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Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovich was sworn in as president on Thursday and immediately pledged to fight corruption and poverty, and restore political stability to win back foreign support for the struggling economy. Yanukovich took the oath of office in a low-key ceremony which reflected a bitterly-contested election -- still disputed by his rival, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko -- and which highlighted deep divisions in the country. All the same, his inauguration marked a comeback from humiliation in 2004 when mass protests, called the Orange Revolution, overturned an election that had been rigged in his favour. Speaking to a gathering of officials, lawmakers and foreign dignitaries after accepting the traditional trappings of office, the 59-year-old Yanukovich said the country faced "colossal debts", poverty, corruption and economic collapse. "Ukraine needs a strategy of innovative movement forward and such a strategy has been worked out by our team," he said. Turning to the paucity of foreign investment in the ex-Soviet republic of 46 million, and its notoriously unpredictable business climate, he said he sought to restore political stability, end corruption and set out rules governing links between the state and business. These were all "necessary conditions for investors and international financial institutions to establish trust in Ukraine," he said. Ukraine's economy has been hit hard by the global downturn which hurt its vital exports of steel and chemicals and halved the hryvnia's value to the dollar over the past 18 months. The country is dependent on a $16.4 billion International Monetary Fund bail-out programme, but lending was suspended late last year and is only likely to resume when stability returns. The finance ministry said on Thursday that an IMF technical mission would visit on April 7. This usually leads to full-blown visit from IMF officials who may later decide whether to restart the programme. TIES WITH RUSSIA A burly former mechanic backed by wealthy industrialists, Yanukovich had a deprived childhood in eastern Ukraine and as a young man was convicted twice for petty crime including assault. He is expected to improve ties with Russia, Ukraine's former Soviet master, after five years of estrangement under the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. He has hinted at possible concessions to Moscow over the future of Russia's Black Sea fleet forces in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and has proposed the creation of a consortium including Russia to run the country's gas pipelines. However, he says he wants to change a 10-year-old agreement on supplies of Russian gas to Ukraine which was negotiated by Tymoshenko and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He also says he will pursue a balanced foreign policy and has vowed to push for closer ties with the European Union. In his speech on Thursday, he kept all his options open, saying his foreign policy would be one of "equal and mutually-advantageous ties" with Russia, the EU and the United States which would reap "maximum results" for Ukraine. His web site later quoted him as confirming he would go to Brussels next week, a visit which EU officials say will take place on Monday. He is also intending to visit Moscow in the first 10 days of March, his Regions Party said. Yanukovich beat Prime Minister Tymoshenko by 3.5 percentage points but won the support of only a third of the 37 million-strong electorate. The voting pattern highlighted a sharp split between Russian-speaking voters in the industrial east and south who backed him, and Ukrainian-speakers in the west and centre who voted for Tymoshenko. Tymoshenko dropped her legal challenge to Yanukovich's election only last Saturday. But she maintains he was not legitimately-elected and she and most of her bloc in parliament stayed away on Thursday, giving the ceremony a hollow ring. Despite Yanukovich's call for the establishment of a "competent executive power", Tymoshenko is still resisting attempts to oust her as prime minister, signalling continued political tension at least in the short-term. She is trying to persuade her allies to close ranks round her in parliament, while his party and its powerful backers are seeking to draw deputies away from her coalition and forge a new one. Forging a coalition requires some tricky horse-trading and could be a lengthy process. If Yanukovich fails to secure a new coalition, he will reluctantly have to call new parliamentary elections, further prolonging uncertainty. | null |
German authorities launched raids is six northern German states on Wednesday on concerns left-wing radicals were planning attacks to disrupt a G8 summit in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm next month, prosecutors said. The federal prosecutor's office said in a statement that some 900 security officials were involved in searches of 40 sites in Berlin, Brandenburg, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. "We suspect those targeted, who belong to the militant extreme-left scene, of founding a terrorist organisation or being members of such an organisation, that is planning arson attacks and other actions to severely disrupt or prevent the early-summer G8 summit in Heiligendamm from taking place," the office said. The statement said German security officials suspected the group of being behind nine minor attacks in the Hamburg area and three in the Berlin region over the past two years. The list of attacks included a well-publicised incident last December when a car in front of the home of deputy finance minister Thomas Mirow was set on fire and his house's windows and walls splattered with paint. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned earlier this year that there was a risk of left-wing extremists launching attacks during Germany's year-long presidency of the Group of Eight (G8) club of industrialised nations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel will host the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States at the Heiligendamm summit, which is likely to focus on climate change, global economic coordination and other hot foreign policy topics. Germany has not experienced any major left-wing violence since the militant Red Army Faction (RAF), which waged a bloody two-decade long campaign of killings and kidnappings, announced in 1998 that it was disbanding. | null |
This year, scientists are urging a focus on another potent greenhouse gas – methane – as the planet's best hope for staving off catastrophic global warming. Countries must make "strong, rapid and sustained reductions" in methane emissions in addition to slashing CO2 emissions, scientists warn in a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released Monday. The plea could cause consternation in countries opting for natural gas as a cleaner alternative to CO2-belching coal. It also could pose challenges for countries where agriculture and livestock, especially cattle, are important industries. But while both methane and CO2 warm the atmosphere, the two greenhouse gases are not equal. A single CO2 molecule causes less warming than a methane molecule, but lingers for hundreds of years in the atmosphere whereas methane disappears within two decades. The report puts "a lot of pressure on the world to step up its game on methane," said IPCC report reviewer Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington, DC. “Cutting methane is the single biggest and fastest strategy for slowing down warming,” Zaelke said. BUT WHY METHANE NOW? Today’s average global temperature is already 1.1C higher than the preindustrial average, thanks to emissions pumped into the air since the mid-1800s. But the world would have seen an additional 0.5C of warming, had skies not been filled with pollution reflecting some of the sun’s radiation back out into space, the report says. As the world shifts away from fossil fuels and tackles air pollution, those aerosols will disappear – and temperatures could spike. Quickly reducing methane could “counteract” this effect, while also improving air quality, said IPCC report summary author Maisa Rojas Corradi, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chile. On a global scale, methane emissions are responsible for around 30% of warming since the pre-industrial era, according to the United Nations. But the role of methane, aerosols and other short-lived climate pollutants had not been discussed by the IPCC until now. “The report draws attention to the immediate benefits of significant reductions in methane, both from an atmospheric concentration point of view, but also the co-benefits to human health from improved air quality,” said Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. METHANE MOMENTUM Updates in technology and recent research suggest that methane emissions from oil and gas production, landfills and livestock have likely been underestimated. The report sends a loud signal to countries that produce and consume oil and gas that they need to incorporate “aggressive oil and gas methane reduction plans into their own climate strategies,” said Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at Environmental Defense Fund. Landfill and energy company emissions might be the easiest to tackle, he said. Large-scale agricultural methane is tougher, because scaled-up replacement technology does not exist. The EU is proposing laws this year that will force oil and gas companies to monitor and report methane emissions and to repair any leaks. The United States is expected to unveil methane regulations by September that are more stringent than rules issued by the Obama administration, which were then rolled back under former President Donald Trump. The United States and the EU account for more than a third of global consumption of natural gas. But major economies without strict regulations on oil and gas production or agriculture, such as Brazil and Russia, are also likely to be high methane emitters, said IPCC co-author Paulo Artaxo, an environmental physicist at University of Sao Paulo. “(Methane) leakage from gas and also oil wells is very difficult to quantify,” he said. If countries are not looking, they will not find it. Some environmental groups and government officials have urged a global agreement on methane, such as the Montreal Protocol that tackled ozone depletion. Such an agreement could start with methane from the oil and gas industry, which already has technology to curb those emissions, said Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based climate technology group. “It's not rocket science. There's no exotic technology required here,” he said. “So let's start there.” | null |
Together, the mammoth structures proposed by scientists would completely enclose the North Sea and offer protection for tens of millions of Europeans threatened by rising sea levels caused by climate change.The scientists behind the proposal, outlined in a paper published on Thursday in the American Journal of Meteorology, said that the scale of the project — which exists only in the broadest outlines at this point — reflected the urgency of the crisis.“See this as a warning,” said one of the authors, Sjoerd Groeskamp of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “What we’re saying is: Here’s a plan, a plan we don’t want. But if we end up needing it, then it’s technically and financially feasible.”The project would be one of the largest engineering feats ever attempted on the planet and would cost anywhere from $250 billion to $550 billion, according to the proposal — a cost the authors suggest could be covered by more than a dozen Northern European countries that would be protected by the barrier.Some experts expressed doubt that damming the North Sea was the best solution for dealing with rising sea levels.“My initial reaction is skepticism,” said Craig Goff, who has been a dam safety engineer in Britain for about 20 years. “I suspect that it would be cheaper and quicker to build defenses along the coastline of Europe than to build dam structures across the North Sea.”Even the scientists behind the proposal acknowledge that attempting to dam the entire North Sea is not an ideal solution.Much better, they said, would be for the proposal to serve as an alarm, vividly illustrating the kind of drastic action that might become necessary if global leaders cannot find a way to address climate change.“It might be impossible to truly fathom the magnitude of the threat” posed by rising sea levels, the scientists wrote. “However, conceptualizing the scale of the solutions required to protect ourselves against global-mean sea level rise aids in our ability to acknowledge and understand the threat that sea level rise poses.”The other co-author of the paper, Joakim Kjellsson, a Swedish professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, said that no official proposal had been made to the nations that would be protected by the barrier.“In the end, we came to realize it’s such an extreme solution that it would be much better and much less dramatic to reduce our CO2 emissions and curb global warming so that we don’t need these kind of things,” he said in an interview.If carbon pollution continues to grow, sea level rise by 2100 could exceed 40 inches (1 meter), Groeskamp said.If nothing changes, Kjellsson said, millions of people will be forced from their homes — effectively becoming climate refugees. Even today, coastal cities such as San Francisco and Manila are faced with the consequences of sea level rise.
FILE -- The OceanAire apartment complex in Pacifica, Calif, on Dec 3, 2019. A proposal to build two huge barriers, one that would connect Norway to Scotland, the other France to England, was described as a warning about the urgency of the climate crisis and together, the mammoth structures proposed by scientists would completely enclose the North Sea and offer protection for tens of millions of Europeans threatened by rising sea levels. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)
By 2050, some 150 million people in low-lying coastal cities could find themselves below the high-tide line, threatening to submerge whole cities, according to a report by Climate Central, a science organization based in New Jersey.The proposed dams would dwarf the largest such barriers built so far — the Afsluitdijk in the Netherlands, and the Saemangeum Seawall, in South Korea, which at 21 miles in length is the world’s longest sea wall.For scale, the North Sea dams would require at least 51 billion tons of sand — roughly equal to the total annual use of that commodity in construction projects around the world.While the depths of waters are manageable in much of the proposed area to be covered, engineers would also have to contend with the Norwegian Trench, which plunges to a depth of nearly 1,000 feet.The authors say that technology used by fixed oil rigs could be adapted for the dam.Building such structures across the North Sea would forever alter the ecological makeup of the area. Isolating the sea would stop the tidal flow, eventually turning it into a freshwater lake of sorts which would make it unlivable for species that depend on salt water.That, in turn, would have economic consequences, including on the income from North Sea fishing.But, as the authors of the proposal note, the good choices become fewer as the threat of rising sea levels increases.If there is one nation that is familiar with the risks and challenges of dealing with the sea, it is the Netherlands, where much of the country exists on land below sea level.“It’s a fairly extreme plan for the far future,” said Ferdinand Diermanse, an expert on flood risk at Deltares, a Dutch research institute for water. But when talking about the possibility of a sea level rise of multiple meters, he noted, “there are no simple solutions.”c.2020 The New York Times Company FILE -- The OceanAire apartment complex in Pacifica, Calif, on Dec 3, 2019. A proposal to build two huge barriers, one that would connect Norway to Scotland, the other France to England, was described as a warning about the urgency of the climate crisis and together, the mammoth structures proposed by scientists would completely enclose the North Sea and offer protection for tens of millions of Europeans threatened by rising sea levels. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times) | null |
Maruf Mallick
bdnews24.com environment correspondent Copenhagen, Dec 12 (bdnews24.com) – The EU's climate fund commitment is not enough, Bangladesh's state minister for environment said Saturday in Copenhagen. The European Union on Friday made a commitment of 10 billion euro over three years to the climate adaptation fund being negotiated in Copenhagen, through which rich nations are expected to assist poor and vulnerable countries. But state minister Hasan Mahmud said the EU did not clarify whether their commitment was in addition to Official Development Assistance (ODA). "We (vulnerable countries) are talking about contribution in theregion of 1.5 percent of GDP by Annex 1 countries (industrialised nations) to the adaptation fund. If we see this, it will create a $400 to $600 billion fund," he told newsmen at the Bella Conference Center on the 6th day of the climate talks in the Danish capital. "We think this proposal (of the EU) is not enough to raise the total $400-600 fund for adaptation." "We are firm in our demand," he added. The state minister stressed the demand by poor/vulnerable nations for a distinct climate fund, which should be in addition to existing ODA. This fund should not be managed by financial institutions like IMF and World Bank, he added. "A separate institution that will be easily accessible and more transparent has to be created," he said. 'MVC GROUP' Hasan also said 70 percent of any fund should be allocated to least developed or most vulnerable countries, and 15 percent to Bangladesh alone. "More than one billion people are vulnerable to climate change across the world." Hasan said Bangladesh has taken an initiative to form a new group of most vulnerable countries (MVCs). "Already, we have communicated with such countries. A total of 20 countries may be brought under the new group," he added. He said G-77 or LDCs in terms of economic development are recognised by the UN. "We are trying to do something similar for climate change and get UN recognition," he said. "It is necessary to form a new group of the vulnerable countries for better negotiation," he argued. 'CLIMATE VICTIM' However, Hasan stressed, Bangladesh was the most vulnerable country, topping a Global Climate Risk Index. "Fifteen percent of the 1 billion most vulnerable people are in Bangladesh. So, 15 percent of the adaptation fund must go for Bangladesh. It is our demand". "Bangladesh is affected by almost all the negative impacts of the climate change such as sea level rise, and extreme weather. The total number of affected people would be much higher than all the small island countries," he said. Earlier in the day, a Dhaka delegation organised an open discussion, on the sideline of the conference, titled Bangladesh: Victim of Climate change. Climate expert Dr. Ainun Nishat dwelt on the impact of climate change on food and agricultural production, water management, health and infrastructure. | null |
It could produce the ultimate "hot chick flick", or it may erupt as a boiling international rant against the threat of global warming. But whichever way it goes, producers of an all-women directed interactive mobile phone film say it will be a "cinematic symphony of women's voices from around the world". The project -- entitled "Overheated Symphony -- is part of the Birds Eye View film festival taking place in London next month which showcases the work of female film-makers. Women across the world are being asked to make a short film -- a "quick flick" -- between 40 seconds and four minutes long on a mobile phone and then send it via the internet to a London-based film director who will pull them all together. Apart from the the overall theme "Overheated", there is no restriction on content or subject matter. "If it's hot, we'd like to see it," the project's Web site declares: "Ladies, wherever you are, whoever you are, we want you to join in." According to Sarah Turner, the British film director whose task it will be to create a final edit from the mobile phone contributions, the inspiration for "Overheated Symphony" was the 1927 film by German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann called "Berlin - Symphony of a Great City", which used a montage of still pictures from many sources to document city life. Like that work, Overheated Symphony will be "very abstract", says Turner. It will give those who contribute the chance to engage in a "dialogue of ideas" with women across the world. "Because they are films made by women, women's themes and issues are bound to be an integral part of the finished piece," she told Reuters. "I expect some of them to be quite intense, because this is quite an intense thing to respond to. We all have overheated moments, when we are angry about something, or upset, or when we are sexually hot. We might even end up having some menopause films, you never know." Turner is gathering the mobile films ahead of the March 2 deadline and will then produce a live edit of the symphony to be aired on March 9 at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. Rachel Millward, director of the Birds Eye View festival, which is now in its third year, says the film is as much about new technology as it is about women and heat. "The way film and media are going is very much towards interactivity and multi-platform projects," she said. "We wanted to develop a project along those lines, and also one that had a kind of gamey feel to it -- the sense that everyone can join in and have a play." "Making a film from all these female voices around the world is quite a beautiful thing, but also it's about shooting down the idea that women are not up to date with technology." Contributors are being asked on www.birds-eye-view.co.uk to upload their cinematic efforts onto the festival's own youtube channel to be edited. And while Millward admits the end result is as yet unknown, she is confident it will be far more than the sum of its parts. "The great thing about this film is that you can't predict what it will be," she says. "It could be about climate change, or it could be about passion. I imagine it will be all of those things and more." | null |
The United States may provide an incubating ground for some flu strains, helping them migrate to warmer climates, US researchers said on Thursday. For many years, researchers assumed that flu strains were mostly the product of China and Southeast Asia. But a team at the University of Michigan, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Florida State University found that not all strains of flu circulating in North America die off at the end of influenza season. Some of those appear to head to South America, and some migrate even farther, the reported. That may have happened with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, they added. "We found that although China and Southeast Asia play the largest role in the influenza A migration network, temperate regions -- particularly the USA -- also make important contributions," said Trevor Bedford of the University of Michigan, whose study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens. He and his colleagues tested genetic sequences from seasonal flu viruses collected from patients around the world between 1998 and 2009. They built a sort of family tree, charting the relationships among the viruses. The new understanding of flu may require public health officials to change some of their strategies for fighting flu, they said. For example, aggressive use of antiviral drugs such as Roche AG's Tamiflu could promote drug resistance if flu strains never really die out in the United States. "We found, for instance, that South America gets almost all of its flu from North America," Bedford said in a statement. "This would suggest that rather than giving South America the same vaccine that the rest of the world gets, you could construct a vaccine preferentially from the strains that were circulating in North America the previous season." The findings could also be used to keep better track of flu strains, the team said. "By doing this kind of research, we get a clearer idea of where in the world flu is actually coming from. We know that it's mostly Southeast Asia, but now we see that it can come out of temperate regions as well, so our surveillance needs to become more global," Bedford said. The first cases of H1N1 swine flu were diagnosed in the United States. Experts are still unsure where swine flu originated, but genetic analysis suggests it came from pigs and had been circulating for many years before it was detected. | null |
The purchase three years ago, in Exeter, promised to make his sprawling community a major hub for what seemed like Canada’s next big growth industry — legal pot — and the high-paying jobs it would bring. But before any of the 200 or so anticipated jobs in the greenhouse were filled — or before a single marijuana seed was even sown there — it became apparent that Canada was already growing far more marijuana than the market wanted. After sitting idle for two years, the 1-million-square-foot greenhouse was sold last year for about one-third of its original purchase price of 26 million Canadian dollars, or $20.75 million. Exeter’s experience with the greenhouse — high hopes, followed by disappointment — mirrors the broader Canadian story with the business side of legal pot. Analysts say one reason the sunny projections have failed to materialise is the tightly regulated distribution system introduced by Canada, which largely bans advertising and marketing. The halting rollout of stores in some provinces — particularly Ontario — is also a factor. Plus, surveys have suggested that many Canadians are simply not interested in adopting a new vice. “We were looking forward to it,” said the mayor, George Finch, standing outside Exeter’s 19th-century Town Hall. “Sounded too good almost, eh? It’s too bad. So it may well revert to vegetables again.” When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government legalised marijuana in 2018, a primary goal was to create a more equitable justice system — not a major new business sector. Investors, however, thought otherwise, and in the time leading up to legalisation, a “green rush” swept the Toronto Stock Exchange. Money poured into companies starting up to service not only the Canadian market but also eyeing other opportunities, particularly the US market, where more states were embracing legalisation. Long-dormant greenhouses were renovated and sold for record prices like the one in Exeter, and new indoor growing facilities popped up across the nation. Newspapers that had been cutting back on staff hired journalists to cover new marijuana beats. Like plastics in the film “The Graduate,” marijuana seemed destined to become Canada’s next big thing. The investment craze produced a strong echo of the dot-com stock boom of the late 1990s. And it ended with the same collapse. Even with a slight recovery propelled by the spreading legalisation in the United States — New York legalised marijuana last month, and voters in four states backed legalisation in November — one marijuana stock index is still down about 70% from its peak in 2018. And 2 1/2 years after legalisation, most marijuana producers in Canada are still reporting staggering losses. A major new competitor is looming as well; Mexico’s lawmakers legalised recreational pot use last month. So the business climate for Canada’s growers could become even more challenging. “There’s probably going to be a series of shakeouts,” said Kyle Murray, vice dean at the University of Alberta School of Business in Edmonton. “Things were way overblown. It’s very similar to the dot-com boom and then bust.” Canopy Growth, the country’s largest producer, lost CA$1.2 billion, or about $950 million, in the first nine months of its current operating year. Layoffs have swept the industry. Large producers have merged in a bid to find strength in size. The lights have been permanently switched off in many greenhouses in several provinces. The big bets on marijuana, analysts said, were made on the assumption that marijuana sales in Canada would mirror the sharp spike in liquor sales that occurred in the United States after the end of Prohibition. “Everyone thought that in Canada, the industry was going to move further, faster, and that hasn’t happened,” said Brendan Kennedy, chief executive of Tilray, a major grower based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, that lost $272 million last year. “One of the challenges around competing with the illicit market is that the regulations are so stringent.” Kennedy is among the few leaders in Canada’s marijuana industry still standing. As losses piled higher and stocks tumbled, most pioneers were shown the door. When a planned merger between Tilray and Ontario-based Aphria goes through this year, creating what is likely to be the world’s biggest cannabis company, Kennedy will remain as a director, although he will no longer be at the helm. In Ontario, the plan at first was to handle sales through a branch of the government-owned liquor store system, the way it is done in Quebec. But when a new Conservative government came to power in 2018, it swiftly canceled those plans, which left only online sales through a provincial website. Since then, the province’s plans have changed two more times, making for an uneven introduction of privately owned shops. Even after a recent increase in licensing, Ontario still has approved only 575 shops. By comparison, Alberta, which has about one-third of Ontario’s population, has 583 shops. While initial hopes for marijuana wealth were overly optimistic, Murray said he was confident that a viable business will emerge, with the rising number of Ontario shops one sign of that. That prices have dropped closer to parity with street prices should also help legal sales. “None of this means that it’s a bad market,” Murray said of the poor start. “Too much money and too many companies were involved initially. Eventually there will be some companies that are very successful for a long period of time. And if we’re lucky, they become global leaders.” One comparative bright spot has been British Columbia, previously the heart of Canada’s illegal marijuana industry. There, sales in legal stores grew 24% from June to October 2020. And in Quebec, while the government-owned cannabis store operator, Société Québécoise du Cannabis, lost nearly CA$5 million during its first fiscal year, it has since become profitable. Largely disappointed at home, some of the larger growers in Canada have pointed to foreign markets, particularly for medical marijuana, as their next great hope. But many analysts are skeptical. Mexico’s recent move toward creating the world’s largest legal market could doom most marijuana growing in Canada, said Brent McKnight, a professor at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Trade agreements will likely make it impossible for Canada to stop imports from Mexico, while Mexico’s significantly lower labor costs and warmer climate potentially give it a competitive advantage. “That would certainly put some downward pricing pressure on local growers,” he said. And as Canada’s industry is forced to consolidate to survive, some worry about who will lose out as large, publicly traded companies come to dominate the space. Long before legalisation, many of the first shops to defy Canadian marijuana laws were nonprofit “compassion clubs” selling to people who used cannabis for medicinal purposes. The current system’s emphasis on large corporate growers and profits has squeezed many people from minority communities out of the business, said Dr Daniel Werb, a public health researcher and drug policy analyst at St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Werb is part of a research group whose preliminary findings have shown that “there is a marked lack of diversity” in the leadership of the new, legal suppliers, he said. Sellers in Indigenous communities, too, have been left in limbo, generally not subjected to police raids but also outside the legal system, although Ontario has begun licensing shops in some of those communities. “I get more and more concerned about, on the one hand, the lack of ethno-racial diversity and, on the other hand, a lack of imagination around the fact that this didn’t have to be a wholly for-profit industry,” Werb said. “It seems like there was a missed opportunity to think creatively.” © 2021 The New York Times Company | null |
Without amending Canada’s Constitution, Charles will automatically succeed Queen Elizabeth II as Canada’s head of state just like every British monarch since the nation’s founding. Poll after poll shows that the 96-year-old queen who has battled some recent health issues is widely respected by Canadians. For the past several years, however, an ever-declining number of Canadians, polls show, want to swear allegiance to another British monarch, particularly Charles, who is disliked by many here and who represents an institution that many see as increasingly irrelevant to their lives. Much less clear, however, is what Canadians might do to prevent the rule of King Charles III. “Both sides in Canada are a bit at a truce,” said Philippe Lagassé, an associate professor at Carleton University and an expert on the role of the monarchy in Canada. “The monarchists get to keep the formal legal situation, they get the occasional royal tour and they get some symbolism. But the Republicans are able to say that the monarchical principle doesn’t really animate Canadian life in any significant way.” The visit by Charles and his wife, Camilla, which comes a year after the remains of hundreds of children were identified as buried on the grounds of a former residential school for Indigenous children in British Columbia, has something of an Indigenous theme. They will attend a reconciliation event in the province of Newfoundland, their first stop on the trip, and visit an Indigenous First Nation near Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories on the final day. In between, the royal couple will be in Ottawa, the capital. The trip will also feature climate-related discussions between Charles and business leaders as well as a visit to an ice road to discuss the effects of climate change in the far north. Perhaps the only mystery surrounding the visit is if handshaking, traditionally the major activity of Royal Tours, will be replaced by a more COVID-safe form of greeting. Late last month, a poll released by the Angus Reid Institute, a nonprofit public opinion research group, indicated that 55% of Canadians found the monarchy irrelevant and another 24% said it was becoming less relevant. A resounding 67% of Canadians who were questioned said they opposed the idea of Charles succeeding his mother. Large and enthusiastic crowds greeted Charles when he visited Canada with Diana, his first wife, three times. But public interest in him swiftly declined following their separation in 1992. His sometimes patronising manner does not work well in a country that values egalitarianism. The relationship between Charles’ brother Andrew and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself in a Manhattan jail, have further eroded support among Canadian for the monarchy. Their standing was further damaged after Meghan Markle, Charles’ daughter-in-law who lived in Toronto and British Columbia, said in an interview that she was subjected to racially insensitive comments by royals Still, Charles and Camilla are likely to draw crowds, particularly in St John’s, Newfoundland, where their visit will be the dominant talk of the town. Geography plays a role in how the royals are viewed. In modern times, the monarchy has never enjoyed any significant support in largely French-speaking Quebec, the second-most populous province. And Canada’s changing demographics have contributed to the spread of that sentiment elsewhere. Many immigrants to Canada come from countries like China, giving them no real connection to Britain’s monarchy. Or they have roots in countries like India where the crown is still viewed by many as a symbol of occupation and repression. “There may well be a point at which Canadians say: ‘Huh, who’s this dude on my money?’” said Shachi Kurl, the president of Angus Reid. The lingering level of support for the monarchy is thanks, in large part, to respect for the queen, Kurl said, and is probably destined to fall even further following her death. “The lack of motivation around making a change really has to do with a genuine affection for her as much as anything,” she said. Barbados dropped the queen as its head of state and became a republic in November in a ceremony witnessed by Prince Charles and Rihanna. Six other Caribbean nations may follow suit. Separate tours of the Caribbean this year by Prince Edward, Charles’ brother, and Prince William, the future king’s son, were the subject of protests against the monarchy and Britain’s brutal history with slavery. The protests forced the cancellation of some stops. Rather than worrying about protests, the organisers of Charles’ trip to Canada seem to have made efforts to ensure that he simply has an audience. Aside from a wreath-laying ceremony at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, there are no real opportunities for crowds in major cities to gather. Instead, he will visit Quidi Vidi, a neighbourhood and fishing village in St John’s, a city with a population of 114,000 people, where an appearance by any international celebrity, popular or not, is bound to be a major event. The system for amending Canada’s Constitution to remove the British monarch as head of state makes such a step extremely difficult, according to Lagassé and Kurl. Replacing the British monarch with a Canadian head of state would require the unanimous consent of the federal government and all 10 provinces. In a country where politics are driven by regionalism, attaining that consent might be impossible. “Any talk of constitutional change is political kryptonite to most politicians,” Kurl said. “They would prefer not to go there and just look at their shoes.” One workaround, Lagassé said, might be to accelerate a long-running process of simply diminishing the monarch’s presence in Canada. He said that since 1947 the Queen’s powers, which are mostly symbolic, have been assigned to the governor-general, her official representative in Canada. There are, Lagassé said, a number of steps the Canadian government can take without legislation, let alone meddling with the constitution. The queen once appeared on all of Canada’s bank notes. Removing her from the last remaining one, the 20 dollar bill, poses no legal issue, he said, nor would replacing the royal effigy on coins. No law requires the monarch’s portrait to hang in government offices or, for that matter, mandates royal tours. “There’s a whole bunch of these things, the soft underbelly of monarchical symbolism, that can be altered,” Lagassé said. “The general approach now in Canada is that the monarchy is there, it’s not broken. Don’t deal with it, but also don’t give it any more room than it actually needs.” © 2022 The New York Times Company | null |
Washington, Feb 18 (BDNEWS)-Scientists say they have "compelling" evidence that ocean warming over the past 40 years can be linked to the industrial release of carbon dioxide, according to wire service report. US researchers compared the rise in ocean temperatures with predictions from climate models and found human activity was the most likely cause. In coming decades, the warming will have a dramatic impact on regional water supplies, they predict. Details of the study were released at a major science meeting in Washington DC. The team used several scenarios to try to explain the oceanic observations, including natural climate variability, solar radiation and volcanic emissions, but all fell short. "What absolutely nailed it was greenhouse warming," said Dr Barnett. This model reproduced the observed temperature changes in the oceans with a statistical confidence of 95%, conclusive proof - say the researchers - that global warming is being caused by human activities. Regional water supplies will be dramatically affected by climate change in the decades immediately ahead, say the team. In the South American Andes and western China, millions of people could be left without adequate water during the summer due to accelerated melting of glaciers. "If the snow pack melts sooner, and if societies don't have the ability catch all of that water, they're going to end up with water shortages in the summer," Dr Barnett explained. According to the Scripps researcher, political leadership was now needed to avert a global disaster. The researchers said," Hopefully we can get the US cranked around in that direction. I think the first thing to do is figure out the global warming-related problems we have ahead of us around the world". "Unless we know what we're dealing with, I think it's going to be pretty hard to fix it." | null |
Olesya Dmitracova London Mar 15 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Activist group, Egality, is inviting British voters to give their right to vote to someone in one of three developing countries which, it says, are "directly affected by UK policies on war, climate and poverty." Britons can register from Monday on www.giveyourvote.org to donate votes to Afghans, Bangladeshis or Ghanaians and, on the eve of the election -- expected on May 6 -- they will receive a text message telling them who wants to vote for which party. "I've voted in the past but I find that this is a really exciting way for my vote to be important and to count ... Our actions in this country are responsible for so much all over the world," said student Fanny Rhodes-James, 23, who plans to donate her vote. Hundreds of Britons have already committed their votes, Egality says, adding it expects thousands to register. At the last two general elections in 2001 and 2005, national turnout in Britain slumped to around 60 percent, compared to 77 percent in 1992. "When we complain that our political parties are all the same, that voting changes nothing, we're missing the vital perspective of vulnerable people in developing nations -- people whose livelihoods can be destroyed by the stroke of a pen in an anonymous office in Whitehall," Egality said in a statement. Whitehall is shorthand for British government departments. Ghanaian Kwabena Okai Ofosuhene says one of the reasons he wants a vote in the British election is Britain's influence on international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, which are "key to development in Ghana." "UK is one of the leading economies in the world and one of Ghana's leading trading partners," he told Reuters by telephone. Britain's political clout is another factor, added Ofosuhene who works for a non-governmental organization. "America would not have gone to Iraq without the UK backing it, or to Afghanistan without the UK," he said. Britain is one of the world's biggest donors of development and humanitarian aid, with the government saying it donated 5.5 billion pounds ($8.34 billion) between 2008 and 2009. Would-be voters in the three participating countries can contact Egality with questions for British politicians and British volunteers can put them to their local parliamentary representatives, in local debates or via media channels. "We are essentially running a UK election campaign (in those countries), not dissimilar to what the Electoral Commission does in the UK," said campaign coordinator May Abdalla. An Electoral Commission spokesman said that if people were not being paid for votes, there was nothing illegal in Egality campaign and said he had not heard of a similar campaign before. | null |
President-elect Barack Obama shifts his focus to the second half of his White House Cabinet next week with decisions pending in the high-profile areas of energy, the environment, trade and agriculture. Obama, who takes over for President George W. Bush on January 20, has already put his economic and national security team in place, but has made it clear that other areas -- especially climate change policy -- will be priorities too. Officials within his transition team have kept quiet about a handful of names making the rounds for each of those posts. Obama will hold a news conference on Sunday, the anniversary of Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War Two, to discuss "the contributions of those that have served our nation," his office said in a statement. He is also to appear on a Sunday television news program where he may be asked about plans for further appointments. One important supporter during Obama's campaign, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, is a top contender for an administration post, possibly as energy or agriculture secretary. "Governor Sebelius is honored to be mentioned as a potential secretary and will do whatever she can to help the Obama administration," her spokeswoman said in an e-mail, declining to comment on "hypothetical" jobs. The popular Democratic governor, who was on Obama's short list of potential vice presidential picks earlier this year, has made a big push for renewable energy in Kansas, setting a target for 20 percent of the state's energy needs to be met with wind by 2020. Obama has promised to increase U.S. use of renewable energy sources in order to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers of oil. CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT Industry sources said Dan Reicher, climate director at Google.org and a former Energy Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration, was also a strong contender for energy secretary. Speaking to Reuters on Thursday, he declined to address his prospects but said he enjoyed being on Obama's transition team. Another observer said John Podesta, Clinton's White House chief of staff and now co-chair of Obama's transition team, may also be in consideration for energy secretary or climate "czar," a White House position being created by Obama to spearhead climate change policy. Carol Browner, who was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Clinton and currently leads Obama's energy and environment task force, is a top contender for the climate chief position, said one source with knowledge of the process, adding a decision was expected in the coming weeks. The source said vetting for those positions was not completed and Obama officials were still working out how a climate official in the White House would affect the roles of other policy players. Names mentioned for EPA administrator include Lisa Jackson, who has served as commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection in New Jersey, and Mary Nichols, an assistant administrator for the EPA under Clinton. In the area of trade, Obama met on Thursday with California Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra to discuss the job of chief trade negotiator, a Democratic source said. Becerra, who has a record of caution on international trade agreements, would be the first Hispanic to hold the job. Two other Democrats from the US House of Representatives, John Salazar of Colorado and Sanford Bishop of Georgia, along with Sebelius, are the top candidates for agriculture secretary, according to two farm lobbyists who spoke on condition of anonymity. Vice President-elect Joe Biden announced he had chosen Jared Bernstein as his chief economist and economic policy adviser. Bernstein served as deputy chief economist for the Department of Labor from 1995 to 1996. | null |
A new global deal on climate change should be achieved at a meeting in Copenhagen next year despite disagreement at talks this week, the head of the UN climate change secretariat said on Tuesday. "I really am confident that at the end of the day, the deal will be struck," Yvo de Boer said in a speech at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. His comments came a day after the European Union and environmentalists at U.N.-led talks in Bonn called for action on climate change but were met by reluctance from the United States, which said it was too early for substantial steps. The Copenhagen meeting at the end of next year is intended to agree a new treaty on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that would come into force after the first round of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. De Boer said growing public awareness of the cost of failure to take action on global warming would push governments into taking action, particularly after the agreement reached at the Bali summit on climate change last year. "I think that the world is expecting an agreed outcome in Copenhagen," he said. "Just as no self-respecting politician could leave the conference in Bali without negotiations being launched, I believe that no self respecting politician can leave Copenhagen without the deal having been concluded." He said the new pact should be tight and focused and should leave national governments as free as possible to shape and implement their own policies. "For the Copenhagen agreement to be really successful, it should be as short as possible and focus on the main issues that you can only make effective through an international agreement," he said. "I hope that not all kinds of stuff will be loaded on that doesn't really belong in that agreement." Speaking to reporters earlier, De Boer said that concrete action from the United States had been hindered by the presidential election but he believed that all main candidates in the race had shown real awareness of the need for action. He refused to criticize the U.S. stance, saying Washington had acted responsibly in declining to lay down commitments that would concern a future administration. He said he hoped for an advance next year. | null |
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke visit their ancestral homeland this week to press China to join with the United States in stepped-up efforts to fight global warming. The two Chinese-American cabinet officials arrive in Beijing on Tuesday to talk with senior Chinese leaders and highlight how working together to cut greenhouse gas emissions would benefit both countries and the entire planet. The trip also sets the stage for a visit by President Barack Obama to China later this year that many environmental experts hope will focus on the need for joint US-China action before a meeting in Copenhagen in December to try to forge a global deal on reducing the emissions. They believe cooperation, perhaps even a bilateral deal, between the world's largest developed country and the world's largest developing country is vital if efforts to forge a new global climate treaty are to succeed. "The potential is very large and the need is very serious," said Kenneth Lieberthal, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute, a US think tank. "It's not one of those things where one side benefits and the other side pays." In recent years, China has surpassed the United States to become the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming, although its per capita emissions are still far lower. Chu, a Nobel physicist who has devoted years to climate change issues, is expected to make the case for US and Chinese action to rein in rising global temperatures in a speech on Wednesday at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "We face an unprecedented threat to our very way of life from climate change," Chu told US senators last week, warning the world could experience a climatic shift as profound as the last Ice Age but in the opposite direction. Locke, a former governor from the export-oriented state of Washington, is eager to showcase opportunities for China to reduce carbon dioxide emissions using US solar, wind, water and other renewable technology. "There's a huge need in China which creates huge market opportunities for our companies. At the same time, there are big challenges," a Commerce Department official said. PUSH BEIJING China relies on coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel, for over two-thirds of its energy needs and that dependence is expected to continue for decades to come. The United States has the world's largest coal reserves and relies on coal for about 22 percent of its energy needs, creating a big incentive for the two countries to collaborate on technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions and inject them far underground instead of into the air. "That's at the top of the list," David Sandalow, assistant energy secretary for policy and international affairs, told Reuters in a pre-trip interview. "We believe we can do more working together than separately." China's drive to build new nuclear power plants also has caught the attention of US companies. As Obama pushes Congress to complete work on a bill to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions, he is under tremendous pressure to get China to agree to a quantitative emissions cap at December's meeting in Copenhagen. Without such a commitment, a new climate change treaty is unlikely to pass the US Senate, said Stuart Eizenstat, who was lead US negotiator for the December 1997 Kyoto climate treaty, which was never ratified by the United States. Although Chu and Locke are not going to Beijing for talks on a bilateral climate deal, the United States hopes closer cooperation with China will contribute to a favorable outcome in Copenhagen, Sandalow said. China joined with 16 other major world economies last week in setting a goal of holding the global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. But it has refused to set a short-term target for cutting emissions. Beijing argues it has been industrializing for only a short time and that strict caps now would hamper growth and urbanization efforts in a country where most people live in much poorer conditions than in the West. Still, the country's latest five-year plan set a goal of reducing energy intensity by 20 percent by the end of 2010. China has also set a target of using renewable energy to meet 15 percent of total demand by 2020. The Obama administration should push Beijing to translate such goals into binding international commitments as "a first step," Eizenstat said. Eventually, China will have to agree to emission caps but that is unlikely this December in Copenhagen, he said. | null |
But it turns out that it is not, as was previously stated in
a number of reports, including by The New York Times, Elon Musk’s SpaceX that
will be responsible for making a crater on the lunar surface. Instead, the cause is likely to be a piece of a rocket
launched by China’s space agency. Last month, Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, a suite
of astronomical software used to calculate the orbits of asteroids and comets,
announced that the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was on a trajectory
that would intersect with the path of the moon. The rocket had launched the
Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration on Feb. 11, 2015. Gray had been tracking this rocket part for years, and in
early January, it passed within 6,000 miles of the surface of the moon, and the
moon’s gravity swung it around on a path that looked like it might crash on a
subsequent orbit. Observations by amateur astronomers when the object zipped
past Earth again confirmed the impending impact inside Hertzsprung, an old,
315-mile-wide crater. But an email Saturday from Jon Giorgini, an engineer at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, changed the story. Giorgini runs Horizons, an online database that can generate
locations and orbits for the almost 1.2 million objects in the solar system,
including about 200 spacecraft. A user of Horizons asked Giorgini how certain
it was that the object was part of the DSCOVR rocket. “That prompted me to look
into the case,” Giorgini said. He found that the orbit was incompatible with the trajectory
that DSCOVR took, and contacted Gray. “My initial thought was, I’m pretty sure that I got it
right,” Gray said Sunday. But he started digging through his old emails to remind himself
about when this object was first spotted in March 2015, about a month after the
launch of DSCOVR. Almost every new object spotted in the sky is an asteroid,
and that was the assumption for this object too. It was given the designation
WE0913A. However, it turned out that WE0913A was orbiting Earth, not
the sun, which made it more likely to be something that came from Earth. Gray
chimed in that he thought it might be part of the rocket that launched DSCOVR.
