[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The Russian Prime Minister paid a visit to one of the four Russian-held islands which lie off Japan’s most northern region. Known as Iturup in Russian and Etorofu in Japanese, the island was occupied by the Soviet Union after World War 2. It has been a source of dispute between Moscow and Tokyo for the last three-quarters of a century – and Mr Medvedev’s visit threatens to put relations between Russia and Japan under strain.
Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs pulled no punches with a strongly worded statement aimed at the Kremlin.
Officials said that Mr Medvedev’s visit was incompatible with the Japanese people’s view on the Russian-held islands.
The statement added: “We strongly urge the Russian side to take constructive measures to further advance Japan-Russia relations, including the issue of the conclusion of the peace treaty.”
Iturup is one of four islands involved in the so-called Kuril Islands dispute, also known as the Northern Territories altercation.
The Yalta agreement – a post World War 2 deal signed by the US, Britain and the Soviet Union – stated that “the Kuril Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union” after the conclusion of the war.
It was supported by the Cairo Declaration of 1943, which stated that Japan must be expelled from all territories which have been taken by violence.
Japan originally took control of the island in 1875 after Russia reportedly agreed to give up all the rights for the Kuril Islands.
The Russo-Japanese war 30 years later yielded more territory to Tokyo and became the backdrop of simmering tensions between the two nations.
Diplomatic progress has stalled in the past 20 years over the dispute.
In 2005, to Moscow’s dismay, the European Parliament recommended Russia return the islands to Japan.
Recently, Discovery of Oil and Natural Gas in Sakhalin have given Russia a Milking cow in the region. Which was earlier used as Gulags.
2011 saw the installation of weapons on the island to, according to Mr Medvedev, “ensure the security of the islands as an integral part of Russia”.
Mr Medvedev’s latest visit came just two weeks after Moscow outright refused to discuss the potential handover of two of the contested islands to Japan.
That and the following article are not really all you need to know, as oil and natural gas supplies - which Japan is in desperate need for - have been located in Sakhalin Island, a natural extension of Japan’s historical and genetic ethnostate and an affect of the Russian Federation’s cleptocratic aggrandizement.
The decades-old dispute has prevented the two countries from concluding a peace treaty to formally end World War II.
Called the Kurils by Russia and the Northern Territories by Japan, a string of volcanic islands are at the heart of a feud between the two countries that has prevented them signing a formal World War II peace treaty. Talks stalled for decades due to Japan‘s claim to the four strategic islands seized by the Soviet army in the final days of the war.
Russia and Japan’s leaders meet for talks in Moscow on Tuesday over the disputed island chain.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are set to meet in Moscow on Tuesday for talks expected to be dominated by the territorial dispute, here are some key facts about the Kuril islands:
Location
The disputed islands of Iturup (Etorofu in Japanese), Kunashir (Kunashiri), Shikotan and Habomai lie at their closest point just a few kilometres off the north coast of Hokkaido in Japan.
They are the southernmost islands in a volcanic chain that separates the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean.
Indigenous people of Sakhalin Island
They are located to the southeast of the Russian island of Sakhalin and are administratively part of the same region, although Tokyo considers them part of its Hokkaido prefecture and “illegally occupied by Russia”.
Treaties
Russian Empress Catherine the Great claimed sovereignty over the Kuril islands in 1786 after her government declared they were discovered by “Russian explorers” and therefore “undoubtedly must belong to Russia”.
In the first treaty between tsarist Russia and Japan in 1855, the frontier between the two countries was drawn just north of the four islands closest to Japan.
Twenty years later in 1875, a new treaty handed Tokyo the entire chain, in exchange for Russia gaining full control of the island of Sakhalin. Japan seized back control of the southern half of Sakhalin after its crushing defeat of Moscow in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.
Soviet takeover
The Kuril islands have been back at the centre of a dispute between Moscow and Tokyo since Soviet troops invaded them in the final days of World War II.
The USSR only entered into war with Japan on August 9, 1945, just after the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The Soviet troops completed the takeover of the islands after Japan’s general surrendered later that month.
Russia argues that then-US President Franklin Roosevelt promised Soviet leader Joseph Stalin he could take back the Kurils in exchange for joining the war against Japan when they met at the Yalta conference in February 1945 at which the Allied leaders divided up the post-war world.
