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katyshannon

U.S.-Russia Deal on a Partial Truce in Syria Raises More Doubt Than Optimism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fire-in-syria-obama-putin.html

u s deal truce syria doubt optimism new york times politics crisis history culture obama putin assad

shared by katyshannon on 23 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The United States and Russia announced an agreement on Monday for a partial truce in Syria, though the caveats and cautious words on all sides underscored the obstacles in the way of the latest diplomatic effort to end the five-year-old civil war.
  • Under the terms of the agreement, the Syrian government and Syria’s armed opposition are being asked to agree to a “cessation of hostilities,” effective this Saturday. But the truce does not apply to two of the most lethal extremist groups, the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, raising questions about whether it will be any more lasting than previous cease-fires.
  • The agreement calls for the Syrian government and the opposition to indicate by noon on Friday whether they will comply with the cessation of hostilities, a term carefully chosen because it does not require the kind of agreement in a formal cease-fire.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The United States is responsible for bringing the various opposition groups in line while the Russians are supposed to pressure the government. Washington and Moscow also agreed to set up a hotline to monitor compliance by both sides.
  • President Obama sealed the final terms of the arrangement in a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has become perhaps the most influential player in the Syrian war since Russia thrust itself into the conflict in September on behalf of its client, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
  • The diplomatic efforts did yield a small victory: Aid was delivered for the first time in months to several towns after the combatants gave permission under intense pressure.
  • On the ground in Syria, the prospects for an end to the bloodshed seemed even more elusive. In the last week alone, more than 100 people in Homs and Damascus were killed by suicide bombings by the Islamic State.
  • Airstrikes by the Syrian government and its Russian allies in Aleppo and elsewhere have killed scores of people, including in at least five hospitals, one aided by the international charity Doctors Without Borders.
  • Farther east, scores of civilians were said by locals to have been killed in airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
  • The priorities, Mr. Obama told Mr. Putin, were to “alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people,” accelerate a political settlement and keep the focus on the coalition’s battle against the Islamic State.
  • hundreds of thousands of Syrians remain trapped in areas that are classified as besieged or hard to reach, without regular access to food and medicine. Humanitarian groups caution that the more access to aid is used as part of political deals, the less the combatants will provide it unconditionally, as required under international law.
  • The agreement came after one false start: Secretary of State John Kerry announced in Munich on Feb. 12 that the truce would take effect in a week, but the target date passed as the two sides wrestled over how to carry it out. On Sunday, in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Kerry spoke three times by phone with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to iron out the details.
  • On Monday, while flying back to Washington, Mr. Kerry briefed ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey about the agreement, according to a senior State Department official. He is expected to discuss the truce when he testifies at a budget hearing Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
  • Mr. Kerry has tended to be more optimistic than the White House about the prospects for a diplomatic solution in Syria. But his statement on Monday was also notably reserved. He did not mention the Feb. 27 date and said that while the agreement represented a “moment of promise,” the “fulfillment of that promise depends on actions.”
  • Analysts expressed skepticism about the deal, noting that in the five days before the truce takes effect, the Syrian forces and their Russian allies could inflict a lot more damage to Aleppo through bombing raids. Some speculated that Russia might expand its military campaign to Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, where Nusra fighters are also operating.
  • “This depends entirely on the good faith of Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, none of whom have shown much good faith in the last five years,” said Frederic C. Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who worked on Syria policy during the first term of the Obama administration.
  • In Riyadh on Monday, a Saudi-backed consortium of Syrian opposition groups and political dissidents said they would agree to the terms of the truce. But Riad Hijab, who coordinates the group’s efforts, did not expect the Syrian government, Iran or Russia to abide by it since, he said, Mr. Assad’s survival depended on “the continuation of its campaign of oppression, killing and forced displacement.”
  • For the Obama administration, a partial truce in Syria may simply be a way to keep a lid on the violence there while it turns its attention to planning and carrying out military operations against Islamic State fighters in Libya.
  • Some analysts said the agreement was less an effort to end the fighting in Syria than to ease the bloodshed enough to allow more humanitarian aid to reach stricken cities like Aleppo.
katyshannon

