Tag Archives: european

It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

by TedPmuzswto Posted on December 25, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Go to war and every politician will thank you, and they’ll continue to do so—with monuments and statues, war museums and military cemeteries—long after you’re dead. But who thanks those who refused to fight, even in wars that most people later realized were tragic mistakes? Consider the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now widely recognized as igniting an ongoing disaster. America’s politicians still praise Iraq War veterans to the skies, but what senator has a kind word to say about the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched and demonstrated before the invasion was even launched to try to stop our soldiers from risking their lives in the first place?

What brings all this to mind is an apparently heartening exception to the rule of celebrating war-makers and ignoring peacemakers. A European rather than an American example, it turns out to be not quite as simple as it first appears. Let me explain.

December 25th will be the 100th anniversary of the famous Christmas Truce of the First World War. You probably know the story: after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, fighting on the Western Front came to a spontaneous halt. British and German soldiers stopped shooting at each other and emerged into the no-man’s-land between their muddy trenches in France and Belgium to exchange food and gifts.

Continue Reading »

Read the article: 

It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, Brita, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

by OpalSkillen Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Almost no one wants to see Scott Panetti put to death. Conservatives such as Ron Paul and Ken Cuccinelli and evangelical leaders have spoken up on his behalf. The European Union has protested his pending execution, which is temporarily on hold thanks to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Even some of Panetti’s victims don’t believe he should be killed by the state.

The Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot execute a mentally ill person who lacks a rational understanding of the nature of his punishment. Panetti fits that standard: He insists that Texas wants to kill him to prevent him from preaching the Gospel. And yet the state has gone to great lengths to ensure that Panetti gets the needle. Right up until December 3, when the 5th Circuit temporarily halted Panetti’s execution with hours to spare, the state has deployed legal gamesmanship that seems more appropriate for patent litigation than a death penalty case.

Panetti’s schizophrenia has been apparent since 1978, when he was 20 years old. By 1986, the Social Security Administration had declared him disabled by his brain disorder and therefore eligible for federal benefits. Six years later, after a series of hospitalizations and bizarre incidents—in one case he buried demon-possessed furniture in his yard—Panetti shot and killed his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado.

His criminal case was a theater of the absurd from the outset, thanks to a series of puzzling legal decisions by Texas and federal judges. It began when Kerr County District Judge Stephen Ables, still on the bench today, permitted Panetti to represent himself at trial over the objections of the state. He showed up wearing what a friend of the family later described as a 1920s-era cowboy outfit: “It looked idiotic. He wore a large hat and a huge bandana. He wore weird boots with stirrups, the pants were tucked in at the calf,” she testified in an affidavit. “He looked like a clown. I had a feeling that Scott had no perception how he was coming across.” Thus clad, standing before the jury, Panetti called himself “Sarge” and rambled incoherently for hours with little interruption from the judge—who did, however, argue with the defendant over the relevance of belt buckles and whether he could discuss the TV show Quincy. As part of his defense, Panetti issued a stream-of-consciousness description of his crime, from Sarge’s perspective:

Fall. Sonja, Joe, Amanda, kitchen. Joe bayonet, not attacking. Sarge not afraid, not threatened. Sarge not angry, not mad. Sarge, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom.

Sarge is gone. No more Sarge. Sonja and Birdie. Birdie and Sonja. Joe, Amanda lying kitchen, here, there, blood. No, leave. Scott, remember exactly what Sarge did. Shot the lock. Walked in the kitchen. Sonja, where’s Birdie? Sonja here. Joe, bayonet, door, Amanda. Boom, boom, blood, blood.

Demons. Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, Lord, oh, you.

Continue Reading »

Link: 

Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

by Juli34Bfuc Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last night I got around to reading George Packer’s long New Yorker profile of German chancellor Angela Merkel, and it turned out to be a surprisingly absorbing piece. Unfortunately, that’s due more to Packer’s skill as a writer than to anything he ends up revealing about Merkel. In fact, the truly astonishing thing is that he manages to write 15,000 words about Merkel without really enlightening us in any serious way about what makes her tick. Apparently she’s really that enigmatic. Here, for example, is what he says about why a sober-minded East German chemist, who had never before displayed any political ambitions, suddenly decided to visit a political group that had formed after the Berlin Wall fell to ask if she could help out with anything:

Merkel’s decision to enter politics is the central mystery of an opaque life. She rarely speaks publicly about herself and has never explained her decision. It wasn’t a long-term career plan—like most Germans, she didn’t foresee the abrupt collapse of Communism and the opportunities it created. But when the moment came, and Merkel found herself single and childless in her mid-thirties—and laboring in an East German institution with no future—a woman of her ambition must have grasped that politics would be the most dynamic realm of the new Germany.