The Soviet capture of the islands has since prevented Moscow and Tokyo from signing a formal peace treaty to end the war, despite repeated attempts over the past 70 years to reach an agreement.
In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev first offered to give Japan the two smallest islands, Shikotan and Habomai, in exchange for signing a peace treaty but dropped the idea after Tokyo struck a military alliance with Washington.
Strategic value
Strategically, control of the islands ensures Russia has year-round access to the Pacific Ocean for its Pacific Fleet of warships and submarines based in Vladivostok, as the strait between Kunashir and Iturup does not freeze over in winter.
Russia has military bases on the archipelago and has deployed missile systems on the islands.
The islands’ current population is around 20,000 people.
After numerous meetings over the past few years between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin, they have launched various economic projects on the islands in areas such as the farming of fish and shellfish, wind-generated energy, and tourism, though Moscow says investment is still meagre.
Since 2017, the two countries have also agreed on charter flights for Japanese former inhabitants to visit family graves there.
The islands are rich in hot springs and minerals and rare metals such as rhenium, which is used in the production of supersonic aircraft.
That’s not really all you need to know, as oil and natural gas supplies - which Japan is in desperate need for - have been located in Sakhalin Island, a natural extension of Japan’s historical and genetic ethnostate and an affect of the Russian Federation’s cleptocratic aggrandizement.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 16 December 2018 13:39.
Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is part of a group of Congress members pushing for a Green New Deal. (Charles Krupa / AP Photo)
TruthDig.Com, “This Radical Plan to Fund the ‘Green New Deal’ Just Might Work”, 16 Nov 2018:
With what author and activist Naomi Klein calls “galloping momentum,” the “Green New Deal” promoted by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appears to be forging a political pathway for solving all of the ills of society and the planet in one fell swoop. Her plan would give a House select committee “a mandate that connects the dots” between energy, transportation, housing, health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee and more. But even to critics on the left, it is merely political theater, because “everyone knows” a program of that scope cannot be funded without a massive redistribution of wealth and slashing of other programs (notably the military), which is not politically feasible.
That may be the case, but Ocasio-Cortez and the 22 representatives joining her in calling for a select committee also are proposing a novel way to fund the program, one that could actually work. The resolution says funding will come primarily from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”
A network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal in the same way President Franklin Roosevelt funded the original New Deal. At a time when the banks were bankrupt, he used the publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a public infrastructure bank. The Federal Reserve could also fund any program Congress wanted, if mandated to do so. Congress wrote the Federal Reserve Act and can amend it. Or the Treasury itself could do it, without the need to even change any laws. The Constitution authorizes Congress to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and that power has been delegated to the Treasury. It could mint a few trillion-dollar platinum coins, put them in its bank account and start writing checks against them. What stops legislators from exercising those constitutional powers is simply that “everyone knows” Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation will result. But will it? Compelling historical precedent shows that this need not be the case.
Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He writes that disasters such as Zimbabwe’s fiscal troubles were not due to the government printing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”
As long as workers and materials are available and the money is added in a way that reaches consumers, adding money will create the demand necessary to prompt producers to create more supply. Supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable. The reverse is also true. If demand (money) is not increased, supply and gross domestic product (GDP) will not go up. New demand needs to precede new supply.
The Public Bank Option: The Precedent of Roosevelt’s New Deal
Infrastructure projects of the sort proposed in the Green New Deal are “self-funding,” generating resources and fees that can repay the loans. For these loans, advancing funds through a network of publicly owned banks would not require taxpayer money and could actually generate a profit for the government. That was how the original New Deal rebuilt the country in the 1930s at a time when the economy was desperately short of money.
The publicly owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was a remarkable publicly owned credit machine that allowed the government to finance the New Deal and World War II without turning to Congress or the taxpayers for appropriations. First instituted in 1932 by President Herbert Hoover, the RFC was not called an infrastructure bank and was not even a bank, but it served the same basic functions. It was continually enlarged and modified by Roosevelt to meet the crisis of the times, until it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest financial organization. Its semi-independent status let it work quickly, allowing New Deal agencies to be financed as the need arose.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act of 1932 provided the financial organization with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). The initial capital came from a stock sale to the U.S. Treasury. With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. A small part of this came from its initial capitalization. The rest was borrowed, chiefly from the government itself. Bonds were sold to the Treasury, some of which were then sold to the public, although most were held by the Treasury. All in all, the RFC ended up borrowing a total of $51.3 billion from the Treasury and $3.1 billion from the public.
