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Current issue: May 2015
… After Greece, who’s next? Iran and Saudi Arabia, strategic balancing act; Germany special report, politics and the euro; crisis in the Mediterranean, what asylum policy? untold stories. Piketty, the wealth of the wealthy, London, playground of the global rich… and more…click cover to access…
The Arctic is the “canary in the coal mine” of global warming. Over the past 50 years Arctic winters have gotten a whole lot warmer,rising in temperature by an average of 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit. With the region warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, changes in the Arctic are providing a preview of what is to come if climate change is not stopped. The picture is not pretty: the Arctic is suffering increasing coastal erosion, more acidic oceans, earlier spring snowmelt, drier landscapes, and more extensive wildfires. Significant habitat changes are also pushing many species—including the iconic polar bear—to the very brink of extinction.
The United States is taking over chairmanship of the Arctic Council at a challenging and critical time. Thanks to melting sea ice caused by climate change, the Arctic is opening up. This means that Arctic nations could soon begin sparring over new shipping routes and access to remote oil and gas deposits. At the same time, the region is being hit hard. Climate change is directly impacting the Arctic ecosystem. Rising sea levels are upending coastal settlements, while gas flaring is coating sea ice in a nasty layer of black carbon that speeds the melting causing over a million premature deaths each year from respiratory and heart disease.
If the United States wants to protect the Arctic from climate change, it can’t allow any more oil and gas drilling in the region. The Obama Administration has a unique ability to use its chairmanship of the Arctic Council to chart a new course for climate leadership in the region. According to a peer-reviewed study recently published in Nature, the world must choose between drilling for Arctic oil and maintaining a safe, liveable climate. Showing leadership on climate means cutting carbon emissions—not greenlighting oil companies’ risky plans to place new drilling rigs in the Arctic Circle.
Coverage
- US’ Kerry bids to avert Arctic melt (RTCC)
- Climate concerns take top billing as the US pivots to the Arctic (TckTckTck)
- Iqaluit to welcome Arctic Council meeting Friday (CBC)
- Major changes loom in Arctic as US leads Council (Climate Central)
- John Kerry’s mission to save the Arctic (ThinkProgress)
US takes lead in bid to cope with Arctic meltdown (ClimateWire) - As US assumes Arctic Council chairmanship, new report emphasizes cooperation over conflict (Phys.org)
- Canada’s Arctic Council leadership to be handed over at Iqaluit meeting (Canadian Press)
Beijing’s political role, historical narrative, geographical structure, and cultural memory culminate in a city where people share a common experience of culture and emotions. At the same time, Beijing’s unbridled growth can feel unfamiliar, a surreal mix of globalization and localization that has allowed Beijing to build its own traditions, becoming an extremely competitive art hub in the process. Yet there are moments where it diverges from this path. LEAP’s April issue, “The State of Beijing: A Report,” looks at the art capital from the perspectives of architecture, geography, exhibition history, and more, shedding a light on the the rawness and weirdness, authority and gravity that Beijing brings to the table.
This issue’s middle section introduces two important artists as well as new theories: Yuko Mohri’s electro-mechanical sound installations, Timur Si-Qin’s renditions of commercial objects and imagery through a neo-materialist lens, and musings on neoreactionary thoughts and Dark Enlightenment . Einar Engström investigates Mohri’s art via contemporary dynamics — her objects acting as intermediaries and persuading physical forces to reveal a natural order we are simply not accustomed to seeing; Lai Fei interviews Si-Qin, who describes China as a “giant processor of materials,” which may be the Beijing to come; and Matthew Shen Goodman adopts a new philosophy to examine the future of Beijing—a fragmented city-state that is fundamentally unknowable.
This issue’s bottom section features a total of 14 exhibition reviews, including “2015 Triennial: Surround Audience,” “Sharjah Biennial 12: the Past, the Present, the Possible,” “On Kawara: Silence,” “New Measurement and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies in Early Chinese Conceptual Art,” as well as other major international exhibitions. In addition, you will find reviews of new work and solo exhibitions from Wang Gongxin, Huang Yong Ping, Ding Yi, Zeng Hong, Yang Xinguang, Mark Bradford, and Robert Zhao Renhui, among others.
…as UK election approaches, this message is more important than ever. Just say NO to those “sinister rightwing c**ts”…
“We’re living in extreme times and if you listened to modern rock music you wouldn’t know that,” says Gillespie. “I just think it’s odd there’s no protest, resistance or critique of what’s going down. It’s like people are tranquilised. All the rights people had fought for – people like trade unionists, anarchists, artists – are being clawed back by extremists. These people [in charge] aren’t rational thinkers. Someone like Boris Johnson hides behind that bumbling public schoolboy image but he’s a sinister rightwing c**t trying to bring in anti-strike legislation … we’ve got to fight these fucking people!”
