Andrew Iacobucci named new RONA Inc. CEO one day after company announces job cuts

The Canadian Press

A Rona store is seen in St. Eustache, Que., Nov. 5, 2018. RONA Inc. says Andrew Iacobucci is taking the helm as the company's new CEO. , THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

RONA Inc. says Andrew Iacobucci is taking the helm as the company's new CEO.

The announcement comes one day after the retailer announced it was eliminating 500 jobs across the country, saying it needed to adapt to reflect new market realities amid a slowing economy.

The Boucherville, Que.-based home improvement retailer says in a press release that Iacobucci brings almost 30 years of experience to the role, most recently as executive vice-president and chief commercial officer at distribution company US Foods.

Iacobucci also previously worked at Loblaw Co. Ltd.

RONA says Iacobucci will reside in the Boucherville area to work at the company's head office.

It says interim CEO Garry Senecal will stay with the company until the end of the year to ensure a smooth transition.

The company says while Iacobucci learned French during his studies, by the time his nomination comes into effect in July, he will have completed a four-week French immersion program with a language school in Quebec City.

In November, Lowe's announced it was selling its Canadian retail business, including RONA, to New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners.

The retailer says it operates or services around 425 corporate and affiliated stores under different banners across the country. It says it has 22,000 employees.

RONA INC. GETTING RID OF 500 JOBS

ACROSS CANADA, CITING 'NEW MARKET

REALITIES'

The Canadian Press

Jun 15, 2023

RONA Inc. says it's eliminating 500 jobs across Canada in a bid to simplify its organizational structure.

The Boucherville, Que.-based home improvement retailer says in a press release Thursday evening that it needed to adapt to reflect new market realities amid a slowing economy. 

The Canadian economy has been showing some signs of weakness amid higher interest rates as the central bank seeks to quell inflation. 

However, GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3.1 per cent in the first quarter, beating expectations. 

The Canadian consumer has proven resilient amid tightening conditions, with household spending helping to buoy the economy's growth in the first quarter. 

In November, Lowe's announced it was selling its Canadian retail business, including RONA, to New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners.  

RONA says it operates or services around 425 corporate and affiliated stores under different banners across the country. It says it has 22,000 employees. 

The company says decisions like these are never taken lightly, and it will support affected employees throughout the transition. 

Groundbreaking AI project translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform at push of a button

‘Google Translate’-like program for Akkadian cuneiform will enable tens of thousands of digitized but unread tablets to be translated to English. 

Accuracy is debatable

By MELANIE LIDMAN

Today, 


A selection of Akkadian cuneiform translated with AI. (courtesy, Gai Gutherz)

Tablet Inscribed with a Fragment of the Babylonian Flood Story Epic of Atrahasis in Akkadian, Mesopotamia, First Dynasty of Babylon, reign of King Ammi-saduqa (ca. 1646–1626 BCE) (The Morgan Library & Museum)

Reverse side of Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablet YBC 3831 with upper broken section. (Courtesy of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Yale Babylonian Collection/Photography: Klaus Wagensonner)

Cuneiform tablets that were falsely labeled as product samples and shipped to Hobby Lobby Stores. (US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York)

This undated photo provided by the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem shows tablets containing cuneiform writing, one of the world's earliest scripts, on display in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Avi Noam, Bible Lands Museum)

Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing, but it is so difficult to read that only a few hundred experts around the world can decode the clay tablets filled with wedge-shaped symbols. Now, a team of archaeologists and computer scientists from Israel has created an AI-powered translation program for ancient Akkadian cuneiform, allowing tens of thousands of already digitized tablets to be translated into English instantaneously.

Globally, libraries, museums, and universities have more than half a million clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform. But the sheer number of texts, and the tiny number of Akkadian readers — a language no one has spoken or written for 2,000 years — means just a small fraction of these tablets have been translated.

A new Google Translate-type program may allow armchair archaeologists to try their hand at cuneiform interpretation.

“What’s so amazing about it is that I don’t need to understand Akkadian at all to translate [a tablet] and get what’s behind the cuneiform,” said Gai Gutherz, a computer scientist who was part of the team that developed the program. “I can just use the algorithm to understand and discover what the past has to say.”

