WATER IS LIFE

NASA has its first detailed map of water on the Moon


NASA has its first detailed map of water on the Moon

Scott Sutherland
Sat, March 25, 2023 

On one of its final flights, a unique NASA telescope just provided a key discovery that may secure the future of lunar and space exploration.

In February 2022, astronomers used NASA's now-retired SOFIA telescope — the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy — to scan an immense region near the south pole of the Moon. Based on the images collected, they produced a new map that covers over 230,000 square kilometres of the lunar surface, revealing an abundance of water trapped on the shady sides of mountains and in the shadowed parts of craters.

SOFIA-Moon-water-map-NASA-GSFC-SVS-ErnieWright

This image shows roughly half of the SOFIA map of water near the lunar south pole. Darker shades of blue indicate the greatest amount of water, while shades of brown note regions with less water. Credit: NASA/GSFC SVS/Ernie Wright


"When looking at the water data, we can actually see crater rims, we see the individual mountains, and we can even see differences between the day and night sides of the mountains, thanks to the higher concentration of water in these places, Bill Reach, director of the SOFIA Science Center at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a NASA press release.

Reach is the lead author of a new study based on SOFIA's observations, published in mid-March.

The idea that there's water trapped in the perpetually shadowed regions of the Moon is not a new one. Previous studies have revealed hints of what was there, by detecting the presence of hydrogen and oxygen. However, there was no way at that time to determine if we were seeing actual water (H2O) or some other chemical combination of the two elements (such as the less-useful OH 'hydroxyl' molecule).

Observations by SOFIA back in 2020 confirmed the presence of actual water. These new observations reveal exactly where it is, and how much of it is there.

sofia-over-sierra

The SOFIA telescope flies on board this jetliner, to get above the thick tropospheric air to take infrared images of objects in space. Credit: NASA

According to NASA, this is only the first of several lunar water maps that will come from these SOFIA observations. More are on the way, as the team focused on several future lunar mission landing sites.

"With this map of SOFIA data, and others to come, we are looking at how water is concentrated under different lunar environmental conditions," said Casey Honniball, a visiting scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who is working on the upcoming VIPER mission to the Moon. "This map will provide valuable information for the Artemis program on potential prospecting areas but also provides regional context for future science missions, like VIPER."

VIRER is NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, a robot that is expected to land at the lunar south pole sometime in 2024. Its target will be Mons Mouton, a mountain located in a region that will be detailed in one of the upcoming maps from SOFIA.

Following VIRER, Artemis III is expected to launch in 2025, with the intention to land astronauts near the Moon's south pole. This will be the first crewed mission to touch down on the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. If the water discovered by SOFIA and investigated by VIPER is found to be a resource that we can easily extract, Artemis III could quickly become the start of a sustained human presence on the Moon.
Watch below: See the Moon in all its phases for 2023 in less than 5 minutes

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MBS VIETNAM

'Stuck in a swamp': Saudi Arabia seeks exit from Yemen war


Hashem Osseiran
Sat, March 25, 2023 


Eight years after launching its military campaign in Yemen, Saudi Arabia wants to extricate itself from the conflict, despite slim hopes of lasting peace, to focus on ambitious projects at home.

The oil-rich monarchy gave a signal this month by announcing plans to resume ties with Iran, which backs Yemen's Huthi rebels against the Saudi-supported government in a proxy war.

But as Saudi Arabia instigates sweeping social and economic changes as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's "Vision 2030" reform, it "is seeking to shift its approach in Yemen from a military strategy to a soft security and political one", said Ahmed Nagi, from the International Crisis Group.

Since the Saudi-led military intervention began on March 26, 2015, the kingdom has pounded its impoverished neighbour with air strikes in a conflict that has triggered one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, according to the United Nations.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed through direct and indirect causes, with 4.5 million people internally displaced and more than two-thirds of the population living below the poverty line, according to UN estimates.

Nagi said that "military operations, such as air strikes" are now likely to cease, adding that the priority now is a "diplomatic solution".

The Saudi-led intervention, which marks its eighth anniversary on Sunday, came after the Huthis took control of the capital Sanaa in 2014.

- Rebranding project -

A UN-brokered ceasefire that took effect last April brought a sharp reduction in hostilities. Even though the truce expired in October, fighting has largely remained on hold.

Even before the truce, Saudi Arabia and the Huthis were engaging in back-channel negotiations, including talks in neutral neighbour Oman.

Riyadh's top priority is securing border areas and stopping the drone and missile attacks that have targeted its all-important oil facilities, analysts say.

"Saudi is currently negotiating with the Huthis to establish understandings that would enable it to secure its borderlands while maintaining influence" in areas controlled by Yemen's government, Nagi said.

"This new approach could enable Saudi to remain the key actor in Yemen's domestic politics, to ensure that no security threats can affect the kingdom in case conflict continues at the local level," Nagi added.

The Saudi-led intervention's stated aim was to protect civilians from Huthi attacks, restore the government and stop Yemen becoming a safe haven for Iranian-backed forces.

Eight years in, the rebels control swathes of the country and command an impressive arsenal of weapons that they have used to attack Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, another coalition member.

For Riyadh, the fallout jeopardises a rebranding project that aims to turn the conservative country into a hub for tourism and investment.

Saudi Arabia, relatively closed off for decades, is building a $500 billion futuristic new city, NEOM, and a swathe of holiday resorts and attractions.

"There is a huge focus in Saudi now on development, tourism, mega-projects," said an analyst following the negotiations between Riyadh and Huthi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the press.

For Riyadh, there is concern that "anything involving conflict" will harm investment and stability, the analyst added.

