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Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population. With the New York Times publishing the fruits of his misdeeds. Some set of American prosecutorial lawyers is confronting this crooked legal hairpin right now. I feel sorry for them.

the one-man global McDonald’s of leaks

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

It’s not just about him and the burning urge to punish him; it’s about the public risks to the reputation of the USA. They superpower hypocrisy here is gonna be hard to bear. The USA loves to read other people’s diplomatic cables. They dote on doing it. If Assange had happened to out the cable-library of some outlaw pariah state, say, Paraguay or North Korea, the US State Department would be heaping lilies at his feet. They’d be a little upset about his violation of the strict proprieties, but they’d also take keen satisfaction in the hilarious comeuppance of minor powers that shouldn’t be messing with computers, unlike the grandiose, high-tech USA. Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange.

He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. He’s certainly not a “terrorist,” because nobody is scared and no one got injured. He’s not a “spy,” because nobody spies by revealing the doings of a government to its own civil population. He is orthogonal. He’s asymmetrical. He panics people in power and he makes them look stupid. And I feel sorry for them. But sorrier for the rest of us. Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.

The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats are gonna be reading those stolen cables. Not hackers: diplomats. Hackers bore easily, and they won’t be able to stand the discourse of intelligent trained professionals discussing real-life foreign affairs. American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn’t. Now, they’ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago. And, of course, every intelligence agency and every diplomat from every non-American agency on Earth is gonna fire up computers and pore over those things. To see what American diplomacy really thought about them, or to see if they were ignored (which is worse), and to see how the grownups ran what was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always forbidden to see. This stark fact makes them all into hackers. Yes, just like Julian. They’re all indebted to Julian for this grim thing that he did, and as they sit there hunched over their keyboards, drooling over their stolen goodies, they’re all, without exception, implicated in his doings. Assange is never gonna become a diplomat, but he’s arranged it so that diplomats henceforth are gonna be a whole lot more like Assange. They’ll behave just like him. They receive the goods just like he did, semi-surreptitiously. They may be wearing an ascot and striped pants, but they’ve got that hacker hunch in their necks and they’re staring into the glowing screen.

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning’s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can’t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

the American diplomatic corps, and all it thinks it represents, is just collateral damage between Assange and his goal. He aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And the American diplomatic corps are so many Iraqis in that crusade. They’re the civilian casualties.

It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening; after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That’s “transparency,” too; it’s the kind of ghastly sex-transparency that Julian himself is stuck crotch-deep in. The politics of personal destruction hasn’t made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war. “Transparency” can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. Very Edgar Allen Poe.

This knotty situation is not gonna “blow over,” because it’s been building since 1993 and maybe even 1947. “Transparency” and “discretion” are virtues, but they are virtues that clash. The international order and the global Internet are not best pals.

Zille encouraged residents to inform on water-hogging neighbors and become “water impimpis”—a callback to an apartheid-era term for black South Africans who spied for the white-dominated government.

Almost immediately after city leaders announced the first Day Zero predictions, they came under heavy scrutiny from citizens and activists, especially among Cape Town’s communities of color. Many in labor, socialist, and leftist organizations in the region didn’t believe Day Zero was even a thing. Elements from those organizations created the Cape Town Water Crisis Coalition, which protested Day Zero as propaganda designed both to cover up faulty city water management and to deny expanded access to low-income communities.

the management of the crisis has also sparked criticism from the African National Congress, or the ANC, the dominant party in the country. As the only opposition party to control a province, the DA is certainly used to strife with the ANC, but now old struggles over resources have brought that tension to a breaking point.

