Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged tunnel

Rss Feed Group items tagged

jordancart33

Switzerland set to test world's longest tunnel - The Local - 0 views

  •  
    Testing of the new Gotthard base tunnel, set to become the world's longest tunnel when it opens next year, will start in October, the construction firm has confirmed.
oliviaodon

Secret Tunnel in Berlin Is an Echo From the Cold War - The New York Times - 0 views

  • BERLIN — “It was a very touching moment. It brought back memories of a time when as a young man I had sworn to fight the wall.”Those were the words of Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel, a 73-year-old retiree who says that he helped dig a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in the 1960s.
  • The discovery has fueled memories of a dark chapter in Berlin’s history.
  • When East Germany sealed off its section of Berlin in August 1961, many families and friends were separated. Shortly after, a group of four West Berliners, responding to the call of a man named Gerhard Weinstein, found an abandoned railway shed near the wall that split their city, and began digging.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The tunnel was filled in, abandoned and forgotten, only to be discovered recently when workers at the Mauerpark, a green area near the former buffer zone around the wall, found it during building work.
  • “It was a tunnel that had dramatic effect,” said Mr. Holzapfel, who helped to dig it. “Twenty-one people were arrested as a result of that tunnel, and one woman died while she was in prison.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Israel-Hamas War Was Not Inevitable - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players
  • Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.
  • If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • This is triggering a U.S.-China cold war, mass migrations from south to north and an America that has become more unreliable than indispensable.
  • that’s not the half of it. Because now that advanced military technologies like drones are readily available, smaller players can wield much more power and project it more widely than ever before, enabling even their bad choices to shake the world
  • This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war.
  • They are being fought on both physical battlefields and digital ones, with huge global reach and implications.
  • Indeed, in today’s tightly wired world, it is possible that the war over the Gaza Strip — which is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. — could decide the next president in Washington, D.C., as some young Democrats abandon President Biden because of his support for Israel.
  • before we become too pessimistic, let us remember that these choices are just that: choices. There was nothing inevitable or foreordained about them
  • Gorbachev, Deng, Anwar el-Sadat, Menachem Begin, George H.W. Bush and Volodymyr Zelensky, to name but a few, faced excruciating choices, but they chose forks in the road that led to a safer and more prosperous world, at least for a time
  • What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? Because both began, in one sense, as the convergence of sand and seawater at crucial intersections of the world.
  • The short answer is visionary leadership.Dubai has benefited from two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates who had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam
  • Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.
  • Any of Dubai’s neighbors — Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iran and Saudi Arabia — could have done the same with their similar coastlines, but it was the U.A.E. that pulled it off by making the choices it made.
  • Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel.
  • Among the most ignorant and vile things that have been said about this Gaza war is that Hamas had no choice — that its wars with Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with a murderous rampage, the kidnappings of Israelis as young as 10 months and as old as 86 and the rape of Israeli women, could somehow be excused as a justifiable jailbreak by pent-up males.
  • Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war. In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs, and Israel eventually reduced the number of crossings from six to two.
  • In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank. There was a debate among Israeli, Palestinian and Bush administration officials over whether Hamas should be allowed to run in the elections — because it had rejected the Oslo peace accords with Israel.
  • Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, told me that he and others argued that Hamas should not be allowed to run, as did many members of Fatah, Arafat’s group, who had embraced Oslo and recognized Israel. But the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation.
  • Fatah ran unrealistically high numbers of candidates in many districts, dividing the vote, while the more disciplined Hamas ran carefully targeted slates and managed to win the parliamentary majority.
  • Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.
  • Hamas chose not to — making a clash between Hamas and Fatah, which supported Oslo, inevitable
  • That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza — and what would be 22 years of on-and-off Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli checkpoint openings and closings, wars and cease-fires, all culminating on Oct. 7.
  • These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.
  • Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.
  • Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that.
  • Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.
  • In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, foregoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists
  • The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when I raise that with many Israelis right now, they tell me, “Tom, it’s not the time. No one wants to hear it.”
  • please, spare me the Harvard Yard nonsense that this war is all about the innocent, colonized oppressed and the evil, colonizing oppressors; that Israel alone was responsible for the isolation of Gaza; and that the only choice Hamas had for years was to create an underground “skyline” of tunnels up to 230 feet deep (contra Dubai) and that its only choice on Oct. 7 was martyrdom.
  • But our story about agency and choices does not stop there. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — 16 years — also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.
  • Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank.
  • Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the United States and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.
  • This is now a common strategy for consolidating and holding power forever by a single political faction and disguising it with an ideology of resistance. It’s no wonder they all support one another.
  • Don’t they get it? Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.
  • He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as “obstacles to peace.” But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank “occupied” territory.
  • Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.
  • But Israel will have neither the sympathy of the world that it needs nor the multiple allies it needs to confront this Iranian octopus, nor the Palestinian partners it needs to govern any post-Hamas Gaza, nor the lasting support of its best friend in the world, Joe Biden, unless it is ready to choose a long-term pathway for separating from the Palestinians with an improved, legitimate Palestinian partner.
  • For all these reasons, if Netanyahu keeps refusing because, once again, politically, the time is not right for him, Biden will have to choose, too — between America’s interests and Netanyahu’s.
  • In sum, this war is so ugly, deadly and painful, it is no wonder that so many Palestinians and Israelis want to just focus on survival and not on any of the choices that got them here
  • The Haaretz writer Dahlia Scheindlin put it beautifully in a recent essay:The situation today is so terrible that people run from reality as they run from rockets — and hide in the shelter of their blind spots. It’s pointless to wag fingers. The only thing left to do is try and change that reality.
abbykleman