Well, OK then. Packer reports that Merkel is smart, methodical, genuinely unpretentious, and “as lively and funny in private as she is publicly soporific.” But her political views? Apparently she barely has any:

Throughout her Chancellorship, Merkel has stayed as close as possible to German public opinion….“The Chancellor’s long-term view is about two weeks,” a Merkel adviser says. The pejorative most often used against her is “opportunist.” When I asked Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Green leader, whether Merkel had any principles, she paused, then said, “She has a strong value of freedom, and everything else is negotiable.”

….“People say there’s no project, there’s no idea,” the senior official told me. “It’s just a zigzag of smart moves for nine years.” But, he added, “She would say that the times are not conducive to great visions.”

….The most daunting challenge of Merkel’s time in office has been the euro-zone crisis, which threatened to bring down economies across southern Europe and jeopardized the integrity of the euro….Merkel’s decisions during the crisis reflect the calculations of a politician more mindful of her constituency than of her place in history. When Greek debt was revealed to be at critical levels, she was slow to commit German taxpayers’ money to a bailout fund, and in 2011 she blocked a French and American proposal for coördinated European action.

….Throughout the crisis, Merkel buried herself in the economic details and refused to get out in front of what German voters—who tended to regard the Greeks as spendthrift and lazy—would accept, even if delaying prolonged the ordeal and, at key moments from late 2011 through the summer of 2012, threatened the euro itself. The novelist and journalist Peter Schneider compared her to a driver in foggy weather: “You only see five metres, not one hundred metres, so it’s better you are very careful, you don’t say too much, you act from step to step. No vision at all.”

It’s kind of scary, but all wrapped up in a hazy ball of pragmatism that’s hard to get a handle on. Take the eurozone crisis, for example. Over the past five years, Germany has seemed almost spitefully hellbent on destroying the European economy simply because Germans disapprove of the spendthrift southerners responsible for the mess—all the time self-righteously refusing to admit that they themselves played a role that was every bit as lucrative and self-serving in the whole debacle. Because of this, the European economy is now headed for its third recession since 2008.

Does Merkel share this view of things? Or does she recognize what needs to be done but simply doesn’t have either the will or the courage to challenge German public opinion? That’s never clear. And yes, I guess I find that a little scary. This is why I don’t quite get the comparison Packer makes between Merkel and Obama. Initially, he says, Merkel was put off by Obama’s lofty rhetoric:

As she got to know Obama better, though, she came to appreciate more the ways in which they were alike—analytical, cautious, dry-humored, remote. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me that “the President thinks there’s not another leader he’s worked closer with than her.” He added, “They’re so different publicly, but they’re actually quite similar.” (Ulrich joked, “Obama is Merkel in a better suit.”)

During the Ukraine crisis, the two have consulted frequently on the timing of announcements and been careful to keep the American and the European positions close. Obama is the antithesis of the swaggering leaders whom Merkel specializes in eating for breakfast. On a trip to Washington, she met with a number of senators, including the Republicans John McCain, of Arizona, and Jeff Sessions, of Alabama. She found them more preoccupied with the need to display toughness against America’s former Cold War adversary than with events in Ukraine themselves. (McCain called Merkel’s approach “milquetoast.”) To Merkel, Ukraine was a practical problem to be solved. This mirrored Obama’s view.

Personality-wise, perhaps, Obama and Merkel are similar. “No drama” could apply equally well to either of them. But politically? I don’t see it. Obama doesn’t strike me as someone with no vision who hews as close as possible to public opinion. It’s true that he can’t always get what he wants, and obviously he faces the same constraints as any politician in a democratic system—especially one who presides over a divided government. But certainly his broad political views are clear enough, as are his political sympathies. He hasn’t been able to change the course of American politics, but not because he wouldn’t like to. He just hasn’t been able to.