In this arrangement, the Treasury was therefore the lender, not the borrower. As the self-funding loans were repaid, so were the bonds that were sold to the Treasury, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The financial organization was the lender for thousands of infrastructure and small-business projects that revitalized the economy, and these loans produced a total net income of $690,017,232 on the RFC’s “normal” lending functions (omitting such things as extraordinary grants for wartime). The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more, and it funded all this while generating income for the government.
The Central Bank Option: How Japan Is Funding Abenomics with Quantitative Easing
The Federal Reserve is another Green New Deal funding option. The Fed showed what it can do with “quantitative easing” when it created the funds to buy $2.46 trillion in federal debt and $1.77 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, all without inflating consumer prices. The Fed could use the same tool to buy bonds earmarked for a Green New Deal, and because it returns its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs, the bonds would be nearly interest-free. If they were rolled over from year to year, the government, in effect, would be issuing new money.
This is not just theory. Japan is actually doing it, without creating even the modest 2 percent inflation the government is aiming for. “Abenomics,” the economic agenda of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, combines central bank quantitative easing with fiscal stimulus (large-scale increases in government spending). Since Abe came into power in 2012, Japan has seen steady economic growth, and its unemployment rate has fallen by nearly half, yet inflation remains very low, at 0.7 percent. Social Security-related expenses accounted for 55 percent of general expenditure in Japan’s 2018 federal budget, and a universal health care insurance system is maintained for all citizens. Nominal GDP is up 11 percent since the end of the first quarter of 2013, a much better record than during the prior two decades of Japanese stagnation, and the Nikkei stock market is at levels not seen since the early 1990s, driven by improved company earnings. Growth remains below targeted levels, but according to Financial Times, this is because fiscal stimulus has actually been too small. While spending with the left hand, the government has been taking the money back with the right, increasing the sales tax from 5 to 8 percent.
Abenomics has been declared a success even by the once-critical International Monetary Fund. After Abe crushed his opponents in 2017, Noah Smith wrote in Bloomberg, “Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has figured out a novel and interesting way to stay in power—govern pragmatically, focus on the economy and give people what they want.” Smith said everyone who wanted a job had one, small and midsize businesses were doing well; and the Bank of Japan’s unprecedented program of monetary easing had provided easy credit for corporate restructuring without generating inflation. Abe had also vowed to make both preschool and college free.
Not that all is idyllic in Japan. Forty percent of Japanese workers lack secure full-time employment and adequate pensions. But the point underscored here is that large-scale digital money-printing by the central bank to buy back the government’s debt, combined with fiscal stimulus by the government (spending on “what the people want”), has not inflated Japanese prices, the alleged concern preventing other countries from doing the same.
Abe’s novel economic program has done more than just stimulate growth. By selling its debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government, the Japanese government has, in effect, been canceling its debt. Until recently, it was doing this at a whopping rate of $720 billion per year. According to fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:
The Bank of Japan is in the process of owning most of the outstanding government debt of Japan (it currently owns around 40%). BOJ holdings are part of the consolidated government balance sheet. So its holdings are in fact the accounting equivalent of a debt cancellation. If I buy back my own mortgage, I don’t have a mortgage.
If the Federal Reserve followed suit and bought 40 percent of the U.S. national debt, it would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs. Yet liquidating a full 40 percent of Japan’s government debt has not triggered price inflation.
Earth’s ability to provide for humankind’s increasing demands has been exhausted and the world’s wildlife is paying the price.
Life on earth is being wiped out by humans living beyond the planet’s means, according to conservation organisation WWF.
Their latest global report claims wildlife is dying out faster than ever and says nature needs international “life support”.
Between 1970 and 2014, 60% of all animals with a backbone - fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals - were wiped out by human appetites and activity, the report says.
Nine out of 10 of the world’s seabirds are thought to have plastic in their stomachs, while by 2050 only one 10th of the planet’s land will be free from human impact, according to the Living Planet Report 2018.
‘Life on earth is being wiped out by humans’
Climate change and plastic pollution are growing threats
Wildlife populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have fallen 89% since 1970 and climate-warming carbon dioxide levels are estimated to be at their highest for 800,000 years.