Further data confirmed that WE0913A went past the moon two days after the
launch of DSCOVR, which appeared to confirm the identification. Gray now realises that his mistake was thinking that DSCOVR
was launched on a trajectory toward the moon and using its gravity to swing the
spacecraft to its final destination about 1 million miles from Earth where the
spacecraft provides warning of incoming solar storms. But, as Giorgini pointed out, DSCOVR was actually launched
on a direct path that did not go past the moon. “I really wish that I had reviewed that” before putting out
his January announcement, Gray said. “But yeah, once Jon Giorgini pointed it
out, it became pretty clear that I had really gotten it wrong.” SpaceX, which did not respond to a request for comment,
never said WE0913A was not its rocket stage. But it probably has not been
tracking it, either. Most of the time, the second stage of a Falcon 9 is pushed
back into the atmosphere to burn up. In this case, the rocket needed all of its
propellant to deliver DSCOVR to its distant destination. However, the second stage, unpowered and uncontrolled, was
in an orbit unlikely to endanger any satellites, and people likely did not keep
track of it. “It would be very nice if the folks who are putting these
boosters into high orbits would publicly disclose what they put up there and
where they were going rather than my having to do all of this detective work,”
Gray said. But if this was not the DSCOVR rocket, what was it? Gray
sifted through other launches in the preceding months, focusing on those headed
toward the moon. “There’s not much in that category,” Gray said. The top candidate was a Long March 3C rocket that launched
China’s Chang’e-5 T1 spacecraft on Oct. 23, 2014. That spacecraft swung around
the moon and headed back to Earth, dropping off a small return capsule that
landed in Mongolia. It was a test leading up to the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020
that successfully scooped up moon rocks and dust and brought them back for
study on Earth. Running a computer simulation of the orbit of WE0913A back
in time showed that it would have made a close lunar flyby on Oct 28, five days
after the Chinese launch. In addition, orbital data from a cubesat that was attached
to the third stage of the Long March rocket “are pretty much a dead ringer” to
WE0913A, Gray said. “It’s the sort of case you could probably take to a jury
and get a conviction.” More observations this month shifted the prediction of when
the object will strike the moon by a few seconds and a few miles to the east.
“It still looks like the same thing,” said Christophe Demeautis, an amateur
astronomer in northeast France. There is still no chance of it missing the moon. The crash will occur at about 7:26 am Eastern time, but
because the impact will be on the far side of the moon, it will be out of view
of Earth’s telescopes and satellites. As for what happened to that Falcon 9 part, “we’re still
trying to figure out where the DSCOVR second stage might be,” Gray said. The best guess is that it ended up in orbit around the sun
instead of the Earth, and it could still be out there. That would put it out of
view for now. There is precedent for pieces of old rockets coming back: In
2020, a newly discovered mystery object turned out to be part of a rocket
launched in 1966 for NASA’s robotic Surveyor missions to the moon. ©2022 The New York Times Company | null |
Speaking at a seminar on “Bangladesh in 2017 Davos: Some Reflections”, Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali on Sunday said Professor Klaus Schwab wrote the letter four days back. Hasina was the first elected leader of Bangladesh invited for the prestigious forum this year from Jan 17 to Jan 20. Ali said this was indeed in “recognition of the visionary leadership of the Prime Minister and the way she is taking Bangladesh towards stability, development and prosperity with her ‘Vision 2021’”. “This was further vindicated by Prof Schwab’s letter,” he said. The WEF annual meeting in Switzerland remains the leading platform for engaging the world’s top leaders in collaborative activities to shape the global, regional and industrial agenda at the beginning of each year. Leaders share their insights and innovations on how to best navigate the future in this Forum. Newly elected UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will also attend the meeting. Hasina was invited in six sessions related to water, climate change, sustainable development, the digital economy where she shared the progress made in Bangladesh. She also shared her perspective on future growth – the opportunities as well as the challenges she envisaged. “In fact, on a number of occasions, speaking as a voice of the wider developing world, her perspectives helped other panellists appreciate the complexities of the kind of challenges we face,” the foreign minister said. “While doing so the kind of challenges and limitations of a developing country was well articulated for charting possible solutions or pathways.” Ali said some might argue that “many of the prognosis or analyses in Davos may not apply to our situation or Davos does not offer ‘concrete solutions’, but we need to appreciate that these discussions." It provides a set of useful, relevant writings and pointers into scenarios that are likely to emerge as we develop ourselves to the next level, he added. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, MCCI, jointly organised the seminar in a Dhaka hotel. MCCI President Barrister Nihad Kabir was also present, among others. | null |
South African President Thabo Mbeki said he believed Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe will step down peacefully and that the chief challenge for the region was to ensure Zimbabwe has free and fair elections next year. Mbeki told Tuesday's Financial Times he had started mediation following his appointment last week by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to spearhead efforts to resolve Zimbabwe's crisis. Asked if the 83-year-old Mugabe -- accused of electoral abuses and economic mismanagement by the opposition -- would eventually stand down, Mbeki said he believed he would. "I think so. Yes, sure," Mbeki said. "You see, President Mugabe and the leadership of (the ruling) ZANU-PF believe they are running a democratic country." "That's why you have an elected opposition, that's why it's possible for the opposition to run municipal government (in Harare and Bulawayo)," he said in an interview. The SADC appointed Mbeki to act as mediator between Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) when it held a summit in Tanzania last week after the Zimbabwe government's violent March 11 crackdown on political opponents. The South African leader dismissed suggestions that Zimbabwe's neighbours could force change in the country. "We don't have a big stick," he said, adding a joint approach by African leaders could pave the way to a settlement. Mbeki said his office had already been in contact with both of the MDC's main factions and ZANU-PF to draw up a negotiating framework for next year's elections, in which Mugabe has already been endorsed as the ZANU-PF candidate. Mbeki said the future talks would likely focus on MDC demands for legal and electoral reforms, including the strict media and security laws which critics say Mugabe has used to entrench his power in the country. "I am quite clear from previous interactions with the MDC we have had they will raise questions ... like legislation affecting the media, legislation about holding of public meetings," Mbeki said in the online transcript of his interview. "We will then engage ZANU-PF saying it is necessary to respond to all of these. We may very well come to a stage later when they will have to sit together to agree ... (on) what they will do to create a climate conducive to free and fair elections." The MDC's principal leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, said in Johannesburg he would be willing to commit to any election that could be guaranteed free and fair, but said it would require quick action from Mbeki to create the appropriate conditions. The SADC, criticised in the West for turning a blind eye to Mugabe's crackdown, hopes its appointment of Mbeki will lead to direct talks between Mugabe and the MDC although previous attempts to broker political agreement have ended in failure. The West accuses Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe's independence from Britain in 1980, of authoritarian rule and economic mismanagement. Mugabe says he is being punished for seizing white-owned farms to give to landless blacks. | null |
"I didn't want to do it, I wasn't looking for trouble," Stone told Reuters. But the 70-year-old director, known for films such as "JFK", "Natural Born Killers" and "Wall Street", said he changed his mind after he met with Snowden in Russia. "Although I was worried about it still being boring and dull, I saw it as a dramatic thriller. I felt like it wouldn't get an audience as a documentary-type film," Stone said.
"Snowden", out in theatres on Friday, traces Snowden's journey from a conservative CIA agent to a disillusioned NSA operative until he fled the United States in 2013 and exposed the government's mass surveillance programmes of ordinary people. He is now living in Russia and is wanted by the US government on espionage charges. Amnesty International and two other groups this week launched a campaign to have him pardoned. Stone and Snowden met a few times in Russia and agreed that the film was going to be a dramatisation. Then the film hit a wall when Stone went to studios for financing. The director declined to name which studios he had approached. "We live in that climate - this is definitely, I believe, self-censorship," Stone said. "I don't believe the NSA called anybody and said 'don't do this'. Who knows? But the truth is ... you either join the club or you're excluded."
Eventually, Open Road Films, a joint venture by theatre chains Regal Entertainment Group and Dalian Wanda Group-owned AMC Entertainment that distributed this year's Oscar-winning journalism drama "Spotlight", stepped in to co-finance "Snowden", made for about $40 million. The film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden and Shailene Woodley as his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, was shot mostly in Europe, with Germany providing production subsidies and becoming the stand-in for Maryland, where Snowden grew up. Then there were issues making a story about computer coding and programmers engaging for audiences.
"You don't have violence, you don't have chases, you don't have guns. You have to really understand, try to understand the world and make it exciting," Stone said. Stone did shoot key scenes in Washington DC and in Hawaii, and had Gordon-Levitt and Woodley act out a date scene in front of the White House. "Well, if you're going to take a risk in the US, you might as well go the full hog, right?" the director said with a laugh. | null |
Rival Premier League managers Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger joined forces on Thursday to support Kevin Keegan and Alan Curbishley who resigned from their jobs two weeks ago on points of principle. Both men quit only three games into the season with Curbishley leaving West Ham claiming that the club's board had undermined him over transfers. Keegan left Newcastle citing interference from directors as the main reason for his resignation. "I admire Kevin Keegan and I admire Alan Curbishley because they went on a matter of principle and the principle being I am not in control of my team any longer," Manchester United manager Ferguson told Sky Sports News at a League Managers Association dinner at Wembley Stadium. "Players were being sold over their heads without even acknowledging them. That is not acceptable. It is not why you set out to be a manager, on the whims of a chairman. Arsenal manager Wenger said: "If you have no control, but are responsible for success or for failure, that is terrible. "The manager is the most important man at the club, if not why do you sack the manager if it isn't going well?" Ferguson, who has been in charge of Manchester United for nearly 22 years, and Wenger, who is coming up to 12 years at Arsenal, are the two longest-serving managers in the Premier League. "In the modern climate of young chairmen and very rich chairmen, you really need to be successful and you have to manage different things from when Arsene and I started," Ferguson said. MUTUAL RESPECT "Yes, there are financial constraints we are all aware of that but when you change halfway through from the start of the season, and the manager is subjected to these problems, it's no longer the same job. "And so therefore they walk because it's a matter of principle and I totally agree with it." The pair also discussed the amount of overseas money pouring into the Premier League, highlighted by the Abu Dhabi United Group's takeover of Manchester City. The group have said they will try and sign Cristiano Ronaldo from United and Cesc Fabregas from Arsenal in the January transfer window. Wenger said he thought big investment could destabilise the league. "New people are coming in for different reasons now," he said. "In England we had a generation of fans whose ambition was to buy the club of their dreams. Those days are gone. Now people are coming in for different reasons, maybe money or glory. "To have more money in the League is a good thing, but the inflationary pressure of having too much money is destabilising for other clubs, it puts a huge pressure on their resources." Although the two men are fierce rivals, they smiled and joked with each other. "There is a much better understanding and mutual respect now," said Wenger. Ferguson added: "We've sat and shared a glass of wine and a meal on many occasions on coaching conferences in Geneva. Of course there is respect. We've both got great teams and have had incredible competition over the last decade." | null |
CANBERRA, Nov 17, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - After months of stalemate, Australia's government could finally seal an agreement for its sweeping carbon trade scheme by early next week after the opposition said on Tuesday they were confident of a deal. The government wants carbon trading to start in July 2011, covering 75 percent of emissions in what could become the second domestic trading platform outside of Europe. But laws governing the scheme have been stalled for months, unable to win parliamentary approval because of intense opposition from rival lawmakers. The government, short of a majority in the Senate, has been negotiating changes with the main opposition bloc to secure extra votes needed to pass the carbon laws. Opposition negotiator Ian Macfarlane is confident his side would now support a deal. "I remain confident that we'll get an outcome that I can take to the party room, and that the party room can consider. On that basis, I'd be optimistic that the party room would support it," Macfarlane told reporters. He said negotiations on the laws, which were introduced into the Senate on Tuesday, would continue all week and into the coming weekend. The opposition would then vote early next week on wether to support or reject the laws. The government has already bowed to a key opposition demand to permanently exclude agriculture, which accounts for around 16 percent of Australian emissions, but the opposition also wants more concessions for coal miners. The carbon trade bills were defeated in the Senate a first time in August, and could provide a trigger for an early election if they are rejected a second time this month. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants the package of 11 bills passed before he attends December's global climate talks in Copenhagen. The Senate is due to adjourn for the year on Nov. 26, although Rudd has offered to extend the sitting if needed. The opposition Liberal and National party coalition is deeply divided over climate policy, and opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has promised his lawmakers they would have a chance to approve or reject any deal with the government. The divisions resurfaced at a closed-door opposition party room meeting on Tuesday, when 10 opposition lawmakers said the party should vote against the scheme no matter what amendments were negotiated. However, a party spokesman said more than 10 lawmakers spoke in favour of Turnbull's policy to negotiate changes. Turnbull, well behind in opinion polls, wants a deal to head off the threat of an early election. The government is seven seats short of a majority in the Senate. Junior Climate Minister Greg Combet on Tuesday said opposition divisions were the greatest threat to the carbon trade scheme, which is the centrepiece of Rudd's policy to fight global warming. "The coalition is clearly split, with the Nationals gone off on their own course of action, and the Liberal and National parties fundamentally divided over the issue of climate change," Combet told parliament. Australia's carbon debate is being closely watched overseas, particularly in the United States where lawmakers are debating their own proposals. Neighbouring New Zealand is also trying to pass revised emissions trading laws. To read in-depth articles on Australasian carbon risks and opportunities, visit Carbon Central -- Australia's Climate Change Hub here), which brings together several of Australia's leading climate-change advisers and solution-providers in one place. For additional news and analysis on global carbon markets, click here and sign up to our free Carbon Interactive newsletter. | null |
Trained in soldering, she aspired to a career in electrical work but hemmed saris for her husband's tailor shop in the west Indian city of Pune until two years ago, when she found work in the country's fast-expanding electric vehicle (EV) sector. Kumbhar's ambition, stalled by motherhood and safety worries about working in a roadside electrical shop, has now taken wings as she assembles circuits for EV speedometers at a factory in Pune - her first job as a formal worker with fixed wages. She is one of a small but growing group of women blazing a trail amid India's EV boom, driven by record sales and a policy push, as the government seeks to cut planet-heating emissions by promoting the use of electric scooters, rickshaws and cars run on power that is set to become increasingly clean over time. Despite concerns over safety and quality, as well as a shortage of charging stations, demand for EVs is outstripping supply - and as firms ramp up production, they are offering rare jobs to women in an auto industry that has been male-dominated. "I work fixed hours and I am financially independent," said Kumbhar, assembling circuits with pink-gloved fingers on an all-female shop-floor at Kinetic Communications, a manufacturer of EV components and a subsidiary of Indian auto-maker Kinetic Group. "My soldering is good and I may get a promotion. This was my dream," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The factory's workforce is about four-fifths women, which goes against the grain in India, where only 20% of women are in the labour force. The South Asian nation has one of the world's lowest female participation rates, far below the global average of 47% of women employed or seeking a job compared with 74% of men. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated India's gender gap, as nearly half of women lost their jobs across the formal and informal sectors during lockdowns and had not returned to work by the end of 2020, research shows. Yet in the past two years, as sales of EVs surged by over 200% in India and more factories sprang up to produce them, the doors have started to open for women in manufacturing, design and leadership roles. In contrast to manufacturing of internal combustion engine vehicles, which relies on heavy machinery, EV companies are focused on electronics, assembly, software and design - skill-sets more widely available among women, industry analysts say. Labour rights advocates see women's comparative advantage in the EV business as an opportunity to increase their pay and strengthen their status and influence in the workplace. Rashmi Urdhwareshe, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, noted that startups in the EV ecosystem are bringing in new ideas and, unlike legacy auto firms with a conventional male workforce, are building their business from scratch. Ride-hailing firm Ola Cabs and Italian motor manufacturer Piaggio have set up all-women shop-floors at their India-based factories in the last year. And Kinetic Green and fellow leading EV makers Hero Electric and Ather Energy plan to expand and employ largely women. Battery-maker Esmito Solutions and EV manufacturing majors Kinetic Green and Mahindra Electric, meanwhile, are helmed by women, as is the federal power ministry's energy transition company. Urdhwareshe, one of the few women in India's auto industry when she started work in the 1980s, said women have the mindset needed to navigate the challenges of a fledgling business, because they care about safety and value for money. "But there are not enough women yet, and the few that are there are trend-setting examples," she emphasised.
Mahindra's, e2oPlus, operated by Indian ride-hailing company Ola, is seen at an electric vehicle charging station in Nagpur, India Jan 24, 2018. REUTERS/Aditi Shah
BREAKING BIAS Mahindra's, e2oPlus, operated by Indian ride-hailing company Ola, is seen at an electric vehicle charging station in Nagpur, India Jan 24, 2018. REUTERS/Aditi Shah Prabhjot Kaur, the co-founder and CEO of Esmito, a startup producing batteries and battery-swapping stations for EVs, remembers having to patiently explain her job in meetings where she was often the only woman. "I would be asked two, three, four times about what I do. I remember the faces and expressions of everyone who assumed I was a secretary, and then saw me take the floor to make my presentation," said the 42-year-old with a smile. Sulajja Firodia Motwani, founder and CEO of Kinetic Green, has also been in Kaur's shoes. After finishing university and returning from the United States in the mid-1990s, she joined her family's auto business, only to be met with scepticism by staff. "They thought I was a privileged daughter who was here for a little time and that I would disappear in a few days," said Motwani, 51. Kaur and Motwani have faced other challenges common to most women in the EV corporate world, from a lack of female toilets to not being taken seriously by colleagues. More positively, many women leaders and shop-floor workers told the Thomson Reuters Foundation their parents had been their loudest cheerleaders, with fathers especially egging them on to pursue their ambitions. Born and brought up in Rajpura, a small town in largely agrarian northern Punjab state, Kaur traces her determination back to her desire to hold her own in the karate classes she took as a teenager - the only girl in a class of 50. Kaur did not want to go, but her father persuaded her. "I was very angry and it translated into me being the best student," she said. "It also taught me not to fear my surroundings and so I never feared large groups of men." As a child, Motwani whiled away the hours in her grandfather's office, scribbling away on its walls - but when she came back armed with a degree from Carnegie Mellon University, she still had to prove her worth. "I have earned my place in the industry... I never took this platform for granted. I was back at work four days after my baby was born," said Motwani, sitting in the same office. In her early days, she travelled across 200 districts to get to know the firm's dealership network. But it is not just female CEOs who are helping steer India's EV surge - there are also thousands of women factory workers. Nasreen Banu, 25, was the first woman from her family to study and find a job. As a production supervisor on scooter manufacturer Ather's battery assembly line, she said she was ready to "break the bias about what girls can and cannot do". "I love the job and I know how everything here works," she said. "A battery weighs 25 kg and we often hear that girls can't lift it, but I do," she said on a break during her shift at the Ather factory in Hosur in southern Tamil Nadu state. E-MOBILITY FOR ALL? In India's capital, New Delhi, Mahua Acharya heads Convergence Energy Services Limited (CESL), the federal power ministry's energy transition company. With an environmental management degree from Yale and experience in green finance, renewable energy and carbon markets, Acharya views heading up CESL as an opportunity to "get EVs deployed on Indian roads at scale". "I spend a lot of time thinking of business models and innovative ways to put these vehicles on the road," she said. Government incentives and tax benefits for manufacturers and buyers have supported a rise in the production and sales of EVs, which so far currently number a million, or nearly 2% of all vehicles on Indian roads. CESL is trying to push these still small numbers higher by setting up more charging stations, facilitating easy loans for buyers and placing bulk orders for public transport vehicles in cities, making them more affordable. But Acharya's vision for scale faces obstacles ranging from out-of-stock vehicles and limited supplies of batteries and semiconductors, to safety concerns and too few charging stations mainly fed by fossil-fuel power. As a woman heading the government's e-mobility push, she has not faced bias personally, despite often being the only woman in meetings alongside 15 men, she said. In her experience, women bring up issues men fail to spot, such as flagging the importance of locating EV charging stations "in an area that is safe, not far away or grungy-looking", rather than based solely on electricity and land availability. The perspective and nuance brought by women is welcomed by some in the industry. "We (men) are cut-throat, but discussions are more malleable with them," said Sohinder Singh Gill, CEO of Hero Electric and director general of the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles. About eight years ago, at a meeting with major auto brand representatives - all men - discussing the future of EVs in India, Motwani remembers wondering why they were talking only about cars and Tesla. She spoke out over the chatter to draw attention to the fact that, in India, 90% of people used two- and three-wheeled vehicles or buses, while only 10% drove cars. Her persistence led the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers to set up a focus group on two and three-wheelers, which she was asked to champion. That has enabled her to "contribute and make a difference" to India's new policy for electric vehicles - which she said pays attention to green mobility for the masses. SAFETY FEARS As EV demand outstrips supply in India, the excitement in the business is palpable, despite its teething troubles. Conversations with EV company CEOs are peppered with hopeful predictions that the "sunrise industry" will account for 30% of all vehicle sales sooner than India's target year of 2030. Those working in policy speak of an "unprecedented" response by Indian states to make the EV switch - which promises to reduce crude-oil import costs and nudge India closer to its target to cut emissions to net zero by 2070, announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last November. But beyond the smiling faces of new EV users on social media with their brightly-coloured wheels, the industry faces some big barriers: from e-scooters bursting into flames to a lack of charging points that is eroding buyer confidence. Delhi resident Dolly Maurya, 26, took advantage of a state subsidy and purchased a lilac-coloured electric rickshaw in April, but she fears taking it out in a sprawling city that only has about 600 charging stations. "If the battery gets discharged, where will I go? How will I take it home?" asked Maurya, who wants to use the vehicle for part-time work transporting passengers around the capital as she prepares for an entrance test for a government job. Other concerns are mounting among EV users as sales rise. Esmito's Kaur has tracked recent cases of e-scooters catching fire with an increasing sense of dismay. "It is worrying, because it sends out the wrong signals at a time when the industry is growing," said Kaur, who is set to scale up her manufacturing, currently done in the basement car park of the IIT research park in Chennai. Kaur - also the founder of the Centre for Battery Engineering and Electric Vehicles, which collaborates with auto firms to develop batteries as an alternative to fossil fuel engines - said more R&D was needed to make batteries safe. "Most companies, and there are over 400, import parts and assemble them," she added. "We need to adapt everything to our environment, our needs." CITY SUPPORT To build a consumer base from zero five years ago, Kinetic Green's Motwani partnered with non-profit groups and states to subsidise electric three-wheeler rickshaws as a new source of income for women in insurgency-hit Dantewada in eastern India and bicycle rickshaw pullers in northern Uttar Pradesh state. "We showcased EVs as a means to earn a livelihood with a low running cost," said Motwani, sitting next to a cabinet covered with dozens of business leadership awards. "They could run the e-rickshaw and earn 1,000 rupees ($13) a day and we took care of the servicing," said Motwani, who believes in the Hindi saying: "jo dikhta hai woh bikta hai (what you see, sells)". For her part, Acharya in the federal government is pushing for state agencies that operate public buses to recruit more women drivers. "It is a good job, pays well, has defined hours. One of the things women want is certainty of when they can get home," she said. The Delhi government this year removed height restrictions for bus drivers so that more women can apply and abolished the heavy vehicle driving-licence fee of 15,000 rupees for them. The city has also rolled out e-rickshaws, reserving a third of the vehicles it is subsidising for women like Maurya. "It is about creating an opportunity for women to work," said Delhi transport minister Kailash Gahlot. The initiative is also about "good messaging" to encourage more people to switch to EVs and spread a sense of safety among public transport users, he added. CLIMATE-CONSCIOUS Beyond financial incentives, rising EV sales in India are also rooted in growing awareness about climate change, soaring fuel prices and mobility challenges in a pandemic-hit world. Mumbai resident Rajni Arun Kumar, 43, an associate director at a human resources startup, frowned on fuel-guzzling cars and used public transport until COVID-19 made her worry about taking her two unvaccinated children out in crowded spaces. She found the perfect solution for her office commute and dropping her children at their hobby classes: an orange e-scooter. But she is now hoping to get a charging point in the vicinity as the nearest one is 3 km (1.86 miles) and a traffic jam away. "There has to be some point where people begin to act to help conserve the environment," she emphasised. Companies know that women like Kumar are key decision-makers on household purchases. Hero Electric's Gill said e-scooters have more women buyers than conventional scooters, as the new machines remove the bother of trips to fuel stations and are easier to manoeuvre. Besides being price-sensitive, Indian women base their purchases on practical features, said Prerana Chaturvedi, co-founder and CEO of Evolet India, an EV startup in Gurgaon near Delhi. Its scooter has a lower seat height and clean edges to stop scarves and saris getting entangled, said Chaturvedi, a former military aviator in the Indian Air Force who believes EVs should be as simple to operate as cell phones. WORKERS' RIGHTS Off the highway connecting Chennai to Bengaluru, cutting through the industrial town of Hosur, the road to the Ather factory meanders through rose plantations. It is a long way from the bustle of Banu's village in Bhatkal, a coastal town in southern Karnataka state, but she loves the independence her job at Ather has given her. She aspired to work in a bank or an air-conditioned office, but her late father encouraged her to join the auto industry. "He kept telling me I could do what boys could do. And here I am, working on batteries, which are the heart of an electric scooter," she said, teary-eyed as she talked about her "hero". Banu, who has a diploma in electrical engineering and electronics, is among thousands who have enrolled in courses at industrial training institutes nationwide, before joining the workforce and honing their skills on the job. Recruitment agency TeamLease Digital, which scouts talent for EV firms, said hiring of both sexes rose by more than 30% in the last two years, with 40% growth forecast by the end of 2022. The government has projected that the EV sector will create 750,000 jobs in the next five years. Munira Loliwala, business head at TeamLease Digital, estimated the number of new job openings at more than 200,000 in the last six months alone - with women especially sought after. "It's like when mobile (phone) manufacturing began in India, women were needed to handle minute pieces with care, their fingers being thinner, more nimble," she said. Similarly, chip manufacturing for EVs requires precise soldering, welding and assembly, bolstering demand for women on the shop-floor and in design and production. "Women leaders are already inspiring many to join," Loliwala added. While welcoming the new job prospects for women, labour and gender campaigners said EV companies should introduce robust measures to better protect labour rights and equalise pay. Other manufacturing industries like clothing, which also employs a majority of women, often opt for female workers because they are regarded as easier and cheaper to employ. They are generally paid less for the same job as men, keeping production costs low, and cause less trouble for bosses, said Preeti Oza, coordinator of the non-profit Centre for Labour Research and Action. "(Women) tend to rush home after work, don't collectively raise demands and hesitate to unionise, making them preferred hires," she added. But for Banu, who is determined to carry on working even after she gets married, the compact Ather factory is home. She fondly recalls the day she took her father to the bus station after his monthly visit to check on her. "There was an Ather parked near the bus station and I excitedly told him that I could dismantle it and put the entire scooter back together right there. He laughed loudly and said the owner might take offence," she said. "He was so proud of me." | null |
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made an 11th hour appeal on Saturday for a 190-nation conference in Bali to end a deadlock over a plan to launch talks on a new UN treaty. "I am disappointed at the lack of progress," Ban told delegates after making an unscheduled return from a visit to East Timor as the Dec. 3-14 talks ran a day over time. "Your work is not yet over ... everybody should be able to make compromises," he said of a dispute over developing nations' demands that the rich should do more to help the poor cope with climate change. If the dispute is resolved, the meeting would launch two years of talks on a sweeping new worldwide treaty to succeed the UN's Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 and link in outsiders including the United States and all developing nations. "You have in your hands the ability to deliver to the peoples of the world a successul outcome," he said. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono also made an appeal to delegates. "Without an effective road map we may never reach our destination as we envision it," he said. "The worst thing we can do is for this project to crumble because we can't find the right wording," he said. "The world is watching anxiously and I beg you not to let them down." | null |
Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown will play down talk of a cooling of US-British relations in his first talks with President George W Bush next week -- but he will not want to be seen as "America's poodle." Speeches by two of Brown's ministers have been seized on by some commentators as evidence that the month-old Brown government plans a shift in foreign policy away from the United States -- although Brown firmly denies it. While Brown and Bush will stress London and Washington's "special relationship" is alive and well in talks at Camp David, the reserved Brown is unlikely to strike up the same close personal relationship with the U.S. president that his predecessor, Tony Blair, enjoyed. "They are going to say America is our best ally, it's crucial we have good relations. But expect a professional working relationship rather than ... a degree of personal chemistry," Strathclyde University politics professor John Curtice said. Issues on the agenda will include global trade liberalisation talks, climate change, as well as Darfur, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Russia and Iran, Brown's spokesman said. Brown has said Britain will abide by its United Nations' obligations in Iraq and there will be no immediate withdrawal of British troops, as some in the ruling Labour Party want. However, the head of the British military said on Thursday Britain should be in a position to hand over control of the southern Iraqi city of Basra to Iraqi forces by year-end. On Iran, Brown said this week he would not rule out military action but believed sanctions could still persuade Tehran to drop its disputed nuclear programme. Bush and Blair's strong personal bond was forged in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on US cities and their decision to go to war in Iraq. But the relentless bloodshed in Iraq contributed to Blair's downfall, fuelling a backlash from voters and his own party that forced him to step down early as prime minister a month ago and hand over the reins to his long-serving finance minister Brown. The British press regularly mocked Blair as Bush's poodle, a label that did not go down well with the British public and Brown will be keen to distance himself from it. "Brown has no 'poodle' baggage, no one's ever thought of him as a poodle," said Reginald Dale, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Brown has reversed the ruling party's slump since taking office, opening a lead in the opinion polls that has fired speculation he could call an early election. Brown raised eyebrows by visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy before meeting Bush, but he has been cool towards the European Union in the past. Talk of a shift in British foreign policy began when Brown named as foreign secretary David Miliband, reported by British media to have been sceptical about the Iraq war. Brown also gave a junior post to Mark Malloch Brown, a former UN deputy secretary general who has been critical of Britain and the United States over the war. This month, Malloch Brown said it was unlikely Brown and Bush would be "joined together at the hip" as Blair and Bush had been and another minister told a Washington audience a country's strength depended on alliances rather than military might. | null |
Maruf Mallick
bdnews24.com's environment correspondent Copenhagen, Dec 11 (bdnews24.com) -- The Kyoto Protocol must and will survive the climate conference in Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said on Friday. "I think the Kyoto Protocol should survive and must survive for a number of reasons," De Boer said at a news conference on the fifth day of the ongoing climate talk in Copenhagen . "It would be working towards a second period under Kyoto and a new treaty under the convention. That new treaty under the convention would enter into force when enough countries have ratified it." In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, it took eight years between 1997 when countries started to sign it and 2005 when it finally came into enforcement, he said. "The idea of having a single treaty is not off the table in the sense that in the room next door a number of countries stated their preference for a single instrument. "But I see the overwhelming majority of the countries involved in this wanting a two-track outcome, wanting to see something in addition to the Kyoto Protocol." De Boer said the Kyoto Protocol provides market-based mechanisms that are already functioning. There is no provision currently under the Convention for the mechanisms. If somebody wants to push a new treaty, there is again a gap that people do not want to see. The Kyoto Protocol is the only legally binding instrument concerning climate change, and there is no good reason to abandon it, he added. De Boer said significant progress has been made on some of the core elements that will constitute an agreement. "This is the time now to focus on the bigger picture"
Earlier, Bangladesh pressed for a stronger climate deal by building on the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. It also proposed for a new phase with new target for Kyoto protocol. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has also called for a new 'Copenhagen Protocol', based on the existing legally-binding Kyoto Protocol. | null |
Every autumn on the third Thursday of November, wine growers from the Beaujolais region market the first bottles of the year's harvest in the annual "Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé" campaign that started in the 1960s. "If there is one day we can call a day of renaissance, after all the crises we have lived through, it is today," said Le Mesturet owner Alain Fontaine as he served free glasses of Beaujolais on the sidewalk in front of his Paris restaurant. Parisians loved the free wine, even if Beaujolais - a light red wine that is just a few weeks or months old - struggles to overcome an image of being cheap plonk. "It's a nice little wine. It's not the biggest grand cru, obviously, but it is pleasant and not very expensive," said Felix, an employee at the French national library. Wine growers were less upbeat as France is set to produce its lowest wine output since records began, after vineyards were hit by spring frost, hail and disease. The farm ministry has forecast total production a quarter below the average of the past five years with the Burgundy-Beaujolais region's output among the worst hit, seen down by nearly half. "The year has been quite hard weather-wise and the grapes have required more manual work than usual, only for us to end up losing around 30% of the harvest. That's too much work for such meagre results," said Beaujolais Nouveau winemaker Julien Revillon in Villie-Morgon, north of Lyon. Revillon said that even though output has been disappointing, people are more than ever attached to the Beaujolais tradition, seeing it as an opportunity to get together with friends and colleagues after months of isolation. "In difficult periods, people hang onto traditions. Even during a war, we want to celebrate Christmas, even during a pandemic, we want to celebrate the Beaujolais Nouveau," he said. Ninety-year-old Parisian Marie-Francoise, who initially found the new Beaujolais too tart, changed her mind after a second tasting. "It’s a good wine, a very good wine. There is no better Beaujolais!" she said. | null |
US President Barack Obama will go ahead with plans to meet the Dalai Lama despite warnings from China not to, White House confirmed on Tuesday . The White House confirmed that, Obama would meet the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader reviled by Beijing as a separatist for seeking self-rule for his mountain homeland. China warned US President Barack Obama on Wednesday that a meeting between him and the Dalai Lama would further erode ties between the two powers, already troubled by Washington's arms sales to Taiwan. China's angry response reflected deepening tension between the world's biggest and third-biggest economies, with Beijing noting that President Hu Jintao himself urged Obama not to meet the exiled Tibetan leader. Ma Zhaoxu, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said his government "resolutely opposes the leader of the United States having contact with the Dalai under any pretext or in any form". During Hu's summit with Obama in Beijing last November, the Chinese leader "explained China's stern position of resolutely opposing any government leaders and officials meeting the Dalai", said Ma. "We urge the U.S. to fully grasp the high sensitivity of the Tibetan issues, to prudently and appropriately deal with related matters, and avoid bringing further damage to China-U.S. relations," said Ma. China's ire at the White House announcement was predictable, as was the White House's confirmation of the meeting, which has long been flagged. But the flare-up comes soon after Beijing lashed Washington over a $6.4 billion U.S. weapons package for Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing deems an illegitimate breakaway province. It also comes during Sino-U.S. tensions over the value of China's currency, trade protectionism and Internet freedoms. BEIJING GETS PUSHY Beijing has become increasingly assertive about opposing the Dalai Lama's meetings with foreign leaders, and the issue is a volatile theme among patriotic Chinese, who see Western criticism of Chinese policy in Tibet as meddling. Protests over Chinese rule in Tibet that upset the London and Paris legs of the torch relay for the 2008 Beijing Olympics drew angry counter-protests by Chinese abroad and demonstrations in China urging boycotts of French goods. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy would not pull out of meeting the Dalai Lama while his country held the rotating presidency of the European Union in late 2008, China cancelled a summit with the EU and there were Chinese calls for boycotts of French goods. On Tuesday, a Chinese Communist Party official said any meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama "would seriously undermine the political basis of Sino-U.S. relations". The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese Communist Party forces who entered the region from 1950. He says he wants true autonomy for Tibet under Chinese sovereignty, but Beijing says his demands amount to seeking outright independence. Previous US presidents, including Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, have met the Dalai Lama, drawing angry words from Beijing but no substantive reprisals. China's latest statement did not mention any specific retaliation over Obama's planned meeting. "I think it indicates their nervousness in the issue of Tibet ... the wider world recognising that there is problem in Tibet and China should do something about it," said Thubten Samphel, spokesman of the Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamsala, northern India. The White House shrugged off Beijing's earlier warnings about the meeting, which may happen as early as this month. "The president told China's leaders during his trip last year that he would meet with the Dalai Lama and he intends to do so," White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters. "We expect that our relationship with China is mature enough where we can work on areas of mutual concern such as climate, the global economy and non-proliferation and discuss frankly and candidly those areas where we disagree." The United States says it accepts that Tibet is a part of China and wants Beijing to open up dialogue with the Dalai Lama about the future of the region. But a Chinese foreign policy analyst said the response from Beijing, increasingly assertive on what it sees as core concerns, would be tougher than Washington anticipates. "China wants to change the rules of the game," Yuan Peng, head of US studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper. "Though the US has previously sold weapons to Taiwan and met the Dalai Lama, and we've then railed at the United States, this time there'll be true cursing and retaliation." | null |
- Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Thursday said that the government will set up a second nuclear plant in the southern part of the country. She was speaking after inaugurating six new modern scientific research facilities, including a 3MV Tandem Accelerat | null |
European nations, Canada, Bolivia and Nepal
raised backing for the 2015 Paris Agreement to countries representing 56.87
percent of world greenhouse gas emissions, above the 55 percent needed for
implementation, a United Nations website showed. The deal will formally start in 30 days on
Nov 4, four days before the US presidential election in which Republican Donald
Trump opposes the accord and Democrat Hillary Clinton strongly supports it. China and the United States joined up last
month in a joint step by the world's top emitters.
