Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Sergeant Bergdahl has been the focus of attacks by Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign

Donald J. Trump, for one, has called the sergeant a “traitor” who should be executed, while Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has vowed to hold hearings if the sergeant is not punished.

No date has been set for Sergeant Bergdahl’s next court hearing, which will be held at Fort Bragg, the Army said. He is currently assigned to the Army’s Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, the site of his preliminary hearing in September.

In the interviews, he told the same story that he had described to the Army’s investigating officer, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, about why he left the outpost: He wanted to cause a crisis by hiking to another base 18 miles away that would allow him to have an audience with a senior Army commander where he could outline what he felt were serious leadership problems endangering his unit.

In the interviews, which were recorded by Mark Boal, the screenwriter and producer, Sergeant Bergdahl said that he realized within 20 minutes of leaving that he had done “something serious.”

General Abrams’s decision came just days after Sergeant Bergdahl was heard for the first time publicly explaining why he left his base, in taped interviews that were broadcast by the podcast “Serial” last week.

Sergeant Bergdahl told Mr. Boal that during his hike he had also decided to surveil Taliban fighters emplacing improvised explosive devices that could be used to kill American soldiers, and to turn that information over to commanders when he arrived at the other base. He said that he “was trying to prove to the world” that he was a top soldier, and that in some sense he even wanted to emulate someone like Jason Bourne, the spy-movie character.

Republicans have asserted that the swap would embolden the Taliban to kidnap other Americans and that it was done without the required notification of Congress. Some Republicans and members of Sergeant Bergdahl’s unit have also asserted that a half-dozen or more American troops died searching for him.

But in his testimony, General Dahl — who was recently promoted from major general to lieutenant general — said that no troops had died specifically searching for Sergeant Bergdahl and that no evidence was found to support claims that he intended to walk to China or India or that he was a Taliban sympathizer.

Both are in bad shape. The last time the group assessed African elephants, in 2008, it listed them as vulnerable. Now it says savanna elephants are endangered, one category worse.

Alfred Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the I.U.C.N.’s recognition of two African elephant species was a little tardy. More than two decades ago, a study of 295 skulls in museums found “enormous differences” between the two types of elephants, he said.

The shy forest elephants have lost nearly nine-tenths of their number in a generation and are now critically endangered — just one step from extinction in the wild.

Dr. Okita said that considering the two elephant species separately was helping to reveal just how bad things are, especially for the forest elephant.

Even during those few decades, the changes were drastic. The population of savanna elephants has fallen at least 60 percent, the team found. Forest elephants have declined by more than 86 percent.

It will be especially hard for forest elephants to bounce back, Dr. Roca added, because of how long they wait to reproduce — six years longer than the savanna elephants.

As they knock down trees and chew up huge amounts of plant material, both forest and savanna elephants change their environments in ways that create new habitat for other species.

Savanna elephants are “thriving,” Dr. Okita said, in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, which overlaps five countries in southern Africa. In some parts of Gabon and the Republic of Congo, forest elephant populations have stabilized or even grown. Where people are protecting elephants against poachers and planning land use carefully, Dr. Okita said, there has been progress

Unlike previous tropical cyclones, the threat from typhoon Koppu is not so much from the wind but from the massive amount of rain. More than a metre of rainfall is forecast in just a few days in Luzon province. That is double what London gets in an entire year. In the south of Luzon, it has brought severe flooding with whole villages under water. But perhaps more dangerous are massive landslides. The fear is that with the ground heavy and saturated with water, whole hillsides could collapse.

Typhoon Koppu made landfall near the town of Casiguran on the main island of Luzon on Sunday morning, bringing winds of close to 200km/h (124mph) and cutting power to vast areas.

A teenager was killed by a fallen tree in Manila which also injured four others. A concrete wall also collapsed in the town of Subic, northwest of Manila, killing a 62-year-old woman, officials said.

dawn on Monday, wind speeds were down to 150 km/h (93 mph) in the northern town of Santiago, according to the state weather service.But floodwaters are preventing even military vehicles reaching many of the worst-hit villages, and rescuers report a shortage of boats."We haven't reached many areas. About 60% to 70% of our town is flooded, some as deep as three metres," said Henry Velarde, vice mayor of Jaen, a town in Nueva Ecija province."There are about 20,000 residents in isolated areas that need food and water."

calling him "cruel" and a "barbarian".