Cruz fires spokesman over 'inaccurate' Rubio video - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...yler-marco-rubio-video-apology

cruz fires spokesman video politics US

shared by katyshannon on 23 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Ted Cruz asked his communications director Rick Tyler to resign Monday after Tyler distributed a video that falsely depicted Marco Rubio dismissing the Bible.
  • The incident comes a day before the Nevada Republican caucuses and in the wake of accusations from rival campaigns in recent weeks about Cruz's campaign tactics. Donald Trump has called Cruz a "liar" and Rubio and Ben Carson have also blasted the Texas senator.
  • Trump, Rubio and Carson have all attacked Cruz for his ethics ever since Cruz's victory in Iowa. Cruz later underperformed in South Carolina two contests later.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Cruz says he spent the morning investigating what happened before making his decision. Campaign manager Jeff Roe confirmed that Tyler had formally resigned."I have made clear in this campaign we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards and integrity," Cruz told reporters Monday, adding that Tyler is a "good man."
  • A former, longtime spokesman for Newt Gingrich, Tyler was a senior aide and one of the Cruz campaign's first hires in the run-up to his presidential announcement.
  • Tyler had apologized late Sunday for the incident."I want to apologize to Sen. Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today," said Tyler, the spokesman, wrote in a Facebook post.The latest dust-up comes as the two senators' campaigns have been clashing heatedly for days about "dishonesty" and "lies" on the trail.
  • Trump immediately sought to capitalize on the moment."Wow, Ted Cruz falsely suggested Marco Rubio mocked the Bible and was just forced to fire his Communications Director. More dirty tricks!," he tweeted.
  • And Rubio's campaign similarly rubbed salt in the wound, praising Tyler's skills but saying he "had the unenviable task of working for a candidate willing to do or say anything to get elected."
  • Rubio said he accepts Tyler's apology, but called for the Cruz campaign to hold someone accountable.
  • The flub by the Cruz campaign comes after Rubio finished narrowly ahead of Cruz for second place in the South Carolina primary Saturday, behind Donald Trump. In the heated contest there, the Cruz campaign was repeatedly accused by both Rubio and Trump for being dishonest and engaging in dirty tactics.
katyshannon

Supreme Court Deals Blow to Obama's Efforts to Regulate Coal Emissions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oal-emissions-regulations.html

supreme court deals blow obama efforts coal emissions new york times US history crisis policy

shared by katyshannon on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.
  • The brief order was not the last word on the case, which is most likely to return to the Supreme Court after an appeals court considers an expedited challenge from 29 states and dozens of corporations and industry groups.But the Supreme Court’s willingness to issue a stay while the case proceeds was an early hint that the program could face a skeptical reception from the justices.The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court.
  • In negotiating that deal, which requires every country to enact policies to lower emissions, Mr. Obama pointed to the power plant rule as evidence that the United States would take ambitious action, and that other countries should follow.
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  • Opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate policy called the court’s action historic.“We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which has led the 29-state legal challenge.
  • The challenged regulation, which was issued last summer by the Environmental Protection Agency, requires states to make major cuts to greenhouse gas pollution created by electric power plants, the nation’s largest source of such emissions. The plan could transform the nation’s electricity system, cutting emissions from existing power plants by a third by 2030, from a 2005 baseline, by closing hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired plants and increasing production of wind and solar power. Continue reading the main story
  • “Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge of our day, and it is already affecting national public health, welfare and the environment,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. wrote in a brief urging the Supreme Court to reject a request for a stay while the case moves forward.
  • The regulation calls for states to submit compliance plans by September, though they may seek a two-year extension. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions is in 2022, with full compliance not required until 2030.The states challenging the regulation, led mostly by Republicans and many with economies that rely on coal mining or coal-fired power, sued to stop what they called “the most far-reaching and burdensome rule the E.P.A. has ever forced onto the states.”
  • The states urged the Supreme Court to take immediate action to block what they called a “power grab” under which “the federal environmental regulator seeks to reorganize the energy grids in nearly every state in the nation.” Though the first emission reduction obligations do not take effect until 2022, the states said they had already started to spend money and shift resources.
katyshannon

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...EU_TURKEY_SYRIA_PLANE

news associated press russia turkey plane

shared by katyshannon on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkey shot down a Russian warplane Tuesday, claiming it had violated Turkish airspace and ignored repeated warnings. Russia denied that the plane crossed the Syrian border into Turkish skies.
  • Russia said the Su-24 was downed by artillery fire, but Turkey claimed that its F-16s fired on the Russian plane after it ignored several warnings. The ministry said the pilots parachuted but added that Moscow had no further contact with them.
  • Video footage of the incident showed a warplane on fire before crashing on a hill and two crew members apparently parachuting safely.
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  • The North Atlantic Council, NATO's governing body, called a meeting requested by Turkey, an alliance member. "The aim of this extraordinary NAC meeting is for Turkey to inform allies about the downing of a Russian airplane," said Carmen Romero, NATO's deputy spokesperson. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said nothing about the incident at a ceremony approving the list a new cabinet members.
qkirkpatrick