Obama called Wednesday "a historic day
in the fight to protect our planet for future generations" and he told
reporters on the White House Rose Garden: "If we follow through on the
commitments that this Paris agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a
turning point for our planet." Germany, France, Austria, Hungary,
Slovakia, Portugal and Malta - European Union nations which have completed
domestic ratification and account for about four percent of emissions -
formally signed up on Wednesday. In total, 73 countries out of 195 have
ratified the agreement, according to the UN website. "Great job!" tweeted European
Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete. The Europeans brought forward a formal
submission of documents to the United Nations from a ceremony planned on
Friday, fearing that other nations might ratify and trigger entry into force
without them. "We didn't want to be upstaged,"
an EU diplomat said. Many praised the rapid ratification of an
agreement meant to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning
fossil fuels, to limit floods, droughts, more powerful storms and rising ocean
levels. "What once seemed unthinkable is now
unstoppable," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement. But all said more work was needed. "It is no exaggeration to say we are
in a race against time," said Thoriq Ibrahim, Environment Minister for the
Maldives and Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States which fears the
impact of rising sea levels.
By contrast, it took eight years for the
previous UN climate deal, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, to gain enough backing to
take effect. It obliged only rich nations to cut emissions and the United
States stayed out of it. Opposition continues in the
Republican-controlled US Congress to Democrat Obama's climate change policies. "The Paris climate deal would be
disastrous for the American economy," said House of Representatives
Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican. By contrast, Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever
and Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, said
ratification showed that a shift to a low-carbon economy is "urgent,
inevitable, and accelerating faster than we ever believed possible". Still, current national pledges for cuts in
emissions are insufficient to achieve a Paris goal of limiting a rise in world
temperatures to "well below" two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
times. UN studies project that average world
temperatures are set to rise by 3 degrees or more by 2100, based on current
trends. And this year is expected to prove the warmest since records began in
the 19th century, beating 2015. | null |
FROM COPENHAGEN Maruf Mallick
bdnews24.com environment correspondent Dec 14, 2009 Oceans are rapidly turning acidic--100 times faster than any change in acidity experienced in the marine environment over the last 20 million years, giving little time for evolutionary adaptation within biological systems, the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) says. It released on Monday a major study in collaboration with the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) on Ocean biodiversity at Bella Convention Centre, now hosting the climate talks in the Danish capital.
According to the study, seas and oceans absorb approximately one quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities. As more and more carbon dioxide has been emitted into the atmosphere, the oceans have absorbed greater amounts at increasingly rapid rates. Without this level of absorption by the oceans, atmospheric CO2 levels would be significantly higher than at present and the effects of global climate change would be more marked, the study adds. However, the absorption of atmospheric CO2 has resulted in changes to the chemical balance of the oceans, causing them to become more acidic. It is predicted that by 2050, ocean acidity could increase by 150 percent. "Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years, and substantial damage to ocean ecosystems can only be avoided by urgent and rapid reductions in global emissions of CO2. "Attention must be given for integration of this critical issue at the global climate change debate in Copenhagen," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the convention. "This CBD study provides a valuable synthesis of scientific information on the impacts of ocean acidification, based on the analysis of more than 300 scientific literatures, and it describes an alarming picture of possible ecological scenarios and adverse impacts of ocean acidification on marine biodiversity," he added. Among other findings, the study shows that increasing ocean acidification will mean that by 2100 some 70 percent of cold water corals, a key refuge and feeding ground for commercial fish species, will be exposed to corrosive waters. | null |
#NAME? | null |
Diplomats from the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters including the United States, China and India are set to take part in a forum on Monday at the U.S. State Department aimed at getting a U.N. agreement to curb global warming. The two-day meeting of so-called major economies is meant to jump-start climate talks in advance of a December deadline, when the international community meets in Copenhagen to find a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which limits climate-warming greenhouse emissions and expires in 2012. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to make opening remarks. Participants are expected to discuss technology cooperation and other issues. The major economies include Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States. Denmark, the host of the December meeting, also was invited. Environmentalists and others see U.S. commitment to fighting climate change as key to any global pact. "Without U.S. leadership, a global warming agreement in Copenhagen will be largely out of reach," said Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resources Defense Council activist group. President Barack Obama has stressed the link between fighting climate change and helping the struggling economy, and called the meeting to relaunch the major economies process begun by his predecessor George W. Bush. The Bush team's efforts drew skepticism from many participants and were seen as a distraction from the main U.N. negotiations on climate change. OBAMA'S CLIMATE CHANGE STRATEGY Obama aims to cut U.S. emissions by about 15 percent by 2020, back to 1990 levels. Bush opposed the Kyoto Protocol and any other across-the-board limits on emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, saying the agreement unfairly exempted such quickly growing economies as China and India, and would hurt the U.S. economy. By contrast, the Obama team has pushed for action on climate change, most recently by declaring that carbon dioxide emissions endanger human health and welfare, which means the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can regulate them as pollutants. No regulations have been put in place, and Obama prefers legislation to regulation on this issue. Legislation is already being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, where former Vice President Al Gore, a long-time environmental activist, on Friday urged passage of a U.S. carbon-capping law this year. Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, declined to specify what the United States needs to bring to Copenhagen in December to demonstrate U.S. leadership, but noted the Obama administration's approach differs markedly from that of the Bush team. "They were not fundamentally looking for an international agreement," Stern said. "We are looking for an international agreement, and we're looking for cooperation at a significant, we hope, transformative level." | null |
The deal, agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris last December, aims to slash greenhouse gas emissions by shifting away from fossil fuels to limit global warming to "well below" two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. But it needs to be formally ratified by countries representing at least 55 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. "The Secretary-General calls on all Parties to accelerate their domestic procedures in order to join the agreement as soon as possible this year," said a spokesman for the UN Secretary-General in a statement. Next week the European Union is expected to complete the joint ratification of the climate pact, which will be a major milestone as it would take approvals past the 55 percent mark and put the deal into effect ahead of the next round of climate talks in November, in Morocco. The Paris agreement received a boost last month after the United States and China, the world's two biggest emitters, submitted their approvals to the United Nations. Concerns about the participation of the United States loom over the deal but cementing the accord before the US presidential election on Nov 8 would make it harder to challenge if Republican Donald Trump, who has opposed it, beats Democrat Hillary Clinton, a strong supporter.
Motorcyclists ride through a haze on a road in the industrial town of Vapi, about 180 km north of Mumbai, in this 2009 file photo. Reuters
President Obama welcomed India's ratification in a tweet, saying Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the country was carrying on the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and his belief "in a world worthy of our children." Motorcyclists ride through a haze on a road in the industrial town of Vapi, about 180 km north of Mumbai, in this 2009 file photo. Reuters India had called for more work on the agreement ahead of its ratification on Sunday, with its environment ministry saying the Paris agreement laid a "broad framework" but detailed guidelines and rules were needed for it to become operational. The ministry also criticised developed countries, saying their populations "live extravagant lifestyles with a high carbon footprint". It said it was "very crucial" to advance key issues, including those related to finance and technology transfer, at the meeting in Marrakesh next month, where India also plans to urge developed countries to do more. "At Morocco India will insist on a concrete roadmap from developed countries," the ministry said. | null |
Mutual accountability of the government and donors was the bone of contention at a discussion on Sunday. Speakers deliberated upon this aspect of the Joint Cooperation Strategy (JCS), which was agreed upon at a policy-making two-day meeting between the government and development partners in February this year. The Bangladesh Development Forum had decided that this cooperation strategy would coordinate development initiatives. Sunday's session, chaired by finance minister A M A Muhith, was meant to gather feedback of the draft framework from representatives of the civil society including economists, NGO leaders and former bureaucrats. But the discussion revolved around the ins and outs of mutual accountability. Issues like unemployment, underemployment and education had been overlooked in the draft JCS, according to Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, head of the Palli Karma Shahayak Fund, also on several high-powered committees on education policy and climate change. He said that the agencies publish growth projections now and then, often contradicting the government's forecasts, whereas the JCS aims to harmonise these things. "I don't believe this is desirable from the development partners." The JCS draft says much on improving "mutual accountability" to overcome the challenges of aid effectiveness. However, the draft did not indicate how this would be measured, former caretaker government advisor A B Mirza Azizul Islam pointed out. "I don't see any quantifiable or measurable indicators to evaluate the performance of the JCS," he added. Several other discussants echoed the former advisor. On the issue of aid conditionality, Islam said that the development partners imposed certain conditions that were irrelevant. Turning upon the government's problems, he said: "The government should prepare project portfolios so that the development partners can pick specific ones for financing." Mustafizur Rahman, executive director of a Dhaka-based research organisation Centre for Policy Dialogue, raised the developed nations' commitment of giving 0.7 percent of their national income in aid to poor countries. "What has happened to the accountability of that commitment?" Senior Awami League leader Suranjit Sengupta stressed parliament discussions on the JCS draft. "After all, the framework is meant for people's welfare and the parliament represents those people," said the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on law, justice and parliamentary affairs ministry. The prime minister's economic advisor Mashiur Rahman suggested formation of a body, comprising representatives from the government and development partners, which would ensure mutual accountability by monitoring outcome and efficiency of the projects. The finance minister, wrapping up the session, said that the draft had missed out vital areas of migration, land utilisation plan and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). "There should be a land use plan which is very important for the country's planned growth," he said. Terming ICT a "very useful tool for development" Muhith said, "It also helps to ensure transparency and prevent corruption." | null |
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius confirmed this visit during his bilateral meeting with Bangladesh counterpart Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali. Ali came back to Dhaka on Thursday ending his four-day first official visit to Paris. The foreign ministry said following his request, his French counterpart also agreed to bring a high-level business delegation with him including a delegation of MEDEF, French leading chamber of commerce and industries. He said together with his German counterpart, he would also inaugurate a Franco-German embassy building in Dhaka. Fabius also appreciated Bangladesh’s successes in poverty alleviation, women education and empowerment, and reducing child and maternal mortality under this government. The foreign ministry said their meeting also focused on development of bilateral relations, especially the development of economic cooperation. Expansion of bilateral trade and increasing French investment to Bangladesh and expediting cultural exchange programmes between the countries were also discussed. They also discussed various bilateral and international issues including their commitment to combat climate disruption, which particularly affects Bangladesh. Fabius said France would consider Bangladesh’s concern in the upcoming climate change conference in Paris in December, since Bangladesh was among the most climate change vulnerable countries in the world. He also expressed desire to work with Bangladesh to counter terrorism and militancy for ensuring a peaceful world. Ali informed him about Bangladesh's active role in increasing connectivity and regional cooperation through different initiatives like Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal Motor Vehicle Agreement (BBIN-MVA), the BCIM economic corridor, and the BIMSTEC. In reply, Fabius lauded Bangladesh's initiatives for increasing regional cooperation as well as peace in the region. He also offered all-out cooperation to Bangladesh in this regard. The foreign minister during his Paris visit also visited Bangla section of INALCO, a language and cultural research institute in Paris. He presented them some Bangla books. He also attended the award giving ceremony ‘Chevalier des arts et des letters’ (Knight in the order of arts and literature) where eminent Bangladeshi artist Shahabuddin Ahmad was honoured by the France government. Ali also joined a reception hosted by expatriate Bangladeshis and exchanged views with the Bangladeshi community, according to the foreign ministry. | null |
"It would be a tragedy for the United States and the people of the United States if the US becomes a kind of rogue country, the only country in the world that is somehow not going to go ahead with the Paris Agreement," Robinson said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Sunday. US President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican, has promised to pull the United States out of that global climate accord, which was agreed last year by 193 countries and which came into effect earlier this month, just in advance of his election. The deal aims to hold climate change to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius of warming by moving the world economy away from fossil fuels. The agreement provides for $100 billion a year in international funding from 2020 to help poorer countries develop cleanly and adapt to the already inevitable impacts of climate change. Robinson, who now runs a foundation focused on seeking justice for people hit hard by climate impacts despite having contributed little to the problem, said she was confident other countries would continue their backing for the accord regardless of any action taken by the United States. "I don't think that the process itself will be affected (if) one country, however big and important that country is, decides not to go ahead," she said on the sidelines of UN climate talks in Marrakesh, due to end on Friday. But a pullout could mean a "huge difference" to already difficult efforts to gather enough international finance to help poorer countries develop their economies without increasing their emissions, "which is what they want to do", she said. "The moral obligation of the United States as a big emitter, and a historically big emitter that built its whole economy on fossil fuels that are now damaging the world – it's unconscionable the United States would walk away from it," she said of the threat to withdraw from the Paris deal. Life without water However, Robinson said she sympathised with Americans who had lost their jobs in polluting industries such as coal, many of whom supported Trump in his election campaign. "Clearly they're hurting at the moment," she said, calling for assistance to help such workers retrain and win new jobs in a clean energy economy. "But it's not a future to go backward into coal and have higher emissions in the United States," she warned. "The impact of that will be felt by poor communities and poor countries all over the world." As a UN envoy for El Nino and climate change, she said she had been in dry regions of Honduras where women told her they no longer had water as a result of worsening drought. "I saw the pain on the faces of those women. And one of the women said to me, and I'll never forget, 'We have no water. How do you live without water?' ... I'm hearing that all over the world," she said. If the United States backs away on adopting clean energy, it also would be handing China the leadership role in a key new industry, she said. "That's not what so many states, businesses, cities and academic communities and local communities want in the United States," she said. She urged Americans upset about the proposed changes in US policy to make their voices heard. "People in the United States have to get up and make a big noise, and business in the United States has to make a big noise about this," she said. | null |
About 1,000 asteroids big enough to cause catastrophic damage if they hit Earth are orbiting relatively nearby, a NASA survey shows. In a project known as Spaceguard, the US space agency was ordered by Congress in 1998 to find 90 percent of objects near Earth that are 1 km (0.62 of a mile) in diameter or larger. The survey is now complete, with 93 percent of the objects accounted for, astronomer Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. Using NASA's recently retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope, scientists also found about 20,500 smaller asteroids near Earth. Previous studies estimated there were 36,000 to 100,000 of these objects, which have a diameter of about 100 meters (110 yards). "They could still pack quite a punch," Mainzer told Reuters, adding that "any impact is not a very likely event." But a major asteroid strike could and has happened. An asteroid or comet between 5 and 10 km (3.1 and 6.2 miles) in diameter is believed to have smashed into Earth some 65 million years ago, triggering global climate changes that led to the extinction of dinosaurs and other animals. "We know something that big could wipe out mostly all life on Earth," Mainzer said. Scientists are now using archived WISE observations to home in on potentially hazardous objects whose orbits come within about 4.6 million miles (7.4 million km) of Earth. So far, there is no plan about what to do if an asteroid was discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. | null |
Reinhart, who was elevated to senior management as part of the bank's bid to rebuild its credibility after the ethics concerns, said some key concepts for the new product were already clear. These included a mandate for more transparency about the underlying methodology, greater reliance on survey data from companies, and less focus on ranking countries. "The underlying nuts and bolts will be in the public domain," Reinhart said. "Public disclosure is an important pillar in restoring credibility." The bank would also emphasise survey data to reduce the role of judgment, and eliminate the 'beauty contest" aspect of the rankings that incentivised countries to "game the system." In September, the bank's board scrapped publication of the annual "Doing Business" rankings after an external review of data irregularities in the 2018 and 2020 versions claimed that senior bank officials - including then-chief executive Kristalina Georgieva, who now heads the IMF - pressured staff to make changes. The law firm WilmerHale is still working on a second report on possible staff misconduct about the data changes, which benefited China, Saudi Arabia and other countries. The International Monetary Fund's board backed Georgieva after a lengthy review of the allegations, but she could still be implicated in the second review. Reinhart said the saga has dented the credibility of the World Bank, and it would take time and effort to rebuild trust. "It's important that the metrics of credibility are not personality-based, that they're systems based," she said, adding that the bank had instituted "a lot of safeguards" over the past year after reviewing several external reports. "Nothing in life is failsafe but it reduces ... the capacity for misuse and abuse," she said. "Hopefully credibility will follow. You know, credibility is one thing that is difficult to establish and easy to lose. But time will tell." Reinhart commissioned a major review of the Doing Business methodology by an external advisory panel after concerns were raised internally about data manipulation involving the reports. The resulting scathing 84-page review called for a series of remedial actions and reforms, citing a pattern of government efforts to interfere with the scoring. It faulted the bank for a lack of transparency about the underlying data and said it should stop selling consulting services to governments aimed at improving their scores, a practice Reinhart said had been halted already in 2020 and 2021. Reinhart said the bank would take a broader look at the consequences of the scandal and what other measures were required once the second WilmerHale report was completed. "That is a bridge we will have to cross once the full report is in," she said. | null |
Hamila, who at 40 is an entrepreneur and the owner of a Moroccan packaged food business in London, still remembers feeling the excitement surrounding the holiday. She and her father would bring an entire sheep back to the apartment, where all the women would gather to clean the innards and trotters in the bathtub. “We even had a specific order for the way we ate the meat,” she said. The first day of Eid al-Adha was for the organs. On the second day, they ate the head and trotters, and only on the third day, once the fresh meat had rested, would they make kebabs, tagines or grills. Eid al-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, is the second of the year’s two major Islamic holidays, and coincides with the Hajj pilgrimage. It commemorates the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail at Allah’s request. According to the Quran, God ultimately offered Ibrahim a ram to kill in the son’s place. So people across the Islamic world have traditionally sacrificed a lamb — or goat, cow or camel, depending on the region — at home and divided it into thirds among the needy, friends and relatives and their immediate family. Home butchering of animals is now banned in many countries, including large swaths of the Arab world, where a fifth of the globe’s Muslim population live. Meat is still central to Eid al-Adha, which many Arabs refer to colloquially as Eid al-Lahm, or Festival of Meat. But as celebrations deeply entrenched in community and tradition start to slip away, especially for Arab Muslims in the diaspora, people are finding new ways of observing a holiday for which food is a hallmark. Areej Bazzari, a digital marketing director at Salesforce, in San Francisco, grew up in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, where breakfast was the highlight of Eid al-Adha. On her family’s holiday table was a bounty of offal cooked in myriad ways: braised with garlic, fried with onion and spices, or mixed with eggs. “We had teams,” Bazzari said, laughing. “Team liver, team kidneys — and that’s my visual of Eid at home, all of us quarreling over who got to sit in front of which plate.” Since her Palestinian family moved to Sonoma County in 2000, they have rarely prepared organ meat, which is harder to find fresh there. On the rare occasion that her father tracks down a fresh heart or kidneys, they will include it with other cuts of meat just to continue the tradition, but not with the same abundance they grew accustomed to in Saudi Arabia. “We’re not going to a slaughterhouse,” she said. “This is, like, Dad going to Whole Foods.” Bazzari, 38, cherishes the way her Eid al-Adha celebrations have evolved over the years. “I like that I can draw on childhood experiences and different cultural traditions I’m learning from friends here,” she said. For her, Eid al-Adha now usually includes a large get-together of extended family and friends, with Eid decorations and countless dishes, including nontraditional ones like fattehs (toasted bread-based dishes with various protein toppings and sauces); shushbarak (meat filled dumplings cooked in yogurt sauce); and manaqeesh (flatbreads topped with za’atar and cheese). But dessert — the highlight, which stays on the table for the remainder of the day — “is always a flavour from home,” Bazzari said. Her parents still fly to Saudi Arabia or Jordan every year and bring back desserts they save especially for Eid. Ka’ak and ma’amoul — quintessential holiday cookies in the Arab world, made with semolina and most often stuffed with dates or nuts — are the nonnegotiable items on that table. Hamila’s array of desserts this year will feature cookies stuffed with dates or nuts. But her star dish for the long holiday will be mechoui, a slow-roasted leg of lamb — a constant in her feast, for its symbolism as much as for its flavour. Side dishes will lean more toward salads and vegetables. “It’s the middle of summer,” she said, “and I want to keep it a bit light.” This Eid al-Adha is tentatively set for July 20. Because Islamic holidays are pegged to the Hijri lunar calendar, the exact date depends on the sighting of a new moon, and, over time, the holidays move through the seasons. A decade or two ago, Eid al-Adha was celebrated in cooler weather. Over the past five years, the holiday has fallen in summer, influencing the food choices. Hamila appreciates the departures from custom. “I’m a strong believer that traditions have to adapt,” she said. To her, what counts is embracing the celebrations and connecting with the spirit of the occasion. Sumaya Obaid, a chef and TV personality in the United Arab Emirates, recalls that when she was a child, the neighbours, regardless of race or class, would gather to sacrifice sheep for Eid al-Adha, then wash the meat and distribute it. “Now that laws have changed, and people don’t slaughter animals at home, the collaboration and sharing, the butchering, the cleaning together, that has all disappeared,” she said. “That sense of community is just not there anymore.” Other elements of Eid celebration, however, remain intact. Machboos el-Eid, spice-rubbed and roasted lamb, is still the essential holiday dish in the Emirates. The saffron-laced spice mixture varies from family to family, and the women take pride in picking out the fresh spices at the market a few days before the celebration to grind and prepare at home. “It is so unique, so unique,” Obaid said of her own blend. “But I will only give it to my daughter. It is one of the most secret things in the family.” The heart of the Eid al-Adha meals may be meat, but their spirit is generosity. Obaid quickly added, “Inshallah, one day we share this meal, and you taste our family’s machboos.” — RECIPES: Ka’ak el Eid Yield: About 35 round cookies Total time: 1 3/4 hours, plus overnight resting and cooling Ingredients: For the dough: A scant 1 1/2 cups/250 grams semolina flour 2 cups/250 grams all-purpose flour 1/2 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons/125 grams softened unsalted butter 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1 tablespoon nigella seeds (or unhulled sesame seeds) 1 tablespoon ground aniseed 1 tablespoon ground fennel seeds 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon instant yeast 1 teaspoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup warm water, plus more if needed For the filling: Vegetable or olive oil, as needed for greasing 1 pound/450 grams date paste (see tip) 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon Preparation: 1. Prepare the dough: In a large bowl, combine the semolina flour, all-purpose flour, butter and oil. Rub the ingredients between your palms until the mixture resembles wet sand. Cover and leave at room temperature overnight (or several hours). This allows the semolina to soften and fully absorb the butter and oil. 2. Finish the dough: The next day (or several hours later), after your semolina mixture has rested, add the nigella seeds, aniseed, fennel, baking powder, yeast, sugar and salt to the semolina mixture and gently rub together with your hands. Add 1/2 cup warm water and start to gently knead for no longer than 2 minutes. The mixture will probably still be crumbly at this point. 3. Gradually add remaining 1/2 cup water to the mixture in 1-tablespoon increments, and continue to knead for about 1 minute after each addition — making sure you don’t over-knead — until you can take a clump of dough in your fingers and it holds together. You may not need to use all the water, or you may need extra, a couple tablespoons at a time, depending on a variety of factors such as climate or flour. What you are looking for is a clump of dough to come together easily and not fall apart when you try rolling it into a log. Cover and let rest while you prepare the filling. 4. Prepare the filling: Line a medium baking sheet with plastic wrap or parchment paper and grease with oil. Pour some oil in a small bowl that you will use to grease your hands as necessary. Put the date paste and cinnamon in a bowl and knead slightly with greased hands until evenly incorporated. 5. Grease your hands and tear out about 35 portions of filling, each about the size of a golf ball. On a flat surface, roll each into a string slightly thinner than your finger and about 4 to 5 inches long. Place on the greased baking sheet and cover with plastic wrap, then set aside until ready to use. This can sit at room temperature for a couple of days without any issue. 6. Prepare the cookies: Heat oven to 400 degrees and line a couple of baking sheets with parchment. Take a golf ball-size piece of dough, keeping the rest of the dough covered to keep it moist, and roll it between your palms or on a flat surface into a sausage shape about 4 inches long. Using the tips of your fingers, gently press to flatten it. Take one of the date strings and place on top of the dough, cutting off as much as necessary for it to fit the dough. (Any cut off pieces can be used to extend shorter pieces or combined to make more filling strings.) 7. Enclose the dough around the date filling and roll it on a flat surface into a slightly longer, thin sausage shape, about 8 to 9 inches long. Take one end and place it slightly overlapping the other end to form a ring shape. With a thin object (such as a chopstick), press down all the way through to make two holes where the ends overlap to ensure they are firmly attached and won’t come apart during baking. Place on the prepared lined baking sheet and repeat until dough and filling are finished. 8. Bake cookies until a very light golden brown, about 15 to 18 minutes. Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before moving to a wire rack to cool completely. Once cooled, transfer to an airtight container. Cookies will keep 2 to 3 weeks in an airtight container at room temperature, or up to 3 months in the freezer. TIP: Date paste can easily be found in any Middle Eastern grocery store. However, you could also buy good quality soft Medjool dates, pit them and knead them by hand with a tablespoon of olive oil to get a pastelike consistency. Do not use a food processor, because the dates will become extremely sticky and difficult to remove. Sajiyeh Yield: 2 to 4 servings Total time: 40 minutes Ingredients: 3 tablespoons olive oil 1 pound beef (such as sirloin, rib-eye, skirt steak or flank steak), cut into bite-size strips 2 1/2 teaspoons Lebanese seven-spice blend (see tip) 1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt 1 large yellow onion, halved and thinly sliced 1 small red bell pepper, halved, cored and thinly sliced 2 jalapeños or 1 small green bell pepper, halved, cored and thinly sliced Saj bread, pita, naan or flour tortillas, for serving Preparation: 1. Heat olive oil in a cast-iron pan over medium until shimmering and hot, but not smoking. Add the strips of meat, spice blend and 1 teaspoon salt. Cook, stirring periodically, until all the released water evaporates and the meat starts to brown all over, about 10 minutes. 2. Once meat is browned, add 1/2 cup water, cover the pan, and cook until the water again evaporates and oil visibly releases, about 5 to 7 minutes. Repeat the process: Add another 1/2 cup water, cover, and cook until the water evaporates and oil releases. 3. Add the onion, pepper, jalapeños and the remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook, uncovered, tossing regularly, until the onions are browned and meat is starting to soften, about 4 minutes. 4. Add another 1/2 cup water and cook for a final time, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until some of the water evaporates and you are left with a thick sauce coating the meat and vegetables, about 3 minutes. 5. Remove from heat and serve immediately with bread to scoop up the meat and gravy. TIP: You can replace the seven-spice blend with 1/2 teaspoon each ground allspice, ground cinnamon and ground black pepper, plus 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin and a few grates of nutmeg. ©2021 The New York Times Company | null |
Leaders of the Commonwealth group of mostly former British colonies met on Friday for a three-day summit under pressure to get tougher on human rights abuses by members or risk losing its purpose as a group. Britain's 85-year-old Queen Elizabeth opened the meeting of leaders of the 54 states of the Commonwealth, home to 30 percent of the world's population and five of the G20 leading economies but struggling to make an impact on global policies. The leadup to the summit has been dominated by pressure to take a stronger line on human and political rights abuses. A confidential report to the group warned than unless it did, the Commonwealth risked becoming pointless as an organisation. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her opening speech, touched on the issue when she said it needed "to ensure that those member nations that fall short (of the group's values) understand that their peers want to see change". Much of the debate has focused on Sri Lanka and international demands that it allow an independent inquiry into accusations of war crimes during its 25-year civil war, especially in its final months in 2009. Sri Lanka says it will wait for the results of its own investigation next month, calling the pressure over human rights a propaganda war waged by the defeated Tamil Tigers. A senior Commonwealth official said foreign ministers on Thursday failed to agree on a key recommendation in an "eminent persons" report that the group set up a rights commissioner. Canada, home to a large ethnic Tamil community, has said it will boycott the 2013 Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka, unless the host country improves its human rights record. "Today, Commonwealth leaders are faced with a choice - reform the Commonwealth so that it can effectively address human rights violations by its members, or risk becoming irrelevant," said Madhu Malhotra, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Deputy Director. British Prime Minister David Cameron dismissed suggestions that the Commonwealth was no longer of much use. "We live in a world of networks and this is a great network: a third of the world's population, 54 different countries across six continents," he told reporters in Perth. "But not just a network, a network with values about promoting human rights and democracy and freedom." ABORIGINES CLEANSE OPENING CEREMONY Aborigines cleansed the opening ceremony by waving smoke from burning grass over leaders as they arrived. Local Noongar Aborigines welcomed the leaders to their traditional homeland. In a stark reminder of the clash of cultures, Aborigines refer to British white settlement of Australia as the invasion. About 500 people, protesting a broad range of issues, demonstrated in Perth but were kept well away from the leaders by a large contingent of police in the central business district, dominated by office blocks of the mining companies that are the backbone of Western Australia's economy. Smaller countries within the group, many at risk from the effects of global warming, are pressing for a strong statement ahead on next month's international summit of climate change in the South African city of Durban. There have also been calls on leaders to help to end the practice of child brides. Twelve of the 20 countries with the highest rates of child brides are in the Commonwealth. And health advocates say laws in 41 Commonwealth states making homosexuality a crime breached human rights, hindering the fight against HIV-AIDS. Commonwealth states represent 60 percent of the world's HIV-AIDS population. | null |
The conference president entered the plenary hall to a huge applause as the Cancún climate summit gets close to its end with a 'striking balance'. The no-nonsense Mexican foreign minister had been able to strike the balance that many countries had sought for. Patricia Espinosa was visibly embarrassed when ministers, bureaucrats, activists, journalists and officials refused to stop clapping. She had been able to produce a text that was, more or less, accepted by all parties. Without the pressure o strike a deal, almost all of the 190 countries rallied behind her and extended their support for the text. Even the ever critical Venezuelan delegation could not hold back its pleasure. They said this was an "amazing text" with "striking balance". The main hall reverberated with the sounds of applause as delegations took the floor one after another only to praise or commend Espinosa's efforts and extend their strong support to the text. Greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere which raises temperatures leading to climate change through what are called extreme climate events like more frequent and intense floods and cyclones, rising sea level and causing persistent droughts. Experts say a temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius would result in 'catastrophic' climate change which may not be reversed. Espinosa put an end to the two-hour informal plenary just after Friday midnight and asked delegations to sit in their respective working groups in order to get through the tedious but necessary process. Those meetings will be followed by a closing plenary that will finally adopt the outcome barring any surprises. Mihir Kanti Majumder, Bangladesh's environment secretary, said the draft signified progress from what had come out of the last climate summit at Copenhagen. "This draft is acceptable and I think we can work on it and take it further," he said before hurrying off to the plenary on Friday evening. But another delegate of the Bangladesh contingent said the text was not at all the end and it is just the beginning as Espinosa had suggested during her closing speech. She said, "This conference is not an end but the beginning of a new stage of cooperation on solid basis." The delegate pointed out that there were several things that did not suit Bangladesh's negotiating position or the larger interests of the poor and vulnerable countries. "But all the parties agreed to it in the spirit of compromise." Ziaul Hoque Mukta, policy and advocacy manager for Oxfam Bangladesh who is also on the national delegation, said although not fully complete, "It has much potential to be developed." Mukta agreed that the text had the foundations necessary to launch serious negotiations by next year in Durban, South Africa where the next summit of the UN climate convention is scheduled to be held. Saleemul Huq, a senior researcher for the International Institute for Environmental Development, in his initial reaction to bdnews24.com approved the content of the text and the manner in which it was produced. He echoed points of the minister saying, "Two specific points that could be mentioned are the Adaptation Committee and the Green Climate Fund." Also a lead author of assessment reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top body on climate change, he said these two things were the demands of the poor and vulnerable countries. "We are getting that here." He went on: "It's a clean text. The Mexicans have run the negotiations really well. It was open and transparent." Already having had a cursory look, the long-time insider to complex climate negotiations approvingly said about the 32-page document, "They have been able to remove all the brackets." Huq said the text was a certain progress on Copenhagen and pointed out that it reflects "compromise". "Everybody does not have everything, they all have something." "But more importantly it brings back trust in the process and each other," he said. The glee and delight among participants clearly indicated that they were thankful to Espinosa for that particular reason — for bringing back their trust in the multilateral process. | null |
After the hastily arranged 90-minute meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan, Abe told reporters: "The talks made me feel sure that we can build a relationship of trust." But he would not disclose specifics of the conversation because the talks were unofficial. The conversation came as Japan's leadership was nervous about the future strength of an alliance that is core to Tokyo's diplomacy and security. Abe and other Asian leaders were alarmed at Trump's pledge during his campaign to make allies pay more for help from US forces, his suggestion that Japan should acquire its own nuclear weapons and his staunch opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The Republican president-elect will succeed Democratic President Barack Obama on Jan 20. Describing his conversation as "candid" and held in a "warm atmosphere," Abe said: "Alliances cannot function without trust. I am now confident that President-elect Trump is a trustworthy leader." He said he had agreed to meet again with Trump "at a convenient time to cover a wider area in greater depth." It was not clear if such a meeting would occur before Trump's inauguration. Trump official Kellyanne Conway said earlier on Thursday in an interview with CBS that "any deeper conversations about policy and the relationship between Japan and the United States will have to wait until after the inauguration." Trump officials did not immediately comment following the meeting with Abe. Abe is a veteran lawmaker who worked closely with Obama on the 12-nation TPP trade pact, which was part of Obama's push to counter the rising strength of China and was a pillar of Abe's economic reforms.