But he said those criticising him had failed to understand that the idea behind the hunt was to target an old, non-breeding male rhino that was endangering the rest of the herd.

Mr Knowlton said his name had been posted on Facebook and threats had been made to harm both him and his children.

Namibia issues three hunting permits per year, and this is the first time an auction has been held outside the southern African nation. However, tens of thousands of people signed online petitions against the auction, and animal rights groups condemned as "perverse" claims that the hunt was really about conservation.

The money raised from the 11 January auction will go to the Namibian government and will be earmarked for conservation projects, according to the Dallas Safari Club.

"It takes money for these animals to exist. A lot of people don't recognise that," club executive Ben Carter told NPR radio.

Experts say that growing demand for rhino horn in Asia is driving up instances of poaching.

Horns can sell for around $65,000 a kilogram

Merkel remained a captive for the first 35 years of her life, biding her time. As an adult, she lived in East Berlin, riding an elevated train beside the barricade whose 1961 construction she recalled as the first political memory of her life. When it fell in 1989, she gathered the qualities cultivated as a necessity in the East—patience, blandness, intellectual rigor and an inconspicuous but ferocious drive—and changed not only her life but the course of history.

The year 2015 marked the start of Merkel’s 10th year as Chancellor of a united Germany and the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades.

The first was thrust upon her—the slow-rolling crisis over the euro, the currency shared by 19 nations, all of which were endangered by the default of a single member, Greece. Its resolution came at the signature plodding pace that so tries the patience of Germans that they have made it a verb: Merkeling.

The second was a thunderclap. In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it, testing the resilience of an alliance formed to avoid repeating the kind of violence tearing asunder the Middle East by working together. That arrangement had worked well enough that it raised an existential question of its own, now being asked by the richest country in Europe: What does it mean to live well?

Merkel had her answer: “In many regions war and terror prevail. States disintegrate. For many years we have read about this. We have heard about it. We have seen it on TV. But we had not yet sufficiently understood that what happens in Aleppo and Mosul can affect Essen or Stuttgart. We have to face that now.” For her, the refugee decision was a galvanizing moment in a career that was until then defined by caution and avoidance of anything resembling drama. Analysts called it a jarring departure from form. But it may also have been inevitable, given how Angela Merkel feels about walls.

It’s up for debate whether Trump’s interjections on tax policy will ultimately harm the party or save Republicans from politically dangerous choices they would later come to regret. But the more fundamental question is whether Trump actually shares the party’s desire for a bold and comprehensive tax overhaul, as opposed to a quicker and easier tax cut. If he does, the president may have to start helping Republicans make the case for some tax tradeoffs, instead of just nipping them in the bud.

Now, he informs us, he’s “a wartime president”—clearly re-imaging himself as a leader who, like FDR, will repel the Asian invader who has assaulted our shores. Indeed, “I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought, and it’ll be a complete victory.”

The compulsion to lie so routinely that objective truth loses all meaning. The proliferation of inconsistent statements and behaviors dictated by his needs of the moment. The incapacity to think beyond the immediate or learn from his own mistakes. The congenital failure to assess the consequences of his actions in new or complex situations.

The need always to be right. The refusal to acknowledge error. The inability to brook criticism or critics. The compulsion to conform his ever-shifting sense of the world to satisfy his innermost cravings.

Never mind that Trump’s administration stripped the NSC of its global-health arm, established to fight global pandemics—a loss that Dr. Fauci bemoaned. In its place Trump has continued to tout phantom miracle cures. Yet he is strangely reluctant to invoke his very real authority to accelerate production of essential medical supplies.

With luck, Trump’s self-preservation instinct will occasionally compel him to do something right

Will it work? As Bill Kristol notes: “If you’re willing to go further than any predecessor in deploying federal resources, unembarrassed to take advantage of disinformation and misinformation, and eager to collaborate with foreign powers, then your chances of victory simply can’t be ruled out.”

it takes a special man to so blithely obliterate two months of willful lies and disinformation which endangered the lives of several million Americans amidst billions— or trillions—of dollars in economic devastation. But then, Trump is very special indeed.

that sentence may be the most frightening Trump ever uttered: It is so transparently false, so shamefully self-contradictory, so baldly contemptuous of freshly-curated reality, that it lays bare the infinitude of his crippling pathology—and, one worries, our own.