24 SHOTS FIRED INTO BRONX CHURCH - Police Are Baffied but Think It May Have Been Done by Fascisti Sympathizers. BULLETS HIT THE ORGAN Damage Slight at Italian Edifice-- Patrolman Thought Shots Were Part of New Year Revel. - Article - NYTimes.com - 0 views

query.nytimes.com/...abstract.html

church fascism italian politics history

shared by qkirkpatrick on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • 24 SHOTS FIRED INTO BRONX CHURCH; Police Are Baffied but Think It May Have Been Done by Fascisti Sympathizers.
  • he firing of twenty-four shots through a window in the inside of the Bedford Park Italian Prerbyterian Church at 204th Street and Villa Avenue, the Bronx, early yesterday morning puzzled the police of the Bronx Park Station, who searched houses in the vicinity yesterday in an effort to obtain a clue.
  • qkirkpatrick on 13 Jan 16
     
    fascism comes to US. Headline from 1928.
zachcutler

North Korea-South Korea tensions: Warning shots fired - CNN.com - 0 views

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

north korea shots fired Obama

shared by zachcutler on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Tensions between North Korea and South Korea escalated on Wednesday after South Korea said an unidentified aircraft approached the demilitarized zone.
  • It was not immediately clear whether the drone was armed or what its mission was.
  • However, a former U.S. Army senior intelligence officer who served there suggested the purpose was either surveillance or instigation by North Korea.
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  • "We are concerned that additional North Korean provocations could heighten tensions, lead to a cycle of escalation," he said
  • There could be firing by the North Koreans, which then could prompt South Koreans to retaliate very quickly," she said
  • In an additional provocation, South Korean soldiers on Wednesday found anti-South Korea and anti-U.S. propaganda leaflets
  • North Korea defends its nuclear ambitions
  • But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday defended his nuclear program, saying his country needs the capability to strike the United States if provoked.
  • Researchers with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury said that the heavily edited film seemed to show black smoke, several fireballs and even possibly falling debris
Javier E

'The planet is on fire': Bill Nye driven to F-bomb rant by climate change | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ing-angry-about-climate-change

climate change carbon-pricing denial science policy economics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • the Green New Deal.)
  • The non-binding resolution, as Oliver pointed out in the segment, has been especially polarizing, and is regularly ridiculed in bad faith by Republicans, despite the scale of the climate-based issues it merely suggests might be a good idea to address, such as carbon-pricing.
  • After explaining the idea being carbon taxes, and the difficulty politicians have getting people to accept the idea of a new tax, Nye returns for another experiment to cut through all the talk.
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  • “By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees,” Nye says, losing his patience. “What I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire,” he says while taking a torch to a globe.
  • “There are a lot of things we could do to put it out. Are any of them free? No, of course not. Nothing’s free, you idiots. Grow the fuck up. You’re not children any more. I didn’t mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12. But you’re adults now, and this is an actual crisis, got it? Safety glasses off, motherfuckers.”
Javier E

Spain's far-right Vox party shot from social media into parliament overnight. How? - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-into-parliament-overnight-how

