Tag Archives: international

Quote of the Day: Nuclear Talks With Iran "Will Not Lead Anywhere"

by Sandford Beech Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lowering expectations for the nuclear talks that start tomorrow in Vienna:

I am not optimistic about the negotiations. It will not lead anywhere, but I am not opposed either. What our foreign ministry and officials have started will continue and Iran will not violate its (pledge) … but I say again that this is of no use and will not lead anywhere.

Hmmm. Something tells me that when Khamenei says these negotiations won’t lead anywhere, it’s more than just an opinion. Probably more than just a suggestion, too. I think the Vegas odds on these talks just dropped through the floor.

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Quote of the Day: Nuclear Talks With Iran "Will Not Lead Anywhere"

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Obama Trade Deals Are in Trouble, and They Deserve to Be

by AbbieUsusd Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dean Baker is no fan of the trade deals currently being negotiated by the Obama administration. They aren’t being negotiated for the benefit of consumers, he says. “In reality these deals were being negotiated by corporate interests from day one”:

Of course it is possible to craft a trade deal that would promote real economic gains. Doctors in the United States earn salaries that are hugely out of line with those in other wealthy countries. The same is true for other highly paid professions. If a trade deal focused on reducing the barriers that prevent these professionals from providing their services in the United States the gains would be substantial. The savings on doctors alone could be close to $100 billion a year (0.6 percent of GDP).

The agreements could also focus on reducing the value of the dollar, which would make our goods and services more competitive internationally. This would lower our trade deficit and potentially create millions of jobs. And, we could reduce patent and copyright barriers, lowering prices and making markets more competitive.

But these items don’t come up at trade negotiations because the folks at the table would lose from these growth enhancing measures. Instead we get silly stories about trade pacts being negotiated by disinterested parties who are only looking out for the good of the country. Come on folks, you’ve got to do better than this.

It’s pretty hard to get excited about either the TPP (Pacific partners) or the TTIP (Atlantic partners). And it looks like it’s pretty hard for Congress to get excited too. Ironically, the reason for this is largely due to provisions in these deals that the United States itself has been responsible for foisting on everyone else. If we had stuck to a deal that our trade partners liked better, we’d also have a deal that Congress liked better.

For once, it looks like corporate interests in the United States have outsmarted themselves. Instead of settling for a merely lucrative deal, they demanded outrageously favorable treatment. By doing so, they’ve pissed off everyone: our trade partners and Congress and large swatches of even the neoliberal community that would normally be sympathetic to treaties like these.

Who knows. Maybe they’ll learn a lesson from this.1

1Just kidding.

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Obama Trade Deals Are in Trouble, and They Deserve to Be

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You don’t have to live on a coast to get flooded out by climate change

by PiperNTZqsvydfw Posted on February 15, 2014

You don’t have to live on a coast to get flooded out by climate change

By

Shutterstock

Sub-Saharan? More like tragically submarinin’.

The landlocked country of Zimbabwe has been ravaged by deadly floods since heavy rains set in last month. It’s the latest soggy chapter in a climate-changed region where the number of people affected by cyclones and flooding has increased sixfold over two decades. SW Radio Africa reports on the Zimbabwean inundation:

Many parts of the country, from Muzarabani up in the north to Beitbridge down in the south, are now experiencing the worst floods in many years, as water inundates villages, farms, homes and major vital roads. …

Weeks of heavy rain have left large parts of the Masvingo, Midlands and Matabeleland South provinces under water with the levels of most dams and rivers appearing to have peaked, leaving the situation critical in many areas, particularly along rivers.

The crisis has prompted the country’s leaders to plead for international aid. They are asking for $20 million of assistance to evacuate more than 2,000 families living downstream from the Tokwe-Mukorsi dam, which is so overladen with water that experts fear it is about burst.

Such floods may be a symptom of climate change, which is also ravaging the impoverished country with rising temperatures and increasingly frequent droughts.

“When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere, who gasp and sink and eventually die,” President Robert Mugabe said at the 2009 U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen. (Fair point. But he might have more credibility if he weren’t a corrupt and violent tyrant.)

