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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/asia-pacific/william-barr-huawei-caster-semenya-your-thursday-briefing/

William Barr, Huawei, Caster Semenya: Your Thursday Briefing

U.S. Attorney General Grilled by Senate Panel

Attorney General William Barr spent much of Wednesday answering questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the special counsel’s report on Russian election meddling and possible obstruction of justice.

Mr. Barr defended the four-page summary that he released of the report, which the special counsel, Robert Mueller, criticized in a letter released by the Justice Department as failing to capture the “context, nature and substance” of the 448-page document.

Partisan focus: Democrats pressed Mr. Barr on why he had not publicly acknowledged concerns about his original summary and why he asserted that Mr. Trump had cooperated fully with the investigation when he tried to thwart it.

Republicans focused not on Mr. Trump or Mr. Mueller’s report but on Hillary Clinton’s emails and the former F.B.I. officials who opened the Russia investigation.

Go deeper: Read our reporter’s takeaways from the hearing.

What’s next: The House Judiciary Committee voted to allow staff lawyers to question Mr. Barr on Thursday. Mr. Barr has said he will not appear under that format.

See for yourself: Watch clips from the hearing.

Huawei grapples with an identity crisis

The Trump administration’s accusations that the telecommunications giant acts as a spy for the Chinese government, means that Huawei must prove it is trustworthy to maintain lucrative global business ties.

But “its soul is steeped in Communist Party culture,” writes our New New World columnist Li Yuan, and the company’s internal structures resemble the party, from the power of its top leadership down to its team-building activities.

Related: Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, fired her defense secretary, accusing him of leaking sensitive information about the government’s internal deliberations about Huawei and its decision to let the company build out its 5G network.

Trade talks: As the U.S. and China work toward closing a trade deal, there’s one thing that Beijing is unlikely to yield on: control over the data that American companies collect on their consumers inside China.

Women with high testosterone can be barred from races

A nuanced ruling by the highest court in international sports will force female athletes with elevated levels of male hormones to take suppressants to compete in certain international track races.

The ruling is a defeat for Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic champion in track and field from South Africa, who had previously challenged a proposal to limit testosterone levels. The ruling by the arbitration court was also watched closely by transgender athletes.

The court said restrictions on permitted levels of naturally occurring testosterone were discriminatory, but that such discrimination was a “necessary, reasonable and proportionate means” to preserve the integrity of women’s competition.

Response: Ms. Semenya issued a statement through her lawyers, said the decision “will not hold me back. I will once again rise above and continue to inspire young women and athletes in South Africa and around the world.” Her lawyers are considering an appeal.

What’s next: If she wants to keep participating at major international competitions, she faces some hard choices: take hormone-suppressing drugs; compete against men; or enter competitions for intersex athletes, if any are offered.

Focus on food and climate

What we eat every day has consequences.

The world’s food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals and animal products we eat. Climate change is also now altering the foods America grows.

What should you do? We’ve answered all your questions about how to shop, cook and eat in a warming world.

Recipes: Review our collection of climate-friendly dishes. And a correspondent who has traveled the world suggests five cuisines that are easier on the planet.

Quiz: What is the climate impact of the type of foods you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday? Take our quiz.

If you have 8 minutes, this is worth it

In pursuit of Aboriginal justice

Patrick Cumaiyi waved to his family with shackled hands as he boarded a plane to Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, to face a domestic-violence complaint. Before takeoff, an argument broke out, an officer delivered a sharp blow to Mr. Cumaiyi’s head, and another officer dragged him headfirst onto the tarmac.

Medical records obtained by The New York Times suggest he was a victim not only of police brutality — a persistent problem for Indigenous Australians — but also a cover-up.

Here’s what else is happening

U.N.C.: A 22-year-old man was in custody following a deadly shooting at the University of North Carolina that left two dead and four wounded.

Venezuela: Thousands of the opposition Juan Guaidó’s supporters turned out for a second day of protests in the capital, Caracas, and elsewhere, but it was unclear whether the antigovernment demonstrations were a convincing rejoinder to the setback he suffered on Tuesday, when military commanders asserted their allegiance to President Nicolás Maduro.

Julian Assange: A British court sentenced the WikiLeaks founder to 50 weeks in jail for jumping bail when he took refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London seven years ago.

Taliban: Negotiators began a new round of peace talks with the U.S. in Doha, Qatar. The U.S. military command in Afghanistan has stopped counting how much of the country is controlled by the Taliban, eliminating what had been a public measure of progress in the war.

Australia: Kate Jenkins, who is leading the country’s inquiry into workplace sexual harassment, is trying to overcome nondisclosure agreements that prevent victims from speaking out.

Snapshot: Above, Emperor Naruhito’s ascension ceremony. It offers striking visual evidence of the imperial family’s existential crisis: few heirs.

Yeti sighting? The Indian Army posted photos of 32-inch footprints near a base camp in Nepal, saying they belonged to the mythical snowman. Social media users had their own theories.

Netflix: The video streaming giant and SK Global Entertainment, the production house that made the film “Crazy Rich Asians,” acquired the rights to the story of the 12 boys and their soccer coach who were trapped in a cave in Thailand in July.

Do-it-yourself treadmills: Internet users are posting videos of themselves exercising using nothing more than soap, water, a slick hard floor and maybe a lack of common sense.

Dolphins: Scientists believe a beluga whale found off the coast of Norway and harnessed with a GoPro-type camera was being trained by the Russian Navy.

What we’re reading: This conversation with Anjelika Huston in Vulture. “It’s as good as everyone is saying,” writes Katie Rogers, one of our White House correspondents.

Now, a break from the news

Cook: When an average salad won’t do, Samin Nosrat’s greenest green salad will satisfy.

Listen: From Kanye West to serpentwithfeet to the Stellar Awards returning to BET, our critics discuss the evolving dialogue between gospel and pop.

Watch: The comedian Anthony Jeselnik says he can say very dark things because audiences understand that he’s not a monster — his character is. His new special is now on Netflix.

Go: The Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award, announced four finalists. Their work will go on display in Margate, England, and the winner will be announced in December.

Smarter Living:Allergies can be torture. Immunotherapy — shots that can help desensitize you to allergens — can help over time. If needles aren’t your thing, cleaning the filter of your air conditioner or furnace can keep indoor air cleaner. Vacuum often. Mattress protectors for both your mattress and box spring keep dust mites out. Pillow protectors are also an option.

And we asked you for the best advice anyone’s ever given you, and how it made an impact on your life. Here’s what you said.

And now for the Back Story on …

The power of fairy tales

A recent feature by our Berlin bureau chief tracked how Germany’s far-right has adopted anti-immigrant tropes in discussing an influx from Poland of “the most notorious fairy-tale baddie”: the wolf.

Connecting nationalism and fairy tales is not new.

The Brothers Grimm, who based their tales on folk tradition, lived and worked in the 19th century, when Europe was brimming with enthusiasm for the nation-state over multi-ethnic empires. Artists and writers reached for ancient myths to feed the ideal of a national culture.

That legacy lives on in children’s books but also concert halls: Jean Sibelius picked tales from the Finnish national epic “Kalevala”, and Bela Bartok collected folk songs from the former Austro-Hungarian empire.

But populists picking up the tales and myths often seems far from the artists’ intentions.

“Even if musical folklore once owed a debt to nationalism, today, ultranationalism hurts it so much that the damage is far greater than the benefit once was,” Bartok wrote in an essay in 1937.

Earlier this week, we told you about South Korean grandmothers who are learning to read and write for the first time. Their poignant stories reminded our Seoul bureau chief of the older villagers he knew when he was growing up.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Inyoung and Katie

Thank you Alisha Haridasani Gupta helped compile today’s briefing. Mark Josephson, Eleanor Stanford and Kenneth R. Rosen wrote the break from the news. Palko Karasz, in our London bureau, wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about the end of Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s rule of Sudan. • Here’s our Mini Crossword puzzle, and a clue: Singer who’s part of the celebrity couple “J-Rod” (3 letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • The New York Times translated our Tokyo bureau chief’s five-part look at the Japanese monarchy into Japanese.

