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

Silent Spring - Rachel Carson 

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

Our Synthetic Environment - Libcom.org 

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

REST IN POWER

ANOTHER VICTIM OF THE GOP KULTURE WAR

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Kayleigh Scott of Denver, Colorado, starred in a United Airlines video in 2020, where she shared her story as a transgender woman

China's CATL to start mass output of M3P batteries this year


CATL's logo seen at an exhibition

Fri, March 24, 2023 

SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Chinese battery giant CATL plans to start this year the mass production and delivery of batteries based on a new materials technology, M3P, which will perform better and cost less than nickel and cobalt-based ones, its chairman said.

M3P batteries will have greater energy density and perform better than lithium-ion phosphate batteries, a market CATL dominates. They will also be cheaper than nickel and cobalt-based batteries, Zeng Yuqun told an online investor briefing on Friday.

CATL disclosed in August last year that it was working on M3P technology, which can enable an electric vehicle to run 700 km (430 miles) per charge when combined with CATL's next generation of battery-pack technology.

Zeng said CATL was finding it difficult to come up with a technologically feasible and competitive product based on solid state batteries, a competing technology that is also being researched by Japan's Toyota Motor Corp and Germany's Volkswagen.

CATL, whose clients include Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW and Ford, is the world's biggest battery maker accounting for more than a third of the sales of batteries for electric vehicles (EV) worldwide.

The company's dominance attracted attention from Chinese President Xi Jinping, who said earlier this month he was both "pleased and concerned" over its rise.

Since last year, a number of CATL's customers have complained about its market position, with some opting for alternative suppliers or choosing to develop their own batteries, Reuters has reported.

Asked on Friday how these rival batteries could affect CATL's market share, Zeng said that he expected them to have more impact on second-tier and third-tier battery-makers and that CATL would remain the primary battery supplier.

He said new energy vehicle sales in China have been recently affected by inventory clearance efforts by combustion engine car makers ahead of a change in emissions rules, but he remained confident about the overall EV sales outlook.

More than 40 brands have slashed vehicle prices in China in recent months, deepening a price war ignited by Tesla's first salvo in January.

(Reporting by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Tyson Foods plant closure raises antitrust concerns among US farmers, experts


 Nine-day-old chicks drink water at a Foster Farms ranch near Turlock

Fri, March 24, 2023
By Leah Douglas and Tom Polansek

(Reuters) -Tyson Foods Inc gave its chicken suppliers two months' notice of its plan to shut a Virginia processing plant in May, raising concerns among farmers and legal experts about the company's compliance with antitrust regulations requiring it to give 90 days' notice before ending a contract.

The planned closure of the plant has left dozens of Virginia chicken growers scrambling to find new buyers in a region with few other options. It could also expose Tyson to fines under the century-old Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA), the U.S. antitrust law requiring the minimum advance warning, according to Peter Carstensen, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School who previously served in the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Tyson told Reuters the company is not canceling any farmers' contracts and instead has committed to paying the growers for the full-term of their remaining contracts, keeping in compliance with federal regulations.

Antitrust issues, particularly in meatpacking, have been a priority for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) under President Joe Biden, who in 2021 directed federal agencies to tackle consolidation. Four companies, including Tyson, control 55% to 85% of the beef, pork, and chicken markets.

Tyson alerted Virginia farmers by phone on March 13 and later by mail that it will shut its Glen Allen plant on May 12, according to three poultry farmers who supply the plant. The company said there are 55 farmers with 73 contracts who supply the plant with chickens raised for meat.

Tyson owns chickens it slaughters and pays the farmers to raise them. The company hatches baby birds and trucks them to farmers. The farmers then raise the birds for about six weeks, until they reach the size to be slaughtered and are trucked to the processing plant.

Tyson spokesperson Alicia Buffer confirmed farmers received notice last week of the May 12 closing, and said Tyson intends to stop supplying them with chicks after March 28.

She said that instead of canceling their contracts, Tyson is offering farmers a voluntary buyout package, or the option to retain them and be paid through their duration.

The three farmers interviewed by Reuters have between three and 10 years left on their contracts.

Farmers told Reuters they felt pressure to accept the buyout option because they were not sure how the contract could remain in force after the plant is shut and the chicks stop coming.

Roger Reynolds, a farmer in Crewe, Virginia, said retaining his July 2012 contract with Tyson is not a viable option, in part because it would prevent him from selling to another poultry company if one entered the region.