Abe and Trump gave each other golfing gear as gifts during their meeting, according to a Japanese government statement. Photographs taken inside the ornate meeting room at Trump Tower showed Abe and an interpreter along with Trump, his daughter Ivanka, her husband and Trump adviser Jared Kushner, and Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. Filling administration posts A senior Trump official said on Thursday that Trump had offered Flynn the national security adviser position. While it was not clear whether Flynn had accepted the job, a person familiar with the offer told Reuters: "When the president-(elect) of the United States asks you to serve, there is only one answer." As the incoming Trump administration prepares to take office on Jan 20, a Pentagon spokesman said he expected the Defense Department would conduct its first military briefing for Trump transition officials on Friday. Other Obama administration agencies, including the Justice Department, were taking similar steps. A brash outsider who has never held public office, Trump has been consumed since winning last week's election with working out who will occupy senior positions in his administration. Democrats in Congress kept up their criticism of Trump's controversial selection of right-wing firebrand Stephen Bannon as senior counsellor. A spokesman for House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said that during a meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, she urged that the appointment be reconsidered. Trump has been holed up in Trump Tower meeting with people who could fill senior roles on his governing team. On Saturday, he plans to meet with Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 presidential election, and may discuss bringing him on as secretary of state, a source familiar with the meeting said. The source had earlier said the meeting would take place on Sunday. It would be an extraordinary turn of events, given that Romney called Trump a "fraud" and urged Republicans to vote for anyone but the real estate magnate while the party was picking its presidential nominee. Trump mocked Romney on the campaign trail, saying he "choked like a dog" during his unsuccessful 2012 run against President Barack Obama. Trump’s 1980s view of Japan?
Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters on Friday in Tokyo that it was beneficial for Abe to meet Trump before he becomes president, given the importance of Japan-US relations. Abe adviser Katsuyuki Kawai told Reuters he had spoken to several Trump advisers and lawmakers since arriving in Washington on Monday and had been told: "We don’t have to take each word that Mr. Trump said publicly literally." Abe has boosted Japan's overall defence spending since taking office in 2012, while stretching the limits of its pacifist postwar constitution to allow the military to take a bigger global role. Defense spending still stands at just over 1 percent of GDP compared with more than 3 percent in the United States. The United States is projected to spend $5.745 billion for US forces in Japan in the current 2017 fiscal year. According to Japan’s Defense Ministry, Tokyo’s expenses related to US troops stationed in Japan totalled about 720 billion yen ($6.6 billion) in the year that ended in March. Some of Trump's campaign rhetoric suggested an image of Japan forged in the 1980s, when Tokyo was seen by many in the United States as a threat to jobs and a free-rider on defence. The Trump adviser who spoke earlier in the week stressed a more positive view. "Frankly, the prime minister has been more assertive and forthright in trying to make those changes to Japan’s global posture," he said. Abe was expected to see Obama at a summit in Peru on the weekend. Hours before Abe and Trump met, Obama's secretary of state, John Kerry, and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida met in Lima to discuss the Paris climate accord - a deal Trump has pledged to exit. Some diplomats say that until Trump makes key appointments, it will be hard to assess his policies on security issues ranging from overseas deployments of US troops, China's maritime assertiveness and the North Korean nuclear threat. | null |
Unless federal prosecutors can present new evidence that suggests racial malice motivated Zimmerman, who is white and Hispanic, to shoot Martin, an unarmed black teenager, they are unlikely to pursue charges, lawyers with expertise in civil rights said on Monday. A jury in Sanford, Florida, on Saturday found Zimmerman, a 29-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer, not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2012 shooting death of Martin. Defense lawyers argued Zimmerman shot 17-year-old Martin in self-defense. State and federal courts generally have the same threshold for a criminal conviction: a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt by a unanimous jury, or by a judge if a defendant waives a jury trial. By finding Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder, the Seminole County jury rejected the charge that Zimmerman acted with ill will, spite or hatred. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday his Justice Department had yet to decide whether to file federal civil rights charges against Zimmerman. Like the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in 1991 or the 2006 fatal shooting of Sean Bell by New York police, the Martin case is a window into the federal government's authority to enforce civil rights. Preachers led by Al Sharpton planned a news conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington for Tuesday to add pressure to prosecute Zimmerman. They believe he racially profiled Martin before pursuing him with a 9mm pistol. HATE CRIMES LAW The law federal prosecutors would most likely use against Zimmerman was passed in 2009 to target hate crimes. It requires that prosecutors prove that someone caused bodily injury "because of the actual or perceived race" of the victim, a bar that while straightforward can be hard to clear. "The difficult part is always showing the perpetrator's state of mind, and the statute requires that there was racial motivation, that the defendant was thinking in racial terms," said William Yeomans, a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer. The government typically uses evidence such as an attacker's contemporaneous racial epithets, or a pattern of planning to target a specific race, said Samuel Bagenstos, who served in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division during President Barack Obama's first term. "If you look at the standard patterns of these cases, there are often statements made by the defendant expressly referring to the race of the victim during the attack," he said. "That is a cut above the evidence that we've seen so far" against Zimmerman, he added. In an emergency call before the encounter with Martin, Zimmerman told a police dispatcher that Martin "looks black" but only after the dispatcher asked for Martin's race. One of the jurors in Zimmerman's state trial told CNN on Monday that she did not think Zimmerman racially profiled Martin. "All of us thought race did not play a role," said the juror, granted anonymity by the television news network. Further, there is no video of the encounter as there was of King's beating at the hands of four Los Angeles police officers. After a jury acquitted the officers of state charges in the King case, the Justice Department relied heavily on the video when it tried the officers on federal charges that they deprived King of his civil rights. Prosecutors analyzed the baton blows to King and zeroed in on those that came after the video showed King had been subdued. The second jury convicted two of the officers, helping to calm a poisonous US racial climate that included riots. RACIAL ANIMUS Wayne Budd, who as a Justice Department official oversaw the prosecution of the Los Angeles police officers, said he believed it would be difficult for the government to prove racial animus by Zimmerman with the evidence that has become public so far. "They're going to have their hands full. It's not going to be easy," Budd said.Terree Bowers, the US attorney in Los Angeles during the police officers' second trial there in 1993, said prosecutors were able to refine their case the second time around. He said he was not sure the Justice Department could do the same thing against Zimmerman. "I don't know what else is out there for the government to develop if they decide to proceed," he said. Holder, the chief US law enforcement official and an Obama appointee, in April 2012 referred to the difficulty of proving racial motivation. "We have a very ... high bar that we have to meet in order to bring federal charges in this case so we are continuing in that regard," Holder said while addressing Martin's death at a news conference. A Justice Department statement on Sunday alluded again to the challenges prosecutors face, referring to the "limited" civil rights laws. One advantage for prosecutors is a change in the hate-crimes law in 2009 that eliminated a requirement that they show a connection between the crime and a federally protected activity, like voting. A Justice Department spokeswoman on Monday declined to say whether prosecutors had convened a federal grand jury to hear evidence about Zimmerman, a step that would indicate increased activity on the part of prosecutors. | null |
A debate preceded the adoption of the non-binding resolution. MEP Charles Tannock said he found Bangladesh government was committed to protect the rights of citizens’ freedom of expression. He lauded the government for tackling terrorism, facing “very difficult” circumstances. The MEP from London compared this with the European countries' fight against terrorism. He said despite having benefits of economic advancements, the European countries were struggling to fight off terrorism. A foreign ministry official, who followed this debate, said Tannock also urged Parliament to be mindful of this fact while discussing this ‘delicate issue’ or criticising the Bangladesh government’s efforts in ensuring the rights of its people. The debate was mostly focused on “freedom of expression and press” with particular reference to Article 57 of the ICT Act, and the ongoing restrictions on social media use. The MEPs condemned the increasing attacks by “Islamist extremists” against secular writers, bloggers, religious minorities and foreign aid workers, and expressed concern at “restriction on freedom of speech and press and space for civil society organisations”. Romanian politician Dan Preda, however, pointed out that a very high number of newspapers were being published in Bangladesh and said “freedom of expression does exist” in the country. He condemned the killing of a number of journalists, and appreciated the government’s ‘zero-tolerance policy’ in all form of terrorism and extremism. He said Bangladesh was threatened by some terrorist organisations and urged the government to do whatever necessary to protect the lives of the journalists. Jean Lambert, Chair of the European Parliament Delegation to South Asia, commented that Bangladesh had a “vibrant press” which was now under attack. She commended Bangladesh’s considerable developments in gender equality, child nutrition, climate change adaptation and other issues. She said that quality justice system needed to be restored to bring the perpetrators of the killing of journalists to justice. Some lawmakers also urged the parliament to help Bangladesh fight against the rise of fundamentalism and intolerance. A non-binding resolution is a written motion adopted by a deliberative body that cannot be signed into a law. The substance of the resolution can be anything that can normally be proposed as a motion. Seven drafts were initially proposed by different political groups which were finally merged into a joint text. In the adopted resolution, the MEPs also lauded the “modern and secular credentials” of Bangladesh and lauded the socio-economic progress and development, particularly in the field of gender equality, and climate change. They also praised the government’s commitment to combating terrorism and violent extremism and ‘zero-tolerance policy’ in this regard. They urged the government to amend the Information and Communication Technology Act, the Cyber-Security Act of 2015, and Foreign Donation Regulation Act. Diplomats who followed the debate said few MEPs were adamant in their views regarding death penalty and made explicit references to the recent execution of war criminals. They mentioned that the EP “deeply regrets the execution”, arrest of the opposition leaders and attacks on minorities. However, Bangladesh ambassador to the EU intervened and argued against any such references. The ambassador expressed dismay and said should the EP be seen “expressing regret” at instances when perpetrators of crimes against humanity and genocide were brought to justice, it would definitely not augur well for the credibility of the Institution. One of the original seven drafts also had reference to need for “elections and dialogue”, that the ambassador also objected. In the final text, both of those issues did not find place. EU Commissioner for Budget & Human Resources Kristalina Georgieva in a traditional concluding remark said that the priority must be given in fighting radicalisation, respect for human rights as well as ensuring labour rights. She reaffirmed that the EU would continue to assist Bangladesh in strengthening democracy and governance. | null |
- Myanmar's junta arrested more people on Wednesday hours after the departure of a U.N. envoy who came to the country to try to end a ruthless crackdown on protests which sparked international outrage. At least eight truckloads of prisoners were hauled out of downtown Yangon, the former Burma's biggest city and centre of last week's monk-led protests against decades of military rule and deepening economic hardship, witnesses said. In one house near the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in the devoutly Buddhist country and starting point for the rallies, only a 13-year-old girl remained. Her parents had been taken, she said. "They warned us not to run away as they might be back," she said after people from rows of shophouses were ordered onto the street in the middle of the night and many taken away. The crackdown continued despite some hopes of progress by U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari on his mission to persuade junta chief Than Shwe to relax his iron grip and open talks with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he met twice. Singapore, chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) of which Myanmar is a member, said it "was encouraged by the access and cooperation given by the Myanmar government to Mr Gambari". Gambari, in Singapore on his way back to New York but unlikely to say anything publicly before speaking to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, was expected to return to Myanmar in early November, U.N. sources said. But there were no indications of how his mission and international pressure might change the policies of a junta which seldom heeds outside pressure and rarely admits U.N. officials. "I don't expect much to come of this. I think the top leadership is so entrenched in their views that it's not going to help," said David Steinberg, a Georgetown University expert on Myanmar. "They will say they are on the road to democracy and so what do you want anyway?", he added, referring to the junta's "seven-step road to democracy". The first of the seven steps was completed in September with the end of an on-off, 14-year national convention which produced guidelines for a constitution that critics say will entrench military rule and exclude Suu Kyi from office. "NORMALCY RESTORED" The protests, the biggest challenge to the junta's power in nearly 20 years, began with small marches against shock fuel price rises in August and swelled after troops fired over the heads of a group of monks. The junta says the monk-led protests -- which filled five city blocks -- were countered with "the least force possible" and Yangon and other cities had returned to normal. It says 10 people were killed and describes reports of much higher tolls and atrocities as a "skyful of lies", but Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer agreed with other Western governments the real figure was much higher. "It's hard to know, but it seems to me that the number of 30, which is the number we've officially been using, is likely to be an underestimate," he told Australian radio. Still, the junta appears to believe it has suppressed the uprising and lifted the barricades around the Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, the focal points of the protests, and eased an overnight curfew by two hours. Eighty monks and 149 women believed to be nuns swept up in widespread raids last week were released. Five local journalists, one of whom works for Japan's Tokyo Shimbun newspaper, were also freed. However, there was still a heavy armed presence on the streets of Yangon and Mandalay, the second city, witnesses said. The junta is also sending gangs through homes looking for monks in hiding, raids Western diplomats say are creating a climate of terror, and there was no let up in international anger at the harsh response to peaceful protests. In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council, including China, the closest thing the regime has to an ally, condemned the junta's "violent repression". It called on the generals to allow Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the U.N. human rights envoy to Myanmar, to visit for the first time in four years. He said thousands of people had been detained. "Light must absolutely be shed on what happened," Pinheiro told the council, which adopted a resolution deploring beatings, killings and detentions. Myanmar said the hearing was being used by "powerful countries for political exploitation". | null |
Dhaka, Aug 31 (bdnews24.com)—Two British ministers, arriving in Dhaka on Monday, said the UK will help Bangladesh secure the interests of the least developed countries (LDCs) at the critical Copenhagen climate negotiations in December this year. The assurance, from Douglas Alexander, UK minister for international development, and Ed Milliband, in-charge of energy and climate change, came a day before prime minister Sheikh Hasina flies to Geneva to attend to attend the World Climate Conference-3. "We will ... discuss how the UK can support Bangladesh in playing a key role as it represents the interests of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) at the crucial Copenhagen summit in December," Alaxander told reporters after landing in Dhaka. The two British ministers went on to meet Hasina and discussed climate change and development cooperation between the two countries. Bangladesh is the chair of the 50-member LDC Group, which includes the countries that would be most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, mostly a result of emissions by developed countries. Rich nations, including Britain, want to forge an alliance with the LDCs to press emerging economic giants China and India to make commitments for reducing their green house gases too. UN member countries will meet in Copenhagen to frame a new international legal instrument to reduce carbon emissions replacing the existing Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol had emission reduction bindings for developed countries, but not for developing countries. The last major climate talks in Bali in 2007 recognised that major emerging economies will have to reduce emissions. The LDC alliance with the developed countries will mount pressure on China and India which are now seen as major emitters of greenhouse gases. "Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Its efforts in adaptation and risk reduction offer lessons and inspiration to the rest of the world. "The challenges are huge," Ed Milliband told reporters. "The UK is committed to helping Bangladesh meet these challenges". The visiting ministers had dinner with foreign minister Dipu Moni at the state guest house Padma on Monday evening. International Climate Champions Initiative Alexander and Milliband also opened the UK government's International Climate Champions Initiative in Bangladesh at the British High Commission Club on Monday. Under the initiative of the British Council, the UK government will send 15 Bangladeshi youths, aged between 18 and 35 years, to participate in the Copenhagen summit. The objective of the project is to create awareness about climate change and its adaptation among the young generation. The interested candidates will have to submit proposals on climate change and a panel, headed by Dr Atiq Rahman of Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, will choose 15 candidates. | null |
The world's second-worst affected country by the pandemic had only Friday decided to resume international passenger flights from countries deemed "at risk" of the coronavirus, while ordering tightened border screening. But after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the new variant to be "of concern", Modi "highlighted the need for monitoring all international arrivals, their testing as per guidelines, with a specific focus on countries identified 'at risk'," the government said in a statement after he met with officials to review the COVID-19 and vaccination situation. The WHO said Omicron, initially detected in South Africa, may spread more quickly than other forms. This week, India posted the smallest rise in new cases in one and a half years, due to increased vaccinations and antibodies in a large section of its population from previous infections. The nation's daily caseload has halved since September. It reported 8,318 new cases in the last 24 hours. But the new variant, with a spike protein dramatically different from the one existing coronavirus that vaccines are based on, has raised global alarms and frightened financial markets. Modi said people must be more cautious and take proper precautions, such as wearing masks and social distancing. He "spoke about the need to be proactive in light of the new variant," the statement said. "He directed that intensive containment and active surveillance should continue in clusters reporting higher cases and required technical support be provided to states which are reporting higher cases presently." Modi told officials to accelerate second-dose coverage, it said. | null |
The royal couple, on a five-day visit, also toured a school and a national park in the capital Islamabad where they chatted with children and admired their drawings. The trip, which focuses on climate change and access to education, has been described by palace officials as the most complex the couple have undertaken due to security issues. On Tuesday afternoon, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge met Khan at his official residence. William’s mother Princess Diana, a hugely popular figure in Pakistan, visited Pakistan several times in the 1990s and helped Khan raise money for a cancer hospital. Earlier William and Kate met students at an Islamabad Model College for Girls, discussing education with a group of older students and visiting the classrooms of younger students. As they left, a group of girls sang one of Pakistan’s national songs and the couple greeted preschoolers who had lined up to chant ‘bye bye’. They then visited the Margallah Hills National Park on the edge of Islamabad, which is under threat from poaching, wildfires, invasive species and littering. For the morning events, Kate wore a periwinkle blue silk shalwar kameez, the national outfit of Pakistan consisting of a loose tunic worn over trousers. Many on social media and in the fashion industry had been hoping she would don the outfit, which Princess Diana had worn during visits. The designer, Maheen Khan said on Twitter: “It is an honor to have been asked to create this outfit for the Duchess.” The Duchess of Cambridge’s fashion choices, including a bright green tunic over white pants to meet with the Prime Minister, appeared to echo many of the colors and outfits worn by Diana. Foreign policy experts and officials have said the trip, the first by a British royal family member in more than a decade and made at the request of the British foreign office, represented a soft power push, which may help both sides further their diplomatic aims. It comes as Britain seeks to reinvigorate its foreign relationships as the deadline looms for its departure from the European Union, while Pakistan works to repair its global image to boost tourism and investment. | null |
Yet the nascent effort, which took on new urgency after Germany said on Wednesday that it had evidence that Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone had been monitored, faces an uphill battle if it is to be more than a marketing gimmick. It would not work when Germans surf on websites hosted on servers abroad, such as social network Facebook or search engine Google, according to interviews with six telecom and internet experts. Deutsche Telekom could also have trouble getting rival broadband groups on board because they are wary of sharing network information. More fundamentally, the initiative runs counter to how the Internet works today - global traffic is passed from network to network under free or paid-for agreements with no thought for national borders. If more countries wall themselves off, it could lead to a troubling "Balkanisation" of the Internet, crippling the openness and efficiency that have made the web a source of economic growth, said Dan Kaminsky, a US security researcher. Controls over internet traffic are more commonly seen in countries such as China and Iran where governments seek to limit the content their people can access by erecting firewalls and blocking Facebook and Twitter. "It is internationally without precedent that the internet traffic of a developed country bypasses the servers of another country," said Torsten Gerpott, a professor of business and telecoms at the University of Duisburg-Essen."The push of Deutsche Telekom is laudable, but it's also a public relations move."Deutsche Telekom, which is 32 percent owned by the government, has received backing for its project from the telecoms regulator for potentially giving customers more options. In August, the company also launched a service dubbed "E-mail made in Germany" that encrypts email and sends traffic exclusively through its domestic servers. BUGGING Government snooping is a sensitive subject in Germany, which has among the strictest privacy laws in the world, since it dredges up memories of eavesdropping by the Stasi secret police in the former East Germany, where Merkel grew up. The issue dominated discussions at a European summit on Thursday, prompting Merkel to demand that the US strike a "no-spying" agreement with Berlin and Paris by the end of the year. As the row festers, telecom and Internet experts said the rhetoric exceeded the practical changes that could be expected from Deutsche Telekom's project. More than 90 percent of Germany's internet traffic already stays within its borders, said Klaus Landefeld, a board member of the non-profit organization that runs the DE-CIX Internet exchange point in Frankfurt. Others pointed out that Deutsche Telekom's preference for being paid by other Internet networks for carrying traffic to the end user, instead of "peering" agreements at no cost, clashed with the goal to keep traffic within Germany. It can be cheaper or free for German traffic to go through London or Amsterdam, where it can be intercepted by foreign spies. Thomas Kremer, the executive in charge of data privacy and legal affairs for the German operator, said the group needed to sign connection agreements with three additional operators to make a national routing possible. "If this were not the case, one could think of a legislative solution," he said. "As long as sender and receiver are in the Schengen area or in Germany, traffic should no longer be routed through other countries," Kremer said, referring to the 26-country passport-free zone in Europe. A spokesman for Telefonica Germany said it was in early discussions on national routing with other groups. A spokesman for Vodafone said it was "evaluating if and how" to implement the Deutsche Telekom proposal. Although Deutsche Telekom is positioning itself as a safe custodian of user data, its track record on privacy is mixed. In a 2008 affair dubbed Telekomgate, Klaus Trzeschan, a security manager at the group, was jailed for three and a half years for his role in monitoring phone calls of the firm's own management and supervisory board members, as well as business reporters. A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom said the affair was the reason why the group worked "so hard" on privacy and security issues in recent years. "We are now the leading company of our industry when it comes to customers' trust," he said. DATA CENTRES While the routers and switches that direct traffic can be programmed so data travel certain routes, the most popular online services are not built to respect borders. Web companies often rely on a few large data centers to power their entire operation, and they don't choose locations based on the location of their customers but on factors such as the availability of cheap power, cool climates, and high-speed broadband networks. For example, if a Munich resident uses Facebook to chat with a friend sitting 500 kilometers (310 miles) away in Berlin, the traffic would go through one of the company's three massive data centers 8,000 km away in Oregon or North Carolina, or one near the Arctic Circle in the Swedish town of Luleå. European users' profiles are not necessarily stored in the Swedish centre; instead the website's different functions such as games, messaging, and wall posts are distributed among the data centers to improve efficiency. Similarly, emails sent by Google's Gmail between two German residents would probably be routed through one of the company's three data centers in Finland, Belgium and Ireland. The only way to change this would be for Germany to require local hosting of websites, a drastic move according to experts that has not yet been pushed by German leaders. Deutsche Telekom declined to say whether it would lobby for such an approach. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, angered by reports that the U.S. spied on her and other Brazilians, is pushing legislation that would force Google, Facebook and other internet companies to store locally gathered or user-generated data inside the country. One solution would be for European leaders to beef up a new data-privacy law, which has been in the works for almost two years. A greatly toughened version of the law was backed by the European Parliament on Monday, but it still requires agreement by members states. France and Germany may succeed in getting member states to push ahead on talks to complete the new data rules by 2015. Deutsche Telekom's Kremer said the new law could help: "Of course customers need to be able to use any web services they like, anywhere in the world. But we need to make this safer." | null |
French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius, who is chairing the U.N. conference, said he still planned to issue a penultimate draft on Thursday afternoon with as few disagreements or bracketed passages as possible to pave the way for a last round of revisions. "We will now try to move towards a final agreement," he told U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as they met in the conference hall before talks resumed. Fabius has insisted that an accord to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating global warming must be finished by Friday, the meeting's official closing date, rather than overrunning in the manner of previous conferences. But ministers and negotiators from 195 countries remain divided over fundamental issues. They include which countries would be expected to shell out the hundreds of billions of dollars required to help developing countries shift from fossil fuels to lower-carbon energy sources. That sticking point has accentuated backroom tensions between US and China over what US Secretary of State John Kerry has referred to as the "minimalist" approach by countries that could make a greater financial contribution. For their part, the Chinese avoided discussing specific details but said they saw room for compromise. 1.5 degrees or 2? "There will be another draft today where more square brackets will be removed but, most importantly, we need more consultations with our colleagues," said Gao Feng, one of the Chinese negotiators. "On Friday or Saturday we may get there." The talks have also revived differences on how ambitious the deal should be in trying to control the rise in the earth's temperatures. A large block of developing nations are insisting that the agreement include the longer-term goal of keeping temperatures to a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels, even though The cuts in carbon emissions that countries have pledged to make over the coming decade would not come close to that level. Many participants remain haunted by the calamitous failure to get a deal in Copenhagen in 2009, the last time the world tried to reach a consensus on dealing with climate change. This time, said Alex Hanafi, head of climate change strategy for the US-based Environmental Defense Fund, "there really is a desire to get a deal, but the open question is whether it will be a strong deal or a weak deal”. Jose Ramos-Horta, a former president of East Timor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is part of his country's negotiating team, said that no nation should expect to get all they want from an accord. "A treaty is not a Bible. We can also review," he told Reuters, suggesting that whatever is agreed in Paris could be revised and toughened in the future. | null |
COPENHAGEN, Dec 6, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - World concern about climate change has fallen in the past two years, according to an opinion poll on Sunday, the eve of 190-nation talks in Copenhagen meant to agree a UN deal to fight global warming. The Nielsen/Oxford University survey showed that 37 percent of more than 27,000 Internet users in 54 countries said they were "very concerned" about climate change, down from 41 percent in a similar poll two years ago. "Global concern for climate change cools off," the Nielsen Co. said of the poll, taken in October. It linked the decline to the world economic slowdown. In the United States, the number two emitter after China and the only industrialised nation outside the UN's existing Kyoto Protocol for curbing emissions, the number of those very concerned fell to 25 percent from 34. President Barack Obama wants to cut US greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, and plans to join more than 100 world leaders in Copenhagen at the end of the Dec. 7-18 meeting to try to reach a new UN deal. China, the top emitter of greenhouse gases, was among few nations surveyed where the number of people very concerned rose, to 36 from 30 percent. The survey indicated the highest levels of concern were in Latin America and Asian-Pacific countries, topped by the Philippines on 78 percent which was struck by Typhoon Ketsana in September. The poll did not cover most of Africa. Those least concerned by global warming, blamed on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, were mainly in eastern Europe. Estonia was bottom with just 10 percent saying they were very concerned. Jonathan Banks, Business Insights Director Europe of the Nielsen Co., said that worries about climate change may now be picking up with the focus on Copenhagen. "Economic woes temporarily knocked the climate change issue off the top line agenda, but as the recession is now beginning to recede, we expect the Copenhagen summit to push this important issue to the front again," he said. Worldwide, air and water pollution followed by climate change were the top three environmental concerns for the world population, the survey found. | null |
The Group of 20 rich and developing nations promised to give rising powers such as China more say in rebuilding and guiding the global economy, and declared their crisis-fighting efforts a success on Friday. Leaders pledged to keep emergency economic supports in place until sustainable recovery is assured, launch a framework for acting together to rebalance economic growth, and implement tougher rules governing banks by 2012. "Here in Pittsburgh, leaders representing two thirds of the planet's population have agreed to a global plan for jobs, growth and a sustained economic recovery," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said after a two-day summit. US President Barack Obama's first turn hosting a major summit ended on an upbeat note, with leaders claiming victory in stopping the recession from turning into a depression. "It worked," they said in the final communique. "Our forceful response helped stop the dangerous, sharp decline in global activity and stabilize financial markets." Obama said, "We cannot tolerate the same old boom-and-bust economy of the past. We can't wait for a crisis to cooperate. That's why our new framework will allow each of us to assess the other's policies, to build consensus on reform, and to ensure that global demand supports growth for all." The Pittsburgh gathering was the third summit in a year for the G20, which said it would now be the "premier forum" for economic cooperation, supplanting the Western-dominated G7 and G8 that were the primary international forums for decades. "This is a symbolic act of inclusion of immense importance to international politics," said Colin Bradford, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "There is tremendous significance to the history being made today that this decision does not enlarge the G7 but replaces it." Others were more skeptical. "I think the G7 is something of a zombie -- very hard to kill," said Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist. "They have a lot of inter-connections ... but obviously at the summit level, they are gone." The move was a clear acknowledgment that fast-growing countries such as China and India now play a much more important part in world growth. "This movement to the G20 and away from the G7 is recognizing economic realities. You can't talk about the global economy without having the major dynamic emerging economies at the table," John Lipsky, the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told Reuters Television. Disclosure of a second Iranian uranium enrichment plant gave Obama, with the leaders of Britain and France at his side, an opportunity to press for united action against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program. Obama said Iran was "on notice" that it must choose when it meets with world powers in Geneva on October 1 whether it would "continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation". JOB NOT DONE Tough economic tasks remained for the group. The G20 vowed not to return to the "reckless behavior" blamed for triggering the financial crisis, which exploded two years ago when failing U.S. mortgage loans caused catastrophic losses at financial firms around the world. "A sense of normalcy should not lead to complacency," the G20 leaders said in their summit communique. "We want growth without cycles of boom and bust and markets that foster responsibility not recklessness." In addition to the regulatory reforms, which are supposed to be developed by the end of 2010 and put in place two years later, the G20 took aim at lavish pay packages for bankers. The leaders agreed that firms should be able to claw back or reclaim pay and bonuses in certain instances. The measure was aimed at making sure bankers don't get huge payouts for making risky bets that later go bad. The leaders agreed to shift some voting power at the International Monetary Fund to underrepresented countries such as China from rich ones, another sign that the developed world had accepted the changing balance of economic power. In the statement, the G20 endorsed a plan to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as a way to combat global warming, and to step up efforts to complete the Doha round of trade talks. REBALANCING GROWTH World leaders also backed a U.S.-led push for reshaping the global economy to smooth out huge surpluses in exporting powerhouses such as China and large deficits in big importing countries such as the United States. Obama wants to ditch the U.S. borrow-and-spend mold and embrace saving and investment but that means countries such as China that rely on exports for growth must also adjust. G20 leaders agreed to work together to assess how domestic policies mesh and to evaluate whether they are "collectively consistent with more sustainable and balanced growth." Countries with sustained, significant surpluses -- a description that could fit China -- pledged to strengthen domestic sources of growth, according to the communique. By the same token, countries with big deficits -- such as the United States -- pledged to support private savings. Economists have warned for years that these large imbalances could destabilize the global economy, and previous attempts to correct them have fallen flat. The United States thinks the effort will succeed this time because China and other big exporters suffered severe slumps when global trade collapsed during the recession, showing their economies were vulnerable to outside shocks. CLIMATE CHANGE Despite the show of solidarity, there were some sources of friction. Many Europeans were frustrated that little was agreed on how to pay for fighting climate change, particularly with a December climate summit in Copenhagen fast approaching. "I do not hide my concern at the slow rate of progress...It's time to get serious now, not later," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement. Kept at a distance from the G20 convention center, about 10,000 protesters marched against capitalism and the G20's agenda, some of them chanting "You're sexy, you're cute, take off that riot suit" to the police. There was only one arrest on Friday and the mood was buoyant, in contrast to protests on Thursday when there were clashes with police and dozens of arrests. | null |
To derive an answer, every aspect of Venus requires examination. That includes the way its face has metamorphosed over time. Earth has plate tectonics, the gradual migration of continent-size geologic jigsaw pieces on its surface — a game-changing sculptor that crafts an exuberance of diverse volcanoes, giant mountain ranges and vast ocean basins. Venus doesn’t have plate tectonics. But according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it may possess a quirky variation of that process: Parts of its surface seem to be made up of blocks that have shifted and twisted about, contorting their surroundings as they went. These boogying blocks, thin and flat slices of rock referred to as campi (Latin for “fields”), can be as small as Ireland or as expansive as Alaska. They were found using data from NASA’s Magellan orbiter mission, the agency’s last foray to Venus. In the early 1990s, it used radar to peer through the planet’s obfuscating atmosphere and map the entire surface. Taking another look at these maps, scientists found 58 campi scattered throughout the planet’s lava-covered lowlands. These campi are bordered by lines of small mountain ranges and grooves, features that have also been warped and scarred over time. What made them? According to Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University and the study’s lead author, there is only one reasonable explanation: Essentially dragged around by the flowing mantle below, the campi “have been shimmying around the place, just like pack ice.” Campi moving toward immobile land would cause the ground to crumple up, forming mountains. One moving away would have stretched the land, opening grooves. And along these boundaries, campi moving side-to-side would have left strain marks and etchings. That this deformation took place in the lowlands of Venus is significant. The lava smothering them is anywhere between 750 and 150 million years old, making these landscapes some of the planet’s youngest. That means the tectonic two-step of these campi happened relatively recently in the solar system’s history. But is this dance still happening today? NASA’s VERITAS and Europe’s EnVision missions will find out. Equipped with their own advanced radar systems, these orbiters will examine these campi in high-resolution, allowing scientists to ascertain if any have shimmied about since the days of Magellan. If they have, then it will further evidence a long-harboured notion: Venus is tectonically active, if not as hyperactive or as dynamic as Earth. Long ago, Venus had an ocean’s worth of water, for potentially billions of years. This could have made plate tectonics possible, as liquid water permits plates to break, bend and flow. This process also regulates the climate by burying and erupting carbon, preventing worlds from undergoing runaway global warming that would render them uninhabitable. But one of several possible apocalypses — perhaps multiple volcanic cataclysms — turned Venus into an arid hellscape, and its plate tectonics would have shut down. Consequently, for the past billion years or so, the entire planet’s surface was a solitary, stagnant and largely static plate. But that doesn’t mean the planet has become quaver-free. Thanks to missions like Magellan, scientists have previously spotted fault networks, rift zones and mountain ridges — the scar tissue left by both ancient and somewhat more contemporary movement. If this new study is correct, and entire swaths of Venus have been recently jiggling about, then the planet’s surface “is more mobile than people have conventionally assumed,” said Joseph O’Rourke, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who wasn’t involved with the work. Explaining why Venus has this surprising tectonic tempo would have hefty implications. There are countless Earth- and Venus-size worlds in the cosmos, and their tectonic activity will also determine their fates. But “we can’t claim to understand any rocky world in the solar system or beyond if we can’t understand Earth and its nearest neighbour,” O’Rourke said. Venus, and its myriad surprises, certainly isn’t making that task easy. © 2021 The New York Times Company | null |
The comments by presidential spokesman Rego Barros came after governors of states in the Brazilian Amazon told President Jair Bolsonaro that they needed the money to help fight the record wildfires in the world’s largest tropical rainforest. “The Brazilian government, through its president, is open to receiving financial support from organisations and countries. This money, when it enters the country, will have the total governance of the Brazilian people,” Barros said. Separately, a diplomatic source in Brasilia told Reuters the Brazilian government had also accepted 10 million pounds from Britain to fight the fires. Bolsonaro’s press office was not immediately available to comment on the information. Earlier on Tuesday, Bolsonaro had said he would only consider accepting a $20 million offer of aid from the Group of Seven wealthy nations if French President Emmanuel Macron withdrew the “insults” against him. Bolsonaro and Macron have been embroiled in a deeply personal and public war of words in recent days, with Bolsonaro mocking Macron’s wife and accusing the French leader of disrespecting Brazil’s sovereignty. Macron has called Bolsonaro a liar and said Brazilian women are “probably ashamed” of him. The office for the French president declined to comment. Brazil’s president is finding himself increasingly isolated on the global stage over his response to the blazes, which threaten what many view as a key bulwark against global climate change. The far-right government’s response could threaten Brazil’s trade deals and powerful agribusiness sector, which is a crucial driver of its recession-plagued economy. “We think that it’s not the moment to turn down money,” Flávio Dino, the governor of Maranhao state, told reporters after a meeting in which Bolsonaro pledged to agree on a package of legislative measures with the states by Sept. 5 to help prevent the surge in forest fires happening again. “The anti-environment rhetoric could expose Brazil to international sanctions,” Dino said. The number of blazes in Brazil has skyrocketed 80% in the year to date compared to the same period in 2018, according to data from space research agency INPE. About 90 km (55 miles) from Porto Velho, in the Amazon state of Rondonia, a Reuters witness saw houses abandoned due to the fierce forest fires. There were isolated patches of rain on Tuesday, but not enough to put out the fires, he said. Widespread rain that could snuff the fires out are likely weeks away, according to weather data and two experts. A local farmer, who declined to give his name, said he expected the fires to worsen next week when the forest is usually at its driest. PUBLIC SPAT G7 leaders pledged the $20 million after discussing the fires ravaging an area often dubbed “the lungs of the world”. The offer, which was made at a summit in France on Monday, has stirred up emotions within Bolsonaro’s nationalist government. Some officials are grateful for the much-needed help, and others view it as a colonial gesture that undermines Brazil’s control of its lands. Bolsonaro raised Macron’s ire on Sunday when the Brazilian leader responded to a Facebook post that compared the looks of his wife Michelle, 37, with Macron’s 66-year-old wife Brigitte. “Do not humiliate the man hahahah,” Bolsonaro wrote. Macron, who has accused Bolsonaro of lying about climate change policy, called the remarks “extremely disrespectful” to his wife. On Tuesday morning, Bolsonaro said he would only countenance accepting G7 money if Macron retracted his earlier comments. “First of all, Macron has to withdraw his insults. He called me a liar. Before we talk or accept anything from France ... he must withdraw these words then we can talk,” Bolsonaro told reporters in Brasilia. “First he withdraws, then offers (aid), then I will answer.” Barros, the president’s official spokesman, told reporters later that Brazil was open to accepting international aid if it could decide how the money is spent. INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE US President Donald Trump on Tuesday tweeted his support for Bolsonaro, an ideological ally on the environment, China and trade. The Brazilian president “is working very hard on the Amazon fires and in all respects doing a great job for the people of Brazil - Not easy. He and his country have the full and complete support of the USA!” Trump tweeted. Bolsonaro responded, also on Twitter: “We’re fighting the wildfires with great success. Brazil is and will always be an international reference in sustainable development.” The fires are not limited to Brazil, with at least 10,000 sq km burning in Bolivia, near its border with Paraguay and Brazil. Neighbours Peru and Colombia on Tuesday asked Bolsonaro to attend a meeting on Sept 6 to discuss the disaster and come up with a long-term coordinated plan to stop deforestation. Norway’s environment minister on Tuesday urged representatives of oil firm Equinor, fertiliser-maker Yara and aluminium producer Norsk Hydro to make sure their supply chains in Brazil are not linked to deforestation. | null |
Dhaka, Jan 27 (bdnews24.com)—Prime minister Sheikh Hasina has said climate change will not only disrupt the lives of millions of people on Asia and the Pacific region, but also harm the national and regional stability. Terming natural disasters and shortage of fuel large barriers to development of the region, she said: "Global warming has put us all at serious risk." The prime minister was speaking at the inaugural session of the CIRDAP second ministerial meeting on 'Rural development in Asia and the Pacific' at Dhaka Sheraton hotel on Wednesday. Representatives from 14 member states of the Centre on Integrated Rural Development in Asia and the Pacific (CIRDAP) and a few non-member countries are taking part in the meeting, being held 23 years after the first one in 1987. Hasina said urbanisation process is intensifying and pressure on fuel mounting because of the influence of globalisation. She urged the leaders of the region to look at the problems, resulting from climate change and globalisation, and said: "Otherwise, rural development and poverty eradication programmes will not bring any sustainable result." The prime minister said an increasing number of natural disasters and the current economic meltdown have put food security of the poor people at stake. "We have to use our wisdom maintaining our united stance to find out practical solutions to the common problems," she told the ministers. The prime minister emphasised boosting investment and exports to offset the negatives of globalisation and said: "We have to identify new challenges and potentials of globalisation from regional perspective." She mentioned that threats of climate change on low-lying countries have already been identified. Hasina listed her government's poverty reduction measures, including formulation of a poverty reduction strategy paper, expansion of social safety net, increase in agriculture subsidy, and measures to ensure uninterrupted power supply for irrigation. She said the government is going to implement the 'one-house one-farm' programme from this year. CIRDAP chairperson and local government and rural development minister Syed Ashraful Islam, state minister Jahangir Kabir Nanok, rural development and cooperatives division secretary Rokeya Sultana, and CIRDAP director general Durga P Paudyal also spoke on the occasion. | null |
The first UN special session on climate change focused on the world's rich countries on Tuesday, as policy-makers urged long-standing polluters to shoulder much of the burden for cutting greenhouse gases. British economist Nicholas Stern said poor and developing countries also need to participate in a "global deal" to curb the human-made emissions that swaddle the planet like a blanket. Stern, author of a path-breaking report last year on the economic consequences of climate change, said the global target for reducing greenhouse gases -- notably the carbon dioxide released by coal-fired electric plants and petroleum-powered vehicles -- should be a cut 50 percent by 2050. "Because of reasons of past responsibility and better access to resources, the rich countries should take much bigger objectives than that 50 percent," he said. "They should be looking for around 75 percent cuts." That responsibility could extend to financing cuts in emissions in other countries, said Stern, formerly head of the British government's economic service and now at the London School of Economics. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown sounded a similar note in earlier remarks at the United Nations. "We know that the gains from global prosperity have been disproportionately enjoyed by the people in industrialized countries and that the consequences of climate change will be disproportionately felt by the poorest who are least responsible for it -- making the issue of climate change one of justice as much as economic development," Brown said. "The rich world has to reduce emissions far more drastically than it has done so to date," said Sunita Narain, director of India's Center for Science and Environment. "The political leadership is very high on rhetoric but very low on real action when it comes to delivering the goods on climate change." Global climate change has been blamed for droughts, floods, rising seas and more intense storms, and these cannot be explained by natural climate variability, John Holdren, an environmental scientist at Harvard University, told the gathering. The United States, one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, made no statement at Tuesday's sessions, and has repeatedly rejected firm targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, maintaining this would hurt the US economy. Instead, Washington has called for voluntary rather than mandatory emissions cuts. President George W. Bush agreed with other leaders of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations in June to make "substantial" but unspecified reductions in climate-warming emissions and to negotiate a new global climate pact that would extend and broaden the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. The two-day climate meeting at the United Nations, which concludes on Wednesday, is the first of its kind in substance and in style. The gathering is carbon-neutral, with all emissions from air travel and the operation of the UN Headquarters building in New York being offset by investment in a biomass fuel project in Kenya. | null |
Britain said on Saturday it deplored the escalating violence against opposition supporters in Zimbabwe a month after elections there and called for a United Nations mission to inspect human rights abuses. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is seeking an arms embargo on President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party, said Britain would step up diplomatic efforts ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on the former British colony. "The coming days will be critical. We will intensify international action around a UNSC discussion on Tuesday. We will press for a UN mission to investigate the violence and human rights abuses," he said in a statement. "The whole international community must speak up against the climate of fear in Zimbabwe." The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has said it won the March 29 parliamentary and presidential elections, and a partial recount ordered by Mugabe confirmed it had pushed ZANU-PF into second place in parliament for the first time in 28 years. However, the official results of the presidential vote have still not been released despite the fact Mugabe has called for a re-run. "If there is a second round, the international community will insist that there are international monitors deployed and SADC and AU principles upheld," Brown said. "I welcome the positions taken by the UN Secretary General, by African leaders, by Europe, by the US and by all those who want to see a return to democracy in Zimbabwe. "We, and others, stand ready to help rebuild Zimbabwe once democracy returns. I pledge that Britain will be in the vanguard of this effort." | null |
With the U.S. Capitol encircled by thousands of armed troops two weeks after a mob laid siege to it, Biden took the oath of office administered by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts and became the oldest U.S. president in history at age 78. "To overcome these challenges to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity," he said in his inauguration speech. "We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this - if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts." The scaled-back inauguration ceremony was stripped of much of its usual celebratory spirit. The National Mall, typically packed with throngs of supporters, instead was filled with U.S. flags in a reminder of the pandemic Biden will confront as chief executive. Speaking on the steps of the Capitol, where supporters of then-President Donald Trump clashed with police in a chaotic assault that left five dead and stunned the world on Jan.6, Biden cast his ascension as proof that the attackers had failed to disrupt the underpinnings of American democracy. The violence prompted the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Trump last week for an unprecedented second time, accusing him of incitement after he exhorted his backers to march on the building amid false claims of election fraud. "Here we stand, just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work on our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground," Biden said. "It did not happen; it will never happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever."
