Tag Archives: international

Here’s What Sexperts Think About "Female Viagra" and Why You Shouldn’t Call It That

by RosalinSimms Posted on August 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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When news broke on August 18 that the Food and Drug Administration approved Addyi, the pill that is being incorrectly referred to as the “female Viagra,” it might have seemed like an obvious feminist win. Viagra has been around since 1998, but there hasn’t been anything remotely comparable on the market for women. Addyi is supposed to alleviate female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (or lack of sexual desire). But as we’ve reported, women on Addyi experienced an increase of only one sexual event per month during clinical trials.

So what’s really going on with the little pink pill? And what’s the latest science on low libidos? We asked Rachel Hills, author of the The Sex Myth, and Emily Nagoski, sex educator and author of Come As You Are, to weigh in:

What is female sexual dysfunction? Hills points out that when Viagra went on the market, it aimed to treat a very specific disease: erectile dysfunction. Viagra works by increasing blood flow to the penis to get an erection hard enough for sex; it does not cause arousal. Addyi targets the brain, and it does aim to increase arousal by stimulating the brain in a way that’s comparable to antidepressants. Hills says this is where it gets tricky, because “female sexual dysfunction” is not well-defined medically, and she thinks the term is being used too broadly. “It’s more amorphous than erectile dysfunction because the ‘disease’ is basically not wanting to have sex enough,” she says.

Do we need Addyi? According to Nagoski, there are two types of desire: spontaneous desire, which occurs without any physical prompting from a partner, and responsive desire, which comes from being in a sexual situation (think foreplay or dirty talk). Nagoski says it’s pretty normal for women to only experience responsive desire. But, maybe because men’s bodies work a little differently, women are led to believe that something is wrong with them if they don’t crave sex every day. Nagoski, who has worked as a sex educator for almost a decade, often hears women say, “Once my partner and I got started, everything was fine. It’s getting me started that’s the problem.” She thinks a lot of the hype surrounding Addyi is due to a lack of readily available information surrounding female sexuality.

Is this simply a pharmaceutical company trying to tap into a profitable market? A lot of the hype surrounding Addyi stemmed from good marketing, not a scientific breakthrough. “The most generous possible interpretation of the FDA responder analysis is that, of the thousands of women who were on the drug, a few experienced minimal benefit,” says Nagoski. Hills is also suspicious of the motives behind treating female sexual desire with a pill: “The entire question of female sexual dysfunction was motivated by the fact that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made in that.” There is certainly a lot of money at stake—Sprout Pharmaceuticals, the makers of Addyi, announced that Valeant Pharmaceuticals International acquired the pill for $1 billion.

Let’s talk about pleasure. Nagoski says the problem with Addyi is that it’s purpose is to create desire, but the point of desire falls flat if women aren’t experiencing pleasure. Hills and Nagoski believe the conversation about Addyi is too focused on how much sex women are having, regardless of whether the sex is good or not. For this reason, Hills says she doesn’t buy that Addyi is a feminist victory. “It’s certainly not that I think women should not have the right to sexual desire; it’s just that I think everyone has the right to desire as much sex as they want,” Hills says. “I worry about the desire for sex becoming an imperative.” Nagoski adds that framing a lack of desire as a medical problem reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong, which creates additional pressure that can impede libido. A focus on pleasure rather than desire could break that cycle.

So what’s the key to female sexual arousal? Nagoski details an interesting theory about this in Come As You Are. The way she sees it, the brain has what’s called a “dual-control model,” in which there is a sexual “accelerator” and a sexual “brake.” For the most part, men have more sensitive accelerators and women have more sensitive brakes—it’s easier for them to lose sexual arousal. The key is figuring out what’s hitting the brakes. Nagoski says it could be as simple as being distracted by grit on the sheets, or being worried someone will walk in. Or maybe it’s literally cold feet—a study by Dutch scientists found that wearing socks increased a woman’s chance of having an orgasm. Of course, if the sensitivity is trauma-related, Nagoski says seeing a sex therapist might be the best way to go. But for others, try to “take control of the issues you can take control of,” she says.

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Here’s What Sexperts Think About "Female Viagra" and Why You Shouldn’t Call It That

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Breaking: Malaysia Says Washed-Up Wreckage Is from MH370

by SonMdn121076 Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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The biggest aviation mystery of our time is one step closer to being solved today, after the Malaysian Prime Minister confirmed that washed-up debris discovered on the remote French island Réunion last week is from Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

The barnacle-encrusted wing-part, called a “flaperon”, was being studied by French authorities for connections to the Boeing 777, which was carrying 239 people when it veered dramatically off-course and vanished on March 8, 2014, sparking an international hunt for the plane, thought to be at the bottom of the Indian Ocean off Australia.

The Guardian quotes Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak as saying: “Today, 513 days since the plane disappeared, it is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you that an international team of experts has conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Réunion is indeed from MH370. We now have physical evidence that on 31 March last year, flight MH370 tragically ended in the south Indian ocean.”

Great mysteries remain, however, most notably how the wing part ended up drifting so many thousands of miles from the search area off Australia’s Western coastline.

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Breaking: Malaysia Says Washed-Up Wreckage Is from MH370

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American Weapons and Support Are Fueling a Bloody Air War in Yemen

by PatsySummerfield Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the night of July 24, Saudi-led coalition warplanes began dropping bombs on two residential compounds in the Yemeni port city of Mokha. A shaky video shot at the scene, a housing site for workers at a nearby power plant, shows a night cast in amber light with a soundtrack of explosions and screams. The video, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) last week (see below), then shows the lifeless bodies of two young men, one with a stream of blood running from his eye, the other with a gaping wound where the side of his torso had been.

A day and a half later, HRW researcher Belkis Wille went to the scene of the bombing and asked the power plant’s housing supervisor if people had died in a particular apartment unit. “All of them,” Ali Ahmad Ragih answered. “How can you expect people to survive such a situation?…Bodies were taken out. Pieces of bodies. Hands…heads.” When the survivors tallied the damage, they determined that nine bombs had fallen, killing 65 civilians, including 10 children, and injuring dozens more.

Human Rights Watch has called the attack an “apparent war crime,” one that implicates the United States and the United Kingdom due to their supporting roles in the conflict, in which Saudi Arabia and nine other nations are conducting air strikes against Houthi rebels who effectively ousted the government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi in January. “Providing direct support to military operations, such as information on targets, would make the US and the UK parties to the armed conflict, and bound to apply the laws of war,” Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report.

The United States maintains that it plays a noncombat advisory role in Yemen. Yet one day after the Saudi-led air campaign, dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, was launched on March 26, the Pentagon announced the expansion of its role by providing Saudi Arabia with bombs, aerial refueling, logistics support, and intelligence—including live feeds from surveillance flights “to help Saudi Arabia decide what and where to bomb.” Additionally, the United States has equipped Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of weaponry, including bombs and fighter jets.

So far, it is unknown who built or provided the bombs dropped on Mokha in July. “There are very few remnants left on the ground after these air strikes,” making it difficult to accurately identify the weapons, says Ole Solvang, a senior emergencies researcher at HRW. (A State Department official confirms that the United States provided support in the July 24 attack, but did not provide details of the type of support.)

Five days after Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm, the first civilian casualties were reported: 31 civilians were killed in an air strike that hit a dairy factory, according to the United Nations. Reports of widespread civilian deaths have continued. As of July 21, the civilian death toll in the Yemen conflict has reached at least 1,693 with another 3,829 injured, the majority from coalition air strikes, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s largest importer of American arms. According to the Congressional Research Service, Washington and Riyadh inked $90 billion in weapons sales between 2010 and 2014, including the transfer of fighter jets, attack helicopters, missile defense systems, armored vehicles, and missiles and bombs. A 2010 deal worth $29 billion included 84 new F-15SA jets, and thousands of bombs to be loaded onto them. In April, a State Department official told Defense News that the United States is “making every effort to expedite security assistance to Saudi coalition forces.”

The body of a man is uncovered in the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi air strikes in Sanaa, Yemen, in June. AP Photo/Hani Mohammed

Just two days after HRW accused Saudi Arabia of human rights violations, two new arms deals between the Saudis and United States were announced. One was for $500 million worth of explosives, detonators, fuses, and guided missile systems. Patrick Wilckens, an Amnesty International researcher on arms control and security trade, notes that this deal “seems to be specific to replenishing stock of the particular munitions that have been used in aerial bombardments.” The other sale was of $5.4 billion worth of PAC-3 Missiles and associated equipment, parts, and logistical support, meant to “modernize” and “replenish” Saudi Arabia’s missile stockpiles. The sale, US officials noted, would help “promote stability within the region.”

For many years, the United States armed the Saudis with little expectation that the weaponry would be used in combat. “The theory was that the Saudis mostly bought this stuff to cement the relationship with the United States, and the US would protect them if they were in a jam militarily. It was almost like a tacit alliance sealed with arms deals,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “Much of this equipment used to mostly just sit around. Now it is less a symbolic gesture and a money thing and is more likely to end up in the middle of a war.”

Human rights organizations say the United States isn’t doing enough to ensure the coalition is minimizing civilian casualties while deploying American weapons. “The fact that the US is a strong partner and is providing huge amounts of weapons, logistics, and expertise could be a cause for concern,” says Amnesty’s Patrick Wilckens. “The US, along with the UK and other governments, needs to put in place precautionary measures if there is a risk that some of their equipment will be used in bombing raids that could contravene international humanitarian law. We did research specific strikes and did find that there were not sufficient precautionary measures put in place to avoid civilian targets.”

Asked what preventative measures the United States is taking to mitigate potential casualties in Yemen, the official, who asked to remain unnamed, says, “Since the start of military operations in Yemen, we have called upon all sides to comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians.”

The Saudi coalition has also deployed US-manufactured cluster munitions that have been banned by more than 100 countries due to the danger they pose to noncombatants, which have harmed civilians. Reporting from Yemen in Rolling Stone, Matthieu Aikins recently described meeting a man who claimed that “a huge cluster bomb” had hit as many as 50 homes, killing and injuring dozens. The strike occurred in an area where “there are no military bases,” the man said. Aikins himself saw the casing of a cluster bomb and a half-exploded 1,000-pound bomb that were both made in the United States.

The Obama administration has downplayed concerns about civilian casualties from coalition bombing. On May 6, less than two months into the Saudi bombing campaign, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated, “We certainly are pleased that the Saudis have indicated a willingness to scale back their military efforts, but we haven’t seen a corresponding response from the Houthi rebels.” Two days later, the Saudi coalition reportedly dropped leaflets on the cities of Sadaa and Marran, declaring them “military targets” and warning the residents to evacuate by seven that night. On July 6, in responding to a question on the Saudi-led coalition’s repeated destruction of civilian homes, State Department spokesman John Kirby said, “I’ll let Saudi Arabia speak to their operational capabilities and performance.”

Meanwhile, the administration has been making new arms deals with coalition members, which include some the largest recipients of US weapons and security assistance. In late May, the Pentagon announced a new $1.9 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia that included 10 MH-60R Multi-Mission Helicopters, 38 Hellfire missiles, and 380 Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System rockets. Not long afterwards, an arms deal was reached with the UAE for more than 1,000 guided bomb units for use in Yemen and against ISIS. Notably, that deal includes the sale of MK84 bombs, which contain more than 800 pounds of high explosive. An Amnesty International investigation released in July identified fragments of a US-designed MK84 bomb, manufactured in 1983, that had destroyed three houses in a Yemeni village and killed 10 members of a single family, including 7 children. Amnesty says the same type of bomb has been used by the coalition across Yemen, including a strike that killed 17 civilians in May.

Shortly after the attack in Mokha, a resident of the housing complex that was bombed guided HRW’s Belkis Wille through the rubble. “I gathered all my daughters in my arms,” he recalled. “Here, in this place, I shielded them.” He led Wille to his home. “It was peaceful in here…There were children’s smiles here. They died,” he said as tears turned to anger. “They’re gone. Gone because of the war…the war…the war.”

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American Weapons and Support Are Fueling a Bloody Air War in Yemen

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Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

by ShaniTasman Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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If Sandra Bland indeed committed suicide after spending three days in a Texas jail, as the Harris county medical examiner determined last week, her death fits a pattern: Half of all suicides behind bars occur within the first 14 days of custody. Twenty-three percent happen within the first 24 hours following an arrest. And like two-thirds of the 750,000 people in US jails, Bland had not yet been convicted of any crime.

Bland had two options to get out of jail. The court set a $5,000 bond. If she had the money, which she didn’t, she could have posted it and gotten it back when she appeared for trial. Alternately, she could have paid a bail bondsman a 10 percent fee to post bond for her—$500 that she or her family would not get back. Her family’s attorney has said that they were working on trying to secure the fee to have her released.

This system, in which people either stay locked up or pay money to a private company to get out, is almost entirely unique to the United States. The Philippines is the only other country with something similar. In Canada, acting as a bail bondsman can earn you two years in prison on a charge equivalent to bribing a juror. “We don’t have a system currently that does a decent job of separating who is dangerous and who isn’t,” Tim Murray, director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, told me when I wrote about the commercial bail industry. “We only have a system that separates those who have cash and those who don’t.”

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Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

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Rand Paul’s Super PAC is Powered By Whole Foods and Pot

by Neville11O Posted on July 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rand Paul’s fundraising has been surprisingly anemic over the past few months as the GOP presidential candidate has found his message failing to resonate with some of the traditional sources of GOP campaign money, such as Wall Street. But a recent filing by a super PAC that supports him, and which is staffed by former aides and relatives of the Senator, shows that Paul is getting some traction with libertarian-leaning donors. The bad news for Paul is that the oufit backing his candidacy still raised $100 million less than the one backing Jeb Bush.

The super PAC, America’s Liberty PAC, reported raising $3.1 million in the first half of 2015, with two wealthy businessmen chipping in $1 million or more each. George Macricostas, the CEO of data storage company RagingWire, donated $1.1 million to the super PAC. Jeff Yass, the CEO of Philadelphia private investment firm Susquehenna International donated $1 million. Both represent relatively untapped sources of money for a conservative candidate. Yass has previously written large checks, but none larger than the $50,000 donation he made in 2004 to Club for Growth, while Macricostas appears to have donated a total of just over $12,000 prior to his $1.1 million donation to America’s Liberty.

The super PAC roped in other big donations, including $50,000 from John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, and $50,000 from Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com. The group also also received $15,000 from ICC Holdings, an Illinois company hoping to be one of the first companies to legally operate a commercial cannabis farm.

America’s Liberty PAC is one of two pro-Paul super PACs. To date, the group has spent about $412,000, and produced an anti-Jeb Bush online ad, mocking him as “Bailout Bush.” On the group’s payroll is the consulting firm of Jesse Benton, who is married to Rand Paul’s niece and who was previously a top aide to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. Benton resigned from his position as campaign manager for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last August over his involvement with an ongoing scandal stemming from the 2012 Iowa caucuses. (A former Iowa state senator has admitted to taking money from the Ron Paul 2012 presidential campaign in exchange for his endorsement and is awaiting sentencing.) Since the beginning of the year, the super PAC has paid Benton’s company $63,000 for consulting work.

America’s Liberty PAC also reported paying John F. Tate, who was Ron Paul’s campaign manager in 2012 and now runs Campaign For Liberty, a grassroots libertarian group founded by Ron Paul.

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Rand Paul’s Super PAC is Powered By Whole Foods and Pot

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Yelp Is Pushing a Law to Shield Its Reviewers From Defamation Suits

by WadeNicholls Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Matthew White was getting nervous. It was the fall of 2013, and White believed he was stuck with a botched hardwood-floor job. The stairs weren’t rebuilt to code, multiple doors would no longer fully open, boot prints were embedded in the varnish—the list went on. Convinced that many problems would never be fixed to his satisfaction, White logged into Yelp and gave his Denver-area contractor, Footprints Floors, the first of two scathing reviews. “Absolutely horrible experience,” he wrote. “The quality of the work is absolutely deplorable. Be warned!”

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Yelp Is Pushing a Law to Shield Its Reviewers From Defamation Suits

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Here’s How GOP Presidential Hopefuls Are Reacting to the Iran Nuclear Deal

by TyroneStClair07 Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Early Tuesday morning, Iran and six world powers announced a landmark agreement aimed at halting Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for lifting international sanctions that have long crippled the country’s economy. The accord, which concluded a tense 18-day summit in Vienna, was met with praise by both U.S. officials and Iranian leaders as ushering in a new era of cooperation between the two historically at-odds nations.

Unsurprisingly, the accord was also met with a barrage of criticism from conservatives who had long opposed negotiating with Iran in the first place. They were specifically outraged by President Obama’s vow to veto any congressional legislation attempting to block the deal from being implemented. Upon learning that the negotiations had successfully concluded, GOP presidential hopeful and foreign policy hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham told Bloomberg‘s Josh Rogin the deal was “akin to declaring war” on Israel.

It didn’t take long for others to weigh in. Here is a sampling of the reactions from Republican presidential candidates below:

Conservative pundits also weighed in:

Congress now has 60 days to review the details of the agreement, and the intense rhetoric is likely to escalate.

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Here’s How GOP Presidential Hopefuls Are Reacting to the Iran Nuclear Deal

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Teddy Roosevelt Was Obsessed With Making the Dollar Look Like the Greek Drachma

by LynneZoqnipucg Posted on July 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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After Sunday’s decisive vote to reject a financial bailout offer, Greece may now be inching closer to leaving the Eurozone—the collection of 19 countries that maintains the Euro. If it does, it will need a new currency, of course, likely the drachma—the name of Greece’s currency going back to ancient times.

Ancient Greek drachma coins, as it happens, were famous for their artistry, especially the handcrafted, high-relief designs—three-dimensional and elaborate—that rose from the faces of the coins. Many coins from Athens featured an owl, the bird representing the goddess Athena, with her face on the flip-side of the coin (the owl design was replicated for Greece’s modern-day 1 Euro coin). “Ancient Greek coins are undeniably some of the most beautiful coins ever produced in the ancient world,” said Philip Kiernan, a professor of archeology at the University of Buffalo where he studies ancient money, a field known as numismatics. “They’re little miniature works of art.”

The Athenian tetradrachm (worth four drachmas) was probably the most commonly used coin, starting around the 6th century B.C., and lasting until the 2nd century B.C., according to Kiernan. The Romans finally sacked Greece and installed their own currency, but at its peak, “Athens once produced what was essentially the US dollar of the ancient world,” Kiernan said. “They were considered, remarkably, a very stable currency in the ancient world.”

Athenian tetradrachm coins, featuring Athena and an owl. Wikimedia Commons.

“Would that our coins today were as pretty as that!” he bemoaned when I spoke to him.

In fact, the enduring beauty of the ancient drachma has reached far into the modern world, even captivating, for several intense years, President Theodore Roosevelt.

TR thought the designs of US coins at the time were lifeless and stale, unbecoming of a great nation. “I think our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness,” he wrote to the Treasury Secretary in 1904. Roosevelt wanted new designs that harked back to the high-relief Hellenic masterpieces, but also captured the spirit of a nation growing in stature around the world.

At a White House dinner the following year, an obsessed Roosevelt located his kindred spirit: an Irish-born, New York-raised sculptor named Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had already designed the president’s inaugural medal and shared the president’s love of drachma coins. Roosevelt—so moved to redesign the country’s currency that he feared the treasury secretary thought him “a crack-brained lunatic on the subject”—commissioned the master sculptor to make designs for a new penny, $10, and $20 coin. “This is my pet crime,” said the president, referring to his passion for the subject.

Saint-Gaudens got to work. “You have hit the nail on the head with regard to the coinage,” he wrote to the president. “Of course the great coins (and you might say the only coins) are the Greek ones you speak of…”

What emerged from his arduous commission, which was plagued by political, bureaucratic and technological problems, was the famous 1907 $20 gold coin, a.k.a the double eagle, widely regarded as an artistic triumph.

Saint-Gaudens’ Lady Liberty powers towards the viewer of the coin, carrying an olive branch and a torch, with dawn light splintering behind her. The US Capitol building can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner. Law required the artist to use an eagle for the design on the flip side of the corn.

Saint-Gaudens’ design on the 1924 “double eagle.” Wikimedia Commons

But the coin was hard to make: it took nine strikes from a hydraulic press to fashion each one, making mass production impossible. Fewer than 24 were minted, in February and March 1907, according to the Smithsonian.

“The minting process of the day was not conducive to high-relief coins,” says the US Mint. “As a result, despite being considered one of the most beautiful gold pieces ever minted, Saint-Gaudens’ full vision for the production of an ultra high relief coin was never realized.”

Roosevelt was nonetheless deeply impressed by Saint-Gauden’s work. Writing about the sculptor’s prototypes for a new $10 coin, Roosevelt wrote ecstatically: “Those models are simply immense—if such a slang way of talking is permissible in reference to giving a modern nation one coinage at least which shall be as good as that of the ancient Greeks… it is simply splendid. I suppose I shall be impeached for it in Congress; but I shall regard that as a very cheap payment!”

The sculptor died of cancer in August 1907, amid mounting problems with manufacturing the new coins. His design, though, lasted in some form until 1933—though fundamentally altered from his dramatic, high-relief original.

The fascinating, and quite personal, correspondence between Roosevelt and the sculptor was published in April, 1920, in The Century, which editorialized enthusiastically about the project:

The Century’s article on Roosevelt’s coin obsession, in 1920.

“The President’s share in the new issue of coins, the thought, the patience, the unflagging enthusiasm, and the insistence that he brought to bear is a vivid example of his high regard for the need of artistic development in our national life.”

In 2002, one of the only 1933 “double eagles” known to have survived sold for more than $7 million at auction.

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Teddy Roosevelt Was Obsessed With Making the Dollar Look Like the Greek Drachma

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China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

by HaroldChappell Posted on June 30, 2015

China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

By on 30 Jun 2015commentsShare

Three of the world’s biggest polluters — China, Brazil, and the U.S. — all announced new strategies to tackle climate change today.

China unveiled its long-awaited pledge for the U.N. climate talks to be held in Paris this December. (Such pledges are known in wonk-speak as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs.) The country is committing to a more ambitious goal for cutting the amount of greenhouse gases emitted for each unit of economic growth.

From the BBC:

The statement, released following a meeting in Paris between [Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang] and French President Francois Hollande, said China aimed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65% by 2030, from 2005 levels.

The carbon intensity target builds on a previous plan to cut carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020.

The pledge also reiterates China’s intention to halt the rise of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to get about 20 percent of its electricity from non–fossil fuel sources by that same year, as first announced in a deal with the U.S. in November. That still gives the country 15 years to keep increasing its climate pollution, but Li said China will “strive for the earliest possible peak,” and there are other signs that the country in fact plans to meet and exceed its goals faster than it is committing to. China’s coal consumption has dropped off dramatically. The country is also now one of the world’s biggest investors in renewable energy.

Just a few hours after the China announcement, President Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff — the leaders of the Western Hemisphere’s two most populous countries — came forward with their own climate announcement. The leaders promised to have their countries running on 20 percent non-hydroelectric renewables by 2030. (Brazil gets a lot of its energy from controversial hydroelectric projects.)

“This is a big deal,” Obama climate aide Brian Deese said on a press call. “For the United States, it will require tripling the amount of renewable energy on our electricity grid. … For Brazil, it will require more than doubling.”

Brazil also promised to restore 12 million hectares of forests by 2030 while continuing to put in place “policies aimed at eliminating illegal deforestation.” This, too, is important, as deforestation and the emissions it produces present a double threat to the climate. And the two countries pledged to work together to push for an ambitious outcome at the Paris climate talks.

There have been a lot of signs of progress toward a global climate change deal this year, and today’s developments add to the momentum. But whether these announcements (like, for example, a recent one by G7 countries) are enough to foster an unprecedented level of international environmental cooperation this December is far from clear. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday that the negotiations are, despite the appearance of enthusiasm on the part of some political and business leaders, moving at a “snail’s pace.” For instance, Brazil, though it made a climate announcement today, still hasn’t produced its INDC.

But China’s increasing engagement is a good sign. It has, in the past, played a central role in scuttling negotiations. That the country has, this time, consistently played a different tune — reflected again in today’s INDC — is encouraging. If China and other big polluters — the U.S. and Brazil among them — stay on track, then maybe Ban’s proverbial snail will ultimately ooze its way across the finish line.

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China, Brazil, and the U.S. all unveil new climate goals

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Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

by KKMBrigette Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dozens of people were killed on Friday in Tunisia, France, and Kuwait in what authorities in all three countries are calling terrorist attacks. Here’s what we know so far.

Tunisia

The deadliest attack happened at a resort in Sousse, a Tunisian beach town popular with European tourists. Tunisian officials said 27 people were killed on the beach near the Imperial Marhaba hotel, some of them foreigners.

“One attacker opened fire with a Kalashnikov on tourists and Tunisians on the beach of the hotel,” a local worker told Reuters. “It was just one attacker. He was a young guy dressed in shorts like he was a tourist himself.”

John Yeoman, a tourist apparently staying at the Imperial Marhaba, tweeted descriptions of the attack and a photo of the barricade he constructed in his hotel room.

The shooting comes three months after another major terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and it could devastate Tunisia’s vital tourist economy. “This could well be a dagger through the heart of Tunisian tourism, which would have very dark implications,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Mother Jones.

France

An apparent lone attacker drove a car through the gates of a factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, a city near Lyon in southwestern France, killing one man and leaving his severed head on the front gate of the complex. Gartenstein-Ross said the decapitation suggested the attack may have been inspired by ISIS, whose execution videos have frequently shown the decapitation of Western hostages.

French authorities arrested the suspected attacker, whom French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said was possibly named Yassin Sahli (his name has been spelled differently in various media reports) and was previously known to French law enforcement. “This person was under investigation for radicalization but this investigation was not renewed in 2008,” the Guardian reported. “He had no police record.”

KUWAIT

ISIS, the Sunni jihadist group that controls parts of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City. Media reports have given conflicting numbers of victims, but the Kuwait Watch Organization, a human rights group, told the Associated Press that 16 people were killed. The bombing is the largest terrorist attack in Kuwaiti history; while Kuwait is a majority Shiite country ruled by a Sunni royal family, such large-scale sectarian violence is rare.

Just three days ago, an ISIS spokesman called for the group’s followers to ramp up attacks during the holy month of Ramadan. “Muslims everywhere, we congratulate you over the arrival of the holy month,” said Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in an audio statement released on Tuesday. “Be keen to conquer in this holy month and to become exposed to martyrdom.”

Continued here:

Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

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