Vox Spain far right politics history culture polarization backlash

shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • Whereas successful political movements used to have a single ideology, they can now combine several. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: They do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties can now operate like that: You can bundle together issues, repackage them and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging — based on exactly the same kind of market research — that you know has worked in other places.
  • Opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to feminism and same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration, especially by Muslims; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care a lot about and others don’t know exist; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery and a whiff of nostalgia
  • All of these are the ingredients that have gone into the creation of Vox.
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  • The important relationships between Vox and the European far right, as well as the American alt-right, are happening elsewhere.
  • there have been multiple contacts between Vox and the other far-right parties of Europe. In 2017, Abascal met Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, as Vox’s Twitter account recorded; on the eve of the election, he tweeted his thanks to Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader, for his support. Abascal and Espinosa both went to Warsaw recently to meet the leaders of the nativist, anti-pluralist Polish ruling party, and Espinosa showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the D.C. area, as well.
  • these are issues that belong to the realm of identity politics, not economics. Espinosa characterized all of them as arguments with “the left
  • the nationalist parties, rooted in their own particular histories, are often in conflict with one another almost by definition.
  • The European far right has now found a set of issues it can unite around. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative worldview is another.
  • dislike of same-sex civil unions or African taxi drivers is something that even Austrians and Italians who disagree about the location of their border can share.
  • Alto Data Analytics. Alto, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of public data, such as that found on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other public sources, recently produced some elegant, colored network maps of the Spanish online conversation, with the goal of identifying disinformation campaigns seeking to distort digital conversations
  • three outlying, polarized conversations — “echo chambers,” whose members are mostly talking and listening only to one another: the Catalan secessionist conversation, the far-left conversation and the Vox conversation. 
  • the largest number of “abnormal, high-activity users” — bots, or else real people who post constantly and probably professionally — were also found within these three communities, especially the Vox community, which accounted for more than half of them
  • uncovered a network of nearly 3,000 “abnormal, high-activity users” that had pumped out nearly 4½ million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic messages on Twitter in the past year
  • For the past couple of years, it has focused on immigration scare stories, gradually increasing their emotional intensity
  • all of it aligns with messages being put out by Vox.
  • a week before Spain’s polling day, the network was tweeting images of what its members described as a riot in a “Muslim neighborhood in France.” In fact, the clip showed a scene from recent anti-government riots in Algeria.
  • Vox supporters, especially the “abnormal, high-activity users,” are very likely to post and tweet content and material from a very particular groups of sources: a set of conspiratorial websites, mostly set up at least a year ago, sometimes run by a single person, which post large quantities of highly partisan articles and headlines.
  • he Alto team had found exactly the same kinds of websites in Italy and Brazil, in the months before those countries’ elections in 2018
  • the websites began putting out partisan material — in Italy, about immigration; in Brazil, about corruption and feminism — during the year before the vote.
  • they served to feed and amplify partisan themes even before they were really part of mainstream politics.
  • In Spain, there are a half-dozen such sites, some quite professional and some clearly amateu
  • One of the more obscure sites has exactly the same style and layout as a pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian site, almost as though both had been designed by the same person
  • The owner of digitalSevilla — according to El Pais, a 24-year-old with no journalism experience — is producing headlines that compare the Andalusian socialist party leader to “the evil lady in Game of Thrones” and, at times, has had more readership than established newspapers
  • They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign
  • all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.
  • he Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Though the pact received relatively little mainstream media attention, in the lead-up to that gathering, and in its wake, Alto found nearly 50,000 Twitter users tweeting conspiracy theories about the pact
  • Much like the Spanish network that promotes Vox, these users were promoting material from extremist and conspiratorial websites, using identical images, linking and retweeting one another across borders.
  • A similar international network went into high gear after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked thousands of posts from people claiming to have seen Muslims “celebrating” the fire, as well as from people posting rumors and pictures that purported to prove there had been arson
  • These same kinds of memes and images then rippled through Vox’s WhatsApp and Telegram fan groups. These included, for example, an English-language meme showing Paris “before Macron,” with Notre Dame burning, and “after Macron” with a mosque in its place, as well as a news video, which, in fact, had been made about another incident, talking about arrests and gas bombs found in a nearby car. It was a perfect example of the alt-right, the far right and Vox all messaging the same thing, at the same time, in multiple languages, attempting to create the same emotions across Europe, North America and beyond.
  • CitizenGo is part of a larger network of European organizations dedicated to what they call “restoring the natural order”: rolling back gay rights, restricting abortion and contraception, promoting an explicitly Christian agenda. They put together mailing lists and keep in touch with their supporters; the organization claims to reach 9 million people.
  • OpenDemocracy has additionally identified a dozen other U.S.-based organizations that now fund or assist conservative activists in Europe
  • she now runs into CitizenGo, and its language, around the world. Among other things, it has popularized the expression “gender ideology” — a term the Christian right invented, and that has come to describe a whole group of issues, from domestic violence laws to gay rights — in Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe.
  • In Spain, CitizenGo has made itself famous by painting buses with provocative slogans — one carried the hashtag #feminazis and an image of Adolf Hitler wearing lipstick — and driving them around Spanish cities.
  • It’s a pattern we know from U.S. politics. Just as it is possible in the United States to support super PACs that then pay for advertising around issues linked to particular candidates, so is it now possible for Americans, Russians or the Princess von Thurn und Taxis to donate to CitizenGo — and, thus, to support Vox.
  • as most Europeans probably don’t realize — outsiders who want to fund the European far right have been able to do so for some time. OpenDemocracy’s most recent report quotes Arsuaga, the head of CitizenGo, advising a reporter that money given to his group could “indirectly” support Vox, since “we actually currently totally align.”
  • “Make Spain Great Again,” he explained, “was a kind of provocation. . . . It was just intended to make the left a little bit more angry.”
  • The number of actual Spanish Muslims is relatively low — most immigration to Spain is from Latin America — and the number of actual U.S. Muslims is, relatively, even lower. But the idea that Christian civilization needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has, of course, a special historic echo in Spain
  • “We are entering into a period of time when politics is becoming something different, politics is warfare by another means — we don’t want to be killed, we have to survive. . . . I think politics now is winner-takes-all. This is not just a phenomenon in Spain.
  • As Aznar, the former prime minister, said, the party is a “consequence,” though it is not only a consequence of Catalan separatism. It’s also a consequence of Trumpism, of the conspiracy websites, of the international alt-right/far-right online campaign, and especially of a social conservative backlash that has been building across the continent for years.
  • The nationalists, the anti-globalists, the people who are skeptical of international laws and international organizations — they, too, now work together, across borders, for common causes. They share the same contacts. They tap money from the same funders. They are learning from one another’s mistakes, copying one another’s language. And, together, they think they will eventually win.
Javier E