Jennifer Lopez sang “America the Beautiful” and “This Land Is Your Land” during the inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden. https://t.co/EXPUFixUPD pic.twitter.com/9GAJnvSZgw— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
Jennifer Lopez sang “America the Beautiful” and “This Land Is Your Land” during the inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden. https://t.co/EXPUFixUPD pic.twitter.com/9GAJnvSZgw Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, became the first Black person, first woman and first Asian American to serve as vice president after she was sworn in by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Latina member. The norm-defying Trump flouted one last convention on his way out of the White House when he refused to meet with Biden or attend his successor's inauguration, breaking with a political tradition seen as affirming the peaceful transfer of power. Trump, who never conceded the Nov. 3 election, did not mention Biden by name in his final remarks as president on Wednesday morning, when he touted his administration's record and promised to be back "in some form." He then boarded Air Force One for the last time and flew to his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida. Top Republicans, including Vice President Mike Pence and the party's congressional leaders, attended Biden's inauguration, along with former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Biden takes office at a time of deep national unease, with the country facing what his advisers have described as four compounding crises: the pandemic, the economic downturn, climate change and racial inequality. He has promised immediate action, including a raft of executive orders on his first day in office. After a bitter campaign marked by Trump's baseless allegations of election fraud, Biden struck a conciliatory tone rarely heard from his predecessor, asking Americans who did not vote for him to give him a chance.
Breaking News: Kamala Harris became the first woman — and the first woman of color — sworn in as vice president of the United States. https://t.co/tO2Vbn92S7 pic.twitter.com/qjvP31HMSr— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
Breaking News: Kamala Harris became the first woman — and the first woman of color — sworn in as vice president of the United States. https://t.co/tO2Vbn92S7 pic.twitter.com/qjvP31HMSr "I pledge this to you: I will be a president for all Americans," he said. "And I promise you I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did." Although his remarks were directed primarily at problems at home, Biden delivered what he called a message to those beyond America's borders, promising to repair alliances frayed by Trump, lead and be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security. He made no specific mention of high-stakes disputes with North Korea, Iran and China. 'SOUL OF AMERICA' Biden's inauguration is the zenith of a five-decade career in public service that included more than three decades in the U.S. Senate and two terms as vice president under Obama. But he faces calamities that would challenge even the most experienced politician. The pandemic in the United States reached a pair of grim milestones on Trump's final full day in office on Tuesday, reaching 400,000 U.S. deaths and 24 million infections - the highest of any country. Millions of Americans are out of work because of pandemic-related shutdowns and restrictions. Biden has vowed to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear on the crisis. His top priority is a $1.9 trillion plan that would enhance jobless benefits and provide direct cash payments to households.
At President Biden’s inauguration, Lady Gaga performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” https://t.co/4gGKCue25u pic.twitter.com/rwUUtb7ICa— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 20, 2021
At President Biden’s inauguration, Lady Gaga performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” https://t.co/4gGKCue25u pic.twitter.com/rwUUtb7ICa But it will require approval from a deeply divided Congress, where Democrats hold slim advantages in both the House and Senate. Harris was scheduled to swear in three new Democratic senators late on Wednesday, creating a 50-50 split in the chamber with herself as the tie-breaking vote. Biden will waste little time trying to turn the page on the Trump era, advisers said, signing 15 executive actions on Wednesday on issues ranging from the pandemic to the economy to climate change. The orders will include mandating masks on federal property, rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending Trump's travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries. Although Biden has laid out a packed agenda for his first 100 days, including delivering 100 million COVID-19 vaccinations, the Senate could be consumed by Trump's upcoming impeachment trial, which will move ahead even though he has left office. The trial could serve as an early test of Biden's promise to foster a renewed sense of bipartisanship in Washington. Trump issued more than 140 pardons and commutations in his final hours in office, including a pardon for his former political adviser, Steve Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to charges that he swindled Trump supporters as part of an effort to raise private funds for a Mexico border wall. But Trump did not issue preemptive pardons for himself or members of his family, after speculation that he might do so. | null |
With the ascent to power of young Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom has seen an expansion in women's rights including a decision to allow women to attend mixed public sporting events and the right to drive cars from this summer. The changes have been hailed as proof of a new progressive trend towards modernisation in the deeply conservative Muslim kingdom, although the gender-segregated nation continues to be criticised for its continued constraints on women. "The laws are very clear and stipulated in the laws of sharia (Islamic law): that women wear decent, respectful clothing, like men," Prince Mohammed said in an interview with CBS television aired late on Sunday.
Women run during an event marking International Women's Day in Old Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Mar 8, 2018. Reuters
"This, however, does not particularly specify a black abaya or a black head cover. The decision is entirely left for women to decide what type of decent and respectful attire she chooses to wear." Women run during an event marking International Women's Day in Old Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Mar 8, 2018. Reuters A senior cleric said last month that women should dress modestly, but this did not necessitate wearing the abaya. It remains unclear if these statements signal a change in the enforcement of women's dress code in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia has no written legal code to go with the texts making up sharia, and police and judiciary have long enforced a strict dress code requiring Saudi women to wear abayas and in many cases to cover their hair and faces. But the kingdom has witnessed a cautious new climate of social freedoms with the rise of the 32-year-old crown prince to power after decades of elderly rulers.
With the ascent to power of young Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom has seen an expansion in women's rights. Reuters
Saudi women have started wearing more colorful abayas in recent years, the light blues and pinks in stark contrast with the traditional black. Open abayas over long skirts or jeans are also becoming more common in some parts of the country. With the ascent to power of young Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom has seen an expansion in women's rights. Reuters On March 8, a group of women in the Saudi city of Jeddah marked International Women's Day by exercising one of their newly acquired freedoms: the right to go for a jog, paying no heed to bemused onlookers. However, activists have blasted the country’s continued guardianship system requiring a male family member to grant permission for a woman to study abroad, travel and other activities. Last week, a UN rights watchdog called on Saudi Arabia to end discriminatory practices against women including male guardianship, and give them full access to justice. | null |
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to arrive in Dhaka on Saturday afternoon on a two-day official visit to discuss bilateral issues with Bangladesh. She is scheduled to land at 4:10 pm at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport where foreign minister Dipu Moni will receive her. The foreign ministers will have their formal talks in the afternoon followed by a joint press briefing and later they would sign a declaration on Bangladesh-US Partnership Cooperation. Clinton will also meet prime minister Sheikh Hasina and leader of the opposition Khaleda Zia. She will also meet Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and Brac chairman Fazle Hasan Abed and members of the civil society. BANGLADESH INTEREST Bangladesh will vigorously push for duty-free market access of its garment products to the US market. Being a least developed country, Bangladesh has the legitimate right to get duty-free access to all rich countries including US, officials say. The other important issues that Bangladesh will discuss are membership of Millennium Challenge Corporation fund and extradition of Bangabandhu killer Rashed Chowdhury who lives in the US. US INTEREST In Muslim-majority Bangladesh the US has strategic interests. The importance of Bangladesh increased significantly after the March verdict by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) that awarded Bangladesh a vast area in the Bay of Bengal. It is also a partner of all four global initiatives of president Barack Obama - global food security, global health, climate change and engagement with Muslim country. The other US interests here include protection and promotion of US investment, better security ties and opportunity for more exports. US company ConocoPhilips is currently exploring gas and oil at blocks 10 and 11 in the Bay of Bengal and seeking another six blocks for exploration. Bangladesh and US had its first ever security dialogue in April to continue cooperation in the area. | null |
BERLIN, Thu Jul 24, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Presidential candidate Barack Obama travels to Berlin on Thursday to give the only public speech of a week-long foreign tour, an outdoor address on transatlantic ties that is likely to draw tens of thousands. Highly popular in Germany, where he is often likened to former President John F. Kennedy, the Democratic senator will also meet for the first time Chancellor Angela Merkel, who opposed his initial plan to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. Instead, Obama will give his evening address at the "Victory Column" in Berlin's central Tiergarten park, down the road but still within sight of the Gate, a landmark that stood behind the Berlin Wall for decades as a potent symbol of the Cold War. "Hopefully (the speech) will be viewed as a substantive articulation of the relationship I'd like to see between the United States and Europe," Obama told reporters in Israel shortly before leaving for Germany. "I'm hoping to communicate across the Atlantic the value of that relationship and how we need to build on it." Relations between the United States and Germany reached a post-war low under Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, who strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the conservative Merkel, who grew up behind the Wall in the communist East, has worked hard to repair ties and emerged as one of President George W. Bush's closest allies in Europe. She said on the eve of Obama's visit that she expected to discuss NATO cooperation, climate change and trade issues with the Illinois senator during a morning meeting at the Chancellery that German officials have said will last about an hour. They are also expected to discuss Afghanistan and Iraq, the countries where Obama started his Middle East and European tour. In Kabul on Sunday, Obama described the situation in Afghanistan as precarious and urgent. LIMITS He and his Republican challenger for president John McCain have both said Europe must step up its efforts there, but Merkel told reporters on Wednesday that she would tell Obama there were limits to what Germany could do. The Obama visit has dominated the newspaper headlines in Germany for weeks, even sparking sharp exchanges between Merkel and her foreign minister over whether a speech at the Brandenburg Gate was appropriate. Merkel has said the landmark -- where President Ronald Reagan famously urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" -- is a place for presidents, not candidates to speak. Her advisers tried to convince the Obama campaign to hold the speech at a university or other low-key location. Asked if he had read the Cold War speeches delivered by Reagan and Kennedy in Berlin to prepare for his own trip, Obama said unlike the two presidents, he was just "a citizen". "Obviously, Berlin is representative of the extraordinary success of the post-war efforts to bring the continent and to bring the West together," he said. Around 700 policemen will be in place for the visit and city workers have been setting up barriers around the "Siegessaeule", a 230 foot (70 meter) high column built to celebrate 19th century Prussian military victories over Denmark, France and Austria, since Monday. Crowd forecasts vary widely, ranging from 10,000 to nearly a million. German public television station ARD will broadcast the full 45-minute speech, which starts at 7 p.m. (1700 GMT), live. A Pew Research Center poll showed Germans favored Obama over McCain by a 49 point margin. Influential weekly Der Spiegel dedicated its weekend issue to the visit, putting a picture of Obama on the cover and the title "Germany meets the Superstar". | null |
The Puja began Tuesday at the famous Durgabari temple, located in front of the 113-year-old Ujjayanta Palace, eastern India's biggest such.A part of the fortress and mansion continues to be the abode of the former princely rulers and the remaining served as the Tripura assembly until 2009.It has now been turned into northeast India's biggest museum conserving the history, life and culture of northeast India."Tripura is the only Indian state where the state government, be it ruled by Left or non-Left parties, is at the forefront of funding such a Hindu religious festival. The tradition has been going on since Tripura's merger with the Indian union and has been on during Communist rule in the state," Panna Lal Roy, a writer and historian, told IANS.At the end of 517-year rule by 184 kings, on Oct 15, 1949, the erstwhile princely state came under the control of the Indian government after a merger agreement signed between Kanchan Prabha Devi, then regent maharani, and the Indian governor general.The merger agreement made it mandatory for the Tripura government to continue the sponsorship of temples run by the Hindu princely rulers. This continues even after six- and-a-half decades.A full-fledged division - Debarchan Vibhag - under district magistrates in four of Tripura's eight districts now bears this responsibility and the entire expenditure of several temples, including that of Durgabari."Before starting the five-day long worshiping of Durga and her four children, a procession led by the head priest, escorted by the Tripura Police, goes to the palace to seek the consent of the former royal family to begin the puja to the deities at Durgabari," said Nagendra Debbarma, a senior official of the west district.He said that many ancient traditions are not followed nowadays."A young buffalo, several goats and pigeons are sacrificed during the five-day festival at Durgabari in the presence of thousands of devotees - all at government expense," Debbarma told IANS.People For Animals (PFA) chairperson Maneka Gandhi, currently union minister of women and child development, in a letter to the district magistrates asked them to stop "cruel killing of animals in the temples" during religious festivities."The district magistrate of West Tripura earlier has to report in writing about the preparations at Durgabari to the former royal family and submit a final report after completion of the mega puja. Now this practice has been discontinued."Dulal Bhattacharjee, the octogenarian chief priest of Durgabari temple, said it is on the final day of Dashami that the real splendour of the festival comes to the fore."The idols of Durgabari that lead the Dashami procession are the first to be immersed at Dashamighat with full state honours, with the police band playing the national song."Historian Roy, who wrote many books on the history of royal era, said: "The over 200-year-old Durga Puja is unique in the sense that the prasad (holy offering) includes meat, fish, eggs and, of course, fruits."Though the Durgabari temple's Durga Puja celebration remains the main attractions due to numerous reasons, community pujas organised by clubs and families also vie for much attention.Traditional themes, prevailing issues and events continue to dominate pandals with Indian temples and historical happenings forming part of the decorations.India's mission to Mars and climate change will come alive in pandals through colourful lighting.Global warming, protection of the environment, crime against women, ancient India's epics, folk and traditional life and culture of Hindu Bengalis and tribals, conventional handicraft work, Tripura's royal palace, Kolkata's Birla Planetarium, Guwahati's Kamakhya Temple, Konarak's Sun Temple, Kashmir's snow-capped hills and Dal Lake, Bombay High and a Buddhist temple in China are also being depicted through puja marquees.According to the Tripura Police, 2,335 community and family pujas have been organised all across Tripura, bordering Bangladesh.Of these, 1,023 are in urban areas and 1,312 in rural areas. Around 550 pujas are being held in and around Agartala alone. | null |
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Sunday his 2008 priority would be dealing with the global credit crunch and steering a stable course through the financial turbulence. "The global credit problem that started in America is now the most immediate challenge for every economy and addressing it the most immediate priority," he said in a New Year's message setting out his goals for next year. "Our strong economy is the foundation. And with unbending determination, in 2008, we will steer a course of stability through global financial turbulence," he said. Six months after succeeding Tony Blair, Brown's popularity has slumped due to government blunders and growing economic clouds, including a crisis at mortgage lender Northern Rock that led to the first run on a British bank in more than a century. Northern Rock, Britain's highest profile casualty of the credit crisis, has had to borrow at least 25 billion pounds ($50 billion) from the Bank of England. Brown and finance minister Alistair Darling have come under fire for their handling of the crisis but Brown expressed confidence the economy would not be pushed off course. The economy has enjoyed solid growth since Brown's Labour Party came to power in 1997, but weakening house prices and sliding consumer morale have raised fears of a slowdown next year. "I promise that we will take no risks with stability," said Brown, finance minister for 10 years under Blair, and he vowed to keep interest rates low by keeping inflation low. Brown has invited German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to London for a meeting on financial market stability, expected in the first half of January. After an early honeymoon with voters, Brown's popularity quickly wore off and Labour lags the opposition Conservatives by up to 13 points in opinion polls. An uproar over the tax agency's loss of computer discs containing half the population's personal data and a storm over secret donations to Labour have embarrassed Brown. Brown, who has been under pressure to set out his vision, attempted to do so in his New Year's message, pledging 2008 would be a year of "real and serious changes" for Britain. New laws would bring long-term changes in energy, climate change, health, pensions, housing, education and transport, he said, while Britain would continue to work to counter the threat of global terrorism. | null |
Paris is gone for now, its lifeblood cut off by the closure of all restaurants, its nights silenced by a 6 pm curfew aimed at eliminating the national pastime of the aperitif, its cafe bonhomie lost to domestic morosity. Blight has taken the City of Light. Taboos fall. People eat sandwiches in the drizzle on city benches. They yield — oh, the horror! — to takeout in the form of “le click-and-collect.” They dine earlier — an abominable Americanisation. They contemplate with resignation the chalk-on-blackboard offerings of long-shuttered restaurants still promising a veal blanquette or a boeuf bourguignon. These menus are fossils from the pre-pandemic world. Gone the museums, gone the tourist-filled riverboats plying the Seine, gone the sidewalk terraces offering their pleasures at dusk, gone the movie theatres, gone the casual delights of wandering and the raucous banter of the most northern of southern cities. In their place, a gray sadness has settled over the city like fog. “Parisian gloom is not simply climatic,” Saul Bellow wrote in 1983. “It is a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and rooftops, but also on your character, your opinions and your judgment. It is a powerful astringent.” Bellow, however, could still stop for a sauvignon blanc and a plate of charcuterie when the “Parisian grisaille” — that depthless monochrome that can envelop even the Eiffel Tower — gave him the January blues. Not in this damp Parisian winter, as the toll of COVID-19 mounts and the city’s ghostly streets follow one another like TS Eliot’s “tedious argument.” I have seen sunlight three or four times since arriving from New York about seven weeks ago. A glimmer, a summons to life, gone soon enough to leave doubts as to whether it was real. New York does not do drizzle or weeks of uninterrupted gray skies. So my adaptation has been harsh, particularly to a Paris with its soul torn out. “It’s of an absolute sadness,” Alain Ducasse, the celebrated chef, said when I asked how Paris felt these days. “It’s a terrible imprisonment. The French are not accustomed to life without its social side — a drink at a cafe, a touch, a kiss.” Yes, even the “bisou,” the little kiss on both cheeks that is a rite of greeting or farewell, is gone. With more than 74,000 people dead across France from the pandemic, everyone understands the restrictions imposed. Almost all major cities across the world have had to endure lost lives, lost jobs, lost ways of life. Paris is far from alone in its deprivations. But each city changes in its own way. In New York, the absence that feels most acute is of the energy that defines it. In Paris, the hole in its heart is the absence of the sensual conviviality that makes people dream. It is the disappearance of pleasures the French have spent centuries refining in the belief there is no limit to them. Life is monotonous. There is really nowhere to go. “We’ll only have Paris,” a friend feeling claustrophobic grumbled the other day. He has bought a dog because he is allowed to walk it after the curfew. Frédéric Hocquard is responsible for tourism and nightlife in the mayor’s office. He told me the number of tourists in Paris was down about 85% last year. Visits to the Louvre and Versailles, both now closed, were down about 90%. “It’s catastrophic,” he said. Hotel occupancy is running at about 6%. One bright spot: The number of Parisians going up the Eiffel Tower last year doubled. “One of the characteristics of a true Parisian is that he or she has never ascended the Eiffel Tower,” Hocquard said. “We started to change that.” All it took was the elimination of alternatives. There are other upsides to this Parisian misery. Traffic flows. Markets are unbowed with their gleaming-eyed oyster shuckers, their butchers taking five minutes to truss each quail, their oozing Camembert cheeses prompting debate about ripeness, their rum baba cakes with little syringes to inject the rum. The city’s islands still point their prows toward the low-slung bridges of subtle fulcrums. The 19th-century wrought-iron lampposts down the deserted Rue de Rivoli cast a dreamlike procession of light, as if in a film noir. (With a press pass it is possible to go out after the curfew). Paris quieted is also Paris in a reverie. “One hundred days,” Ducasse said. Then, he insisted, the revival would begin. I asked if he had travelled. Only to Bologna in Italy, he said, to recruit a master maker of gelato. After starting a successful chocolate business a few years ago, his next venture will be ice cream. Hocquard is also eyeing April and May, planning concerts and other outdoor activities in parks, on the banks of the Seine, even at underused airports. Such optimism leaves the problem of dealing with the present. One recent snowy Sunday, I went to the Tuileries in search of distraction. I have always liked the formality of this garden, the gravel paths, the pollarded trees, the geometric patterns. One attraction was still functioning: a carousel! Round and round went colourful horses, an ostrich, a car, a plane, a ship and a couple of Cinderella carriages. My partner and I chose horses. The music was North African. There were a couple of children. The carousel, a little miracle, spun me down my intermittent Paris years stretching back to the mid-1970s. Paris would be back — if not this spring, someday. I watched a crow advance, wedge a discarded French fry in its beak and fly off to perch on a bench. I gazed at a wall with plaques for French fighters killed during the liberation of Paris in 1944. The youngest, Jean-Claude Touche, was 18. The pandemic has, in some ways, imposed conditions of war in time of peace. It, too, will end. With his famous wartime line from “Casablanca” — “We’ll always have Paris” — Humphrey Bogart was also telling Ingrid Bergman to leave him, stay with her husband and console herself with memories of the city of their love. It was an invitation to the imaginary. Now more than ever, Paris must be imagined. © 2021 The New York Times Company | null |
If such people prove that they face the right sort of
danger, and meets the host country’s conditions for staying, then that country
is obligated to welcome them. This ideal has never been perfectly observed, even in
its origins after World War II, when it was seen as both a moral and a
practical imperative, to rebuild shattered societies for the common good. But the very Western powers that championed this
compact have been steadily eroding it in recent years — chipping away at their
own, and therefore the world’s, obligations toward a responsibility they once
characterised as crucial to global stability. That assault, experts say, reached a new extreme last
week, as Britain’s government announced a new plan for thousands of foreign citizens
in the country who had applied for asylum. Rather than hear their claims, it
would ship them to Rwanda, a faraway quasi dictatorship in which most had never
set foot, to become someone else’s problem. Britain did not invent the practice of shutting refugees
and asylum-seekers in faraway facilities. European governments have been paying
foreign despots and warlords, in countries like Sudan and Libya, to detain
migrants on their behalf for years. Australia outsources this work to a string
of island nations sometimes described as its gulag archipelago. The United
States effectively pioneered the practice in 1991, when it diverted boats full
of Haitians to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A rise in right-wing populist politics, the backlash
in Europe against a surge of migration in 2015 and then the coronavirus
pandemic have accelerated this practice and others like it: walls, armed
patrols and “deterrence” policies that deliberately make the journey more
dangerous. The result is not exactly that the global refugee
system is dead. European governments are taking in millions of Ukrainians
displaced by Russia’s invasion, for example. Rather, Britain’s policy
highlights that this system, once held up as a universal and legally binding
obligation, is now treated as effectively voluntary. “It’s pretty bold to, within a month, offer housing to
Ukrainians and then announce you’re sending all the other migrants 4,000 miles
away,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a scholar of migration politics at the
University of Pennsylvania. “The brazenness of the double standard seems like an
implicit announcement,” Schwartz added, “that governments should just take
refugees when they want to and don’t when they don’t.” The consequences of this shift, which in many ways
have already arrived, are likely to accelerate in the coming months, amid what
is expected to be a significant summertime rise in refugee arrivals — along
with, perhaps, more of the backlash that has animated clampdowns like
Britain’s. AN ERODING IDEAL The world’s commitment to refugees and asylum-seekers
has always been more conditional and self-interested than it was presented to
be. In the years after World War II, even as Western
leaders pledged to resettle Europe’s refugees where they would be safe, they
forcibly returned 2.3 million Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, many against
their will. One in five were subsequently executed or sent to the gulag,
according to estimates by historian Tony Judt. Still, as the Cold War hardened, Western governments
increasingly emphasized their respect for refugee rights, and pressured their
allies to do the same, as a way to position their bloc as superior to communist
governments that sometimes barred citizens from fleeing. Western compliance
remained spotty, privileging refugees from communist countries or others who
offered some political gain. But the real shift came at the Cold War’s end, in
1991, when Western countries lost this political incentive. Global refugee
populations soared in the early 1990s, to 18 million, according to one United
Nations metric, nearly nine times as many as when the world formally enshrined
refugee rules in a 1951 convention. The US policy of diverting Haitian refugees began in
1991. It was a kind of loophole: If the refugees did not arrive at US shores,
the United States was not technically obligated to hear their claims. Though no
one was fooled, it kept Washington in compliance with US law, which had been
written to match international obligations, as in many countries. Years later came another surge in refugees worldwide,
to 20 million in 2017, a figure that has risen slightly since then, though it
remains smaller, as a share of global population, than the 1992 peak. The
current refugee crisis is almost certainly smaller than the one following World
War II, which forced tens of millions from their homes across Europe and Asia
and devastated whole societies, all but forcing world powers to act. But by the 2010s, as refugee outflows rose mostly from
poorer countries, the response was very different. The United States applied
similar policies to people from Central America as it had to Haitians,
negotiating deals with governments, particularly in Mexico, to prevent refugees
and other migrants from reaching the border. Europe and Australia pursued similar
strategies. The result: concentric rings of detention centres,
some notorious for brutality, just beyond the borders of the world’s richest
countries. Most are along refugees’ paths, or near the borders they had hoped
to reach, allowing governments a fig leaf of compliance. Britain’s new
proposal, by shipping people to the far reaches of another continent, takes
this a step further, underscoring how the new system really works. Some argue that enshrining new international
agreements, or scrapping the old ones altogether, might more sustainably
distribute global responsibility, particularly as a rise in climate refugees
scrambles the boundaries between economic migrant and political refugee. World
leaders, though, have expressed little interest in such plans. And if the
problem is that governments do not want refugees and cannot be made to take
them, replacing one half-ignored agreement with another would change little. THE EMERGING ORDER Europe’s seeming double standard — as its governments
welcome Ukrainians but continue going to extraordinary lengths to keep out
migrants from the Middle East — has laid the unwritten norms of the new refugee
system especially bare. Increasingly, governments apply ostensibly universal
refugee rights selectively and often on the basis of which demographic groups
are expected to meet domestic political approval. Even as Britain announced its
expulsion of asylum-seekers already in the country, for instance, it apologised
for not bringing in more Ukrainians. For all of the revulsion at President Donald Trump’s
statement in office that the United States should welcome arrivals from
countries like Norway and bar populations he considered undesirable, the
sentiment reflects an increasingly common practice. The Biden administration last week granted protected
status to the 40,000 Cameroonian citizens in the United States, meaning that
they do not have to return to Cameroon amid that country’s civil war. Last
month, the United States extended protected status to 30,000 Ukrainians. At the same time, the administration has been divided
over whether to maintain a Trump-era rule that allows the country, on public
health grounds, to outright reject most refugees who arrive at the border.