#asia bibi news update #asia digital news #asia news aggregator #asia news defence #asia news wsj #channel news asia zero latency

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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Stop Asking People of Color to Get Arrested to Protest Climate Change

Indigenous peoples and people of color are disproportionately affected by our global climate crisis. But in the mainstream green movement and in the media, they are often forgotten or excluded. This is Tipping Point, a new VICE series that covers environmental justice stories about and, where possible, written by people in the communities experiencing the stark reality of our changing planet.

Tatiana Garavito is a Colombian organizer working with racialized communities in the U.K. She also works with activist groups leading climate justice campaigns in Colombia and is part of the Wretched of the Earth.

Nathan Thanki is a human ecologist, writer, and activist who works in support of the global movements for climate justice, including within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Back in April, London was rocked by Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests, with more than a thousand people arrested during weeklong occupations of Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge, and other notable landmarks. Since then, XR has garnered tons of media attention—and even celebrity endorsements from the likes of Radiohead—for its acts of civil disobedience. But for those of us whose immigration status is still questioned even after becoming citizens, getting arrested was not an option.

XR was founded in 2018 by a small group of British academics interested in civil disobedience, and since then has painted itself as a decentralized, “apolitical” group outside the mainstream environmental movement. It says it has no leaders, and uses non-violent direct action to call attention to climate change and biodiversity loss. XR aims for the widest appeal possible, and promotes local chapters in countries outside of Western Europe, though it lacks a base outside the U.K.

As people active in climate change politics, we have witnessed what American activist Van Jones described as the “unbearable whiteness of green” for a long time in the mainstream environmental movement. For all its apparent novelty, XR embodies the same problems: It overwhelmingly reflects the concerns, priorities, and ideas of middle-class white people in rich countries of the global north. By doing so, it ends up silencing the stories of our communities, who for hundreds of years, have been resisting the root causes of climate change.

These biases are inherent in XR’s core demands: that governments “tell the truth” and reduce emissions to “net zero” by 2025.

But whose truth? As we wrote in an open letter to XR as the Wretched of the Earth, a grassroots environmental justice collective for Indigenous, people of colour, and diaspora groups in the U.K., “The economic structures that dominate us were brought about by colonial projects whose sole purpose is the pursuit of domination and profit. For centuries, racism, sexism, and classism have been necessary for this system to be upheld, and have shaped the conditions we find ourselves in.”

We understand climate violence not as a threat of a future apocalypse but as the wind that fans the flames of existing injustices. It is already here—in the Cyclone Idais, Typhoon Haiyans, Hurricane Katrinas, and other, slower disasters that beset communities in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East (the global south) and marginalized people in the global north.

We don’t need to read the latest scientific reports to know that those least responsible for causing the climate crisis are usually the most vulnerable to its effects, including displacement. And that those people are overwhelmingly poor, Black or brown, and in the global south.

Yet XR, in its attempts to gain widespread appeal, is abandoning the people of the global majority. In Europe we already face frenzied anti-migrant rants from senior politicians and media figures. Now these attitudes are being further legitimized with the brush of environmentalism: We’ve both heard old white “climate activists” saying that we have to stop climate change so that crowds of poor brown people don’t come looking for shelter in Fortress Britain.

It hurt when, in a recent video, XR activist Ronan Harrington encouraged others in the movement to learn from xenophobic politicians and avoid taking “lefty liberal” positions such as “no borders” to not alienate potential right-wing allies. If the comment section is anything to go by, his notions have widespread support, including from XR co-founder Roger Hallam.

Hallam sees our anti-racist, feminist, and global justice politics as “chronically overcritical, radical, and hard left”—a strategic flaw and a barrier to success. Instead he advocates putting “scientific fact” before political ideology in shaping XR’s strategy. But this itself is an ideological position. What kinds of people do you think get to set the strategic priorities? Why aren’t they people like us?

XR’s primary tactic—mass arrests—has also left other activists baffled. Many of us already live with the risk of arrest and criminalization by virtue of our background. As we said in the open letter, XR’s strategy “needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence.”

White people in XR, however, assume that if they are polite and reasonable, the government will listen to them and protect them. Racialized communities and marginalized people know better.

XR’s lack of accountability to communities in the global south and those without access to power is a tactical and moral failing. Despite having an “international solidarity” working group, XR never echoes our key climate justice demand: that rich countries do their “fair share” of a collective global effort to keep temperature rise below 1.5 C.

Asking the U.K., U.S., and other rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025, as XR does, is not enough to avert further climate catastrophe. According to the Climate Equity Reference Calculator developed by nonprofits Stockholm Environment Institute and Ecoquity, the U.K. would have to reduce its emissions 202 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 to do its fair share. To date, all rich countries’ pledges fall way short of the mark.

What’s more, without reparations in the form of huge financial and technology transfers, countries in the global south simply won’t be able to make sufficient reductions, nor will they be able to help their people adapt to the already-severe and worsening effects of climate breakdown. Developing countries are estimated to need around $4.4 trillion just to fulfill their contributions to the Paris Agreement. XR has ignored these facts in favor of what they deem to be simpler and more palatable messages.

If XR had listened to the many movements rising in the global south for decades, it would have adopted the politics of anti-racism, feminism, and global justice not only as a matter of morality, but as a matter of strategy.

When we challenged XR about its overwhelmingly white base and problematic demands and tactics, Ronan McNern, a spokesperson for XR, insisted that it is “trying to directly ensure a more diverse movement.” He mentioned a voluntary living expenses initiative, so that it isn’t just people with money who can actively take part in actions, and a two-day decolonization training in July.

“We aren’t perfect but we are trying—and we welcome the engagement with those with different experiences and knowledge,” he said.

However, as far as we can see, this effort has not advanced much beyond cold-calling people of color to ask them to publicly endorse the “rebellion.”

Many in XR agree that we need to tackle white supremacy and build an environmental movement that avoids replicating the same power imbalances that led to the crisis in the first place. But that requires active listening, not just tick-box exercises that pretend to take our concerns on board. The good folks in XR should remember that its “left-wing” critics are not its enemies. This is the fight for all of our lives, and we need to do it right.

Follow Tatiana Garavito and Nathan Thanki on Twitter.

Have a story for Tipping Point? Email [email protected]

Stop Asking People of Color to Get Arrested to Protest Climate Change syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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courtneytincher · 5 years

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Dubya Was Bad, but the Donald Might Be Worse: Richard Clarke