Another farmer with a contract to supply the plant, who asked not to be named, said they may eventually have to sell their third-generation farm as the buyout offer would not cover long-term expenses like property taxes.

Carstensen, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, said it was unclear if Tyson's approach would absolve it of its requirement to provide farmers 90 days' notice before ending a purchase contract, because closing the plant means it won't be processing chickens there anymore.

PSA violations can carry a $29,270 fine, according to the USDA website, and Carstensen said fines could apply for each contract.

The USDA, which enforces the PSA, told Reuters it is "closely monitoring" Tyson's planned plant closure.

'WE'RE DONE'

Under normal circumstances, Tyson supplies farmers with chicks, while farmers assume the costs of land and chicken houses.

Documents reviewed by Reuters show the company's proposed buyout package offers payment to farmers based on their average payment per flock in 2022.

They also show that farmers opting to retain existing contracts instead of accepting the buyout would have to meet Tyson's contractual requirements for their facilities even after the company stops providing chicks.

Tyson said those growers would have to perform "routine and preventive maintenance" to meet contract requirements and called the options generous.

Farmers must choose between the options by the end of March, according to the document.

On Monday, about 20 Tyson farmers and local government officials gathered in a fire station in Burkeville, Virginia, and raised concerns about Tyson's short timeline for closure of the plant, attendees said.

Taylor Lee, a farmer in DeWitt, Virginia, who attended the meeting, said he built two new chicken houses in 2017 and raised about 400,000 birds annually for Tyson, and is unclear what will happen to his investment.

"When we're done growing chickens (for Tyson), we're done, unless somebody else steps in," Lee said.

The nearest chicken plants to Glen Allen are 100 to 150 miles away, outside the ideal radius of 60 miles, said Hobey Bauhan, Virginia Poultry Federation president. Longer distances hike transportation costs and health risks to chickens.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington and Tom Polansek in Chicago; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Nick Zieminski)

Archaeologists on ‘first-of-its-kind’ mission to map sunken ancient landscapes


Nilima Marshall, PA Science Reporter
Fri, 24 March 2023 

Two British archaeologists are set to embark on a “first-of-its-kind” mission to map ancient landscapes lost to the oceans thousands of years ago.

Dr Simon Fitch, from the University of Bradford, and Professor Richard Bates, from the University of St Andrews, will travel to Split in Croatia to begin a five-day long survey of the Adriatic seabed as part of the Life on the Edge project, which has received £1 million in funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

They will be joined by Vedran Barbaric, from the University of Split, as part of the pilot team to map submerged landscapes in parts of the Adriatic and North Sea.

These maps can then be analysed for clues into the lives of humans who lived there between 10,000 and 24,000 years ago, during the late Paleolithic period.

Dr Simon Fitch, from the University of Bradford (Dr Simon Fitch/University of Bradford)

Dr Fitch, a geoarchaeologist and a UKRI Future Leadership Fellow, said: “This is the first time anyone is going more than 500 metres from the coastline in the Adriatic to map the seabed.

“We know humans once lived on the land down there because trawlers regularly dredge up artefacts.

“This is about finding out who we are as a species and where we come from.”

Dr Fitch said the sea levels were up to 100 metres lower during the late Paleolithic compared with the present day.

He said: “We have an incomplete picture of human history.

“If we go back in time to the period known as the late Paleolithic – so, between 10,000 and 24,000 years ago – that is when we had the last ‘glacial maximum’.

“It means a lot more land was exposed and people would have lived there.”

A 3D image of the coastline of Croatia with the 14,000-year-old coastline in red

 (Simon Fitch/University of Bradford)

Dr Fitch added: “We know most human populations like to live on the coastline, so it’s likely there were settlements on what is now the seabed.

“Our aim is to find evidence of those settlements and then recover the archaeology.”

Dr Fitch’s work is the first in a series of expeditions expected to take place over the next five years.

He is working with collaborators from the University of Split, and Flanders Marine institute (VLIZ) in Belgium, as well as commercial companies who are already mapping seabeds as they prepare to install wind farms.

The University of Bradford’s supercomputers will be used to analyse the data and turn it into maps that may reveal lost landscapes.