Iconic California Sequoia 'tunnel tree' destroyed in storm - 0 views

  •  
    A massive sequoia tree that was carved into a tunnel in the 1800s toppled to the ground during a winter storm in California on Sunday, according to Calaveras Big Trees State Park officials. The Sequoia tree, which was also referred to as the Pioneer Cabin Tree, was almost 100 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter, the park said.
grayton downing

BBC News - Turkey's Bosphorus sub-sea tunnel links Europe and Asia - 0 views

  • A railway tunnel underneath the Bosphorus Strait has been opened in Turkey, creating a new link between the Asian and European shores of Istanbul.
  • Japan invested $1bn of the $4bn (£3.4bn) total cost of the project, named Marmaray,
  • In theory it brings closer the day when it will be possible to travel from London to Beijing via Istanbul by train.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The rail service will be capable of carrying 75,000 people per hour in either direction.
  • Authorities came under fire earlier this year when protesters opposed plans to redevelop a park in Istanbul. Widespread violence between anti-government demonstrators and security forces ensued.
Grace Gannon

In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small - 0 views

  •  
    The plan here seems far-fetched - a $36 billion tunnel that would run twice the length of the one under the English Channel, and bore deep into one of Asia's active earthquake zones. When completed, it would be the world's longest underwater tunnel, creating a rail link between two northern port cities.
katyshannon

'It was like an action movie,' neighbors say of El Chapo's capture in Mexico - LA Times - 0 views