- 'Wash their hands' -

The unofficial talks with the Huthis are now maturing into a potential "understanding" that could pave the way for a slimmer Saudi military role ahead of a UN-sponsored inter-Yemeni dialogue, the analyst said.

"They want to go from some form of Saudi-Huthi understanding to being able to hand it over to a wider UN process," he said.

The Saudis "want to wash their hands of the situation," and avoid responsibility for any future flare-ups, he added.

A Saudi official, also speaking anonymously, said the country "will not tolerate any threat to our security", noting it shares a long border with Yemen.

"Iran can and should play a major part in promoting this -- and we hope it will," the official said, confirming negotiations with the Huthis aimed to revive UN-facilitated peace talks.

"We did see some progress of course, and we want to build on that progress to achieve lasting peace to open up for a political solution," the official said.

Many analysts are pessimistic that Riyadh's plans for a downsized military role will bring peace to Yemen, which remains deeply fractured along religious, regional and political lines.

Saudi Arabia, nonetheless, has "decided to leave Yemen whatever the price is", said an Arab diplomat in Riyadh. "They are... stuck in a swamp that is very costly on all levels."

ho-rcb/th/pjm/lb

Russia faces shrinking middle class, rising inequality, study finds


Pedestrians walk across Nevsky Avenue in central Saint Petersburg

Reuters
Fri, March 24, 2023 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's middle class will shrink as social inequality grows over coming years, an economic study conducted by Russian experts suggested, as sanctions against Moscow and limited growth potential scupper development prospects.

The study, published this week, presents four possible scenarios for how Russians' living standards will change between now and 2030 from experts from the Social Policy Institute at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, one of Russia's leading educational establishments.

The study, based on a 2022 survey of experts from economic institutions, businesses and public organisations, states that only a combination of global economic growth and an easing of sanctions on Russia, imposed by the West because of what Moscow calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine, can improve real incomes and reduce poverty.

The middle class is set to suffer in any event, even if sanctions pressure is reduced, the study finds.

Russia's economy proved unexpectedly resilient in the face of tough Western sanctions last year, but a return to pre-conflict levels of prosperity may be far off as more government spending is directed towards the military.

The study's most optimistic scenario sees real incomes exceeding 2021 levels by around 2% in 2030 and poverty dropping below 10% from 11.8% in 2022. In that scenario, the size of the middle class would still drop to 14%-31% by 2030 from current estimates of 20%-50%.

"Thus, even in the most favourable development of events, one can expect the deterioration of the middle class and of the population's social and psychological well-being," the study's authors write.

The worsening scenarios eventually see real incomes declining up to 2030 and poverty approaching 20%.

"On the one hand, there will be an increase in the concentration of wealth and a further breakaway at the 'top', and on the other hand, a contraction of inequality below through the convergence of the middle (or formerly middle) strata with the poor," the authors say.

Growing inequality in all four scenarios could lead to increased social tensions, the study finds. All four scenarios expect more and more security officials to drop into the middle class.

(Reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Nick Macfie)

A twin who survived Auschwitz shares how a doctor experimented on her and her identical sister — and tried to get them pregnant with other twins




Nancy Segal
Jane Ridley
Fri, March 24, 2023 

Twin concentration-camp survivors Stepa Heller, left, and Annetta Able, with their birthday cake in 2019. The inmate number that Heller was given at Auschwitz can be seen tattooed on her arm.Courtesy of Daphna Able

Nazis wanted identical twin Annetta Able to get pregnant by another identical twin at Auschwitz.


Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death," treated her and her sister as human guinea pigs.


Able's horrific story features in a new book about twins who survived these Holocaust "experiments."

Soon after Annetta Able and her identical twin sister, Stephanie Heller, were liberated from Auschwitz, they learned that Dr. Josef Mengele planned to have each of them made pregnant by identical twin brothers.

They knew the men who'd been selected for the process because Mengele, the Nazi physician who carried out such "medical experiments" on prisoners, had already subjected the four young adults to various blood transfusions.


"You don't want to think about things from the past like that," Able, now 99, told Insider, referring to Mengele's warped intentions.

Documents retrieved from the camp and witness statements by other Jewish inmates who were forced to work for Mengele confirmed the proposed "experiment" on the two sets of siblings.

"We only found out afterwards," Able said in an email to Insider that she dictated to her daughter, Daphna Able. She added, "We never saw the other twins again after that, but know that one of them died after the experimentation."
Mengele was known as the 'Angel of Death' because of his power and human experiments at Auschwitz

Able and her sister's story is featured in the new book, "The Twin Children of The Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive." The book — written by the psychology professor Nancy Segal, the director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton — documents Mengele "experiments" using identical and fraternal twins as human guinea pigs.

"It was documented that that around 1,500 pairs passed through Auschwitz. But another reference said it was 730," Segal said, adding that the exact number "will never be known."

"Mengele was known as the 'Angel of Death' because of these unthinkable and horrific experiments to which he subjected the twins and some of their families," Segal told Insider.

Identical twin sisters Annetta and Stephanie in their mid-20s, after their liberation from the Nazi death camp.Courtesy of Daphna Able.

Daphna Able said that her mother and aunt, known to family and friends as Stepa, who died in 2019, were appalled to learn that Mengele plotted to have them impregnated and killed at some point during their pregnancies in order to dissect the fetuses to find out if they were also identical twins.

"He wanted to determine if they would multiply," Daphna told Insider. But the young women had stopped menstruating because they were given so little food to eat. "They wouldn't have been able to conceive anyway," she said.
The identical twins were treated as guinea pigs

The sisters were taken by the Nazis from their home in Prague, now in the Czech Republic, in 1942. They were 19 when they were transferred to Auschwitz a year later. They didn't know it at the time, but the rest of the family, including their mother and 12-year-old sister, had been sent to the gas chambers.