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyFormer White House counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, who worked directly under three presidents during his 30 years in government, still believes his ex-boss George W. Bush was the worst of them all.Yet Clarke—whose new book, The Fifth Domain, chronicles the dire threats to the United States posed by cyberwarfare—says Donald Trump is very likely, in the end, to wreak even more havoc “He’s eviscerating the government. He’s eviscerating capabilities that we need,” Clarke told The Daily Beast this week as the Los Angeles Times reported that the Trump administration had “gutted programs aimed at detecting weapons of mass destruction”—rigorous local and national training programs that Clarke had a hand in starting. “And it’s not as though if the Democrats win the 2020 election you just turn those capabilities back on. The people go away, the skill sets go away, the capabilities atrophy. And it will take years to undo the damage.”Clarke added: “You’ve got to wonder if the cumulative effect of a million bad decisions equates to the disasters caused by one big bad decision that Bush made”—namely, the ruinous military adventure in Iraq that Bush 43 sold to Congress and the American people as a justifiable response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with. “But we’re getting there,” Clarke added, referring to Trump.Richard A. Clarke: What We’ve Learned From 9/11But couldn’t Trump just end up blundering through his presidency without inviting a catastrophe?“I think the chances of that,” Clarke answered with a mirthless laugh, “are really low.”Clarke is especially pessimistic that the Trump administration will do anything effective to combat the threats in cyberspace, especially since the president’s pugnacious national security adviser, John Bolton, last year eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council—in part because he didn’t want any challenges to his authority. “There are isolated pockets of career civil servants who are trying,” Clarke said. “There are some people in Homeland Security who are trying—some people at the FBI, some people at NSA, some people at Cyber Command [an agency of the Defense Department]. But what we don’t have is an executive order, a national security directive. We don’t have anybody in the White House who is a single coordinator of a response. We don’t have a request for money—in fact quite the opposite. The administration is telling [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to oppose more money for cybersecurity in the election process.”On the bright side, however, Clarke said he was heartened recently when Trump rejected Bolton’s advice to bomb Iran to retaliate for attacks on oil tankers, and instead listened to Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s pleas to stand down.“I know John pretty well,” Clarke said, going back to their days when both worked in the State Department under Ronald Reagan and Bolton was an assistant secretary. “He’s aggressive, he’s iconoclastic, and he likes to think things up and damn the consequences. That’s OK when you’re an assistant secretary of state, but not when you’re national security adviser.”Unable to suppress a laugh, Clarke added, “I loved the fact that when Trump went to North Korea last month, he took Tucker Carlson with him and sent John Bolton to Mongolia. It was very funny.”Like Bolton, but for different reasons, Clarke is very nearly a household name. His unhappy tenure as Bush 43’s counter-terrorism adviser in the months before 9/11 earned him a portrayal by actor Michael Stuhlbarg in the Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower.“I’m probably the wrong person to ask about how he portrayed me, but everybody I know who knows me—and certainly everybody I know who worked with me in those days—said ‘you were a much stronger, louder, more bossy kind of person than he portrayed, and more in charge than he portrayed. I think that’s probably right.”A former Republican who supported Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and later served the 44th president as an ex-officio cybersecurity expert, Clarke is backing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg this time around.“The only candidate who I have noticed mentions cybersecurity pretty regularly is Pete,” Clarke said. “Maybe that’s because I’m advising him.”Clarke said he has been volunteering as a Buttigieg policy adviser for the past six weeks, and has already “maxed out” in his contributions (the federally allowable figure is $2,800) to the 37-year-old mayor’s Democratic primary race. “A friend said, ‘You gotta read his book,’ and I was like, ugh, fuck, I got so many goddamn books to read,” Clarke said, by way of explaining his enthusiasm for Buttigieg, whose memoir, The Shortest Way Home, was published in February. “But I read the book and I was like ‘Whoa! Did this guy actually write this?’ And I said to myself, this has got to be a ghostwriter—so let me go hear him speak.”Clarke ultimately attended a Buttigieg campaign event in Washington, D.C. “It was pretty clear he wrote the book, and pretty clear that he is a very bright fellow, and has emotional intelligence, and thinks systematically,” Clarke said, recalling his reaction. “Just on sheer intelligence alone, he’s undoubtedly in a class by himself.Clarke, who is 68, continued: “At my stage in life, I’m more concerned about who should be president than who’s gonna win. And I said that back when Obama was running in ’07, when I read his books and went to meet with him, and I was blown away.” Clarke said he pledged his support to the freshman Illinois senator as “a voice in my head said ‘but you have no chance of winning.’… It’s the same this year.”Clarke predicted that Buttigieg’s public profile as an out-gay man, who happens to be married to another man, won’t hurt his presidential prospects.“I think the country’s ready for it, but it’s more the fact that he’s a small-town mayor with no federal experience and no national experience,” he said about Buttigieg’s political handicaps. “I never heard of him before six months ago. So he’s got a much harder row to hoe than people who are senators and people who have run for president before. I think if everybody started with a clean slate equally, he’d have a helluva chance, and the fact that he’s raised more money than anybody else in the last quarter [$24.8 million] means that he still has a chance.”Clarke’s The Fifth Domain, co-authored with former Obama administration cybersecurity adviser Robert Knake, is a comprehensive survey of the threats from this country’s four most determined cyberwar adversaries—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—and how the government and U.S. companies can successfully defend against them.The threat is more far-reaching than simply a foreign power such as Russia meddling in American democracy by hacking into private emails and balloting systems, while deploying bots to target persuadable swing-state voters with potent lies.“I rank the cyber threat right under global warming and climate change” as the nation’s most pressing challenge, Clarke said, “because it touches everything. It touches health care. It touches the economy. It touches the military. It has become a pervasive problem throughout everything we do.”Calling Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea the United States’ “Big Four” cyber enemies, Clarke said, “When you look at the annual threat briefing that the intelligence agencies give to the Congress in open session, those are the four they mention. But it’s very interesting what they said this year… They said Russia is in the controls of our power grid and could cause outages in parts of the country. China is in the controls of our gas pipeline system, and could cause outages. Iran could attack U.S. companies and wipe all data from their networks. Those are rather specific, I thought.”Meanwhile, North Korea—infamous for hacking into the emails of Sony movie executives five years ago (payback for a 2014 comedy in which a Kim Jong Un character is assassinated)—regularly invades the computer networks of banks “to steal money,” Clarke said. “The North Koreans are different from the other three in one respect: The North Korean government hacks for money—it’s a major source of revenue for them—whereas the other three hack for espionage purposes.”Clarke, who these days earns his living as a corporate cybersecurity consultant, has been a member of the national security establishment at least since 1985, when he was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence during the Reagan administration. But he is probably best known as that rare government official who has publicly apologized for official failure—in his case, the government’s failure to prevent al Qaeda’s hijacking of commercial airliners to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and kill nearly 3,000 people.Testifying before the 9/11 Commission in March 2004, Clarke famously called the public hearing “a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11,” and added: “To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask—once all the facts are out—for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”Never mind that Clarke, as Bush 43’s counter-terrorism adviser, had repeatedly warned the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that the U.S. intelligence community was picking up alarming chatter that indicated something imminent being planned in the months-long run-up to 9/11; Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who blocked Clarke’s access to the president, persistently ignored Clarke’s urgent requests for high-level meetings to respond to the threat.“It was just horrifying,” Clarke said, recalled his stint under Bush 43, “because he clearly was not too bright, and then he had such an inferiority complex. It didn’t work out very well…”Clarke, who left the Bush White House in 2003, continued: “They made enormous mistakes before and after 9/11. The mistakes after 9/11 were probably even worse. The Iraq war is an unforgivable mistake that destroyed the lives of many Iraqis and many Americans, and our children and grandchildren will be paying for it for many years to come.”As assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, Clarke had worked closely with Bush 43’s father, President George H.W. Bush, to muster international support for the first Gulf War.“Bush 41 was a very good national security president,” Clarke said. “He knew how the machinery worked, and he was good at working inside it. He respected it, he respected the system, he respected the people. And he achieved incredible results. The way in which he ended the Cold War was perfect, spot-on. And the way in which he conducted the first Gulf War was damned-near perfect. If you were electing a president for national security alone, he would have been perfect. He didn’t care about much else, unfortunately.”Clarke voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, even though a Clinton presidency meant he’d probably lose his job. Much to his surprise, Clinton not only kept him on, he elevated Clarke to the White House, where he served on the National Security Council and enjoyed cabinet-level access to the president as Clinton’s point man for security, infrastructure protection, and counter-terrorism.“I loved Bill Clinton,” Clarke said, and Clinton has returned the favor, effusively blurbing Clarke’s latest book. “The guy was and is incredibly smart and curious—really a rare breed. He’s a lot like Pete Buttigieg in a way.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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michaelfallcon · 5 years

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In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee

The social and political climates of every economy in our world are undergoing widespread change. Whether or not it’s realized, the laws of our lands and the commentary that comes with them affect every facet of our lives. Coffee isn’t immune to this—as a global industry, it depends on the exploitation of black and brown farmers and international laws of trade to thrive.

We look to coffee professionals in Iran, who are currently barred from participating in SCA events and WCE competitions thanks to the Trump administration, and Guatemalans leaving coffee behind in search for a better, safer life. Not only are these examples of the close relationship coffee has with politics, but the way our media portrays these people and events often demonizes them instead of informing the general public. As a result, portions of this public sometimes feel emboldened to react in dangerous ways.

In the state of Victoria in Australia, similar things are happening. Over the last year, unfair, racist media and political persecution has heavily affected Sudanese-Australians. Apparently, Melbourne is experiencing a rise in violence due to “African gangs,” but this is a myth. The sensationalism by Australian media outlets is doing more harm to these communities than good.

In the world of coffee, stepping in to stand up for the underserved and wrongly persecuted has become a new norm. It’s an acknowledgement of the very communities that produce the fruit an entire industry is built off of. From Sprudge’s multiple national fundraisers for refugees and asylum seekers to Department of Brewology’s Filter Coffee, Not People campaign—both helped send a message in strong support of people banned at US borders.

1951 Coffee Company in Berkeley, California offers employment to refugees also. Across the world in Singapore, Bettr Barista puts its focus on at-risk youth and marginalised women within their own community.

