All countries’ agri-environmental policies at a glance

University of Bonn researchers publish dataset of over 6,000 policies from all over the world

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BONN

 

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THE CHARTS SHOW THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PERCENTAGE OF A COUNTRY’S GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT GENERATED BY THE AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY AND HOW MANY NATIONAL AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES IT HAS. RICHER COUNTRIES TEND TO INTRODUCE MORE SETS OF AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS.

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CREDIT: CHART: WUEPPER ET AL., “NATURE FOOD,” 2024

There can be no analysis without data. In this spirit, researchers from the University of Bonn and the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology (ETH) Zurich have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions. The researchers have used two examples to demonstrate how this can be done: how a country’s economic development is linked to its adoption of agri-environmental policies and how such policies impact soil erosion. Their study has now been published in “Nature Food.” Embargo: Don´t publish before March 22, 2024, 11 AM CET!

Although agriculture is vital for our survival and well-being, it is also responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and soil degradation. Countries are therefore adopting all manner of different policies to make agriculture sustainable, from regulations to paying for agri-environmental services. Every year, new laws, programs, and schemes are introduced all over the world while others are abolished, making it hard to keep track of developments. This is a problem for researchers and policy decision-makers alike: how are they to go about making comparisons? How can they tell which measures work in which circumstances? Together with colleagues at ETH Zurich, Professor David Wuepper from the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn has now put together an extensive, easy-to-use database containing 6,124 policies from over 200 countries that were adopted between 1960 and 2022.

In their work, the team focused on measures that meet certain criteria: “First and foremost, the measure has to be relevant in some way to agriculture, such as land use, nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides. But forest conservation is included too, because it’s linked to agriculture in many countries,” explains Wuepper, who is also a member of the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn. The measures also have to have national significance, meaning that they cannot be focused too strongly on the local level, for example. New thematic areas can be added to the database at any time. “We deliberately gave it a modular structure so we can keep on expanding it.”

Old question meets new data

Wuepper and his co-authors were quick to use their database to shine new light on an old but contentious question: how does a country’s economic development tie in with its adoption of agri-environmental policies? “You might expect higher-income countries to implement a larger number of eco-friendly measures because the environment is becoming increasingly important in relative terms on the policy front,” Wuepper explains. And, thanks to his database, he has now been able to confirm that this is indeed the case. “We’ve shown that richer countries actually do introduce more measures, generally speaking.” Here too, however, it is the exceptions that prove the rule. “This trend doesn’t apply across the board. For instance, the Middle Eastern have relatively few agri-environmental policies in place given their income level. This demonstrates that countries need to make an active effort to implement sustainable policies and that it won’t happen by itself.” What these policies then actually achieve, however, is another question entirely. “But this is also something that can—and should—be investigated with the help of the database,” Wuepper says, and in fact an initial analysis of this kind is included in the article that has been published.

National policies help fight the problem of soil erosion

The database helped Wuepper answer a question that had been on his mind for some time: in a previous research project at ETH Zürich (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0438-4), he had studied what impact countries have on soil erosion. “Comparing levels of soil erosion along national borders showed that countries exert significant influence,” Wuepper reveals. “At the time, we were able to demonstrate a link to agriculture, and we also thought that national policies might be an influencing factor. However, we couldn’t look into it because we didn’t have the data on the countries’ relevant policies to compare on a global scale.” Armed with their new policy database, the researchers have now been able to investigate the extent to which this significant influence that countries exert on global erosion can be explained by their policies. They have found that national soil management policies account for at least 43 percent of a country’s impact on soil erosion.

The database is accessible to the general public at  https://zenodo.org/records/10842614

Institutions involved and funding secured

The University of Bonn and ETH Zurich were involved in the study, which was funded by the European Research Council and the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence.

Although agriculture is vital for our survival and well-being, it is also responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and soil degradation. Countries are therefore adopting all manner of different policies to make agriculture sustainable, from regulations to paying for agri-environmental services. Every year, new laws, programs, and schemes are introduced all over the world while others are abolished, making it hard to keep track of developments. This is a problem for researchers and policy decision-makers alike: how are they to go about making comparisons? How can they tell which measures work in which circumstances? Together with colleagues at ETH Zurich, Professor David Wuepper from the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn has now put together an extensive, easy-to-use database containing 6,124 policies from over 200 countries that were adopted between 1960 and 2022.

In their work, the team focused on measures that meet certain criteria: “First and foremost, the measure has to be relevant in some way to agriculture, such as land use, nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides. But forest conservation is included too, because it’s linked to agriculture in many countries,” explains Wuepper, who is also a member of the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn. The measures also have to have national significance, meaning that they cannot be focused too strongly on the local level, for example. New thematic areas can be added to the database at any time. “We deliberately gave it a modular structure so we can keep on expanding it.”

Old question meets new data

Wuepper and his co-authors were quick to use their database to shine new light on an old but contentious question: how does a country’s economic development tie in with its adoption of agri-environmental policies? “You might expect higher-income countries to implement a larger number of eco-friendly measures because the environment is becoming increasingly important in relative terms on the policy front,” Wuepper explains. And, thanks to his database, he has now been able to confirm that this is indeed the case. “We’ve shown that richer countries actually do introduce more measures, generally speaking.” Here too, however, it is the exceptions that prove the rule. “This trend doesn’t apply across the board. For instance, the Middle Eastern have relatively few agri-environmental policies in place given their income level. This demonstrates that countries need to make an active effort to implement sustainable policies and that it won’t happen by itself.” What these policies then actually achieve, however, is another question entirely. “But this is also something that can—and should—be investigated with the help of the database,” Wuepper says, and in fact an initial analysis of this kind is included in the article that has been published.

National policies help fight the problem of soil erosion

The database helped Wuepper answer a question that had been on his mind for some time: in a previous research project at ETH Zürich (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0438-4), he had studied what impact countries have on soil erosion. “Comparing levels of soil erosion along national borders showed that countries exert significant influence,” Wuepper reveals. “At the time, we were able to demonstrate a link to agriculture, and we also thought that national policies might be an influencing factor. However, we couldn’t look into it because we didn’t have the data on the countries’ relevant policies to compare on a global scale.” Armed with their new policy database, the researchers have now been able to investigate the extent to which this significant influence that countries exert on global erosion can be explained by their policies. They have found that national soil management policies account for at least 43 percent of a country’s impact on soil erosion.

The database is accessible to the general public at  https://zenodo.org/records/10842614

Institutions involved and funding secured

The University of Bonn and ETH Zurich were involved in the study, which was funded by the European Research Council and the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence.

The chart shows the number of national agri-environmental policies in each country. It can be seen that there are a particularly large number of agri-environmental policies in the EU member states.

CREDIT

Chart: Wuepper et al., “Nature Food,” 2024

JOURNAL

Nature Food

DOI

10.1038/s43016-024-00945-8 

ARTICLE TITLE

Countries’ Agri-Environmental Policies from 1960 to 2022

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Mar-2024

The backlash against Dobbs could do more than defeat Trump

John Stoehr
March 22, 2024

Former President Donald Trump Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

I have been saying for a while now the U.S. Supreme Court is lost. It will be dominated by a rightwing majority for years, decades. The best thing citizens can do, if they care about democracy, individual liberty and liberal values, is dominate the institutions of lawmaking, especially the U.S. House. Thanks to Donald Trump, they have a chance to do that.

Trump recently took a firm position – well, firm enough – on the idea of a national abortion ban. In February, the Times reported he privately supported the proposition of a 16-week national abortion ban, with exceptions for rape and incest. Trump denied the report, however, for fear of radicalizing voters who’ve been radicalized by the fall of Roe.

The former president seems to have misplaced his previous fear. On Tuesday, during a radio interview, he said he was open to a 15-week ban. He said it was a “reasonable” position, but stopped short of endorsing it. Trump has been coy since 2022, when the Supreme Court invalidated abortion rights. That is, when he’s not taking credit for it.

The reason he’s even talking about a national abortion ban is because supporters are unsatisfied with letting states decide how to regulate abortion, even though state’s rights were key to the Dobbs ruling. They are unsatisfied, because the anti-abortion movement was never about abortion, but instead a woman’s place in society relative to a man’s.

Trump knows he’s treading on thin ice. He knows the backlash against Dobbs – and, therefore, against him – is the reason GOP candidates have been losing elections since 2022. Even in red states, activists have been fighting to put the question to voters in ballot initiatives. In some, like Ohio, they enshrined abortion rights in their state constitution.

Trump could say nothing and maintain all the support he needs from white evangelical Protestants and other diehard anti-abortionists while letting swing voters, who don’t love abortion but hate bans on it, come to their own conclusions about him. He doesn’t need a position on a national ban, yet here he is, playing footsie with the idea. Perhaps he can’t help himself. He's a showman. He has to pander to the crowd.

In any event, playing footsie with a national abortion ban just might jolt blue-state Democrats out of their sense of complacency. They may be appalled by the sight of what’s happening in Texas, where the “exceptions” to its abortion ban turned out to be farcical and where pregnant women face the horror of birthing dead babies. But they are largely unconcerned about abortion restrictions in their own states.

That’s partly due to blue states generally having liberal abortion laws. But it’s also partly due to believing the anti-abortionists when they say their goal is protecting life, beginning the moment a human sperm touches a human egg. They don’t care about that. They care about controlling women. They care about that so much they’re prepared to ditch previous overtures to state’s rights in favor of a national ban.

A 15-week national abortion ban would threaten to invalidate liberal abortion laws blue-state Democrats currently take for granted. Depending on the Supreme Court’s rightwing majority, it might even invalidate amendments to state constitutions currently enshrining abortion rights. Moreover, Trump and congressional Republicans wouldn’t stop at 15 weeks. That number was made up to give the impression of a middle ground. They would find a way to zero.

To do that, Trump would need a Republican Congress. That’s where blue states come in. More than 20 House Republicans come from California and New York alone, whose liberal abortion laws are taken for granted by Democratic voters in those states. If they remain complacent, and if Trump wins, House Republicans from those states could, and probably would, help enact a national ban on abortion. If, however, Democratic voters from just those two states drop their complacency, they could avoid that fate by driving each of those Republicans out of office, denying Trump the majority he’d need.

The conventional wisdom is the reaction to Dobbs is going to defeat Donald Trump. But the reaction to Dobbs could be much more than that. Indeed, it must be. The American principle of checks and balances are out of balance thanks to a rightwing majority on the Supreme Court. Whereas previous generations came to see the high court as the giver of rights, subsequent generations will almost certainly see it as the taker of rights. The only way to counterbalance that is by dominating the institutions of lawmaking, namely the House.

The Senate isn’t enough. Though the Senate is where judges are confirmed, and though judges determine through the common law what the law is, they can be, and probably will be, overruled by a rightwing majority if it doesn’t like their jurisprudence. And anyway, the distribution of votes in the Senate is almost evenly divided, and there’s probably not much that’s going to change about that soon.

However, if the Democrats hold the House – for years, hopefully longer – they can take the necessary action, during those times when the Senate is in Democratic hands, to restore rights and protections, such as the right to an abortion, that the rightwing majority of the Supreme Court has taken away and will almost certainly continue to take away.

The backlash against Dobbs shouldn’t only defeat Trump. It should restore balance to a constitutional order desperately in need of it.

N.J. food factory fined $463K over unsafe working conditions, OSHA says

2024/03/19


A food company is facing hefty fines after federal safety inspectors say its New Jersey plant harbored unsafe working conditions.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration last Wednesday said it proposed fines against Aunt Kitty’s Food Inc. for operating deficiencies at its factory on North Mill Road in Vineland. OSHA proposed the company pay $463,000 in fines, the agency said.

The company is a subsidiary of Hanover Foods Inc. It manufactures canned foods including soups, sauces, pasta, vegetables and gravy. Hanover sells products under the the Bickel’s Snacks, Castleberry’s, John Cope’s, Spring Glen and Wege Pretzels brands.

Attempts by NJ Advance Media to reach a representative for the company were unsuccessful on Tuesday.

OSHA investigators began probing the South Jersey plant following a complaint in 2023, the agency said last week. Inspectors said they found one willful violation and two repeat and four serious infringements.

Aunt Kitty’s is accused of allowing workers to both service and clean equipment without procedures to prevent machinery from starting unexpectedly. It also failed to develop and implement “lockout/tagout program and written procedures for maintenance and sanitation staff that worked on and cleaned production equipment in the canning and filling department.”

“Ensuring lockout/tagout procedures are established and used can make the difference between an employee ending a shift safely and suffering a serious, life-altering injury,” OSHA Area Director Paula Dixon-Roderick said in a statement.

The plant is also accused of leaving workers vulnerable to injuries by not installing proper guarding on conveyor belts and providing baseline and annual audiograms.

The company has 15 days from receiving the proposed fines to respond to OSHA.

The citations aren’t the only instance where Aunt Kitty’s faced operation woes in the past year.

In October, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the company was recalling nearly 13,000 pounds of canned chicken pot pie soup over mislabeling undeclared allergens. Those cans were sent to nearby states, including Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania and as far away as Texas.

Penn Live Staff Writer Chris Mautner contributed to this report.

Is Walmart screwing customers? Former Secretary of Labor says so

2024/03/24

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and a member of the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, has accused Walmart of “price gouging.”

 (Associated Press | Gene J. Puskar)

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and a member of the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, has accused Walmart of “price gouging.”

On Saturday, he tweeted: “Walmart hiked prices on its Great Value food brands. The result? Its net income spiked 93% to $10.5 billion toward the end of 2023. Walmart rewarded shareholders with $5.9 billion in buybacks and dividends. When I say price gouging is driving inflation, this is what I mean.”

Reich, in previous essays, has written: “Businesses have been using the coverof inflation to justify price increases, so consumers accept them.” He adds that inflation hasn’t been being propelled by an overheated economy. “It’s being propelled by overheated profits.”

Walmart is the largest company by revenue in the world and the largest private company employer in the U.S. The department store and grocery giant recently settled a class-action lawsuit for $45 million after customers accused Walmart of overcharging customers who purchased weighted groceries or bagged fruit. Customers claimed the company inflated product weight, mislabeled bagged produce weight and overcharged for clearance items.

In taking on the country’s largest retailer, Reich is echoing charges by the current administration. In his State of the Union Address on March 7, President Biden pointed his finger at “big pharma” and the “biggest corporations” that “pad their profits” with “shrinkflation,” “price gouging,” “deceptive pricing,” “exorbitant prices” and “price-fixing,” according to a Wall Street Journal scorecard.

“Big Profits and High Prices: There Is a Connection,” a WSJ headline blared.

In addition to calling out corporate greed on every-day pricing, Biden has taken aim at “junk fees,” which the Council of Economic Advisers estimates costs the average household more than $650 each year. These are charges which companies declare as mandatory but aren’t clearly disclosed fees.

Biden also urged Congress to pass a bill that targets “shrinkflation” — the practice of deceptively giving the consumer less while disguising it.

According to The Guardian, a report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative thinktank, found that corporate profits accounted for more than half of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. In the 40 years prior to the pandemicProfits drove just 11% of price growth, the report said.

Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative wrote that companies are ”openly bragging to investors about how well it’s working.” Here’s one of many examples she offered:

“I think we’ve done a great job with our pricing,” boasted the CFO of Hormel, a maker of popular grocery brands. “I think it’s been very effective.” As prices went up, the company improved its operating income by 19 percent in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2021.

Owens report said that while prices for consumers rose by 3.4% over the past year, costs for producers increased by just 1%, based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The days of trickle-down economics are over

John Stoehr
March 23, 2024

If you read only headlines or news summaries for the State of the Union address, you almost certainly missed the bigger story, as most of them, at least those I have seen, were about optics and vibes.

Here’s CBS News with a representative sample: “Joe Biden on Thursday delivered his third State of the Union, taking a defiantly political tone amid the gridlock in Congress and addressing his predecessor and likely opponent, former President Donald Trump, ahead of what will likely be a nasty rematch between the two in November.”

True, but this is also true: The president delivered an era-defining speech – precisely, an era-ending speech. He closed a long chapter in American history that began in the last quarter of the last century when another Democratic president himself delivered another State of the Union address that itself ended a long chapter in American history.

“We know big government does not have all the answers,” Bill Clinton said in his 1996 State of the Union. “We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington, and we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.”

Clinton went on to qualify that statement. (Though “the era of big government was over,” he said in the very next breath, people who need help shouldn’t be left to fend for themselves). But that’s what people remember, and that’s almost certainly what Clinton himself wanted people to remember in the run-up to that year’s election.

A Democratic president had picked up where his conservative predecessors had left off in rolling back some of the safety net and social justice programs in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Where Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush launched a period marked by low taxation and low regulation, and by the general retreat by the federal government from the economic lives of the citizenry, Bill Clinton deepened and consolidated it. It was “trickle-down economics,” but with a fresh face, “neoliberalism.”

From that period came virtually all the economic consequences that have haunted us for more than 20 years – the offshoring of jobs, the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing, the immiseration of the middle class, the celestial wealth of the .01 percent and, according to some thinkers, the rise of Donald Trump. We were told empowering the rich would empower us all, but all it did was make them greedier and meaner, make the rest of us poorer and meaner, and trigger endless combat over crumbs between everybody and everyone.

The conventional wisdom is that Joe Biden ran for president to save the soul of America. While that was true in the beginning of his 2020 campaign, his thinking changed, as it became clearer that the covid crisis, and the mismanagement of it, had exposed deep structural problems – such as the yawning gap between normal people and the very obscenely rich – that had been destabilizing the country for two decades. Saving the soul of America meant more than beating Trump and restoring order. It meant establishing a new economic order.

“The days of trickle-down economics are over,” Biden said Thursday.

That should have been the headline from last week’s address. It was era-defining, as was Clinton’s in 1996. Precisely, it was era-ending. Just as Clinton’s economic policies finally ended the presidencies of Roosevelt and Johnson, Biden’s economic policies are finally ending the presidencies of Reagan and Clinton. A huge portion of his speech was dedicated to illustrating just how the Democrats have been upending the last 40 years of economic thought, so that the federal government, long beholden to the few, is now serving the greater common good.

When the president talked about “America’s comeback,” he wasn’t just talking about rebounding from the worst public health and economic disaster in a century. He was talking about going back to the original republican idea that a government should be of, by and for the people. “America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities, building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down, investing in all America, in all Americans, to make sure everyone has a fair shot and we leave no one, no one behind,” he said.

He went further. By talking about what’s good for everyone, Biden was implicitly talking about what’s bad for a minority whose interests are at odds with the interests of the majority – in other words, billionaires, “Wall Street,” corporations and the GOP elites who serve them. Over and over, the president made clear where he stands: for people who work for a living and against people who own so much they don’t have to work. At one point, after hearing some Republican grumbling in objection to the claim the Trump tax cuts mostly benefited the very obscenely rich, the president turned to the TV cameras, and asked: “Folks at home, does anyone really think the tax code is fair?

“Do you really think the wealthy and big corporations need another $2 trillion tax break? I sure don’t. I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make it fair. Under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in federal taxes. Nobody. Not one penny.”

Billionaires, “Wall Street,” corporations and the GOP elites who serve them – these are today’s equivalent of what Roosevelt once called “economic royalists” who hated the concept of investing in the greater common good, and by extension him. Roosevelt, knowing his political advantage with the people, famously said he welcomed their hate.

Biden never said that, but he expressed the same “bring it on” spirit. “Over 100 million of you can no longer be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions,” he said. “But my predecessor, and many in this chamber, want to take those prescription drugs away by repealing the Affordable Care Act. I am not going to let that happen.

“We stopped you 50 times before and we will stop you again.”

The implication couldn’t have been clearer. “We” meant the democratic will of the American people, with Biden as its champion. “You” meant special interests. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” Biden later said. “You know what the average federal tax is for these billionaires? They are making great sacrifices: 8.2 percent. That’s far less than the vast majority of Americans pay. No billionaire should pay a lower federal tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker or a nurse.”

It wasn’t just a speech. On Monday, the White House released a budget plan calling for increased taxes on major corporations and the rich to pay for programs that lower the cost of health care, housing and consumer good, all while paying off $3 trillion in debt over 10 years. The proposal is dead on arrival in a House controlled by Republicans, but that’s not the point. The point is getting Americans who are used to thinking in terms of scarcity, rather than abundance, to dream big.

“Imagine what we could do,” Biden said Monday, according to the Post, “from cutting the deficit, to providing child care, to providing health care, to continuing to provide our military with all they need. Folks, look, this is not beyond our capacity.”

We used to think so. We used to think, as Bill Clinton said, that we wanted “a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington,” one “that lives within its means.” Then came the covid crisis, and all the structural and destabilizing problems that it exposed. Biden could have limited himself to saving the soul of America. He could have tried to save the existing economic order. Thank God, he didn’t. Now he’s encouraging Americans to dream. If nothing else, that’s transformative.

Australia, Britain vow AUKUS nuclear-powered subs will be built

MAKING THE WORLD A LITTLE MORE DANGEROUS PLACE

In total, the AUKUS submarine project could cost up to Aus$368 billion (US$240 billion) over the next 30 years.


By AFP
March 22, 2024

(L-R) Australia's defence minister Richard Marles, Britain's foreign secretary David Cameron and British defence secretary Grant Shapps speak with media in Adelaide - Copyright AFP Michael Errey

Australia and Britain said Friday that a landmark deal to develop AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines would go ahead, despite mounting fears about costs, capabilities and the possible return of Donald Trump.

Under the fledgling AUKUS deal, the two countries along with the United States have pledged to beef up their military muscle in a bid to counter China’s rise.

Defence chiefs this week unveiled ambitious plans to supply Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, a key pillar of the agreement.

“The three governments involved here are working at pace to make this happen,” Australian defence minister Richard Marles told reporters on Friday.

“This is going to happen and we need it to happen,” he added.

Barely two years old, there are already signs that AUKUS and its central project could be under threat.

Some fear Trump could jettison the pact if he wins this year’s presidential election, returning to his “America first” style of foreign policy.

UK foreign secretary David Cameron suggested that “brilliant” AUKUS and other alliances like NATO — which he dubbed “the most successful defence alliance in history” — needed to be fighting fit come US election time.

“I think whoever is president, the best thing we can do is to get those alliances, to get those projects into the best possible shape so whoever is the new president can see that they’re working,” Cameron said.

He added that the nuclear-powered submarines deal was “a huge project, a huge undertaking, but absolutely essential for our security”, adding that he had “total confidence” that the deal would go ahead.

– Dangerous times –

With potential flashpoints emerging across the globe, and China taking an increasingly aggressive stance in the Taiwan Strait, visiting UK defence minister Grant Shapps said AUKUS was as crucial as ever.

After decades of relative peace, Shapps said the planet was slowly shifting from a “post-war” era to a “pre-war” footing.

“We are living in more dangerous times,” he said during a tour of the Osborne Naval Shipyard in South Australia.

UK defence contractor BAE Systems has been enlisted to help construct Australia’s fleet of nuclear-propelled submarines.

Australia hopes to have eight nuclear-powered vessels in the water by the 2050s — a mix of the new AUKUS-class subs built at home and in the UK, and Virgina-class vessels purchased from the United States.

Marles said a “drumbeat” of AUKUS-class submarines would then continue to roll off Australian production lines “every few years” in perpetuity.

“There is no country in the world which has obtained the capability to build nuclear-powered submarines, which has then turned that capability off,” he said.

“We will see submarines being produced here on an enduring basis.”

– Potent threat –

Although the financial details of the BAE deal are under wraps, Australian defence officials want to initially build at least five AUKUS-class nuclear-powered subs at a cost of billions of dollars.

The subs will be quieter and stealthier than Australia’s existing diesel fleet, and capable of deploying over vast distances without surfacing, posing a potent threat to any foe.

BAE Systems, one of the largest defence contractors in Europe, said it was “already making good progress on the design and development of the next generation submarine”.

The company has a close relationship with the UK navy, and is responsible for building its Astute-class and Dreadnought-class nuclear-powered vessels.

The scale of the project is vast, and questions have been raised about whether Australia — with limited nuclear experience and a relatively small navy — can pull it off.

Australian officials believe about 20,000 workers will be needed for the homegrown nuclear industry — among them an army of technicians, metal workers, electricians and welders.

The Australian navy has struggled to maintain its current fleet of ageing diesel-electric subs, which have been plagued by design flaws and cost blowouts.

In total, the AUKUS submarine project could cost up to Aus$368 billion (US$240 billion) over the next 30 years.

Russian spacecraft launch aborted seconds before take-off


By AFP
March 21, 2024

Russia had devoted the launch to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who would have turned 90 this month - 

Copyright AFP Nicholas Kamm

The launch of a Russian spacecraft to the International Space Station was aborted at the last minute on Thursday, in another high-profile setback for Russia’s space programme.

The Russian Soyuz MS-25 mission was due to take off from the Baikonur space port in Kazakhstan on Thursday, carrying three astronauts from Russia, the United States and Belarus.

But the launch was cancelled just seconds before scheduled blast-off at 4:21 pm Moscow-time (1321 GMT), when engines didn’t fire up as the crew were strapped in and counting down.

“Attention at the launch complex. There was an automatic launch cancellation. Bring the units of the launch complex to the initial state,” the flight controller said in a live broadcast by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos.

A separate NASA broadcast of the planned launch said it was aborted 20 seconds before take-off.

“This is Mission Control Houston. To recap: today’s launch of Soyuz MS-25 was aborted at about the T minus 20 second mark,” the announcer said.

The announcer said the “engine sequence start” did not occur as expected, triggering an “automatic command to abort the countdown”.

Roscosmos head Yury Borisov later said a “voltage dip” had occurred in a chemical power source during the final pre-launch preparations, Russian state news agencies reported.

“This is the thing with space. The situation is quite understandable,” he told reporters.

He said the launch would be rescheduled to Saturday.

– Latest setback –

Russia had devoted the mission to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who would have turned 90 this month.

Moscow’s once pioneering space programme has faced multiple setbacks since it won the first leg of the space race more than 60 years ago.

The programme has suffered since the collapse of the USSR, including with the loss of its first lunar probe in almost 50 years last August.

The Russian segment of the ISS also suffered three coolant leaks in under a year, spraying flakes of frozen coolant into space on multiple occasions in 2023.

Roscosmos said the crew were safe and were being extracted from the spacecraft after Thursday’s failed launch.

Space is one of the final areas of US-Russia cooperation amid an almost complete breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington over the last two years.

But Russia has said it plans to ditch the ISS and build its own space station.

It previously said it would quit “after 2024,” but the most recent position is that Russia will remain a participant until 2028.

Russian officials have decried outdated equipment on board the ISS and said it justifies their desire to quit the initiative.

“The International Space Station is approaching the finish line of its existence,” Borisov said last year.

For almost a decade, Russian Soyuz launches were the only way to ferry astronauts between Earth and the ISS, after NASA halted its Space Shuttle programme.

But the United States has now moved to using privately-built SpaceX rockets and capsules, ending Russia’s monopoly on manned launches.

Irish PM resignation: what happens next?


By AFP
March 21, 2024

Leo Varadkar announced on Wednesday that he would step down as Ireland's prime minister 

- Copyright AFP JOHN THYS

Peter MURPHY

Leo Varadkar’s announcement that he is stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister has triggered a leadership contest in his Fine Gael party.

The 45-year-old leader on Wednesday said his decision was made for “personal and political” reasons, and comes before European parliament and local elections in June.

A general election also has to be held in Ireland by March 2025.

– What happens next? –

The race to replace Varadkar as Fine Gael party leader, and by default as taoiseach (prime minister), began almost immediately.

Speculation is already bubbling about likely contenders.

The contest proper started on Thursday, with parliamentary party members allowed to submit nominations until Monday.

Party members are due to vote between April 2 and 4 before a winner is declared on April 5.

The Irish parliament — where the governing coalition’s centre-right Fine Gael and Fianna Fail parties, and Green Party form a majority — is expected to vote in the new taoiseach after it returns from recess later in April.

– Who’s in the running? –

The frontrunner is education minister Simon Harris, who was expected to formally throw his hat in the ring later on Thursday.

By midday on Thursday, the 37-year-old had secured endorsements from more than 20 party members including Fine Gael ministers, MPs and members of the European Parliament.

His campaign said over 100 councillors also support his candidacy to “re-energise” Fine Gael.

Several Fine Gael cabinet ministers and MPs insist a leadership contest would be good for the party.

But with votes from Fine Gael MPs weighing more than the 20,000-strong party membership, the race could be decided quickly if Harris’s dynamic early showing convinces potential challengers not to stand.

Public spending minister Paschal Donohoe, chair of the prestigious Eurogroup of European Union finance ministers, was seen as Harris’s main rival.

But Donohoe, 49 — recently touted as a potential IMF head — ruled himself out while in Brussels on Thursday on the sidelines of a Eurogroup meeting.

“I think it’s over. There is the capacity for contenders to come forward until Monday but with Donohoe out of the race, it’s hard to see how anyone is going to stand against Harris,” said Paul Cunningham, a political reporter with public broadcaster RTE.

“It’s possible but highly unlikely.”

Varadkar, also in Brussels for a European Council summit, was tight-lipped, and said he would follow precedent and not come out publicly in favour of a candidate.

“I’m not going to do that and the reason why I’m not going to do that is it will allow me to support wholeheartedly whoever is elected as the next Fine Gael leader,” he told reporters.

– What does it mean for the general election? –

Before Varadkar’s departure, pundits expected a general election would be held later this year rather than in early 2025.

But the leaders of the other parties in the governing coalition — Fianna Fail’s Micheal Martin and the Green Party’s Eamon Ryan — both say they prefer the government to serve a full five-year-term.

Meanwhile, opposition parties have queued up to demand an immediate general election.

“Rather than limping on, and rather than passing the office of taoiseach amongst yourselves again, the correct democratic route at this point is to go to the people,” said Mary Lou McDonald, leader of the largest opposition party, Sinn Fein.

“There needs to be a general election,” McDonald, whose left-wing nationalist party currently leads in polls, told RTE.

‘On brink of abyss,’ Polish Catholic church ignores warning signs


By AFP
March 21, 2024

Only 71% of Poles describe themselves as Catholic, down from 88% a decade ago - 

Copyright AFP/File Roman PILIPEY

Bernard OSSER

With empty pews and seminaries and its moral authority in free fall, Poland’s Catholic church is on the brink of the abyss, a reality analysts say it is choosing to ignore.

The election last week of Tadeusz Wojda — known solely for his anti-LGBTQ statements — as head of the Polish church promises no change, observers told AFP.

Moreover, the selection of the archbishop considered “a man of continuity” comes soon after two of the country’s bishops resigned amid accusations of covering up child sexual abuse by priests.

“It’s a sign that Poland’s bishops aren’t aware of the situation that the church is in,” Catholic commentator Ignacy Dudkiewicz told AFP.

Yet, alarm bells are ringing.

Only 71 percent of Poles describe themselves as Catholic, down from 88 percent a decade ago, according to the latest national census, from 2021.

Less than a third of the faithful went to Sunday mass that year, the lowest figure since 1980, according to Poland’s Institute for Catholic Church Statistics.

The number of baptisms fell by 40 percent between 2017 and 2022, and families have been taking their children out of religion class in droves, especially in big cities.

Faced with a lack of interest, three seminaries recently closed their doors.

The roughly 200 priests ordained last year were half that of a decade ago, prompting some bishops to recruit priests from Africa to fill the gap.

Among young Poles, the late homegrown Pope John Paul II — once a beloved national hero whose likeness graces hundreds of statues across the country — is nothing more than a subject of memes.

The church’s moral authority, which it earned as a bastion of resistance during the communist era, is something of the past.

A church spokesperson did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.

– ‘In ruins’ –

The previous head of the episcopate left Poland’s church “in ruins” after a decade of governance, according to theologian Stanislaw Obirek.

“The church has been abandoned by the Catholics themselves,” said the former Jesuit, adding that it is “on the brink of the abyss” and its new head guarantees no reform.

The list of the church’s failings is long, beginning with the paedophilia scandals and the institution’s inability to manage them.

Fourteen bishops have been punished by the Vatican for sexual assault scandals in recent years.

“The matter of sex crimes is not over. It’s just the beginning,” theologian Zuzanna Radzik told AFP, explaining that cases of harassment at seminaries and religious orders had yet to be examined.

The church’s alliance with the former government has also not helped its reputation.

“For years, Poland’s bishops blackmailed successive governments in order to obtain gains for the church or themselves,” Dudkiewicz said.

They notably backed a massive campaign against “LGBTQ ideology” waged by the previous right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government.

The new head of the episcopate personally played a role in the crusade.

In 2019, he publicly opposed a gay pride parade in the eastern city of Bialystok, saying it “mocked faith and corrupted the youngest” members of society.

Thanks to the alliance, the church benefited from financial privileges, political influence and also a certain impunity, as the judiciary was often reluctant to prosecute paedophilia.

But that power and influence is now in the past.

– ‘Less’ –

A 2022 survey by Ipsos found that just two percent of Poles saw bishops as a moral authority.

In elections last October, the majority of Poles backed a pro-European coalition that promised, among other things, to separate church and state, liberalise access to the morning-after pill and reduce the number of hours of religion in schools.

“Poles decided they had enough of the church as an institution acting as a supervisor… of society,” Dominican friar Pawel Guzynski told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

Analysts agree, with Dudkiewicz affirming that “the new government holds all the cards” rather than the bishops, whom the faithful see as “disconnected from reality”.

He said the bishops should get used to the notion of less: “fewer priests, less money, less influence, less authority”.

“And for now they don’t seem to know how to respond.”

Top French court studies fate of ‘Europe’s largest’ hippo Jumbo


By AFP
March 21, 2024

Hippopotamuses hail from sub-Saharan Africa - Copyright AFP JOHN THYS

France’s top administrative court is to decide if a three-tonne hippopotamus called Jumbo should be freed after decades working as “the largest hippo in Europe” for a family circus.

The decision, which is expected in the coming weeks, is the culmination of a lengthy legal battle between an animal rights group and the Muller Circus.

The One Voice group has accused the circus of mistreating Jumbo, leaving the semi-aquatic mammal alone for hours on end in an enclosure, locked up in a lorry, or standing in a water-filled skip from which it cannot clamber out on its own.

They have requested that Jumbo, who they say is obese, be transferred to a sanctuary.

The circus has rejected the claims, and said the animal should stay with them.

The centre of the case is an official permit issued by the southern Drome region in 2008 giving the Muller family the right to show the animal to the public.

One Voice took legal action in 2017 to repeal the permit, but an administrative court in 2019 refused to do so, and a regional appeals court in 2022 upheld that decision.

The case has now made its way to the State Council, France’s highest administrative court, where the fate of Jumbo was discussed Wednesday.

The circus says the hippo, now in its late thirties, has retired. They did not however say when.

France has also since the start of the case introduced an animal rights law to gradually phase out the performance of wild animals from travelling shows by late 2028.

A rapporteur at the State Council has advised the court to send the case back to the appeals court, recommending it re-examine it taking into account new developments.

As Jumbo has retired, the contended 2008 permit to perform no longer applies, they argued.

One Voice’s lawyer Thomas Lyon-Caen said that recommendation seemed “perfectly justified”.

But the Muller family’s lawyer, Helene Farge, argued Jumbo would be happier living out the rest of its days with the circus.

Won’t it “be better off where it has always lived instead of in a retirement home?” she said.

Hippopotamuses hail from sub-Saharan Africa, where they usually wallow in water all day before emerging onto land at night to graze on grass.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists them as “vulnerable”, as they are threatened by human activity and drought.

In 2007, a French court ordered the release of an 11-year-old hippopotamus called Tonga from another circus. It was flown to a sanctuary in South Africa.