So: who is Angela Merkel? After 15,000 words, I still don’t feel like I know. Is she really just someone who’s skilled at keeping her political coalition together and doesn’t much care about anything more than that? It’s a little hard to believe. And yet, that sure seems to be the main takeaway from all this.

Link to original: 

The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

by ArleenFriese Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The rat king is a haunting image from European folklore: a bevy of rats, tangled together by their tails and thought to grow together as a bunch. (Rat king characters also make appearances in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics and the animated show Adventure Time.)

Then there’s RATKING, a left-field hip-hop group that’s one of the most exciting recent acts to come out of New York City. The mythical metaphor is apt. In an age of hypersleek solo rappers like Drake and Kanye, the three-member posse celebrates the grime of the streets, the everyday beauty of faces passing on the subway, the steam rising from manholes.

Together they’re a motley crew, with a lot of growing left to do. The group formed in 2011 and has released two albums since: 2012’s Wiki93 EP and the 2014 full-length So It Goes. The first version of the 2012 EP, before they signed to British label XL, was titled 1993. That’s the birth year of frontman Wiki, a.k.a. Patrick Morales, 21. Hakeem “Hak” Lewis, Wiki’s rapping partner and childhood friend, is a year younger; Eric Adiele, 33, who goes by “Sporting Life,” is the group’s producer.

If you’ve never heard of RATKING, you couldn’t do better than to start with their single “Canal.” The track distills RATKING down to its essence, and the result is like nothing else in contemporary hip-hop. Sporting Life’s lumbering, explosive production hits you first. “I wanted it to be like Dipset meets Three 6 Mafia,” he says, listing some of the group’s canonical influences. “Shit Juelz Santana woulda spit over, Juicy J, Project Pat. But flipping those, running them through weird delays and effects.”

Then come the verses, paeans to Manhattan’s Canal Street—home of pawn shops, hawkers, and travelers of all colors and nationalities, mashed together as densely as Sporting Life’s production. (Or a rat king.) Taken together, the effect is visceral. You can almost smell the streets. Wiki, with his two missing front teeth, shouts over the din of a dirty metropolis, buoyed by the quieter, more poetic Hak’s reflections on his “17 summers” growing up in the city.

Shot in 16mm, the accompanying music video is the perfect complement. Celluloid film isn’t like digital—there’s no previewing or deleting, so what comes back from the lab can often be surprising. And that’s the beauty of the medium, as the video makes clear in an instant. Utterly unpredictable film burns—the washing in and out of colors at the ends of a reel—cut quickly between stunning Technicolor observations of daily life in New York City. Clothes wave from windows; fish stare back from Chinatown aquariums; all types of people walk down sidewalks and alleyways, but we only ever see them from the back. It’s the same teeming city where, by chance one day, Sporting Life watched a teenage Wiki freestyle in a Lower East Side park and approached him on a whim. The song celebrates the vitality of a place that people love to complain has strayed from its creative roots. Wiki pushes back defiantly on his bridge: “Think the city has let up? / Get up, wake up! / Open your eyes, wake up!”

The exhortation is so energetically earnest that never for a moment do you think that this is “rap with a positive message,” proselytizing in any way. All it is is a heartfelt reflection on a world these artists know firsthand. When I ask the group (minus Hak, absent to deal with weed charges he picked up on tour in North Carolina) about their attitude toward politics, the answer is in that mode. “Me personally, I don’t know everything that’s going on, all the current events,” Wiki says. “And I feel like you should be informed as fuck before you start throwing around opinions. But if there’s something in front of you…”

Sporting Life chimes in: “If it comes into your world, hopefully you say something about it, you have an opinion about it.”

Hakeem “Hak” Lewis at Lollapalooza 2014. Daniel Patlán/Flickr

This is the spirit most memorably on display in their track “Remove Ya,” where over a grimy, UK-influenced beat, Wiki and Hak trade bars about facing police harassment just for being teenagers in New York. Half-Puerto Rican, half-Irish Wiki riffs off the well-circulated Nation recording of an NYPD officer stopping and frisking a guy (“for being a fucking mutt“): “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah, we some mutts.”

It’s a telling hook for a song that could easily carry so much anger and resentment. RATKING’s world is not so much a battle between good and evil as a constant assertion of life in all its wonder against the forces of boredom, bureaucracy, and routine. It’s a party where everyone’s invited, and the only foul is being dull.