Deeply complicating the dynamic between the two parties is that the Western Cape is the major center of white demographic strength and political clout in the country, and that the DA—while embracing a membership of blacks, “coloured” multiracial descendants of indigenous peoples and Asian immigrants, and whites—often finds white leaders near or at the top

Under South Africa’s Constitution, the ANC is responsible for providing water to all citizens, but the actual infrastructure and services in the Western Cape falls upon the DA to manage

Last July, when confronted on Twitter by a black user who said that black residents in areas without running home water had experienced Day Zero from birth, Zille, who is white, responded with: “It must be a relief that you weren’t burdened by the legacy of a colonial water-piping system.” Zille, who’s faced harsh internal and external criticism for previous statements in defense of colonialism, this time suffered a rebuke from party boss Mmusi Maimane, and has since been officially suspended from party activities

Residents in well-apportioned suburbs pointed fingers at the mostly-black and poor residents of the so-called “informal settlements”—the tin-roofed, sprawling shanties that ring the outskirts of the city—despite the fact that these settlements use the least water per capita of any place in the province. And lacking internal plumbing and sewage, residents in the informal settlements often see in the city’s elites and governing class a neo-colonialist force, doling out resources at whim and mismanaging the commons

As they stand now, the Level 6B restrictions created by the city of Cape Town in January 2018 are supposed to limit residents to 50 liters per day, slash agricultural use by 60 percent below last year’s usage, aggressively push water-management devices and fines, and encourage the use of new fittings and other devices to minimize water waste.

Americans use somewhere around 90 gallons, or 340 liters, of water every 24 hours. That’s more than 700 pounds of water per day, and that’s not even counting what goes into the food you eat or the thirsty maws of the industries and services that sustain you

Right now, the water usage of the average Capetonian sits at about 125 liters per day, a dramatic decrease from the 200 daily liters of last year. Both of those levels sit below the average of developed cities worldwide, and well below the standard American usage of 340 liters.

the extreme social engineering brought about by the Day Zero campaign is unlikely to be a long-term solution to future water problems in Cape Town. Nor will it necessarily prove to be a sustainable model for other cities facing water shortages

“The climate projections for Cape Town indicate essentially a relatively consistent reduction in the amount of rainfall in Cape Town,” Wolski told me. “In the best case, it would be rainfall that is similar to what we have. But most of the projections indicate reduction.”

Environmental think tanks and journalistic outlets have published lists of cities that look likely to run out of water in the near future: São Paulo, Brazil, which faced its own Day Zero situation just a few years ago; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Cairo, Egypt; Mexico City; and—surprisingly, given its climate—Moscow, Russia. While each city has a very different set of reasons for its water woes, ranging from pollution to poor infrastructure to poor planning to desertification and drought, they all share a common challenge: Climate change will likely make the task of providing water harder, the populations thirstier, and the people angrier, even as many of the cities grow.

shortages in São Paulo sparked street fights, citizen mobilization, and major political dissent in the city

inequality manifests both in social stratification and in the development of water-delivery systems to those different strata

Mirroring class conflicts in the 20th century, the idea that access to water is a human right has become a driver of solidarity, hardening ad-hoc activist groups into major political movements. Extrapolating to the rest of a warming world, where racial and class barriers have been built into zoning and infrastructure, the uneasy detentes of segregated spaces and places could become new zones of conflict. All you have to do is remove water.

so far this winter the rainfall has helped raise the dam levels to just below 60 percent of capacity, which should put off the next crisis point for some time. Cab drivers, students, waiters, and tour guides spoke incessantly of the Day Zero crisis—and with plenty of real venom—but they mostly spoke of it as a thing that had happened, an event that was now being relegated to the past

Martin O’Malley was mocked for suggesting that a climate-change-intensified drought in the Levant—the worst drought in 900 years—helped incite the Syrian Civil War, thus kickstarting the Islamic State. The evidence tentatively supports him. Since the outbreak of the conflict, some scholars have recognized that this drought pushed once-prosperous farmers into Syria’s cities. Many became unemployed and destitute, aggravating internal divisions in the run-up to the war

Scheffran underlined these climate connections but declined to emphasize them. “The Syrian War has so many complex interrelated issues—and most of them are political and economic—that the drought is just one contributing factor to the instability in the region,”

it’s all about the exogenous shock. We were all interested in, to what extent does a big event like a flooding or a drought undermine society, or trigger a conflict outbreak?

Heatwaves, droughts, and other climate-related exogenous shocks do correlate to conflict outbreak—but only in countries primed for conflict by ethnic division. In the 30-year period, nearly a quarter of all ethnic-fueled armed conflict coincided with a climate-related calamity. By contrast, in the set of all countries, war only correlated to climatic disaster about 9 percent of the time

climate disaster will not cause a war, but it can influence whether one begins

Models predict that northern Africa and the Levant, both already drought-prone, will dry out significantly over the course of the century. On the phone, Schleussner also cited southern Africa and south-central Asia as regions to watch. (It’s no coincidence that some of the largest, longest wars this century have occurred in those places.)

a drought-and-flood-fueled armed conflict near the Mediterranean Basin could send people toward Western Europe in the hundreds of millions

“I wouldn’t say that there would be a mass migration to Europe, but I would expect to see a large number of people being displaced within Africa,”

There is literally, in legal parlance, no such thing as an environmental refugee,” says Edward Carr. “To meet the international standard for refugee, a changing environment is not a forcing. It doesn’t count.”

When would you attribute the decision to move to changes in the climate? Does a place have to be dry for five years? For 10 years? Does someone have to have three children die, and then they decide to move?

Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism in two ways, then. First, it could devastate agricultural yields and raise food prices; destroy coastal real estate and wash away family wealth; transform old commodities into luxury goods. Second, it could create a wave of migration—likely from conflict, but possibly from environmental ruination—that stresses international reception systems and risks fomenting regional resource disputes.

it could erode people’s sense of security, pushing them toward authoritarianism

Like the CEO in the 1950s who predicted that America would see flying cars and three-day workweeks by the year 1999, I’ve assumed that every ongoing trend line can be extrapolated out indefinitely. They can’t. The actual future will be far stranger.

climate change must be mitigated with all deliberate speed. But he also suggests certain cultural mechanisms. Some Americans may favor more restrictive immigration policies, but—in order to withstand against future waves of mass migration (and humanely deal with the victims of climate change)—racist fears must be unhooked from immigration restrictionism. In other words, as a matter of survival against future authoritarians, white supremacy must be rejected and defeated.

Improving the United States’s immune response to authoritarian leadership—a response that could be repeatedly tested in the century to come—can follow from weaving its civic fabric ever tighter. I don’t know what this will look like, exactly, for every person. But here are some places to start: Volunteer. Run for local or state office. Give to charity (whether due to religion or effective altruism). Organize at work. Join a church or a community choir or the local library staff. Make your hometown a better place for refugees to settle. Raise a child well.

climate realists have always split their work between mitigation—that is, trying to keep the climate from getting worse—and adaptation—trying to protect what we already have

Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers

Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.

the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.

The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.

While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders

what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.

In a review of Covid-19 social response programmes, cash transfer programmes were found to be: Short-term in their duration – lasting just over three months on average Small in value – an average of $6 (£4.30) per capita in low-income countries Limited in scope – with many in need remaining uncovered

The world’s food systems endured numerous shocks in 2020, from economic impacts on producers and consumers to desert locust swarms and erratic weather. All indicators suggest that this may be the new normal. The ecosystems we rely on for water, air and food supply are under threat. Zoonotic diseases are on the rise owing to growing demographic and economic pressures on land, animals and wildlife.

A warming planet is contributing to costlier and more frequent extreme weather events. And as people pack into low-quality housing in urban slums or vulnerable coastal areas, more are living in the path of disease and climate disaster.

We need sustained financing for approaches that prioritise human, animal and planetary health; restore landscapes and diversify crops to improve nutrition; reduce food loss and waste; strengthen agricultural value chains to create jobs and recover lost incomes; and deploy effective climate-smart agriculture techniques on a much greater scale.

Focusing on food security would address a basic injustice: almost one in 10 people live in chronic hunger in an age of food waste and plenty. This focus would also strengthen our collective ability to weather the next storm, flood, drought, or pandemic – with safe and nutritious food for all.

Operators of the 60 000 to 90 000 oil tankers, bulk carriers, ferries and other huge cargo ships plying the seas are racing to find alternatives to fuel oil as pollution rules are tightened. The industry generates roughly three percent of Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, a figure that experts say could reach 17% by 2050 if nothing is done.

picked by European rocket-maker Ariane Group for a sail-equipped cargo ship to transport parts for its new Ariane 6 launcher to French Guiana starting in 2022.The ship will be equipped with four huge rectangular sails rising 30 metres (100 feet) high, supplementing a motor and cutting fuel consumption by about 30 percent.

Beside sails, some firms have designed huge kites that pull cargo ships, though just a few operators have adopted the system.

Another option is to use “Flettner rotors” like those built by Norsepower of Finland, employing a technology developed by German engineers in the 1920s.The tall columns are installed on a ship and set spinning, creating lift that propels a ship forward when they catch a perpendicular wind.

wind advocates say tighter pollution rules — potentially including more widespread taxes on carbon emissions — will force shipping firms to clean up their act

Gorbachev was determined to stay in Russia and fight for reform, not to take up a life of well-compensated exile abroad. To do that, he would need money to fund his center, his staff, and his activities—urgently. As Gorbachev later told France 24 when asked about the ad, “I needed to finish the building. The workers started to leave—I needed to pay them.” To keep his vision going—and to stay relevant in a world moving beyond him—he would need a lot of money. More, even, than he could make by giving lectures. More than anyone in Russia could, or wanted to, give him.

(The exact amount that Gorbachev would receive for the commercial is secret, but it may have been one of the largest talent fees in history—an amount that would be easily in the seven figures today, adjusted for inflation.)

The concept obviously exploited the shock value of having a former world leader appear. But the ad played on the fact that Gorbachev was far more popular outside Russia than inside it. As late as October 1991, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 54 percent of Americans wanted to see Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union, compared with only 18 percent for Yeltsin. And warm feelings toward Gorbachev persisted in the West long after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The negotiations took months. Partly, this represented a negotiating tactic: The longer the negotiations drew out, the higher Gorbachev’s talent fee would be. But it also represented real hesitation on Gorbachev’s part.

a Moscow Pizza Hut near Red Square, which had opened in 1990 as part of a Soviet-era deal with the chain’s then-parent company, PepsiCo. That arrangement, which had been hailed as the “deal of the century,” flopped when the Soviet Union collapsed, killing both the Russian economy and the restaurant’s supply chain. (Overnight, Lithuanian mozzarella became an expensive import from a foreign country.)

Filming the interior scenes took the better part of a day in a different location, inside a real Moscow Pizza Hut. (Even though the bulk of the commercial is just a conversation around a table, multiple sources stressed that filming such a scene—with its complicated sightlines—is enormously challenging.) Coincidentally, it also happened to be Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Since the commercial was being shot at a working Pizza Hut, the cast and crew—including Gorbachev—ate pizza, which was “one of the most interesting Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever had,” said Shaine, who was seated with Gorbachev.

Gorbachev’s granddaughter Anastasia Virganskaya ended up eating the slice.

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

Gorbachev finally assented—with conditions. First, he would have final approval over the script. That was acceptable. Second, he would not eat pizza on film. That disappointed Pizza Hut. “We always wanted the hero of the ad to eat the pizza,”

Gorbachev justified his decision to do the commercial on two grounds. First, the former leader argued, “pizza is for everyone.” It was nicely communal: “It’s not only consumption. It’s also socializing.”

Besides the expense and effort of the shoot and the postproduction (an original score recorded live!), the dialogue is entirely in Russian with English subtitles—even though Americans hate subtitles.

The commercial closes with the cheers resounding throughout Red Square and then all of Moscow in progressively wider shots with celebratory music underneath. “It has this impression, you might say the illusion, that the entire nation feels this is a wonderful thing that happened.” Of course, it is an illusion—in this case, taking the actor’s dialogue, adding reverb, and layering the chants over each other. But it’s also one that suited both the marketing needs of Pizza Hut and the myth-making needs of Gorbachev. Pizza Hut gets to be not only the avatar of global capitalism but also the restaurant that brings people together. In the commercial’s fiction, at least, Gorbachev gets the hero’s reception that Raisa always thought he deserved.

The future turned out to be much dimmer than the ad anticipated. A little less than a year after the ad was filmed, in August 1998, the Russian financial system collapsed. The economic recovery that had begun to take hold was wiped out. As the Moscow Times wrote, “The whole Russian economy fell to pieces at a stroke.”

Whatever optimism made the pro-Gorbachev slant of the ad even dimly plausible as a representative sampling of Muscovite opinion vanished. News reports suggest that the Pizza Hut location in which the commercial was filmed itself closed during the crash.

this fictional family, like most Russians, probably spent the early 2000s supporting the increasingly hard-line Vladimir Putin, seeing him as “the only person who can take them back to stability and potential for growth,” Weber said. Out with pizza, in with the vertical of power.

despite Gorbachev’s ambitions that his post-presidency could push his country toward greater openness, Russia has slipped ever further along a much less free path than he once envisioned

A tightening of laws on foreign support for nonprofits inside Russia squeezed the Gorbachev Foundation; many of his family members have reportedly moved to Germany. In a book released last month, Gorbachev even weakly offered praise for his successor on the grounds that Putin “inherited chaos” and that his moves could be justified if “the aim of authority is to create conditions for developing a strong modern democracy.”

In a 2018 poll by the respected Levada Center (another byproduct of Gorbachev’s reforms), 66 percent of Russians responded that they regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, of course, does Gorbachev. His ambition was to perfect the country, not to end it.

As a leader, Russians rank Gorbachev well below Joseph Stalin.

The US has a key Cold War-era air base at Thule, used for surveillance of space using a massive radar. It is the US military's northernmost base, there to provide early warning of a missile attack on North America.

"Despite the Arctic nations' shared ambition to keep the region free of security policy disagreements, the military focus on the Arctic is growing. A power game is unfolding between great powers Russia, the United States and China that deepens tensions in the region."

There are competing territorial claims at the UN from Denmark, Russia, the US and Canada in the North Pole region, where energy and mineral resources are becoming more accessible.

in August Denmark sent a large support ship to Greenlandic waters for the first time. The Absalon, and sister ship Esbern Snare, are the biggest Danish naval vessels.

Greenland's population is about 56,000 and for decades the territory has been economically dependent on Denmark.The Self Rule Act of 2009 granted Greenland far-reaching autonomy, though Denmark retains control over foreign affairs, defence, security and immigration.Fisheries account for more than 90% of Greenland's exports, most of which go to Denmark, and prawn is the main species caught.

Denmark is helping Greenland to build three big international airports, one of them in the capital Nuuk. A Chinese bid for the airport project was rejected.

Russia has invested heavily in infrastructure to develop the Northern Sea Route and hopes it will become a major shipping lane as the Arctic warms at a faster rate than the rest of the world. It is not currently used in winter due to thick ice cover.Russian authorities have said the country plans to begin year-round shipping via the Northern Sea Route in 2022 or 2023

All countries — especially G20 countries — that have submitted “updated” NDCs that were no more ambitious than their previous commitments, and countries that have not yet communicated new or updated NDCs at all, should update their NDCs and long-term strategies in a credible, ambitious manner

developed countries must lead on climate ambition — they are the laggards in living up to their climate promises despite their overwhelming contribution to the climate crisis

After COP26, it was noted “with deep regret” the failure of developed countries to meet the $100 billion goal they originally promised to achieve by 2020, feeding into the credibility gap and hamstringing the ability of developing countries to plan further climate action.

clear finance targets for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage finance

$600 billion in climate finance from 2020-2025

The urgency for enhanced adaptation action is underscored by the IPCC Working Group II report, mentioned previously,  which finds that every tenth of a degree of additional warming will escalate threats to people, species and ecosystems. Yet many communities still lack the resources required to manage today’s climate change impacts, let alone worse impacts in the future.

countries must also prepare their National Adaptation Plans and Adaptation Communications

developed countries need to provide grant-based funding to finance adaptation plans, especially through the Adaptation Fund and other entities of the Financial Mechanism established under the UNFCCC.

despite an urgent plea from climate-vulnerable countries, the proposal for a new loss and damage financing facility was  rejected by developed nations. Instead, at COP26, countries established the Glasgow Dialogue to discuss possible arrangements for loss and damage funding, with the first discussion to be held in June 2022.

even the most effective adaptation measures cannot prevent all losses and damages, which are a present-day reality for vulnerable people in certain regions

Countries also made progress at COP26 on the operationalization and funding of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), which aims to provide developing countries with technical assistance on how to address loss and damage in a robust and effective manner. Sufficient financing for the SNLD is crucial to ensure technical support for developing countries and to create a new method in encouraging technical assistance that is country-owned and emphasizes local expertise.

The first Global Stocktake process must be done in a way that is inclusive, raises awareness, ensures the meaningful participation of Global South organizations, and paves the way for a comprehensive outcome that promotes increased NDC ambition and is centered around equity. Additionally, the UN Secretary General should hold countries and non-state actors accountable to develop a robust accountability system for commitments made outside of the UNFCCC process.

Shortly after COP27, we will be more than a quarter of the way through the decisive decade — what will the world have to show for it? Now is the time for solidarity and ambitious, real, on-the-ground action and support that will deliver justice for vulnerable countries and communities. While realizing countries’ differentiated responsibilities and capacities, the world needs to be all in, all together on climate.

Italy’s parliamentary committee for security, Copasir, last week opened a probe into disinformation, in response to widespread concerns that Italian news outlets are being used to spread the pro-Putin line.

In perhaps the most egregious example of a top Russian official exploiting western media for disinformation, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared in an interview on a privately-owned TV channel founded by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He used the occasion to assert falsehoods virtually unchallenged, including an inflammatory assertion that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood” — a remark for which Putin ultimately had to apologize to Israel. The European Commission was forced to remind EU broadcasters that they “must not allow incitement to violence, hatred and Russian propaganda in their talk shows.”

Italy is often seen as a soft touch for Kremlin disinformation and a potential Trojan horse in Europe because of historic ties to Russia based on strong economic ties and the largest Communist party in the west.

Putin built a warm relationship with Berlusconi, based on shared economic interests. Over the past decade, and even after the annexation of Crimea, Putin has engaged with the rise in populist and anti-establishment parties — and especially the far-right League party — who saw him as a fellow adversary of the EU and global western elites

The Italy media landscape is more polluted than other countries, she said. “The talk shows fail to give context, distinguish between opinion and facts. They care more about creating a show and ratings.”

Italian TV stations were forced to apologize after publishing a graphic that apparently showed NATO biological laboratories underneath the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, but was in reality drawn from an apocalypse-themed board game.  

The Fatto Quotidiano newspaper published a full-page article blaming the U.S. and the EU for “the massacre that is taking place in Ukraine” so favorable to Russia it was retweeted by the Russian Embassy in Italy.

Italy’s distinctive political talk show tradition, strong on melodrama and orchestrated arguments and light on fact-checking and tough interviews, that is causing the most commotion. The all-in-one politics and show-business format began with shows such as Rita Dalla Chiesa’s Parlamento In, on Berlusconi’s private TV channels in the 1980s, but was soon imitated by the state broadcaster Rai.

The talk shows “are a kind of infotainment,” said Romano. “The objective is to create a row not inform.”

The parliamentary investigation will look at how talk show guests are selected and whether they had been paid by the Kremlin

As far as Lavrov’s appearance goes, Berlusconi’s Mediaset defended the interview saying it confirmed Putin’s unwillingness to arrive at a diplomatic solution and therefore allowed us to learn something about the Russian leadership. On the same evening, another channel interviewed Vladimir Soloviev, a presenter on Russian state TV, who is subject to sanctions, and described by the U.S. State department as the Kremlin’s most energetic propagandist today.

Romano, the MP, agrees. “We cannot treat facts and opinions with equal value, you wouldn’t have Goebbels debate Anne Frank about the Holocaust.”

Russia’s efforts to disorient Italians seem to be working. According to a recent poll, half of Italians think coverage of Ukraine is distorted. And 25 percent say they don’t believe the media on Ukraine. Italians are also far less supportive of arming Ukrainians than other Western allies, with only around 30 percent in favor of sending more weapons compared to around 60 percent in the U.K. and U.S., according to polls.

Head of Rai Carlo Fuortes has suggested it may finally be time to rethink the talk show format, to avoid inflammatory debates at the expense of serious and informed exchanges.

“Things like climate change, earthquakes, drought — they are of course realities of our lives,” Durusu-Tanrıöver said. “But there are human actions that can be taken to foresee what will happen and behave accordingly.

In the half-century leading up to empire’s collapse, the scientists found, the rings inside the tree trunks gradually start to get narrower — suggesting that water shortages were limiting the junipers’ growth. Chemical analyses of the kind of carbon captured in the wood also showed how drought altered the trees at the cellular level.

cuneiform tablets from that time in which Hittite officials fretted over rising food prices and asked for grain to be sent to their cities. But Manning said the empire — which was known for its elaborate water infrastructure projects and massive grain silos in major cities — should have been able to survive this “low frequency” drought.

between 1198 and 1196 B.C., the region was struck by three of the driest years in the entire 1,000-year-long tree ring record. The abrupt spurt of intensely dry weather may have been more than the Hittites could bear. Within a generation, the empire had dissolved.

“Very few societies ever plan for more than one or two disasters happening consecutively.”

“But I think it’s naive to believe that three years of drought would bring down the storerooms of the Hittite empire,” Weiss said. He argues that the longer-term drying trend, which has been documented in other studies, was probably more significant.

“What’s a crisis for some becomes almost an opportunity for others,” Manning said. “You have adaptation and resilience in the form of new states and new economies emerging.”

Durusu-Tanrıöver blames an unsustainable economy and centralized political system. The intensive agricultural practices required to support the capital city probably exhausted the region’s water resources and weakened surrounding ecosystems

parallels to modern urban areas, which are both major sources of planet-warming pollution and especially vulnerable to climate change impacts like extreme heat.

we never talk about going to war to preserve democracy when it is at risk in places like Hungary, Turkey, India, or Mexico. What makes Taiwan a special case? We need to ask ourselves whether that has to do with our predisposition to contain Chinese power more than it has to do with a careful assessment of U.S. national interests.

if all nations seek to have sufficient power that they cannot be bullied by global hegemons (and let’s be realistic, we’re the only global hegemon in this conversation at the moment), isn’t their desire to have military power consistent with the size of their country, their economy, and their national security interests what we should expect of them?

Is there something inherently wrong or dangerous about China seeking to challenge the United States economically, technologically, or politically? Isn’t that what all nations do? Don’t we believe in the inherent superiority of our system? Don’t we believe in the benefits of competition? (I thought that was fundamental to America’s national identity and values.)

until the start of the industrial revolution, China had the world’s largest economy and it is now resuming that role.

What really bothers us about China’s rise is that they are quite open about the fact that they want to challenge our influence in the world. We want to be No. 1. We don’t like being challenged.

we need to get over the idea that somehow the U.S.-China relationship is a zero-sum conflict, the way the U.S.-Soviet Union relationship was.

Our economies are intertwined. Over 70,000 U.S. companies are active in China. There is not a single major global issue we can resolve without cooperating with China. On many of them, our interests intersect. On some of them, they overlap.

even if our goal is to maximize our influence and our piece of the global economic pie, we need to carefully weigh whether a Cold War and ballooning military expenditures are the best way to balance our interests. It can be argued that overspending on defense has and will cost us influence and undercut the dynamism of our economy.

Being called out by the Chinese leader may have been uncomfortable for the U.S. But, as it happens, everything Xi said was true. The U.S. is actively seeking to contain China and impede its ability to develop key technologies.

We should believe in our hearts that our values and system serve the world better than theirs do and we should seek to persuade the world of that.

We have, I fear, entered a period in which the self-interested search of our defense establishment and our political classes for an international enemy are pushing us into misreading and mishandling the most important bilateral relationship in the world. We are applying old models and obsolescent frameworks to something new. We are mistaking our own bellicosity for strength. We are underestimating our strengths and our rival’s weaknesses. We are relying on reflex, when what we need is creativity.