratory birds were eating their seedbeds. Fishermen said fish were depleted in the waters along the coasts following the cyclone and surge, forcing many fish-eating fowl to change their diets for survival. The farmers say they cannot kill the birds as Bangladesh law prohibits killing or capturing ""guest birds."" ""It's really a big problem for us,"" said Mohammad Belayet Hossain, deputy commissioner (administrator) of Bhola, about 250 km (155 miles) from the capital Dhaka. ""We suggested farmers to guard their fields as we have no technology to protect them."" Mohammad Dastagir, another local council official in the district, said farmers try to scare away the birds by shouting and beating tin-containers, and sometimes by making fires. In some places, farmers also put up scarecrows made with straw and bamboo, but it does not work after a few days as the fowl get used to the scene, said the islanders. ""Migratory birds also damaged rice plants in the previous years, but this time we are more concerned as we really need to yield rice in the shortest possible time, so that our families are not hungry,"" said Abdul Malek, a farmer. Rice is the main staple in Bangladesh, home of more than 140 million people.",
" Governments should focus more on generating returns and reducing risk for investors to attract the $100 billion in aid needed by developing countries to cope with climate change, a panel of experts said on Wednesday. Rich countries are being urged to adhere to key elements of a climate accord signed in Copenhagen last year, including a promise of $10 billion a year in quick-start aid from 2010-12 for poor countries, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. ""$100 billion sounds like a lot of money ... (but) raising large amounts of money in the private sector is actually very easy,"" said Martin Lawless, head of environmental financial products at Deutsche Bank. ""Too much attention is focussed on who will provide the money. Instead it should be on the other side, how to increase returns and reduce risks. Once that is established, the finance will follow."" The United Nations urged rich nations on Tuesday to keep their pledge to give $30 billion to poor nations by 2012, saying it was ""not an impossible call"" despite budget cuts in Europe. But with worries over sovereign debt also growing, the private sector may be asked to help fill more of the funding gap. ""When you have the right proposition, the financing will come,"" said Mohsen Khalil, global head of the International Financial Corporation's new Climate Business Solutions Group. ""We're at a transition phase where the public and private sectors have to align their interests because heavy subsidies will be required initially until costs come down and we can have a large-scale sustainable business."" The panel agreed that the role of carbon markets in directing funds to financing clean energy and climate change adaptation in developing countries was shrinking. Another panel of analysts said earlier on Wednesday that market mechanisms will survive beyond 2012, but their exact shape remains unclear as international climate talks now bypass their role in favour of the wider policy picture. ""Carbon credits were good for a time, but is it the only instrument (to engage the private sector)? I don't think so,"" said Khalil. ""Against the background of recent economic turmoil, investors are particularly risk averse, so the private sector needs TLC: transparency, longevity and consistency,"" Lawless said. He cited a unilateral carbon price floor set by China in 2007 and growing uncertainty over the $144 billion global carbon market's future post-2012, when the first five-year leg of the Kyoto Protocol expires, as deterrents to investors. Key ministers and climate negotiators from China to Norway have said governments are unlikely to agree a successor to Kyoto at UN talks in Cancun, Mexico later this year.",