  • is house was nothing special, a single-story, tree-shrouded home in a middle-class neighborhood in this seaside city. And there the world's most sought-after drug kingpin hid for months until his capture in a deadly shootout.
  • Neighbors noticed his comings and goings, but without special attention. And then suddenly, the Mexican naval special forces descended Friday.
  • And with that, Sinaloa cartel commander Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was captured, in a shootout that killed six of his associates. It was six months after he escaped from Mexico's maximum-security prison through a tunnel he dug under his cell.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • His ability to elude authorities was due in large part to the support he has among rank-and-file Mexicans. He was also able to pay off local government and military authorities and spread largesse.
  • “It makes us sad because he is a good guy and gives us security,” said Los Mochis resident Mariana Ocampo, 21.
  • In the end, it wasn't exhaustive Mexican detective work, nor sophisticated U.S. intelligence, that exposed Guzman's whereabouts. It was ego and a chance at Hollywood.
  • Mexican Atty. Gen. Arely Gomez said Guzman had been in talks to produce a movie about his life.
  • “He established communication with actors and producers, which has formed a new line of investigation,” she said in a late-night news conference as Guzman was being transported from Los Mochis.
  • One of those contacts was apparently actor Sean Penn, who revealed in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone, published Saturday, that he had held a secret interview with Guzman in October at his jungle hide-out in Mexico.
  • Surrounded by the drug lord's armed security troops, Guzman told Penn of his daring prison escape, in an interview translated by Kate del Castillo, an actress who had famously played a drug trafficker in a Mexican soap opera.
  • “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” he boasted. “I don't want to be portrayed as a nun.”
  • Gomez said authorities were able to track Guzman's meetings with lawyers and other associates and were close to capturing him in October, apparently after his meeting with Penn. He had been spied by helicopter, she said, but was accompanied by two women and a child, and so security forces decided not to engage.
  • Gomez also gave new details about Guzman's summer escape, saying his brother-in-law, two pilots and tunnel engineers were involved. Once he made it through the tunnel, on a motorcycle speeding over specially built rails, he was whisked to an airfield where his airplane and a decoy took off in the night.
  • In a statement Saturday afternoon, the Mexican government announced the beginning of extradition proceedings that would set the stage for Guzman to face trial in the United States.
  • The proceedings are in response to two formal extradition requests from the U.S. government for crimes including murder, money laundering and arms possession, according to the statement.
carolinehayter

Capitol riot: Scathing watchdog report reveals Capitol Police had expired ammo and inef... - 0 views

  • A scathing report by the US Capitol Police watchdog obtained by CNN reveals that there were even more law enforcement failures prior to January 6 than previously known, including new details about expired ammunition, ineffective shields and a previously unreported warning more than two weeks ahead of the insurrection about a map of the Capitol's underground tunnels that was posted on a pro-Donald Trump website.
  • Further, the report points out Capitol Police leadership knew as far back as July 2020 the department needed to make significant changes, but inexplicably failed to do so.
  • On that day, "the Department of Homeland Security notified the Department of a blog referencing tunnels on U.S. Capitol grounds used by Members of Congress and research of the website identified four 'threads/blog topics containing comments of concern,'" the summary states.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The report goes on to expose, for the first time, a startling degree of indifference from Capitol Police leadership when it came to routine house-keeping items, such as failing to maintain an accurate roster of officers assigned to the Civil Disturbance Unit.
  • there were several longstanding issues that the department "either knew and did not address in time or did not address in a routine manner to prevent,"
  • Even equipment maintenance appeared to be a low priority. The summary shows the CDU shields were not stored in the correct temperature, rendering them ineffective, while some ammunition in the armory was expired.
  • In the end, the unit was "operating at a decreased level of readiness," due to the numerous failures, the report states.
  • The summary lists 27 recommendations for corrections, including changing procedures to "refine document reporting that better captures operational impact to include improbable outcomes based on intelligence, trend data, threats to members, and information analysis."
annabelteague02

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: inside the dramatic US military raid that killed the ISIS leader ... - 0 views

    • annabelteague02
       
      I wonder how ISIS will conduct its strategies and decision making now that they have lost their leader. Will they really be weakened?
  • "He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The tunnel had caved in on it in addition," Trump said.
    • annabelteague02
       
      it's really sad that 3 children had to die with him. he easily could have went alone. he had to have known why the military was there, and it was not to kill children, it was to kill him.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were notified about Baghdadi's possible location "earlier in the week" and told Thursday that there was a high probability he was in the compound.
    • annabelteague02
       
      I have to wonder if all of this military action that was required to kill one man was really worth it. It kind of seems like America is trying to prove a point. I hope that his death really will make a positive difference in the future of our conflicts with ISIS, but I am not sure if it will.
  • g: "Something big has just happened."
    • annabelteague02
       
      it seems unprofessional to tweet about something so sensitive...
  • "Russia treated us great. They opened up. We had a fly over certain Russia areas, Russia-held areas. Russia was great. Iraq was excellent. We really had great cooperation," the President told reporters Sunday.
    • annabelteague02
       
      continued friendliness with Russia
  • "world's number one terrorist leader" is dead.
  • ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi "blew himself up"
  • He formed ISIS in 2014, he led to establishing the physical caliphate throughout the region, so this is a major blow to them,
bluekoenig