In that way, the music is stridently youthful, which makes sense. Two out of three of the band’s members still live with their parents, after all. So how have the folks reacted to their sons’ remarkable success, their multiple national tours before they were old enough to drink legally? “My mom’s definitely been really cool,” Wiki says. “She’s always been very supportive of me in the arts,” he says, emphasizing the words self-mockingly. Okay, but what about all the rhymes about smoking weed and getting drunk? “She knows that I smoke weed. She knows that I drink,” he says. “She probably doesn’t understand fully…” They laugh. “But I would never filter, you know?” Wiki goes on. “In regular life, I filter more than in my music.”

“Anyway,” he adds, “I think I’m gonna move out when I get back. My mom’s actually moving to a new cr—apartment.” Presumably he was about to say “crib,” but stopped himself. It’s incontrovertibly the case that the members of RATKING, for all the hooliganism in their image, are remarkably mature in person. The Fader‘s T. Cole Rachel noted that they’re an “immediately and strikingly polite” bunch, the type to throw a smoke bomb at a Fashion Week party (as Wiki did in the 10th grade) but then sit and read Kurt Vonnegut, whose refrain in Slaughterhouse-Five inspired the name of their last album.

I was surprised by how eager they were to listen, how often they’d stop to ask if they were making sense. That unusual openness is also apparent in their wide range of declared influences, which go way beyond hip-hop to include the 1970s no wave scene, ’50s film noir, the nonlinear storytelling of director Harmony Korine, and even, Wiki insists, the freethinking spirit of former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, “that chubby little motherfucker.”

How do you take all of that and make a cohesive sound? Here, too, the thoughtfulness of the approach belies the band’s youthful aura. “The longer people don’t know about what you’re working on, the stronger it gets,” Sporting Life explains. “Being present and able to recognize what’s ill around you creates kind of like an ill void. You pick enough things out of that void and put them together, and you can create something that glides through people’s consciousnesses.” And that process is painstakingly iterative. “There’s this period where you’re just adding, taking all these elements,” Wiki says. “But then you have to start moving toward the simplest form.”

“And that takes work,” notes Sporting Life. “It’s like when you see a tai-chi master. It’s so much work up until being able to do that, but it looks so simple. And we’re closer to that now than we’ve ever been.”

Eric Adiele, a.k.a. Sporting Life. Stuart McAlpine/Flickr

The group is now touring with kindred alternative rap acts Run the Jewels and Despot while working on a 7-track project, 700 Fill (like the fill power of a jacket). Look for the new release in January or February. “If we miss the winter, it’s not coming out ’til next winter,” Wiki says. “It’s a winter album.”

After I’m done, the band members check to see if I have any lingering questions, considerate as ever—did I get everything I need? Actually, I would like to know one more thing. As perceptive young artists, what worries and excites them the most about our culture today?

Wiki fingers the toothbrush he’s been holding in anticipation of a preshow shower. He frowns. “You know,” he says, raising the brush like a staff, “the same shit that worries me excites me.” Sporting Life concurs: “I mean, there’s little to be worried about, really…There’s a lot you can do these days, just sitting in a bedroom or wherever. The individual has really been empowered if they have time to just sit and build. Just try not to be bored.”

See the original article here:  

RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

by SusannahGiles Posted on November 14, 2014

Going for a hat trick?

Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

By

14 Nov 2014 2:48 PM

Share

Share

Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

×

In the wake of news that China and the U.S. have struck a deal behind closed doors to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s third largest emitter, India, is asking itself where it stands on the issue of emission caps, and whether it should be ready with a commitment for the U.N. climate conference in Paris in late 2015.

In past conversations about an international plan to tackle climate change, India often got lumped in with China. It has a similarly large, billion-plus population and a similarly growing appetite for fossil fuels. In the past, the two countries have together resisted emissions caps. So for India especially, China’s new commitment to peak its emissions by 2030 is a game changer.