The following graph from a paper published last year in the International Journal of Humanities and Social Science reveals how erratic the nation’s rainfall is becoming:

Philippe Rekacewicz, UNEP/GRID-Arendal

Click to embiggen.

The University of Zimbabwe researchers who authored the paper described global warming’s impacts on the nation’s farmers:

The past three decades have been characterized by an erratic rainfall pattern over Africa’s sub-tropics and a significant decline in the amount of rainfall. This has resulted in droughts which have significantly affected agriculture and food production. Crops and livestock have failed to quickly adapt to these harsh climatic conditions. Research on the impacts of climate change in Zimbabwe shows that the country’s agricultural sector is already suffering from changing rainfall patterns, temperature increases and more extreme weather events, like floods and droughts.

The rising frequency of floods in southern Africa isn’t limited to Zimbabwe, as the following chart from the paper shows:

International Journal of Humanities and Social ScienceClick to embiggen.


Source
Worst flooding in years swamps Zimbabwe, SW Radio Africa
Thousands at risk as rains strain Zimbabwe dam: government, Reuters
The Effects of Climate Change and Variability on Food Security in Zimbabwe: A Socio-Economic and Political Analysis, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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You don’t have to live on a coast to get flooded out by climate change

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Can You Ever Have Too Many Choco Pies?

by JulioSteiner Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points today to a story from a few months back about cuts in benefits to workers at North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Complex:

Due to financial difficulties at Kaesong caused by the complex’s five-month halt in operations…the number of Choco Pies distributed will be reduced and North Korean workers — known to resell Choco Pies on the black market for a considerable profit — will have a major source of income cut.

Before the closure of the complex, those working in chemical and heat treatment factories would receive five to 10 Choco Pies a day and those working night shifts would receive up to 20. Choco Pies would then be resold on the black market for 500 to 600 North Korean won each. However with the new regulations restricting each worker to $0.20 worth of snacks a day, the workers will receive a maximum of two Choco Pies.

Choco Pies. Can anyone explain Choco Pies to me?1 Here in Irvine we have lots of Asian supermarkets, and every one of them features enormous floor stacks of Choco Pies. Not just during certain holidays, and not just during special promotions. All the supermarkets. All the time. And judging from the selection of other sweets in these stores, Choco Pies must account for upwards of half of their sweet sales.

There’s no American equivalent I can think of. It would be as if every supermarket greeted its customers with a gigantic display of, say, Snickers bars, which accounted for 50 percent of all candy bar sales.

I bought a box of Choco Pies once. They were OK, but it was hard to see anything special about them. So what’s up? Is this just one of those particular cultural things for which there’s no real explanation? Or is there some fascinating historical reason for the immense popularity of Choco Pies among Koreans? Anyone know?

1Not among North Koreans, of course. That’s just a hook for this post. Their black market value in a place like North Korea is pretty obvious.

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Can You Ever Have Too Many Choco Pies?

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Meet 18 Sochi Athletes Whose Struggles (and Style) Will Make You Stand Up and Cheer

by Vonnie Criswell Posted on February 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, during slopestyle qualifiers at the Winter Olympics, Dutch snowboarder Cheryl Maas became the first Olympian to act in direct opposition of Russia’s bigoted anti-gay law when she stared into a television camera and shoved a rainbow-colored unicorn glove at the lens. In doing so, the defiant winter veteran—one of only six openly gay competitors in Sochi—carried on a long tradition of athletes injecting a little character and dissent into the Games, reminding us just why we love sports to begin with.

Considering the staggering tales of mismanagement, corruption, and regional terrorist threats, here are 17 more Olympians we’re hoping do the same:

THE FIVE OTHER OPENLY GAY ATHLETES

SSA TV/Youtube

Partly because of boycotts, and partly because of Russia’s anti-LGBT law, just five other gay athletes—all women—are joining Maas in openly competing in this year’s Games. Four of them—Ireen Wüst (a gold-medal-winning Dutch speed skater), Sanne van Kerkhof (a Dutch short-track speedskater), Barbara Jezeršek (a Slovenian cross-country skier), and Anatasia Bucsis (a Canadian speed skater) are also previous Olympians. For Belle Brockhoff, an Australian snowboarder who came out as gay specifically to protest the Russian law, Sochi is her first Olympic competition. In an interview with the BBC, she explained: “I want to go there because I’m not afraid of these laws and I want others that live in Russia, who are homosexuals, to see that.”

SHIVA KESHAVAN

Imago/Zuma

Last year, the Indian Olympic Association was suspended on allegations of corruption. As a result, none of India’s three Olympic athletes will be allowed to compete under the Indian flag in Sochi. But luger Shiva Keshavan is sliding anyway—and he’s doing so in a multicolored, patterned cap intended to represented his home village. Keshavan is no stranger to fighting the odds: At 16, became the youngest luger in history, and now competes without a coach or winter sports infrastructure. Despite Keshavan winning gold in the 2011 and 2012 Asia cups, acting IOA president Vijay Kumar Malhotra insists that the Indian winter athletes don’t stand a chance of winning. Still, this will be Keshavan’s fifth Olympiad—with or without his country’s official backing.

LANNY BARNES

WBUR/Flickr

Perhaps this year’s quintessential Olympic tale of selflessness, Lanny and Tracy Barnes’ story will melt the icy cockles of your cynical heart. The twin sisters were both expected to qualify for Sochi, but during the final round of US biathlon qualifiers, Lanny fell too ill to compete and was forced to stay home. Tracy, though, made the cut. A week later, Tracy sacrificed her spot so Lanny could race instead. “Love is selfless dedication,” she explained in an interview. “Love means giving up your dream so somebody else can realize theirs.” Though they’re both Olympic veterans, Tracy’s withdrawal comes only four years after barely missing the 2010 Olympics.

NORWEGIAN CURLING TEAM

Cameron Yee/Flickr

In recent years, curling has seen an unexpected and surging growth in popularity. If you tuned in to the 2010 Vancouver Games, you might recall Norway’s amazing patterned pants during its silver-medal-winning performance. In Sochi, the team will don even more outrageous outfits: 1970s-inspired red, blue, and white zig-zag suits referencing the nation’s flag. Appreciation for the team’s loud sense of style even spawned a Facebook page with more than 540,000 fans—nearly as many people as live in Oslo.

YOHAN GOUTT GONCALVES

Yohan Goutt Goncalves/Wikimedia Commons

Goncalves is the first athlete to ever compete in the Winter Olympics for East Timor, a country that’s never seen snow. In fact, the country’s annual temperature stays around 85 degrees. Competing in the ski slalom, Goncalves wants to go to Sochi as a “diplomat” to show that there is “more to East Timor than war.” That’s more than we can say about his mariachi-suited slalom competitor.

JAMAICAN BOBSLED TEAM

Olympics/Youtube

Heading to the Winter Olympics for the first time in more than a decade, the Jamaican bobsled team has fans hoping for Cool Runnings 2.0. Jamaica’s inaugural bobsled run, in the 1988 Calgary Olympics, ended in a disastrous crash. Upon arriving in Sochi, the team was further hindered as a result of the airport temporarily losing the competitors’ clothes and equipment. Still, 12 years since their last appearance, and crowd-funded by more than $184,000, the two-man team is looking for redemption.

US WOMEN’S SKI JUMPING TEAM

Mht54321/Wikimedia Commons

2014 marks the first year women’s ski jumping will be an Olympic event, with advocacy by American Lindsay Van largely responsible for bringing it there. In an interview on Rock Center With Brian Williams, Van explained how sexism kept the event out of the Olympics for years. (In 2006, International Ski Federation President Gian Franco Kasper said, “It’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”) Now, along with teammates Jessica Jerome and Sarah Hendrickson—a medal favorite who’s recovering from an ACL injury—Van finally will see her hard work come to fruition at the Olympics.

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Meet 18 Sochi Athletes Whose Struggles (and Style) Will Make You Stand Up and Cheer

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Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

by LadonnaClune Posted on February 4, 2014

Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

By

Katherine Herriman

Tunisia, the country that kicked off the Arab Spring in 2010, has now finalized a new constitution. It ensures gender equality and rejects Sharia law. And it does another awesome thing that only two nations before it have done: It commits the country to contribute to the protection of the climate for future generations. Responding to Climate Change explains:

Before today only Ecuador and Dominican Republic had included climate change in their constitutions.

Speaking to RTCC from Tunis, [Member of Parliament] Dhamir Mannai, who proposed the inclusion of a climate amendment, said legislators were concerned about the potential impacts a warming world could have on Tunisia.

“This opens the door for legislation for both the environment and climate protection,” he said.

“As MPs we wanted to tackle the issue head on, and then tackle it through climate legislation, and hopefully put us in a position where we can demand that other countries do the same.”

This isn’t just a case of saying nice words about an environmental crisis. The constitution obliges the government to act against global warming – and experts say that obligation could spill over into international arenas. Here’s the Toronto Star with more on that:

“What Tunisia has done is something relatively new in terms of world constitutions … it is a big step,” said David Estrin, a senior environmental lawyer with Gowlings, a large Canadian law firm.

Tunisia, he said, has not only given its citizens the right to ask their government to deal with climate change — it has also “elevated the concept (of climate change) to one of an international law.”

Basically, it could open doors for one country to sue another on climate change, he said, and “eventually allow bodies like the International Court of Justice to act on complaints that one country is causing harm to another by not abating its emissions.”

This is an important step, said Estrin, who has practised environmental law since 1971. “Right now we are almost in a lawless rule when it comes to (climate change).”

Oh, and one more cool thing: Tunisia’s constitution also says the “state shall provide the necessary means to eliminate environmental pollution.”

Well played, post-revolutionary state. Well played.


Source
Tunisia embeds climate change in constitution, Responding to Climate Change
Tunisia embeds protection of climate in new constitution, Toronto Star

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

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U.N. warns us to eat less meat and lay off biofuels, or we’re in for it

by 4q4cv8v Posted on January 27, 2014

U.N. warns us to eat less meat and lay off biofuels, or we’re in for it

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We’re overconsuming ourselves into environmental oblivion.

Farming will eliminate forests, plains, and other wild areas nearly the size of Brazil by 2050 around the world if we can’t mend our agricultural, dietary, and biofuel-burning ways. This unsustainable drive for more growing land will result in rising hunger and more frequent riots as food prices increase.

That’s the salty prognosis in a new report by scientists working for the U.N.’s International Resource Panel.

The amount of farmland has increased 11 percent since the 1960s, as growers struggle to meet growing populations’ ballooning demands for food and biofuel, according to the report. About 1.5 billion hectares, or 3.7 billion acres, is now being used globally to produce crops, and that figure continues to grow. Making matters worse, about a quarter of the world’s soils are degraded, which reduces the amount of crops that can be grown in them.

“Growing demand for food and non-food biomass will lead to an expansion of global cropland; yield growth will not be able to compensate for the expected surge in global demand,” the report states. “Cropland expansion at the cost of tropical forests and savannahs induces severe changes in the living environment with uncertain repercussions.”

What may be hardest for some of the world’s poorest and hungriest residents to stomach is the vast amount of farmland that’s being dedicated to growing crops for biofuels and for animal feed.

“One of our key challenges is overusing agricultural land for growing meat,” said report lead author Robert Howarth of Cornell University. “We don’t need to become complete vegetarians, but to put this into context and to help sustain feeding a burgeoning global population, we need to reduce our meat consumption by 60 percent — which is about 1940s era levels.”

The report lays out the malnourishing consequences of the worldwide shift toward biofuels, which eat into the proportion of croplands that can be used to feed humans. “In light of global efforts to increase food security, markets for food and fuel should be decoupled,” the report says. “This implies, for instance, reducing biofuel quotas.”

If current trends continue, by 2050, when the world population is expected to be greater than 9 billion people, between 320 and 849 million hectares of natural land would have been converted to cropland, according to the report. The upper end of that estimate approaches the size of Brazil. The lower end is twice what the scientists behind the report consider to be safe.