Species are rapidly disappearing from the earth
Even the UK is seeing the effects, with the puffin population falling as rising sea temperatures reduce the numbers of the sand eels they feed on.
Tanya Steele, WWF chief executive, said: “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”
Plastic particles found in humans
Scientists have shown for the first time that humans are ingesting microscopic plastic particles in their food
WWF international director general Marco Lambertini added: “The situation is really bad, and it keeps getting worse.
“The only good news is that we know exactly what is happening.”
The rate of human consumption is too much for the Earth to cope with, the report says
The world’s conservation efforts are not enough to match the scale of the problem, the report says, with climate change and plastic pollution posing particular threats.
Over-fishing, tree felling and the use of pesticides in agriculture are also signs that the rate of human consumption is accelerating so fast that the Earth cannot cope.
But animals are not just “nice to have around”, our food, health and medicines rely on natural resources which, globally, provide services worth £97 trillion a year.
Among the species threatened are hedgehogs, which are predicted to almost vanish within the next few decades.
The jaguar is one of the species under threat in Latin America
The weird and the wonderful - they’re all at risk
Puffin numbers in the UK have declined
Puffin numbers in the UK have declined
At the Northumbrian Hedgehog Rescue Trust just outside Morpeth, where a team of volunteers cares for hundreds of sickly and underweight specimens every year, they fear the species is heading for extinction.
“Everybody likes neat and tidy gardens, puts slug pellets down and uses weedkiller,” says the trust’s founder Carole Catchpole.
“It’s serious and I wish people would take that really seriously and try and do something to help.”
Sky’s Ocean Rescue campaign encourages people to reduce their single-use plastics. You can find out more about the campaign and how to get involved at www.skyoceanrescue.com
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 02 October 2018 06:43.
New Observer, “New US Law Obliges Americans to Pay Unlimited Billions to Israel”, 1 Oct 2018:
In what has been described as an “unprecedented gift of executive power to Israel,” the US Congress has passed for the very first time a law that forces the American president to give Israel a minimum of $3.8 billion per year—without limitation and no matter what Israel does.
Passed by the House of Representatives on September 12, 2018, the “United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018” rolls back any limitations that the US places on the amount of “aid” American taxpayers must hand over to Israel.
The bill states in “Sec. 102. Statement of Policy) that it “shall be the policy of the United States to provide assistance to the Government of Israel in order to support funding for cooperative programs to develop, produce, and procure missile, rocket, projectile, and other defense capabilities to help Israel meet its security needs and to help develop and enhance United States defense capabilities.”
According to a review of the law published by the If Americans Knew group, the AIPAC-lobbied law, introduced by Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), whose maternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews, originally from the Ottoman Empire, who had been active in Cuba’s Jewish community, and Ted Deutch (D-Florida), whose grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Belarus, the bill is “even more generous to Israel than the Senate bill and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding and “amounts to $7,230 per minute to Israel, or $120 per second.”
The If Americans Knew review adds that the bill “guarantees $38 billion to Israel over the next ten years” and “is a dramatic departure from the deal offered under President Obama’s 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
“Most dramatically, this new act would eviscerate the ability of President Trump and his successors for the next ten years to withhold United States aid to Israel,” the review continued.
Netanyahu had a significant role in arranging the Trump-Putin meeting along with some of its key objectives. Note that Netanyahu has been close to the highly corrupt Kushner family since Jared was a child; and it was Jared who negotiated Trump’s route to the White House by means of an avowal to undo the Iran Deal.
The Jerusalem Post, “Intelligence Report: Israel needs Trump and Putin in Syria”, 15 July 2018:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin . (photo credit: KOBI GIDEON/GPO)
Though he hasn’t been present there, the spirit of Israel’s prime minister hovered all over the summit meeting between the US and Russian presidents in Helsinki in mid-July. Benjamin Netanyahu worked laboriously mobilizing all his influence in Washington to persuade Donald Trump to meet Vladimir Putin.
The two leaders have mysterious relations that are unfolding as a special investigation of former FBI director Robert Muller into alleged Russian meddling in the last US presidential elections is progressing. Trump and Putin were scheduled to discuss international matters from North Korea to the Russian occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine to the trade wars declared by Trump and the conflicts in the Middle East.