The project began as a thesis project for Gutherz’s masters degree at Tel Aviv University. In May, the team published a research paper in the peer-reviewed PNAS Nexus, from the Oxford University Press, describing its neural machine translation from Akkadian to English.
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Neural machine translation, also used by Google Translate, Baidu translate, and other translation engines, works by converting words into a string of numbers, and uses a complex mathematical formula, called a neural network, to output a sentence in another language in a more accurate and natural sentence construction than translating word-for-word.

This undated photo provided by the Bible Lands Museum shows tablets with cuneiform writing, one of the world’s earliest scripts, on display in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Avi Noam, Bible Lands Museum)

Akkadian was written and spoken in Mesopotamia and the Middle East from around 3,000 BCE to 100 CE. It was the lingua franca of the time, allowing people from different regions to communicate. The language split into Assyrian Akkadian, and Babylonian Akkadian around the year 2000 BCE. Starting around 600 BCE, Aramaic slowly began to replace Akkadian, until it became much more widely spoken.

Akkadian and its predecessor, Sumerian, were written using cuneiform, in which a sharpened reed creates wedge-shaped markings on a wet piece of clay. The Akkadian and Sumerian cuneiform are the earliest written languages ever discovered, though there are vastly more Akkadian than Sumerian texts available.

Translating all the tablets that remain untranslated could expose us to the first days of history

“Translating all the tablets that remain untranslated could expose us to the first days of history, to the civilization of those people, what they believed in, what they were talking about, what they were documenting,” said Gutherz.

Some of the translated tablets have information that is still relevant today. “If he cleans his garments, his days will be long,” according to one Akkadian scribe more than 3,000 years ago.

Tablet Inscribed with a Fragment of the Babylonian Flood Story Epic of Atrahasis in Akkadian, Mesopotamia, First Dynasty of Babylon, reign of King Ammi-saduqa (ca. 1646–1626 BCE). 

(The Morgan Library & Museum)

The team is also sharing its opensource research online, in the hope that other experts can create translation programs for other ancient or dead languages, Guetherz said.
Lost in translation?

Translation is an art form, so it can be difficult to measure numerically what constitutes a “good” translation, Gutherz said. In order to rate the translations, the researchers used the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4), an evaluation tool developed in the early 2000s to automatically measure the accuracy of machine-created translations.

According to the study, the neural machine translation provided a BLEU4 score of 36.52 for cuneiform to English, and a score of 37.47 for transliterated cuneiform to English. BLEU4 scores are from 0 to 100, with 0 being the lowest and 100 being a perfect translation, which even a human translator could not achieve. Around 37 is considered fairly good for an early-stage translation model, explained Gutherz.

Gutherz said that Google Translate, a privately-funded commercial tool that has been in existence for over a decade, would get a BLEU4 score of about 60 translating from Spanish to English.

“One of the main achievements in the research is we showed that it’s possible to get a high-quality translation going directly from cuneiform to English,” said Gutherz, who was previously a software engineer for Google and is now starting an AI business involving different technology from this project. The current time-consuming research process usually requires experts to translate the cuneiform first to the Latin transliteration, and then largely to English.

A rendering of how AI translates Akkadian cuneiform into English, using Latin transliteration or going straight to English. (courtesy Gai Gutherz)

In 2020, Gutherz, archaeologist Prof. Shai Gordin of Ariel University, and others published a paper about using AI to translate Akkadian cuneiform to a transliterated Latin script. The transliterated script reads as a nonsensical collection of letters and numbers to the untrained eye, but is a common “language” that allows archaeologists and researchers to study and discuss cuneiform across the world.

In the 2020 paper, the team was able to use AI to achieve 97 percent accuracy from Akkadian cuneiform to transliterated Latin script. This is a much simpler process since it works by translating the cuneiform symbols to a single word, and keeping the words in the same order that they were found.

Translating Akkadian to English or transliterated script to English is a much more complicated process because it requires the computer to string together full phrases or sentences that make sense in English, which is written in a different syntactical order.