Bobby Gillespie’s primal scream: click here to go to the interview in full @ the guardian
April 2015
… redefining ‘terrorism’; Libya, from chaos to war; the IS brand of daily terror; 100 years on, the Armenians speak; US, nothing is as usual; an African Spring? Senegal, Burkina Faso, Nigeria; Sao Paulo’s water crisis; India’s giant, Tata in the 21st century; Algeria’s harkis; dancing for Kobane… and more…
::: just click cover above to access :::
To combat online censorship, Reporters Without Borders is unblocking access to 9 news websites in order to make them available in the 11 countries where they are currently banned.
The nine mirror sites created by Reporters Without Borders…
- Grani.ru, blocked in Russia, is now available at https://gr1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- Fergananews.com blocked in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, is now available at https://fg1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- The Tibet Post International, blocked in China, is now available at https://tp1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- Dan Lam Bao, blocked in Vietnam, is now available at https://dlb1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- Mingjing News, blocked in China, is now available at https://mn1.global.ssl.fastly.net/news/main.html
- Hablemos Press, blocked in Cuba, is now available at https://hp1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- Gooya News, blocked in Iran, is now available at https://gn1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- Gulf Centre for Human Rights, blocked in United Arab Emirates, is now available at https://gc1.global.ssl.fastly.net/
- Bahrain Mirror, blocked in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, is now available at https://bahrainmirror.global.ssl.fastly.net/
This list is also available at https://github.com/RSF-RWB/collateralfreedom
To help make freely-reported news and information available in these countries, all Internet users are invited to join in this operation by posting this list on social networks with the #CollateralFreedom hashtag.
The former prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, is also a longtime student of China, with a unique vantage point to watch its power rise in the past few decades. He asks whether the growing ambition of China will inevitably lead to conflict with other major powers — and suggests another narrative.
TED 2015, filmed March 2015.
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Momentum continues to build for the next UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Paris this December, with nations realising the huge benefits of climate action and getting on with the job of developing their national emissions reduction plans for the negotiations. These action plans – known as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) – marry national goals reflecting individual circumstances and ambitions with a UN framework to keep average global warming below the internationally agreed 2DegC red line.
So far, Switzerland, the European Union, Norway, and Mexico have all submitted plans, but Australia has further cemented its reputation as a coal-obsessed wrecker by not only ignoring the deadline, but dragging its feet and only now calling for public submissions on what it should do. Its discussion paper ignores the 2DegC red line, it attempts to cook the books (again) by describing its current target as “equivalent to a reduction of 13 per cent below 2005 levels” instead of referring to its inadequate five percent below 1990 levels commitment. It also totally ignores the “5-25 per cent range” ittrumpeted in early 2010.
While the rest of the world moves forward, Australia’s climate change policy is “on course for ‘disastrous’ 4DegC warming” as it allows polluters to increase emissions as much as they like without penalty. While railing against the age of entitlement, the Abbott government is looking for special treatment to keep burning and selling coal. It claims it is determined to reduce emissions “without destroying jobs”, but its actions demonstrate that it does not understand the health, employment, environmental and economic benefits that come with cleaning up its economy. The Government has been captured by a dying coal industry, is fighting the future for it, and dooming Australia to climate pariah status on the world stage for its dim prospects.
Related Tree Alerts
- Australia cooking the books to meet emissions target as carbon pollution soars
- Climate Change Authority finds Australia’s 5% emissions target “not credible”
- Australia on a wing and a prayer as momentum builds for global climate deal
- Study shows keeping most coal in the ground is the only way to contain climate change
- Australian government’s “hard-line ideological agenda” at COP19 damaging reputation
Tweets…
- MT @Mattias_S: #Australia – when can we expect your #climate contributions, #INDC , You’re already behind #Mexico – Is that leadership?