Dr Jessica Cook Hale, from the University of Georgia in the US, who has also joined the project, said: “We know from experience human populations like to live along the coast, so once we get an understanding of the topography, we can then make an educated guess as to where they might have lived at a time when sea levels were much lower than they are today.”

In addition to the UKRI funding, the Life on the Edge project has also received £400,000 in-kind ship time from VLIZ as well as a PhD studentship from the University of Bradford.

Power move: Stacey Abrams’ next act is the electrification of the US

Brian Kahn

THE GUARDIAN
Sat, 25 March 2023 

Stacey Abrams has been hailed as a masterly community organizer, after she helped turn out the voters that secured two Senate seats for Democrats in once solidly red Georgia. She has also run twice – unsuccessfully – for state governor. For her next move, she’s not focusing on electoral power so much as power itself.

Recently she left the world of campaign politics and took a job as senior counsel for the non-profit Rewiring America. Her role will focus on helping thousands of people across America wean their homes and businesses off fossil fuels and on to electricity, at a moment when scientists have given a “final warning” about the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent global catastrophe.

Related: ‘It’s not about winning an election’: Stacey Abrams’ legacy in Georgia

“We are at an inflection point where we can choose to electrify,” she said in an interview. “We don’t have to do it everywhere, all at once. If you want to see what the future looks like, we start building it here and now.”

The impetus for her role comes from significant moves taken by the Biden administration. When he signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last year, President Joe Biden hailed it as “the biggest step forward on climate ever”. It includes a sprawling array of tax credits, rebates and other incentives to help people electrify their lives.

“The government has basically filled a bank account for you with thousands of dollars that will help you go electric,” Abrams said.

Her mission is to help people access that so-called bank account.

“You can improve your indoor air quality, make cooking quick and easy, make being cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and be more affordable,” Abrams said. “But we have to talk about it.”

Abrams is perhaps best known for registering 800,000 voters in Georgia through her voting rights advocacy organization Fair Fight Action. She wants to use a similar playbook with electrification, and doing so could benefit many of the same people whose voices risked going unheard in elections.

Low-income communities and communities of color have long had to contend with polluting, inefficient appliances. This has an impact on public health by increasing the risk of asthma and leads to higher utility bills that take a bigger bite out of households’ income. The IRA takes aim at some of those wrongs, with tax credits and rebates that can help those households swap in heat pumps, induction stoves and electric vehicles for their gas-powered counterparts.

‘You meet people where they are, not where you want them to be’: Stacey Abrams. 

Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

But figuring out what incentives you qualify for and how to access them can be involved, to say the least. While Rewiring America has a calculator that lets individuals suss out what IRA benefits they can snag, Abrams will be taking that and other tools to the community level. She highlighted how houses of worship could be prime places to talk about the IRA and a potential target for outreach.

And she hopes to work with local leaders such as teachers, mayors and city council members to make the IRA a kitchen table issue. Enlisting them will, she hopes, eventually lead to neighbors talking to neighbors about how much money they saved on a new induction stove or how much more comfortable their home was during a heatwave thanks to a newly installed heat pump.

“You meet people where they are, not where you want them to be,” she said. “That means understanding the lives they’re living and the questions they have and who they go to to talk about their questions.”

While the IRA has the potential to be transformative, it’s also not enough to electrify every household in the country. The law has billions set aside for home upgrades, but more resources will be needed to achieve the Biden administration’s goal of reducing US emissions up to 52% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

An analysis by the Rhodium Group found the law has the potential to cut emissions by up to 42%. And that it could reduce home energy bills by $717 to $1,146 by 2030.

Abrams said that, based on her experience in the arena of voting rights, the prospect of such benefits could help foster an electrification movement. “As people get more, they expect more,” she said. “The most sustainable movement is when people expect more and are willing to work for more.”

Related: The heat pump revolution is here. This is what you need to know

This isn’t Abrams’ first foray into climate. She was quick to point out her college senior thesis was on environmental justice and that she interned with the Environmental Protection Agency. During her tenure in the Georgia house of representatives, she also worked as minority leader to help pass a bill that included the state’s biggest influx of cash for public transportation.

Ultimately, the Biden administration wants the US to reach net zero by mid-century. It might be hard to imagine that occurring – a distant future, when presumably technologies that are only nascent today like carbon dioxide removal will be more widespread, almost every car and home will be electric, and the inequalities targeted by the IRA and Biden’s executive orders will have dwindled.