Explore These World War I Trenches and Tunnels in France and Belgium | Travel | Smithso... - 0 views

  •  
    This article details some of the remaining trenches from WWI that can still be visited today, 100 years later, acting as a memorial and educational experience
Javier E

Sweden's Trolley Problem - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • Though a majority of nations have opted to pull the lever and shift tracks to a lockdown strategy, thereby sacrificing economic growth, Sweden has continued on the same line.
  • the Swedish government’s decision not to pull the lever and pursue a low-death approach has taken them into a tunnel.
  • From inside this tunnel we do not know how many people are now tied to the track. We do not know how far the line runs. Or even what the final destination looks like. Sweden’s strategic inaction was predicated on the hope that they might save lives in future by taking risks now and avoiding a shutdown.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • That’s a large gamble based on very little scientific understanding.
  • Contrary to the popular understanding, Sweden has not done nothing. Social distancing is in place, people are to work from home where possible and to isolate when even mildly symptomatic. Steps have been taken to shield vulnerable citizens
  • WHO mortality data shows Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States all have higher death rates, despite having imposed significant mitigation and suppression protocols.
  • by traditional metrics of deaths/capita, cases/capita, or even crude case fatality rate, they ended up seemingly in a worse position than Sweden, where bars remain open and coffee culture is booming.
  • A strategy should be based on a broad empirically derived consensus which takes into account both what we know, and what we do not.
  • We don’t know how many people have a strong immune response to the virus.
  • We don’t know how long that immune response lasts.
  • We don’t know how many people have been infected and how those infections might manifest.
  • We don’t know how many individuals need immunity to produce effective herd immunity.
  • And we don’t know if immunity to the current strain would carry over to future strains.
  • Even more bracing: We are unlikely to find definitive answers to these questions in the near future.
  • One of the key perceived advantages of Sweden’s approach was the expected reduction in economic damage. But Sweden’s economy is projected to contract by 7 percent to 10 percent of GDP this year, only slightly better than its Nordic neighbors who shut down their societies and have far less morbidity and mortality
  • All of that said, it is unlikely that we’ll be able to say definitively whether or not Sweden’s choice was optimal any time soon. Even comparing key metrics like cases and deaths between countries is difficult because of methodological differences in collecting data
  • When we consider economic damages, long-term sequelae of infection and the differential impact across marginalized groups, direct comparisons becomes extremely challenging.
  • sometimes there are no good decisions; only less bad ones. Sweden may be on the road to herd immunity but even if they are in fact on the path, the road is neither swift nor smooth. And it is littered with friends and relatives.
Javier E

The UK government was ready for this pandemic. Until it sabotaged its own system | Geor... - 0 views

