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Contents contributed and discussions participated by lucieperloff

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lucieperloff

At Beijing Olympics, Question of Free Speech Looms Over Athletes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...olympics-china-protests.html

international china

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • As competitions began in a Winter Olympics overshadowed by controversy over China’s record on human rights, the issue of what participants can and cannot say has loomed larger than at any Olympics in years.
  • China’s Communist Party has also warned that athletes are subject not only to Olympic rules, but also to Chinese law. The warnings have been part of a crackdown in the weeks before Friday’s opening ceremony that, critics say, has had a chilling effect on dissent inside and outside the Olympic bubble.
  • Some national teams, including the United States and Canada, have warned their athletes there is potential legal jeopardy in speaking out — from both the International Olympic Committee and the Chinese judicial system.
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  • Within the Olympic community, the limits of political speech have become increasingly contested, a debate that has intensified with the Games in China, which routinely ranks among the world’s most repressive in surveys on political, religious and other freedoms.
  • Political activism has surfaced at many international events, including the Tokyo Olympics last summer, but no other host nation has been as strict as China in policing political dissent.
  • In fact, protests among Olympic athletes are rare, even among those who may sympathize with human-rights causes. Most athletes are zealously focused on their sport, having devoted years of training to have the chance to compete at the highest level.
  • Beijing 2022’s organizers have pledged to honor the Olympic Charter’s spirit to allow freedom of speech. Within the “closed loop” bubbles erected around Olympic venues, the authorities have created an open internet not restricted by China’s censorship.
lucieperloff

Food Prices Hit Two-Decade High, Threatening the World's Poor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...od-prices-inflation-world.html

international crisis pandemic

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.
  • A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.
  • But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the world experienced seismic shifts in demand for food. Restaurants, cafeterias and slaughterhouses shuttered, and more people switched to cooking and eating at home.
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  • The effects of rising food prices have been felt unevenly around the world. Asia has been largely spared because of a plentiful rice crop. But parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that are more dependent on imported food are struggling.
  • Joseph Siegle, the director of research at National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, estimated that 106 million people on the continent are facing food insecurity, double the number since 2018.
  • In the United States, food prices rose 6.3 percent in December compared with a year ago, while the price of restaurant meals rose 6.0 percent and the price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • But economists and agricultural experts say that while these efforts help at the margin, there may be little the government can do to combat a phenomenon that is both complex and global.
  • Overloaded shipping companies have been refusing to send their steel boxes to the Midwest to pick up agricultural products, instead preferring to ship them back to Asia to carry more lucrative cargo.
  • With both their costs and their sales prices increasing, many farmers are making similar margins to what they earned before, Mr. Edgington said. But “huge swings” in the price of corn, soybeans and fertilizer were still putting their finances at risk.
lucieperloff

Taiwan team relents, will attend Olympic ceremonies in China - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...mpic-ceremonies-china-82598764

taiwan china culture

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Taiwanese athletes compete as Chinese Taipei at the Olympics as part of a decades-old agreement with China brokered by the International Olympic Committee. China claims the self-ruled island of Taiwan as its own territory and has an ongoing policy of diplomatic and military intimidation.
  • Officials in Taiwan said the country would “adjust” its plan not to have an opening ceremony delegation in Beijing after repeated requests by the IOC to attend and fulfill obligations under the Olympic Charter.
  • The Taiwanese team, which has four athletes competing at the Beijing Games, had also identified COVID-19 security among reasons not wanting to send officials to the ceremonies.
lucieperloff

Danish energy fund to lead massive green hydrogen project in Spain - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...hydrogen-project-in-spain.html

spain policy climate

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners announced details of a partnership with Spanish companies Naturgy, Enagás and Fertiberia. Vestas, the Danish wind turbine manufacturer, is also involved.
  • A pipeline will link Aragon with Valencia in the east of Spain, sending the hydrogen to a green ammonia facility. CIP said this ammonia would then be “upgraded” into fertilizer.
  • Hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries. It can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen.
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  • The scale of the overall development is considerable. “Once fully implemented, Catalina will produce enough green hydrogen to supply 30% of Spain’s current hydrogen demand,” CIP said.
  • And in July 2021, a briefing from the World Energy Council said low-carbon hydrogen was not currently “cost-competitive with other energy supplies in most applications and locations.” It added that the situation was unlikely to change unless there was “significant support to bridge the price gap.”
  • For its part, the European Commission has laid out plans to install 40 GW of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer capacity in the European Union by the year 2030.
lucieperloff