That scenario can read a bit like science fiction – a genre of which Abrams is a well-known fan.

“In almost every sci-fi story, it begins with what decisions people are making long before the story takes place,” she said.

UK
Top Tory MPs ask for £10,000 a day to work for fake Korean company

Jon Ungoed-Thomas

THE GUARDIAN
Sat, 25 March 2023 

In this article:

Kwasi Kwarteng
British politician (born 1975)

Matt Hancock
British politician (born 1978)

Graham Brady
British Conservative politician


The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.

Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling.”

Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, also attended an online meeting for the fake foreign firm from his parliamentary office. When asked about the limits on arranging meetings, he made clear he could not advocate on behalf of the interest but said he may be able to advise the firm on who to approach in government. He said a rate of about £6,000 a day “feels about right” and any payments would be on a public register.

A fourth MP, former minister Stephen Hammond, who had been approached, said this weekend he considered he had been the victim of a “scam”. He said he thought he was engaged in a preliminary discussion with a company but “it turns out this company was fake, with a fake website”. Hancock’s spokesperson said he had acted “entirely properly” and criticised what he described as the “illegal publication of a private conversation”.

The senior politicians have complied with all relevant rules and referred to their obligation to their constituents during preliminary meetings. The Led by Donkeys project, conducted with investigative reporter Antony Barnett, comes at a time when people face a cost of living crisis. The campaign group released a report on its investigation on Twitter on Saturday , with recorded undercover footage.

While they are not prohibited from such meetings and no arrangements were finalised, there is currently intense scrutiny of politicians’ outside earnings. Labour has said it will ban most second jobs for MPs if it wins power.

The purported firm that approached the politicians did not exist and had a rudimentary foreign website with fake testimonials. MPs have been warned by the Home Office to be on their guard against the “threat of foreign interference”, and the group’s investigation demonstrated the ease with which they seemed able to gain access to the MPs .

Led by Donkeys is understood to have approached 20 MPs from the Conservative party, Labour and Liberal Democrats after examining the outside earnings of MPs on the parliamentary register of interests. An email sent by the fake investment and consulting firm, Hanseong Consulting, said it wanted individuals for an international advisory board to “help our clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe.

It said advisers would be required to attend six board meetings a year, with a “very attractive” remuneration package and “generous expenses” for international travel. Five MPs agreed to be interviewed on Zoom, with one who was clearly suspicious of the firm’s credentials terminating the call. The MPs were interviewed by a woman purporting to be a senior executive, with a backdrop of the skyline of Seoul, the South Korean capital, at her office window.

In February, Kwarteng attended an online meeting of about 40 minutes, informing the interviewer that he was “sitting in my office in parliament”. Kwarteng was sacked as chancellor last October by the then prime minister Liz Truss after his mini-budget precipitated a financial crisis.

During a discussion about what the renuneration might be, Kwarteng said he would not do anything for less than £10,000 a month. He said he would need to be compensated “particularly if I’m going to Korea”. When he was told the firm was looking at a rate of £8,000 to £12,000 a day, he responded that they were numbers he could work with. It was agreed that if he went to Korea he could invoice at £10,000 a day.

Discussing his credentials, he said he had significant experience from his roles as a former business secretary and “briefly as chancellor”. The prospect of Kwarteng citing his political track record for what appeared a lucrative role may anger homeowners who saw mortgage repayments rise because of his disastrous tenure at the Treasury. He discussed Brexit, the energy industry and Boris Johnson, with whom he said might be able to arrange a meeting.

In early March, Hancock agreed to an online meeting for the advisory role. The Telegraph had that week published his leaked cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, but he seemed relaxed for the meeting with the fake foreign firm. He said it had been “quite a busy week” but that March was the “start of hope”.

“We were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?” he was asked by the interviewer, posing as a senior business executive. “I do, yes,” Hancock replied. “It’s 10,000 sterling.”

The footage showing his rapid response to a question over fees is likely to spark fresh controversy over concerns MPs may be bolstering their finances in ways that may be counter to the interest of the constituents they serve. Hancock is an independent MP after he had the whip suspended for taking part in I’m a Celebrity, for which he was paid £320,000, with Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson saying at the time that “MPs should be working hard for their constituents”.

Hancock said in the meeting that he followed the “spirit and letter” of parliamentary rules, and would also require additional approval for the role because he had been a minister, but outside interests were permitted. He said he was mindful of the responsibility to serve his constituents.