Historic melt event continues on Greenland ice sheet - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...into-north-atlantic-july-alone

ice sheet crisis

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the ice sheet sent 197 billion tons of water pouring into the Atlantic Ocean during July. This is enough to raise sea levels by 0.5 millimeter, or 0.02 inches, in a one-month time frame
  • every increment of sea-level rise provides a higher launchpad for storms to more easily flood coastal infrastructure, such as New York’s subway system, parts of which flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Think of a basketball game being played on a court whose floor is gradually rising, making it easier for even shorter players to dunk the ball.
  • “this is the year Greenland is contributing most to sea-level rise,”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Thanks to an expansive area of high pressure enveloping all of Greenland — the same weather system that brought extreme heat to Europe last week — temperatures in Greenland have been running up to 15 to 30 degrees above average this week.
  • The 2019 extreme melt event is being compared to a record extreme heat and melt episode that occurred in Greenland in 2012. While the extent of surface melt during that event may have exceeded this one so far, Shuman found that Summit Station experienced warmth that was greater “in both magnitude and duration” during the current event
  • “The event itself was unusual that the warm air mass came from the east, and appears to be a part of the air mass that caused the record-breaking heat wave in Europe. Most of our extreme melt days on the Greenland ice sheet are associated with warm air masses moving from the west and south. I cannot recall an instance where we saw such extensive melt associated with an air mass coming from Northern Europe,”
  • The heat, along with below-average precipitation in parts of Greenland, has even sparked wildfires along the Greenland’s non-ice-covered western fringes. Satellite images and photos taken from the ground show fires burning in treeless areas, consuming mossy wetlands known as fen that can become vulnerable to fires when they dry out. These fires can burn into peatlands, releasing greenhouse gases buried long ago through decomposition of organic matter.
  • Studies have shown that ice melt periods like the one seen in 2012 typically occur about every 250 years, so the fact that another one is taking place only a few years later could be a sign of how climate change is upping the odds of such events
  • She said state-of-the-art climate computer models have been unable to simulate events like this, which hampers scientists’ ability to accurately predict Greenland ice melt and, therefore, future sea-level rise.
Javier E

Germany Has Some Revolutionary Ideas, and They're Working - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ny-renewable-energy-revolution

germany climate change energy policy revolutionary ecological culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today.
  • Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has promised some of the most aggressive emission cuts—by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, and by 2050, at least 80 percent.
  • The energiewende will take much longer and will involve every single German—more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the population, are selling electricity to the grid right now
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • “It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”
  • The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest
  • . The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.
  • So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.
  • I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.
  • energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”
  • NG STAFF; EVAN APP
  • Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.
  • Chernobyl was a watershed.
  • The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”
  • It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.
  • The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.
  • In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.
  • Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years
  • Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some
  • The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.
  • Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.
  • Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.
  • “Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”
  • Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.
  • Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.
  • The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.
  • “The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”
  • All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though
  • For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.
  • here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.
  • At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide
  • Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.
  • “The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”
  • In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.
anonymous

Opinion | How the Kent State Shootings Changed America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nt-state-shooting-protest.html

US history

shared by anonymous on 04 May 20 - No Cached
  • On Friday, May 1, 1970, just after noon, about 300 students at Kent State University, outside Cleveland, gathered in the grassy campus Commons to protest President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia.
  • Later that night, when the most audacious of the young protesters destroyed commercial property in downtown Kent, the town’s mayor asked Governor James Rhodes for assistance. Rhodes called in the National Guard. The next day, around 9 p.m., the campus building used by the Reserve Officer Training Corps, one of the Army’s primary recruiting tools during the Vietnam War, was torched, probably by a very small fringe of activists.
  • Student activists had long been at the forefront of the antiwar movement, and Kent State, with some 21,000 students, boasted a long tradition of radical protest, partly because of its proximity to Cleveland, then a stronghold of progressive labor.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Rhodes primed polarized sentiments, calling the protesters “worse than the ‘Brown Shirt’ and the communist element,” labeling them “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
  • Just after noon, a group of guardsmen suddenly huddled together, retreated briefly, wheeled toward the right, turned in tandem and fired at the students for 13 seconds.The students were not only unarmed; most didn’t realize that the guards’ rifles held live ammunition. Four students were killed: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder. Nine others were injured. After 50 years, we still don’t know why the guard turned and fired.
  • Thomas M. Grace, one of the students shot on May 4, went on to become a historian. Among his books is a well-received history of the protests, “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties.” In it, he argued that the shootings and the mass student strike had three immediate, tangible effects
  • First, the ensuing political pressure propelled Nixon to end the unwarranted Cambodian invasion earlier than anticipated, on June 30, 1970. Second, the horror of students dying at the hands of a militaristic state helped propel Congress to pass the War Powers Act in 1973, which curbed the president’s war-making authority. Third, the protests contributed to the ratification of the 26th Amendment a year later, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Legislators recognized, not only that young adults old enough to be drafted should have the right to vote, but the civic awareness necessary for voting was evident in the acute appreciation of political problems that young people poignantly showed during the spring of 1970.
  • Kent State marked the symbolic end of the 1960s, stretching from the optimism of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration through the March on Washington to the long hot summers of riots, assassinations and radical activism.
  • Kent State did more than end an era; it also shaped a new one. As David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers, explained, Kent State “left a legacy of disillusionment.
  • The May 4 shootings were viewed very differently by conservatives and liberals; most conservatives endorsed the National Guard’s actions and at best wrote off the shooting as a tragic accident
  • a position that liberals and the left found unimaginable
  • most people have forgotten that less than two weeks later, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two students in Mississippi, were killed by police officers in the wake of a false rumor about the death of a civil rights leader. And while Kent State stands out as an exception — National Guardsmen killing white college students — over the years, state authorities have killed far more African-American protesters than whites
  • But the campus, largely empty of students and faculty, is quiet. An eerie silence will mark 12:24 p.m., the exact moment, 50 years earlier, when the soldiers opened fire. It will be, perhaps, appropriate — a moment to reflect, in our own freighted era, on the fragility and significance of the democratic ideals for which these students gave their lives.
horowitzza

North Korea fires multiple missiles The United States and South Korea are analyzing the launch of multiple missiles from North Korea's east coast. Rising tensions » - 0 views

www.yahoo.com/...s-flew-1-000-km-001140911.html

north multiple united united states launch

shared by horowitzza on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • North Korea fired four ballistic missiles early on Monday, three of which landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone
  • "South Korea and the United States are conducting a close-up analysis, regarding further information,
  • Japanese officials described the launches as a grave threat and said they lodged "strong protests" with nuclear-armed North Korea.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • North Korea test fired a new type of missile, known as the Pukguksong-2, into the sea early last month, and has said it will continue to launch new strategic weapons.
  • "The launches are clearly in violation of Security Council resolutions. It is an extremely dangerous action,"
  • "Not only Pukguksong-2 but newer independent strategic weapons will fly high vigorously in the sky off the ground as long as the United States and the puppet regime are going ahead with their nuclear threat to us and an exercise for invasion war against the North," North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the ruling Workers' Party said in a commentary last week.
maxwellokolo

S. Korea: N. Korea Test-Fires Handful Of 'Unknown Projectiles' Into Japan Waters - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-projectiles-into-japan-waters

shared by maxwellokolo on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 06 Mar 17
     
    South Korea's military says North Korea has test-fired a handful of "unknown projectiles" off its West coast into its East coast waters, further rattling an already uncertain situation on the Korean peninsula under ongoing political drift in Seoul and a new American administration.
cdavistinnell

Bannon: Comey firing was worst mistake in 'modern political history' - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

Trump Comey politics

shared by cdavistinnell on 12 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon believes President Donald Trump's decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey was one of the worst mistakes in "modern political history."
  • Comey's dismissal -- which ignited a political firestorm and directly led to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential ties to Trump's campaign -- the biggest mistake in political history
  • Trump himself told reporters last month he hasn't given firing Mueller any thought, despite people close to him telling the media that the President was considering it.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Bannon's brash character was on full display in the interview
millerco

Bannon's 'epic' defense of Trump doesn't extend to all his moves, or all his aides and allies - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html

Us history Trump republicans politics steve bannon

shared by millerco on 12 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Bannon’s ‘epic’ defense of Trump doesn’t extend to all his moves, or all his aides and allies
  • Bannon did offer forceful praise — and, indeed, an epic defense — of Trump and much of his agenda
  • he also called Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey the biggest mistake “maybe in modern political history”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • accused Republican congressional leaders of “trying to nullify the 2016 election”
  • warned that the president’s decision to give Congress six months to come up with a solution for “dreamer” immigrants brought to the country illegally as children could cause a “civil war” within the Republican Party
  • Sanders said that “the president was right in firing Director Comey,” and pushed back on some of Bannon’s other assertions. “I think that Steve always likes to speak in, kind of, the most extreme measures,”
  • Bannon has at times also treated Trump as an imperfect vehicle for his own nationalist agenda
  • “It’s difficult to make the case that you’re helping the president if you’re in the position where you’re actively opposing either him or his political agenda,”
malonema1

So is Donald Trump secretly recording conversations or not? - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...trump-comey-tapes

US politics trump

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • So is Donald Trump secretly recording conversations or not?
  • On May 12, just three days after he fired James Comey as the FBI director, President Donald Trump tweeted this: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"Like many of Trump's tweets, this one immediately came to dominate the political conversation. Did he actually have a secret recording system in the White House? If not, why say it? And, like many of Trump's tweets, it produced a chain reaction of events that backfired on Trump. The threat -- I guess that's the best way to describe what Trump did -- of the existence of recordings spurred Comey to pass along memos he had written detailing his conversations with Trump to a friend, with the express goal of them being leaked and, hopefully, triggering a special counsel to be appointed.
izzerios

Hearing May Shed Light on What White House Knew About Flynn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-clapper-russia-hearing.html

shared by izzerios on 08 May 17 - No Cached
  • Sally Q. Yates, the former acting attorney general, is scheduled to testify at 2:30 p.m. Monday before a Senate subcommittee.
  • Democrats who hope she will reveal new information about the investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia are likely to be disappointed
  • Ms. Yates alerted the White House to concerns about Mr. Flynn.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States. The White House assured the public that they had not.
  • Yates, a temporary holdover from the administration of President Barack Obama, knew otherwise.
  • misstatements made Mr. Flynn vulnerable to foreign blackmail, because Russian operatives would know that he had misled his bosses.
  • Yates’s account could put pressure on the White House to more fully explain its response. The president ultimately fired Mr. Flynn, but not because of Ms. Yates’s warnings
  • who has said repeatedly that the leaks of classified information are far more significant than the actual connections between Russian officials and the Trump campaign
  • General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration
  • Mr. Flynn’s security clearance was not an issue in his firing. Mr. Trump said he fired him for lying — after Mr. Obama left office.
  • even though it is widely known that the United States eavesdrops on foreign officials, the existence of a wiretap on the Russian ambassador remains classified
  • Yates, who was deputy attorney general during the last year of the Obama administration, can talk about Russian meddling and the government’s public conclusions.
  • “There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper said.
  • The F.B.I. obtained a court-approved wiretap on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent.
anonymous

Under Fire, The NCAA Apologizes And Unveils New Weight Room For Women's Tournament : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ght-room-for-womens-tournament

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Under fire for differences in amenities for its men's and women's basketball tournaments, the NCAA revealed an upgraded weight room Saturday for players participating in the women's college basketball tournament in San Antonio. What had been a single small rack of dumbbells has now been replaced with a larger space with more equipment, including a variety of bars, racks and stands.
  • The facilities were upgraded overnight after the organization was widely criticized by players, coaches and fans alike.
  • NCAA President Mark Emmert said in an interview on Friday with reporters. "This is not something that should have happened, and should we ever conduct a tournament like this again, will ever happen again.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The controversy broke Thursday after a coach from Stanford University posted a photo to social media comparing the men's and women's weight setups.
  • the NCAA had originally intended for women's players to have access to a full weight room once their team had reached the third round of the tournament. The men's teams had access to a full weight room during the entirety of their tournament run.
  • The controversy picked up steam as more disparities were revealed: uninspiring box meals compared to a buffet with steak filets and lobster mac & cheese; swag bags appearing to be a third the size of the men's.
  • the school's men's team were being tested daily with highly accurate PCR COVID-19 tests, while his women's team were receiving antigen tests, which are less accurate. The NCAA later confirmed that the two tournaments are using different testing methods.
  • Reaction to the disparities was swift and negative. Joining the voices of women's players facing the conditions in San Antonio were NBA stars like Steph Curry and Kyrie Irving alongside top college administrators and coaches. "I appreciate that [the NCAA] is working on a solution, but this is unacceptable to begin with," wrote Ross Bjork, the athletics director at Texas A&M, on Twitter. "No one in athletics would have thought this was appropriate if someone would have been consulted."
  • said longtime Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw. "The NCAA had an opportunity to highlight how sport can be a place where we don't just talk about equality we put it on display. To say they dropped the ball would be the understatement of the century."
  • NCAA officials said that despite appearances, the swag bags were equal in value, and that the food quality had been "addressed immediately" with the hotels in San Antonio housing the women's players.
  • As for the differences in testing, NCAA President Mark Emmert said Friday that he had "complete confidence" in the different protocols, pointing to the organization's partnerships with local health organizations in Indianapolis and San Antonio.
yehbru

Miami Shooting: 3 Masked Suspects Opened Fire At Banquet Hall : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...cts-in-a-banquet-hall-shooting

US Miami Banquet Shooting

shared by yehbru on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A manhunt continued into Memorial Day for three masked suspects who opened fire early Sunday morning outside a Miami banquet hall, killing two men and wounding 21 others
  • The video shows three people getting out of the vehicle, one gripping a handgun, while the other two carried what police described as "assault-style rifles."
  • That's when the gunmen sprayed bullets indiscriminately into the crowd, even though police said the assailants had specific targets in mind.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Police said some in the crowd returned fire
  • In all, 23 people were shot. In addition to the two fatalities, three others were in the hospital in critical condition. Because of privacy laws, police were not releasing the names of any of the victims.
  • Sunday's shooting came a little more than a day after a drive-by shooting claimed the life of one person outside another venue about 13 miles (about 21 kilometers) away in the Wynwood area. Six others were injured. Some witnesses likened the scene to a "war zone" after a barrage of dozens of bullets sent people scurrying in the night.
Javier E

Debate Erupts at N.J. Law School After White Student Quotes Racial Slur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Rutgers-law-school-n-word.html

law school censorship slur racial free speech

shared by Javier E on 03 May 21 - No Cached
  • Rutgers officials willing to talk openly about their opposition to the students’ demands have said that the school, as a public institution, has a greater obligation to safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment right to free speech.
  • The head of the journalism department at Central Michigan University was fired last year after using the same slur when quoting from a lawsuit. An Emory University law school professor was placed on administrative leave for more than a year after using the word in discussions with students about race.
  • Any public use of a racial epithet can carry a risk of steep professional consequences.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • “Although we all deplore the use of racist epithets,” said Gary L. Francione, a law professor who also signed the statement, “the idea that a faculty member or law student cannot quote a published court decision that itself quotes a racial or other otherwise objectionable word as part of the record of the case is problematic and implicates matters of academic freedom and free speech.”
  • Among the professors who have signed a statement in support of Professor Bergelson and the student are some of the school’s most prominent faculty members, including John Farmer Jr., a former New Jersey attorney general, and Ronald K. Chen, the state’s onetime public advocate. Both are former deans of Rutgers Law School.
  • rofessor Bergelson, 59, has said that she did not hear the word spoken during the videoconference session, which three students attended after a criminal law class, and would have corrected the student if she had.
  • Professor Bergelson said she was never told about her students’ objections, learning of them only after the petition surfaced April 6, five months later. Within days, she said, she convened a meeting with the criminal law class and other first-year students to discuss the incident and to offer an apology. The student, who has not been publicly identified, also apologized during the meeting.
  • “I don’t think the Law School should have rules that are stricter than the Constitution of the United States,” said Dennis M. Patterson, a professor.
  • Professor Lopez and his co-dean, Kimberly Mutcherson, said in a statement that the discussion underway had nothing to do with “stifling academic freedom, ignoring the First Amendment, or banning words.”
  • Rather, they said, it was about “how best to create classroom environments in which all of our students feel seen, heard, valued and respected.”
  • “He said, um — and I’ll use a racial word, but it’s a quote,” the student said, according to a summary of the incident written by professors. “He says, ‘I’m going to go to Trenton and come back with my [expletive]s.”
  • The controversy began on Oct. 28, after a criminal law class all first-year students are required to take. In discussing the circumstances under which a criminal defendant could be held liable for crimes committed by his co-conspirators, the student repeated a quote from a defendant that appeared in an opinion written by a former State Supreme Court judge, Alan B. Handler.
  • Samantha Harris, the lawyer representing the woman, said the school would be abdicating its responsibility to train lawyers if it encouraged professors to avoid epithets in all contexts.
  • “When you’re an attorney, you hear all kinds of horrible things,” said Ms. Harris, a former fellow at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
  • dam Scales, a Black professor at Rutgers Law who has signed the statement of support for Professor Bergelson, said he opposed even voluntary limits on speech. But he said the number of his colleagues who believe racial epithets should never be spoken, regardless of the context, is “not insignificant.”
  • “You represent people who have said horrible things, who have done horrible things,” she said. “You can’t guarantee a world free of offensive language.”
  • The faculty discussions, held by videoconference, have been fraught, he said.
  • “I can’t imagine a less hospitable setting than a 100-person Zoom call to discuss racism,” he said. “It’s a demoralizing time for everyone involved.”
  • “I certainly grew up in the shadow of this tragedy,” she said. “I am very sensitive to how a word can trigger painful episodes. I would never use the words in class.”Still, she said, other professors and students should be free to make their own choices.
  • Professor Bergelson, who emigrated from Moscow as an adult, said her belief that slurs rooted in racism, bigotry or misogyny should be avoided in class stems from her personal history. Her grandmother, she said, was a journalist who was executed in 1950 by the Stalin regime for associating with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Another relative was executed in 1952.
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