Now that China has changed course, Indian policymakers are expected to try and distance their country from China in these discussions about carbon emissions. India still pollutes far less than China on the whole, the argument goes, and far less than countries like the U.S. and Australia per capita. At the same time, roughly a third of the country’s 1.2 billion people lack electricity, and the country’s carbon budget needs room to allow them to get it. An editorial in The Times of India argues today:

For [the] agreement to be implemented it is imperative that the US takes the lead in climate change mitigation. That’s not only because the US is among the highest per capita as well as historical emitters, but also because, more than any other country, it has the resources and innovative capacity to develop green technology. That said, the US-China deal also puts pressure on India to commit to emission caps of its own. India should accept the challenge while also decoupling itself from China.

Given that India’s share of global carbon emissions last year was only 7% compared to China’s 28% and the US’s 14%, and that India is the lowest per capita emitter among major economies, New Delhi has a strong case for pitching for different standards.

India’s official thinking on climate change is a policy advanced by Manmohan Singh, who served as the country’s prime minister until earlier this year. Back in 2007, he declared at a G-20 summit in Germany that India’s per capita emissions will never exceed the average per capita emissions for developed countries. Right now, that affords India quite a bit of elbow room. If the U.S. and the European Union pull off the cuts they’re talking about, India would have a bit less leeway, though some in the Indian government believe that even then the country could continue increasing its emissions for 15 or 20 years beyond the 2030 cap China’s agreed to, and still be below the developed world’s per capita average.

Global Carbon Project

via

Vox

So emissions cuts, at the moment, don’t seem to be a policy priority for India. Here’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s environmental minister, Prakash Javadekar, in an interview with The New York Times immediately after the September U.N. Climate Summit in New York:

“What cuts?” Mr. Javadekar said. “That’s for more developed countries. The moral principle of historic responsibility cannot be washed away.” Mr. Javadekar was referring to an argument frequently made by developing economies — that developed economies, chiefly the United States, which spent the last century building their economies while pumping warming emissions into the atmosphere — bear the greatest responsibility for cutting pollution.

Mr. Javadekar said that government agencies in New Delhi were preparing plans for India’s domestic actions on climate change, but he said they would lead only to a lower rate of increase in carbon emissions. It would be at least 30 years, he said, before India would likely see a downturn.

But there are also signs that India is looking for another path forward. Though the country’s coal use is increasing, it aims to double the amount of energy it gets from renewables by 2020. The new prime minister has shown a predilection for sustainable energy, particularly solar. Earlier this month, he reconstituted an almost-defunct panel tasked with guiding how the country deals with climate change adaptation and mitigation. On that panel is Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently advised that tackling poverty and tackling climate change are not mutually exclusive — in fact, it is difficult to do the former without doing the latter.

And the Modi administration has dropped hints that its position going into the U.N. Lima climate conference in a few weeks has not yet been finalized. “We are consulting experts, former negotiators, and civil society organisations in order to craft our position in Lima,” one government source told India’s Economic Times. So there may yet be room for cautious optimism that the third-biggest polluter will soon step forward with its own timeline for peaking and reducing emissions.

And if it doesn’t? A recent U.N. report modeled a way in which the world could avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming while India’s emissions continue to grow as it hooks its impoverished people up to the grid. But for that to happen, China would have to stick to its commitment to let emissions peak at 2030, and the wealthier major polluters — the U.S., the E.U., Japan, and Russia — would have to take big steps to shift their sources of energy. Don’t bet on all that happening on schedule.

Regardless, the U.S.-China deal unexpectedly thrust India into the hot seat. Now, whether India likes it or not, the world will be watching closely — first, at the G-20 meeting in Brisbane this week, then at Lima next month and in the run-up to Paris next year — to see what steps it might take to turn down the temperature.

Find this article interesting?
Donate now to support our work.Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Source – 

Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, solar power, sustainable energy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

Will China Help Barack Obama Save the World?

by TaniaRizzo Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Without active leadership from China and the United States—the world’s biggest economies and carbon emitters—there’s little hope of reaching a global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at next year’s big climate summit in Paris. That’s why President Barack Obama’s visit to Beijing this week for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is shaping up to be a big deal for the fight against global warming.

Climate change is, of course, just one part of Obama’s complex agenda in China. But policy experts say his one-on-one meetings with Chinese president Xi Jinping on Wednesday could provide much-needed momentum, potentially signaling to the world the extent to which both countries are willing to slash their carbon pollution.