Brady, one of parliament’s most senior backbenchers, was interviewed remotely in his parliamentary office in mid-February. He said he could attend international meetings and may have more flexibility because of his degree of seniority in the party.

Brady said £60,000-a-year may be a reasonable fee, and it was agreed a rate of £500 an hour and £6,000 a day would be appropriate, but open to negotiation. He said he was always careful to follow the rules, but said he might be able to identify people in government to approach and “how to do it in the most appropriate way”.

Hammond, the Wimbledon MP and a former transport and health minister, also agreed to a meeting, saying he had a specific interest in South Korea because he had a number of nationals living in his constituency. He told the company he already had roles with two other firms, both of which are disclosed in the parliamentary register of interests.

Labour called the developments “shameful”. Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow leader of the House of Commons, said: “Being an MP is a full-time job. Tory MPs should not be using their taxpayer-funded offices to line their own pockets. This is shameful at any time but particularly during the cost of living crisis.

“Rishi Sunak promised a government of integrity at every level, yet his own MPs are seemingly breaching the rules. He must act and remove the whip from those involved.

“Labour will put an end to MPs raking in thousands of pounds on the side and act to restore trust in politics.”

MPs have faced repeated controversies over outside earnings. A new code of conduct for MPs was introduced on 1 March, and for the first time it prohibits members providing paid parliamentary advice to an outside employer.

Labour’s Commission on the Future of the UK, which was published last December and chaired by former prime minister Gordon Brown, called for a general ban on second jobs for MPs.

Led By Donkeys activists, from left, Ben Stewart, Oliver Knowles, Will Rose and James Sadri in a north London pub in 2019. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Led by Donkeys was established in 2018 as a campaign in response to Brexit. Its high-profile projects and satirical stunts have since included a spoof episode of the BBC show Line of Duty with Boris Johnson being interrogated by the anti-corruption AC-12 unit and painting the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside the Russian embassy in London.

A spokesperson for Hancock said: “The accusation appears to be that Matt acted entirely properly and within the rules, which had just been unanimously adopted by parliament. It’s absurd to bring Mr Hancock into this story through the illegal publication of a private conversation. All the video shows is Matt acting completely properly.”

Brady said he was leaving parliament at the next election and had received a number of approaches concerning future opportunities, including the purported South Korean firm. He said: “I made it clear that any arrangement would have to be completely transparent and that, whilst a member of parliament, I would only act within the terms of the code of conduct. I also made it clear that while I could be flexible in attending international meetings in person, this would be subject to some important votes or commitments in Westminster.”

He said that, with regard to advice on approaching figures in government, he made clear he would always follow the rules. He said he was interviewed prior to a stricter code of conduct being introduced on 1 March.

He said he did “some internet research” on the firm but, given it was an exploratory conversation, considered it reasonable to proceed. He said he did not consider he was “doing business” in his parliamentary office and it was not a bad thing for MPs to have outside interests, providing they followed the rules.

Hammond said: “This was nothing other than what I thought to be a preliminary discussion with a South Korean company – a country that is close to my heart as I have a substantial Korean community in my constituency, and which is an important ally to the UK. It turns out this company was fake, with a fake website. The remuneration amount was suggested by the actor purporting to be an employee of the company, not by me. Scamming is an unpleasant activity undertaken with malicious intent. I believe it is a great honour to be an MP. I have always put my constituents first and will always try to act in their best interests.”

Kwarteng did not respond to a request for comment.

UN accuses Russia, Ukraine forces of 'summary executions' of prisoners
AFP
Fri, 24 March 2023 


The United Nations said Friday it was "deeply concerned" by what it said were summary executions of prisoners of war by both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.

The allegations came shortly after Kyiv accused Russian forces of killing a captured Ukrainian serviceman who was filmed saying "Glory to Ukraine" before being shot dead.

The head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, said that her organisation had recently recorded killings by both sides.


"We are deeply concerned about (the) summary execution of up to 25 Russian prisoners of war and persons hors de combat by the Ukrainian armed forces, which we have documented," Bogner said at a press conference in Kyiv on Friday.

"This was often perpetrated immediately upon capture on the battlefield," she said.

"While we are aware of ongoing investigations by Ukraine authorities into five cases involving 22 victims, we are not aware of any prosecution of the perpetrators," she added.