Though the rule is set to be lifted May 23, many in the administration fought
to keep it. The pandemic, Schwartz said, “broke the seal on things
that were once considered extreme,” like near-total border closures. As a
result, restrictions that might have once seemed shocking now feel more normal,
easing governments’ way. Governments have also learned that, as long as they do
not hold one another to account for breaking international norms, there is no
one other than their own citizens to stop them. And it is their own citizens who often demand these
policies. Right-wing populist parties saw their support surge in
the past decade, in part by championing a backlash to immigration and
portraying refugee rules as a plot to dilute traditional national identities. While some establishment parties pushed back — Germany
welcomed 1 million refugees amid the rise of the country’s far right — others
concluded that curtailing nonwhite immigration was necessary to save their
parties, maybe their democracies. Would-be refugees, fleeing wars or famines,
were made to pay the price. It was hardly the founding intentions of the global
refugee compact that cycle-by-cycle domestic politics would determine which
families, displaced by disaster, found a new life abroad and which were
condemned to squalid camps or mass graves. Still, if that is how it is to be, then the British
public’s response to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s proposal, and its unusually
brazen defiance of that compact, may prove revealing. “It’s inhumane, it’s morally reprehensible, it’s
probably unlawful, and it may well be unworkable,” David Normington, previously
the top civil servant in Britain’s Home Office, told the BBC. But whether the plan is truly workable, in the eyes of
the British government or others, may ultimately depend less on laws or
morality than on what the British public will tolerate. © 2022 The New York Times Company | null |
The Strategic Dialogue is a forum led by Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh Md Shahidul Haque and Permanent Under Secretary of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Sir Simon McDonald. The UK side will have a delegation of 15-20 members comprising the representatives from Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Department of International Development, Department of Trade, UK Home Office/ UK Border Agency, Department of Transport, and Ministry of Defence, the foreign ministry said. Bangladesh side is expected to consist of the delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Commerce, Export Promotion Bureau, Bangladesh Investment Development Authority, Ministry of Defence, Economic Relations Division, Security Services Division, Special Branch of Bangladesh Police, and Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism. The two-day dialogue is expected to discuss entire gamut of bilateral relations between the countries, along with other regional and multilateral issues including Rohingya, countering terrorism and violent extremism. They will also discuss the growing focus on trade and investment relations, new areas of cooperation, regional connectivity and stability, and wide range of global issues including climate change, migration, cooperation in UN peacekeeping, Sustainable Development Goals, and Development partnership in the LDC gradation process. McDonald is expected to give a talk on UK-Bangladesh relations during the times of Brexit at the Bangladesh Institute of International Strategic Studies. He is also likely to meet young leaders and diplomats during the visit. The UK secretary will have a private meeting with his Bangladesh counterpart. Bangladesh High Commissioner to the UK Saida Muna Tasneem will attend the dialogue. | null |
Fire all male teachers at girls’ schools, Halimi said he was told. Replace them with women — men should not teach girls, the militants said. The government did as it was told. “We didn’t want to give them an excuse” to shut down the schools by force, Halimi said. But Farah’s schools were not spared. Last month, on two successive nights, armed men on motorcycles set fire to two girls’ schools just outside Farah city, the provincial capital. Both were badly damaged and the teaching materials inside were destroyed, ending classes indefinitely for nearly 1,700 girls. Graffiti on a nearby wall read, “Long live the Islamic Emirate” — the Taliban’s name for their movement. Four other girls’ schools in the province have been attacked in the past several months, said Muhibullah Muhib, a police spokesman. Besides terrifying teachers, students and their families, the attacks have renewed larger fears of a return to the repressive days of Taliban rule, as the militants and the United States try to negotiate a peace deal. Until the Taliban government was toppled in 2001, girls’ education was outlawed and women were confined to their homes. Today, more than 3.6 million Afghan girls are enrolled in school and 100,000 women attend universities, according to education ministries. But about 400 schools for both boys and girls have closed over the past several months for “security reasons,” including armed conflict and Taliban threats or attacks, the ministry said. The Farah bombings came after Taliban leaders in Qatar, where the talks with the Americans have been held, said they were committed to women’s rights under Islamic law, including the right to education. But in Farah, the school attacks underscored deep misgivings among Afghan women that any future government that included the Taliban would once again ban or limit education for girls. Sosan Aubi, 38, a teacher at one of the schools that were burned last month, said she and other teachers had been optimistic about the chances for peace because of the Qatar talks. “But after this explosion all of us have lost our hope,” she said. Nayab Khan, a village grocer whose sisters and daughters had attended one of the burned schools, said he didn’t trust the Taliban’s promises. “They say they have changed for the good, but we see them blowing up schools and preventing girls from getting education,” Khan said. Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, denied responsibility for the attacks and said the militants would investigate and punish those involved. If the schools reopen, “there won’t be any threat from our side,” Mujahid said. But angry local residents pointed out that the schools were in areas controlled by the Taliban. They also said government officials had been unable to reach the schools to inspect the damage. Dadullah Qani, a member of the Farah provincial council, said the attacks demonstrated that the government was losing control of the province. “The security situation here is deteriorating day by day,” Qani said. “There is no difference between the government and ordinary people — both are helpless to prevent such attacks.” Provincial government officials and village elders said the attacks exposed a split among the militants, with many Taliban civil authorities willing to tolerate girls’ education but some military commanders opposed. The Taliban operate so-called shadow governments in areas controlled or contested by the militants, taxing residents and establishing offices that govern day-to-day affairs. “Some of them are OK with girls’ education and some of them are against it,” said Halimi, the deputy education director. Village elders said a delegation met with government officials in Farah city to demand they rebuild the schools, but were told that the government was powerless to intervene. They said they were advised to contact local Taliban leaders. Halimi said a group of about 50 villagers was considering temporarily resuming classes in tents. Local residents said Taliban education officials had contacted provincial school leaders to discuss the reopenings, but asked for time to reach an accommodation with Taliban military commanders. Mohammad Azimi, the provincial education director, said he had asked parents and students to help reopen the schools. At Sher Ali Khan school in the village of Naw Deh, about 8 miles from Farah city, the windows had been blown out and the walls had buckled. Inside, burned desks and school papers were strewn around. At the school entrance was a plaque engraved with Afghan and American flags and a message saying the U.S. Agency for International Development had helped build the school in 2005. Someone had tried to scratch out the U.S. flag. (The agency’s office in Kabul said it did not currently fund the school but that it may have been a past project.) Abdul Rahman, the school principal, said armed five men wearing masks tied up the night watchman, splashed fuel inside the school and set it alight on the night of April 15. They also detonated a small explosive device inside the school office. School records, student supplies and academic textbooks were burned, but the attackers spared Islamic religious texts, Rahman said. “Now all the girls are scared,” Rahman said. “Even if we reopen the school, maybe they won’t come anymore.” Abdul Hamid Haidari, 45, a shopkeeper, said his three daughters attended Sher Ali Khan school. He said his daughter Roya, 18, was scheduled to graduate this year and pursue a career as a teacher, but that it was now unlikely to happen because her school transcripts had been destroyed. Haidari said Roya and her sisters burst into tears when told about the attack. He said he was determined to educate his children — his daughters and his four sons — and had sacrificed to place them in schools despite the precarious security climate. “I was hoping the peace talks would change the situation,” he said. “But now that our school has been blown up, I’m not so hopeful anymore.” Qani, the provincial council member, described a climate of fear and mistrust in the wake of the school attacks. He said they may have had the desired effect: Even if the schools reopen, many parents are afraid to send their girls back to them. “Today they blow up school buildings,” Qani said. “Tomorrow will they attack students?” c.2019 New York Times News Service | null |
The "solar direct-drive" refrigerators – plain, box-like coolers that do not require fuel or batteries - have helped boost child vaccinations in DRC's poorest rural provinces by 50% in the past year, according to global vaccine alliance Gavi. That has helped cut child mortality in DRC to half of what it was two decades ago. More than 18 million children were vaccinated last year against a deadly measles outbreak, which has slowed dramatically in recent weeks. Now the world is looking to launch a far bigger immunisation push once vaccines for COVID-19 become available. Delivering millions of inoculations in Africa, a sprawling continent with fragile health systems and a lack of electricity to power them, will be a daunting task. And it remains unclear whether existing off-grid fridges can keep the vaccines cold enough to help. Refrigeration is essential for vaccine distribution. Most vaccines require cooling at between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius (35-46 degrees Fahrenheit), but nearly half of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates under development will require cold storage as low as minus 80C, researchers say. In addition, a cold chain distribution network for COVID-19 vaccines will require seamlessly low temperatures from manufacturers to airports to remote rural villages. Despite advances that have likely saved millions of lives by keeping vaccinations cold in recent years, most African countries still have enormous gaps in such networks. “It’s probably the biggest logistical challenge the world has ever faced, and it’s an especially immense challenge for sub-Saharan African countries with significant rural populations,” said Toby Peters, a professor specialising in cooling systems for food and medicine at Britain’s University of Birmingham. DELIVERY 'REVOLUTION' When William Clemmer, a doctor with faith-based nonprofit IMA World Health, arrived in the DRC in the 1990s, many health centres were using outdated kerosene-powered refrigerators that would often break down, damaging or destroying vaccines. First-generation solar refrigerators were an improvement, but they required storage batteries that often stopped working after two to three years and were hard to replace. Solar direct-drive refrigerators changed that, starting about a decade ago. Costing between $3,500 and $9,000, they are wired directly to solar photovoltaic panels, which provide thermal energy to freeze a thick lining of water, with the ice layer keeping the vaccines inside cool for many days, no matter the weather. In 2016, only 16% of DRC’s rural health centres had working refrigerators, according to Gavi. Today close to 80% are equipped, many with direct-drive solar units. They have enabled 24,000 monthly immunisation sessions in the nine poorest provinces in the past year, a 50% jump from 2018. “They’ve essentially revolutionized vaccine delivery for children in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Clemmer. Karan Sagar, a doctor who heads the health systems and immunisations strengthening team at Gavi, credits the off-grid equipment for achieving a 25% jump in child vaccination rates in Africa from a decade ago. Since 2017, a $250-million effort led by Gavi has delivered more than 15,300 solar direct-drive fridges to three-dozen African countries, including nearly 3,400 units to the DRC and 5,400 to Nigeria. Sagar said 87% of children in those African countries received the first dose of a vaccine last year for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough). “This is a testament to the ability of supply chains to reach even the most remote communities in the world,” he said. FACTORY TO VILLAGE It is not only ultra-cold temperatures for COVID-19 vaccines that Africa may need to contend with. Solar refrigerators are only the last of many steps that will be required to move the vaccines quickly and safely from centralized manufacturing sites - whether inside or outside Africa - to urban and rural destinations across the continent. At every step along the way – airplanes, warehouses, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, canoes and even drones – the vaccines must be kept at specific, very cold temperatures, just like other perishable products. And substantially larger volumes will be needed. While child vaccination campaigns typically reach about 115 million infants annually worldwide, the COVID-19 vaccine will need to reach as many as 750 million people in Africa alone, health experts predict. To prepare for this challenge, cold chain expert Peters is leading a government-backed effort to evaluate Africa’s needs in delivering an eventual COVID-19 vaccine, working with nonprofit, commercial and academic partners. They are drawing on lessons from Rwanda, a central-east African country that has made enormous progress in recent years building efficient, climate-friendly cold chains for food and vaccine delivery. Its system evolves around one warehouse that serves as a cooling hub for vaccines that are distributed to district hospitals, health centres and remote rural health posts, of which dozens are using solar fridges. The vaccines are reaching more than 95% of the population, according to the World Health Organization. But replicating Rwanda’s success will be a formidable task. “Rwanda is small - countries like Nigeria are much more difficult,” Peters said. FOOD MODEL Food cold chains where larger-scale commercial capacity is more established will be the kind of model needed, he added. “We know how to move hundreds of millions of tonnes of fresh food from small farms across Africa to the fridges of consumers in Europe,” Peters said. “We need to take this expertise and transfer it to vaccines.” But that is before factoring in the potential ultra-cooling needs COVID-19 vaccines may require - which solar direct-drive fridges are typically not equipped to handle. Rwanda and the DRC do have firsthand experience of vaccines needing ultra-cold storage in the form of a new vaccine that helped end the Ebola outbreak this past summer. “Super thermos” coolers, filled with blocks of synthetic alcohol ice, kept the vaccine at minus 60-80C for up to 6.5 days. But the amounts involved were a tiny fraction of what would be needed for an effective COVID-19 vaccine. “Few African economies have any ultra-cold chain capacity at all,” Sagar noted. Peters is hoping COVID-19 vaccines will require only the standard cold storage at 2-8C, which solar direct-drive refrigerators can provide at rural health centres. “If mainstream cold chains have to get below that, we have a massive new challenge,” he said. | null |
As a consequence of a geomagnetic storm
triggered by a recent outburst of the sun, up to 40 of 49 newly launched
Starlink satellites have been knocked out of commission. They are in the
process of reentering Earth’s atmosphere, where they will be incinerated. The incident highlights the hazards faced by
numerous companies planning to put tens of thousands of small satellites in
orbit to provide internet service from space. And it’s possible that more solar
outbursts will knock some of these newly deployed orbital transmitters out of
the sky. The sun has an 11-year-long cycle in which it oscillates between
hyperactive and quiescent states. Presently, it is ramping up to its peak,
which has been forecast to arrive around 2025. This recent solar paroxysm was relatively
moderate by the sun’s standards. “I have every confidence that we’re going to
see an extreme event in the next cycle, because that typically is what happens
during a solar maximum,” said Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at the
University of Southampton in England. If a milquetoast outburst can knock out
40 Starlink satellites hanging out at low orbital altitudes, a more potent
solar scream has the potential to inflict greater harm on the
megaconstellations of SpaceX and other companies. SpaceX announced the looming destruction of as
many as 40 of its satellites in a company blog post on Tuesday night. The
company said that after the launch, the satellites were released to their
intended orbit, about 130 miles above Earth. This altitude was chosen partly to prevent
potential collisions in the future with other satellites. If the satellites
malfunction after being deployed at that altitude, and are unable to raise
their orbits to more secure heights, “the atmosphere kind of reclaims the
failed technology very rapidly,” Lewis said. “And that’s a very good safety
measure.” But on Jan 29, before these satellites
launched, a violent eruption from the sun of highly energetic particles and
magnetism known as a coronal mass ejection was detected. That ejection arrived
at Earth sometime around Feb 2, creating a geomagnetic storm in Earth’s
magnetic bubble. The powerful storm added kinetic energy to
particles in Earth’s atmosphere. “The atmosphere kind of puffs up, expands, as
a result,” Lewis said. That expansion causes an increase in the atmosphere’s
density, which in turn increases the drag experienced by objects moving through
it, including satellites. This drag shrinks the size of their orbits, which
draws them closer to the thick, lower atmosphere in which they burn up. According to SpaceX, during the recent
Starlink deployment, “the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused
atmospheric drag to increase up to 50% higher than during previous launches.”
This ensured that as many as 40 of the 49 satellites would eventually succumb
to the forces of gravity and perish. There are currently a total of 1,915 Starlink
satellites in orbit, so for SpaceX, a loss of up to 40 “is not a big deal from
their point of view,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who also
catalogs and tracks artificial space objects. But Lewis said “that probably accounts for
potentially up to $100 million of hardware, if you include the cost of the
launch.” The dangers that solar outbursts and
geomagnetic storms pose to objects in low-Earth orbit, from electrical damage
to communications disruptions, are well known. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration ranks geomagnetic storms on a scale from minor to
extreme. The latest, a “moderate” storm, is noted by the agency as possibly
causing changes in atmospheric drag that can alter orbits. With these risks being known, did SpaceX take
this hazard into account during this Starlink deployment? “I’m just kind of dumbfounded,” said Samantha
Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada. “Really? They did
not think of this?” “It’s a bit of a surprise,” said McDowell.
“They should have been ready for this, one would have thought.” When contacted by email, a SpaceX media
representative said that no one was available to answer questions, noting that
“it’s an incredibly demanding time for the team.” That these satellites seem to be quickly
entering the atmosphere, rather than lingering in low-Earth orbit, is a good
thing. They also pose no threat to anyone on the ground. “From a safety
perspective, the system functioned exactly as it should have,” Lewis said. “The
satellites de-orbited, and nothing else was put at risk.” Most satellites orbit at higher altitudes and
can avoid the hazards posed by atmospheric expansion. But the threat to
satellites orbiting at lower altitudes is far from over, and it leads to the
question of whether SpaceX can continue deploying spacecraft at this low
altitude. “As the sun gets more active, it releases an
increasing amount of extreme ultraviolet, which gets absorbed into our
atmosphere,” Lewis said. That atmosphere will expand significantly, and “the
expectation is that the atmospheric density is going to increase by one or two
orders of magnitude. That’s a way bigger change compared to what we’ve just
seen with this particular event.” Many astronomers have been critical of
Starlink and other satellite constellations, which reflect sunlight and will
potentially interfere with telescope research on Earth. And some see this
incident as emblematic of SpaceX’s attitude toward problems occurring in
low-Earth orbit. “If things fail, they fix them and do things
better next time,” Lewis said. “This is another example of that” — a policy of
adherence to hindsight, not foresight. The death of these satellites is “a harsh
lesson for SpaceX,” Lewis said. What happens next is up to them. Lawler added, “I hope this will knock a little
bit of sense into them.”
© 2022 The New York Times Company | null |
The COP26 conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow opens a day after the G20 economies failed to commit to a 2050 target to halt net carbon emissions - a deadline widely cited as necessary to prevent the most extreme global warming. Instead, their talks in Rome only recognised "the key relevance" of halting net emissions "by or around mid-century", set no timetable for phasing out coal at home and watered-down promises to cut emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg asked her millions of supporters to sign an open letter accusing leaders of betrayal. "As citizens across the planet, we urge you to face up to the climate emergency," she tweeted. "Not next year. Not next month. Now." Many of those leaders take to the stage in Glasgow on Monday to defend their climate change records and in some cases make new pledges at the start of two weeks of negotiations that conference host Britain is billing as make-or-break. "Humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change. It's one minute to midnight and we need to act now," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will tell the opening ceremony, according to advance excerpts of his speech. "If we don't get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow." But discord among some of the world's biggest emitters about how to cut back on coal, oil and gas, and help poorer countries to adapt to global warming, will not make the task any easier. US President Joe Biden singled out China and Russia, neither of which is sending its leader to Glasgow, for not bringing proposals to the table. "Russia and ... China basically didn't show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change," Biden, who faces domestic resistance to his climate ambitions, told reporters at the G20. ABSENTEES Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, will address the conference on Monday in a written statement, according to an official schedule. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan will also stay away from Glasgow. Two Turkish officials said Britain had failed to meet Ankara's demands on security arrangements and protocol. Delayed by a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, COP26 aims to keep alive a target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels - a level scientists say would avoid its most destructive consequences. To do that, the conference needs to secure more ambitious pledges to reduce emissions, lock in billions in climate-related financing for developing countries, and finish the rules for implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by nearly 200 countries. Existing pledges to cut emissions would allow the planet's average surface temperature to rise 2.7C this century, which the United Nations says would supercharge the destruction that climate change is already causing by intensifying storms, exposing more people to deadly heat and floods, raising sea levels and destroying natural habitats. "Africa is responsible for only 3 percent of global emissions, but Africans are suffering the most violent consequences of the climate crisis," Ugandan activist Evelyn Acham told the Italian newspaper La Stampa. "They are not responsible for the crisis, but they are still paying the price of colonialism, which exploited Africa's wealth for centuries," she said. "We have to share responsibilities fairly." Two days of speeches by world leaders starting Monday will be followed by technical negotiations. Any deal may not be struck until close to or even after the event's Nov 12 finish date. | null |
Xu is also the assistant administrator of the region and the UN Assistant Secretary-General.He would be in Bangladesh until May 21, UNDP in Dhaka said.During his visit, Xu will meet senior ministers and key officials to discuss wide-ranging issues of economic growth, importance of innovation and country’s resilience.UNDP said his visit would assist the international community and the global development partners acquire a better perspective on Bangladesh and its vision for the future.It said his visit is of “great importance” to Bangladesh as he will take stock of the success of UNDP initiatives to reduce urban poverty, disaster management and climate change adaptation.To see those projects he would travel to Dakop, a coastal South West district, as well as Hatia.
He will also visit Chittagong Hill Tracts to see UNDP-led initiatives in peace building.Xu joined UNDP in 1995 and has worked in the Asia and Pacific and Eastern Europe and CIS nations (former Soviet Union) respectively.Before taking up the current position, he was UNDP Resident Representative and UN Resident Coordinator in Kazakhstan and Deputy Regional Director for Europe and the CIS in New York. | null |
France had earlier said that, starting from 2300 GMT on Monday, it would restrict cross-Channel trade, threatening to turn bickering over fish into a wider trade dispute between two of Europe's biggest economies. But Macron, who earlier on Monday met British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the sidelines of the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, told reporters the French plan was on hold pending the outcome of renewed talks. "Since this afternoon, discussions have resumed on the basis of a proposal I made to Prime Minister (Boris) Johnson. The talks need to continue," Macron told reporters. "My understanding is that the British were going to come back to us tomorrow with other proposals. All that will be worked on. We'll see where we are tomorrow at the end of the day, to see if things have really changed," he said. "My wish is that we can find a way out on all these issues." LEGAL THREAT European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune said on his Twitter feed the trade sanctions would not be applied before a meeting with British Brexit minister David Frost in Paris on Thursday. Britain welcomed the decision. "We welcome France's acknowledgement that in-depth discussions are needed to resolve the range of difficulties in the UK/EU relationship," a UK government spokesperson said in a statement. Frost accepted Beaune's invitation, the spokesperson added. Earlier on Monday, Britain gave France 48 hours to back down from the threat of sanctions or face legal action under the Brexit trade deal. The measures threatened by France include increased border and sanitary checks on goods from Britain and banning British vessels from some French ports, steps that have the potential to snarl cross-Channel trade. "The French have made completely unreasonable threats, including to the Channel Islands and to our fishing industry, and they need to withdraw those threats or else we will use the mechanisms of our trade agreement with the EU to take action," British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told Sky News Britain and France have squabbled for decades over access to the rich fishing grounds around their Channel coasts. The fishing issue dogged the negotiations that led to Britain's exit from the European Union, not because of its economic importance - it is scant - but rather its political significance. Re-asserting Britain's control over its fishing grounds was a central plank of the case for Brexit that Johnson presented to British voters. Macron, meanwhile, faces re-election next year and needs to be seen standing up for his nation's trawler crews, a vocal political constituency. The latest row erupted in September after Paris accused London of failing to allocate enough post-Brexit licences to French boats to fish in the zone 6-12 nautical miles from UK shores. Britain says it is issuing licences to vessels that can prove they have previously fished in its waters - a central demand from British fishermen who fear French boats could wipe out their own profits. Last Wednesday French authorities seized a British scallop dredger, the Cornelis Gert Jan, in French waters near Le Havre, angering London. On Monday afternoon, anticipating a new ratcheting-up of tensions once the French deadline expired, fishing crews from both France and Britain were staying out of each other's waters, according to marine traffic tracking data and a French industry representative | null |
The European Union's Nobel peace prize comes just as a realization is dawning that Europe's single currency - the EU's most ambitious project - has survived three years of incessant financial turmoil and is not going to break up. But having narrowly avoided an acrimonious divorce and the loss of some of its errant children, the euro zone risks a future as an unequal, loveless marriage with frequent rows and the prospect of separate bedrooms. Two things have become clearer in the last few weeks that were widely disputed before: contrary to prevailing opinion earlier this year, the euro is here to stay and could very probably keep all 17 members and add more in future. But the euro zone has not yet found a way out of the doldrums of economic stagnation, unemployment and social dislocation that are widening the gap between northern and southern Europe and fuelling Eurosceptical populist movements in many countries. Three events have changed the outlook for the euro area: - The European Central Bank put a floor under the euro zone by agreeing last month to buy unlimited quantities of bonds of any troubled member state that accepts the conditions of a bailout program. ECB President Mario Draghi made clear the bank will use all its tools to defeat anyone betting on a break-up of the monetary union. - The euro zone's permanent rescue fund came into effect last week after months of wrangling and legal challenges, providing a 500 billion euro backstop for countries that risk losing access to capital markets. - And German Chancellor Angela Merkel signaled by visiting Athens that the EU's most powerful economy wants Greece to stay in the euro area, drawing a line under months of debate in Berlin, notably in her own coalition, about ejecting the Greeks. Coincidentally, a flood of scenarios for the explosion and break-up of the euro that spewed out of the banks and political risk consultancies of London and New York for months has suddenly dried up. In currency markets, short bets against the euro have subsided. Bond yields have fallen and bank shares have recovered. Spanish banks are having to borrow less from the ECB as some regain access to the money markets. GREXIT RECEDES In another micro-indicator of a changed climate, economists at U.S. bank Citigroup have revised their view that Greece will almost certainly leave the euro, saying key euro zone players seem to have decided a Greek exit would do more harm than good. The US bank lowered the probability of a "Grexit" to 60 percent from 90 percent, although it still believes Greece is more likely than not to leave the euro within 12-18 months, arguing that European governments are unlikely to agree to waive part of the country's huge debt to make it sustainable. Don't write off a write-off, though, especially if it can be delayed until after next year's German general election. It may then seem a more rational, albeit unpopular, option than a disorderly Greek default and exit, with all the disastrous economic and social consequences for Greece and Europe. One voice last week jarred with the easing of European existential anxiety: the International Monetary Fund said the EU's policy response remained "critically incomplete, exposing the euro area to a downward spiral of capital flight, breakup fears and economic decline". In its role as an uncomfortable truth-teller, the IMF is trying to jolt the euro zone, especially Germany, into moving ahead faster with a banking union and closer fiscal integration, and altering the policy mix between austerity and growth. In a candid acknowledgement, the IMF admitted it had underestimated the damage to growth wrought by budget cutting and urged Europe to ease up on austerity, drawing an indignant rebuff from Germany's finance minister. RAVAGES The shift in perceptions about the euro zone is more noticeable in the financial markets than on the streets, where the impact of the sovereign debt crisis will continue to cause ravages for years to come. Public spending cuts and recession are tearing at the fabric of societies from Athens to Madrid, casting many middle class families and retirees into poverty and more unemployed and young people into precarity. The crisis has changed the balance of power in Europe, giving Germany and its north European allies a preponderant say in euro zone decision-making commensurate with their credit rating, while making southern states weaker and more dependent. A two-speed Europe, in which everyone was heading in the same direction at different paces, may now be turning into a two-tier Europe, with the euro zone becoming a tighter inner core with its own budget and stricter rules, while Britain, Sweden and some others form a looser outer circle. Germany, determined to limit its taxpayers' liabilities for other euro states, has rejected issuing common euro zone bonds or providing a joint bank deposit guarantee. The German, Dutch and Finnish finance ministers are trying to rule out any retroactive use of euro zone rescue funds. Yet Berlin supports the emerging idea of creating a separate euro zone budget to cope with asymmetric economic shocks, and its backing for a single banking supervisor will surely open the door to some greater mutualization of risk in the longer term. As the euro area becomes a more integrated federal bloc, EU members outside the single currency face awkward choices. Those such as Poland, Hungary and Latvia that aspire to join the monetary union as soon as possible are trying to hug the euro zone as tightly as possible, demanding seats and votes in a new banking supervisory authority that take decisions on banks operating on their soil. Poland tried unsuccessfully last week to lever its way into the inner sanctum of euro zone finance ministers by offering to join a group of EU states launching a financial transaction tax in return for a seat at the Eurogroup table. It was told only euro members could attend the Eurogroup. Britain, which has no intention of joining either the euro or the banking union, is demanding a veto right to protect its large financial sector from decisions taken by the others, while aiming to use closer euro zone integration as an opportunity to negotiate a loosening of its own European ties. Sweden, with a pro-euro political establishment that lost a referendum on joining the currency in 2003, seems more uneasy and conflicted about the euro zone moving ahead without it. All of this means Europe faces a tense period of reshaping that will severely test its Nobel-recognized powers of building peace and prosperity on a fractious continent. | null |
TOKYO, Tue May 6,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Chinese President Hu Jintao lauded closer cooperation with Japan -- and offered a pair of pandas as a friendly gesture -- after arriving on Tuesday for a state visit intended to nurture trust between the wary Asian powers. The state visit, the second ever by a top Chinese leader, comes as China seeks to soothe international concern over Tibetan unrest, which has threatened to mar Beijing's Olympic Games in August. Hu was greeted at the airport by senior Japanese officials and flag-waving well-wishers, mostly Chinese, but in the centre of the capital, more than 1,000 protesters marched peacefully chanting "Human rights for Tibet". Trucks carrying right-wing activists roamed the city blaring anti-China slogans and Japan's national anthem. Some 7,000 police were deployed amid concern over protests by the activists, who see China as a threat, but there were no reports of scuffles. China wants to promote an image as a friendly neighbor after years of feuding over Japan's handling of its wartime aggression. Hu, who has stressed forward-looking goals for his five days of summitry and ceremony, said stable and friendly ties were good for both countries, whose economies are increasingly intertwined. "Relations between the two countries now have new opportunities for further development," he said in a written statement upon arrival in Tokyo. "I hope through this visit to increase mutual trust and strengthen friendship." In a gesture that might help woo a skeptical Japanese public, Hu offered to give Japan two pandas for research purposes, Japan's foreign ministry said in a statement, following the recent death of popular Ling Ling panda at a Tokyo zoo. He made the offer during an informal dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda at a Tokyo restaurant with historical links to Sun Yat-sen, considered the "father" of modern China. OPPORTUNITIES, ANXIETIES China replaced the United States as Japan's top trade partner last year, with two-way trade worth $236.6 billion, up 12 percent from 2006. "As two important powers, if China and Japan can coordinate and cooperate more, and together promote regional economic integration and respond together to international financial, energy, environmental and a series of other challenges, that would be an excellent supplement to our two countries overall trade and economic relations," Chinese ambassador to Japan Cui Tiankai said in a recent interview on Chinese state TV. But Beijing's expanding diplomatic and military reach has also stirred anxieties in Japan over disputed energy resources, military power and the safety standards of Chinese exports. "Although the iceberg between China and Japan has melted, fully warming relations require further efforts from both sides," a commentator wrote in China's People's Daily. The political climax of Hu's visit is set to be a summit on Wednesday with Fukuda, when they hope to unveil a blueprint for managing future ties. Beijing and Tokyo are keen to avoid a rerun of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's visit to Japan a decade ago, which left a chill after he delivered pointed lectures on Japan's 1931-1945 invasion and occupation of China. Sino-Japanese ties chilled during Junichiro Koizumi's 2001-2006 term as prime minister over his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine, but tensions have eased since then. Japanese media reports said that touchy references in the joint document to Taiwan, human rights, and Japan's hopes for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council were still under negotiation. The two countries are also quarrelling over the rights to gas beds beneath the East China Sea, while a row over Chinese-made dumplings laced with pesticide that made several people sick has become for some a symbol of Japanese alarm at China's rise. GOODWILL, NOT BREAKTHROUGHS? Japan wants greater transparency about China's surging defense spending, set at 418 billion yuan ($60 billion) for 2008, up 17.6 percent on 2007 and outstripping Japan's defense budget. Foreign critics say China's real military budget is much higher. Tokyo wants Chinese backing for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, an issue that in 2005 fuelled anti-Japanese protests in China, where there is deep rancor over Japan's harsh wartime occupation of much of the country. China has pressed Japan to spell out again its stance on Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing says must accept reunification. Tokyo has said it supports "one China" that includes Taiwan, which was a Japanese colony for fifty years until 1945 and keeps close ties to Japan. Few expect big breakthroughs on specific disputes, but the two sides are keen to stress forward-looking goodwill and are to issue a joint document on fighting climate change, a key topic for Japan as host of the July G8 summit. Hu will speak to Japanese students at Tokyo's Waseda University and may unwind a bit by playing ping-pong with Fukuda. ($1=6.988 Yuan) | null |
Pope Benedict said on Friday that communism had failed in Cuba and offered the Church's help in creating a new economic model, drawing a reserved response from the Cuban government ahead of his visit to the island next week. Speaking on the plane taking him from Rome for a six-day trip to Mexico and Cuba, the Roman Catholic leader told reporters: "Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality." Responding to a question about his visit to Cuba, 90 miles (145 km) off the coast of the United States and a Communist bastion for more than 50 years, Benedict added: "In this way we can no longer respond and build a society. New models must be found with patience and in a constructive way." The 84-year-old pontiff's comments reflected the Church's history of anti-communism and were more pointed and critical than anything his predecessor John Paul II said on his groundbreaking visit to Cuba 14 years ago. They were also surprising because, after decades of poor relations following Cuba's 1959 revolution, the Church and government have moved closer in recent years, so it was widely thought the pope would avoid problems by treading lightly on controversial topics. If Cuban leaders were riled by his comments, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez gave no hint of this news conference at the opening in Havana of the press center for the visit. "We will listen with all respect to his Holiness," he said when asked about the pope's words. "We respect all opinions. We consider useful the exchange of ideas," he added, noting however that "our people have deep convictions developed over our country's long history." Elizardo Sanchez, head of the independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights, praised the pope for showing "the good will of the Catholic Church and especially Pope Benedict XVI about the situation in Cuba," but he doubted much would change. LACKING WILL FOR CHANGE "The government lacks the will to make the political changes Cuba needs," Sanchez said. John Paul is best remembered for his conciliatory words at a Mass in Havana's vast Revolution Square: "May Cuba, with all its magnificent potential, open itself up to the world, and may the world open itself up to Cuba." Pope Benedict said John Paul had "opened up a path of collaboration and constructive dialogue, a road that is long and calls for patience but moves forward." While they have resolved some differences, the Cuban bishops and government are still at odds over issues such as Church use of the media and religious education. The Church will be hoping to use the papal visit to boost its congregation in Cuba which plummeted after the revolution, partly due to the exodus of many families and also due to a climate of government hostility. Church officials say about 60 percent of Cuba's 11.2 million people have been baptized in the faith, but only about five percent of those regularly go to mass. Benedict, who arrives in Cuba on Monday for a three-day visit including large Masses in the cities of Havana and Santiago, offered the help of the Church in achieving a peaceful transition on the island saying the process required patience but also "much decisiveness." "We want to help in a spirit of dialogue to avoid traumas and to help move forward a society which is fraternal and just, which is what we desire for the whole world," the pope added. The word "trauma" has been used previously by Church members to refer to a possibly difficult transition when Cuba's aging leaders are gone, including revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, 85 and his brother and successor, President Raul Castro, 80. Cuba's leaders have repeatedly recognized that the country's economic model needs improvement, though they staunchly defend the island's one-party communist-run political system. In 2010, Fidel Castro told a reporter for the Atlantic magazine that the "Cuban model doesn't even work for us any more," which some commentators interpreted as a recognition that communism had failed in Cuba. Castro later said the remark was not meant as a criticism of Cuba's communist revolution, but was instead directed at the island's difficult economic conditions. The comment appeared to reflect Castro's agreement with his brother's modest reforms to stimulate Cuba's troubled economy in order to preserve the revolution. HUMAN RIGHTS It is still unknown is whether Benedict will meet Fidel, who ruled Cuba for 49 years before age and infirmity forced him to step down. The Vatican has said the pope will be "available" if the elder, ailing Castro wants to meets him. In a report published on Thursday, the human rights group Amnesty International said harassment and detention of dissidents in Cuba had risen sharply the last two years. Asked on the plane whether he should defend human rights in Cuba, the pope replied: "It is obvious that the Church is always on the side of freedom, on the side of freedom of conscience, of freedom of religion, and we contribute in this sense." On Monday, Cuba released 70 members of the dissident Ladies in White group detained during the weekend but warned them not to attend activities related to the pope visit. The women, known in Spanish as the "Damas de Blanco," were freed without charges after being arrested in three separate incidents on Saturday and Sunday when they attempted to march in Havana. They could not be reached by phone on Friday. Rodriguez warned that "those who try to hinder this papal visit with political manipulations will fail because his Holiness will find in Cuba a patriotic and educated people, proud of its culture, of its convictions." There are no meetings with Cuban dissidents on the pope's program. Last week the Vatican re-stated its condemnation of the US trade embargo against Cuba, calling it useless and something that hurts ordinary people. The embargo, which marked its 50th anniversary last month, is still the cornerstone of US policy toward the Caribbean island although it has failed to meet its objective of undermining the communist government. Washington imposed the near-total trade embargo at the height of the Cold War to punish Havana for its support of the Soviet Union and in the hope it would bring an end to communism. | null |
His message stressing the importance of reinvigorating alliances and recommitting to defending Europe was predictably well received at a session of the Munich Security Conference that Biden addressed from the White House. But there was also pushback, notably from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who in his address made an impassioned defence of his concept of “strategic autonomy” from the United States, making the case that Europe can no longer be overly dependent on the United States as it focuses more of its attention on Asia, especially China. And even Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who is leaving office within the year, tempered her praise for Biden’s decision to cancel plans for a withdrawal of 12,000 US troops from the country with a warning that “our interests will not always converge.” It appeared to be a reference to Germany’s ambivalence about confronting China — a major market for its automobiles and other high-end German products — and to the continuing battle with the United States over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia. But all three leaders seemed to recognise that their first virtual encounter was a moment to celebrate the end of the era of “America First,” and for Macron and Merkel to welcome back Biden, a politician whom they knew well from his years as a senator and vice president. And Biden used the moment to warn about the need for a common strategy in pushing back at an Internet-fuelled narrative, promoted by both Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, that the chaos surrounding the American election was another sign of democratic weakness and decline. “We must demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people in this changed world,” Biden said, adding, “We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of history.” For the president, a regular visitor to the conference even as a private citizen after serving as vice president, the address was something of a homecoming. Given the pandemic, the Munich conference was crunched down to a video meeting of several hours. An earlier, brief closed meeting of the Group of 7 allies in which Biden also participated, hosted this year by Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, was also done by video. The next in-person summit meeting is still planned for Britain this summer, pandemic permitting. Biden never named his predecessor, Donald Trump, in his remarks, but framed them around wiping out the traces of Trumpism in the United States’ approach to the world. He celebrated its return to the Paris climate agreement, which took effect just before the meeting, and a new initiative, announced Thursday night, to join Britain, France and Germany in engaging Iran diplomatically in an effort to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump exited.