Some translations were very good… and some were total ‘hallucinations’

Gutherz said that despite the complexity, the AI translations performed better than expected, though the program is still in the early stages and far from precise. Predictably, the AI had a higher level of accuracy for formulaic texts, such as royal decrees or divinations, which follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or treaties, had a higher incidence of “hallucinations,” an AI term meaning that the machine produced a result that is completely unrelated to the text provided.

Members of the team that piloted AI to translate Akkadian cuneiform present their work at a conference. (courtesy, Gai Gutherz)

One of the things that most surprised the researchers is that the translations captured the style or rhythm of a certain genre so that they could determine — simply based on the style of the translation — if the text was a formulaic legal document, astrological report, or scholarly letter.

“Some translations were very good, some were near the point, where you could start from it, but you would have to make it more accurate manually, and some were total hallucinations,” said Gutherz. “This is the first step for an automatic translation for Akkadian and ancient languages, and I really hope more research will be done in this area and translations will get better and have higher accuracy.”
Just like Google Translate

The biggest challenge for training the AI model was the limited amount of material — images of tablets and translated tablets — that the team had available to train the AI model. Even the largest online databases of Akkadian tablets have only tens of thousands of entries.

“The amount of data you train on is correlative to how well you can perform, and the more data you have, the better your models will be,” said Gutherz. “ChatGPT works so well because they managed to train it on basically the entire internet. For us, the main task at the beginning was to gather all the possible translations we could get, to generate as many examples as possible.”

Gai Gutherz, part of the team that is piloting AI to translate Akkadian cuneiform. (courtesy)

The team drew their samples from ORACC, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, an online database from the University of Pennsylvania. For the data they were able to scan, the researchers used 90% of the material for training (50,544 sentences), 5% for validation (2,808 sentences), and 5% for testing (2,808 sentences).

During the 3,000 years that Akkadian was used, there are massive variances. Written Akkadian from 1,000 years apart can have completely different cuneiform symbols, and there were differences in dialects, which add to the complexity.

Gutherz said he decided to take on ancient languages for his final project in natural language processing (NLP), after archaeologist Prof. Shai Gordin, a senior lecturer in Assyriology and Digital Humanities at Ariel University, made a presentation to his NLP class.

Not many researchers are trying to use modern computer science methods to try to work on ancient languages

“I’m interested in history, I think it has a lot to teach us,” said Gutherz. “I realize that not many researchers are trying to use modern computer science methods to try to work on ancient languages. It’s a field that I felt I could contribute to because it’s not in the spotlight… not many people are working on it.”

Just click ‘translate’

An early demo version of the translation project from cuneiform to transliteration is available online to the public on a portal called The Babylon Engine. The research and source code for the current project can be found on GitHub on Akkademia and the Colaboratory.

Not all Akkadian experts are lining up to use the new technology, though.

“I’m an old school philologist who’s sitting at a table, looking at the tablets and reading them as humans used to do for thousands of years,” said Prof. Nathan Wasserman, a professor of Assyriology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He looked into the AI translation opportunities in the paper, but is not convinced that they would be useful for him.

“We’re post-ChatGPT and we’re in a different world now, so if I say, ‘It won’t work,’ that makes me look stupid,” Wasserman said. “Of course, it will work, I didn’t land from the moon yesterday. But for deeper and less formulaic texts, this is still very far from being useful.”

Prof. Nathan Wasserman, professor of Assyriology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (courtesy)

Wasserman’s area of expertise is the most complicated and poetic Akkadian texts, including hymns, prayers, and myths, often found on tablets that are in the worst condition and exceptionally difficult to read. His work is not just about translating, but about understanding the context within Akkadian culture and literature, he said. And he is interested in watching the way this technology develops, even if he is not rushing to use it now.

“I’m old enough to remember the start of Google Translate, and it was a joke, but now you can do large amounts of texts and get a decent result, plus or minus,” he said. “But what happens if you put Hamlet into Google Translate, will you get a decent translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet?”

Wasserman said he thinks that AI can be most useful to scan large bodies of digitized tablets and try to find connections. For example, the names of a certain priest or king could pop up on two totally unrelated tablets, maybe even ones that were found in different locations and are housed at different libraries and could lead to new understandings. He is also curious about using the program to track statistics about different word usage, including the chronological or geographic distribution of certain words.