Despite the industry as a whole often toeing the line of humanitarianism and White savior complexes, it’s needless to say: the world of coffee has a heart to act for the social good of people because people are its core.

But in Melbourne—a city globally known and highly revered for its cafe culture—there rings a silence toward mobilizing for this cause in the coffee scene.

This isn’t true for every cause—there was an outpouring of community support for Australia’s vote to legalize gay marriage, and cafes have worked together nationally to raise money for the homeless. Richmond cafe Long Street Coffee also joins the list of places that employ refugees and recent migrants to Australia. Since we are in the age of coffee businesses utilizing their place in society as social third spaces to take strong stances for marginalized people everywhere, this could be an opportunity for Melbourne to join in. But as time passes, the current silence is beginning to speak volumes.

i.O.G.

In North Melbourne at Auction Rooms Cafe, three Sudanese-Australian artists—members of the collective Burn City Movement: Wantu Tha One, i.O.G, and Prince Leo—gather over coffee. They speak openly with Sprudge about their experience being seen as outsiders in a society they grew up in, and how the coffee community could play a role in fighting back against the political and media circus.

“Growing up in Australia was a wild experience,” i.O.G begins. He’s lived here almost half his life, having moved to Melbourne from South Sudan in 2006. “I grew up in the suburbs, where it was safer than most. Over the years, it’d been peaceful. But now it’s getting serious.”

I.O.G is referring to the recent rise in race-related incidents since the media’s reporting on the “African gang crisis” in the state of Victoria. This sensationalism has lingered in the media all year. Isolated incidents of South Sudanese youth committing crime have been exaggerated, so much so the Prime Minister himself spoke out against the so-called issue.

Wantu Tha One

“The Prime Minister of Australia is blurting out nonsense about African gangs and Sudanese-specific communities, while the police commissioner says this is far from a crisis; just a group of young people getting together now and again committing petty crimes,” says Wantu Tha One. “The statistics don’t add up to what they’re saying.”

And he’s right—crimes committed by Sudanese people in Victoria accounted for 1% of all crime in 2017. While many Victorians know and understand the demonization of South Sudanese people in Australia is to cause unwarranted fear for political party votes, Sudanese-Australians question why it comes at the expense of their own communities. At the same time, some are trying to find creative ways to address these problems while bringing everyone together.

This is where coffee can come in.

Wantu says, “The first thing—[Melbourne] coffee culture would have to find a way to welcome people of all backgrounds. And from there, we can feel more comfortable utilizing these spaces to come together.” Although they’re not the only black people in the cafe on this particular Sunday afternoon, they stand out. The stares from patrons of the cafe are glaringly apparent, but the vibe isn’t inherently unwelcoming.

“[Coffee shops] are more friendly in the city,” Wantu continues. “You find more open minds, and you’re greeted with a friendly smile. There are other areas where you walk into the shop and you feel out of place automatically.”

In the decades following the White Australia Policy ending in 1973, Australia promoted multiculturalism. The City of Melbourne proudly calls itself home to “one of the world’s most harmonious and culturally diverse communities,” reflected heavily in the city’s culinary spread, including coffee. But when you walk into one of the numerous cafes residents and tourists alike have to choose from, folks on both sides of the bar look mostly the same.

There’s a chance for Melbourne cafes to not only open their space to have these conversations and mobilize for the community, but offer jobs, as well. After all, being a barista is considered a serious profession in Australia—often viewed as a trade.

Certain politicians have suggested Sudanese people aren’t adjusting quickly enough to Australian culture. This is an interesting point to make considering the lack of support received overall after migration from a war-torn country to a society much different than their own. But maybe it’s here—at the coffee shop—where the lines that have clearly been drawn to divide Australians can begin to blur.

Prince Leo

Prince Leo asserts, “I don’t drink coffee on a daily basis, but I do respect the culture. Over here, it’s more than coffee. It’s social. It’s a vibe. We can use that to bring more awareness to what’s happening right now.”

The idea of spending time behind the espresso machine riles up the conversation as the group sips on cappuccinos and gazes at the baristas working. Wantu says, “Being a barista, you get to meet and connect with a lot of different people. And the idea of having coffee meet-ups to have a space for these connections could make a change.”

In a city where coffee is woven into the fabric of society, the amount of influence the coffee community has is immense. The community can take a stand for its fellow Australians and help change the narrative hurting Sudanese communities. If diversity is truly something we should champion and celebrate instead, standing by silently while certain groups of people are demonized is a step in the wrong direction.

Very recently, Victoria voted to re-elect Labor Party leader Daniel Andrews to office in the state elections. Similar to the American Democratic party, Victorians rejected “a campaign based on fear and division“ in overwhelming numbers. If this is truly the case, there’s no better time for the people of Victoria to band together and slow the ripple effects of this year’s political and media storm.

As Melbourne-based lawyer, activist, and Sudanese-Australian Nyadol Nyuon put it in the Saturday Paper:

“When the voting is done, and political careers are secured or lost, when the journalists put down their ‘pens’ and head to their families or bed, and when the publishers are onto the next story, the resultant scars from this episode of moral panic will still be carved into our lives. And they will still be there, weakening the ties that bind us into a shared identity as Victorians.”

Perhaps these ties can be strengthened again, if at the very least, over a cup of coffee.

Michelle Johnson (@thechocbarista) is the publisher of The Chocolate Barista. Read more Michelle Johnson on Sprudge.

The post In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee appeared first on Sprudge.

In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

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epchapman89 · 5 years

Text

In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee

But in Melbourne—a city globally known and highly revered for its cafe culture—there rings a silence toward mobilizing for this cause in the coffee scene.

i.O.G.

Wantu Tha One

This is where coffee can come in.

Prince Leo

As Melbourne-based lawyer, activist, and Sudanese-Australian Nyadol Nyuon put it in the Saturday Paper:

Perhaps these ties can be strengthened again, if at the very least, over a cup of coffee.

Michelle Johnson (@thechocbarista) is the publisher of The Chocolate Barista. Read more Michelle Johnson on Sprudge.

The post In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee appeared first on Sprudge.

seen 1st on http://sprudge.com

0 notes

mrwilliamcharley · 5 years

Text

In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee

But in Melbourne—a city globally known and highly revered for its cafe culture—there rings a silence toward mobilizing for this cause in the coffee scene.

i.O.G.

Wantu Tha One

This is where coffee can come in.

Prince Leo

As Melbourne-based lawyer, activist, and Sudanese-Australian Nyadol Nyuon put it in the Saturday Paper:

Perhaps these ties can be strengthened again, if at the very least, over a cup of coffee.

Michelle Johnson (@thechocbarista) is the publisher of The Chocolate Barista. Read more Michelle Johnson on Sprudge.

The post In Melbourne, Debunking The African Gang “Crisis” Over Coffee appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge http://bit.ly/2SnaUDq

0 notes

inhandnetworks-blog · 7 years

Text

The Dakota Access Pipeline Isn't About Climate Change—It's About Profit

www.inhandnetworks.com

This story originally appeared on High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the weather gets colder, the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline is heating up, in rather ugly ways. Just days before Thanksgiving, law enforcement officers tried to blast the protesters away with water cannons in 25-degree weather and employed other “less than lethal,” though still harmful, dispersal methods. One protester may lose her arm as a result of injuries suffered during the violence. And to top it off, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to close one of the camps of "water protectors" next week, which may embolden law enforcement to take a more forceful approach.

High Country News has reported what’s at stake for the Standing Rock Sioux tribal members and their allies trying to stop or re-route the project: Tribal sovereignty, water, environmental justice, holy lands, treaty-rights and antiquities. Add to that the prospect of more carbon spewing into the atmosphere, and one can see why activists are risking so much to stand in the pipeline’s way.

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Less clear is what the $3.78 billion, 1,172-mile-long crude oil pipeline offers in return if and when construction is completed and it goes into operation. Energy Transfer Partners, the project’s main proponent, says that the pipeline will offer jobs, economic relief to a struggling region and, by spurring production of North Dakota Crude, it will take the U.S. closer to the lofty ideal of energy independence.