French President Emmanuel Macron takes part in an Online G7 meeting, in Paris, France February 19, 2021. Thibault Camus/Pool via REUTERS
But rather than detail an agenda, Biden tried to recall the first principles that led to the Atlantic alliance and the creation of NATO in 1949, near the beginning of the Cold War. French President Emmanuel Macron takes part in an Online G7 meeting, in Paris, France February 19, 2021. Thibault Camus/Pool via REUTERS “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident,” the president said. “We have to defend it. Strengthen it. Renew it.” In a deliberate contrast to Trump, who talked about withdrawing from NATO and famously declined on several occasions to acknowledge the United States’ responsibilities under Article V of the alliance’s charter to come to the aid of members under attack, Biden cast the United States as ready to assume its responsibilities as the linchpin of the alliance. “We will keep the faith” with the obligation, he said, adding that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” But he also pressed Europe to think about challenges in a new way — different from the Cold War, even if the two biggest geostrategic adversaries seem familiar. “We must prepare together for long-term strategic competition with China,” he said, naming “cyberspace, artificial intelligence and biotechnology” as the new territory for competition. And he argued for pushing back against Russia — he called Putin by his last name, with no title attached — mentioning in particular the need to respond to the SolarWinds attack that was aimed at federal and corporate computer networks. “Addressing Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world has become critical to protect collective security,” Biden said. The president avoided delving in to the difficult question of how to make Russia pay a price without escalating the confrontation. A senior White House cyberofficial told reporters this week that the scope and depth of the Russian intrusion was still under study, and officials are clearly struggling to come up with options to fulfil Biden’s commitment to make Putin pay a price for the attack. But it was the dynamic with Macron, who has made a habit of criticising the NATO alliance as nearing “brain death” and no longer “pertinent” since the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, that captured attention. Macron wants NATO to act as more of a political body, a place where European members have equivalent status to the United States and are less subject to the American tendency to dominate decision-making. A Europe better able to defend itself, and more autonomous, would make NATO “even stronger than before,” Macron insisted. He said Europe should be “much more in charge of its own security,” increasing its commitments to spending on defence to “rebalance” the trans-Atlantic relationship. That is not a widely shared view among the many European states that do not want to spend the money required, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are unwilling to trust their security to anyone but the United States. Macron also urged that the renovation of NATO’s security abilities should involve “a dialogue with Russia.” NATO has always claimed that it is open to better relations with Moscow, but that Russia is not interested, especially as long as international sanctions remain after its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine about seven years ago. But Macron, speaking in English to answer a question, also argued that Europe could not count on the United States as much as it had in past decades. “We must take more of the burden of our own protection,” he said. In practice, it will take many years for Europe to build up a defence arm that would make it more self-reliant. But Macron is determined to start now, just as he is determined to increase the European Union’s technological capacities so that it can become less dependent on American and Chinese supply chains.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel puts on her mask after holding a news conference following a virtual summit with G7 leaders at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, February 19, 2021. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse/Pool
Biden, in contrast, wants to deepen those supply chains — of both hardware and software — among like-minded Western allies in an effort to lessen Chinese influence. He is preparing to propose a new joint project for European and American technology companies in areas like semiconductors and the kinds of software that Russia exploited in the SolarWinds hacking. German Chancellor Angela Merkel puts on her mask after holding a news conference following a virtual summit with G7 leaders at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, February 19, 2021. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse/Pool It was Merkel who dwelled on the complexities of dealing with China, given its dual role as competitor and necessary partner for the West. “In recent years, China has gained global clout, and as trans-Atlantic partners and democracies, we must do something to counter this,” Merkel said. “Russia continually entangles European Union members in hybrid conflicts,” she said. “Consequently, it is important that we come up with a trans-Atlantic agenda toward Russia that makes cooperative offers on the one hand, but on the other very clearly names the differences.” While Biden announced he would make good on an American promise to donate $4 billion to the campaign to expedite the manufacturing and distribution of coronavirus vaccines around the world — a move approved last year by a Democratic-led House and a Republican led-Senate — there were clear differences in approach during the meeting. Underscoring the importance that the European Union accords to Africa, Macron called on Western nations to supply 13 million vaccine doses to African governments “as soon as possible” to protect health workers. He warned that if the alliance failed to do this, “our African friends will be pressured by their populations, and rightly so, to buy doses from the Chinese, the Russians or directly from laboratories.” Vaccine donations would reflect “a common will to advance and share the same values,” Macron said. Otherwise, “the power of the West, of Europeans and Americans, will be only a concept, and not a reality.” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, on Friday also urged countries and drugmakers to help speed up the manufacturing and distribution of vaccines across the globe, warning that the world could be “back at Square 1” if some countries went ahead with their vaccination campaigns and left others behind. “Vaccine equity is not just the right thing to do, it’s also the smartest to do,” Tedros said to the Munich conference. He argued that the longer it would take to vaccinate populations in every country, the longer the pandemic would remain out of control. ©2021 The New York Times Company | null |
That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. For decades, it was true: Israeli leaders and voters alike treated Washington as essential to their country’s survival. But that dependence may be ending. While Israel still benefits greatly from US assistance, security experts and political analysts say that the country has quietly cultivated, and may have achieved, effective autonomy from the United States. “We’re seeing much more Israeli independence,” said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who has studied Israeli strategy. Israel no longer needs US security guarantees to protect it from neighbouring states, with which it has mostly made peace. Nor does it see itself as needing American mediation in the Palestinian conflict, which Israelis largely find bearable and support maintaining as it is. Once reliant on US arms transfers, Israel now produces many of its most essential weapons domestically. It has become more self-sufficient diplomatically as well, cultivating allies independent of Washington. Even culturally, Israelis are less sensitive to US approval — and put less pressure on their leaders to maintain good standing in Washington. And while US aid to Israel remains high in absolute terms, Israel’s decadeslong economic boom has left the country less and less reliant. In 1981, US aid was equivalent to almost 10% of Israel’s economy. In 2020, at nearly $4 billion, it was closer to 1%. Washington underscored its own declining relevance to the conflict last week, calling for a cease-fire only after an Egyptian-brokered agreement was nearing completion, and which Israeli leaders said they agreed to because they had completed their military objectives in a ten day conflict with Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit the region this week, although he said he does not intend to restart formal Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The change comes just as a faction of Democrats and left-wing activists, outraged over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and bombing of Gaza, are challenging Washington’s long-held consensus on Israel. Yet significant, if shrinking, numbers of Americans express support for Israel, and Democratic politicians have resisted their voters’ growing support for the Palestinians. The United States still has leverage, as it does with every country where it provides arms and diplomatic support. Indeed, former President Donald Trump’s unalloyed embrace of the Israeli government demonstrated that Israel still benefits from the relationship. But American leverage may be declining past the point at which Israel is able and willing to do as it wishes, bipartisan consensus or not. STEPS TOWARDS SELF-SUFFICIENCY When Americans think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many still picture the period known as the Second Intifada, when Israeli tanks crashed through Palestinian towns and Palestinian bombs detonated in Israeli cafes and buses. But that was 15 years ago. Since then, Israel has reengineered the conflict in ways that Israeli voters and leaders largely find bearable. Violence against Israelis in the occupied West Bank is rarer and lower-level, rarer still in Israel proper. Although fighting has erupted several times between Israel and Gaza-based groups, Israeli forces have succeeded in pushing the burden overwhelmingly on Gazans. Conflict deaths, once 3-to-1 Palestinian-to-Israeli, are now closer to 20-to-1. At the same time, Israeli disaffection with the peace process has left many feeling that periodic fighting is the least bad option. The occupation, though a crushing and ever-present force for Palestinians, is, on most days and for most Jewish Israelis, ignorable. “Israelis have become increasingly comfortable with this approach,” said Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli think tank. “That’s a cost that they are willing to accept.” It’s a status quo that Israel can maintain with little outside help. In past years, its most important military tools were US-made warplanes and other high-end gear, which required signoff from Congress and the White House. Now, it relies on missile defence technology that is made and maintained largely at home — a feat that hints at the tenacity of Israel’s drive for self-sufficiency. “If you had told me five years ago,” said Narang, the MIT scholar, “that the Israelis would have a layered missile defence system against short-range rockets and short-range ballistic missiles, and it was going to be 90% effective, I would have said, ‘I would love what you’re smoking.’” Although heavy US funding under President Barack Obama helped stand up the system, it now operates at a relatively affordable $50,000 per interceptor. Israel began working toward military autonomy in the 1990s. Cool relations with the George HW Bush administration and perceived US failure to stop Iraqi missiles from striking Israel convinced its leaders that they could not count on American backing forever. This belief deepened under subsequent presidents, whose pressure to strike peace with the Palestinians has run increasingly counter to Israeli preferences for maintaining control of the West Bank and tightly blockading Gaza. “The political calculus led to seeking independent capabilities that are no longer vulnerable to US leverage and pressure,” Narang said, adding that Israel has also sought independent intelligence gathering. “It certainly appears they’ve been able to get to that point.” THE ‘OTHER FRIENDS POLICY’ There is another existential threat from which Israel no longer relies so heavily on US protection: international isolation. Israel once sought acceptance from Western democracies, which demanded that it meet democratic standards but bestowed legitimacy on a country that otherwise had few friends. Today, Israel faces a much warmer international climate. “Anti-imperialist” powers that once challenged Israel have moved on. While international attitudes toward it are mixed, and tend starkly negative in Muslim-majority societies, Israel has cultivated ties in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Even nearby Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt, once among its greatest enemies, now seek peace, while others have eased hostilities. Last year, the so-called Abraham Accords, brokered under Trump, saw Israel normalise ties with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Israel subsequently normalised ties with Morocco and reached a diplomatic agreement with Sudan. “We used to talk about a diplomatic tsunami that was on its way. But it never materialised,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst and pollster. Scheindlin runs an annual tracking poll asking Israelis to rank national challenges. Security and the economy reliably come first. Foreign relations are now near the very bottom. Even as European diplomats warn of consequences that never come and Democrats debate the future of the alliance, she said, Israelis view their international standing as excellent. On diplomacy, too, Israel has sought independence from the Americans. In the mid-2010s, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, all but directly campaigned against Obama’s reelection because of his Middle East policies, sending relations plunging. Since then, Netanyahu has cultivated a network of illiberal democracies that, far from condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, treat it as admirable: Brazil, Hungary, India and others. Scheindlin calls it the “other friends policy.” As a result, Israelis no longer see US acceptance as crucial to survival. At the same time, rising nationalism has instilled a greater willingness to shrug off international criticism. Washington’s support for Israel’s democratic credentials, a soft kind of leverage long wielded by American diplomats, means less every year. RISKING THE CONCENSUS One of the top jobs of any prime minister, it has long been said in Israel, is safeguarding Washington’s bipartisan consensus in support of the country. So when Netanyahu aligned Israel with Republicans in the mid-2010s, even haranguing Obama from the floor of Congress, he was expected to pay a political cost at home. But Obama and congressional Democrats did little to modulate their support. Americans then elected Trump, who catered to Netanyahu more than any previous president. The episode instilled a “sense of impunity,” Scheindlin said. “Israelis have learned that they can handle the heat, they can handle a little bit of rocky relations.” In a series of focus groups conducted since President Joe Biden’s election, Scheindlin said she had found that Israelis no longer fear reprisal from American politicians. “People are just not that moved,” she said. “They’re like, ‘It’s America. Biden will be fine.’” At the same time, many Israelis have lost interest in the peace process. Most see it as doomed, polls show, and growing numbers consider it a low priority, given a status quo that much of the Israeli public sees as tolerable. “That changes the nature of the relationship to the US,” Mizrahi-Arnaud said. Because Israeli leaders no longer feel domestic pressure to engage in the peace process, which runs through Washington, they do not need to persuade the Americans that they are seeking peace in good faith. If anything, leaders face declining pressure to please the Americans and rising demands to defy them with policies like expanding settlements in the West Bank, even annexing it outright. Israel is hardly the first small state to seek independence from a great-power patron. But this case is unusual in one way: It was the Americans who built up Israel’s military and diplomatic independence, eroding their own influence. Now, after nearly 50 years of not quite wielding that leverage to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it may soon be gone for good, if it isn’t already. “Israel feels that they can get away with more,” said Mizrahi-Arnaud, adding, to underscore her point, “When exactly is the last time that the United States pressured Israel?” © 2021 The New York Times Company | null |
It said 767 million people were
living on less than $1.90 a day in 2013, its latest comprehensive data, down
from 881 million people the previous year, with the strongest income rises in
Asia. "It's remarkable that countries have
continued to reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity at a time when the
global economy is underperforming," Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank's
president, said in a statement. The new figures confirm progress made in
helping the poor over the past quarter century. The world has nearly 1.1
billion fewer poor in 2013 than in 1990, despite population growth, the Bank
said. The findings bring the world closer to
meeting the United Nations goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. The target is part of the Sustainable
Development Goals, a set of 17 goals to combat poverty, inequality and climate
change. But meeting that target will also mean
tackling persistent inequality, the Bank said. "Meeting the international community's
targets by 2030 will actually require that the world takes on inequality and it
makes growth more inclusive," Francisco Ferreira, senior adviser on the
World Bank's Development Research Group, said in a call to journalists. Income inequality had widened over the 25
years to 2013, the Bank said. Still, latest data shows inequality has
lessened in more than 40 countries - including Brazil, Peru, Mali and Cambodia,
it said. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for half of
those living in extreme poverty, according to the Bank. A third of the global
poor live in South Asia. Poverty reduction was driven mainly by
countries in East Asia and the Asia Pacific, particularly China, Indonesia and
India, the Bank said. Last year, the Bank said the number of
people living in extreme poverty was likely in 2015 to fall for the first time
below 10 percent of the world's population. | null |
New Delhi, Sept 2 (bdnews24.com)—Indian defence analysts have cautioned the Indian government against complacency in taking India-Bangladesh ties towards a new heights and move towards a strategic partnership. A taskforce report—'India and Bangladesh: Moving Towards Convergence'—which was released on Friday by the leading New Delhi-based think-tank Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses or IDSA, also recommended that faster implementation of the issues stated in the 2010 joint communiqué including security, trade deficit and border issues is accelerated. On the eve of prime minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Dhaka on Sept 6-7, the report said, "The positive momentum in bilateral relations generated during prime minister Sheikh Hasina's visit must be continued." The report takes note of the strategic importance of the neighbouring countries for each other and argues that the Manmohan's visit provides "an opportunity to take India-Bangladesh relations to a higher trajectory by overcoming mutual suspicions and displaying a practical will to convert their ties into a strategic partnership". The panel of IDSA scholars emphasised that the legacy issues including border demarcation, enclaves and adverse possessions, Teen Bigha corridor flyover, river water sharing -- which have 'bedevilled' relations between the countries -- should be settled at the earliest possible. They recommended that the two sides should explore new areas of cooperation in climate change, environment, agricultural research, water management, remote sensing, IT and communications technologies, marine technologies, medicine and health etc. "Linkages between appropriate institutions can be established. The focus should be on joint research and capacity building. Both countries should work jointly for meeting the challenge of pandemics and water contaminated with arsenic," the report said. Over the water-sharing issue, the panel suggested the government that since Bangladesh would be seeking an agreement on river water sharing, and both countries have "nearly reached an agreement on sharing of the water of Teesta and four other rivers, minor differences should not be allowed to come in the way and an agreement should be signed". A draft on the Teesta deal has already been finalised. SECURITY Lauding Bangladesh for taking necessary measures to address India's security concerns, the report said: "India has shown sensitivity to Bangladeshi concerns and come out with a comprehensive assistance and cooperation package for Bangladesh. These moves have created the environment for transformation of ties between the countries." IDSA thinks security cooperation with Bangladesh is commendable, "but it needs to be institutionalised so that the matter is not limited to any particular regime". It further emphasised issues information sharing and joint patrolling along the border. "The US-Mexico model on the joint management of border can be considered." Pointing at Bangladesh-proposed South Asia Task Force on terrorism, in which it should play a lead role, the IDSA said, "A counter-terrorism centre based in Dhaka can be set up to help the task force. India could offer to fund the centre." The group said that the two countries enhance cooperation in the military sphere, including in search and rescue, joint patrolling of piracy infested areas of the Bay of Bengal, capacity building and joint exercises. "Defence cooperation will build mutual confidence," it observed. It also suggested setting up a dialogue mechanism involving the governments as well as non-governmental organisations working in the area of de-radicalisation. "Fundamentalism and extremism are a shared threat. Both sides should work closely to meet this challenge," it added. TRADE Putting stress on transit, the report said, "Connectivity should be a top priority. Both countries should work to operationalise it as soon as possible. A public campaign as to why connectivity will be advantageous for the people on both sides can be launched." Regional countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Thailand would be benefited from trade and transit connectivity between the two neighbouring countries. The report also called on the two countries to redress the trade issues and strengthen economic linkages and suggests Bangladesh, in particular, to make special efforts in attracting Indian investment. "India could consider extending assistance to Bangladesh for renovating and modernising its power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure." It also suggested the Indian government to persuade Bangladesh "to acknowledge the problem of illegal migration". Both sides should try to create an environment where this issue can be amicably dealt with. "Innovative methods like work permits can be considered." | null |
Alok Sharma, the conference chairman, urged the almost 200 national delegations present in Glasgow to accept a deal that seeks to balance the demands of climate-vulnerable nations, big industrial powers, and those whose consumption or exports of fossil fuels are vital to their economic development. "Please don't ask yourself what more you can seek but ask instead what is enough," he told them, in the closing hours of a two-week conference that has already overrun by a day. "Is this package balanced? Does it provide enough for all of us?" "Most importantly - please ask yourselves whether ultimately these texts deliver for all our people and our planet." But before a plenary meeting could be convened to vote on the deal, delegates from India, China, the United States and the European Union met to discuss language on an agreed phase-out of coal, a member of the Indian delegation said. The final agreement requires the unanimous consent of the countries present, ranging from coal- and gas-fuelled superpowers to oil producers and Pacific islands being swallowed by the rise in sea levels. The meeting's overarching aim is to keep within reach the 2015 Paris Agreement's target to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. A draft deal circulated early on Saturday in effect acknowledged that existing commitments to cut emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases are nowhere near enough, and asked nations to set tougher climate pledges next year, rather than every five years, as they are currently required to do. In a public check-in round with key delegations, there was encouragement for Sharma when China, the world's biggest producer and consumer of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, said it had "no intention to open the text again". The West African state of Guinea, which had pressed hard on behalf of the G77 group of developing countries for greater commitments from rich countries to compensate them for "loss and damage" from unpredictable climate disasters, also indicated that the group would accept what had been achieved. However, India, whose energy needs are heavily dependent on its own cheap and plentiful coal, signalled unhappiness. "I am afraid ... the consensus remained elusive," Environment and Climate Minister Bhupender Yadav told the forum, without spelling out whether or not India would block a vote on the package. EU Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans, speaking after Yadav, asked if the marathon conference was at risk of stumbling just before the finish line and urged fellow delegates: "Don't kill this moment by asking for more texts, different texts, deleting this, deleting that." Scientists say that to go beyond a rise of 1.5C would unleash extreme sea level rise and catastrophes including crippling droughts, monstrous storms and wildfires far worse than those the world is already suffering. But national pledges made so far to cut greenhouse emissions - mostly carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas - would only cap the average global temperature rise at 2.4 Celsius. Saturday's draft, published by the United Nations, called for a phase-out of coal power as well as efforts to reduce the huge subsidies that governments around the world give to the oil, coal and gas that power factories and heat homes. Previous UN climate conferences have all failed to single out fossil fuels for their harm to the climate. | null |
Growing speculation that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard could be dumped by her party before the end of the year forced senior ministers to rally behind her Friday after a disastrous start to 2012. Defense Minister Stephen Smith joined a string of cabinet ministers to offer support for Gillard despite media suggestions that she could face a leadership challenge this year from Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who she replaced in June 2010. Some political analysts now believe Gillard is unlikely to lead the party to the next election, due in the second half of 2013, with a move against her most likely in the latter part of the year. "MPs are starting to think the boat is going down, and they're starting to panic," Monash University political analyst Nick Economou told Reuters. "I don't think she'll lead the Labor Party to the next election." The first major opinion polls for 2012 found government support stalled near record lows, while online bookmakers Sportsbet Friday said odds on Rudd returning as leader by the end of the year have shortened to just $1.20 for a $1.00 bet. "I'm a strong supporter of the Prime Minister. I think she's doing a very good job in very tough circumstances," Smith told Australian television from Brussels. He joined Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, and Regional Affairs Minister Simon Crean, who have all called for an end to party dissent, with Crean saying Rudd was not a team player. Rudd is seen as a lone operator by his Labor colleagues and was toppled as prime minister in a party room coup after his government struggled to pass reforms, but polls show he remains popular with voters. Adding to the government's dilemma is the fact Gillard governs with support from two independents and the Greens, and any leadership change could force a change of government or an early election if a new leader can't negotiate similar support. That means a leadership spill could trigger a change of government, with the conservative opposition promising to scrap a new 30 percent mining tax and a carbon tax, both due to start on July 1 this year. Gillard dismissed the latest rumblings Friday, saying she was focused on delivering good policy. "I don't worry about chatter in the media, I get on with the job," she said. DISASTROUS NEW YEAR Gillard finished 2011 strengthened after a disaffected opposition lawmaker became parliamentary speaker, effectively bolstering her majority from one vote to three. But she has had a poor start to 2012. She lost the support of one independent in January after she reneged on a promise to change gambling laws, and then lost a staffer who quit over his role in promoting a rowdy protest against Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that turned into a security scare. That means the government is back to square one, commanding only a one seat majority in parliament and with one lawmaker under a cloud, due to an ongoing police investigation over the use of union money to pay for prostitutes. At the same time, house prices are falling and manufacturers continue to cut jobs, although Gillard may get a reprieve if the central bank cuts interest rates next week as economists expect. Australian Financial Review political editor Laura Tingle said the past week had seem a shift in support away from Gillard, although most Labor lawmakers were still deeply hostile about Rudd. "The tide has turned with a sharp but silent menace against Julia Gillard," Tingle wrote Friday. Economou said any move against Gillard would be unlikely before July, when the carbon tax and mining tax both start. That would allow Labor to deliver its budget in May, and to campaign for the March 24 Queensland state election, where polls suggest Labor will be thrown from office. "The dangerous time is after the carbon tax comes in," Economou said. "If things don't improve by then, she'll have to go." | null |
“Sleepless: A Musical Romance,” which opened on Tuesday at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater here, is more noteworthy for what it represents than for the show itself: London’s first fully staged indoor musical since the coronavirus pandemic brought live performances to a halt back in March. Several musical revivals have since been performed in concert at alfresco locations around the city. The rare plays on offer have had either casts of one or, as with the sound installation “Blindness” at the Donmar, no live actors at all. But like it or not — and “Sleepless” is fairly anodyne — the show running through Sept. 27 exists on a scale that seemed unimaginable even a month or two ago. And for that at least, three cheers. It helps that the musical has as its source “Sleepless in Seattle,” the wildly successful 1993 screen comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan that is unusual for keeping its romantically inclined leads apart until the very end. (This “Sleepless,” by the way, is not connected to a separate 2013 stage musical that had its premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.) The result builds into the plot a geographical separation that chimes with our socially distanced age: The show, like the film, spends two hours bringing the widowed Sam (Jay McGuiness) and the excitable Annie (Kimberley Walsh) together atop the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, at which point they don’t do much more than clasp hands as Morgan Large’s attractive two-tiered turntable set whooshes them from view. Safety precautions are in place. The cast and crew are tested daily for the coronavirus, while audiences are required to wear masks, have their temperatures checked upon arrival and follow a one-way system through a building that has hand sanitiser in evidence at every turn. The theatre itself, which is toward the outer reaches of northwestern London and well away from the still-shuttered West End, is putting less than one-third of its 1,300 seats on sale for each performance — a revenue-limiting measure by producers who clearly decided that some paying public was better than no public at all.
In an undated image provided by Alastair Muir, from left, Kimberley Walsh, Jack Reynolds and Jay McGuiness in “Sleepless: A Musical Romance” at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater in London. Based on the hit 1993 hit film “Sleepless in Seattle,” the production is London’s first fully staged indoor musical in months. Alastair Muir via The New York Times
The determination of all involved makes it especially disappointing that the director Morgan Young’s production isn’t more exciting, however likable its leads are. (Young and his two English stars collaborated this time last year on the West End premiere of the 1996 Broadway musical “Big,” another screen-to-stage transfer of a Hanks film.) In an undated image provided by Alastair Muir, from left, Kimberley Walsh, Jack Reynolds and Jay McGuiness in “Sleepless: A Musical Romance” at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater in London. Based on the hit 1993 hit film “Sleepless in Seattle,” the production is London’s first fully staged indoor musical in months. Alastair Muir via The New York Times It’s bracing to find a musical showcasing a new British composing team in Robert Scott and Brendan Cull amid a climate still defined this side of the Atlantic by Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose new musical, “Cinderella,” is among the many autumn openings that have been postponed. But too much of the score has a samey, easy-listening quality, with one song blurring into the next. Annie’s numbers exist largely to tell us that she’s “out of my mind” or “out of my head,” as you might be, too, if you developed a sudden obsession with a man on the other side of the United States based only on a chance hearing one holiday season on the radio. As is true of the film, you feel for the decent if dull Walter (Daniel Casey), Annie’s partner, who is blindsided by her gathering infatuation with a voice she needs to see made flesh. The depressive Seattle architect Sam, in turn, is upstaged in this telling by his matchmaking son, Jonah, the 10-year-old here played by a young vocal dynamo, Jobe Hart, another alumnus of the musical “Big.” (Hart shares the role of Jonah with three other boys, in accordance with union requirements.) Indeed, the closest “Sleepless” comes to a showstopper is a second-act duet, “Now or Never,” for Hart and musical theatre veteran Cory English as Sam’s ebullient friend, Rob. The song comes with its own reprise: “Shall we do it again, just from the key change?” And they do. Michael Burdette’s book takes its lead from Nora Ephron’s Oscar-nominated screenplay, at times running certain references into the ground. It’s fine to present Annie, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, as a film buff with an abiding interest in the Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr film “An Affair to Remember,” to which Ephron’s film owes a debt. But it’s unclear why Annie really needs to sing of her love for Grant — just as it’s hard to believe that so avid a film buff would debate the pronunciation of Kerr’s last name. Then again, Annie is the sort who thinks that “even the word exotic sounds exotic,” so there’s no telling where her conversations may lead. Both known for their work with pop groups, McGuiness and Walsh prove amiable team leaders in a show that can’t help feeling like an also-ran. You leave “Sleepless” pleased that it happened, and restless for more and better theatre to come. © 2020 New York Times News Service | null |
The hearing comes after a wave of sexual assault scandals and new Pentagon data showing a steep rise in unwanted sexual contact, from groping to rape, that have deeply embarrassed the military.In an exceptional display, the top uniformed officers of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard, along with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all appeared at the Senate Armed Services Committee together to assure Congress they were taking the matter seriously.The top lawyers from each service sat next to them."We are acting swiftly and deliberately to change a climate that has become too complacent," said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.The service chiefs made clear that it was important to maintain the power of commanders, who now have the ability to decide which cases go to trial.But under proposed legislation by Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, responsibility for prosecuting sex crimes would be taken out of the victim's chain of command altogether and given to special prosecutors.General Raymond Odierno, chief of staff of the Army, said that proposal could hurt unit cohesion and noted the importance of the commander to quickly "administer justice.""Without equivocation, I believe maintaining the central role of the commander in our military justice system is absolutely critical," Odierno said.Still, many critics of the military's handling of past cases say the system is broken and radical change is necessary.A study the Defense Department released in May estimated that cases of unwanted sexual contact in the military, from groping to rape, rose 37 percent in 2012, to about 26,000 cases from 19,000 the previous year.There has been an outcry in Congress over how the military handles such cases, including those in which commanders showed leniency to accused offenders.In one high-profile case, a senior US military commander in Europe set aside the sexual assault conviction of an Air Force officer, throwing out his one-year prison term and dismissal from the service."I cannot overstate my disgust and disappointment over the continued reports of sexual misconduct in the military. We've been talking about the issue for years and talk is insufficient," said Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona.Still, the head of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, appeared sympathetic to military concerns about ensuring the power of the chain of command."Only the chain of command can establish a zero-tolerance policy for sexual offenses," Levin said. "Only the chain of command has the authority needed to address any problems with command climate that foster or tolerate sexual assaults." | null |
When another COVID-19 wave hit in January, Stishi’s father was infected and died within days. She sought work, even going door to door to offer housecleaning for $10 — to no avail. For the first time, she and her children are going to bed hungry. “I try to explain our situation is different now, no one is working, but they don’t understand,” Stishi, 30, said as her 3-year-old daughter tugged at her shirt. “That’s the hardest part.” The economic catastrophe set off by COVID-19, now deep into its second year, has battered millions of people like the Stishi family who had already been living hand-to-mouth. Now, in South Africa and many other countries, far more have been pushed over the edge. An estimated 270 million people are expected to face potentially life-threatening food shortages this year — compared with 150 million before the pandemic — according to analysis from the World Food Program, the anti-hunger agency of the United Nations. The number of people on the brink of famine, the most severe phase of a hunger crisis, jumped to 41 million people currently from 34 million last year, the analysis showed. The World Food Program sounded the alarm further last week in a joint report with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, warning that “conflict, the economic repercussions of COVID-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hot spots over the next four months,” mostly in Africa but also Central America, Afghanistan and North Korea. The situation is particularly bleak in Africa, where new infections have surged. In recent months, aid organisations have raised alarms about Ethiopia — where the number of people affected by famine is higher than anywhere in the world — and southern Madagascar, where hundreds of thousands are nearing famine after an extraordinarily severe drought. For years, global hunger has been steadily increasing as poor countries confront crises ranging from armed groups to extreme poverty. At the same time, climate-related droughts and floods have intensified, overwhelming the ability of affected countries to respond before the next disaster hits. But over the past two years, economic shocks from the pandemic have accelerated the crisis, according to humanitarian groups. In rich and poor countries alike, lines of people who have lost their jobs stretch outside food pantries. As another wave of the virus grips the African continent, the toll has ripped the informal safety net — notably financial help from relatives, friends and neighbours — that often sustains the world’s poor in the absence of government support. Now, hunger has become a defining feature of the growing gulf between wealthy countries returning to normal and poorer nations sinking deeper into crisis. “I have never seen it as bad globally as it is right now,” Amer Daoudi, senior director of operations of the World Food Program, said describing the food security situation. “Usually you have two, three, four crises — like conflicts, famine — at one time. But now we’re talking about quite a number of significant of crises happening simultaneously across the globe.” In South Africa, typically one of the most food-secure nations on the continent, hunger has rippled across the country. Over the past year, three devastating waves of the virus have taken tens of thousands of breadwinners — leaving families unable to buy food. Monthslong school closures eliminated the free lunches that fed around 9 million students. A strict government lockdown last year shuttered informal food vendors in townships, forcing some of the country’s poorest residents to travel farther to buy groceries and shop at more expensive supermarkets. An estimated 3 million South Africans lost their jobs and pushed the unemployment rate to 32.6% — a record high since the government began collecting quarterly data in 2008. In rural parts of the country, yearslong droughts have killed livestock and crippled farmers’ incomes. The South African government has provided some relief, introducing $24 monthly stipends last year and other social grants. Still by year’s end nearly 40% of all South Africans were affected by hunger, according to an academic study. In Duncan Village, the sprawling township in Eastern Cape province, the economic lifelines for tens of thousands of families have been destroyed. Before the pandemic, the orange-and-teal sea of corrugated metal shacks and concrete houses buzzed every morning as workers boarded minibuses bound for the heart of nearby East London. An industrial hub for car assembly plants, textiles and processed food, the city offered stable jobs and steady incomes. “We always had enough — we had plenty,” said Anelisa Langeni, 32, sitting at the kitchen table of the two-bedroom home she shared with her father and twin sister in Duncan Village. For nearly 40 years, her father worked as a machine operator at the Mercedes-Benz plant. By the time he retired, he had saved enough to build two more single-family homes on their plot — rental units he hoped would provide some financial stability for his children. The pandemic upended those plans. Within weeks of the first lockdown, the tenants lost their jobs and could no longer pay rent. When Langeni was laid off from her waitressing job at a seafood restaurant and her sister lost her job at a popular pizza joint, they leaned on their father’s $120 monthly pension. Then in July, he collapsed with a cough and fever and died of suspected COVID-19 en route to the hospital. “I couldn’t breathe when they told me,” Langeni said. “My father and everything we had, everything, gone.” Unable to find work, she turned to two older neighbours for help. One shared maize meal and cabbage purchased with her husband’s pension. The other neighbour offered food each week after her daughter visited — often carrying enough grocery bags to fill the back of her gray Honda minivan. But when a new coronavirus variant struck this province in November, the first neighbour’s husband died — and his pension ended. The other’s daughter died from the virus a month later. “I never imagined it would be like this,” that neighbour, Bukelwa Tshingila, 73, said as she wiped her tear-soaked cheeks. Across from her in the kitchen, a portrait of her daughter hung above an empty cupboard. Two hundreds miles west, in the Karoo region, the pandemic’s tolls have been exacerbated by a drought stretching into its eighth year, transforming a landscape once lush with green shrubs into a dull, ashen gray. Standing on his 2,400-acre farm in the Karoo, Zolile Hanabe, 70, sees more than his income drying up. Since he was around 10 and his father was forced to sell the family’s goats by the apartheid government, Hanabe was determined to have a farm of his own. In 2011, nearly 20 years after apartheid ended, he used savings from working as a school principal to lease a farm, buying five cattle and 10 Boer goats, the same breed his father had raised. They grazed on the shrubs and drank from a river that traversed the property. “I thought, ‘This farm is my legacy, this is what I will pass onto my children,’” he said. But by 2019, he was still leasing the farm and as the drought intensified, that river dried, 11 of his cattle died, the shrubs shrivelled. He bought feed to keep the others alive, costing $560 a month. The pandemic compounded his problems, he said. To reduce the risk of infection, he laid off two of his three farm hands. Feed sellers also cut staff and raised prices, squeezing his budget even more. “Maybe one of these crises, I could survive,” Hanabe said. “But both?” © 2021 The New York Times Company | null |
COPENHAGEN (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Environment ministers tried to overcome rifts between rich and developing nations in Copenhagen on Sunday just days before a deadline for reaching a global pact on tackling climate change. Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, highlighting a spat between top greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States, said he hoped all nations would seek to raise their offers in the talks. "China is calling on the United States to do more. The United States is calling on China to do more. I hope that in the coming days everyone will call on everyone to do more," he said. The ministers were holding informal talks during a one-day break in the December 7-18 meeting involving 190 nations, which will culminate in a summit of world leaders on Thursday and Friday including US President Barack Obama. "There are still many challenges. There are still many unsolved problems," Danish Minister Connie Hedegaard told reporters. "But as ministers start to arrive there is also the political will." The talks bring together representatives from rich and poor nations who have been arguing over who is responsible for emissions cuts, how deep they should be, and who should stump up cash to pay for them. Countries like China and India say the industrialized world must make sharper reductions in greenhouse gas output and provide the poor with more cash to fund a shift to greener growth and adapt to a warmer world. "An agreement is certainly possible. If all of us trust each other and if we have the courage and conviction, we can still come to a fair, equitable deal in Copenhagen," Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said, heading into Sunday's sessions. Richer countries say the developing world's carbon emissions are growing so fast they must sign up for curbs to prevent dangerous levels of warming. China has said it wants to wrap up a firm deal before Premier Wen Jiabao joins other world leaders at the summit. "My understanding is that the leaders are coming to celebrate the good outcome of the talks," senior Chinese envoy Su Wei said on Saturday. DEMONSTRATORS RELEASED On Sunday, South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu handed over to the UN's de Boer tens of thousands of signatures from around the world calling for climate action. An afternoon church service was also planned at Copenhagen's Cathedral, with a sermon by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and attended by Danish royalty, followed by a "bell ringing for the climate" in churches around the world. Police have released all but 13 of nearly 1,000 people detained after a march on Saturday, a police spokesman said. The march by tens of thousands of people was largely peaceful but violence erupted toward evening when demonstrators smashed windows and set fire to cars. Some of those detained said they were unfairly held and badly treated by police. "They arrested us for no reason. We were all peaceful," said Hana Nelson, aged 24, a student from Halifax, Canada, who was released without charges. | null |
Secretary, Bilateral and Consular, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kamrul Ahsan and Director General of Foreign Policy of Portuguese Foreign Ministry Pedro Sanchez Da Costa Pereira led their sides during the Dec 6 meeting. They agreed “to have enhanced cooperation to deepen and widen" the bilateral relations. The discussions covered trade and investment, power and energy, particularly renewable energy, blue economy and maritime resources, tourism and culture, employment opportunity for Bangladeshi workforce, regional and international issues such as Brexit, Rohingya, climate change, and other issues of mutual interest. Portugal “congratulated” Bangladesh on the socio-economic development, and “appreciated” Bangladesh’s important humanitarian role in hosting over a million Rohingyas of Myanmar. It also expressed interest to take part in the upcoming projects particularly in infrastructure, ICT, power and renewable energy sectors. The two sides agreed to hold regular political consultations and regular exchange of visits at all levels including political, business, civil society and people’s group to boost relations. | null |
Scientists launched a $600 million global initiative on Wednesday to raise rice yields and reduce the impact of rice production on the environment, which they said could also help 150 million people escape poverty by 2035. The Global Rice Science Partnership will oversee research over the next five years to boost yields and breed stronger strains that can resist flooding and threats from climate change. The scheme, led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and partners, was launched in Hanoi as rice scientists, executives, policymakers and traders from nearly 70 countries met to discuss research, demand and trading and currency risks. "Given that rice is a staple food for more than half the global population and in most of the developing world, there is no question that availability of rice is equated with food security," said Robert Zeigler, director general of the Manila-based IRRI. The new research is also aimed at cutting emissions of greenhouse gases from rice production by an amount equivalent to more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by adopting improved irrigation methods and avoiding deforestation. With higher yields, farmers would not have to expand their fields into new areas, and that could save more than 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) of forest, wetlands and other natural ecosystems by 2035, the consultative group said. Annual funding for rice research by donors would rise to $139 million by 2015 from around $100 million next year to help realize the scheme's goals. By boosting supplies and lowering food prices, the initiative should help lift people out of poverty, perhaps as many as 72 million by 2020, Zeigler said. In addition to IRRI, the initiative includes two French organizations and a research center in Japan plus hundreds of other partners from governments, the private sector and civil society. | null |
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) | null |
“Bangladesh is already considered a role model in the management of natural disasters. Prime minister proposes to redouble her efforts. But singular effort of Bangladesh is not enough,” he said. “Government is open to any initiative at the regional and global level on this including the BIMSTEC, SAARC, Delta Coalition, Climate Vulnerable Forum and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). At the global level, Bangladesh is a champion in promoting climate issues.” The foreign minister was speaking at the 2019 Thematic Meeting of PDD, Platform for Disaster Displacement, which is attended by a high-level delegations and experts on Sunday in Dhaka. Displacement due to either slow or sudden onset disasters is a global problem, more aggravated due to erratic climate change and environmental degradation. Momen shared Bangladesh stories. “I met a rickshaw puller in Sylhet and I asked him why he travelled all the way for Southern coastal belt of Barisal. “He replied, due to erosion of his cultivable land that has been washed away due to river erosion, leaving him no option but to move to a higher plain with his family for safety and security and now he is trying to earn a living just to survive,” he said, adding that he is not alone. “In the capital city of Dhaka, out of its estimated 19 million residents, nearly 1/3rd are just like that floating population, forced out partly as their homes or living firms have been washed away their land is not enough to provide their living due to climate change.” The World Bank predicts that 1 meter rise in the sea level will inundate 20 percent of its coastal region leaving 25 to 30 million people without home, without jobs. Momen asked where these climate change migrants should go. He said since Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries in terms of climate vulnerability, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took corrective actions to live with climate change. She adopted “Climate Change Strategies & Action Plan” as early as 2009. She also involved communities and created 60,000 well trained volunteers and erected nearly 3,800 cyclone Shelters plus afforestation. “In addition, Bangladesh erected embankments to nearly 70 percent to 80 percent of coastal areas and arrange irrigation facility in 80 percent of its cultivable areas. It also developed flood resistant salinity resilient Crops to adopt and live with climate change,” he said. In addition, to face challenges in climate change, Bangladesh adopted 100-year Delta Plan. However, this programme may cost an additional 2.5 percent of GDP each year and by 2031, in terms of dollars, it would cost $29.6 billion. The foreign minister said the prime minister’s initiatives especially various mitigation strategies resulted in minimal less than 0.03 percent greenhouse emission in Bangladesh and in spite of the fact that, our country is not rich, yet she devoted substantial amount of its own hard-earned money to climate Funds. She established 2 climate Funds and initiated dredging of rivers and green afforestation. “Unfortunately, recent influx of nearly 1.2 million Rohingyas of Myanmar are eating up our afforestation and creating environmental disaster.” | null |
If there is anything Oscar voters love, it is a good drama. But as a key festival stop on the road to Hollywood awards got down to business on Friday, dramas were less on movie screens and more behind the scenes where the film genre is troubled. The Toronto International Film Festival, which has long been considered a starting point for movie awards -- Oscar winner "Slumdog Millionaire" got a big boost here last year -- opened on Thursday night with Charles Darwin drama "Creation," which came into the event seeking a US distributor. The festival boasts more than 330 films screening over 10 days, and ahead of opening week about a third of them lacked key distribution, including titles such as Atom Egoyan's "Chloe" and Oliver Parker's "Dorian Gray." Facing the recession at home, audiences have flocked to escapist fantasies and comedies, causing distributors of the dramas that vie for Oscars to snap up rights for those genres, leaving serious-minded fare in the dust. Industry players say lovers of good dramas are not gone, nor is the genre dead. They see the issue as cyclical and more a marketing and cost problem than one of creative content. Still, if you are making movies like 2007's "No Country for Old Men," which earned a best film Oscar, times are tough. Director Jon Amiel, whose "Creation" tells of Charles Darwin struggling with his theories of evolution in the 1850s, called "drama" the new "five-letter word" in Hollywood. "If you're making a movie about a dead, bald Englishman, you're not making a movie that even the indie distributors are flocking to buy these days," Amiel said. "There are just many, many movies that American audiences are not going to see." BOX OFFICE BLUNDERS? The waning interest can be seen at box offices. Two big hits of the art house market this past summer were war drama "The Hurt Locker," which earned $12 million -- a solid number for a low-budget film but far less than twice the roughly $29 million earned by romantic comedy "(500) Days of Summer." "There's a real conservative attitude (and) dramas are viewed as risky in today's marketplace," said Steven Beer, an entertainment attorney with law firm Greenberg Traurig. Still, industry players say dramas can lure fans and make money. The key is devising the right production and marketing model that makes sense given today's movie going climate. In many cases, those marketing strategies call for grass roots campaigns that target key groups, lovers of science and period pieces for a movie such as "Creation," for instance. Production costs must fall to account for lower box office and declining DVD sales, which have dropped by double-digits on a percentage basis due in large part to competition from other forms of home entertainment. "These have always been tough movies and they'll always be tough movies. In a tough economic climate perhaps even tougher, which is why those models have to change," said Tom Ortenberg, president of theatrical films at The Weinstein Co. Industry watcher David Poland of MovieCityNews.com, said the drop in DVD sales had been a key factor in distributors' unwillingness to back expensive dramas but, like the other experts, he noted there remained an appetite for the genre. Still, distributors remain selective when looking at dramas, and that leaves little room for another breakthrough at Toronto 2009 such as "Slumdog" proved to be last year when it was acquired by Fox Searchlight ahead of awards season. "You're going to have a lot of buyers coming to Toronto that are a lot more cautious than in the past, and I think that that's something that is different," said Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. | null |
Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the prime minister’s son an ICT adviser, announced the winners at a virtual programme organised by Young Bangla, the youth platform of the Awami League’s Centre for Research and Information, on Tuesday. The winners include 16 under social inclusion category and 14 under social development. Young Bangla picked 47 organisations for the final from 600 groups of youths aged between 18 and 35. Describing their work as “outstanding”, Joy said they are working to serve the common people in an inspiring manner. He thanked them for working for the poor children, people with disabilities and other marginalised people. Joy said the winners were trying to resolve the problems they found while some other people always prefer to complain. “They (winners) are not big organisations, maybe a single youth working in a village. But they are helping the people with their own ideas instead of complaining. That’s what we all should do,” he added. Nasrul Hamid Bipu, thde state minister for power, energy and mineral resources who is also a trustee of CRI, joined the event moderated by Dr Nuzhat Choudhury. The winners and category: Happy Natore and Shoshtho Indrio or The 6th Sense of Rajshahi (children’s rights).