“It is key we get the Chinese on board before Paris,” said Tim Boersma, an energy security analyst with the Brookings Institution. “And whomever comes up with the formula will have produced a brilliant policy move.”

Obama is hoping it’s his team that comes up with the goods. This week’s talks will build on a series of efforts by the two countries to cooperate on climate policy, says Elliot Diringer, the executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a former White House senior environmental policy adviser.

“The success of Paris rests very heavily on US and Chinese participation, there’s no question,” he said, adding that Obama’s team “has worked hard to be a consistent partner” to the Chinese. According to Diringer, the hard work has “helped pay off in some renewed trust.”

That trust—basically telling each other “we’re serious, if you are”—seems to be growing. In 2013, US and Chinese leaders leaders signed a bilateral agreement to reduce HFCs, a family of powerful greenhouse gases used in heavy industry. There has also been cooperation on energy security at the highest levels of both governments. The US-China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, sponsored the two countries’ governments, has been meeting for the last 13 years. In 2009, Obama and then-President Hu Jintao announced an agreement to develop China’s immense shale gas resources, conceived in part as a way to help break China’s coal addiction and reduce emissions.

Now, world leaders are hoping to replace the expired Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse gases with a new treaty that will be negotiated in Paris. Much is unknown about what form the final agreement will take, but a key first step is for individual countries to make declarations about how much they are willing to cut their emissions. The European Union has already come forward with its proposal: Last moth, EU members agreed to slash emissions by 40 percent by 2030, a figure that environmental groups criticized as not being ambitious enough.

Analysts don’t expect any similarly big announcements to come out of Obama’s meetings in Beijing this week. But Diringer anticipates the countries will privately exchange important information on their intended targets and wait until the end of March to publicly announce how much they intend to cut. “I’d expect a bit of show and tell, but no direct negotiation or deal or target levels,” he added.

Even small maneuvers at such a high-profile meeting can send big signals to the international community, especially if Washington and Beijing publicly commit to getting their emissions targets on the table well in advance of the Paris meeting. Simply putting out a statement outlining a timetable would be be a big deal. “A joint declaration by the world’s two largest carbon emitters that they will put ambitious numbers on the table would inject additional momentum heading into Paris,” Diringer said.

As part of its argument for closer climate ties and stronger action, Obama’s team is highlighting an issue the Chinese are already extremely sensitive to: air pollution. Smog routinely blankets Chinese cities, and the environmental crisis has become a political emergency as Chinese officials worry about the potential for escalating social unrest. The issue has already spurred action: China has begun pushing coal-fired power plants out of major cities and is working on plans for a massive, nationwide cap-and-trade program that is slated to start in 2016.

Pushing China to use cleaner energy is a no-brainer for the US administration. Secretary of State John Kerry told a group of business leaders in Beijing ahead of the summit: “This is a win-win-win-win-win, because in every aspect, you gain in health of your population, you gain in environmental protection, long-term responsibility. You gain in security; you gain in energy independence, energy capacity. You gain in health, where you have air that’s cleaner.”

Heavy smog blanketed Liaocheng, a city in Shandong, last month. US officials are highlighting the impact of pollution as a reason for China to take climate action. Imaginechina/ZUMA

Still, some experts worry that this week’s meetings could actually end up undermining the Paris negotiations. Kyle Ash, a climate policy analyst with Greenpeace, warns that any bilateral arrangements reached between China and the United States over the next year might reinforce the idea that the Paris agreement should be voluntary, since the two biggest emitters would have already signed a their own deal. “We hope that the leaders are not going to be using the bilateral relationships to slow progress on multilateral talks,” he said. “It’s a worry because we’re on a tight timeline.”

Regardless of the risks, Diringer says successful climate talks this week will benefit both countries. China wants to be seen as a powerful leader on the world stage, and an engaged global citizen. Meanwhile, “stronger US action has always run up against the claim that China and India aren’t doing anything. An ambitious number from China will make it easier to sell the Obama climate agenda at home.”

And Obama will need all the help he can get. The GOP takeover of the Senate threatens to undermine international confidence in America’s ability to tackle the climate issue at home, a development that could make progress in Paris even harder.

For both the United States and China, says Ash, “success in Paris will be convincing the world that they’re acting at home.”

Continued:  

Will China Help Barack Obama Save the World?