Bogner also expressed "deep" concern over the alleged executions of 15 Ukrainian prisoners by Russian armed forces after their capture.

She said the Wagner mercenary group, which claims to be leading Russia's assault for Bakhmut -- the longest and bloodiest battle of the war -- was responsible for 11 of those killings.

Moscow and Kyiv have accused each other of mistreating prisoners of war since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded a year ago.

In response to the UN report, Kyiv's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was "unacceptable" to hold the "victim of aggression" responsible.

- 'They broke us' -

One UN report issued Friday claimed Ukrainian military personnel had subjected prisoners of war to death threats, mock executions or threats of sexual violence. Some beatings were "purely retaliatory", it said.

"In some cases, officers beat POWs saying: 'This is for Bucha'," the mission reported detainees as saying, referring to a town near Kyiv where Russian forces were accused of widespread atrocities.

"Before questioning, they showed me an axe handle covered in blood as a warning," the report quoted a Russian POW as saying.

"The questioning lasted for about an hour and they used electricity six times, whenever they thought I was lying," the detainee said, according to the report.

Ukrainian POWs quoted in the report said they were subjected to torture, sexual violence, a lack of food and water and denied medical attention.

They said they were tortured and ill-treated to extract information or as a form of punishment, the mission said.

Ukrainian prisoners reported being beaten with shovels, stabbed, subjected to electric shocks and strangled.

"Some of them lost their teeth or fingers, had their ribs, fingers or noses broken," the report said.

"They did not just beat us, they broke us. They used their fists, legs, batons, tasers. There were POWs who had their arms or legs broken," one man was quoted as saying.

The Ukrainian parliament's human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said Friday that he was "surprised" by the allegations against Ukrainian troops and said he had not been informed of them in advance.

On Telegram, he wrote that he wanted to "know the facts and the indisputable arguments on which the conclusions" of the UN report were based.

In a separate statement on Friday, Kyiv's Ministry of Foreign Affairs thanked the UN monitors for their work but emphasised that Ukraine "expects that the UN mission will avoid any steps that may be interpreted as equalising the victim and the aggressor".

bur/imm/lcm/fb/lb/cwl

Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark struck a deal to run their 200+ advanced fighter jets as a single fleet, creating a new headache for Russia

Alia Shoaib
Sat, 25 March 2023 

Norwegian F-35 fighter jets pictured over Norway on March 22, 2022

.John Thys/AFP via Getty Images

The four Nordic countries agreed to operate their roughly 250 fighter jets in one fleet.

Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, have modern air forces that include F-35s.

They joined forces hoping to deter Russia.

The air forces of four Nordic countries agreed to operate their fleets of around 250 fighter jets as a combined force, hoping to deter Russia by working together.

Air force commanders of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark said Friday that they have signed a letter of intent to establish a unified Nordic air defense, Reuters reported.

"The ultimate goal is to be able to operate seamlessly together as one force by developing a Nordic concept for joint air operations based on already known NATO methodology," Denmark's air force said in a statement, per Bloomberg.

"Our combined fleet can be compared to a large European country," commander of the Danish air force, Major General Jan Dam, told Reuters.

Dam said the move was in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year. The invasion also prompted Sweden and Finland to seek entry into NATO, an alliance which already includes Denmark and Norway.

The joint force will be a worry for Russia, boasting a significant number of top-tier fighter jets.

Norway, Denmark, and Finland have all committed to the F-35 jets which are the most advanced Western fighter planes. Norway operates some already, while Finland and Denmark are due to receive them in the coming years.

Sweden has its own model of fighter jet, the Gripen C and D, with modernized Gripen E planes on order.

NATO Air Command chief General James Hecker was also present at the signing of the letter at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO in May 2022, jolted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine into ending decades of their position of "non-alignment."

Their applications have been held up by Turkey and Hungary, who are yet to ratify the memberships.

One of the many reasons cited by Russian President Vladimir Putin as justification for his invasion of Ukraine has been NATO's enlargement since the Cold War.

However, Russia's war in Ukraine led to further expansion of the alliance, and increased co-operation and defense spending by its members.

RUSSIAN COLONY

Putin to send nuclear weapons to Belarus

James Kilner
Sat, 25 March 2023

Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, is a staunch supporter of Vladimir Putin - AFP

Vladimir Putin has announced plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus for the first time, shifting his most destructive weapons closer to Europe and Kyiv.