Obhizatrik Foundation of Patuakhali and Miserable Welfare Association of Sylhet (ultra-poor empowerment). Hate Khori Foundation of Pirojpur, Ek Takay Shikkha of Chattogram and Good Film of Barishal (empowerment of disadvantaged people). Unmesh of Rangamati, Ignite Youth Foundation of Chandpur, iTech School of Chandpur and Positive Bangladesh of Dhaka (youth development). Deshi Balllers of Dhaka and Youth for Change of Barishal (women empowerment). The Centre for Rights and Development of Persons With Disabilities of Barishal, Bangladesh Wheelchair Sports Foundation of Mymensingh, and Association for Autism and Social Improvement of Habiganj (empowerment of the people with disabilities). Bloodmen Healthcare of Dhaka, Mastul Foundation of Dhaka, World Youth Army of Noakhali, Central Boys of Raujan of Chattogram and Mission Save Bangladesh Foundation of Dhaka (emergency work to prevent coronavirus). Plastic Initiative Network of Dhaka and Youth Environment Social Development Society of Dhaka (environment and climate change). Psycure Organisation of Jamalpur, and DIP Medical Services of Natore and Dipasha Foundation (health education and awareness). Pohorchanda Adarsha Pathagar of Cox’s Bazar, Uttoron Jubo Sangha of Moulvibazar, Cinema Bangladesh of Laxmipur (socio-cultural entrepreneurship). Footstep Bangladesh of Noakhali and Safety Management Foundation of Kurigram (disaster management and reducing risk of damage). The winners will receive certificates, crests and laptops. Young Bangla has so far awarded 130 organisations since 2015. Many of them went on to get international recognition later. | null |
The Democratic former vice president has shrugged off the Republican incumbent's long-shot challenge to his victory, naming longtime adviser Ron Klain on Wednesday as White House chief of staff, his first major appointment. New records for daily coronavirus infections and hospitalisations in the United States ensured that the presidential transition will be dominated by the response to the pandemic, which has accelerated since the Nov. 3 election. Trump remains in office until Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20. Foreign allies have congratulated Biden. A group of prominent former world leaders known as The Elders, chaired by former Irish President Mary Robinson, urged Trump to accept defeat, fearing he was "putting at risk the functioning of American democracy." Attention is now expected to shift to Biden's picks for Cabinet posts, though aides have so far given few clues about when announcements will be made. On foreign policy, diplomat and longtime confidant Antony Blinken is seen as a possible choice for secretary of state or national security adviser. Whoever is chosen for treasury secretary will have to cope with a recession and joblessness, as well as serving as the fulcrum to address wealth inequality, climate change and other issues. Klain, who served as Democratic President Barack Obama's "Ebola czar" in 2014 during an outbreak of that virus in West Africa, is expected to take a leading role in the incoming Biden administration's response to the nationwide spike in COVID-19 cases. In Klain, Biden brings in a trusted and experienced operative who also served as Democratic Vice President Al Gore's top aide during Bill Clinton's administration. "He was always highly informed and his advice was always grounded in exceptional command of the policy process, the merits of the arguments, and the political and justice context," Gore told Reuters. The United States again set records on Wednesday with more than 142,000 new coronavirus infections and nearly 65,000 hospitalisations, according to a Reuters tally. The death toll rose by 1,464, approaching the levels reached during a catastrophic first wave earlier this year. BIG BIDEN LEAD Biden has won enough of the battleground states to surpass the 270 electoral votes needed in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the next president. He is also winning the popular vote by more than 5.2 million votes, or 3.4 percentage points, with a few states still counting ballots. Since major news organisations called the election for Biden on Saturday, Trump has maintained a minimal public schedule, preferring instead to air his grievances on Twitter, and has not addressed the climbing virus case load nationwide. Trump has focused on efforts to overturn the election's results in closely contested states, despite presenting no evidence of irregularities that could affect the outcome, and a sceptical reception from judges. His team has also been busy raising money, soliciting contributions to pay for legal challenges. But a donor would have to give more than $8,000 before any money goes to an account established to finance election challenges. Small-dollar donations instead will go to the Republican National Committee or a newly formed political action committee, which can use the cash for other purposes such as travel expenses or other political campaigns. Democrats have accused Trump of aiming to undermine public trust in the US election system and delegitimize Biden's victory. Trump's nearly four years in office have been marked by political divisions and the shattering of democratic norms. Edison Research gave Biden 279 electoral votes as of Thursday morning. While some news organization have added Arizona and its 11 electoral votes to Biden's column, Edison Research had yet to call that traditionally Republican state for the Democrat, who led by a margin of 0.3 percentage point. Results in Georgia, another longtime Republican stronghold with 16 electoral votes, also showed Biden with a lead of 0.3 percentage point. In order to remain in office, Trump would need to win both Arizona and Georgia and overturn one or more states already in the Biden column before the formal Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, a highly unlikely scenario. "If we can audit the total votes cast, we will easily win Arizona also!" Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said the vote was not close enough to trigger a recount. With slightly fewer than 25,000 ballots left to count, Trump would need to win 65 percent of the remaining votes to catch Biden's lead. "That certainly could happen," Hobbs told CNN on Thursday. "I think it's not likely to happen." Georgia has decided to recount its votes by hand. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican secretary of state, said it was unlikely to find many errors from the previous machine count. "End of the day, you may not like the results, but it'll be an accurate recount, and we'll know exactly what the vote totals are," Raffensperger told Fox News Channel on Thursday. | null |
US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping made common cause on Monday with other countries to stress the urgency of an agreement to slow a rise in global temperatures blamed for spurring floods, heat waves and rising sea levels. But as the leaders left Paris, negotiators from 195 countries were left to work on a draft text of more than 50 pages still riddled with disagreements. The main sticking point is how to come up with the billions of dollars needed to finance the cleaner energy sources that are badly needed if emerging countries are to develop without relying heavily on fossil fuels. Many delegates said the large turnout at the UN climate summit in Paris, weeks after attacks by Islamic State militants killed 130 people, was a sign of hope after the last summit collapsed in failure in 2009 in Copenhagen amid rancour between rich and poor nations. French President Francois Hollande said he was encouraged by the start of talks that are planned to run untilDec. 11. "It's set off well but it has to arrive too," he told reporters. He said there were "two reefs. Either we overload the vessel and it sinks or we empty it and it goes nowhere." The technical talks repeated little of Monday's grand language. Countries restated their negotiating positions with few hints of likely compromise. China's delegate Su Wei "noted with concern" what he called a lack of commitment by the rich to make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and help developing nations with new finance to tackle global warming. NITTY GRITTY "It's back to the nitty gritty," said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, adding the opening day was "all good but that does not resolve the crunch issues." Obama: climate change an economic, security imperative "It is still a text with many options," Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar Vidal told Reuters, adding with a shrug "but everybody has shown their commitment to have an agreement." The mood was brightened by major announcements including a plan by India and France to mobilise $1 trillion for solar power for some of the world's poorest people and a private sector initiative led by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to mobilise billions of dollars for new energy research and development. "Leaders still have the scars of Copenhagen on their hearts and brains," Yvo de Boer, who was the UN's climate chief in Copenhagen, said. "The fact that so many leaders came back here on the opening day to send encouragement ... is a sign that they really want to move," he said. A deal in Paris would be by far the strongest ever agreed to bind both rich and poor nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which scientists say have blanketed the earth, raised global temperatures and begun upending the planet's climate system. Liz Gallagher, of the London-based E3G environmental think-tank, said the opening day had "made an agreement more likely". But she said the biggest gap was over climate finance. Developing nations want the rich to pledge rising amounts beyond the current goal of $100 billion a year by 2020 to help them obtain clean energy sources and adapt to the effects of climate change, such as more floods, droughts and intense storms. Other disputes concern how to define a long-term goal for phasing out fossil fuels. In June, developed nations in the Group of Seven (G7) signed up for a goal of decarbonising the world economy by 2100. China and India say they need to rely on coal to lift millions from poverty and prefer a shift to low-carbon development this century. So far, pledges made by about 170 countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020, made in the run-up to the Paris summit, are too weak to limit rising global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That is widely viewed as a threshold for dangerous and potentially catastrophic changes in the planet's climate system. | null |
Bankrolled by Russian owner Roman Abramovich, Mourinho led Chelsea to successive league titles in 2005 and 2006 in his previous spell with the English Premier League club.However, the financial climate has changed, with Uefa trying to force clubs to move towards breakeven or ultimately risk exclusion from competitions such as the Champions League."Every wrong move you make has an influence on the future," Mourinho said of the Financial Fair Play regulations."You need to work more closely with the board in the financial area, you have to have a different perspective and a different look at the players on loan and youth football," he added in comments on the club website (chelseafc.com).The comments chime with Mourinho's low-key news conference last week when the returning Portuguese coach seemed at pains to break with the brash image he created on his arrival in London in 2004.Chelsea last week agreed to pay a reported 18 million pounds ($28.22 million) to sign 22-year-old winger Andre Schuerrle from German club Bayer Leverkusen, their first signing since Mourinho came back.Chelsea won the Champions League in 2012, helping them to make a profit for the first time since Abramovich bought the club a decade ago.Mourinho said qualification for the lucrative Champions League was vital for the stability of Chelsea."It's important for the players, for the young players' development, for the club, for the fan base and for the economic situation which is more important with Financial Fair Play," he said. | null |
Dhaka June 10 (bdnews24.com) — A Saudi multi-billionaire prince was given a rare state honour as he arrived in Dhaka on a hours-long trip on Sunday and held talks with the Prime Minister and senior members of her Cabinet. Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal received Bangladesh Friendship Medal in a brief ceremony attended by Sheikh Hasina and senior ministers at Sonargaon Hotel, officials said. They said Prince Al-Waleed, who arrived around mid-morning and was to depart early afternoon, had a meeting with Hasina. bdnews24.com foreign affairs correspondent Sheikh Shahariar Zaman said he saw Deputy Leader of the Parliament Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury, LGRD Minister Syed Ashraful Islam, Foreign Minister Dipu Moni, Prime Minister's Advisor Gowher Rizvi, Cabinet Secretary Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan and Power Secretary Abul Kalam Azad entering the meeting venue. "They obviously discussed, among other things, investment and business opportunities in Bangladesh," one official said. A Power Point presentation highlighting the overall investment scenario in the country, opportunities for investment in the Public Private Partnership projects, and tourism and power sector, climate change challenges, was shown after the meeting. The ceremony over, they were having lunch together and the prince would then be driven to the Bangabhaban for a call-on with President Md Zillur Rahman. The Saudi royal arrived in Dhaka at 10:30am and was scheduled to depart at 3pm. Al-Waleed Bin Talal, owning $18 billion, is currently ranked 29th in the Forbes magazine's list of billionaires. He visited Bangladesh earlier in 2005. | null |
Colombia's Marxist rebels called a two-month unilateral ceasefire on Monday, the first truce in more than a decade, as delicate peace talks began in Cuba to try to end a half century of war. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos' government reiterated, however, that there would be no halt to military operations until a final peace deal is signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC. The rebel group said it would halt all offensive military operations and acts of sabotage against infrastructure beginning at midnight on Monday and running through January 20. "This decision by the FARC is a decisive contribution to strengthen the climate of understanding needed so the parties ... can achieve the purpose desired by all Colombians," lead rebel negotiator Ivan Marquez said, standing outside a convention center for the start of talks in Havana. The gesture is a sign that the rebels may be keen to push talks to a successful end - something that was thrown into doubt by long, drawn-out speeches by its leadership calling for major changes to Colombia's political system. The warring sides arrived at the talks in black luxury cars and will meet almost daily until negotiations end. A crush of journalists surrounded the bearded, bespectacled Marquez who stood with other FARC delegates, including Dutch national Tanja Nijmeijer in Havana's plushest neighborhood. Some FARC members wore caps and T-shirts of Simon Trinidad, an official guerrilla negotiator who is in prison in the United States. Others shouted "Long Live the Army of the People." The head of the Colombian government delegation, Humberto de la Calle, smiled and waved as he entered but made no comment. Speaking from Bogota, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon doubted the sincerity of the FARC's ceasefire pledge. "Security forces have the constitutional duty to pursue all criminals that have violated the constitution," he said. "Hopefully they keep their promise, but history shows that this terrorist group never complies with anything." Colombia's war has dragged on for 50 years, taking thousands of lives, displacing millions more and causing damage to infrastructure in Latin America's longest running insurgency. A failure of the latest peace process would mean years of more fighting and further blight on the reputation of a country eager for foreign investment and regional clout, yet which has been unable to resolve its most serious domestic problem. Residents in western Cauca province, one of Colombia's most war-ravaged areas, celebrated the FARC ceasefire. "We hope it's not just two months, we hope that it's definitive," Orlando Ramos, a resident in Miranda, Cauca, said on local television. 'GRAIN OF SALT' The announcement by the FARC could be a breather for oil and mining companies, the target of many FARC attacks in recent months as the group sought to hobble Santos' main source of international revenue. The war costs Latin America's fourth-largest economy 1 to 2 percentage points of gross domestic product every year, according to the government, and makes large tracts of arable land unsafe due to combat or landmines. "A peace agreement with the FARC could entice more sectors and investors into Colombia," said Eurasia Group's Latin America analyst Heather Berkman. "The opportunities for agriculture production in particular could reshape the country's export sector, particularly as both small-scale and larger farmers could produce on land long off-limits due to security troubles." Santos wants an agreement within nine months, while the rebels say the process will likely take longer. The two sides face plenty of thorny issues in their five-point agenda, which will begin with rural development. Previous peace attempts have failed, but both the government and the FARC have expressed optimism that this time might be different. Not everyone is so upbeat though. "You have to take this announcement with a grain of salt," Felix Lafaurie, head of Colombia's National Federation of Cattle Ranchers, said on Colombian radio. "I hope this is going to be a sign of the FARC's good will and not that they'll then take swipes on substantive issues." The vast majority of Colombians support the peace process, although they think it will ultimately fail. Even so, the talks are the biggest gamble in Santos' political career and their success or failure may decide the outcome of the next election in 2014. The conflict dates back to 1964 when the FARC emerged as a communist agrarian movement intent on overturning Colombia's long history of social inequality. During the 1990s, the FARC controlled large parts of the country. In the early 2000s, billions of dollars in US aid, improved intelligence and increased mobility began to turn the tide of the war in favor of the government. The FARC has lost at least half a dozen top commanders and been pushed back into remote jungle hideouts in recent years, though the rebels are far from a spent force and still wage attacks on security forces and economic infrastructure. Violence was among the reasons previous peace talks failed. In the last attempt from 1999 to 2002, the government broke off negotiations after the FARC hijacked an airplane. "The FARC have heard the voice of many Colombians, that rightly have been skeptical about its willingness to reach an end to the war, given the past," said Juan Fernando Cristo, a senator for the Liberal Party. "The decision for a unilateral truce should fill us with optimism about what's coming at the negotiating table." | null |
That changed on Tuesday, when Shahana Hanif, a former City Council employee, won her election in a Brooklyn district that covers Park Slope, Kensington and parts of central Brooklyn. Hanif, who is Bangladeshi American, was the first Muslim woman elected to the Council in its history, despite the fact that the city is home to an estimated 769,000 Muslims. She was one of two history-making South Asian candidates to win as well; the other, Shekar Krishnan, won a seat representing Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens. (A third, Felicia Singh, another South Asian candidate, lost to her Republican opponent in a closely watched Queens race.) In a statement on Tuesday night, Hanif said that she was “humbled and proud” to be the first Muslim woman on the Council — and the first woman of any faith to represent District 39. She cited volunteers and endorsements from the community and progressive groups, including the left-leaning Working Families Party. “Together we are building an anti-racist, feminist city,” she said. “We deserve a city that protects its most vulnerable, a city that has equitable education, a city invested in climate solutions that are local and driven by communities, a city where our immigrant neighbours feel at home and heard and safe. This work requires all of us to keep showing up even though the election is over.” The City Council will also have its first out gay Black women serve as members next year: Kristin Richardson Jordan scored an overwhelming victory in a Harlem district, as did Crystal Hudson in a Brooklyn district that encompasses parts of Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. A number of other LGBTQ candidates clinched victories, including Tiffany Cabán in Queens. Chi Ossé in Brooklyn and Erik Bottcher in Manhattan had run in uncontested races. Lynn Schulman was expected to win a seat in Queens. The candidates are part of a larger shift in New York’s City Council, which is poised to be nearly as diverse next year as the city it represents. More than two dozen women are positioned to take a majority of the Council’s seats, for the first time ever. | null |
President Barack Obama challenged the world on Tuesday to act swiftly to fight global warming but offered no new proposals that could jumpstart stalled talks on a UN climate pact. Speaking shortly after Obama at a special U.N. summit on global warming, Chinese President Hu Jintau pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of his country's economic growth. In his speech, Obama said time was running out to address the problem. "Our generation's response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it -- boldly, swiftly, and together -- we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe," he said. "The time we have to reverse this tide is running out." Activists hoped the United States and China would inject momentum, 2-1/2 months before 190 nations gather in Copenhagen aiming to complete a deal to slow climate change. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who called the meeting, said talks were moving too slowly. "Failure to reach broad agreement in Copenhagen would be morally inexcusable, economically short-sighted and politically unwise," Ban said. "We cannot go down this road. If we have learned anything from the crises of the past year, it is that our fates are intertwined," he said. Talks leading to the December 7-18 meeting have put developed and developing countries at odds over how to distribute emissions curbs. Poorer nations are pressing richer ones to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars a year to help them cope with rising temperatures. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said talks are "dangerously close to deadlock" and were in danger of an "acrimonious collapse." Obama and Hu, who are scheduled to meet one-on-one after the summit, could help break the impasse. An aggressive move by China to curb its emissions, even if short of an absolute cap, could blunt criticism in Washington, where many lawmakers are reluctant to commit to U.S. emission cuts without evidence that Beijing is acting. Obama's legislative initiatives to reduce U.S. emissions have been overshadowed by his push for healthcare reform. But he said in his speech that the United States had done more over the last eight months to reduce carbon pollution than at any time in history. | null |
Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has congratulated Trump on his election and promised to work with him to bolster trade and international security, the media has summed up the victory as a ‘stunning upset’. “Suddenly, a monkey wrench has been thrown into the works of Canada-US relations. For so long, Canadian governments worked to make sure relations would be relatively predictable. The US electorate changed that on Tuesday night,” wrote a commentator in the Globe and Mail, one of the largest-circulated dailies in Toronto. “When a US president focuses a major part of his campaign on building up borders in every sense – on trade, immigration, security – you can bet it is a danger to the nation that depends the most on dealings across the border. That’s Canada,” the commentator said. “Donald Trump, the surprise winner of the US presidential race, has promised to rip up many of the things Canada has tried to nail down,” he added. “The threat of protectionist US moves that would cut off crucial trade links? Canadian leaders signed free-trade agreements to blunt that danger – but Mr. Trump pledged to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),” the commentator went on. Canada is the biggest trade partner of the US where it exports over 75 percent of its goods and services. It also shares around 4,000 miles of territorial boundary (excluding Alaska) with America. A NAFTA break-up will change all that and put the Canadian economy in trouble. In his campaign, everything in Trump’s rhetoric - from immigration to terrorism threats to Muslim visitors, was about bigger, thicker borders – and suggested slower passage for traffic and trade, which Canada cannot afford. “I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences,” Trump had said in the campaign. He also described the North American free-trade agreement as a “disaster” and said he would renegotiate or even “break” it. However, some economists and commentators believe that the protectionists talk in the US election is very common but when it comes to governing, the scenario could be completely different. Not only NAFTA, Trump has questioned the value of NATO, saying he would demand that allies pay more for US protection. Toronto’s Global News reported that Canadian officials are already bracing for a very bumpy ride as the shockwaves from stunning upset reverberates to south of the border. Experts, according to the Global News, agree on one point: “It’s not going to be business as usual.” It’s too early to suggest where Trump’s ‘America First’ policy would lead Canada in its relations with the neighbour. But economics and trade, environment, security and defence, and international relations may all come under further scrutiny under the new US administration. Prime Minister Trudeau is pressing forward on a climate-change policy to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions but with Trump in power, he would find it harder to sell his own climate-change policies in Canada. Trudeau avoided talking down Trump during the election campaign and he probably did it for Canada’s interest to build the relationship. There are other things to build on – cross-border security arrangements and NORAD, which is the bilateral military air defence alliance, are a few to name. But how far can Trudeau carry forward the Canadian agenda with the protectionist ‘America First’ US president? Is Trump becoming a new conundrum for Canadian PM? It will take sometime to get the answer. | null |
Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali told Bangladesh journalists at about 6.30pm that they would meet again after the official dinner.This is an unprecedented event in the SAARC foreign ministers-level parleys that after concluding all agendas the meeting had been adjourned.“We are trying to get the energy cooperation deal signed,” he said as the Nepal foreign ministry cancelled its scheduled briefing for foreign journalists.Ali, however, ruled out any chance of signing the two other deals related to road and railway connectivity during the summit.Though he did not name the country because of which those signing would not take place, it was an established fact in Kathmandu that Pakistan was not agreeing to sign those deals.The signing does not mean that member states would implement those as it could not live up to their earlier promises that include implementing South Asian free trade regime and South Asian economic union.But the signing would send a strong message across that the leaders could agree on a common goal of connectivity in the summit themed on ‘Deeper Integration for Peace and Prosperity’.The foreign ministers will set the agenda for the two-day 18th summit where the leaders of the eight member states would gather amid tight security.Even the movement of the accredited journalists has been restricted.SAARC that unites South Asia, which according to an ADB study is the “least integrated” region in the world, has been criticised for not having any collective gains to show since it began functioning in 1985.But this summit will be watched closely as influential India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a strong message of working together with the SAARC countries by inviting all heads of states in his swearing-in ceremony.This is his first summit and before leaving New Delhi he in a statement said “development of close relations with our neighbours is a key priority for my Government”.Analysts say the relations between India and Pakistan determine whether the regional grouping can move smoothly.Bangladesh for timely implementationBangladesh stressed on “timely” implementation of the regional projects at the foreign ministers-level meeting on Tuesday.Foreign Minister Mahmood Ali said they had taken a number of decisions to make the regional grouping “effective”.The meeting approved the standing committee proposals.Apart from, trade, economy, communications, energy, poverty reduction, climate change, combating terrorism, education and culture, regional cooperation, youths development have also been stressed in the meeting.One research paper titled ‘Best practices in poverty alleviation and SDGs in South Asia’, two separate action frameworks on sanitation and nutrition and one publication on ‘Next steps to the South Asian Economic Union (SAEU)’ have been launched in the foreign ministers’ meeting.The meeting instructed the SAARC Secretariat to take views of the member states to organise the summit at a particular time like the UN general assembly.They also asked member states to submit the “request list” and “offer list” to the Secretariat under the SAFTA sensitive list reduction.Bangladesh has already submitted those.The foreign minister said Bangladesh has requested investments in tourism. “It’s open."The foreign ministers asked the SAARC Development Fund Secretariat to take up innovative projects on energy and communications.They agreed to publish a ‘SAARC Development Report’ biennially where member states would present their development outcomes.They further asked for starting an inter-governmental process to put forward the collective views of South Asia in the formation of the post-2015 development agenda.The ministers also agreed on making SAARC food bank functional by eliminating the “threshold limit” for the members.The meeting analysed different projects of the SAARC Agriculture Centre based in Dhaka.They also decided to transfer the two projects – Regional Support Unit (RSU) and Regional Epidemiological Centre (REC) – to the Agricultural Centre after their completion.The foreign ministers stressed on making the South Asian University in New Delhi as a ‘Centre of Excellence’ and Bangladesh pushed for taking more students and teachers from the country.South Asian Women Development Forum (SAWDF) has been recognised as a SAARC body.The moratorium of taking new SAARC observers will continue, the foreign minister said, while briefing journalists on the outcomes of the meeting.Foreign Secretary M Shahidul Haque was present, among others, during the briefing at Hotel Soaltee Kathmandu. | null |
A senior Iranian lawmaker warned Western powers they would soon have to accept the reality of the country's nuclear advances, Iran's state news agency reported late on Saturday, days before talks are set to re-open on its disputed nuclear programme. The head of the parliamentary committee for national security and foreign policy, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, was speaking at a ceremony in Mashhad in memory of what Iran describes as its nuclear martyrs; at least four scientists associated with Iran's nuclear programme have been assassinated since 2010 and a fifth was wounded in a bomb attack. Western countries suspect Tehran of covertly developing a nuclear weapons programme, accusations Iran has repeatedly denied. Both sides are set to take part in negotiations this week in an effort to find a solution to international concerns, though even the location of the talks has not yet been agreed. Boroujerdi said the P5+1 group of countries needed to change their policy because "confronting the Islamic Republic will not be to their benefit", the IRNA news agency quoted him as saying. "Honourable Iran will continue the debate about peaceful nuclear energy, and that moment isn't far away when the world will see that arrogant countries, led by America and Europe, will accept the reality of nuclear advances and Iran's membership into the nuclear club." He added that despite the climate of threats and sanctions, Iran had made great progress in its nuclear capability and was proficient in all stages of enrichment from mining raw uranium in Iranian mines, producing yellow cake (concentrated uranium powder), building centrifuges and injecting uranium gas into them. In February Iran announced it had loaded domestically made fuel rods into the Tehran Research Reactor, which produces radio isotopes for medical use and agriculture. Iran has repeatedly pointed out that under its membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it has the right to engage in peaceful nuclear activities. Boroujerdi emphasised that Iran's nuclear programme was solely for peaceful needs, but that if the International Atomic Energy Agency did not keep to its commitments, "then no doubt our enthusiastic young scientists will build a reactor inside the country". Speaking in the presence of families of scientists who were killed, Boroujerdi warned that assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists was pointless. "Iran's advances have forced the Zionist regime (Israel), the Arabs and America to turn to eliminating our nuclear scientists. But they should understand that such evil deeds will lead nowhere, because thousands of universty students and professors in Iran will continue along the road of nuclear science." A recent report by the IAEA said Iran had tripled its production of higher grade enriched uranium, which has caused further concern that there is a military motive to its activities. While some analysts remain doubtful about Iran's claims, experts say that uranium enriched to 20 percent represents most of the technical effort needed to attain the 90 percent threshold required for nuclear explosions. The Islamic Republic says the more highly refined uranium will replenish dwindling stocks of special fuel for a Tehran reactor that produces much-needed medical isotopes for thousands of cancer patients across the country. The United States and its allies have imposed new sanctions against Iran's financial and energy sectors to force Tehran to abandon its enrichment activities. Israel has threatened Iran with pre-emptive strikes to stop it getting the bomb, but US president Barack Obama has emphasised the importance of trying to find a diplomatic solution. The next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries comprising the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany had been due to take place this Friday, April 13, but the two sides have been seemingly unable to agree on a location. | null |
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