Construction on the pipeline is about 85 percent complete and it has, indeed, put people to work. Yet it is not clear how many new jobs have been created since the jobs are spread out over 1,000 miles. Rural towns along the pipeline’s corridor have reported a boost in hotel and campground occupancy rates as the contractors move through. That, in turn, generates sales and lodging tax revenues for the local governments. The boost, however, won't last. In a few months, when (and if) construction is complete, the workers and their spending money will depart. The finished pipeline will require just 40 permanent maintenance and operational jobs along its entire stretch.

People donate food and equipment to campers inside of the Oceti Sakowin camp as "water protectors" continue to demonstrate against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, December 2. Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Once oil is flowing, property tax revenues—an estimated total of $55 million annually—will kick in. While it’s a big chunk of change, the impacts will be diffused, shared by four states. North and South Dakota are expected to receive about $13 million each, divided between several counties, a drop in the budget bucket (Colorado generates nearly $20 million per month from taxes and fees on marijuana). That said, it might be enough to buy the county sheriffs some more military gear from the Pentagon in order to squelch the next pipeline protest. It will not, however, cover the costs of such squelching: The current law enforcement effort has reportedly cost $15 million so far.

The fact is, pipelines, like transmission lines, don't have a major economic impact except when they’re built. They otherwise go mostly unnoticed until they spill, burst or explode.

The bigger-picture impact, whether on climate change or energy independence, is more difficult to suss out. Both proponents and opponents seem to be working on the “build-it-and-they’ll-fill-it” premise. That is, if you expand pipeline capacity for North Dakota crude, it will encourage more oil drilling and thus more oil production. If more domestic oil is produced, the logic goes, then we have less need to import foreign oil and we achieve greater energy independence. The flip side to that is, the more oil we drill, the more we consume, resulting in greater carbon emissions. It's summed up in this nifty formula:

More Pipeline Capacity —> More Oil Production —> More Energy Independence and Carbon Emissions

This formula, however, holds only if lack of pipeline capacity is a major hindrance to oil development. It's not. We can move crude oil not only through pipelines, but also with trucks, trains and tankers. Oil’s mobility (along with its relative fungibility) help make it a global commodity in a way that natural gas, for example, is not. The lack of pipeline capacity is not a major limiting factor in oil development and production; when the North Dakota boom was on, no one opted out of drilling because of lack of transportation options. In fact, prices were so high, no one opted out of drilling at all.

Just as the biggest driver of oil development is a high oil price, the biggest hindrance, particularly for expensive-to-drill North Dakota crude, is a low oil price. That relationship has been on display in North Dakota, and across the West, for the last decade: Oil prices went up, thanks to burgeoning demand in China and the developing world, so drilling intensified and production went bananas. Oil prices crashed as China's economic growth slowed, the drill rigs were stored away and production has decreased.

Very few wells have been “shut-in” or plugged up. Most of the already-drilled wells continue to produce, but at lower and lower rates, a phenomenon known as the “decline curve.” Wells that produced 220 barrels per day when they were drilled in 2005, for example, now only produce about 20 barrels per day.

High Country News

Plug these critical factors—global supply vs. demand and price—into the aforementioned formula and the outcome becomes far murkier. No longer does more pipeline capacity directly lead to more production; it must first either raise the price of oil, or induce demand. The latter's not going to happen. A pipeline across the upper Midwest will not inspire the masses in China to buy cars and drive them all over the country. It will not affect global demand.

So how about price? The Dakota Access Pipeline is expected to carry half-a-million barrels of oil per day to refineries and market hubs in Illinois. Moving a barrel of oil on the pipeline is expected to cost about $8, compared to approximately $15 for shipping it via rail. That is, if the producer would have received $34 per barrel for rail-shipped oil, it will get $41 per barrel for Dakota Access Pipeline-shipped oil.

This $7-per-barrel bonus could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue for the producer over the well’s life, and could certainly keep wells from being shut-in. Yet it's doubtful that it's enough to push the producer to dust off the rigs and start drilling again. It costs anywhere from $5 million to $15 million to drill a well in North Dakota's Bakken formation. After the last bust, producers and their investors are unlikely to fork out that kind of cash until oil prices go up considerably and stay there, which will only happen if Saudi Arabiacommits to a long-term slash in its production. Unless new wells are drilled in North Dakota at a furious rate, production will continue to decrease, thanks to the decline curve.

There is one other way the pipeline could impact oil prices, at least for the oil flowing through the line. Some oil customers reportedly entered into contracts with producers prior to construction to buy DAPL oil at or near 2014 prices. If those contracts remain in place despite the protest-caused construction delay, it could, theoretically, push producers to drill a few more wells to produce enough oil to fetch the higher price. But probably not. It's more likely that those producers will simply divert oil now shipped by rail to the pipeline, thus increasing profit without increasing production.

If, somehow, the pipeline were able to increase oil production, then we'd still have another variable to plug into our equation. I'll call it the T. Greg Merrion factor, for the New Mexico oil executive who told me about it: “Nothing helps low prices like low prices, and nothing hurts high prices like high prices.” That is, the increased supply delivered by the pipeline (without a consequent increase in demand) would increase the amount of oil supply on a market where demand can’t keep up with supply. The glut grows. Prices slide further downward. There's even less drilling. Production slides. The cycle continues.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, on its own, is not likely to result in increased production of North Dakota Crude, because More Pipeline Capacity ≠ More Demand;Therefore the pipeline will not create more oilfield jobs or result in higher severance tax revenues to North Dakota;If there is any uptick in production thanks to the pipeline, it won't be enough to put a dent in the 5.2 million barrels of oil the U.S. continues to import each and every day;Since the pipeline won't push more production, it also will not result in more consumption. Therefore, it will not directly lead to a significant increase in carbon emissions.

Which is to say, the pipeline will be neither the economic boon, nor the climate bane, it's been made out to be. Nor will it get the U.S. any closer to energy independence.

Why, then, is Energy Transfer Partners so intent on building this thing? The equation that answers that one is far simpler. If the pipeline indeed carries 470,000 barrels per day, at a rate of $8 per barrel, the company should gross about $1.37 billion per year. Operating costs are low (remember, there are just 40 employees running this thing), so it shouldn’t take long to recoup the capital costs. That leaves a lot for the investors, like Energy Transfer Partners' billionaire CEO Kelcy Warren, or reputed billionaire and President-elect Donald Trump.

Yes, Trump is invested in the companies behind the pipeline, though the amount of his stake decreased substantially between 2015 and 2016. Meanwhile, Warren donated more than $100,000 to Trump’s campaign, clearly hoping he would remove federal obstacles to the pipeline.

These numbers are worth considering when you see the images of the “water protectors” getting pummeled with water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas. They’re not being attacked in the name of jobs, the economy or energy independence. They’re being attacked in the name of profit.

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delicatelysublimeforester · 7 years

Text

Horned Grebe Podiceps Auritus

Horned Grebe Podiceps Auritus “Members of the family of Grebes are to be found in the temperate zones of both hemispheres, beyond which they do not extend very far either to the north or south. They are usually found on ponds or large sheets of stagnant water, sometimes on deep, slow-moving streams; but always where sedges and rushes are abundant. Probably there are no birds better entitled to the name of water fowl than the Grebes—at least, observers state that they know of no others that do not on some occasions appear on dry land. It is only under the most urgent circumstances, as, for instance, when wounded, that they approach the shore, and even then they keep so close to the brink that on the slightest alarm they can at once plunge into the water. Whatever they do must be done in the water; they cannot even rise upon the wing without a preliminary rush over the surface of the lake. From dry land they cannot begin their flight. Their whole life is spent in swimming and diving. They even repose floating upon the water, and when thus asleep float as buoyantly as if they were made of cork, the legs raised to the edges of the wings, and the head comfortably buried among the feathers between the back and shoulder. Should a storm arise, they at once turn to face the blast, and are usually able, with their paddle-like feet, to maintain themselves in the same place. They dive with great facility, and make their way more swiftly when under water than when swimming at the top. When flying the long neck is stretched out straight forwards and the feet backwards. In the absence of any tail, they steer their course by means of their feet. When alarmed they instantly dive.