The move represents the first time Russia will store part of its nuclear arsenal in another country since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

"We agreed with Lukashenko that we would place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus without violating the nonproliferation regime,” he said in an interview for Russian TV broadcast on Saturday evening.

Mr Putin went on to suggest that his announcement was in response to news that Britain was sending depleted uranium shells to Ukraine with its Challenger-2 tanks.

"Russia has its own answer to ammunition with depleted uranium. We have similar weapons, but the Russian Federation has not yet used them,” he said.

Experts insist however that depleted uranium is standard use in British armour-piercing shells and holds no nuclear value.

Responding to Russia’s concerns around depleted uranium earlier in the week, the British ministry of defence said: “The British Army has used depleted uranium in its armour piercing shells for decades. It is a standard component and has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or capabilities. Russia knows this, but is deliberately trying to disinform.”

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko is a staunch supporter of Mr Putin and allowed Russia to use Belarus as a launchpad for its invasion of Ukraine.

He has resisted Mr Putin’s pressure to directly enter the war but has allowed Russian warplanes to use Belarusian airspace to fire missiles at Ukrainian targets.

Last year, the Russian military upgraded Belarus’ air force so that it was capable of firing missiles with nuclear warheads and in February, Belarus’ military said that it had taken delivery of Iskander missile launchers from Russia which are capable of firing nuclear-tipped missiles.

Mr Putin said that he wasn’t breaking any international treaties because we are “doing what the US has been doing for decades”.

“We agreed that we will do the same, without violating our obligations,” he said.

The US stations nuclear missiles in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Earlier this year, Russia pulled out of the Start Nuclear Treaty, the last remaining treaty with the US aimed at stopping a nuclear arms proliferation.

Mr Putin said that the storage facility to house tactical nuclear weapons would be completed by July and that Russia would remain in control of the weapons.

Russia is already suspected of stationing nuclear weapons in its European exclave of Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. It has also developed a missile called Satan-2 that can fire a nuclear warhead at any city in the world within minutes of being launched from Russia.

Kremlin officials threatened Russia’s enemies with nuclear strikes last year, although US intelligence has said that this threat has receded.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 it left parts of its nuclear arsenal in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. A deal signed in 1992 meant that by 1996, former Soviet nuclear weapons outside Russia had either been destroyed or transferred back to Russia.

Mr Putin also used his TV interview to back up claims that either Ukrainian or US special forces blew up the Nord Stream oil gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea last year.

Initially, Western intelligence agencies had blamed Russia for blowing up the pipeline.

Earlier this week, Mr Putin hosted Chinese president Xi Jinping in Moscow, giving himself a major boost on the world stage, although he said that discussions about a Chinese peace plan for the war in Ukraine were only a part of their talks.

“The main focus of the talks was on the economy,” he said in his TV interview.

 Meet the motley crew of anarchists and anti-fascists fighting Russia in Ukraine 

By Joshua Askew  •  Updated: 10/06/2022

Anti-authoritarian forces have organised their own international units within the Territorial Defence Force of Ukraine.   -  Copyright  Resistance Committee - Telegram

• 
• 
• 
• 

“In a world where rulers use all kinds of manipulation, compulsion and violence to wage bloody wars for their own interests, organised people must confront them with force.”

These are the incandescent words of Ilya, a self-styled Ukrainian anarchist.

He is part of a motley crew of "anarchists, anti-fascists and football hooligans", who say they have united under the black flag -- a key symbol of anarchism -- to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. 

Although “security concerns” prevent them from sharing too much about their identity, their self-styled “anti-authoritarian” platoon numbers several dozen, with volunteers coming from all around the world.

"For us, this invasion reflects the imperialist policies of Putin's regime,” Ilya told Euronews. “It is clear that the Kremlin’s propaganda about 'fighting Nazis in Ukraine' is just a smoke screen to disguise greed for power and the desire to establish harsh authoritarian rule.”

                                                                           The squad are participating in the territorial defence of UkraineBlack Head Quarters - Telegram

Ilya’s anti-authoritarian platoon is part of Ukraine's Territorial Defence Forces (TDF), a volunteer military reserve formed after Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea.

In keeping with the anarchist tradition of rejecting the state, Ilya said their platoon was not fighting for the Ukrainian government, but for Ukrainian society “which is the main resistance against this brutal aggression”.