A stone tablet with cuneiform writing is seen in the foreground, as UNESCO’s Iraq representative, Louise Haxthausen, documents the damage wreaked by the Islamic State group at the ancient site of Nimrud, Iraq, on December 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Wasserman counts himself among the “old school” researchers, but he is no enemy to using technology for ancient languages. Wasserman was part of the team that developed SEAL, Sources of Early Akkadian Literature. The online database, hosted by Hebrew University, was one of the pioneering digitization projects of Akkadian cuneiform tablets when it started in 2010. Newly digitized tablets are still uploaded on a regular basis, and the site today remains one of the largest deposits of Akkadian literary works from 3000-1000 BCE.

“I’m not worried [about AI], I’m curious, it’s a brave new world and I’m curious to see what will happen,” he said. “It’s not like I’m working in a bank, and worried I’ll be sent home because a machine will do my work.”

“When you have a text, even when you have the words correct, it doesn’t mean you understand what’s there. For that, you still need the human mind,” he said. “I’m not afraid of [the AI], but also, we should not be totally infatuated with it. It should be evaluated for what it can do for us, and for what it cannot.”

Rockfall narrowly misses village of Brienz in Switzerland

Footage shows the aftermath of the large rockslide in Brienz, in eastern Switzerland.

Relieved residents of a village in south-east Switzerland say a huge rock mass, which was feared would fall and destroy their homes, has come down but stopped just short of the settlement.

Key points:

The Swiss village was evacuated last month

About two-thirds of the rock mass has fallen

Residents will not be able to return home just yet

Brienz was evacuated in early May after 1.9 million cubic metres of rock was deemed at risk of breaking away and potentially destroying the village.

Most of the rock mass tumbled late on Thursday night, with the head of the local council saying the rockslide stopped just short of Brienz, leaving a "metres-high deposit" in front of the school building.

"We can say that today is one of the best days since the evacuation," Daniel Albertin said.

"The wait for the mountain was long. But now the mountain has come down as we envisioned, and … a great deal has come down, but nothing is damaged in the village and no inhabitants were harmed."

Somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million cubic metres of rock has come down the slope towards Brienz.(AP: Michael Buholzer)

About two-thirds of the rock — somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million cubic metres — appears to have come down the slope, geologist Stefan Schneider said at a news conference.

"This is very good news because the danger … to the village has become much smaller," he said.

Residents had been able to come back to retrieve items from time to time but only for 90 minutes at a time.

Officials had said that experts saw a 60 per cent chance of the rock falling in smaller chunks that might not reach the village or valley, but also a 10 per cent chance that the entire mass would tumble down, threatening lives and property.

They said the chances of residents returning to the village was high, but they could not confirm when that might be.

"The people of Brienz will still have to be a bit patient before they can move back," Mr Albertin said.

"We have to carry out further evaluations before we can give them enough security to be able to move back to their village and continue living or working there."

AP/ABC

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China shares 1.5 TB of satellite imagery data with BRICS

Xinhua, June 17, 2023

Since the signing of an agreement on Cooperation on BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation in August 2021, China has shared 400 scenes of satellite imagery data with BRICS countries, with the total volume amounting to 1.5 TB.

Zhang Kejian, head of the China National Space Administration, made the remarks Friday in virtual format at the session "Cooperation with BRICS countries in space" of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

"The BRICS mechanism is an important platform for cooperation between emerging market countries and developing countries. BRICS cooperation has entered a new stage of cooperation in this field," Zhang said. "China invites more emerging market countries to join the BRICS space exchange and cooperation pattern."

Russia has also actively participated in the implementation of the agreement. According to the press service of Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos, in 2022, Russia shared satellite imagery of over 85,000 square km with BRICS partners.

Russia is interested in deepening cooperation with the BRICS countries, and transitioning from individual projects to a full-scale technological alliance in space exploration, said Yuri Borisov, Roscosmos director general, at SPIEF.

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VOLCANO

Phivolcs records largest pyroclastic flow in Mayon since June 8

June 17, 2023


ANN/PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER – The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) yesterday said it recorded the largest pyroclastic density current (PDC) registered since June 8 on Thursday night.

According to Phivolcs in its latest advisory, the PDC occurred at 11.18pm on Thursday and is the largest seen since June 8.