The allowance for surgical masks made more sense when scientists initially thought the virus was spread by large droplets. But a growing body of research shows that it is spread by minuscule viral particles that can linger in the air as long as 16 hours.

A properly fitted N95 respirator will block 95% of tiny air particles – down to 0.3 micron in diameter, which are the hardest to catch – from reaching the wearer’s face. But surgical masks, designed to protect patients from a surgeon’s respiratory droplets, aren’t effective at blocking particles smaller than 100 microns, according to the mask maker 3M. A Covid-19 particle is smaller than 0.1 micron, according to South Korean researchers, and can pass through a surgical mask.

said Katie Scott, an RN at the hospital and vice-president of the Michigan Nurses Association. Employees who otherwise treat Covid-19 patients receive surgical masks.

A 2013 Chinese study found that twice as many health workers, 17%, contracted a respiratory illness if they wore only a surgical mask while treating sick patients, compared to 7% who continuously used an N95, per a study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Earlier this month, the national Teamsters Union reported that 64% of its healthcare worker membership – which includes people working in nursing homes, hospitals and other medical facilities – could not get N95 masks.

The CDC’s recent advice on surgical masks contrasts with another CDC web page that says surgical masks do “NOT provide the wearer with a reliable level of protection from inhaling smaller airborne particles and is not considered respiratory protection”.

That matches CDC protocol, but leaves nurses like Scott – who has read the research on surgical masks versus N95s – feeling exposed.

At Michigan Medicine, employees are not allowed to bring in their own protective equipment, according to a complaint the nurses’ union filed with the Michigan Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration. Scott said friends and family have mailed her personal protective equipment (PPE), including N95 masks. It sits at home while she cares for patients.

“To think I’m going to work and am leaving this mask at home on my kitchen table, because the employer won’t let me wear it,”

News reports from Kentucky to Florida to California have documented nurses facing retaliation or pressure to step down when they’ve brought their own N95 respirators.

In New York, the center of the US’s outbreak, nurses across the state report receiving surgical masks, not N95s, to wear when treating Covid-19 patients, according to a court affidavit submitted by Lisa Baum, the lead occupational health and safety representative for the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA).

White House to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean war-era law that allows the federal government, in an emergency, to direct private business in the production and distribution of goods.

provide health care workers with protective equipment, including N95s masks, when they interact with patients suspected to have Covid-19.

“Nurses are not afraid to care for our patients if we have the right protections,” said Bonnie Castillo, the executive director of National Nurses United, “but we’re not martyrs sacrificing our lives because our government and our employers didn’t do their job.”

Ape trafficking is a little-known corner of the illicit wildlife trade, a global criminal enterprise that hauls in billions of dollars. But unlike the thriving business in elephant ivory, rhino horns, tiger bone wine or pangolin scales, ape smuggling involves live animals — some of the most endangered, intelligent and sensitive animals on Earth.

Apes are big business — a gorilla baby can cost as much as $250,000 — but who exactly is buying these animals is often as opaque as the traffickers’ identity.

n central African towns (as elsewhere in the world), many chimpanzees are kept as pets. Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, who lives in a riverside mansion in Kinshasa, the capital, has a large chimp locked up in a cage.

But poaching an ape is a serious crime in Congo, and nonprofit wildlife groups have been assisting the Congolese authorities in prosecuting offenders.

Jason Ward, whose popular birdwatching series Birds of North America features Christian Cooper, decides to view the injustice the same way a bird would see the world: migrating through spaces, stopping at places that benefit them and passing over ones that offer them nothing.

These are defense mechanisms that Ward and many other black nature-lovers have to employ when out in the wild – lest a situation turn sticky and they have to answer questions from a suspecting police officer. In short, in a battle of he-said-she-said, most black people know who the burden of proof falls on.