"When we arrived in the cattle cars, the Nazi soldiers knew to be on the lookout for twins," Able said in her email. She said they were taken to barracks where other twins were held.

The women were escorted to Mengele's laboratory at the camp where, Able said, he asked "so many questions" and recorded their height, weight, and the color of their eyes and hair. "We were not of any interest to him other than as human guinea pigs," Able said in the email.

Annetta Able with her daughter Daphna, who often helps her mother tell her story about her two-year ordeal in Auschwitz.Courtesy of Daphna Able.

She went on to describe the conditions at the camp as "vile, freezing, cramped, and exposed to the elements." She added, "We were always starving. It's what you would imagine hell to be."

Talking directly to Insider, Able said that she and her sister were determined to "stay alive together." She said, "We have always been close. I lived her life, and she did mine."

Segal said that many of the subjects of Mengele's experiments knew that if one died, the other would be killed because he would "compare their organs." "The bond between the twins in Auschwitz was so important," Segal said. "Everyone had to be as mindful of their twin as themselves."
The twins were subjected to blood transfusions from identical twin men around their age

Able told Insider that their two-year ordeal at the camp in occupied Poland was "a hard time" — made even more painful because they didn't know where their other family members were, until they discovered they had been killed.

In the email, Able said the siblings tried to cope with the torment by "making up stories to avoid our reality." "We spoke about how wonderful it will be when we get home to our family," Able added. "What we would eat, how we would play with our sister."

Daphna Able said that her mom and her twin had told her they were terrified when Mengele would order the blood transfusions between them and the identical brothers. The 67-year-old said that the sisters got sick from the experiments and Heller had constant issues with her health after leaving the camp.

Identical twins Annetta and Stephanie Heilbrunn, with their mother and younger sister in Prague, before they were displaced by the Nazis. The girls' mother and sister perished in the gas chambers.Courtesy of Daphna Able.

Segal told Insider that she disagreed with experts who claimed that Mengele wanted to understand the biological basis of twins so that he could increase the Aryan race. "It didn't make sense because he would have studied the parents, not the twins themselves," Segal said. "The general consensus is that he was trying to demonstrate a genetic influence on racial differences and, in that way, prove that the Aryans were superior to the other races."
Able described her and her sister as 'two bodies and one soul'

Able said in her email that she and Heller turned 21 during the death march when the SS tried to transfer its prisoners by foot ahead of the imminent liberation of Auschwitz. They went on to qualify as nurses in former Czechoslovakia before moving to Israel, then Australia.

"My sister and I were always two bodies and one soul," the great-grandmother of six said in the email to Insider. "The shared experience made us even closer if that was possible."

Do you have a powerful story to share with Insider? Please send details to jridley@insider.com.

Read the original article on Insider

After a decade, South Dakota's Amish are moving on

Jason Harward, The Daily Republic, Mitchell, S.D.
Fri, March 24, 2023

Mar. 24—TRIPP, S.D. — About two miles west of Tripp, past a yellow warning sign with a horse and buggy and down a dirt road muddied from snow melt, sit a set of red barns and white homes, all with green roofs.

The structures dotting the rolling landscape house South Dakota's lone Amish community, a nine-family, 60-person settlement that started in 2010, widely believed to be the religious group's first venture into South Dakota.

But come this summer, they'll be gone — some of their homes are listed on
Zillow, and an auction is scheduled for April 28.

"We wanted there to be an Amish community here, but seems like everybody Amish is more from Ohio or Pennsylvania, where there are more trees," Rudy Borntreger, the community's bishop, or elder, explained. "I think it's so open, nobody wants to join us. Now more people decided to move back to Iowa and Minnesota, so kind of for unity's sake."

Though their time in the state will be cut short — and an aversion to technology, deep focus on family and generally reclusive nature limited their socializing potential — they left a lasting impression on the Tripp area and beyond, community members say.

"We love 'em here," Marion Ymker, the owner and manager of Ymker Greenhouse and Landscaping in Armour, where some of the Amish have worked for about a decade, said. "We're disappointed they're moving."

That feeling is mutual.

"Good country. Good area. Good friends," Borntreger said, speaking in a tone of finality on his time in South Dakota, where he's spent around half of his adult life. "Lot of things change in 13 years. Most businesses in Tripp all changed hands. Old friends passed on."

The Amish are part of the Anabaptist Christian movement, closely related to the Mennonites and more distantly connected to the Hutterites. They first arrived in the United States in the 1720s, initially landing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which remains the largest single community of Amish in the nation, numbering around 30,000.

Most of the Tripp Amish come from Tomah, Wisconsin, a settlement formed in 1969 that numbers more than 8,000. Borntreger said his family and some others plan to go back to a different region in Wisconsin.

Faith sits at the center of their lives: Bortntreger reads the Bible daily and attends church every other week. The children attend an Amish parochial school on the farm.

Likely the most well-known characteristic of the Amish is an eschewing of modern conveniences. However, there is a somewhat wide range of technology usage among Amish communities, and most of those decisions come down to the discretion of the leadership of individual church districts.

Borntreger described himself as a more conservative bishop. His family's large, white home has no electricity, though they do sometimes use propane lamps. The community also shares a pay phone.

For shorter-distance communication, a large bell sits in front of the Borntreger home; as the reporter arrived on the property for an interview for this story, his wife, donning a white bonnet and blue dress, shook the instrument to hail him from a distant barn.

In the chilly March air, Borntreger wore a black hat low over his forehead. Opposite the round brim, jointly framing his square jaw and forehead, is a dense, curly black beard.