Their food consists of small fishes, insects, frogs, and tadpoles. Grebes are peculiar in their manner of breeding. They live in pairs, and are very affectionate, keeping in each other’s company during their migrations, and always returning together to the same pond. The nest is a floating one, a mass of wet weeds, in which the eggs are not only kept damp, but in the water. The weeds used in building the nests are procured by diving, and put together so as to resemble a floating heap of rubbish, and fastened to some old upright reeds. The eggs are from three to six, at first greenish white in color, but soon become dirty, and are then of a yellowish red or olive-brown tint, sometimes marbled.

The male and female both sit upon the nest, and the young are hatched in three weeks. From the first moment they are able to swim, and in a few days to dive. Having once quitted the nest they seldom return to it, a comfortable resting and sleeping place being afforded them on the backs of their parents. “It is a treat to watch the little family as now one, now another of the young brood, tired with the exertion of swimming or of struggling against the rippling water, mount as to a resting place on their mother’s back; to see how gently, when they have recovered their strength, she returns them to the water; to hear the anxious, plaintive notes of the little warblers when they have ventured too far from the nest; to see their food laid before them by the old birds; or to witness the tenderness with which they are taught to dive.Col. F. M. Woodruff.”

Designated Special Concern by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada COSEWIC, “because over 90% of this bird’s breeding grounds are within Western Canadian wetlands, the continued destruction of marshes and waterways is a major threat to the survival of this species.”Nature Canada “Threats include degradation of wetland breeding habitat, droughts, increasing populations of nest predators (mostly in the Prairies), and oil spills on their wintering grounds in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. COSEWIC”

“The global population has been declined by 30% over the last three decades and by 79% within North America. Within 1985 and 2001, grassland and wetland drainage amounted to 5% global habitat loss. Due to global declines, the Horned Grebe has been unlisted from least concern to vulnerable resulting in conservation and research action plans.*”

According to the Ministry of the Environment, A breeding bird or breeding Grebe colony is protected May 15 through to July 15 of the year, foot traffic, and other low disturbances must maintain a distance of 100 meters. Medium disturbances such as vehicles and ATVs as well as high disturbances, roads, drilling both must maintain a distance of 200m from loons and any Colonial Nesting Grebes. The Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area and the Afforestation Area formerly known as George Genereux Park are both located in the West Swale which drains into the South Saskatchewan River at Yorath Island/Maple Grove.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Nature Canada suggests:

“Tell elected officials that you support the protection of at least half of Canada’s Boreal forest.” “The eco-system of a forest is very fragile. It is very easily upset. This would be a fifth reason why tree cover should be maintained…It is not enough for a mayor to put on his chain and plant a tree but he must plant forest trees for our lives”~Richard St. Barbe Baker The afforestation areas of Saskatoon are a vital heritage site, and a true testament to the Parks Department of Saskatoon.

Dan Kraus,Weston conservation scientist and senior director of conservation program development for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, writes about the temperate prairies, and the endangered grasslands ~ the World’s most endangered eco-system. So it certainly would not hurt to tell your elected officials that you support the protection, as well, of the native grasslands of the West Swale, including those of the Afforestation area formerly known as George Genereux Urban Regional Park, and the native grasslands of the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area.

“When viewed in the context of our climate and geological history, it is evident that prairie wetlands are integral and irreplaceable parts of the Saskatchewan landscape.The challenge is to find a place for these wetlands in our social, economic and land-use systems – a place where their protection and conservation is assured by their inherent value.Managing Saskatchewan’s Wetlands Is there not truly a great symbiosis between woodlands, grasslands and wetlands?

“Advocate for greater protection of Important Bird Areas (IBA) in your community and across the country.”

“Learn more about IBAs.” Do you consider Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area, the West Swale, and the many and several wetlands around Chappell Marsh an important bird area? Chappell Marsh is huge, extending from Chappell Marsh Conservation Area managed by Ducks Unlimited, into Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area managed by the City of Saskatoon and the Meewasin Valley.

“Stay informed about endangered birds and other species”

“Thousands of volunteers have helped conserve Important Bird Areas by surveying bird populations, building nest boxes, erecting signs, removing invasive species, planting native grasses, and promoting awareness of the value of wildlife.”

What will you do?

From the account above, can you recognize the Horned Grebe, now on your travels into the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area, and around about the West Swale wetlands, the series of marshes alongside Chappell Marsh?

1./ Learn.

2./ Experience

3./ Do Something: ***

The elected officials are:

The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau,, P.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Canada, Ottawa

The Honourable Catherine McKenna Minister of Environment and Climate Change

Her Honour the Honourable Vaughn Solomon Schofield, S.O.M., S.V.M., Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan

Honorable Sheri Benson, Member of Parliament Constituency:Saskatoon West Email:[email protected]

The Honourable Brad Wall, Premier of Saskatchewan. Email [email protected]

Ms. Jennifer Campeau. Saskatchewan Party Saskatoon Fairview ~ representing the regions for the West Swale and Afforestation areas. Members of the Legislative Assembly. [email protected]

His Worship Mayor Charlie Clark

Saskatoon City Councillors. Ward 2 – Councillor Hilary Gough and Ward 3 – Councillor Ann Iwanchuk

Shaping Saskatoon Email communications Division

“From water and earth we came, and the future of mankind on this planet will be determined by respectful or disrespectful treatment of these basic elements.

Water must be a basic consideration in everything: forestry, agriculture and industry. The forest is the mother of the rivers. First we must restore the tree cover to fix the soil, prevent too quick run-off, and steady springs, streams and rivers. We must restore the natural motion of our rivers and, in so doing, we shall restore their vitalizing functions. A river flowing naturally, with its bends, broads and narrows, has the motion of the blood in our arteries, with its inward rotation, tension and relaxation.” ~Richard St. Barbe Baker

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Collins, Henry Hill Editor. Harper and Row’s Complete Field Guide to North American Wildlife. Harper and Row Publishers. New York. 1981. ISBN 0-06-181163-7 page 12. Continuing Horned Grebe and Snow Buntings sullivancountybirder, Sullivan & Delaware County Birder’s Blog

COSEWIC Assessment and Status Report on the Horned Grebe Podiceps Auritus. Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. COSEWIC. 2009. COSEWIC assessment and status report on the Horned Grebe Podiceps auritus Western population and Magdalen Islands population, in Canada. Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Ottawa. vii + 42 pp. (www.sararegistry.gc.ca/ status/status_e.cfm)

Audubon Mural Project 2016. New York, NY. Bird #20: Horned Grebe: Giannina Gutierrez. Aug 13, 2016 street artstreet artistsNew York

David Krughoff’s Horned Grebe Prairies North Magazine.

Horned Grebe v.s. Highways. CBC.ca The Afternoon Edition. [Saskatchewan Highways and infrastructure have run into a different kind of roadblock at the site of one of their construction projects: the Horned Grebe.]

Horned Grebe. All About Birds Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Horned Grebe Audubon Field Guide

October birding around Victoria on a wonderful weekend hazel, FOSSILS & FAUNA Dec 4, 2016 birdsbcnature

Horned Grebe videos, photos, and facts. Podiceps auritus. |ARKive

Species Profile Horned Grebe Western population Species at Risk Public Registry. SARA Government of Canada.

Species Profile Horned Grebe Species at Risk Public Registry. SARA Government of Canada.

Horned Grebe Bird Web.

Horned Grebe: Life History All About Birds.

Horned Grebe Bird Watcher’s Digest.

Horned Grebe. Birdinginformation.com

Horned Grebe Wikipedia.

Peterson, Roger Tory. A Field Guide to Western Birds. A completely new guide to Field Marks of All Species Found in North America West of the 100th Meridian and North of Mexico. Peterson Field Guides. Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company Boston. 1990. ISBN 0-395-51749-4. page 26

Nature Canada ~ Horned Grebe Species Spotlight

Sibley, David Allen. Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2003. ISBN 0-679-45121-8. Page 30.

For more information:

Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area is located in Saskatoon, SK, CA north of Cedar Villa Road, within city limits, in the furthest south west area of the city. Wikimapia Map: type in Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area Google Maps South West Off Leash area location pin at parking lot Web page: https://stbarbebaker.wordpress.com

Where is the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area? with map

Facebook: StBarbeBaker

Facebook group page : Users of the St Barbe Baker Afforestation Area

Facebook: South West Off Leash Recreation Area SW OLRA

Pinterest richardstbarbeb

If you wish to support the afforestation area with your donation, write a cheque please to the “Meewasin Valley Authority Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area trust fund” (MVA RSBBAA trust fund) and mail it to Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area c/o Meewasin Valley Authority, 402 Third Ave S, Saskatoon SK S7K 3G5. Thank you kindly! Twitter: St Barbe Baker

Save

1./ Learn.