Lanham goes back to his nine rules to exemplify this. When he considers going on a specific trip, alongside weighing up the many universally good factors (nature’s beauty) as well as the bad (the possibility that he will get stung by a wasp or step on an ants’ nest), he also has to make other decisions, mostly based on his safety. “I have to make decisions about where I go, when I go, who I go with, what people will be thinking of me when I am there. I need to make sure I am wearing the right thing, that my car registration is in the right place so when I am stopped, I am not suspected of harboring something,” he says. “I have some complex equation that I have to figure out several times a fucking day.”

“I am tired of the narrative of black bodies being harmed in nature and in the outdoors,” she says. “From a practical perspective, we all pay taxes on these public lands and so to enjoy them is an exercise of our citizenship. It is what being American is all about,” she says.

“When I grew up, there was no one I knew in the natural world studying animals who looked like I did, at least not on television. And yet, still my love persisted,” he says.

In the weeks and months ahead, our journalism will investigate the prospects for a new green settlement. We will showcase the big thinkers and protagonists and amplify the arguments for authorities everywhere to consider as they lead us out of coronavirus.

You've read 66 articles in the last six months. Our journalism is open to all because we believe everyone deserves access to factual information, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. If you can afford to, we hope you will consider supporting our journalism today.

At about 4 a.m. on the day of the shooting, Keegan was awakened by "loud music" in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn, where he was staying. He asked Ellison to turn the music down and Ellison refused

Keegan got dressed, grabbed a semiautomatic handgun and went to the hotel’s front desk to complain to a clerk

Ellison and Keegan argued, and Keegan said Ellison punched him in the face several times, according to the report. Keegan shot Ellison once, striking him in the chest, the affidavit said.

An autopsy revealed no injuries to Ellison’s hands that would be indicative of him punching Keegan

A local community organization condemned the shooting as an act of racism. Southern Oregon Black Leaders, Activists, and Community Coalition released a statement expressing outrage and saying “racism continues to endanger Black bodies and Black lives.”

The case has also drawn the attention of civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who raised the prospect of hate crime charges against Keegan on Twitter.

In a Facebook post, O'Meara said Ellison was killed "because the suspect chose to bring a gun with him and chose to use it, 100% on him, not the poor young man that was murdered."

According to the Oregon Department of Justice, “A hate crime happens when somebody intentionally uses offensive physical contact, threatens physical injury or threatens to cause damage to the property of another person because of their actual or perceived race, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.” 

Keegan is also charged with first-degree manslaughter, reckless endangering and unlawful carrying or concealment of a firearm and is being held without bond.

Ashland is a city of about 21,000. Its population is 92.5% white and 1.4% Black, according to the U.S. Census.

Julie Akins, the city’s newly elected mayor, called on residents to “take stock of systemic racism which continues to cause the death of our brothers and sisters of color” in a statement posted to Facebook. 

“There is no other way of speaking about this but bluntly: white supremacy and racism is embedded in language, culture, and the zeitgeist of the United States and every community therein. Until we face this reality, apologize for it and make amends – these acts of violence will continue to bind us to our historic and continued oppression.”

He has insisted that the 12 jurors were given “all of the evidence” and were free to pursue additional charges.

As is customary in the recording of Grand Jury proceedings, juror deliberations and prosecutor recommendations and statements were not recorded, as they are not evidence,

The audio files do not include statements or recommendations from prosecutors about which charges they think should be brought against the officers. Mr. Cameron has said that jurors were told that the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor were justified in their actions. Ultimately, the jurors indicted a former officer last week on three charges of endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors by firing into their home during a raid of her apartment in March, but did not charge either of the officers who shot her.

Grand jurors are given broad powers to request evidence, call witnesses and determine which charges to pursue, but prosecutors often closely guide the jurors, presenting them with certain charges and telling them about their own roles. The process almost always remains secret.

grand jurors indicted Brett Hankison, a former detective, on three counts of “wanton endangerment” last week, saying Mr. Hankison had recklessly fired his gun during the raid after Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend — who has said he thought intruders were entering the apartment — shot an officer in the leg.

Mr. Hankison’s rounds did not hit anyone, investigators have said, but some of them flew into an apartment behind Ms. Taylor’s, leading to the three charges.

Detective Myles Cosgrove, who the F.B.I. said fired the shot that killed Ms. Taylor, described a disorienting scene of flashing lights as officers breached the door and seemed to suggest uncertainty about exactly what happened.