His black coat and dark blue pants are handmade by his wife from spools of thick denim. Completing his stringy, 5-foot-10 frame is the only purchased portion of his outfit: grime-stained, brown boots nearly up to the knee.

Next to him is his youngest child, who carries a bright yellow, orange and green turtle toy, a pop of color in the otherwise drab landscape.

The humble lifestyle — from clothes to horse-and-buggy transportation — is about keeping a focus on God and family, explained Erik Wesner, who publishes Amish America, an Amish news website.

"They adopt certain technologies, but the way they approach technology is really trying to be thoughtful about how it's used," said Wesner, who became acquainted with the Amish by selling the population educational materials. "What are the effects of that technology, whether they're intended or unintended? What are the potential negative effects of that technology? Does the benefit that this tech brings us outweigh the negative side?"

Wesner used the example of a car to illustrate the point. While ownership of a personal vehicle does offer ease of transportation — and the Tripp Amish community has a slate of drivers who often bring them back to Wisconsin for familial engagements or around the state — it also has the potential to "fragment and disperse the family."

Borntreger shared some of these views, tying the root cause of many social ills to a breakdown in family structure.

"It's important to have parents that are willing to work together to raise their children," Borntreger, a father of 14, said. "If we look at overall situations, I think some are neglected; they have questions and their parents don't have answers so the children may look elsewhere."

While discussing family values, he mentioned a fondness for Gov. Kristi Noem, whose speeches he sometimes reads in local weeklies.

However, the Amish do not vote.

"We leave that to the rest," he said.

The Tripp Amish uprooted from their home in Wisconsin partially for "elbow room," which also served as the headline for a 2010 article in the Yankton Daily Press and Dakotan announcing their arrival.

South Dakota as a landing spot was a budgetary decision.

"There's a corn belt between here and there that's more higher-priced ground," Borntreger explained. "But it's good ground, we like it."

It wasn't always easy: he recalled extreme drought in 2012 and the 2022 derecho, which took down some of their buildings. But that didn't factor into the choice to relocate; instead, the problem was an inability to attract and retain population.

A set of six families, referred to as the "Founding Six" by Jim Mize, who sometimes serves as a driver on trips to Wisconsin, rolled in during the first two years. Of that group, only one, Rudy Borntreger's family, remains.

A total of around two dozen families lived in the community throughout the years, though the settlement never numbered more than 90 people.

While Borntreger chalked up the churn to familial ties being elsewhere, Mize surmised that the inner workings of the group were not always the best.

"They won't tell you specifically why, but you can read between the lines; they made a couple of comments that Rudy was hard to get along with," he said. "In Amish practice, the bishop controls where they can work, how much they can work, the type of technology."

Leaving that aside, the impression the Tripp Amish left on local businesses was overwhelmingly positive.

At Ymker Greenhouse in Armour, where mainly younger Amish work a few days per week, they showed exceptional skills in repairing buildings or working in the greenhouse.

"When it comes to craftsmanship, you won't find better people to have," Marion Ymker, who owns the shop, said. "You don't have to worry about foul language. You don't need to worry about back talk or anything like that."

Matt Mehlhaf, the owner of the sale barn in Menno frequented by the Tripp Amish, had similar comments.

"They're good people as far as I'm concerned. And they're good customers, too," he said. "They're willing to work and work hard. And that's what it takes to raise livestock."

In the end, those takeaways are essentially all Borntreger would like to leave behind.

"When we first moved here, people probably figured we were a little different. And I guess we are different, but we're just trying to be friendly people, make an honest living, raise our families," Borntreger said. "That's what our mission is, I guess. Serve God, and don't forget to pray."

Jason Harward is a Report for America corps reporter who writes about state politics in South Dakota. 

The era of Swiss exceptionalism is over

TO THE JOY OF THE TORY PRESS

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

THE TELEGRAPH
Fri, March 24, 2023 

Credit Suisse

A century of Swiss exceptionalism is ending with shocking speed. Everything is going wrong at once.

The war in Ukraine is testing Switzerland’s armed neutrality to the point of destruction. They are surrounded on all sides by EU states, yet their relationship with the EU has broken down and seems stuck in permanent crisis. This has led to the punitive expulsion of Swiss scientists from the Horizon Europe programme.

And now Credit Suisse no longer exists. Switzerland’s business model as banker for the global elites crashed and burned over four stormy days from Thursday to Sunday night.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports that the finance minister did not even have an adviser to help as the Swiss financial world crumbled around her. This is astounding given that she used to be a translator, with no experience in finance before her appointment in January.


“It is as amateurish as it gets. How can this happen in a civilised economy? ” said a veteran European regulator with intimate knowledge of the events.

He said the country’s banking industry – 9pc of GDP – was close to a systemic meltdown over the weekend. The debacle nearly escalated into a bank-run on Switzerland itself.

UBS Credit Suisse - Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Saudi Arabia and Qatar were enraged by moves to wipe out Credit Suisse stockholders without a vote by the board, in violation of shareholder rights, and at the outer boundaries of legality. “They told the Swiss that all their other investments in Switzerland would be called into question if it happened,” said the regulator.

It was an implicit threat to set off a second and fatal round of deposit flight by the petropowers and mid-East wealth funds. “It would have been the end of Switzerland’s banking industry. The best you can say now is that it is still standing. But can the model survive?” he said.

The Swiss backed down. They expropriated $17bn (£13.8bn) from holders of Credit Suisse convertible AT1 bonds instead, risking contagion through Europe’s $270bn market for junior bank debt at a perilous moment. This is just as bad for Switzerland’s credibility.