2./ Experience

3./ Do Something: ***

Save

“In the wealth of the woods since the world began The trees have offered their gifts to man.” – Henry van Dyke

The greatest gift of all is life. For millions of years the trees were paving the way for life on this planet, absorbing impurities, clearing up the foetid atmosphere and the swamp breath, absorbing carbon dioxide and giving off the life giving oxygen that we breathe.” ~Richard St. Barbe Baker

Basic Consideration : Water Horned Grebe Podiceps Auritus "Members of the family of Grebes are to be found in the temperate zones of both hemispheres, beyond which they do not extend very far either to the north or south.

0 notes

newstfionline · 7 years

Text

China scrambles to build rapport with Trump and his Cabinet

By Simon Denyer, Washington Post, February 28, 2017

BEIJING--For China’s Communist Party, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Hardly a day goes by without some opinion piece in state media here reveling in the demise of democracy and American global leadership under President Trump.

But underneath the triumphalism, China’s government is deeply anxious, experts say, as it faces a government packed with hawkish voices led by a man who sees Beijing as one of the United States’ fiercest competitors.

On Monday, China’s most senior diplomat began a two-day trip to Washington, which included a brief meeting with Trump, aimed at finding a new basis for what former president Barack Obama called the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century.

It won’t be an easy task for State Councilor Yang Jiechi.

Economic and business ties had long been the ballast that kept the relationship stable, but they have now become a source of conflict. Climate change had provided a narrative of cooperation rather than competition, but it has been taken off the table. Meanwhile tensions over the North Korea’s nuclear program, the disputed waters of the South China Sea and the status of Taiwan loom larger than ever.

“China is keen to find something to replace climate change as the notional glue to hold the relationship together,” said Christopher Johnson, a former senior CIA China analyst and now an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“But what really keeps the relationship from tipping into an adversarial one is the economic relationship,” he said. “If that gets scratchy, the whole stability of the relationship becomes impacted.”

It is not unusual for new presidents to face tough adjustment periods when it comes to China policy--Ronald Reagan clashed with Beijing over Taiwan, Bill Clinton over human rights--but with Trump it is “qualitatively different,” said Evan Medeiros, formerly Obama’s chief adviser on Asia and now the Eurasia Group’s managing director for Asia

“The current agenda of potentially contentious issues is quite large,” he said. “Plus this administration appears to be packed with senior officials who have an ideological and/or an interest-based concern about China and see it as a strategic competitor, and a president who, to the extent he has a coherent view about China, appears antagonistic.”

Indeed, the past three months have been a roller-coaster ride for the Chinese.

Exultation greeted Trump’s victory, just as it did in Moscow--here was a business executive and a dealmaker, the argument went in China, a man who won’t try to subvert our regime by promoting democracy, like Hillary Clinton might have done.

But the mood soon turned to horror as Trump reached out to Taiwan and questioned the principle that there was only one China, the bedrock of diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing.

But Beijing stood firm, and Trump appeared to back down, finally agreeing to honor the one-China policy in a “very warm” phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Lines of communication between the two governments, previously somewhat scarce, opened up: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Munich, while Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke with China’s economic leaders.

Collision course avoided, proclaimed the China Daily newspaper, as China and the United States “restore belief that they can reduce frictions.”

There was a sense, too, that the administration’s more radical impulses toward China, personified by National Trade Council chief Peter Navarro, are being tempered by an array of more conventional figures from the conservative establishment, such as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Tillerson or the Goldman Sachs duo of Mnuchin and Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn.

“These guys have got to deal with the real world as it is,” said Douglas Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“I tend to see this as a contest between the deep state--the old poles of intelligence, State, Defense and Congress--trying to keep the ship of state floating, when there are a lot of other people trying to rock the boat,” Paal said.

An early sign of this moderating influence came when Mattis visited Tokyo and Seoul, and stressed diplomatic rather than military solutions to the dispute in the South China Sea.

Another indication: While Trump last week told Reuters that the Chinese were the “grand champions” of currency manipulation, Mnuchin was telling Bloomberg any decision to label China a manipulator would only follow a review by the Treasury Department.

Nevertheless, there is a widespread belief that the administration will unveil a package of trade and investment measures aimed at China, when (and if) Robert Lighthizer is confirmed as U.S. trade representative.

He and the new commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, are expected to take a tough line with China on trade, while Mnuchin told Chinese officials he wanted “a more balanced bilateral economic relationship.”

Although the business community has been lobbying hard against Trump’s most radical proposals, reciprocity is now the buzzword in Washington. Why should China’s subsidized state-owned giants get a pass to export to and invest in the United States, when China erects barriers the other way?

“Brace for U.S.-China trade conflict,” the analysis firm Gavekal Dragonomics said in a client report, warning that the coming months will probably bring “aggressive trade actions” by the United States and a firm Chinese response.

The best outcome, it argued, was that Trump’s “get tough” approach wins some cosmetic concessions from China, before the two sides resume more productive discussions. “The worst outcome is that the Trump administration gets trapped by the fantasy it can simply force China to change, and the world gets stuck with a full-scale trade war.”

War isn’t likely in the South China Sea, but tensions could easily rise again, with Trump promising a big rise in naval spending and voices in the Pentagon arguing for a greater U.S. naval presence there, experts said. China, meanwhile, appears to be continuing its slow, steady construction of military facilities there, with buildings that U.S. officials say could one day house surface-to-air missiles.

North Korea is another point of tension, with the recent assassination of leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother in Malaysia, apparently with a VX nerve agent, a reminder of the regime’s ruthless nature.

“The mood in Washington is that the administration is more open to thinking about military options than in the past,” said Medeiros. In other words, “taking the kinds of military actions, like joint exercises and missile defense, that China is very uncomfortable with.”

On Monday, China’s Foreign Ministry again signaled its firm resistance and strong dissatisfaction with plans to deploy a U.S. missile defense system in South Korea, warning that both countries would bear the consequences.

On the global stage, China has been nimble in reacting to Trump, reaching out to Germany and the European Union, which have been deeply hurt by Trump’s rebuffs, or, as Xi did in Davos, Switzerland, presenting Beijing as a somewhat unlikely defender of “economic globalization.”

But when it comes to U.S. relations, Beijing has been outmaneuvered so far by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who stole a march on his Chinese rivals with a round of golf and a visit to the president’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.

At the American Enterprise Institute, Daniel Blumenthal said that Trump has been smart to rock the Chinese back on their toes, adding that it is time for a tougher approach on everything from the economic relationship to the South China Sea and Taiwan.

Walter Lohman of the Heritage Foundation welcomed Trump’s commitment to the military, saying that a bigger Navy is crucial to defending U.S. security interests in Asia’s waterways.

But others said that Trump could be tipping the relationship with China into a new period of contention and conflict that doesn’t help anyone

“Uncertainty is okay, I don’t have a problem with that,” said Johnson. “But too much uncertainty and unpredictability becomes scary to China and perhaps more importantly to our allies. It requires a lot of nuance and skill to walk that line finely.”

#China #US-China relations

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mayorgalvan · 7 years

Video

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H. L. Mencken Interview

Cancel the F-35

A petition to the United States Congress and the governments of Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, and Canada from the world and from the people of Burlington, Vermont, and Fairbanks, Alaska, where the F-35 is to be based. Initiated by Vermont Stop the F35 Coalition, Save Our Skies Vermont, Western Maine Matters, Alaska Peace Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Peace Club, North Star Chapter 146 Veterans For Peace, World Beyond War, RootsAction.org, Code Pink, Ben Cohen. Supported by: Centro Documentazione Manifesto Pacifista Internazionale, International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Nej tak til nye kampfly (in Denmark), Peaceful Skies Coalition (in Santa Fe, NM), Straits Area Concerned Citizens for Peace, Justice, and the Environment (in Michigan).

Please add your name below:

The F-35 is a weapon of offensive war, serving no defensive purpose.