U.K.'s Other Health Crisis: A Huge Backlog of Delayed Non-Covid Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-uk-nhs-backlog.html

health covid crisis

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Ms. Wahab, 34, from North London, is part of an enormous and growing backlog of patients in Britain’s free health service who have seen planned care delayed or diverted, in part because of the pandemic — a largely unseen crisis within a crisis. The problems are likely to have profound consequences that will be felt for years.
  • The current delays most likely impact more than five million people — a single patient can have multiple cases pending for different ailments — which represents almost one-tenth of the population. Hundreds of thousands more haven’t been referred yet for treatment, and many ailments have simply gone undiagnosed.
  • The latest official figures are almost two months out of date, and experts say that severe staffing shortages this winter and the wildfire spread of the Omicron variant have almost certainly made the situation worse.
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  • At the end of November 2021, the caseload was six million. More than 300,000 cases have been waiting for more than a year for planned care. A decade ago, there were fewer than 500.
  • Macmillan Cancer Support, a charity, estimates that some 50,000 people across Britain have not yet been diagnosed with some form of cancer that should have been caught earlier, in a direct result of the pandemic’s hindering screenings and referrals. The number of women being diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer — which means that the disease is advanced and very dangerous — has jumped by 48 percent in recent months.
lucieperloff

An Extraordinary Iceberg Is Gone, but Not Forgotten - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iceberg-a68a-antarctica.html

climate international

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The iceberg drifted slowly through the icy Weddell Sea for a few years, before picking up steam as it entered the Southern Ocean. When last we heard from it, in 2020, it was bearing down on the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, a bit shrunken and battered from a journey of more than a thousand miles.
  • Ecologists and others had feared that during its journey the iceberg might become grounded near South Georgia. That could have kept the millions of penguins and seals that live and breed there from reaching their feeding areas in the ocean.
  • As it traveled through the relatively warm waters of the Southern Ocean into the South Atlantic, it melted from below, eventually releasing a huge quantity of fresh water into the sea near the island. The influx of so much fresh water could affect plankton and other organisms in the marine food chain.
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  • The imagery showed how the area of the iceberg changed over time. The researchers also determined its thickness using data from satellites that measure ice height. By the time it broke up, Ms. Braakmann-Folgmann said, A68a was more than 200 feet thinner overall.
  • When the iceberg was near South Georgia, scientists with the survey were able to deploy autonomous underwater gliders to take water samples. On the island, they used tracking devices on some gentoo penguins and fur seals, to see whether the presence of the iceberg affected their foraging behavior.
  • A large influx of fresh water on the surface could affect the growth of phytoplankton, at the lower end of the food change, or it could alter the mix of phytoplankton species available, he said.
lucieperloff

LGBT rights: New French law to criminalise 'conversion therapy' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-60145970

politics policy government

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • France has passed a new law criminalising the use of so-called "conversion therapy" to attempt to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ people.
  • The law had already been overwhelmingly backed in the French upper house, the Senate, where it was passed by 305 votes to 28, with the conservative Republicans party opposing it.
  • United Nations experts have repeatedly condemned conversion therapy, which can use group sessions, injections, electric shocks and prayer in its attempts to alter LGBTQ people's identities.
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  • The new legislation will open a range of avenues to those impacted by the practice, including allowing groups to take civil legal action on behalf of victims.
  • Similar legislation has now been passed in a number of countries around the world, including Canada, Brazil, Ecuador, Malta, Albania and Germany.
lucieperloff

Taiwan reports new large-scale incursion by Chinese warplanes - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...on-chinese-warplanes-rcna13243

international politics government

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, has complained for more than a year of repeated missions by China’s air force near the democratically governed island, often in the southwestern part of its air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands.
  • Taiwan sent combat aircraft to warn away the Chinese aircraft, while missile systems were deployed to monitor them, the ministry said.
  • China has stepped up pressure on Taiwan to accept its sovereignty claims. Taiwan’s government says it wants peace but will defend itself if attacked.
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  • Taiwan has reported almost daily Chinese air force forays into the same airspace since then, but the number of planes on Sunday was the largest on a single day since the October incursions.
lucieperloff