“Switzerland will never be the same again. The reputation of Swiss banking has now been damaged forever. Bankers in Singapore are going to be popping corks” said professor Arturo Bris from the Swiss business school IMD.

The legal theft of $17bn required invoking emergency powers from the Second World War and was executed without an accounting justification. It inverts the market hierarchy for loss absorption. Bondholders would normally hope to recoup half or more from a bank resolution. Aggrieved funds are already preparing for years of litigation. Swiss authorities will rue the day they picked this fight.

Britain’s pensions fiasco last September was scarcely better. The difference is that the Bank of England managed the affair with supreme skill, winning plaudits from across the world. The British political leaders responsible were decapitated instantly. No relevant actor in Switzerland has been removed from harm's way.

Mark Dowding from BlueBay Asset Management said investors must now contend with the novel concept of Swiss political risk. “They used to be the safest of safe havens, but we may now start seeing a (risk) premium attached to Swiss assets. Trust is everything in banking,” he said.

The UBS takeover of the Credit Suisse corpse leaves Switzerland with a monopolistic monster: too big to fail, carrying $1.7 trillion of liabilities that stretch the fire-fighting capabilities of the Swiss state itself. “It really worries me: such a super-sized bank can get an entire country into trouble,” Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research. (DIW).

The enlarged UBS becomes the West’s fourth largest bank after JP Morgan, HSBC, and Citigroup, wildly out of proportion to the state and economy that underpins it in a crisis. Its liabilities are near 200pc of Swiss GDP.

Switzerland is not Iceland. A buccaneering trio of Icelandic banks, acting like hedge funds, took on so much leverage that they would have bankrupted the Icelandic state in 2007 had Reykjavik not repudiated the losses, leaving London, Amsterdam, and New York to clean up the mess.

However, the Swiss central bank has limits and has already exhausted the political patience of the irascible cantons. It recently disclosed that it lost 25pc of Swiss GDP last year on its QE portfolio, using up all of its loss provisioning set aside. A few more bad months and it will have to go cap in hand to Swiss taxpayers for a bail-out.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) is not alone in suffering a Katzenjammer from the great QE experiment. The Dutch central bank says it may need recapitalisation, and so does the mighty Bundesbank. What is unique is the scale. The SNB’s balance sheet reached 144pc of GDP, and some of it in Amazon, Tesla, Apple, and Meta, all acquired in the name of fighting deflation.

The fast-shrinking capital base of the SNB did not stop it extending a $100bn liquidity line to UBS over the weekend to enable the shot-gun marriage. Yet it is legitimate to ask how Swiss leaders might react if the elephantine mega-bank comes to grief in the future. There may not be technical constraints on the SNB’s ability to stem a major crisis, but after the antics of last weekend there are most-assuredly political constraints.

Simon Brady from risk specialists 1LoD says Credit Suisse went into terminal decline because it clung too long to the old Swiss recipe of “bank secrecy, wealth concealment, anonymity and tax avoidance”.

One could extend the criticism to the larger nexus of Swiss banking. The German car industry made a parallel strategic error by clinging too long to fossil combustion, letting the Americans and the Chinese run away with the electric future.

Switzerland - Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Switzerland remains a AAA economy (for now), with a broad base of life sciences, hi-tech, and machine engineering. But it is not a AAA member of the Western democratic alliance. It has manoeuvred itself into a diplomatic quagmire, and for the same reason as its banking travails: out of hubris and addiction to the old recipe.

The war in Ukraine has rehabilitated the British in the eyes of Europe – at least among those in defence and foreign policy circles – because the UK has been a rock solid at a time of great peril for European civilisation. Rishi Sunak and the Windsor Framework have iced the cake.

The war has had the opposite effect for the Swiss, exposing the threadbare moral claims of their armed neutrality. The country has a substantial weapons industry. It sells arms to the Middle East. Sig Sauer assault rifles sold to the Saudis have been used against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Yet it stands on piety as Vladimir Putin tries to expunge a democratic European state. It refuses to let Berlin transfer Swiss-made shells for German Gepard tanks to Ukrainian forces on the grounds that they will be used in conflict. There comes a point when this crosses into complicity.

“I have to say clearly: I cannot understand why Switzerland does not provide Gepard ammunition,” said Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice-chancellor. Polls show that at least half the Swiss population agrees with him.

The Swiss are formidably well-educated and a resourceful people. They will overcome this enveloping national crisis just as we in Britain will overcome ours. But first they are will have to shed a lot of 20th Century Swiss shibboleths.

BRIC

Lula to seek Chinese semiconductor technology, investment in Beijing


Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attends a ceremony at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia

Fri, March 24, 2023 
By Lisandra Paraguassu

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil will seek Chinese technology and investment to develop a semiconductor industry in the South American country despite U.S. attempts to discourage association with China in this area, a senior presidential adviser told Reuters.

Semiconductors will be a priority on President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's visit to China next week.

His top foreign policy adviser, former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, said Brazil cannot afford to take sides in growing tensions between China and the United States. Lula's trip will seek Chinese cooperation in fostering Brazil's sustainable development and digital economy.

The countries are preparing to sign agreements on the Sino-Brazilian CBERS small satellite program started in 1988, along with accords on production of communications and microelectronics equipment, Amorim said in an interview.

The U.S. government has suggested that associations with the production of Chinese microelectronics would not be welcome, which could affect Brazilian plans to produce semiconductors amid a global shortage.

"I don't pay attention to messages. If the U.S. wants, they can propose bigger and better conditions and that's it, and we will choose theirs," Amorim said.

