France's political pillars teeter after presidential debacle


Joseph Schmid
Sun, 10 April 2022


Republicans candidate Valerie Pecresse failed to woo back voters who from Emmanuel Macron or the far right of Marine Le Pen (AFP/Alain JOCARD)


The party appears unable to find a national heavyweight since Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential defeat in 2012 (AFP/JULIEN DE ROSA)


The Republicans will also have to contend with Macron's former prime minister Edouard Philippe (AFP/Sameer Al-DOUMY)



Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo scored just barely two percent according to projections

 (AFP/Thomas COEX)

With humiliating eliminations from France's presidential vote on Sunday, the historic rightwing Republicans party joins the Socialists in facing a moment of truth -- rebuild a viable political project or risk consignment to the history books.

Republicans candidate Valerie Pecresse finished in fifth place according to projections after failing to woo back voters who turned to centrist upstart Emmanuel Macron or the far right of Marine Le Pen, who both advanced to the April 24 run-off.

The blow was all the more devastating as the Republicans party traces its roots to Charles de Gaulle, the revered World War II Resistance hero who built the foundations of the all-powerful French presidency.


"I had to fight a battle on two fronts, between the president's party and the extremes that joined forces to divide and beat the republican right," Pecresse said after her defeat.

"This result is obviously a personal and collective disappointment."

- Changing political landscape -

With parliament elections looming in June, Republicans must now rethink their strategy and craft a conservative message in tune with voters expectations -- and perhaps even drop their opposition to joining with far-right forces that have steadily gained traction in France.

"They've been in the opposition for 10 years now -- that should have been enough time to have a programme and some strong candidates," said Dominique Reynie of the Fondapol think-tank in Paris.

The party still has control of the Senate and of municipal councils across France, but its leaders appear unable to find a national heavyweight since Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential defeat in 2012.

"We're seeing a recomposition of French political life, with this new polarity between centrists and the far right," said Gaspard Estrada, a political scientist at Sciences Po university in Paris.

"The traditional governing parties, the Socialists and Republicans, together got less than 10 percent of the votes -- that speaks volumes about France's political evolution," he said.

Macron will be prevented from seeking re-election in 2027 under French term limits. His upstart centrist party has produced no obvious successors, meaning the jockeying has already begun to take his place.

Le Pen has said this is her last presidential campaign, but her strong showing makes it likely she will remain a powerful force to be reckoned with.

The Republicans will also have to contend with Macron's former prime minister Edouard Philippe, whose popularity on the right has soared since taking over as mayor of Le Havre.

He has formed his own party, Horizons, and is widely expected to try to recruit more from Macron's Republic on the Move party -- a vehicle that has failed to establish any on-the-ground presence in city halls or regional councils.

- Socialists adrift -

The challenge is even more daunting for the leftwing Socialists, whose candidate Anne Hidalgo scored just barely two percent according to projections -- below the five-percent threshold required to have campaign expenses reimbursed by the state.

"In 2017 we saw the Socialist party explode, and in this vote we're probably going to see the explosion of the Republicans," Remi Lefebvre, a political scientist at the University of Lille told the Grand Continent political journal.

The party's ranks have dwindled for decades as France's political landscape shifted to the right. More recently, leftwing voters backed Macron or embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of Jean-Luc Melenchon -- who far outpaced the Socialists with a projected score of around 21 percent.

"The left has never been able to recover the working classes...," said Reynie. "Instead of reinventing itself the party stuck with the bureaucratic middle classes and civil servants -- It's not necessarily bad, but it's not enough."

Yet neither Melenchon nor the Greens nor the Communist candidates -- all of whom trounced Hidalgo on Sunday -- have shown any interest in an alliance.

"Tonight I make a solemn call for leftwing and environmental forces, on social forces, on citizens ready to commit to build together a pact for social and environmental justice for the parliament elections," Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure said Sunday.

If the Socialists again lose parliament seats in June -- they currently have just 25 -- state funding for their party will fall even more, putting them in dire financial straits just years after selling their iconic Paris headquarters.

"They tried to present themselves as a social-ecological party... but without clearly laying out an original doctrine," said Frederic Sawicki, a political scientist at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris.

"If this very bad score for the presidency is followed by a debacle in the parliament elections, the party's survival in its current form will be in question," he said.

js/sjw/jj

Wealthy Russians and oligarchs are reportedly buying as many as 4 apartments at once in Turkey in attempts to earn 'golden passports'


Hannah Towey
Fri, April 8, 2022


Wealthy Russians are buying as many as 4 apartments at a time in Turkey, the WSJ reported.


Foreigners who buy real estate worth $250,000 can earn Turkish citizenship in just three months.


Turkey's foreign minister previously said oligarchs are welcome to legally invest in the country.

Wealthy Russians, "some of them oligarchs," are buying as many as 4 apartments in Turkey at once in order to qualify for citizenship there, the CEO of Istanbul based real-estate company Golden Sign told The Wall Street Journal.

Gül Gül, the Golden Sign CEO, previously told Reuters that her company sells seven to eight units to Russians "every day," and said they often pay in cash or "bring gold."

At the time, she told Reuters that her clients are wealthy Russians, but not oligarchs. However, she later told the Journal that "some" are. Golden Sign did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Like many countries, Turkey has an investment-for-citizenship program, commonly referred to as a "golden passport" or "golden visa." Turkey's program grants citizenship to foreign investors who purchase real estate worth at least $250,000 and commit to keeping it for a minimum of three years.



Investors — including wealthy Russians looking to escape sanctions — can then earn a Turkish passport in as little as three months, one of the quickest turn around times in Europe.

Russian investment in Turkey has grown so much since the invasion of Ukraine that Gaul's Russian clients now outnumber her previous customer base, she told the Journal.

In addition to apartments, Turkey has proven a popular spot for the superyachts of oligarchs like Roman Abramovich. While the country denounced the war on Ukraine, it chose not to sanction Russia, thus creating a physical and financial safe haven for oligarchs and their assets.

During the last week of March, Turkey's foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Russian oligarchs are welcome in the country, as long as they follow international law.

"We implement UN-approved sanctions, so if any Russian citizens want to visit Turkey, of course, they can visit Turkey. Now Russians are coming to visit Turkey, that's no problem," he told CNBC.

When pushed on whether sanctioned oligarchs can do business in the country, Cavusoglu added: "If you mean that these oligarchs can do any business in Turkey, then of course if it is legal and it is not against international law, I will consider."

IMMORTALITY STUDIES

Scientists rejuvenated the skin of a 53-year-old woman to that of a 23-year-old's in a groundbreaking experiment



Allana Akhtar
Fri, April 8, 2022

Scientists in Cambridge rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells to look and behave like a 23-year-old's.MJTH/Shutterstock

Babraham Institute in Cambridge announced on Thursday researchers had successfully rejuvenated skin cells.

Scientists reprogrammed adult skin cells to look and behave 30 years younger than the original.

The technique cannot be taken to a clinic yet because previous studies have found it may increase the risk for cancer.

A team in the Babraham Institute in Cambridge has successfully rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells to look and behave like a 23-year-old's, the research center announced on Thursday.

The team had initially set out to create embryonic stem cells, which can divide into any type of cell in the body, using adult cells. Nobel Award winner Shinya Yamanaka, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan, first turned "normal" cells that have a specific function into stem cells back in 2006.

The BBC reported German molecular biologist Wolf Reik, postdoctoral student Diljeet Gill, and a team at Babraham Institute built upon Yamanaka's work. Yamanaka grew stem cells by exposing adult cells to four molecules for about 50 days — a unique method he named iPS. Reik and Gill's team exposed skin cells to the same molecules for only 13 days, then let them grow under natural conditions.

By studying collagen production in the cells, the researchers found age-related changes on skin cells were removed and they temporarily lost their identity. After growing under normal conditions for a period of time, researchers found the cells began behaving like skin cells again.

The team then measured age-related biological changes in the reprogrammed cells, and found the cells matched the profile of those 30 years younger to reference data sets, Gill said in a release.

"I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be," Gill told BBC. "It was a very exciting day."

The research was done in a lab, and Reik told the BBC the team cannot take the technique to a clinic because the technique used to rejuvenate the cells has the potential to increase the risk of cancer, likely due to creating lasting genetic changes within cells.

But the biologist said the method of rejuvenating cells could help speed up healing time in burn victims, and may eventually extend human life.

"Eventually, we may be able to identify genes that rejuvenate without reprogramming, and specifically target those to reduce the effects of aging," Reik said in a press release.

The researchers published their findings in the journal eLife on April 8.

SHOULD BE THE LAW EVERYWHERE
Spain bans harassment of women entering abortion clinics

Fri, April 8, 2022

MADRID (AP) — Spain is awaiting the publication in coming days of a new law banning the intimidation or harassment of women entering abortion clinics.

The law comes into force when it is published in the Government Gazette, possibly next week, after the Spanish Senate on Wednesday endorsed a law passed earlier by parliament.

The Senate gave its blessing by 154 to 105 votes for changes to the penal code in Spain, where abortions are available for free in the public health service through the 14th week of pregnancy.

The legal changes mean that anyone harassing a woman going into an abortion clinic will be committing a crime that can be punished with up to one year in prison.

Spain’s government, led by the center-left Socialist government, proposed the law last year and lawmakers approved it in September.

In the Senate, as in parliament, the changes were opposed by right-of-center political groupings.

They argued that the alterations flew in the face of the constitutional right to free speech and the right to assemble.

Anti-abortion groups said their gatherings outside abortion clinics were organized to pray and offer help to the women.

The national Association of Accredited Clinics for Pregnancy Termination says that more than 100 cases of harassment are reported outside clinics each year.

Ocasio-Cortez gets official to admit USPS leaders don't care about sending truck work to anti-union state

Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at South By Southwest 2019 in Austin, Texas, nrkbeta

Jessica Corbett 
Common Dreams 

April 06, 2022

While much of the criticism of a U.S. Postal Service deal with Oshkosh Defense for a new fleet has focused on the fact that most vehicles will be gas-guzzling versus electric, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday got a USPS official to admit the agency isn't concerned the Wisconsin-based firm plans to build the trucks in notoriously anti-union South Carolina.

Near the end of a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, the New York Democrat questioned Victoria Stephen, executive director of the Postal Service's Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) Program, about whether the USPS considered Oshkosh's unionized workforce in Wisconsin and when the agency knew about the company's location decision.

After noting that the nearly $3 billion contract, first announced in early 2021, will include an initial order of 50,000 NGDVs—only 10,000 of which will be electric vehicles (EVs)—Ocasio-Cortez asked about whether Oshkosh's unionized workforce in Wisconsin "was an important consideration" or regarded as a "favorable element" in the decision-making process—particularly given President Joe Biden's support for union labor.

"The solicitation from the Postal Service requires domestic production only. It does not require particular locations or workforce," Stephen explained. A unionized workforce "is not a contract requirement... It was not considered in the decision."


After entering some reports into the record, Ocasio-Cortez asked Stephen about Oshkosh's decision to complete production in South Carolina rather than Wisconsin, a revelation that came after the company won the contract.

"The Postal Service was made aware of that decision shortly before the public announcement and it is a decision that's at the discretion of the supplier," Stephen said.

Ocasio-Cortez then asked, "Are you aware that Oshkosh Defense might be trying to circumvent its long-standing contract with the United Auto Workers workforce in Wisconsin by essentially building a brand-new facility after the contract was awarded in a vacant warehouse in South Carolina?"

The USPS official said that "I have no awareness of that but I would encourage you to have that conversation with Oshkosh."

Highlighting that "after the ink was dry, it looks like they're opening up a scab facility in South Carolina with no prior history of producing vehicles in that facility," Oscaio-Cortez asked Stephen if the Postal Service "is troubled by this timeline at all."

Stephen appeared to challenge the facts as the congresswoman laid them out—but offered no details or clarifications—then confirmed that the USPS is not concerned with the timeline of the company's South Carolina decision.


In a tweet about the exchange Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez took aim at embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, declaring that "he needs to go."


When the USPS announced the contract last year, it said that "Oshkosh Defense is evaluating which of their several U.S. manufacturing locations is best suited to potentially increase the production rate of the NGDV."

Oshkosh Corporation executive vice president and Oshkosh Defense president John Bryant then revealed in June that the company planned to create about 1,000 new jobs in South Carolina, saying that "we're proud to bring this historic undertaking to Spartanburg County."


"South Carolina has a skilled workforce and a proven history in advanced automotive manufacturing—it's the perfect place to produce the NGDV," he said. "More importantly, we know the people of the Upstate take pride in their work and their community. What we build together here will reach every home in the country."

The Guardian reported in February that Oshkosh "chose to use a large, empty, former Rite Aid warehouse in Spartanburg. The company said it was eager to have a 'turnkey' plant where it could quickly begin production to help meet its goal of delivering the first vehicles in 2023."

The newspaper detailed outrage over the decision among Wisconsinites:
"We are extremely disappointed in Oshkosh Defense's decision to accept the money from the U.S. Postal Service and then turn around and send their production to a different state," said Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO union federation. "This is just another slap in the face to Wisconsin workers. People are very outraged about it. It doesn't fit into President Biden's vision to have high-road manufacturing."

Many Oshkosh Defense workers are wearing buttons to work, saying, "We Can Build This." These workers, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), say they're dismayed that the company—unionized since 1938—plans to do postal vehicle production in one of the nation's most anti-union states. UAW Local 578 in Oshkosh has collected over 1,500 signatures urging the company to rescind its South Carolina decision, and Wisconsin's unions are planning a big rally in February to further pressure Oshkosh Defense.

"When we were notified the company won the contract, we were all excited—that's another contract under our belt, more work for us to do," said Thomas Bowman, a welder at Oshkosh Defense. "But when we were told it wasn't being built here, we were all asking, why not? We know we can build it. We got the workers. We got the tooling. It can be done here."

During that February rally, UAW Local 578 president Bob Lynk told a local television station that "it's a fight for our life right now. I do believe contracts are meant to be amended."

In a lengthy statement responding to the rally, Oshkosh signaled it won't reconsider the move, saying that "we evaluated sites in multiple states, including Wisconsin, for production of the NGDV. The Spartanburg, South Carolina facility ranked highest in meeting the requirements of the NGDV program and gives us the best ability to meet the needs of the USPS."

Meanwhile, in Congress, some Democrats are pushing for even broader changes. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) last month introduced the Green Postal Service Fleet Act, which would block the Oshkosh contract by requiring that at least 75% of new USPS vehicles are electric or otherwise emissions-free.

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Pelosi fumed that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal were competing for 'queen bee' of the left, a new book says

Grace Panetta
Fri, April 8, 2022

Reps.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and joined Pramila Jayapal of Washington on Capitol Hill, April 07, 2022.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images


Pelosi privately blamed progressives for nearly costing Democrats the House in 2020, a book says.


Pelosi said some had "alienated Asian and Hispanic immigrants with loose talk of socialism."


Pelosi later said Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Jayapal were competing to be "queen bee" of the left.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi privately blamed progressives for nearly costing Democrats the House majority in 2020 and later fumed that Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were competing for "queen bee" of the left, according to a forthcoming book.

New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns pull back the curtain on Pelosi's internal frustrations in their forthcoming book "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future," due for release on May 3. Punchbowl News reported on some excerpts of the book's reporting on Friday morning.

Democrats were expected to maintain and possibly even expand their majority in the US House of Representatives in 2020 given President Donald Trump's unpopularity.

Instead, they lost a dozen House seats on net, nearly losing their majority in the chamber. Some of the districts Democrats lost in places like South Florida and Southern California included high concentrations of Latino and Asian immigrants, a warning sign for Democrats' electoral prospects.

"In a few strictly confidential conversations she pointed a finger leftward," the authors wrote. "Pelosi told one senior lawmaker that Democrats had alienated Asian and Hispanic immigrants with loose talk of socialism. In some of the same communities, the Italian Catholic speaker said, Democrats had not been careful enough about the way they spoke about abortion among new Americans who were devout people of faith."

House Democrats played their fair share of the blame game after the 2020 elections, including on sometimes-tense and emotional calls.

On one such call shortly after election day, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, castigated the phrase "defund the police," the Washington Post reported at the time, saying, "If we are classifying Tuesday as a success . . . we will get fucking torn apart in 2022."

Democrats secured a trifecta of government in January 2021, but their troubles didn't end there.

In the fall of 2021, congressional Democrats tried to pass both components of President Joe Biden's economic agenda in a bipartisan infrastructure bill focusing on roads, bridges, green energy, and transportation, and a much pricier economic spending package including childcare, social programs, and climate spending that known as the Build Back Better agenda that Senate Democrats would pass along party lines.

But moving both measures at the same time proved to be an immense challenge, with progressives withholding their support for the infrastructure package in protest of what they saw as a lack of commitment to Build Back Better from centrists.

Pelosi, who famously only brings bills to the floor when she knows she has the votes to pass them, had to cancel two planned votes for the infrastructure bill on September 30 and again on October 29.

The speaker told a colleague that Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Ocasio-Cortez "were vying to be the 'queen bee' of the left, but that their reward might be serving in the House minority after the next election," according to the book.

Despite the holdups and intra-party squabbling, Pelosi got the necessary votes to pass the bipartisan infrastructure law on November 5, with 13 Republicans voting in favor of the legislation. But she was still miffed at top progressives, who she blamed for at least temporarily derailing the bill's passage.

Jayapal has served as a mentor and source of guidance to members of the progressive "Squad", including Ocasio-Cortez, Politico reported in 2019, with the two congresswomen sharing a box of tomato soup on Ocasio-Cortez's Instagram live.

A representative for Jayapal declined to comment. Ocasio-Cortez's office did not return Insider's request for comment.

The legislation once-dubbed Build Back Better, meanwhile, has stalled out in the Senate after Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said in December 2021 that he could not support the measure as proposed at the time. Key Democrats are in talks to revive an economic reconciliation bill of some form, but it's unclear whether all 50 Senate Democrats, including Manchin, will be to agree on a measure to pass before the 2022 midterms.

The Bin Laden Papers: al-Qaeda’s secret documents – and delusions – finally revealed

Saul David
Fri, April 8, 2022

Osama Bin Laden was plotting a coordinated attack on supertankers 

carrying oil to the United States when he died in 2004 - Alamy

In the early hours of May 2 2011, a team of Navy Seals discovered and killed Osama Bin Laden – the leader of al-Qaeda, architect of 9/11 and the most hunted man on the globe – in a raid on a domestic compound in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. With their strict 30-minute deadline almost up, the Seals requested more time on the ground because they had found “a whole s--- ton of computers and electronic gear on the second floor”.

Permission was granted, and during the next 18 minutes more than 470,000 files were recovered, including “nearly 6,000 Arabic pages of internal al-Qaeda communiqués that were never intended for public consumption”. But for the Seals’ “courageous efforts” during those perilous additional minutes, writes Nelly Lahoud, the Bin Laden papers would never have come to light.

The papers – recently declassified and now analysed in detail for the first time by Lahoud, an Arabic-speaking expert in security and counter-terrorism – offer an extraordinary insight into the inner workings of Al-Qaeda, both before and after 9/11, and lay bare the terrorist organisation’s closely guarded plans, ambitions and frustrations.

The first of many revelations is a scribbled note by Bin Laden on a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook, headed “The Birth of the Idea of September 11”. In the note he explains that he had been reading a news report about the disgruntled pilot al-Batouty who deliberately crashed EgyptAir Flight 990 from New York to Cairo off the New England coast, killing 217 people, on October 31 1999. Turning to his associates, Bin Laden asked: “Why didn’t he crash it into a financial tower?”

Frustrated that al-Batouty had not put his thirst for vengeance to better use, Bin Laden came up with the plan to fly planes into the symbols of American power: the financial district in New York, and the Pentagon and Capitol Building in Washington DC

.

'Why didn’t he crash it into a financial tower?':

 Bin Laden got the idea for 9/11 from the 1999 EgyptAir crash - Patrick Sison

“This is how the idea of 9/11 was conceived and developed in my head,” wrote Bin Laden, “and that is when we began the planning.” The 9/11 Commission Report named Khaled Sheikh Muhammed as the “architect” of the attacks. Yet he is not mentioned in Bin Laden’s notes, “although he may have been instrumental in other ways later on”.

Most commentators have assumed that the Taliban leader Mullah Omar did not know about 9/11 in advance. We learn, however, from Bin Laden’s handwritten notes, that “consultation with other [Jihadist] groups, including the Taliban, preceded the international attacks al-Qaeda orchestrated from Afghanistan”. The bombings in East Africa in 1998, for example, were “supported by everyone”.

Moreover, Lahoud suspects that al-Qaeda’s assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a Taliban enemy, on the eve of 9/11 was not a coincidence, but a quid pro quo for Mullah Omar approving the attack on America. The miscalculation by al-Qaeda and its allies was not to anticipate that America would respond by launching a full-scale war on Afghanistan. The “worst they had envisaged”, writes Lahoud, was “limited US airstrikes”.

Exactly where Bin Laden went after he fled the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan in late 2001 is unclear. Lahoud suspects North Waziristan, in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, and later Abbottabad. What is not in doubt is the ineffectiveness of al-Qaeda after 9/11. With most of its leaders in hiding or imprisoned in Iran, it failed to launch a single international operation, and was restricted to applauding other jihadist copycat acts, like 7/7 in London in 2005, that had no direct contribution from al-Qaeda. Had Western governments understood this, there might have been no need to invade Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan two years earlier, wars of aggression that were partly fought to suppress international terrorism.

The papers also reveal that, from 2004, Bin Laden worked tirelessly to rebuild his shattered organisation and at the time of his death was planning another “spectacular”: a coordinated attack on supertankers carrying oil to the United States. He hoped to choke off a third of America’s oil supply, thus producing an economic meltdown and public protests that would lead to a change in US foreign policy.

The remains of Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, photographed in 2021 - Saiyna Bashir

Might it have worked? Not according to former US general Joseph Votel. Al-Qaeda could have sunk the tankers, argues Votel, but this would not have destroyed the US economy. This is yet more evidence for Lahoud of the “vast chasm” between Bin Laden’s “global vision and the absence of the means by which to realize it”.

When the Seals assaulted the Abbottabad compound – built in 2005 – they discovered two of Bin Laden’s wives and multiple children and grandchildren. So high was the risk of discovery by drone or satellite that the children were not even allowed to play in the courtyard, nor did anyone have access to the internet or a phone.

It was a grim, self-sufficient existence. They kept goats, chickens and a cow, and relied sparingly on their two “security guards” – local Pakistani supporters – to buy other basic needs. “We bake our own bread,” wrote Bin Laden, “and purchase grains in bulk. Our regular shopping consists of fruit and vegetables.” Basic medicines were kept at the house, and doctors were consulted only in an emergency. Two of Bin Laden’s daughters, Sumaya and Mariam, played a key role helping their father with his public statements.

There is one final revelation. After Bin Laden’s death, the CIA claimed they were able to identify his compound by intercepting calls made by one of his Pakistani security guards, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. This, says Lahoud, was deliberate disinformation to protect the probable informant, Abu al-Harish al-Sindi, who was one of three trusted intermediaries between Bin Laden and his followers in North Waziristan. From the papers, Lahoud discovers that al-Sindi was arrested by the Pakistani security service, ISI, in January 2011. Bin Laden knew this, but took no precautions.

Interestingly, al-Sindi did not know that the author of the letters he carried was Bin Laden. The CIA were also uncertain, which is why “President Obama authorized the Abbottabad raid on a provability basis”. The CIA then lied about al-Kuwaiti’s involvement in their post-operation debrief to protect the real source, and because they had “a smaller but sizeable fish to fry”: Bin Laden’s deputy Atiya, who was killed by a drone strike four months later.

Lahoud’s story jumps around thematically, and is light on colourful narrative, but is never less than gripping.

By over-estimating al-Qaeda’s capabilities, and under-estimating those of other Jihadi groups (Islamic State, for one), the West paid a high price. In the end, concludes Lahoud, Bin Laden’s “repeated miscalculations meant that his leonine post-9/11 goals did not go beyond empty threats, unexecuted plans, and more than a little wishful thinking”.

The Bin Laden Papers by Nelly Lahoud is published by Yale at £18.99. 

Visualizing the scale of the carbon removal problem

Deploying direct air capture technologies at scale will take a massive lift

By Justine Calma@justcalma Apr 7, 2022

The fan and air intake of the direct air capture system stands at the Carbon Engineering Ltd. pilot facility in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, on Monday, Nov. 4, 2019. 

Photo by James MacDonald/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To get climate change under control, experts say, we’re going to have to start sucking a whole lot more planet-heating carbon dioxide out of the air. And we need to start doing it fast.

Over the past decade, climate pollution has continued to grow, heating up the planet. It’s gotten to the point that not one but two major climate reports released over the past week say we’ll have to resort to a still-controversial new technology called Direct Air Capture (DAC) to keep our planet livable. Finding ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is “unavoidable,” a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

FINDING WAYS TO REMOVE CARBON DIOXIDE FROM THE ATMOSPHERE IS “UNAVOIDABLE”

We already have some direct air capture facilities that filter carbon dioxide out of the air. The captured CO2 can then be stored underground for safekeeping or used to make products like soda pop, concrete, or even aviation fuel.

But this kind of carbon removal is still being done at a very small scale. There are just 18 direct air capture facilities spread across Canada, Europe, and the United States. Altogether, they can capture just 0.01 million metric tons of CO2. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need a lot more facilities with much larger capacity, according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). By 2030, direct air capture plants need to be able to draw down 85 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas. By 2050, the goal is a whopping 980 million metric tons of captured CO2.


It’s hard to understand how massive that kind of growth is, so we decided to draw it out. The small black box below is how much CO2 existing direct air capture plants remove from the atmosphere today. The next generation of direct air capture plants is supposed to be way bigger, with a single plant able to capture the equivalent of all the blue boxes (plus the black box) together — 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year.


Fast forward to 2030, and if the IEA’s vision comes true, there’ll be a lot more of those giant facilities. The blue and orange boxes below represent 85 million metric tons of captured CO2, the IEA’s goal for the end of the decade.

But 2030 is just a milestone on the way to a much bigger goal. By 2050, if the best-case scenario plays out, humans should have balanced out their carbon emissions. That means ditching fossil fuels, first and foremost. (For this scenario to work out, carbon removal can’t become a crutch for the fossil fuel industry — something activists are very worried about.) Any stubborn greenhouse gas emissions that remain will need to be captured. Ideally, that should really only come from heavy industries that can’t easily turn to renewable energy — like cement manufacturing, which makes up 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

So, in addition to cutting emissions, the IEA projects we’ll need to scale up carbon removal dramatically. More than 30 new direct air capture plants would need to be built each year, on average, to reach its 2050 goal. Each of those plants would need to be able to draw down 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year, for a total of 980 million metric tons per year in 2050.

In the image above, the blue is what one futuristic DAC plant might capture, the orange is how much CO2 needs to be captured by 2030, and the pink represents the 2050 goal for captured CO2.

Again, what we can capture now is just one one-hundredth of that blue square. And the first plant big enough to capture as much CO2 as that blue square represents isn’t expected to come online until the mid-2020s. So we’re already behind schedule when it comes to the IEA’s plans, and speeding things up is expected to come with a hefty price tag (right now, it typically costs upwards of $600 to capture a mere ton of CO2).

On top of that, there’s the question of what happens to all that carbon once it’s sucked out of the air. In addition to building the plants, you’ve got to lay out pipelines to transport the captured CO2. And then you have to find places to safely store the greenhouse gas. Some carbon removal proponents want to bury CO2 at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, for example. As you can imagine, plans to build new pipelines and dredge the seafloor have already pissed people off.

Despite all that, companies, industries, and think tanks keep posing direct air capture as a key piece of the puzzle to stopping climate change. It might be possible. But looking at the sheer scale of the problem is an important reality check. From where we are now to the expansive future these new reports envision, carbon removal technologies face a long — and bumpy — road.

THE REALITY IS THAT CCS IS NOT GREEN NOR CLEAN IT IS GOING TO BE USED TO FRACK OLD DRY WELLS SUCH AS IN THE BAKAN SHIELD IN SASKATCHEWAN
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-myth-of-carbon-capture-and-storage.html

ALSO SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CCS

'We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history': Noam Chomsky on climate change and nuclear war

Professor Noam Chomsky (image via screengrab).

Brandon Gage 

April 06, 2022

Renowned author, social critic, and philosopher Noam Chomsky believes that human civilization is rapidly "approaching the most dangerous point" in its collective history, citing a conflagration of global crises that threaten to shatter the foundations of modern society.

Chomsky, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained in an interview with The Statesman that was published on Wednesday that climate change and the specter of nuclear war pose an immediate existential threat to the future of life on Earth.

Over the last three decades, the GOP has become the proud home of climate deniers, many of whom are bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry. Chomsky, however, blames the broader anti-science dogma that has overtaken the Republican Party on former President Donald Trump, whose single term in the White House was in part defined by the gutting of environmental protections.

“Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a death warrant to the species," Chomsky said, although he stressed that he has not abandoned optimism.

“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behavior of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all," he added. "Well, that’s the hope for the future.”

Meanwhile, the looming possibility of a clash of the world's nuclear superpowers stems from Russian President Vladimir Putin's "monstrous" war in Ukraine. His saber-rattling has prompted worldwide fears that a miscalculation – or his growing desperation as his war continues to go poorly – could result in him triggering atomic Armageddon.

“We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history," Chomsky told New Statesman Senior Editor George Eaton. "We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organized human life on Earth.”

Watch below via The New Statesman

Read Chomsky's full interview here.

'Don't Say Gay' Republicans pushing for legalizing child marriage

Image credit: RELewisJr / Wikimedia Commons

Mia Brett

April 07, 2022
AlterNet 

According to the GOP, discussion of gender or sexuality is bad for children. Unless it’s your parents’ (heterosexual) marriage. Or a love story in a cartoon. Or dressing up as a bride for Halloween. Or playing with dolls and treating them like your babies. I could have sworn everyone thought it was cute when I had “boyfriends” in kindergarten.
Oh!

Of course.

Republicans only think it’s bad for children to know about gender or sexuality if we’re talking about gay or trans people. Hell, if we’re talking about straight cisgender people, not only do Republicans think it’s fine to talk with children about acceptable sexuality but they actually think it’s fine to engage in sex with children, as long as you’re married.

While Republicans are supporting the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida and asserting it’s actually an “anti-grooming” bill (it’s no such thing), Republicans in Tennessee are trying to eliminate all age requirements for marriage, which would effectively legalize sexual abuse.

Republicans are claiming the “Parental Rights in Education Bill” (dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics) is an “anti-grooming” bill.

Which pretty much makes no sense.

The law bans any discussion of LGBTQ topics until third grade and requires discussions after third grade to be “age-appropriate.”

The bill allows parents to sue if they don’t like what their child is learning. It requires schools to inform parents if their child seeks mental health services. (This outs students who don’t want their parents to know they’re questioning their gender identity or sexuality).

While the bill quite literally doesn’t allow teachers to say “gay” or “trans” or “lesbian” or “queer” in the classroom, it does not protect children from grooming. If anything, denying kids information about sex and gender can make them more vulnerable to abusers.

“Grooming” in relation to sexual abuse usually refers to an adult psychologically manipulating a child or teenager so they become more vulnerable to the abuser. It’s hard to see how the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” has anything to do with grooming unless you think all teachers are sexual abusers and that acknowledging the existence of gay people somehow makes a child more likely to engage in sex.

That golem Rod Dreher claimed recently that the word “grooming” is being used here to mean “an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It may not specifically be to groom them for sexual activity, but it is certainly to groom them to take on a sexual/gender identity at odds with the norm.”

But in another article the American Conservative pundit called Democrats the “party of child mutilators and kidnappers” so it’s pretty clear conservatives are trying to smear Democrats as pedophiles and not drawing the fine line about grooming meaning something else.

This comes soon after conservatives on the Senate Judiciary Committee tried to smear Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as sympathetic to sexual abusers and easy on people who possess child porn.

While the focus on grooming might be new, conservatives have been using QAnon about pedophilia to smear Democrats for a while. The myth that gay people are more likely to molest children goes back to the 1970s though there’s absolutely no evidence to back it up.

While accusing Democrats of grooming, Republicans in Tennessee are trying to pass an alternative common-law marriage that can only happen between one man and one woman.

Apparently conservative Christians there object so strenuously to gay marriage that they refuse to get marriaged under laws gay people use.

It gets worse. The bill doesn’t include an age requirement. That would allow marriage for minors without parental consent. Since common-law marriages don’t require a ceremony or a marriage certificate, it’s unclear how much agency a minor would have in entering such a marriage. In other words, it’s not clear if or whether a minor has consented to marriage. Without an age requirement, such laws effectively legalize the worst forms of child abuse, as a legal marriage after the fact typically makes statutory rape laws moot.

Tennessee’s current marriage laws require a person to be 18 (17 with parental permission.) Parties also can’t be over four years apart in age.

If this new law passes as is, people (most likely older men) could marry — at least in theory – 12-year-olds without parental consent.

At least these too-young-to marry children won’t be getting mental health care without their parents knowing – or learning about gay people in school in “an age-inappropriate way,” whatever that means.

Some people – some Republicans – are already skirting current law. Imagine what others will do if and when the new bill becomes law.


US Rep John Rose of Tennessee married his wife when she was 21.

He was 46.

But!

They met when she was 19.

He was 44.

T e c h n i c a l l y legal, but c’mon.

Who knows how young Congressman Rose’s young wife might have been had the new Tennessee marriage law been in place at the time?

Meanwhile, US Rep. Matt Gaetz is being investigated for paying a 17-year-old for sex (when he was in his 30s). That could constitute sex trafficking if she traveled across state lines. Republican Roy Moore pursued four girls under the age of 18 when he was in his 30s.

Some form of child marriage is currently legal in 44 states. Only Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island require both parties to be 18 to enter into a marriage without any exceptions (also all six states have Democratic governors).

Most states require people to be 18 to get married with a few exceptions of 19 or 21. However, many states allow 16-year-olds to get married if they have parental consent or judicial approval.

Some states have no minimum age requirement as long as there is parental consent or judicial approval. Maryland and North Carolina lower the age with judicial approval if the minor is pregnant.

In those states an abuser could purposely get a 15-year-old pregnant in order to marry them and have a valid defense against statutory rape.

In any case, we have statutory rape laws for a reason. Marrying the person you’re abusing (which only gives the abuser more control) should not legally help perpetrators escape prosecution.

Child sexual abuse and statutory rape are real issues that need addressing. Denying children and teenagers information about sex and gender will only make them more vulnerable to abusers.

The more information children have, the more they understand the difference between appropriate interaction with adults and crossing the line. Far from fighting the grooming of children, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill will likely make it easier for abusers to groom children.

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