But, he added, “It’s like a surreal thing. If you told me I didn’t do something at that time, I’d believe you. If you told me I did do something, I’d probably believe you, too.”

Detective Cosgrove said he also saw a shadow of a person, a “larger than normal human shadow,” when they raided the apartment and he saw flashing lights.

The first witness was an investigator for the Attorney General’s office, who presented photos and videos of the scene, including the body camera videos of three officers who arrived after the shots were fired

Grand jurors asked whether Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, had been named in the search warrant (he had not), what exactly the officers saw when the apartment door opened, and whether the officers executing the warrant were aware that the police had already found Jamarcus Glover, who was the target of an illegal drug investigation.

Mr. Glover was Ms. Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, and he was in custody by the time they raided her apartment. At times, the jurors’ questions suggested they were skeptical of what they were being shown: one asked about the time stamps on the video. Another asked why they had not seen the room where the gun was found; the investigator said that would be shown in a different video.

Grand jurors heard at least two Louisville police officers who were at the raid on Ms. Taylor’s apartment say the group knocked and announced their presence several times before breaking down the door, according to a recording of the proceedings released on Friday.Those accounts, which have been questioned by several of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors and her boyfriend, were included among roughly 15 hours of audio filed by the attorney general on Friday, which includes interviews heard by the grand jury over several days last week.

The unidentified neighbor yelled at them, “something about leave her alone, there was some girl there,” Detective Cosgrove said in an interview with police investigators last month that was played for the grand jury.

He said officers were outside knocking for 90 seconds, and that the volume escalated from “gentle knocking” to “forceful pounding” to pounding while yelling “police.”

Detective Nobles, who held the battering ram that broke through Ms. Taylor’s door, said he stood at the door, knocking and announcing himself as police for one or two minutes before he used the battering ram to force his way into Ms. Taylor’s apartment. His interview was also played for grand jurors. He said it took three knocks with the battering ram to break down the door completely.The first blow hit the handle, he said. The second broke the door, but left it still on the hinges. The third broke down the door completely. When he entered, Mr. Nobles said it was “pitch black,” and that Sgt. John Mattingly, one of the officers who shot Ms. Taylor, was quickly shot in the leg after the team entered the building.

In previous interviews with The Times, 11 of 12 of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors said they never heard the police identify themselves. One neighbor said he heard the group say “Police,” just once.

Grand jurors were played recordings of radio calls from Mr. Hankison, the detective who fired blindly from outside the apartment and has been charged with wanton endangerment, as well as 911 calls that came in after the shooting began.

The calls suggest that Mr. Hankison, who was fired after the shooting for violating department procedure, believed that Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly had been wounded by someone with an “A.R.” who was “barricaded” inside the apartment. Mr. Hankison’s reference to an “A.R.” on the call appears to be a reference to either an assault rile or the AR-15, a type of a military-style semiautomatic rifle.

The only charges brought by the grand jury were three counts of “wanton endangerment in the first degree” against Mr. Hankison for his actions during the raid.

Under Kentucky law, a person commits that crime when he or she “wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person,” and does so “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Other states may use terms like “reckless endangerment” for an equivalent offense.

But the charges against Mr. Hankison are not for killing Ms. Taylor. None of the 10 shots he fired are known to have struck her. Instead, the Kentucky attorney general said the former detective was charged by the grand jury because the shots he fired had passed through Ms. Taylor’s apartment walls into a neighboring apartment, endangering three people there.

The crime is a Class D felony in Kentucky, which means it can carry a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine on conviction for each count.

A person can be guilty of wanton endangerment even if they did not intend to harm anyone or to commit a crime; it is sufficient to recklessly disregard the peril that one’s actions create.

Mr. Hankison was fired from the force. During the raid, he fired into her apartment from outside, through a sliding glass patio door and a window that were covered with blinds, in violation of a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight.

The name Breonna Taylor has echoed across the nation for months as demonstrators demanded the police be held accountable for her death.

The police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in May after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee, brought renewed attention to deadly episodes involving the police, including Ms. Taylor’s death, and fueled Black Lives Matter protests that persisted throughout the summer.