"We have no preference for a Chinese semiconductor factory. But if they offer good conditions, I don't see why we refuse. We are not afraid of the big bad wolf," he commented, when asked about U.S. discouragement of technology deals with China.

Lula's trip to China comes less than two months after he met with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House, as Brasilia aims for a pragmatic foreign policy balancing ties with its top trading partners despite growing tensions between the two.

Amorim said Brazil does not see the world divided between China and the United States and will not adopt an ideology from either of them, be it "international communism or the war of democracies against autocracies."

Brazil is grateful for the U.S. support for its democratic process, which was threatened by supporters of Lula's far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, Amorim said.

But he added: "I cannot condition where I am going to buy a chip, or something else, to these values. In fact, the chip is not impregnated with these values, it is value free."

Lula is expected to visit the factory of Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecommunications giant that has been operating in Brazil for 20 years.

A supplier of much of the fourth- and fifth-generation mobile technology (4G and 5G) in Brazil, Huawei had the approval of its new technologies suspended by the U.S. government, which classified the company as a risk for national security.

Under pressure from the Trump administration, Bolsonaro weighed banning the use of Huawei equipment in Brazil's 5G network, but dropped the idea due to lobbying by phone carriers already invested in the cheaper Chinese equipment.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Diane Craft)

Kerry on climate: ‘We have to work with China’ and other top polluters to avoid disaster

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Sat, March 25, 2023 

Despite mounting tensions between the United States and its rivals China and Russia, President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, told Yahoo News that the U.S. must work with those adversaries on combating climate change.

“We have to work with China, we have to work with India,” Kerry said during an interview Friday at Yahoo News’ New York offices. “We even have to find a way, ultimately, if we can resolve the war in Ukraine, to work with Russia, because Russia is a huge emitter. And any one of these countries has an ability — if it doesn't move to change its energy base — to make it much harder for the rest of the world, if not impossible, to reach the goals we've set.”

China is by far the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which scientists have established are causing global temperatures to rise. The United States is the second-largest emitter, followed by India and Russia. But China, with a population of 1.4 billion people and as the world’s second-largest economy, towers over the others. Its emissions are more than double those of the U.S., and Kerry echoed United Nations climate change experts who say that the world will be unable to avert catastrophic climate change unless China takes more significant steps to curb emissions.

Climate czar John Kerry. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Ethan Hill for Yahoo News)

“President Biden empowered me to reach out to China and work with China, which we have done for two years, and with some effect,” Kerry said. "Not as much as we need, ultimately.”

Kerry’s comments on the need for U.S. climate cooperation with two of its geopolitical competitors comes at an especially awkward moment. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a two-day summit in Moscow this week intended to present a united front against the U.S. and Europe, who have joined together to oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the summit, Putin also reiterated Russia’s position that it considers Taiwan part of China. China has increased military maneuvers near the island, which it reportedly hopes to seize. The U.S. has countered by arming allies in the South Pacific and beefing up U.S. military forces in the Philippines. Biden has also said that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if it is attacked.

Despite those disagreements, the U.S. and China have kept an open line of communication on climate change. In November 2021, Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, jointly announced “a road map for our future collaboration” on the issue. Both nations said they would work to phase out coal and reduce emissions of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas, but China has not yet laid out specific targets or reduction plans.


“Our president has tried hard to separate climate from the other issues that are real that we obviously have with China, but we can't get bogged down by that, because this is a universally felt existential challenge to the planet,” Kerry said. “And it's important that the two largest economies in the world work to try to resolve it.”

Whereas China has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the U.S. and Japan, the fifth-largest climate polluter, have committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Like China, India and Russia have been reluctant to commit to emissions reductions as ambitious as those laid out by the U.S. or Japan. India, whose population is set to overtake China’s this year, has committed to a 2070 target for reaching net-zero emissions.

Russia, one of the world’s largest producers of oil and gas, has proposed to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, but it has not adopted policies that would set it on that course. “Russia’s existing policies indicate no real commitment to curb emissions,” the research organization Carbon Action Tracker states.

Relations between the U.S. and Russia have also been spiraling downward for years, due largely to Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, its alliance with Iran and Syria, and its efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Yet Kerry said that the precarious state of the world’s climate requires the U.S. to continue to pursue a diplomatic breakthrough.

“What is happening in Ukraine is an abomination,” he said. “It is a violation of everything we have worked to achieve since World War II, where we put in place rule of law, international law. … So this is an important fight, but it's not an exclusive fight. We also have to deal with climate at the same time.”


On a per capita basis, China and India are much less wealthy than developed nations like the U.S. and Japan, and some climate experts argue that rich countries with outsized historical emissions should be required to achieve net zero emissions sooner than 2050. That would give poorer countries like India more breathing room, allowing them to lift millions out of extreme poverty while beginning to curb emissions. “We need some countries to be net-zero even before 2050, and other countries are going to reach net zero around 2055, and it will balance out around 2050,” a reviewer of the IPCC report told Yahoo News on Monday.

As part of their efforts to limit climate change while raising standards of living, China and India have both begun to ramp up renewable energy production. But both countries continue to burn coal and build new coal-fired power plants.

“[India] understand[s] that they've got to try to find a way to reduce coal, but they're also fighting this question of keeping their folks employed and being able to keep their economy moving,” Kerry said.

He added that China has “the same feeling that, you know, they can't suddenly unemploy their entire population and survive.”

“Now, China is the largest maker of renewable energy in the world,” Kerry added. “They are the biggest supplier of solar panels, biggest deployer of solar panels. In China, they have deployed far more renewable energy than we have or than Europe has. So yes, they're behind [on reducing emissions], and it's a problem. Coal is a problem. But that's why it's important [that] we work with China, we reach out to China.”