But there is hope. Here are some highlights from the report:

[G]ross expansion of croplands by 2050 could be limited to somewhere between 8 per cent and 37 per cent, provided a multi-pronged strategy is followed for meeting the food, energy and other requirements of the global economy. …

The authors believe global net cropland area could safely increase to up to 1,640 million hectares by 2020. While they recognize there is still great potential in increasing yields in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors highlight new opportunities to steer consumption towards levels of sustainability, particularly in high-consuming regions.

[T]he improvement of diets to enhance efficiency in biomass use and its substitutes, delinking the biofuels and food markets, the reduction of food loss and waste, the control of biomaterials consumption; with improved land management and restoration of degraded land, may allow us to save 161 to 319 million hectares of land by 2050.

Oh, and one more big-ticket item: We need to stop wasting so much damned food! “Reducing unsustainable demand can be achieved in a number of innovative ways,” the report says. “This includes aiding consumers to cut out wasteful and excessive consumption behaviors, improving efficiency across the life-cycle of agricultural commodities, and increasing the efficiency with which land-based resources are used.”


Source
Assessing Global Land Use: Balancing Consumption with Sustainable Supply, International Resource Panel
U.N. report sounds alarm on farming land-use crisis, Cornell Chronicle

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How NSA Surveillance Fits Into a Long History of American Global Political Strategy

by ChristiScanlon Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line— like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of US surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.

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How NSA Surveillance Fits Into a Long History of American Global Political Strategy

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Fox News Just Can’t Get Americans to Buy Into Benghazi Conspiracy Theories

by SuzanneBl Posted on January 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen alerts me today to this hilariously loaded question in a recent Fox News poll:

Do you know what’s most hilarious about this? Even with question wording that practically demanded the answer they wanted, only 49 percent of respondents played along.

Give it up, guys. If you’re looking for evidence that the American public just doesn’t buy the cover-up conspiracy, this is it.

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Fox News Just Can’t Get Americans to Buy Into Benghazi Conspiracy Theories

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My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later

by pela_elpol Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Growing up in a well-heeled suburban community, I absorbed our society’s distaste for dissent long before I was old enough to grasp just what was being dismissed. My understanding of so many people and concepts was tainted by this environment and the education that went with it: Che Guevara and the Black Panthers and Oscar Wilde and Noam Chomsky and Venezuela and Malcolm X and the Service Employees International Union and so, so many more. All of this is why, until recently, I knew almost nothing about the Mexican Zapatista movement except that the excessive number of “a”s looked vaguely suspicious to me. It’s also why I felt compelled to travel thousands of miles to a Zapatista “organizing school” in the heart of the Lacandon jungle in southeastern Mexico to try to sort out just what I’d been missing all these years.

Hurtling South

The fog is so thick that the revelers arrive like ghosts. Out of the mist they appear: men sporting wide-brimmed Zapata hats, women encased in the shaggy sheepskin skirts that are still common in the remote villages of Mexico. And then there are the outsiders like myself with our North Face jackets and camera bags, eyes wide with adventure. (“It’s like the Mexican Woodstock!” exclaims a student from the northern city of Tijuana.) The hill is lined with little restaurants selling tamales and arroz con leche and pozol, a ground-corn drink that can rip a foreigner’s stomach to shreds. There is no alcohol in sight. Sipping coffee as sugary as Alabama sweet tea, I realize that tonight will be my first sober New Year’s Eve since December 31, 1999, when I climbed into bed with my parents to await the Y2K Millennium bug and mourned that the whole world was going to end before I had even kissed a boy.

Thousands are clustered in this muddy field to mark the 20-year anniversary of January 1, 1994, when an army of impoverished farmers surged out of the jungle and launched the first post-modern revolution. Those forces, known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, were the armed wing of a much larger movement of indigenous peoples in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, who were demanding full autonomy from their government and global liberation for all people.

As the news swept across that emerging communication system known as the Internet, the world momentarily held its breath. A popular uprising against government-backed globalization led by an all but forgotten people: it was an event that seemed unthinkable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The market had triumphed. The treaties had been signed. And yet surging out of the jungles came a movement of people with no market value and the audacity to refuse to disappear.

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My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later

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