It was also among the 13 PDCs recorded from Thursday to yesterday, which is higher than the three PDCs recorded from Wednesday to Thursday.

“In the past 24-hour period, very slow effusion of lava from the summit crater of Mayon Volcano continued to feed lava flows and collapse debris on the Mi-isi (south) and Bonga (southeastern) gullies,” said Phivolcs.

“Traces of ashfall dispersed from the PDCs were reported in Sitio Buga, Brgy Nabonton, City of Ligao and Purok 7, Brgy San Francisco, Municipality of Guinobatan,” it added.

Meanwhile, 307 rockfall events and four volcanic earthquakes were also recorded in the same period.

Both are slightly higher than the recorded numbers from Wednesday to Thursday where 306 rockfall events and two volcanic tremors occurred.

Apart from these, Phivolcs also recorded steam-laden plumes that rose 750 metres, as well as an average sulfur dioxide emission of 826 tonnes.

Ash fall events are then forecast to likely occur on the south side of the volcano, based on the prevailing wind pattern.

Currently, Alert Level 3 remains, which means “it is currently in a relatively high level of unrest as magma is at the crater and hazardous eruption within weeks or even days is possible”.

As a result, all residents within the six-kilometre radius of the permanent danger zone should be evacuated due to the effects of PDCs, lava flows, rockfalls and other volcanic hazards.

Civil aviation authorities were also advised to prohibit pilots from flying close to the volcano’s summit as ash from any sudden eruption can be hazardous to aircraft.

The Mayon volcano belches hot emissions down its slope as seen from Daraga town, Albay province, northeastern Philippines. PHOTO: AP

 

Sicilian farmer swaps oranges for bananas and mangoes, as Italy ‘becoming a tropical country’

The 44-year-old now grows papayas, mangos, passion fruit, coffee and cocoa plants because of climate changes

Italian farmer Rosolino Palazzolo, 44, is now growing tropical fruit like papaya (Photo: Rosolino Palazzolo)

By Silvia Marchetti

June 17, 2023 

ROME – Rosolino Palazzolo, a 44-year-old Sicilian farmer, has just finished picking the first pitanga (Surinam cherry) and acerola (Barbados cherry) on his farm in a tiny village called Terrasini, close to Palermo. He looks at the bright cherries in his hand, smiling proudly.

These fruits would normally be found growing along the equator but, in the past few years, climate change and year-round warm temperatures have led to a produce revolution in Italy’s deep south.

“Italy is turning into a tropical country. That’s why I also grow papayas, mangoes, passion fruit, baby bananas dubbed ‘bananito’, black sapote [a soft, orange-fleshed fruit], annona [custard apple] and even coffee and chocolate plants,” Mr Palazzolo tells i.

“Tropical fruit is the future of Italy’s agriculture; it will save the country from the negative effects of rising temperatures and crazy, wild rainfalls.”

The farmer still grows traditional fruits such as pears, citrus fruits and peaches, and vegetables such as tomatoes and courgettes, but in smaller quantities due to the tropical-like climate that has taken hold in Italy, particularly in the south.

The Sicilian is increasingly eschewing traditional local produce such as oranges for exotic alternatives like bananas (Photo: Rosolino Palazzolo)

Turning to exotic products has proved successful. Oranges and lemons have always been the core business of Sicily’s agriculture. However, heat and floods are jeopardising yields of these fruits, imported centuries ago by the Arab conquerors, and Mr Palazzolo says he will be forced to ditch traditional plantations to fully embrace bananas and mangoes. Today, 40 per cent of his 11-hectare farm is used to cultivate tropical produce.

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According to national data there’s been a 20 per cent drop in Italy in the production of oranges, mandarins, tangerines and lemons, most of which is concentrated in Sicily. Meanwhile, tropical fruit production has tripled in the past five years.

“It’s been raining hell since May, and while heavy rainfalls, high levels of humidity and constant rising heat are great for bananas, mangoes and other exotic produce, these harm tomatoes, strawberries, pears [and] lemons,” says Mr Palazzolo. Looking forward, he believes all farmers should diversify their orchards with more exotic fruits that grow well in the south.