Posted in Anchor, Bunn, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ringer, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will China Help Barack Obama Save the World?

Quote of the Day: Bush Would Have Punched Putin in the Nose

by NapoleoKluge Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Here is John Boehner, the leader of the House of Representatives and third in line for the presidency:

When you look at this chaos that’s going on, does anybody think that Vladimir Putin would have gone into Crimea had George W. Bush been president of the United States? No! Even Putin is smart enough to know that Bush would have punched him in the nose in about 10 seconds.

Look, I get it: I’m a partisan, and right now I’m blogging through a slight bit of a morphine haze. But WTF? Have our political leaders always talked like this? This is just ridiculously juvenile.

And while we’re on the subject, I note that Boehner also said this: “I talk to world leaders every week. They want America to lead. They’re begging America to lead. Because when America leads and America’s strong, the world is a safer place.” Ten bucks says Boehner is basically lying, unless by “world leaders” he means Paul Ryan and the odd backbencher in London he happens to have played golf with a couple of years ago. As anyone with a pulse knows, world leaders simply have different priorities than we do. It’s the Europeans who are resisting stronger action against Putin. It’s the Turks who aren’t too interested in saving Kobani. It’s the Saudis who want us to devote all our attention to their longtime Shiite enemies. It’s Angela Merkel who’s single-mindedly intent on destroying the European economy. If John Boehner thinks all these folks are eagerly waiting for America to whip them into line, he’s even more delusional than I thought.

Link: 

Quote of the Day: Bush Would Have Punched Putin in the Nose

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: Bush Would Have Punched Putin in the Nose

For E.U. Climate Meeting, Deep Divisions and High Stakes

by Myrna Posted on October 21, 2014

Curbing emissions has long been a popular cause in the European Union. But leaders have to agree on how to generate and distribute energy. Originally posted here:  For E.U. Climate Meeting, Deep Divisions and High Stakes ; ; ;

This article: 

For E.U. Climate Meeting, Deep Divisions and High Stakes

Posted in alo, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For E.U. Climate Meeting, Deep Divisions and High Stakes

News Organizations Battle Pennsylvania Over Secret Source of Its Execution Drugs

by CamilleDickens Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and four news organizations filed an emergency legal motion on Thursday, demanding that Pennsylvania reveal the source of its execution drugs.

Later this month, the state is scheduled to put 57-year-old Hubert Michael to death for the 1993 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. While the execution has been stayed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, the ACLU fears the hold could be lifted at any time, opening the way for the first execution in Pennsylvania in more than 15 years.

Since 2011, when the European Union banned the export of drugs for use in executions, Pennsylvania and other death penalty states have been forced to rely on untested drug combinations and loosely regulated compounding pharmacies. And most have become secretive about the sources and contents of their execution drugs. Death row inmates around the country have sued to block their executions on the ground that withholding this information is unconstitutional, as untested or poorly prepared drug cocktails could create a level of suffering that violates the Eight Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. So far, they’ve met with little success. Clayton Lockett, who lost his bid to force the state of Oklahoma to reveal the source and purity of the drugs used to put him to death, writhed and moaned in apparent agony after being injected with a secretly acquired drug combinations in April.

Continue Reading »

View this article – 

News Organizations Battle Pennsylvania Over Secret Source of Its Execution Drugs

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on News Organizations Battle Pennsylvania Over Secret Source of Its Execution Drugs

Putin Brags About How Fast He Could Take Ukraine

by JacelynBrigham Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s the latest from Russia:

Vladimir Putin has said Russian forces could conquer the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in two weeks if he so ordered, the Kremlin has confirmed.

Moscow declined to deny that the president had spoken of taking Kiev in a phone conversation on Friday with José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing president of the European commission….Barroso asked Putin about the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Nato says there are at least 1,000 Russian forces on the wrong side of the border. The Ukrainians put the figure at 1,600.

“The problem is not this, but that if I want I’ll take Kiev in two weeks,” Putin said, according to La Repubblica.

The Kremlin did not deny Putin had spoken of taking Kiev, but instead complained about the leak of the Barroso remarks.

Yes, the leak is the real problem here. Invading Ukraine is a mere piffle.

See the article here:  

Putin Brags About How Fast He Could Take Ukraine

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Putin Brags About How Fast He Could Take Ukraine