With Covid transmission falling, Spain's regions consider lifting restriction... - 0 views

english.elpais.com/...ider-lifting-restrictions.html

spain pandemic international

shared by lucieperloff on 20 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, the Spanish Health Ministry reported that the 14-day incidence rate had fallen 20 points to 3,286 per 100,000. This is the second day in a row that this data point has dropped after two months on the rise.
  • What’s more, while hospitals remain under strain, the situation is far from what it was during other waves.
  • In response to the surge in coronavirus infections in the leadup to Christmas, the Spanish government announced on December 23 that face masks would once again be mandatory outdoors. At the time, Darias said this measure would be in place “until the epidemiological situation improved.”
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  • The slowdown in cases, however, is already prompting action from Spain’s regions, which are responsible for the healthcare systems, Covid-19 vaccination drives and coronavirus restrictions in their territories.
  • According to the Cantabria health department, the Covid pass is no longer able to achieve the goal of cutting transmission in indoor areas now that the omicron variant has become dominant. This new strain is highly transmissible, and is able to infect both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
  • For this same reason, Catalonia is also considering lifting the use of the Covid pass in the region. “We think that it has made an effect: it has raised awareness on the importance of vaccination and was also applied to make the public aware that we were in a pandemic situation,” said Carme Cabezas, the Catalan secretary of Public Health.
  • For the other Spanish regions with coronavirus restrictions in force, no changes have been announced, but many of the measures that are currently in place will expire soon if not extended.
lucieperloff

'Build Back Better' Hit a Wall, but Climate Action Could Move Forward - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ack-better-climate-change.html

politics economics climate

shared by lucieperloff on 20 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Faced with the possibility that Democrats could lose control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, the party is now looking to salvage what it can from the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act.
  • That could mean jettisoning many of the child-care, health care and tax-overhaul provisions that are priorities for different segments of the Democratic coalition.
  • Republicans, including those who accept the scientific consensus that climate change is primarily a result of burning fossil fuels, expressed less urgency.
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  • The climate portion of Build Back Better includes about $555 billion aimed at moving the American economy away from its 150-year-old reliance on fossil fuels and toward clean energy sources.
  • Democratic leaders are reluctant to abandon social programs such as universal prekindergarten or lower costs for prescription drugs because they provide benefits that are immediately felt by American families and would demonstrate to voters that the party can deliver on its promises.
  • The Build Back Better Act does include billions of dollars for research and development of so-called “carbon capture,” a technology that is not in use at any commercial scale because it is prohibitively expensive.
  • Voters across the political spectrum — including conservative Republicans — strongly support tax credits and rebates to consumers, businesses and landlords for energy efficient heating and cooling, solar panels, electric vehicles and other low-emissions or no-carbon technology, according to a September 2021 poll conducted by climate change communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities.
  • If Democrats were to try to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor for a vote, they would need to be joined by at least 10 Republicans to clear a 60-vote threshold to push past a Republican filibuster.
lucieperloff

Australia's (Brief) Idea to Ease Supply Chains: Juvenile Forklift Drivers - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...juvenile-forklift-drivers.html

pandemic supply international politics

shared by lucieperloff on 20 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The Australian government has been trying all kinds of things to address a pandemic labor shortage: Letting international students work more hours. Reimbursing visa costs to lure backpackers. Easing isolation requirements for essential workers.
  • Mr. Morrison had planned, according to media reports, to present the notion to state and territory leaders as part of a suite of proposals to reduce regulatory requirements for crucial segments of the work force, as soaring coronavirus case counts keep many off the job.
  • The chief minister of the Australian Capital Territory, Andrew Barr, said in an apparent dig at the prime minister that while the assembled leaders had supported “sensible and safe” measures to alleviate workplace shortages, “allowing 16-year-olds to drive a forklift was unanimously rejected by all states and territories.”
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  • As in many places around the world, supply chains in Australia have been snarled as the Omicron variant has swamped a country that had largely contained the coronavirus for almost two years.
  • To ease the shortages, the Australian government announced last week that transport, freight and logistics workers would no longer have to isolate for seven days if they were identified as a close contact of someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. Instead, they can go back to work as soon as they test negative on a rapid antigen test.
lucieperloff