Mr Palazzolo has been a pioneer in the “tropicalisation” of Sicilian fruit. “It took over 10 years of research and preparation; I flew all the way to the origin countries to fetch the best seeds to plant on my patch of land, first placing them in a greenhouse to make them sprout, then out in the open,” he said. “The coast is nearby, the sea breeze is a natural balm. I’ve invested so much love.”

His plantations are organic and non-intensive with no pesticides used, only natural herbal remedies including the use of plant juices to cure sick trees.

Mr Palazzolo says climate change is turning Italy into a tropical country (Photo: Rosolino Palazzolo)

Compared to traditional produce, exotic fruit is stronger and more resilient, says Mr Palazzolo, who has seen it with his own eyes, and in evidence published in agrarian reports.

“It’s a far better, and more convenient alternative to melons, oranges and lemons that are frequently attacked by parasites, with huge costs for us farmers,” says Mr Palazzolo.

Italian consumers are also benefitting from eating “unconventional” fruit grown in their backyard, adds Mr Palazzolo. According to local media reports, roughly 30 per cent of Italian families regularly consume domestic exotic varieties.

The cost per kilo of his papaya is three euros, while an imported one is roughly double. So far, he sells to domestic markets but is eyeing the possibility of shipping across Europe, although there are no plans yet to export to the UK.

However, tropical fruit in Italy is still a niche sector. Out of 505,000 fruit production hectares, just 1,200 are “exotic”. But numbers are growing fast: two years ago there were just 500 hectares of bananas, mangoes and the like.

Many farmers in the deep south are also going tropical. The dark flanks of Mount Etna volcano is where most Sicilian avocados are grown. Past lava flows have scorched the soil, making it extremely fertile.

Other Italian regions with tropical orchards are Calabria and Basilicata. These are the “kingdoms” of feijoa, pineapple, guava, pomegranate, star fruit, Japanese medlar [loquat], lime and even coconut.

WHEN YOU BECOME THE STATE

German Greens in doldrums over bitter compromises


By AFP
Published June 17, 2023

Rows over issues such as the reopening of the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine have created divisions inside the Greens - Copyright AFP/File Lars Hagberg

Femke COLBORNE

When Germany’s ecologist Greens hold a mini-party congress Saturday, members of the junior coalition party are expected to vent their fury over tradeoffs that have sent the party’s popularity plunging.

From concessions on coal to clashes with climate protesters, the party has repeatedly found itself on the defensive since entering Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

Matters have come to a head in recent weeks, with a painful compromise on European Union migration measures and a row over gas boilers.

“The situation for the party has not been as dangerous for many years as it is this summer,” the NTV broadcaster said in a recent report.

The German Greens scored their best-ever election result in 2021, becoming the third-largest party in parliament and entering the government for the first time since 2005.

But critics in the party say it has sacrificed its founding principles to govern in an awkward coalition with Scholz’s centre-left SPD and the pro-business FDP.

Ahead of the congress, opinion polls put the Greens in fourth place behind the resurgent far-right AfD.

Anger boiled over when EU nations last week reached agreement on a long-stalled revision of their rules on migration. They included plans to introduce fast-track asylum procedures on the bloc’s external borders.

The deal was a crushing blow for the Greens, who had been pushing for more lenient rules for families with children, among other things.

– ‘Low point for Greens’ –

Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock defended voting for the changes. “If Germany had rejected the reform or abstained, it would have meant more suffering, not less,” she argued.

But many party members remain furious.

“It was the wrong decision and we should admit that at the weekend,” Greta Garlichs, leader of the Greens in Lower Saxony, told Stern magazine on Friday.

The mood among the party’s grassroots supporters is “pretty dire”, she said.

The Greens have also run into trouble over a controversial heating law championed by vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, of the Greens.

The law, finally introduced in parliament this week after months of infighting within the coalition government, effectively bans new oil and gas boilers from 2028 in favour of more climate-friendly but expensive solutions.

But the text was only agreed after hefty concessions from the Greens, including pushing back the start date by four years.

Habeck defended the policy in parliament on Thursday, insisting “the core of the law remains intact”.

But Die Welt daily described it as a “low point for the once so radiant Greens” and a “resounding defeat” for the party.

As recently as May 2022, Habeck was one of Germany’s most popular politicians.