On Monday, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report stating that in order to keep average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius to avert catastrophic climate change, the world will need to achieve a 60% cut in emissions by 2035.

“I know that the world can get there, but I am not convinced that we will,” Kerry said of that goal. “And the biggest reason is there's a business-as-usual attitude in too many places in the world. There are some CEOs still of major corporations who have not moved their companies or haven't bought into scientific facts. There are sort of different cultures and different universes of facts that are passing each other, day and night.

“We're seriously behind,” Kerry conceded. “And that was the meaning of the IPCC report that just came out. It's another kick in the you-know-what to get people moving. So, that's our fight; [it] is to get people to do all the things we can do.”

POST-FORDISM
Exclusive-India says 'time has come' for Airbus, Boeing to set up jet assembly plants

Thu, March 23, 2023 
By Tim Hepher and Aditi Shah

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Plane giants Airbus and Boeing face mounting pressure to set up jetliner plants in India, after the country's civil aviation minister told Reuters the "time has come" to serve its soaring demand with jets assembled on domestic soil.

Jyotiraditya Scindia said conditions were ripe for a "leap of faith" by both jetmakers as India's fast-growing aeronautical industry reaches an "inflection point" - highlighted by plans to assemble Airbus C295 military transport planes locally in India.

Asked whether Airbus and Boeing should now consider setting up jetliner assembly in India, Scindia said, "Absolutely, and with a capital A, and the reason why I said capital A is because Airbus has already made that huge landmark step: the C295."

Airbus and Boeing have both highlighted the scale and technology of existing investments in India, playing down the significance of final passenger jet assembly.

An Airbus-Tata consortium plans to assemble 40 C295 planes in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who wants aerospace and defence to become a key engine for his "Make In India" drive to expand the world's fifth-largest economy.

Tata-controlled Air India last month agreed record orders for 470 jetliners from Airbus and Boeing and sources have said India's largest airline, IndiGo, is in talks for another 500.

"The market is there, the volume is there, the engineering talent is there. And then you take that leap of faith. So the time has come now," Scindia said in an interview, adding such decisions would not necessarily be tied to specific jet orders.

"Now is the time for these companies to look at planting their feet on the ground in India," he said.

India has been lobbying quietly for jet assembly for several years but ratcheted up pressure behind the scenes during the past 12 months, two people familiar with the matter said.

The push comes at a time when the two global plane giants are juggling the need for capacity to meet soaring demand with pressure on global supply chains and geopolitical instability.

Their strategies differ, with Boeing keeping benchmark 737 production in the Seattle area, while Airbus runs four sets of competing A320 lines in Europe, the United States and China.

EXISTING INVESTMENTS

For now, both appear to have resisted India's calls for civil final assembly lines (FAL), while playing up existing investments in engineering, supply chain and maintenance. Boeing said it buys $1 billion a year in parts and services from India, while Airbus said it buys $700 million.

Local assembly is restricted to defence projects, where the cost of meeting national security concerns can be built in.

"There's a desire in every country to have as much manufacturing as possible ... and final assembly is a desire that you see all around the world," Salil Gupte, president of Boeing India, told Reuters.

"The volumes that you would require for final assembly on the commercial part of the business are just far, far greater," he said.

A final decision comes down to the business case, and Boeing is always looking at opportunities to do more in India, he added.

Boeing this month announced a Hyderabad plant to convert 737 passenger planes into dedicated freighters and both planemakers have engineering plants and thousands of employees in India.

"Even without the C295 FAL, the Airbus industrial footprint in India already generates more foreign exchange value and jobs for the country than any modern assembly activity would," said Remi Maillard, president of Airbus India & South Asia, by email.

Still, Scindia said such an ecosystem would give planemakers "the confidence in the years to come that they need to put a plant here, because everything is working for it".

Aerospace analysts say assembly represents just 5% to 7% of a plane's value, yet is often seen as a political win.

"The reason is it puts you on the map; it shows that you are the up-and-coming economy in Asia and the world," said Jerrold Lundquist, managing director of The Lundquist Group.

Airbus opened an A320 line in northern China in 2008 in return for an agreed volume of planes for local airlines at a time when its share of the Chinese market was only about 30%.

But while Chinese authorities must approve airplane orders, analysts say the New Delhi government has little formal leverage over ordering by its cost-conscious private-sector airlines.

Boeing has never put a commercial assembly line outside the United States, though McDonnell Douglas assembled a handful of jets in China before being acquired by Boeing in 1997. In 2018, it opened a 737 cabin-completion centre in Zhoushan, China.

(Reporting by Tim Hepher and Aditi Shah; Additional reporting by Krishn Kaushik; Editing by Alexander Smith and Jamie Freed)

Scientists uncover startling concentrations of pure DDT along seafloor off L.A. coast

Rosanna Xia
Thu, March 23, 2023

First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground — and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured straight into the water.

Now, scientists have discovered that much of the DDT — which had been dumped largely in the 1940s and ’50s — never broke down. The chemical remains in its most potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.

“We still see original DDT on the seafloor from 50, 60, 70 years ago, which tells us that it’s not breaking down the way that [we] once thought it should,” said UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine, who shared these preliminary findings Thursday during a research update with more than 90 people working on the issue. “And what we’re seeing now is that there is DDT that has ended up all over the place, not just within this tight little circle on a map that we referred to as Dumpsite Two.”

These revelations confirm some of the science community’s deepest concerns — and further complicate efforts to understand DDT’s toxic and insidious legacy in California. Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972, is still haunting the marine environment today. Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds continue to accumulate in California condors and local dolphin populations, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer in sea lions.