  • e are trapped in a long, dark tunnel, all of whose known exits are blocked. There is no plausible route out of the UK’s coronavirus crisis that does not involve mass suffering and death
  • We have been told repeatedly that the UK was unprepared for this pandemic. This is untrue.
  • Last year, the Global Health Security Index ranked this nation second in the world for pandemic readiness, while the US was first. Broadly speaking, in both nations the necessary systems were in place. Our governments chose not to use them.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • South Korea did everything the UK government could have done, but refused to implement. Its death toll so far: 263. It still has an occasional cluster of infection, which it promptly contains. By contrast, the entire UK is now a cluster of infection.
  • Had the government acted in February, we can hazard a guess about what the result would have been, as the world has conducted a clear controlled experiment: weighing South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand against the UK, the US and Brazil.
  • The climate modeller James Annan has used his analytical methods to show what would have happened if the UK government had imposed its lockdown a week earlier. Starting it on 16 March, rather than 23 March, his modelling suggests, would by now have saved around 30,000 lives, reducing the rate of illness and death from coronavirus roughly by a factor of five.
  • While other countries either closed their borders or quarantined all arrivals, in the three months between the emergence of the virus and the UK’s lockdown, 18 million people arrived on these shores, of whom only 273 were quarantined. Even after the lockdown was announced, 95,000 people entered the UK without additional restrictions.
  • on 12 March, Johnson abandoned both containment and nationwide testing and tracking. A week later, the status of the pandemic was lowered, which meant that the government could reduce the standard of personal protective equipment required in hospitals, and could shift infectious patients into non-specialist care. Again, there was no medical or scientific justification for this decision.
  • Exercise Cygnus, a pandemic simulation conducted in 2016, found that the impacts in care homes would be catastrophic unless new measures were put in place. The government insists that it heeded the findings of this exercise and changed its approach accordingly. If this is correct, by allowing untested patients to be shifted from hospitals to care homes, while failing to provide the extra support and equipment the homes needed and allowing agency workers to move freely within and between them, it knowingly breached its own protocols. Tens of thousands of highly vulnerable people were exposed to infection.
  • In other words, none of these are failures of knowledge or capacity. They are de-preparations, conscious decisions not to act.
  • They start to become explicable only when we recognise what they have in common: a refusal to frontload the costs. This refusal is common in countries whose governments fetishise what we call “the market”: the euphemism we use for the power of money.
  • Johnson’s government, like that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, represents a particular kind of economic interest. For years politicians of their stripe have been in conflict with people who perform useful services: nurses, teachers, care workers and the other low-paid people who keep our lives ticking, whose attempts to organise and secure better pay and conditions are demonised by ministers and in the media.
  • This political conflict is always fought on behalf of the same group: those who extract wealth.
  • The interests of wealth extractors are, by definition, short term. They divert money that might otherwise have been used for investment into dividends and share buybacks.
  • Years of experience have shown that it is much cheaper to make political donations, employ lobbyists and invest in public relations than to change lucrative but harmful commercial policies
  • Working through the billionaire press and political systems that are highly vulnerable to capture by money, in the UK, US and Brazil they have helped ensure that cavalier and reckless people are elected.
  • It’s not that any of these interests – whether the Daily Mail or the US oil companies – want coronavirus to spread. It’s that the approach that has proved so disastrous in addressing the pandemic has been highly effective, from the lobbyists’ point of view, when applied to other issues: delaying and frustrating action to prevent climate breakdown; pollution; the obesity crisis; inequality; unaffordable rent; and the many other plagues spread by corporate and billionaire power.
  • Thanks in large part to their influence, we have governments that fail to protect the public interest, by design. This is the tunnel. This is why the exits are closed. This is why we will struggle to emerge.
Javier E

Skepticism Grows Over Israel's Ability to Dismantle Hamas - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”
  • Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists
  • In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Analysts see the most optimal outcome for Israel probably consisting of degrading Hamas’s military capabilities to prevent the group from repeating such a devastating attack. But even that limited goal is considered a formidable slog.
  • Hamas is rooted in the ideology that Israeli control over what it regards as Palestinians lands must be opposed by force, a tenet likely to endure, experts said.
  • “As long as that context is there, you will be dealing with some form of Hamas,” said Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. “To assume that you can simply uproot an organization like that is fantasy.”
  • The Israeli military said this week that it had killed about 8,000 Hamas fighters out of a force estimated at 25,000 to 40,000. But it is unclear how the count is being made
  • “They’ve been saying this for a while, that Hamas is collapsing,” Mr. Milshtein said. “But it’s just not true. Every day, we’re facing tough battles.”
  • The group’s top echelon are believed to be sheltering, along with most of its fighters and the remaining hostages, in deep tunnels. Although the Israeli army has said that it demolished at least 1,500 shafts, experts consider the underground infrastructure is largely intact.
  • The tunnels, built over 15 years, are believed to be so extensive, estimated at hundreds of miles long, that Israelis call them the Gaza Metro.
  • “From a professional point of view, I must give credit to their resilience,” he said. “I cannot see any signs of collapse of the military abilities of Hamas nor in their political strength to continue to lead Gaza.”
  • A string of Israeli assassinations of Hamas political, military and religious leaders also failed to weaken the group. It won control of Gaza in free Palestinian elections in 2006, then evicted its more moderate rival, the Palestinian Authority, in a bloody conflict the next year.
  • For Israel, the aim is first to dismantle the government, then to disperse the fighters and eliminate the commanders and their primary subordinates, the Israeli official said.
  • “The top leadership can disappear at any time because they can be killed, they can be arrested, they can be deported,” he said. “So they developed this mechanism of the easy transfer of command.”
  • Trying to eliminate Hamas entirely would require fighting from street to street and house to house, and Israel lacks both the time and personnel, said Elliot Chapman, a Middle East analyst with Janes, a defense analysis firm.
  • The Gaza fight has been compared to the campaign to wrest Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State less than a decade ago, but there are significant differences.
  • Notably, Hamas is organic to Gaza — it grew out of frustration with the mainstream factions abandoning the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and according to its founding charter, is committed to its destruction.
  • Some Gazans curse Hamas, even taking to the airwaves or social media to do it, despite the organization’s history of repressing opponents. Other Gazans, however, say that they still back “the resistance,” and Hamas has long attracted support by providing services like schools and clinics.
  • “The right way to think about it is to degrade the organization to the point that it is no longer a sustainable threat,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired C.I.A. officer who specialized in Middle East counterterrorism.
  • “You cannot just have a strategy of killing everybody,” he added. “You have to have that day-after scenario.”
Javier E