China's Rising Menace Hardens Taiwan's Separate Identity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taiwan-china-identity.html

international culture politics

shared by lucieperloff on 20 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • China may be the land of her ancestors, but Taiwan is where she was born and raised, a home she defines as much by its verdant mountains and bustling night markets as by its robust democracy.
  • Beijing’s strident authoritarianism — and its claim over Taiwan — has only solidified the island’s identity, now central to a dispute that has turned the Taiwan Strait into one of Asia’s biggest potential flash points.
  • Most of Taiwan’s residents are not interested in becoming absorbed by a Communist-ruled China. But they are not pushing for formal independence for the island, either, preferring to avoid the risk of war.
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  • The island’s first residents had arrived thousands of years ago and were more closely related to the peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific than to the Chinese. Europeans had set up trading posts on the island. The Japanese had ruled over it for 50 years.
  • The United States and other countries would later follow suit, dealing a blow to mainlanders like Ms. Wang. How could she still claim to be Chinese, she wondered, if the world did not even recognize her as such?
  • Under Mr. Xi, Beijing has signaled its impatience with Taiwan in increasingly menacing ways, sending military jets to buzz Taiwan on a near-daily basis.
  • The global criticism of China for its handling of Covid and its repression at home rekindled a longstanding debate in Taiwan about dropping “China” from the island’s official name. No action was taken, though; such a move by Taiwan would have been seen by Beijing as formalizing its de facto independence.
  • After the Nationalists ended nearly four decades of martial law in 1987, topics previously deemed taboo, including questions of identity and calls for independence, could be discussed.
  • Now, as China under Mr. Xi has become more authoritarian, the political gulf that separates it from Taiwan has only seemed increasingly insurmountable.
lucieperloff

Oil Prices Stay High as Output From OPEC and Others Falls Behind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oil-prices-opec.html

international climate crisis us politics

shared by lucieperloff on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The sharp pullback came with an implicit promise that as factories reopened and planes returned to the air, the oil industry would revive, too, gradually scaling up production to help economies return to prepandemic health.
  • Members of the cartel OPEC Plus, which agreed to cut output by about 10 million barrels a day in early 2020, are routinely falling well short of their rising monthly production targets.
  • Production in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, has also been slow to recover from its one-million-barrel-a-day plummet in 2020, as companies and investors are wary of committing money amid climate change concerns and volatile prices.
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  • A prolonged period when more oil has been consumed than pumped has drained tank farms to low levels. Investment in new drilling for new oil has also fallen to multiyear lows, though it is expected to pick up this year. At the same time, demand is expected to grow strongly, reaching prepandemic levels this year.
  • Energy Aspects forecasts that the deficit will reach just over one million barrels a day this month, or 1 percent of world supplies, and will probably increase later in the year.
  • Following a schedule agreed to in July, the group plans to raise the overall output by 400,000 barrels a day each month, even though they are missing the targets.
  • Nigeria’s industry is plagued by damage to infrastructure caused by oil thieves and others, problems that have worsened in recent months, according to the industry.
  • Kamel al-Harami, a Kuwaiti analyst, said that the domestic industry “does not have the experience and the expertise to deal with old and aged oil fields” but that public opinion is resistant to bringing in international companies.
  • A variety of factors are causing production in some countries to fall short, including political turmoil, outmoded regulatory regimes and pressures on international oil companies to rethink their investments so as to bolster profits and reduce carbon emissions. That shift could leave developing countries that depend on oil income out in the cold.
  • Analysts say Saudi officials don’t want to unilaterally increase output and risk busting up the arrangement with other producers that gives them so much control.
lucieperloff

Prince Andrew and Boris Johnson: The U.K. Deals With Two Crises at Once - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nson-prince-andrew-royals.html

culture crisis policy

shared by lucieperloff on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Stoic, dignified and comforting, the queen’s words helped anchor the country during the fretful days that followed — not the first time the monarchy has acted as a stabilizing force for the government during tumultuous events.
  • While these cases are about starkly different issues, they both feature privileged middle-aged men under fire for their behavior, raising age-old questions of class, entitlement and double standards.
  • Commentators said, half in jest, that the legal ruling against Andrew, 61, helped Mr. Johnson, 57, because it deflected attention from his grilling in the House of Commons, where opposition lawmakers accused him of lying and demanded that he resign. But both men are at the mercy of forces largely out of their control.
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  • What the two cases have in common, critics said, is a lack of accountability on the part of the main actors.
  • With so much at stake, especially in a year in which the queen is celebrating 70 years on the throne, royal watchers speculate that Andrew will seek his own settlement with Ms. Giuffre. Who would pay that settlement, and with what money, are already questions being asked by British newspapers.
  • But that does not mean she is without influence. Legal experts say the monarchy, because of its longevity and constancy, can have a moderating effect on the most extreme forces in politics.
  • If anything, her disciplined adherence to social distancing rules — captured most poignantly when she grieved alone in a choir stall at the funeral of her husband, Prince Philip, last year — is a vivid contrast to the prime minister’s after-work socializing.
lucieperloff

Spanish Doctors Left Without P.P.E. Early in Pandemic Win Settlement - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sh-doctors-ppe-settlement.html

pandemic policy crisis

shared by lucieperloff on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The ruling by a regional court in Valencia, in eastern Spain, was the first to be issued in a raft of lawsuits brought by doctors and nurses, who have said that when they confronted the coronavirus in early 2020, they were sometimes not supplied with protective equipment, or had to make their own basic gear.
  • By the end of March 2020, at least 12,000 Spanish health care workers were infected with Covid-19, and the government had declared a state of emergency.
  • The largest awards are for doctors who had to be hospitalized after becoming infected while working without proper protective equipment. The ruling, dated Jan. 7, was made public this week.
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  • The judge’s ruling highlighted several safety flaws, including that the doctors were given only one face mask per week and had to reuse gowns. The ruling also noted that hospitals kept protective gear locked up. The equipment shortages lasted until June 2020, three months after the pandemic took hold in Spain.
  • Spain’s judiciary has been flooded with lawsuits related to shortcomings in its health care system during the pandemic, including suits over cancers that went undetected while hospitals were focused on coping with Covid-19.
lucieperloff

Japan Approves Major Hike in Military Spending, With Taiwan in Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-defense-spending.html

policy economics military

shared by lucieperloff on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Japan’s cabinet on Friday approved the country’s biggest increase in military spending in decades, as officials expressed growing concern about the possibility of being pulled into a conflict over Taiwan.
  • It also includes more than $51.5 billion for the military, reflecting a substantial increase in a defense budget far smaller than that of its ally the United States or of China, the regional giant.
  • Military spending in Japan has increased steadily since former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in 2012, promising to strengthen the country’s military forces and revise its pacifist Constitution.
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  • If conflict were to break out, policymakers argue, Japan could be dragged in, potentially putting at risk some of the islands in the Ryukyu archipelago in the country’s southwest.
  • The vast majority of Japanese have long opposed large increases in military spending, and there is little public support for amending the Constitution to remove the prohibition against offensive warfare.
lucieperloff

Your Friday Briefing: Boosters and Vaccine Equity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-who-ukraine-russia-biden.html

pandemic economics inequality

shared by lucieperloff on 10 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • As wealthy nations step up their booster campaigns to confront the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, the World Health Organization is concerned that vaccine equity could be further undermined.
  • Most current infections, which are still overwhelmingly being driven by the Delta variant, are affecting unvaccinated people, the W.H.O. said, which means that getting vaccines to those who have no protection should be the priority.
lucieperloff

How Many Countries Will Follow the U.S. Official Snub of Beijing's Olympics? - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...beijing-olympics-reaction.html

pandemic politics human rights china

shared by lucieperloff on 08 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • New Zealand says it decided months ago that its diplomats wouldn’t be attending.
  • Political leaders of other nations are expected to bow out, whether they announce an explicit reason or not.
  • Only a handful of world leaders attended the Summer Games in Tokyo, which were held after a year’s delay because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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  • Chen Weihua of China Daily, bitingly expressed hope that Mr. Biden would live long enough to see China boycott the Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles in 2028.
  • The decision will be especially complicated for European nations, which have sharply criticized China’s abuses of human rights and democracy in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
  • At the same time, many European nations have extensive trade ties with Beijing that they do not want to jeopardize, especially for a measure that is likely only to offend China, not change it.
  • Major sporting events like the Olympics, with their universal audiences, “can be instrumental for spreading positive values and promoting freedom and human rights at global level,”
  • Italy would not join the American boycott, an Italian government official said on Tuesday, while France, Germany and Britain were noncommittal.
  • The White House announcement on Monday that it would send no official delegation prompted anger in Beijing, where Chinese officials on Tuesday once again vowed to retaliate.
  • “When we have concerns about human rights we let the Chinese know,” Mr. Macron’s office said. “We took sanctions related to Xinjiang last March.”
  • Britain has made no decision on a diplomatic boycott either, but there are calls from within the ruling Conservative Party to do so.
  • The British government’s approach to China has been toughening amid growing tension over Chinese policy in its former colony, Hong Kong, a direct embarrassment to London.
  • The International Campaign for Tibet said in a statement that a boycott was “the right choice both morally and strategically.”
  • Although the American decision had been expected and, administration officials said, conveyed to Beijing in advance of Monday’s announcement, the Communist Party government appeared flustered, as well as angered.
  • Officials in Beijing last week tried to pre-empt any prospect of a diplomatic boycott by saying they would not extend invitations to foreign leaders to attend the Winter Games, leaving that task to national Olympic committees around the world instead.
  • China has very stringent quarantine rules, requiring everyone who enters the country to spend two weeks in isolation, followed by a week or two of daily health monitoring at home or a hotel, with many restrictions on travel and social interactions.
  • Mr. Putin, an avid sportsman and an increasingly close ally of Mr. Xi’s, has not yet given final confirmation of his attendance despite China’s public statement last month that he would attend the opening ceremony, to be held on Feb. 4 in Beijing’s National Stadium, popularly known as the Bird’s Nest.
lucieperloff

A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...limate-change-barren-land.html

climate brazil policy

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.
  • Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.
  • But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.
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  • Satellite images and field tests show that 13 percent of the land has already lost its fertility, while nearly the rest of the region is at risk.
  • Brazil’s northeast, the world’s most densely populated drylands, with roughly 53 million people, is among the most at risk.
  • Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.
  • Those entrepreneurs began paying landowners for their mud, and in a few years, dozens of ceramics plants employed hundreds of people.
  • Increasing deforestation in Brazil has alarmed officials around the world because it threatens the Amazon rain forest’s ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere.
  • At his small plant recently, a few dozen laborers laid out thousands of tiles to dry in the midday sun.
  • Factories make the tiles by mixing water with clay, and then firing the result in a wood-burning oven. All those ingredients — water, wood and clay — are in short supply here.
  • The operation consumes 60 to 75 cubic meters of wood a week, or enough to fill five large dump trucks.
  • That can have a devastating effect. The soil and clay they extract is crucial for retaining a proper balance of nutrients and moisture in the surrounding land.
  • In 2010, during another difficult dry season, Mr. Dantas said his family almost ran out of money. To feed themselves and their cattle, they decided to cash in on their mud.
  • But in 2010, instead of planting, the family watched four men with shovels excavate and haul away the soil. It took them three months. They paid about $3,500 for the clay.
lucieperloff

U.N. Seats Denied, for Now, to Afghanistan's Taliban and Myanmar's Junta - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-nations-taliban-myanmar.html

politics un policy

shared by lucieperloff on 02 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • U.N. Seats Denied,
  • A bid by the new Taliban government in Afghanistan and the junta ruling Myanmar to gain international recognition
  • The deferral by a powerful U.N. committee effectively denied, for now and possibly through much of 2022, attempts by the ruling authorities of Afghanistan and Myanmar, which are widely considered pariahs, to occupy seats at the United Nations.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • held a closed meeting on the applications by the Taliban and Myanmar junta to replace the ambassadors of the governments they had deposed.
  • The United States and many other nations in the 193-member organization, along with a wide array of human rights groups, have denounced the repressive actions of the Taliban and the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw.
  • The Tatmadaw overthrew the civilian government in a coup last February and imprisoned its leaders, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate.
  • That could mean the question of who represents both Afghanistan and Myanmar at the United Nations may not be resolved before the next annual General Assembly gathering in September 2022.
  • Many powerful U.N. members, including Russia and the United States, have said the militant group should be judged by its actions before any decision on recognition.
  • “make it harder for both to establish themselves as legitimate governments” abroad, but that “ultimately both are focused on securing power at home.”
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