"Both for the sake of justice and the basic survival of Ukrainian society this invasion should be fought boldly and defeated completely,” he said. “Society here is under deadly attack – it should defend itself."

‘What does Putin’s regime bring them?'

Even if Ukraine is at war with Russia, the anti-authoritarian platoon says they do not consider Russians as enemies. 

In a manifesto published by the Resistance Committee, which helps coordinate the anti-authoritarian resistance in Ukraine, Russians -- and Belarusians -- were called upon to join the war.

"Until the nest of tyranny in Moscow is removed, the whole region will constantly face harassment against its freedom,” the manifesto reads. “Every local tyrant, suppressing his rebellious people, will be assisted by the tsar of Moscow.

“We want to set ourselves and our neighbours free,” it added. “The struggle of Ukrainians gives hope for liberation to everyone oppressed by Putinism.”

In recent years, Moscow helped suppress protests in both Belarus and Kazakhstan against the country’s leaders, arguing intervention was necessary to maintain order.

Many volunteers come from Belarus.Black Head Quarters - Telegram

Much attention has been paid to the alleged role of the far-right within the Ukrainian armed forces, particularly surrounding the Azov Regiment, as well as neo-Nazis in Russia’s military.

The myth far-right zealots run Ukraine is Russian propaganda | View

But this group of soldiers, who have loosely aligned under the flag of anarchism, are unique to the Ukrainian side.

They are the latest incarnation of a small anarchist movement which has fought for their political ideals in a foreign war, following the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 39) and those fighting with the Kurdish YPG in Syria.

‘The epicentre of Ukrainian resistance is here’

Spared the frontline so far, the platoon has provided territorial defence in the central regions of Ukraine, patrolling to “detect and root out enemy infiltrators”.

They have also assisted those on the battlefield logistically and with intelligence, which they say has led to the “destruction” of enemy targets.

The platoon has also helped evacuate civilians from combat areas, often coming under mortar fire in the process.

Inside their unit, the fighters try to live out their politics, with a more democratic culture of free discussion and critique. Deputy commanders are elected for each section, while regular meetings allow fighters to relay feedback.

The logo of the Resistance CommitteeBlack Head Quarters - Telegram

Ilya hoped that the existence of their platoon would contest the allegations surrounding the far-right in Ukraine.

“The myth about the far-right dominating Ukrainian politics relies partly on very huge, well-financed and active propaganda by the Kremlin and partly on the actual, visible presence of the far-right in Ukraine,” says Ilya.

“But statements that the far-right shape Ukrainian politics, society or army are simply not true,” he added.

Moscow has repeatedly said its "special military operation" is to disarm and "denazify" its neighbour.

Ukraine and its allies call this a baseless pretext for a war that has killed thousands, flattened cities and forced millions of people to flee.

‘We were ready’

The platoon formed on 24 February, the very first day of the war.

"Of course, it did not start life from scratch," said Ilya. “Hearing rumours about the coming war, anarchists in Kyiv began planning what to do should our fears come true.” They contacted their "comrades" in the TDF, began training together and plotted how to find one another should something start. 

Shortly after, it did.

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The “source and root of the platoon are the anti-fascist struggle,” says Ilya. Before the war, practically all of the fighters were environmental activists, in trade unions or part of Antifa, a radical left wing group.

Many had also fought in Syria with the Kurdish YPG.

'We need more democracy, more diversity, more ideas'

Faced with the challenges of war, many in the platoon are pursuing far-reaching goals, although they are far from united on what they should be.

In their manifesto, the platoon outlines some of the changes they want to see in Ukraine, including the cancellation of the country’s international debt and a credit amnesty for those inside the country.

Debt is a “noose around the country’s neck held by international financial institutions and wealthy states,” reads the document.

Volunteer fights pose with new equipment donated to their platoon  Black Head Quarters -

Since the outbreak of the war in 2014, international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and European Commission, have lent Ukraine some $40 billion (€37.4 billion).

This money, they say, has been necessary to keep Ukraine’s economy afloat and finance its war effort.

If they are to achieve their objectives both on and off the battlefield, the platoon says it needs more support from around the world.

"Solidarity plays a super important role,'' says Ilya. “Everyone speaks about the urgent importance of supplying weapons from aboard. But I would also stress the moral importance of solidarity from people worldwide against injustice and occupation."