All Signs Point to Higgs Boson, but Still Waiting for Scientific Certainty - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • physicists admit that it will take more work and analysis before they will have the cold numbers that clinch the case that the new particle announced on July 4 last year is in fact the exact boson first predicted by Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to be the arbiter of mass and cosmic diversity
  • What happened in the first instant of the Big Bang? What happens at the middle of a black hole where matter and time blink in or out of existence? What is the dark matter whose gravitational influence, astronomers say, shapes the structures of galaxies, or the dark energy that is forcing the universe apart? Why is the universe full of matter but not antimatter? And what, finally, is the fate of the universe? These are all questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century, does not answer
  • Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called supersymmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite. It predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called superpartners to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the dark matter that pervades the universe. If such particles exist, they would affect the rate at which Higgs bosons decay into other particles, but the CERN teams have yet to record what they consider a convincing deviation from the Standard Model predictions for those decays. Supersymmetry is still at best a beautiful idea.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • One thing that has hampered progress is that physicists still do not agree on how much the new particle weighs.
  • What does it matter how much a Higgs boson weighs? It could determine the fate of the universe.
  • his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future. The reason lies in the Higgs field, the medium of which the Higgs boson is the messenger and which determines the structure of empty space, i.e., the vacuum.
  • It works like this. The Higgs field, like everything else in nature, is lazy, and, like water running downhill, always seeks to be in the state of lowest energy. Physicists assume that the Higgs field today is in the lowest state possible, but Dr. Giudice found that was not the case. What counts as rock bottom in today’s universe could turn out to be just a plateau. Our universe is like a rock perched precariously on a mountaintop, he explained, in what physicists call a metastable state. The Higgs field could drop to a lower value by a process known as quantum tunneling, although it is not imminent.
  • If that should happen — tomorrow or billions of years from now — a bubble would sweep out through the universe at the speed of light, obliterating the laws of nature as we know them.
  • The calculations assume that the Standard Model is the final word in physics, good for all times and places and energies — something that no physicist really believes. Theories like supersymmetry or string theory could intercede at higher energies and change the outcome.
  • The calculations also depend crucially on the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, as well as the Higgs, neither of which have been weighed precisely enough yet to determine the fate of the universe. If the top quark were just a little lighter or the Higgs a little heavier, 130 billion electron volts, Dr. Giudice said, the vacuum would in fact be stable.
  • , “Why do we happen to live at the edge of collapse?” He went on, “In my view, the message about near-criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.” Guido Tonelli of CERN and the University of Pisa, said, “If true, it is somehow magic.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion, he said, if there hadn’t been enough time already for this universe to produce galaxies, stars, planets and “human beings who are attempting to produce a vision of the world,” he said.
  • “So, in some sense, we are here, because we have been lucky, because for this particular universe the lottery produced a certain set of numbers, which allow the universe to have an evolution, which is very long.”
rachelramirez