- MT @MattGrudnoff: PM ‘Australia open for business’. Unless you’re an industry the govt is ideologically opposed to #auspol #climate http://t.co/E7UjKBOIqS
- MT @fionamcrobie: Submissions on Australia’s post-2020 emissions reduction target can be made here: http://t.co/v65OQQe89B #auspol #climate
By Rami Khouri / AlterNet
April 3, 2015
BEIRUT — The agreed parameters of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program that were reached Thursday between Iran and the P5+1 powers represent a monumental achievement that affirms the power of reason and diplomacy over the ravages of fear and warfare. The technical details of the complex understanding remain to be completed. For now, though, the lasting significant aspects of this development are about the past and the future: The past being the bold leadership that Iran and the United States have shown in launching and advancing the diplomatic negotiations, and the future being about the potential significant regional changes that will follow the implementation of a full agreement…
::: click here for piece in full @ AlterNet :::
Rami G. Khouri is was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.
The Booker prize winner Ian McEwan on the Charlie Hebdo attacks and freedom of speech…
“…We need to teach everyone just how important freedom of speech is…”
“…Talking and writing is all we’ve got. Slaughtering eacother is going to bring us to the very gates of hell.”
One of the six realms on the Buddhist Wheel of Life is the Hungry Ghost Realm, its inhabitants “creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction.”
A ravaged German-Canadian man is one day quoting the final lines of Goethe’s Faust, the next delivering a drug-fuelled anti-Semitic diatribe; a woman, very pregnant and intent on keeping her baby, is found beaten up on the sidewalk and screaming for drug money: these are among the hungry ghosts Dr. Gabor Maté encounters in his job as resident doctor at the Portland Hotel on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
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TOP STORIES THIS WEEK
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It’s clear that Rahm Emanuel is out for himself and his rich friends, not for Chicagoans. BY RICK PERLSTEIN Anti-fracking forces pushed Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to pass the ban, and proved conventional wisdom wrong. BY ERIC WELTMAN In order to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should forget, not dwell in, an ancient past. BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Palestinian children are taken from their beds in night raids and not returned to their families for months. BY BETH MASCHINOT
By any other name, it still smells like torture. BY FLINT TAYLOR
The redesigned New York Times Magazine aims for a global outlook, but comes off as elitist. BY SUSAN J. DOUGLAS Public mental healthcare has been gutted in the past 50 years. An innovative Illinois law may provide an answer. BY ANNE-MARIE CUSAC Does a story-sharing program offer a chance at Southern reconciliation? BY THEO ANDERSON
While money poured into the recent elections, voters showed that they are tired of business as usual. BY KARI LYDERSEN
Kent Russell seeks to lay claim to the raw, serious stuff of the American male past. BY CHRIS LEHMANN The city’s progressives should claim no easy victories. BY MARILYN KATZ The victory wouldn’t have been possible without agitation from the grassroots. BY JAY CASSANO |
| WORKING IN THESE TIMES |
| How Chicago’s Grassroots Movements Defeated Rahm Emanuel at the Polls
The progressive swing in Chicago’s recent elections was no coincidence, it came out of years of grassroots organizing. BY AMISHA PATEL |
Panel members said phone data had limited role preventing terrorism in testimony before Senate judiciary committee
- Spencer Ackermanin Washington
- com,Tuesday 14 January 2014 21.44 GMT
excerpt…
The members of president Barack Obama’s surveillance review panel on Tuesday rejected some of the central contentions offered by the National Security Agency for its bulk collection of phone records, including the program’s potential usefulness in preventing the 9/11 attacks.
Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, members of the panel said that restricting the NSA is necessary in order to rebalance the competing values of liberty and security.
Richard Clarke, who was the White House’s counter-terrorism czar on 9/11, echoed the 9/11 Commission in saying that the biggest obstacle to preventing the terrorist attack was not the NSA collecting an insufficient amount of data, but a failure to share information already collected.
“If the information that the federal agencies had at the time…
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Here’s an extract from the report of the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, Australian Human Rights Commission, 2014…
9.3.1 Torture and trauma prior to arrival in Australia
Since more than 90 per cent of children in immigration detention over the period of the Inquiry have been found to be refugees, it follows that many children in immigration detention are likely to have been affected by prior experiences of trauma.(46)
The Inquiry commissioned a literature review to consider factors affecting the psychological well-being of child and adolescent refugees and asylum seekers.(47)The paper concludes that:
research clearly demonstrates that refugee children and adolescents are vulnerable to the effects of pre-migration, most notably exposure to trauma. It is also apparent that particular groups in this population constitute higher psychological risk than others, namely those with extended trauma experience, unaccompanied or separated children and adolescents and…
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Asbestos Bishop – The Real News Channel | Facebook
Asbestos Bishop. … It just so happens that Julie… Bishop was also a Lawyer, but worked for … Edo Voloder Julie Bishop was a solicitor for ASBESTOS MINERS!