But the ZDF broadcaster noted in a recent report that he had undergone a “transformation from communications talent to crisis manager and now bogeyman”.

– Accusations of nepotism –

The three-way coalition had never looked like a match made in heaven for the Greens.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis have made that partnership even more difficult than they might have imagined.

To help compensate for a shortfall in Russian gas deliveries, the government voted last year to restart mothballed coal-fired power plants — much to the ire of climate activists.

The expansion of the Garzweiler open-cast coal mine proved a particular flashpoint, with protesters occupying the village of Luetzerath as clearance work began in January.

Being in government has been a “very sobering experience” for the Greens, Ursula Muench, a political scientist at the Bundeswehr University Munich, told AFP.

“They are hardly succeeding in translating their own convictions on climate, the environment and the protection of species into concrete policies at a time when the climate crisis is worsening,” she said.

The Greens have also been rocked by accusations of nepotism.

An official in Habeck’s economy ministry, Patrick Graichen, was forced to leave his post in May over claims he had handed a plush job to an environmentalist who was the best man at his wedding.

“What happened there reinforces the impression that there is a kind of ‘closed shop’ between politics, the green energy industry and science,” political scientist Hubert Kleinert said in an interview with ZDF.

 

Chinese naval hospital ship offers medical aid worldwide

(Xinhua) 13:37, June 17, 2023

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" has provided medical services for roughly 250,000 people from 43 countries and regions around the globe since its commission in 2008.

The Peace Ark has set sail on 10 overseas missions during its 15-year-old voyage, said Zhang Xiaogang, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defense, at a press conference Friday.

The Chinese military has actively participated in peacekeeping operations, vessel protection operations, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, said Zhang.

China will always build world peace, contribute to global development, and safeguard the international order, the spokesperson added. 

NOT A WEEK GOES BY

UK’s Johnson in new trouble over Daily Mail column

By AFP
Published June 16, 2023

Boris Johnson has been running into new trouble this week

 - Copyright AFP STR

Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson was unveiled Friday as the Daily Mail’s star new columnist — but attracted an immediate rebuke from a government watchdog to cap a tumultuous 48 hours.

A day after Johnson was given a blistering verdict by a committee of MPs investigating his “Partygate” denials, the right-leaning newspaper announced he would be writing a weekly column on Saturdays.

In a video posted by the Mail, former journalist Johnson said he was “thrilled” to contribute to “those illustrious pages”, vowing to deliver “completely unexpurgated stuff”.

The anti-immigrant, anti-woke, Brexit-supporting Mail has long been one of Johnson and the Conservative party’s most vocal and uncritical backers.

Johnson joked that he would cover politics only when “I absolutely have to” — but he now has a high-profile platform to pursue his vendetta against Prime Minister Rishi Sunak if he chooses.

However, the ever-controversial Johnson was upbraided for failing to respect the rules governing outside appointments for former ministers.

The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) is meant to vet all such appointments in the two years after a politician leaves high office.

But Johnson only informed ACOBA half an hour before the Daily Mail posted its announcement on social media, a spokeswoman for the committee said.

That amounted to a “clear breach” of the rules, she said.

“We have written to Mr Johnson for an explanation and will publish correspondence in due course, in line with our policy of transparency.”

However, ACOBA cannot force a politician to go back on an appointment, and Johnson’s habitual disregard for the rules was laid bare in Thursday’s report by the House of Commons privileges committee.

He had already resigned as an MP after being sent a preview of the report, which found that he deliberately misled parliament when denying any knowledge of lockdown-breaking parties in 10 Downing Street.

The House of Commons can no longer vote on the committee’s recommendation to suspend Johnson, given his pre-emptive resignation.

But it is due to vote on Monday — Johnson’s 59th birthday — to decide whether his parliamentary pass should be withdrawn.

 

Boris Johnson breaks ministerial code with new Daily Mail job

Paul McNamaraPolicy Correspondent16 Jun 2023

It’s been a week since the MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, one Boris Johnson, stepped down ahead of a scathing report showing he lied to parliament over lockdown parties at Downing Street.

Today it was announced he has a new job, writing a column for the Daily Mail, but that too has breached ministerial code.