It is planned to cost the U.S. $1.4 trillion over 50 years. Because starvation on earth could be ended for $30 billion and the lack of clean drinking water for $11 billion per year, it is first and foremost through the wasting of resources that this airplane will kill. Military spending, contrary to popular misconception, also

hurts the U.S. economy

(see below) and other economies.

The F-35 causes negative health impacts and

cognitive impairment in children

living near its bases. It renders housing near airports unsuitable for residential use. It has a

high crash rate and horrible consequences

to those living in the area of its crashes. Its emissions are a

major environmental polluter.

Wars are

endangering the United States and other participating nations rather than protecting them.

Nonviolent tools of law, diplomacy, aid, crisis prevention, and verifiable nuclear disarmament should be substituted for continuing counterproductive wars.

Therefore, we, the undersigned, call for the immediate cancellation of the F-35 program as a whole, and the immediate cancellation of plans to base any such dangerous and noisy jets near populated areas.

We oppose replacing the F-35 with any other weapon or basing the F-35 in any other locations. We further demand redirection of the money for the F-35 back into taxpayers' pockets, and into

environmental and human needs in the U.S., other F-35 customer nations, and around the world,

including to fight climate change, pay off student debt, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and improve education, healthcare, and housing.

First Name*Last Name*Zip/Postal Code*Email*StreetCityState/Province Select a state Alabama Alaska American Samoa Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware D.C. Florida Georgia Guam Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Northern Mariana Islands Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virgin Islands Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Armed Forces (the) Americas Armed Forces Europe Armed Forces Pacific Alberta British Columbia Manitoba Newfoundland and Labrador New Brunswick Nova Scotia Northwest Territories Nunavut Ontario Prince Edward Island Quebec Saskatchewan Yukon Territory Other Country Select Country United States Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Bouvet Island Brazil British Indian Ocean Territory Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia Comoros Congo Congo, The Democratic Republic of the Cook Islands Costa Rica Cote D'Ivoire Croatia Cuba Curacao Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France France, Metropolitan French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Heard and McDonald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran, Islamic Republic of Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea, Dem. People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Macedonia, Former Yugoslav Republic Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco Mongolia Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Reunion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Sint Maarten Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Sudan S. Georgia and S. Sandwich Islands Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Svalbard and Jan Mayen Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Outlying Islands Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Wallis and Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Yugoslavia Zaire Zambia Zimbabwe Please add comment.

Display in list as Anonymous

By taking action you will be automatically signed up for action alerts from RootsAction. We consider your contact information to be private and confidential. We will NOT disclose it to any other entity unless you specifically authorize us to do so. You can unsubscribe at the bottom of any email you receive from us.

To endorse as an organization click here.

Why this matters: The F-35 will kill and destroy while making us all less safe. The F-35 is a first strike stealth weapon designed to penetrate air space undetected. It will be used for massive killing and destruction in more wars like Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Vietnam in which millions of civilians have been killed and wounded and millions of refugees created. Despite the misery they caused, these wars did not make people in the United States safer, and they made things worse in each of the countries that U.S. warplanes and soldiers attacked. In fact, CIA director John Brennan told the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on June 16, 2016, that the wars since 2001 have not worked: “… despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.” In fact the war on terrorism has predictably and demonstrably increased rather than reduced terrorism. Gallup polling now finds that much of the world considers the United States the greatest threat to peace on earth. Nor is a fighter/bomber, like the F-35, capable of protecting anyone against nuclear ICBMs, cruise missiles, cyber attacks, global warming, or any individual acts of terrorism. The F-35 is designed for, among other things, delivery of the B61-12 nuclear weapon. Alaska's Congressional delegation has indicated several times that the F-35 is right for Alaska because of its proximity to Russia, making this weapon part of the new and perilous cold war. The F-35 is a damaging trade-off. 1. Cost: The U.S. Air Force says the F-35 program will cost $1,400,000,000,000 over 50 years. The F-35 strips public money to pay private war contractors, like Lockheed Martin, that could better be spent to alleviate suffering, erase student debt, rebuild roads and bridges, defend against global warming, and provide education, health care, and housing. The money taken from such vital public use goes instead to war profiteers, increasing inequality and social division in the United States and elsewhere. 2. The F-35 destroys far more jobs than it creates: Researchers at the University of Massachusetts* report that each billion dollars spent on military preparations costs the United States between 4 and 16 thousand jobs as compared with tax cuts for working people or identical spending on clean energy, healthcare, or education. Thus, the $1.4 trillion, 50-year F-35 program means fewer jobs in the 45 U.S. states involved. * http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf * http://www.ciponline.org/research/entry/promising-the-sky-pork-barrel-politics-and-the-f-35-combat-aircraft 3. The F-35 causes cognitive impairment of children: The U.S. Air Force says the F-35A is more than four times louder than the intensely loud F-16 that it is replacing. A World Health Organization (WHO) report says that noise at the level of the F-35 on takeoff for just one minute is sufficient to cause health consequences: The WHO report states that children are more sensitive than adults, and the report cites data showing that the effects of such aircraft noise on children include cognitive impairment: adverse effects on reading, memory, auditory discrimination, speech perception, and academic performance, as well as other health effects, including increased blood pressure and increased stress hormones.* * http://www.who.int/ceh/capacity/noise.pdf * http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/136466/e94888.pdf 4. The F-35 makes houses unsuitable for residential use: The Federal Aviation Administration says there is no effective mitigation for this noise besides families leaving. In Burlington Vermont, where F-16 jets are now based, the federal government paid to purchase and demolish 150 affordable homes to protect the people from damaging F-16 noise. The U.S. Air Force says that basing 18 F-35 jets at the airport in Burlington will cause 2,252 acres of land holding 2,963 households with 6,663 people to be in the “unsuitable for residential use” noise zone. 5. The F-35 has both a high crash risk and high crash consequences: The U.S. Air Force says all new military jets have a very high risk of crashing. The F-35 has far worse consequences when it crashes in or near people than older jets. Whereas older military jets were made of aluminum, the body of the F-35 is made of military composite materials with a stealth coating which emit highly toxic chemicals, particles, and fibers when set on fire during the inferno when thousands of gallons of jet fuel burst into flames. An Air Force report says this catastrophe should not be allowed to happen near people. The only way to prevent this tragedy from happening is to prevent basing of such military jets in or near densely populated areas, like Burlington Vermont or any of the other towns and cities planned for basing.

GOAL: 25,000

CURRENT: 20,811

1-25 of 20809 signatures

NumberDateNameLocationPlease add comment.

208090 seconds agoMargaret ShafferArcata, CA , US

208082 seconds agomadelyn roeschwoodhaven, NY , US

208073 seconds agoErik PetersonTroy, MI , US

208068 seconds agoPamela CosgroveWilmington, DE , US

208059 seconds agoSusanna AskinsPortland, OR , US

2080410 seconds agoRoger EasterdayAZ , US

2080312 seconds agoMichael SpitzerDurango, CO , US

2080212 seconds agoKeith ArmesCambridge, ot , GB

2080116 seconds agoFrank RouseColton, OR , US

2080018 seconds agoRONALDO VENGCOSACRAMENTO, CA , US

2079923 seconds agoRae BorduaSan Francisco, CA , US

2079823 seconds agoJeffrey JuelSpokane, MT , US

2079724 seconds agoKeith StackhouseLeeds, ot , GB

2079624 seconds agoNancy RohdeFORT MYERS, FL , US

2079525 seconds agoJeffrey Creque94952, CA , USThis disgusting waste of resources has to stop.

2079427 seconds agoMaria M. SuarezBronx, NY , US

2079327 seconds agodavid beatonSarasota, FL , US

2079231 seconds agoSteve PattonPacifica, CA , US

2079135 seconds agoJon PovillTopanga, CA , US

2079035 seconds agoStephanie PiddockTORRINGTON, CT , US

2078937 seconds agoVanessa CarlsonCenterville, SD , US

2078838 seconds agoRoger WeingartenMontpelier, VT , US

2078738 seconds agoAnonymousHouston, TX , US

2078638 seconds agoBeverly & Bill WhelanFlorence, KY , US

2078540 seconds agoBiff ThieleGlenview, IL , US

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courtneytincher · 5 years

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Dubya Was Bad, but the Donald Might Be Worse: Richard Clarke

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

July 22, 2019 at 09:55AM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

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