Bishop’s lawyer work a source of shame | Herald Sun
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/…/bishops–lawyer…/story-e6frf7kf-1226525303…Nov 27, 2012 – … attack on deputy opposition leader Julie Bishop for her work as a lead lawyer … compensation claims from workers dying of asbestos diseases.Powerhouse | Asbestos: Dust Settles On The Low Moral Ground
powerhouse.theglobalmail.org/dust-settles-on-the-low-moral-ground/Jun 3, 2013 – And guess which former lawyer-turned-federal-politician counted James …That would be the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop.
Julie Bishop’s legal past: Clayton Utz work in wake of AWU scandal …
http://www.crikey.com.au/…/julie–bishop-on-her-own-legal-past-the-interview-…Nov 30, 2012 – I wouldn’t…
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Current issue: January 2015
… Cuba in from the cold; drugs companies’ hard sell special report; rise and rise of Boko Haram;Darfur: the trouble with UN sanctions; Turkey: farewell to post-Ottoman dreams, Romaopening; Central Asia’s shifting plates; US special report: the meaning of Ferguson, is Iraq the new Vietnam? Australia courts the Chinese dragon; India’s car workers fight for rights… and more…
“I detest what you write, but I would give my life
to make it possible for you to continue to write…”
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Letters, 1770.
Rupert Murdoch Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible. (07/01/15)
Big jihadist danger looming everywhere from Philippines to Africa to Europe to US. Political correctness makes for denial and hypocrisy. (10/01/15)
Saudi Arabia lashes a liberal blogger 50 times in public, despite widespread international outrage and calls for clemency from human right groups…
Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, said on twitter that blogger and activist, Raif Badawi, was lashed outside a mosque in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on Friday, (09/01/15).
Badawi is due to undergo 50 lashes every week after Friday prayers, which will continue for 20 weeks until his punishment is complete.
Amnesty International says Badawi, who started the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes on charges related to accusations he insulted Islam on the online forum.
He was also ordered by Jeddah’s Criminal Court to pay a fine of $266,000.
Synthesis Report (2014) – IPCC
The Synthesis Report distils and integrates the findings of the three working group contributions to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fifth Assessment Report — the most comprehensive assessment of climate change yet undertaken, produced by hundreds of scientists — as well as the two Special Reports produced during this cycle.
Summary for Policymakers
SPM + Longer Report
Headline Statements
Factsheets
Video
Quick link to report PDFs
Gaza City – Since this summer’s devastating war in the Gaza Strip, the number of patients seeking help from the Gaza Community Centre’s mental health programme has jumped by close to 50 percent.
The centre, which previously handled about 15 patients daily, is now seeing up to 25, administrators say – and the Gaza City centre is just one of three branches of Gaza’s mental health network. The NGO’s psychiatry, social work and physiotherapy services are available for free to residents, but social stigma still prevents an untold number from seeking help.
Psychologist Hasan Zeyada spoke with Al Jazeera about the challenges facing Gazans in the wake of a war that killed 2,200 Palestinians, and amid an ongoing, crippling siege.
Al Jazeera: How has your patient load changed since the summer war?
Hasan Zeyada: We have more cases that are referred to our centres. It’s the immediate reaction after war. A lot of people had psychological and behavioural consequences because of the trauma during the military Israeli aggression. A lot of people, they are in need of consultation, they are in need of intervention. We started to do our intervention immediately through field visits for the families who lost their homes and lost their family members, and for the injured people…
“The war was brutal and it was for a long time, and it’s the third experience for the children here in Gaza, so a lot of people have already developed acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. They are in need of intervention.”
::: click on through to piece in full @ Al Jazeera :::
This is not your sanitized, Hollywood version of Dr. King.As “Selma” opens in a number of cities this week and expands to nationwide release in a couple of weeks, the country is given a chance to assess the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Doing so is particularly relevant right now, in light of boisterous protests against police brutality that have been going on since the summer…
…just click image for piece in full @ AlterNet…
Doubts as water from giant China South North Water Diversion Project reaches capital
http://t.co/0xjqZvJcRWhttp://t.co/gGIeKsj6kZ
Prayer vigil held in New York for slain police officer
http://t.co/jzOcfZ2HKchttp://t.co/jiMBTQnhFn
Malaysia’s worst flooding in decades has forced some 118,000 people to flee their homes http://t.co/lx2IeJhDPGhttp://t.co/dAX4MGDm7n
Swedish protesters denounce mosque arson attack
Orphaned by 2004 tsunami, UK flip-flop kings repay Sri Lankan kindness