U.S. Can't Find ISIS Prisoners - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • THE DISAPPEAREDU.S. Can’t Find ISIS Prisoners
  • Iraq’s security forces have allowed the U.S. military to interview fewer than “a handful” of detained fighters under Iraqi control since the Mosul offensive began in mid-October, a U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast.
  • Iraqi officials have said hundreds of ISIS fighters have died so far in the three-week-long battle; U.S. officials estimate a smaller number have fled.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In contrast, the U.S. military during its last war in Iraq had access to thousands of Iraqi prisoners—and the intelligence they provided. But observers said the lack of detainees this time around reflects an ISIS eager to fight. And it shows the limits of a war in a city littered with bombs and tunnels, and home to hundreds of thousands of civilians.
  • You can’t do these capture operations in the middle of the urban warfare. It’s too dangerous
  • In the war against ISIS in Mosul, the number of fighters detained is the dog that doesn’t bark. ISIS repeatedly has urged its troops to fight to the death, declaring anything short of that punishable by execution.
  • Human Rights Watch offered a more troubling explanation for the lack of reported detainees, saying it believes that Iraqi and Kurdish forces have detained “at least 37 men from areas around Mosul and Hawija suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State” and that government officials have not allowed those detainees to make outside contact.
  • To be sure, both Iraqi and Kurdish forces have arrested hundreds of fighters but what it is less clear is how many have remained in custody.
  • There are international rules for the treatment of prisoners of war but each nation decides how to treat its own criminals. And therefore it is up to the Iraqi government if it will expend resources to bring a case against a prisoner through its tenuous court system.
  • When roughly 100 ISIS fighters launched a surprise attack last month on the Iraqi city of Rutbah, for example, half the ISIS fighters involved were killed in the 36-hour battle, U.S. Air Force Col. John Dorrian told The Daily Beast.
  • There could be more ISIS detainees in the weeks ahead, as Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters start the block-by-block clearance of Mosul, Pentagon officials said, as it will be much harder for ISIS militants to flee in that urban environment. Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga forces first reached the city borders last week.
  • The U.S. troops joining local forces in the push against Mosul are only there in an advisory role, Pentagon officials have said.
malonema1

State asks for bids in $2 million study of North-South rail link - The Boston Globe - 0 views

  • State asks for bids in $2 million North-South rail link study
  • State transportation officials began soliciting bids Wednesday to study a proposed rail tunnel connecting North and South stations, a long-discussed project that would create an unbroken rail route from Maine to Washington, D.C.
  • The study, expected to take about eight months after a consulting firm is chosen, will cost as much as $2 million and will provide updated cost estimates and outline the benefits to riders.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • between $2 billion and $3 billion.
  • In 2003, governor Mitt Romney shelved the project as too expensive, and its fate seemed sealed. But aggressive lobbying from supporters, including US Representative Seth Moulton and former governors Michael Dukakis and Bill Weld, has brought the proposal back into the public conversation
  • The MBTA faces chronic budget woes and is already seeking to build a $2.3 billion Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford, a project that has been delayed over rising cost estimates.
  • “North South Rail Link has the potential to fuel the growth of our economy and connect people with both jobs and housing across the state,” Moulton said Wednesday. The state needs to invest in transportation infrastructure to remain globally competitive, he added.
  • “You have to understand that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the commuter rail lines in the north and the south to not be connected,” he said
Javier E

Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.
  • “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.
  • Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • “It’s throughout all the private schools here,” said DeAnsin Parker, a New York psychologist who treats many adolescents from affluent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side. “It’s not as if there is one school where this is the culture. This is the culture.”
  • The D.E.A. lists prescription stimulants like Adderall and Vyvanse (amphetamines) and Ritalin and Focalin (methylphenidates) as Class 2 controlled substances — the same as cocaine and morphine — because they rank among the most addictive substances that have a medical use.
  • The number of prescriptions for A.D.H.D. medications dispensed for young people ages 10 to 19 has risen 26 percent since 2007, to almost 21 million yearly, according to IMS Health, a health care information company — a number that experts estimate corresponds to more than two million individuals.
  • While these medicines tend to calm people with A.D.H.D., those without the disorder find that just one pill can jolt them with the energy and focus to push through all-night homework binges and stay awake during exams afterward. “It’s like it does your work for you,”
  • But abuse of prescription stimulants can lead to depression and mood swings (from sleep deprivation), heart irregularities and acute exhaustion or psychosis during withdrawal, doctors say. Little is known about the long-term effects of abuse of stimulants among the young
  • the pills eventually become an entry to the abuse of painkillers and sleep aids.
  • “Once you break the seal on using pills, or any of that stuff, it’s not scary anymore — especially when you’re getting A’s,” said the boy who snorted Adderall in the parking lot. He spoke from the couch of his drug counselor, detailing how he later became addicted to the painkiller Percocet and eventually heroin.
  • “Children have prefrontal cortexes that are not fully developed, and we’re changing the chemistry of the brain. That’s what these drugs do
  • merely giving a friend an Adderall or Vyvanse pill is the same as selling it and can be prosecuted as a felony.
  • Doctors and teenagers from more than 15 schools across the nation with high academic standards estimated that the portion of students who do so ranges from 15 percent to 40 percent.
  • “These are academic steroids. But usually, parents don’t get the steroids for you.”
  • “They’re the quote-unquote good kids, basically.”
  • After 30 minutes, the buzz began, she said: laser focus, instant recall and the fortitude to crush any test in her path.
  • “It wasn’t that hard of a decision. Do I want only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy and the coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my parents happy?”
  • Madeleine estimated that one-third of her classmates at her small school, most of whom she knew well, used stimulants without a prescription to boost their scholastic performance. Many students across the United States made similar estimates for their schools, all of them emphasizing that the drugs were used not to get high, but mostly by conscientious students to work harder and meet ever-rising academic expectations.
  • Every school identified in this article was contacted regarding statements by its students and stimulant abuse in general. Those that responded generally said that they were concerned about some teenagers turning to these drugs, but that their numbers were far smaller than the students said.
  • This is one of the more vexing problems with stimulants in high schools, experts said — the drugs enter the schools via students who get them legally, if not legitimately.
  • Newer long-lasting versions like Adderall XR and Vyvanse allow parents to give children a single dose in the morning, often unaware that the pills can go down a pants pocket as easily as the throat. Some students said they took their pills only during the week and gave their weekend pills to friends.
  • She said many parents could push as hard for prescriptions as their children did, telling her: “My child is not doing well in school. I understand there are meds he can take to make him smarter.”
  • “They’re the A students, sometimes the B students, who are trying to get good grades,”
  • Asked if the improper use of stimulants was cheating, students were split. Some considered that the extra studying hours and the heightened focus during exams amounted to an unfair advantage. Many countered that the drugs “don’t give you the answers” and defended their use as a personal choice for test preparation, akin to tutoring.
  • One consensus was clear: users were becoming more common, they said, and some students who would rather not take the drugs would be compelled to join them because of the competition over class rank and colleges’ interest.
  • “Junior and senior year is a whole new ballgame,” the boy said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t take it, but that can easily, easily change. I can be convinced.”
Javier E

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views

  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.
  • at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke
  • The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early
  • while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.
  • Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."
  • robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
  • Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.
  • We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.
  • In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change
  • The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?
  • if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.
  • Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.
  • Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.
  • Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories
  • Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.
  • in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.
  • the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles
  • in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.
  • In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too
  • Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.
  • Take driverless cars.
  • Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin
  • we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.
  • Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them
  • we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."
  • would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?
  • The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced
  •  economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"
  • In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.
  • it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.
  • When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see
  • A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.
Javier E

Speedy Trains Transform China - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.
  • The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early.
  • China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • it has not been without costs — high debt, many people relocated and a deadly accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process for the rail lines.
  • Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.
  • New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s heavy dependence on investment-led growth.
  • Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.
  • “More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,”
  • China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people
  • Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha.
  • Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.
  • Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of 300 to 470 miles.
1 - 20 of 59 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page