With a $5.6-million research boost from Congress, at the urging of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), numerous federal, state and local agencies have since joined with scientists and environmental nonprofits to figure out the extent of the contamination lurking 3,000 feet underwater. (An additional $5.2 million, overseen by California and USC Sea Grant, will be distributed this summer to kick off 18 more months of research.)

The findings so far have been one stunning development after another. A preliminary sonar-mapping effort led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography identified at least 70,000 debris-like objects on the seafloor.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, after combing through thousands of pages of old records, discovered that other toxic chemicals — as well as millions of tons of oil drilling waste — had also been dumped decades ago by other companies in more than a dozen areas off the Southern California coast.

“When the DDT was disposed, it is highly likely that other materials — either from the tanks on the barges, or barrels being pushed over the side of the barges — would have been disposed at the same time,” said John Lyons, acting deputy director of the EPA’s Region 9 Superfund Division. He noted that the new science being shared this week is critical to answering one of the agency’s most burning questions: “Is the contamination moving? And is it moving in a way that threatens the marine environment or human health?”

In recent months, Valentine, whose research team had first brought this decades-old issue back into the public consciousness, has been mapping and collecting samples of the seafloor between the Los Angeles coast and Catalina.

Analysis of the sediment so far shows that the most concentrated layer of DDT is only about 6 centimeters deep — raising questions about just how easily these still-potent chemicals could be remobilized.

“Trawls, cable lays could reintroduce this stuff back up to the surface,” Valentine said. “And animals feeding — if a whale goes down and burrows on the seafloor, that could kick stuff up.”

Postdoctoral student Sebastian Krause, left, works with Valentine to retrieve a tube of sediment collected from the seafloor where DDT waste was dumped into the ocean decades ago. (Austin Straub / For The Times)

On a chilly winter morning in between storms, Valentine and a team of students boarded the RV/Yellowfin and set out to collect more seafloor samples along key points of a hot-spot map that they’ve been piecing together.

As his students sliced and cataloged each layer of mud, they gasped in wonder at the tiny worms, snails and sea stars that lived so deep under the sea. They squinted at each tube that came out of the water and laughed apprehensively when asked about all the chemicals they were possibly holding in their hands.

“The goal is to collect as much mud as possible so that we don’t have to come back out every time we have a question,” Valentine explained as the ship’s mechanical pulley churned for the eighth time that day. “We are starting to build a really exceptional data set … that will help us understand the time history of how things were transported, how they were transformed, and what their ultimate fate is.”

Sediment samples collected from the seafloor where DDT was dumped off Catalina are organized into jars in a lab at UC Santa Barbara. (Austin Straub / For The Times)

Other scientists have also been chipping away at the many pieces to this deep-ocean puzzle.

Thursday’s research updates included plans for the next Scripps mapping expedition, which will scan the seafloor with advanced sonar technology and take hundreds of thousands of photos. Microbiologists shared their latest studies into whether deep-sea microbes could possibly help biodegrade some of the contamination, and chemical oceanographers discussed the many ways they’ve been trying to identify “fingerprints” that could help determine where the DDT is coming from — and how and if it’s moving.

Biological oceanographers, marine ecologists and fisheries scientists also started to connect some dots on the various organisms they’ve found living in the contaminated sediment, as well as the midwater species that could potentially move the chemicals from deeper waters up closer to the surface.

All of them noted that there were uncomfortably high concentrations of DDT and DDT-related compounds in the samples they studied. Even the “control” samples they tried to collect — as a way to compare what a normal sediment or fish sample farther away from the dumping area might look like — ended up riddled with DDT.

“This suggests to us, very preliminarily, that there’s some connection potentially — there’s connectivity in these deep food webs across the basins and across the system,” said Lihini Aluwihare, a marine chemist at Scripps.

On top of all this research, the EPA has been developing its own sampling plan, in collaboration with a number of state and federal agencies, to get a grasp of the many other chemicals that had been dumped into the ocean. The hope, officials said, is that the groundbreaking science now underway on the deep-ocean DDT dumping will ultimately inform how future investigations of other offshore dump sites — whether along the Southern California coast or elsewhere in the country — could be conducted.

Mark Gold, an environmental scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has worked on the DDT problem since the 1990s, said that as he listened to the latest research discoveries, he couldn’t help but think that “our nation’s ocean dumpsites all have horrible contamination problems. And yet they are unmonitored.”

There are also more shallow areas off the Palos Verdes coast and at the mouth of the Dominguez Channel that have been known DDT hot spots for decades. Figuring out how to clean up those contaminated areas in an underwater environment has been its own complicated saga.

For Katherine Pease at Heal the Bay, an environmental group that has been making sure the public remains engaged on this issue in substantive ways, these latest revelations have been eye-opening.

This is, after all, what it truly means to live with a “forever” chemical. After all these decades, scientists are still uncovering new and unsettling surprises about the full extent of the contamination.

“We’re still grappling with this legacy of treating the ocean as a dumping ground,” said Pease, Heal the Bay’s science and policy director. “And the public — whether they’re folks that like to fish ... or people who like to swim and visit the ocean — we all need to understand the history that went on, as well as the impacts. And partly that’s to learn ... to make sure that we’re able to protect our public health, but also to think about how we are treating the ocean now, as well as into the future.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

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Carson's passionate concern in Silent Spring is with the future of the planet and all life on Earth. She calls for humans to act responsibly, carefully, and as ...

ttps://files.libcom.org/files/Bookchin%20M.%20Our%20Synthetic%20Environment.pdf

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Our Synthetic Environment. Murray Bookchin. 1962. Table of contents. Chapter 1: THE PROBLEM. Chapter 2: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH.