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Javier E

Genoa Bridge Collapse Throws Harsh Light on Benettons' Highway Billions - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...italy-autostrade-benetton.html

corruption italy

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The Benettons made occasional, bipartisan political donations but those did not explain the company’s influence. Autostrade could perform perfectly legal favors for politicians, like modernizing a stretch of local highway.
  • Several scholars say the skewed relationship resulted in a case of “regulatory capture,” the political scientists’ term for the situation when a watchdog bends to the interests of a company it is supposed to supervise.
  • When a center-left government took power in 2006, Autostrade’s contract came under scrutiny. The government blocked the company from selling itself to Abertis, a Spanish toll road operator, then signaled that Autostrade needed to be reined in
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  • “The problem was not the merger itself,” Antonio Di Pietro, then the minister of infrastructure and transport, said in a statement, “but concession rules that are too favorable toward the motorway operator, so much so that they led to the bad habit of automatic tariff hikes.”
  • The government approved a new law to encourage efficiency and lower tolls, except it never took effect. In 2008, the center-left government fell. The new conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, took power and amended the new law to stipulate annual increases in tolls right through to the end of the contract
  • Though it aided all of Italy’s toll road operators, Autostrade, the biggest, was the biggest beneficiary.
  • Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state.
  • For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade’s parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea’s largest customer. Spea’s offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade.
  • One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade’s control over Spea as “absolute.”“They even approve promotions inside of Spea,
  • Such potential conflicts are prohibited in other countries where Autostrade operates. In Chile, for instance, regulations block a private toll operator from hiring a company it owns to conduct inspections, according to Mariana Rocha, a spokeswoman at the country’s Ministry of Public Works.
  • Mr. Fonderico, the administrative law professor from Luiss Guido Carli University, said the ministry actually lacked the expertise to carry out its oversight role, particularly on a bridge as vexing as the Morandi. Over time, he said, the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than regulating it.
  • Though the relationship between Autostrade and the government is now defined by pure hostility, a divorce is unlikely.The reason? If the company’s contract were terminated early, the state would need to pay Autostrade the remaining value of the contract, a sum that could exceed $17 billion.“The company would take the state to court,” Mr. Ponti said, “and it would win.”
Javier E

Putin's Regime Faces the Fate of His Kerch Bridge - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671693

history battle ukraine turning point

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • “Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlboroug
  • The strike on the Kerch Strait Bridge was not a battle, but it was an important contributor to one of the great inflection points of this war—the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing
  • The Kerch Strait Bridge attack, by contrast, inflicted at most a couple of casualties but packed multiple punches
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  • Russia’s military predicament is going from bad to worse. Occupying a thousand-kilometer front and reliant on massed firepower, the Russian military depends on creaking supply lines that run parallel to the front and that are increasingly vulnerable to Ukrainian precision attacks.
  • Meanwhile, Russia’s military mobilization is a deeply unpopular botch, as more Russian men flee the country than can be inducted into an army that cannot equip them, cannot train them, and cannot lead them.
  • More disasters await. Ten thousand to 20,000 of Russia’s best remaining troops are bottled up in the city of Kherson, their backs against the Dnipro River and the bridges behind them unusable for heavy traffic.
  • Surovikin—his face set in the menacing scowl of most Russian generals—will not be able to create a unified command organization overnight. Nor is he likely to escape the micromanagement from the Kremlin that seems to have plagued Russia’s war effort. What he will do, however, is repeat the brutalities over which he presided in Syria, where the Russian military gained experience not in fighting but in butchering civilians
  • Putin may now face the unappetizing choice between picking a more effective, colorful, and (on the nationalist right) popular set of subordinates who could turn on him, or sticking with the loyal but failed mediocrities who have absorbed the obloquy associated with Putin’s system and the president himself.
  • Dictatorships built solely on fear and self-interest are brittle things, and in Russia the cracks are showing.
  • Running throughout the open conduits of opinion, primarily on Telegram, is boiling discontent with the military, the conduct of this war, the absurd insistence that it is not a war but a “special technical operation,” the incompetent mobilization, and, by implication, Putin himself.
  • At the same time, Russian paranoia about the West, a combination of grievance and thwarted desires to restore an imperial state, has created an atmosphere in which measured policy is impossible.
  • All of this suggests that predictions of stalemate are wrong, at least so far as the higher conduct of this war is concerned. The impulse of General Surovikin will be to destroy civilians, power plants, and hospitals, because he cannot beat the Ukrainian army.
  • “Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”
  • A much larger psychological disaster for Russia will ensue if and when Kherson falls and the largest city that Russia has taken is lost to Ukraine, together with thousands of Russian prisoners. That would be the real inflection point, a great battle, and as Churchill also put it:
maxwellokolo

Colombia bridge collapse kills 7 - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 12 Jan 17
     
    Colombian risk management authorities said excess weight led to the bridge's collapse Monday. An eyewitness told local media that some 20 people were on the bridge when the ropes holding up the left side of it snapped. The bridge stood at a height of 10 to 15 meters (32 to 49 feet).
Conner Armstrong

USA TODAY: Latest World and US News - USATODAY.com - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...4531707

US usatoday Christie

shared by Conner Armstrong on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The legislative committee sent subpoenas to 17 individuals and three institutions. None was immediately named.
  • A New Jersey Senate committee is also investigating whether Christie's top advisers orchestrated or covered up lane closures near the bridge for political purposes.Two Christie appointees to the Port Authority, which operates the bridge and other bi-state transportation entities, have already resigned in the wake of the uproar over the abrupt reduction from three access lanes to one onto the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 9.
  • Christie, who said he had no prior knowledge of the lane closures, said last week that he would cooperate "with all appropriate inquiries to ensure this breach of trust does not happen again."David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, who claimed the closure was part of a traffic study, have already resigned from the Port Authority.
B Mannke

BBC News - Chris Christie 'humiliated' by bridge-gridlock scandal - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-25671970

shared by B Mannke on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • 9 January 2014 Last updated at 14:25 ET Share this page Email Print Share this pageShareFacebookTwitter Chris Christie 'humiliated' by bridge-gridlock scandal Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: "I am responsible for what happened" Continue reading the main story Related Stories Twitter drips with Christie snark Chris Christie's bridge-sized headache Christie: Republicans' best hope New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has fired an aide who allegedly orchestrated traffic mayhem to pursue a petty political vendetta. Mr Christie, seen as a potential Republican White House candidate, apologised for the scandal, which he said "embarrassed and humiliated" him.
  • Mr Christie, seen as a potential Republican White House candidate, apologised for the scandal, which he said "embarrassed and humiliated" him. The gridlock was allegedly engineered to punish a Democratic mayor who did not endorse the governor's re-election. Mr Christie denied any involvement, blaming "deceitful" staff.
  • "I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or execution," he said, "and I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here."
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  • Asked about a 91-year-old woman who reportedly died after ambulance services were caught up in the gridlock, Mr Christie said that was "awful", though he added it was unclear whether the delay had contributed to her death.
  • "An apology today might be a bit premature. "I think this is a story that has not yet experienced its final chapter."
Javier E

Moral code | Rough Type - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=2173

morality technology robotics conscience

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • So you’re happily tweeting away as your Google self-driving car crosses a bridge, its speed precisely synced to the 50 m.p.h. limit. A group of frisky schoolchildren is also heading across the bridge, on the pedestrian walkway. Suddenly, there’s a tussle, and three of the kids are pushed into the road, right in your vehicle’s path. Your self-driving car has a fraction of a second to make a choice: Either it swerves off the bridge, possibly killing you, or it runs over the children. What does the Google algorithm tell it to do?
  • As we begin to have computer-controlled cars, robots, and other machines operating autonomously out in the chaotic human world, situations will inevitably arise in which the software has to choose between a set of bad, even horrible, alternatives. How do you program a computer to choose the lesser of two evils? What are the criteria, and how do you weigh them?
  • Since we humans aren’t very good at codifying responses to moral dilemmas ourselves, particularly when the precise contours of a dilemma can’t be predicted ahead of its occurrence, programmers will find themselves in an extraordinarily difficult situation. And one assumes that they will carry a moral, not to mention a legal, burden for the code they write.
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  • We don’t even really know what a conscience is, but somebody’s going to have to program one nonetheless.
maxwellokolo

Mosul IS offensive: Iraqi forces capture second bridge over Tigris - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-39176850

shared by maxwellokolo on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 06 Mar 17
     
    Iraqi government forces have captured Mosul's al-Hurriya (Freedom) Bridge over the River Tigris, Iraqi military and Kurdish sources say. It is the second of five bridges to be recaptured since the operation to retake the city from so-called Islamic State began in October.
abbykleman

Police say 6 people slain in 'terrorist incidents' on London Bridge and in nearby market - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-8de1-cec59a9bf4b1_story.html

shared by abbykleman on 05 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 05 Jun 17
     
    A van driving at high speed mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge late Saturday night before the occupants got out and began stabbing patrons at nearby bars and restaurants, witnesses said in an attack that police described as the latest in a string of deadly terrorist strikes to hit Britain this spring.
aidenborst

Hawaii flooding: Emergency declared as flooding causes extensive damage, including brid... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US crisis Culture global-warming climate-change natural-disaster storm

shared by aidenborst on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The state of Hawaii is under an emergency proclamation as the state struggles with widespread damage from flooding.
  • The severe weather is expected to continue through Friday, but residents are already reporting widespread damage.
  • Maui resident Mark Alexander said he found himself with water up to his chest in a matter of minutes at his home in Haiku. The family's dog, Legend, was swept away by the water, but found a way to climb out and onto the roof of the home for safety, KGMB reported.
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  • The mayor of Maui says homes and bridges have been severely damaged in the community's ongoing flooding emergency. "This has been unprecedented flooding, and we will be making damage assessments today," Mayor Michael Victorino said in a written statement Tuesday.
  • The entire state is under a flash flood watch until 6 a.m. local time Wednesday.
  • The floodwaters were so furious they knocked his daughter's bedroom off the foundation, Alexander told the outlet, as he with family members and friends began shoveling feet of mud out of their home.
  • On Monday, Victorino said that residents told him it was the worst flooding they've seen in over 25 years.
  • "Catastrophic flooding from Opaeula Stream. Evacuate now from Haleiwa town," the Honolulu County government said in an emergency notice Tuesday afternoon. "You are in danger. Leave now."
  • "My caution to anyone watching is please heed that warning and evacuate. We don't do those kind of orders capriciously, we do those with purpose, they are most serious," Mayor of the City and County of Honolulu Rick Blangiardi said in a video address on Tuesday.
  • "When you see flood damage in the light of day, it's a reminder of the sheer power of fast-moving water," said Victorino, who visited flooded areas. "We are so fortunate there were no reported deaths or injuries. I want to publicly thank our first responders who did heroic work under very dangerous conditions."
  • "Yes, it's like a bridge, small one over a stream," she said of the road. "It hasn't stopped raining one second. We are about 15 minutes away from the dam."
ethanshilling

Pink Dolphins in Hong Kong Find Respite Thanks to the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hong-kongs-pink-dolphins.html

hong kong dolphins

shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The most popular reward for hiking to the top of Fu Shan, a hill near Hong Kong’s westernmost point, is a selfie backed by the setting sun, the gleaming new bridge across the Pearl River or a flight landing at the nearby airport.But for those who look more closely, there is the chance of a rarer prize: a glimpse of Chinese white dolphins swimming among fishing boats and cargo ships in the milky jade water.
  • The species, also known as the pink dolphin for the flush coloration it gets while swimming actively in warm waters, is found through much of coastal south China and Southeast Asia.
  • The marine mammals have maintained a precarious existence in the Pearl River Delta, which has the world’s second-highest volume of freight shipments, several cities with populations in the millions and an unrelenting pace of development in and along its waters.
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  • But the number of dolphins in Hong Kong have declined as much as 80 percent over the past 15 years, according to a report by 15 conservation groups and regional universities, as pollution, marine traffic and large-scale land reclamation projects have made the environment increasingly hostile.
  • The construction of a new runway for Hong Kong’s international airport and a bridge that links the city with the western side of the Pearl River has also disrupted areas that were once prime dolphin habitat but now rarely see the animals.
  • “If we identify individuals, we can follow their life history — where they like to hang around, whether they have calves,” he said. “This is important, because one of the worries is reproductive rate of dolphins is quite low. To keep the population healthy, we want to see calves. But that’s not happening in Hong Kong.”
  • “All vessel traffic is an issue, but high-speed ferries are a particular issue,” said Laurence McCook, the head of oceans conservation for the WWF-Hong Kong. “They move so fast there’s a risk of vessel strike, but they also just physically disturb the dolphins because the dolphins run away from them.”
  • “People want to hear this news about the benefit of the pandemic for wildlife, but it’s not true for dolphins,” said Vincent Ho, the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society.
  • “Every time we have a project like the bridge,” Mr. Ho said, “they set up a marine park as some kind of compensation. But we think it’s too late.”
  • “What we have documented fairly clearly is that dolphins are moving back out into the ferry zone,” Mr. McCook said. “That actually is their most prime habitat under current circumstances.”
  • Conservation groups say they hope the benefits of the ferry suspension will encourage regional governments and ferry companies to reconsider routes across the Pearl River. By traveling somewhat farther south, they could bypass key areas of dolphin habitat along Lantau, Hong Kong’s largest island.
  • “Rerouting the ferries is not a magic cure-all,” Mr. McCook said. “But we think that can help us catalyze other actions and demonstrate it’s not a fait accompli that we lose the dolphins.”
Javier E

Why Rotterdam Wouldn't Allow a Bridge to Be Dismantled for Bezos' Yacht - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bezos-yacht-rotterdam.html

culture history politics netherlands rich Equality

shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • we think that rich people are not acting normal. Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think ‘Be average.’ That’s good enough.”
  • “When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’”
  • The streak of austerity in Dutch culture can be traced to Calvinism, say residents, the most popular religious branch of Protestantism here for hundreds of years. It emphasizes virtues like self-discipline, frugality and conscientiousness. Polls suggest that most people in the Netherlands today are not churchgoers, but the norms are embedded, as evidenced by Dutch attitudes toward wealth.
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  • “Calvin teaches that you’re given stewardship over your money, that you have a responsibility to take care of it, which means giving lots of it away, being generous to others,”
  • “Work is a divine calling for which you will be held accountable. It’s considered bad for society and bad for your soul if you spend in ostentatious ways.”
  • “He doesn’t pay his taxes,” is a common refrain in this city, and it doesn’t mean that Mr. Bezos is considered a tax cheat. It means that he isn’t fighting inequality by sharing his money, an obligation that transcends the tax code.
  • An ethos endures that nobody is any better than anyone else, or deserves more, and it stems from an unignorable geographic fact. Roughly one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level and citizens for centuries have had little choice but to band together to create an infrastructure of dikes and drainage systems to remain alive.
  • “The Netherlands is built on cooperation,” said Paul van de Laar, a professor of history at Erasmus University. “There were constant threats of disaster from the 15th and 16th century. Protestants and Catholics knew that to survive, they could not quarrel too much.”
  • Chip in. Blend in. Help others. These are among the highest ideals of the Netherlands
  • The Dutch once ran one of the world’s largest empires but there’s a certain pride here that the prime minister of the country rides a bicycle to pay visits to the king — yes, the Netherlands has a royal family, which is also relatively low-key — and locks the bicycle outside the palace.
  • At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.” Choose one, went the thinking. You don’t need both.
  • explaining the anger that Mr. Bezos and Oceanco, the maker of the three-masted, $500 million schooner, inspired after making what may have sounded like a fairly benign request. The company asked the local government to briefly dismantle the elevated middle span of the Hef, which is 230 feet tall at its highest point, allowing the vessel to sail down the King’s Harbor channel and out to sea.
  • The whole process would have taken a day or two and Oceanco would have covered the costs.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
  • The bridge, a lattice of moss-green steel in the shape of a hulking “H,” is not actually used by anyone. It served as a railroad bridge for decades until it was replaced by a tunnel and decommissioned in the early 1990s. It’s been idle ever since.
  • In sum, the operation would have been fast, free and disrupted nothing. So why the fuss?
  • “What can you buy if you have unlimited cash? Can you bend every rule? Can you take apart monuments?”
  • “There’s a principle at stake,”
  • The first problem was the astounding wealth of Mr. Bezos.
  • “The Dutch like to say, ‘Acting normal is crazy enough,’
Javier E

Did the First Americans Arrive via Land Bridge? This Geneticist Says No. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ry-americas-jennifer-raff.html

americas migration origins bridge land archaeology genetics

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • In her new book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” Raff beautifully integrates new data from different sciences (archaeology, genetics, linguistics) and different ways of knowing, including Indigenous oral traditions, in a masterly retelling of the story of how, and when, people reached the Americas.
  • Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from White Sands, N.M., are at odds with the Clovis first hypothesis.
  • the path to the Americas was coastal (the Kelp Highway hypothesis) rather than inland, and that Beringia was not a bridge but a homeland — twice the size of Texas — inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the First Peoples of the Americas.
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  • Raff effectively models how science is done, how hypotheses are tested, and how new data are used to refute old ideas and generate new ones.
  • Raff takes the reader from underground caverns in Belize to a clean lab at the University of Kansas where ancient DNA is tediously teased from old bones. She explains difficult to understand concepts — geoarchaeology, coalescence times, biodistance — with well-placed sidebars. The book is richly referenced, and informative footnotes and endnotes give readers an opportunity to take a deeper dive if they wish.
  • Given the fast and furious pace of discovery in this field, Raff is clear that not everyone will agree with her interpretations of the data. “All scientists must hold themselves open to the possibility that we could be wrong, and it may very well be that in five, 10 or 20 years, this book will be as out of date as any other,” she writes. “That possibility is what makes working in this field so rewarding.” That, she explains, is how science is done.
  • Jennifer Raff is a well-published scholar and accomplished scientific communicator who has contributed important insights into the genetic history and movement patterns of Indigenous Americans. She is at the forefront of a culture change in our science. And now she has written the book anyone interested in the peopling of the Americas must read.
Javier E

At the China-Russia Border, the Xi-Putin Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-russia-china-ukraine-5c588831

china russia relationship partnership tension

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The meeting in Moscow this week between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to showcase what they have declared a partnership with “no limits” between their countries. Beneath the surface are economic, political, cultural and historical divisions that undercut the relationship.
  • Russia seeks to disrupt the international order, including through military action. The International Criminal Court last week issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Putin for war crimes. China, which reached its economic stature through the status quo, seeks changes that further its interests, complicating the binational collaboration,
  • In many ways, the Chinese and Russian economies are highly complementary. Russia exports natural resources China needs to power its industrial economy. China sells goods that Russian consumers want. On the energy front in particular, Chinese purchases of oil and gas since the invasion of Ukraine have helped Russia weather Western sanctions.
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  • China-Russia relations are far from a “monolithic bloc,” Zhao Long, a scholar at China’s Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, wrote in a recent paper. “In Beijing’s vision, it never should become one.”
  • A long and sometimes violent history between Russia and China has left a legacy of distrust. A museum in Heihe is dedicated to what it depicts as centuries of aggressions by Russian soldiers against the Chinese
  • One exhibit depicts the killing of thousands of Chinese in the region by Russians in 1900. Over a loudspeaker, a narrator concludes that Russia-China relations were today peaceful, but that China must remain vigilant. “We can never forget this history,” the narrator said. “If you lag behind, you will get beaten.”  
  • Mr. Xi’s language during his Moscow visit will be closely parsed by Western officials and security analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions for Russia. The frayed ends of China-Russia economic ties are, by contrast, out in the open.
  • Another newly opened bridge, in Heihe, had been highly touted in Chinese state media. It didn’t appear last week to be an economic boon. On the China side of the bridge, two Russian truck drivers, hauling what appeared to be metal shelving, idled near a customs checkpoint. Trucks traveling from China to Russia crossed the bridge at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and even less frequently in the other direction.
  • Before the invasion of Ukraine, most China-Russia trade was settled in U.S. dollars or Euros, an arrangement upended by Western sanctions. Chinese companies now struggle to get paid. One survey by local central-bank officials of Chinese companies that trade with Russia found that after the invasion of Ukraine, 60% of them had suspended operations or were barely scraping by because of logistical and financial hurdles from the sanctions.
  • Russia’s growing dependency on the yuan makes Russia more vulnerable to Chinese actions should relations between the two countries falter
  • “Russian leaders like to emphasize the unprecedented strategic cooperation between the two countries,” Ms. Prokopenko wrote in February for the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet in reality, this cooperation makes Moscow increasingly dependent on Beijing.” 
maxwellokolo

ISIS destroys Mosul bridges as troops advance - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 14 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 14 Jan 17
     
    ISIS has destroyed all five bridges crossing the Tigris River in Mosul, an attempt to slow the advance of Iraqi troops toward the western side of the city, according to Lt. Gen. Abdul Amir Rasheed Yarallah, the commander of Iraqi Forces in Nineveh province.
Javier E

What The World's Leading Negotiating Expert Didn't Understand About Negotiating | The N... - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...t-understand-about-negotiating

negotiation practices academic principles expertise Mideast

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • real negotiations are often the very antithesis of thoughtful, systematic, rational and intellectually honest exercises. In fact, they’re driven and shaped by factors, such as luck, politics and personality, that are hard to quantify and more experiential than analytical.
  • Timing is Critical: Woody Allen was wrong. Ninety percent of life isn’t just showing up; it’s showing up at the right time. Ownership just doesn’t ripen like an orange on a tree; it’s driven by a sense of urgency, and that means the presence of sufficient pain and gain to change the locals’ calculations.
  • What you do try to do is to take each side’s unreasonableness and try to convert it to some common ground by showing both sides they might be able to have their needs met through this bridging idea or that. And if it works, objectivity—whatever that means—is not the relevant factor in any event; the sides’ owning the bridging mechanism and being able to sell it, is.
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  • Give me a real crisis with enough urgency to invest the parties with ownership, set up a credible process, find a mediator with will and skill, add a little luck, and poof, you too can have a chance at an agreement. Less is more here. Toward that end, here are a half dozen rules of the road on when and how negotiations actually work.
  • Own up: Former World Bank and Harvard President Larry Summers was right. In the history of the world nobody ever washed a rental car. People really care only about what they own. And without those in conflict actually investing themselves in the need for an agreement, there won’t be one.
  • Another Fisher principle was to develop objective criteria so that when there was disagreement, there would be some reasonable baseline to resolve them
  • Nobody Gets 100%: The Rolling Stones got this one right: You get what you need, not always what you want. To do a deal that lasts requires a balance of interests where both leaders can convince themselves they got enough on the substance—and persuade their publics too. A third party mediator can often help to make the sale by being creative in packaging. But the substance has to be real.
  • A Credible Process: The so-called peace process—now in a coma—has gotten a bad name. And it’s easy to see why. But if you want to reach an agreement, you’ll need a process that’s credible all the same. Negotiations on complex issues involving identity, religion, security take time. Expectations need to be managed. And there must be a sense that the process—however difficult—is heading toward mutually agreeable goals.
  • The 3rd Party: It would be nice to fantasize that the Arabs and Israelis could do this peace thing without the help of a third party, but history says no. Sure, the two sides often start the process. But the gaps are too wide, the mistrust too deep, and the need for assurances—economic, technical and security assistance—too great to go it alone.
  • put down those academic books. Get yourself to the nearest video store and rent West Side Story and the Godfather. That’s what real world negotiations look like.
Alex Trudel

Ukraine Ban on Russian Symbols Fuels Fight Over National Identity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ht-over-national-identity.html

politics history US culture policy economic education russian ukraine national identity

shared by Alex Trudel on 27 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • SEMYONOVKA, Ukraine
  • Semyonovka stood accused of being a “de-communization” scofflaw.
  • Mr. Papchenko, the local Communist Party chief, refused to concede that anything was remotely amiss.
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  • Instead, Semyonovka’s 12-foot, silver-colored Lenin with his right arm extended had been propped back up on a plinth in a discreet, leafy park. “We want to preserve this small corner of Soviet history,” said Mr. Papchenko, 67, a stout former school principal whose multiple gold molars attested to his own life in the U.S.S.R.
  • Vladimir Vyatrovich, 38, a historian and the head of Ukraine’s National Memory Institute, predicted somewhat rashly that if the effort succeeded in Ukraine, it would cause fateful reverberations next door.
  • The laws dumped the Soviet traditions for commemorating World War II, opened up what K.G.B. secret police archives remained in Ukraine and sought to rehabilitate certain Ukrainian independence fighters whom Moscow had long pilloried as Nazi collaborators.
  • A fight has emerged over the Communist symbols, however, not unlike that between supporters and opponents of the Confederate battle flag in the southern United States.
  • Ukrainians want to instill in the next generation.
  • “They behave like Bolsheviks: ‘We have to wipe out the past!’ ” said Georgiy V. Kasyanov, a historian and education reform activist. “They think the Soviet legacy can be destroyed by destroying statues of Lenin or by renaming streets, which is false. They are wrestling with ghosts.”
  • By the time of the Maidan uprising in Kiev that toppled the pro-Russian government in February 2014, Ukraine was down to about 1,300 Lenins, he says. Another 500 have come crashing down since
  • Some efforts proved more successful than others. One of the largest Lenin statues in Ukraine, in the city of Kharkiv, was dismembered.
  • Apart from the statues, 910 cities and towns need new names, as do tens of thousands of streets.
  • Each City Hall has until Nov. 21 to make the changes. If they do not, Parliament will do it for them by Feb. 21.
  • In Kiev, a television comedy show suggested the modern, landmark Moscow Bridge be renamed the Not Moscow Bridge.
  • And continue to. A woman wearing a navy blue bathrobe, hearing why foreigners were visiting recently, came bowling over, shaking her fist.
Javier E

In ancient DNA, the story of how Native Americans thrived - and then were wiped out - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...hrived-and-then-were-wiped-out

Americas human origins native americans

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Llamas and his colleagues figured out when the initial American settlers left Siberia via the land bridge over what is now the Bering strait. Their answer: roughly 23,000 years ago.
  • From there, it seemed that a group of about 2,000 child-bearing women (suggesting a population of some 10,000 people total) spent the next 6,000 years in genetic isolation — meaning that they weren’t intermarrying with other groups or branching off into separate ones. They just hunkered down together, and lived as their ancestors did.
  • That matches most scientists’s understanding of the early colonization of the Americas. In 20,000 BC, Alaska and pretty much all of Canada would have been encased in a vast ice sheet. Traversing it was impossible — nothing could survive the 3,000 mile trek across a barren glacier, let alone a motley crew of prehistoric humans.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Historically, scientists have believed that early settlers known as the Clovis people migrated south through an ice-free corridor that formed as the glaciers melted at the end of the Ice Age, roughly 11,500 years ago. That “Clovis first” theory, though dominant for most of the 20th century, is a tricky one: recent radiocarbon analysis of human remains discovered at an ancient site in Chile found they were about 14,000 years old. Either the analysis was wrong, or the theory was.
  • A second and increasingly popular possibility is that the people of Beringia, as the land bridge is known, built themselves some boats, traveled south and began settling the American coastline long before the inland ice had melted. The Science Advances study backs up that theory: It found that the genetic diversity of early Americans exploded about 16,000 years ago, suggesting that they’d made it to the warm, wide open spaces of the North and South American continents and flourished.
  • By 14,000 years before present, humans inhabited the Americas from Alaska to Chile.
  • mitochondrial DNA only offers clues about matrilineal lines of kinship — men, and women who didn’t have children, are left out of the equation.
Javier E

Amazon's Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntitrust-lina-khan-amazon.html

antitrust amazon

shared by Javier E on 09 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • “Ideas and assumptions that it was heretical to question are now openly being contested,” she said. “We’re finally beginning to examine how antitrust laws, which were rooted in deep suspicion of concentrated private power, now often promote it.”
  • Like many a wonkish youth, Ms. Khan headed to Washington after graduating in 2010, applying for a position at the left-leaning New America Foundation. Barry Lynn, who headed the organization’s Open Markets antimonopoly initiative, seized on her application. “It’s so much easier to teach public policy to people who already know how to write than teach writing to public policy experts,” said Mr. Lynn, a former journalist
  • “The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety and innovation — factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets,” she wrote.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “It’s one thing to say that antitrust enforcement has gotten far too weak,” said Daniel Crane, a University of Michigan scholar who doesn’t agree with Ms. Khan but credits her with opening up a much-needed debate. “It’s a bridge much further to say we should go back to the populist goal of leveling playing fields and checking ‘bigness.’ ”
  • Her father was a management consultant; her mother an executive in information services. Ms. Khan went to Williams College, where she wrote a thesis on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was the editor of the student paper but worked hard at everything.
  • Her Yale Law Journal paper argued that monopoly regulators who focus on consumer prices are thinking too short-term. In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition.
  • “The whole country has been struggling to understand why the economy is not operating in the right way,” Mr. Cicilline said. “Wages have remained stagnant. Workers have less and less power. All we’re trying to do is create a level playing field, and that’s harder when you have megacompanies that make it virtually impossible for small competitors.” He added, “We’re at the very beginning of solutions to this.”
  • The battle for intellectual supremacy takes place less these days in learned journals and more on social media, where tongues are sharp and branding is all. This is not Ms. Khan’s strong suit. She is always polite, even on Twitter. One consequence is that she didn’t give much thought about what to call the movement to reboot antitrust. Neither did anyone else
  • Mr. Chopra, with Ms. Khan’s assistance, pushed the argument further on Sept. 6 with a 14-page official comment that suggested the F.T.C. bring back a tool buried in its toolbox: the ability to make rules.Contemporary antitrust regulation, the commissioner wrote, is conducted in the courts, which makes it numbingly slow and dependent on high-paid expert witnesses. He called for the agency to use its authority to issue rules that would “advance clarity and certainty” about what is, and what is not, an unfair method of competition.
  • From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.
Javier E

A Closed Brooklyn Bridge and 40,000 Pounds of Deli Meat: New York Is That Crowded - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...crowded-new-york-holidays.html

nyc

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Just how crowded is New York City in the run-up to the ball drop?So crowded that 40,000 pounds of pastrami and beef were served in a week at Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where 3,000 to 4,000 visitors flocked each day, standing in lines that stretched three-plus blocks, the owner said.So crowded that skaters waited more than an hour to glide in Bryant Park.So crowded that a brief but unusual shutdown of the pedestrian and bike lanes across the Brooklyn Bridge was necessary on Saturday afternoon, after the police were called because of the dangerously large crowd.
  • Ms. Barge, 59, was hoping to bike over the span, something she did often when she lived in Park Slope. But, on Sunday, she was relegated to walking her bike, zigzagging around the crowds. Riding would have been a near-Herculean task with thousands of people filling both the pedestrian and the bike lanes.
malonema1

Trump Cabinet Secretaries Call For Infrastructure Plan : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...structure-plan-before-congress

US trump politics

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration sent an all-star team of five Cabinet secretaries to a Senate hearing Wednesday to talk up its infrastructure proposals. But not even the combined talents of the secretaries of Transportation, Commerce, Labor, Agriculture and Energy seemed enough to move the ball on the $1.5 trillion plan, and it remains unclear whether the measure will ever find its way to a vote in the House or Senate.
  • Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said that with some estimates as high as $4 trillion to repair the nation's roads, bridges, ports and airports, "We cannot address a challenge of this magnitude with federal resources alone, or by borrowing." She said the administration was "agnostic" about where the state share of the funds would come from, but said the federal government only owns 10 percent of the nation's roads and bridges, implying it was up to state and local governments to figure out where to find the funds to finance their share of improvements.
  • One of the key principles for the administration, said Energy Secretary Rick Perry, was removing regulatory barriers to speed approval of construction projects. Perry called the current permitting process fractured and redundant, saying "it requires projects to navigate a huge maze of federal regulations." Perry said Trump wants to see the process streamlined and "substantially cut back."
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
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