In September, when the grand jury announced no charges against the officers who killed Ms. Taylor, protesters poured into the streets of Louisville with renewed strength and anger, demanding stronger charges. The protesters called for all three officers, who are white, to be held to account for Ms. Taylor’s death. Ms. Taylor’s family, too, has pleaded for justice, pushing for criminal charges against the officers. Ms. Taylor’s case has also been the center of campaigns from several celebrities and athletes, some of whom have dedicated their seasons to keeping a spotlight on her case.

It’s the height of American exceptionalism that we are where we are. I have family in other parts of the world where health-care workers and vulnerable elderly people are begging to get the vaccine. And here, we’re sitting on stockpiles and begging people to take the vaccine.

Do you think verification and mandates could work in the U.S. with our notions of freedom, individual liberty?

I think we need to reframe freedom here, right? I don’t agree with the statement that some people have been putting out about vaccines, that this is just about personal choice. You can say that maybe eating unhealthy food is your personal choice. But in this case, nobody should have the right to carry an infectious disease that is able to endanger others and potentially kill them. I mean, I’ve got two little kids. I’m very upset thinking about how there are other people who are choosing not to be vaccinated. And as a result, they are choosing to endanger our children. I’m sure they’re not trying to do this intentionally, but that is the end result.

I hope that people see that by not being vaccinated, they’re actually impeding societal progress too. They’re making it harder for kids to get back in school. They’re making it harder for the economy to come back. And why are we allowed to make that kind of personal choice when we do not allow people to make the personal choice to go drunk driving?

How much do you worry about hesitancy, not just around the vaccine, but mistrust of science and mistrust of public health even?

I worry about this a lot. You’ve seen what happened in Tennessee with the vaccine director being fired for trying to promote covid vaccines to adolescents. And even more disturbing, I think is that now, Tennessee health officials are being prohibited from promoting vaccines to children. Not just covid vaccines, but all other childhood immunizations. I mean, public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been before.

Lauri Myllyvirta, the centre’s lead analyst, said this was equivalent to about three months of global emissions. “These plants, if built and operated, would have emitted around 250-280 megatonnes of CO2 a year, which is roughly equal to the total emissions of Spain. Assuming an operating life of 35 years, the cumulative emissions would amount to 10 gigatonnes, or a year of China’s emissions, or three months of global emissions,”

there is evidence that 40% of the heavy equipment at new coal plants outside China and India comes from China

With coal now seemingly in terminal decline, climate activists are turning their sights towards oil, gas, and domestic coal power in China and India.

The immediate impact is likely to be felt in the countries that rely most heavily on Chinese funding for new coal projects: Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Pakistan

Depending on implementation, other possible beneficiaries of this announcement could be the rhinos, giraffes, cheetahs and other endangered species at Zimbabwe’s Hwange national park, where two Chinese companies had hoped to extract the fossil fuel.

Another positive knock-on effect would be to push Japan to follow suit. The government in Tokyo has already taken steps in this direction but left a door open for financing by its private-sector institutions. Their geopolitical reason had been that they did not want to leave China as the only option for regional energy projects.

Despite the uncertainties over implementation, Myllyvirta said China’s announcement would accelerate decarbonisation. “Countries now know that going forward, there is no financing on the table for coal. That should clarify things a lot. Chinese delegates are going to visit Indonesia or Vietnam or Pakistan and they will be saying, ‘We don’t do coal any more, but we can help with clean energy.’ That will make a difference.”

Close to 58% of its power comes from the country’s 1,058 coal plants, almost half the total in the entire the world. This makes China far the biggest carbon emitter, pumping more than one out of every four gigatonnes that enter the atmosphere.

oughly half the country’s plants will have to close if the government 2060 net-zero target is to be achieved.

“It’s completely unacceptable to spy on journalists,” said Carlos Dada, the founder and director of El Faro. “It endangers our sources, it limits our work and it also endangers our families.”

An El Faro journalist’s phone had been reinfected with the spyware over 40 times, the most persistent hacking attempt by Pegasus yet to be discovered.

Revelations that Pegasus software has been used to unjustly spy in El Salvador may not come as a complete surprise, but there is no match to our outrage.”

El Salvador’s government denied responsibility, and a spokesperson with NSO Group would not say whether Pegasus spyware had been provided to El Salvador’s governments, past or present.

“The government of El Salvador is investigating the possible use of Pegasus,”

a prized Israeli technology company whose spyware has long been under scrutiny for its ability to capture all activity on a smartphone — including a user’s keystrokes, location data, sound and video recordings, photos, contacts and encrypted information — and for mounting allegations of misuse by repressive governments.

The spokesman added that the company does not know who the targets of its customers are, but that NSO works to ensure that its tools are used only for authorized purposes.

The Biden administration blacklisted NSO Group in November, stating that the company had knowingly supplied spyware used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” the phones of human rights activists, journalists and others.

After the American government blacklisted NSO Group, the company promised that Pegasus was only licensed to governments with good human rights records.

But in December it was announced that the iPhones of 11 American Embassy employees working in Uganda had been hacked using Pegasus spyware.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for NSO Group, who declined to provide their name, maintained the company only provides its software to legitimate intelligence agencies and to law enforcement agencies to fight criminals and terrorists.

In August it was revealed that Pegasus had been secretly installed on the smartphones of at least three dozen journalists, activists and business executives across the world, including close associates of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Israeli military has also been criticized for its human rights violations at home and abroad.

El Salvador has been criticized for intimidating and censoring local media.

El Salvador’s president, Mr. Bukele, has come under withering criticism from the United States government and rights groups for using the military to interfere with the legislature and to suspend Supreme Court judges and the attorney general.

Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.

Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories.

Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong

Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, “might be dangerous to the health of our democracy,” because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving.

The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong

He insisted that human history provides “stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,” which “look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.” He was interested in “the many might-have-beens of history,” including “felicitous and surprising escapes from disaster.

Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, “history is nothing if not farfetched.”

He invented the term “possibilism,” meant to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.” In his lifetime, one of many such outcomes was the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which almost no one anticipated.

Shifting Involvements—a small masterpiece that illuminates the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and protest movements of diverse kinds. Hirschman emphasized that human beings are often choosing between private and public life, and thus between the different forms of happiness that are associated with each of them. He described “pendular motions of collective behavior,” in which people swing from happiness to disappointment in one kind of activity, and then to the other. For example, the disappointments and frustrations of the student rebellions of the late 1960s encouraged a return to private life in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the highly influential idea that the problem of collective action has a kind of invariable, ahistorical “logic,” Hirschman drew attention to the immense importance of history and timing as, in Adelman’s words, “people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls”—and vice versa.

The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in his mid-seventies, was an outgrowth of the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, and it speaks directly to our current debates. Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much conservative thinking—and its close connection, in its rhetoric, to arguments that have been made for hundreds of years. Indeed, conservative rhetoric is the book’s target, perhaps above all in the person of Edmund Burke,

But if The Passions and the Interests was his favorite, and Exit, Voice, and Loyalty his most important, there can be no question about his most characteristic: The Rhetoric of Reaction. The sustained attack on intransigence, the bias in favor of hope, the delight in paradox, the insistence on the creative power of doubt—all these prove a lot of people wrong, not just Hamlet.

According to its latest energy plan, the government aims to begin construction on about three dozen hydroelectric projects across the country, which together will have more than twice the hydropower capacity of the United States.

“The project will be good for the local government, but it will be a disaster for the local residents,”

They will lose their culture, their traditions and their livelihood, and we will be left with a placid, lifeless reservoir.”

“Why can’t China have just one river that isn’t destroyed by humans?” asked Wang Yongchen,

Part of the reason may have been the fact that the slaves all had to remain at Mount Vernon until Martha’s death. There was no opportunity for newspaper stories of an exodus to freedom. At least as important, Martha Custis Washington made no attempt to publicize the will. She did not agree with her husband’s decision. Even if she had been inclined to free her slaves, she lacked the power. Her first husband’s will had stipulated that all his slaves were to become the property of their surviving Custis descendants -- Martha’s four grandchildren.

A year later, Martha freed all Washington’s slaves unilaterally, and allowed them to leave Mount Vernon. She acted on the advice of Bushrod Washington, her husband’s nephew, who had become a Supreme Court justice. Martha had told him the freed blacks were becoming angry over the long delay in their emancipation.