The Israeli prime minister, however, is mainly interested in two topics: Iran and the civil war in Syria. He needs both leaders to back his policy on these fronts.
On July 11, four days before the summit, Netanyahu was set to meet Putin and sit next to him in his private box at a Moscow soccer stadium watching together one of the two World Cup’s semi-finals.
It will be Netanyahu’s 10th meeting with the Russian leader in the last three years. He has more Putin’s hours than any other leader in the world.
The frequency and urgency of his encounters with Putin are a result of the fact that the Syrian civil war appears to be reaching its end and the army of President Bashar Assad is on its way to regain its position along the Israeli border on the Golan Heights.
Israel’s interests are to allow the Syrian army to return to its posts along the border as mandated by the 1974 agreement on “Disengagement of Forces” between the two sides, which ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War, while preventing any presence of Iranian, Lebanese Hezbollah or Shi’ite militias in undefined areas near the border.
After seven-and-a-half years of violence and bloodshed, including the use of chemical weapons, the death toll among Syrian government forces, opposition forces and civilians is estimated by UN and civil rights groups to be more than 500,000. As of December 2017, approximately 13.1 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria, with 6.3 million people displaced internally, and an additional 5.4 million registered refugees, making the Syrian situation among the largest humanitarian crises in the world.
Throughout the war years, Israeli policy remained more or less unchanged. Though some of the Israeli intelligence estimates were wrong (“Assad will be toppled within three weeks,” then- defense minister Ehud Barak predicted in 2011), the policy of non-intervention and not taking sides was consistent, with a few minor exceptions.
The Israeli “red lines” set by Netanyahu and the three defense ministers who served under him during this period – Barak, Moshe Ya’alon and Avigdor Liberman – consisted until a year ago of the following.
• To ensure the peace on the Israeli side of the border by responding to any violation of its sovereignty, deliberate or errant, by the Syrian army or rebel groups.
• To provide humanitarian aid to the villages next to the border, thus ensuring their gratitude and minimizing their incentives to act against Israel. So far, Israel has treated in its hospitals 3,500 victims, many of them children and women, and supplied more than a hundred tons of medical aid, food, clothes and tents worth nearly $100 million, which mostly was financed by contributions from evangelical communities in the US.
• According to foreign reports, the “good border” relations also included a supply of light weapons, ammunition and communication gear to the moderate, national-secular rebels groups near the border. In return, according to these reports, Israel, gleaned good intelligence on what was happening in Syria and beyond.
• To secure the safety of the Syrian Druze community (roughly half a million people), in order to calm down Israel’s own small Druze community (about 120,000), whose members serve in the Israeli armed and security forces and are considered loyal citizens of the Jewish state.
• To crush by military force efforts by Iran and Hezbollah to create a terrorist infrastructure on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
• To conduct air strikes and demolish transfers from Iran via Syria to Hezbollah of sophisticated weapons.
These goals were more or less achieved by a wise policy of the Israeli military and government by employing the tactics of a tightrope dance that combined determination, sensitivity and caution.
Even the arrival of the thousands of members of the Russian contingency and especially its air force and state-of-the-art anti-aircraft batteries didn’t stop Israel from preserving and enhancing its national interests. This was possible by establishing direct “hotlines” between Hmeimim Air Base in northwestern Latakia, where Russian headquarters is located, and the IDF and Israel Air Force headquarters in Tel Aviv.
The occasional talks between Israel and Russian officers helped “deconflicting” and the prevention of dog fights between Israeli and Russian pilots. On top of that, in his rounds of meetings with Putin, it seems that Netanyahu obtained from the Russia leader the license to almost freely operate in Syria as long as targets were not fully identified with the Assad regime.
But a year or so ago, Israel’s red lines were redefined and extended. While all the above interests are still in place, Israel has added a more important goal: to remove the presence of Iranian, Hezbollah and Shi’ite militias as far as possible from the Israeli border.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 July 2018 04:34.
New Observer, “China Identified as Source of Ozone-Destroying CFC-11 Despite Worldwide Ban”, 10 July 2018:
China’s foam-blowing industry has been identified as the source of a dramatic increase in the ozone-destroying CFC-11 chemical, despite a worldwide ban on the production and use of that chemical, a new environmental report has revealed.
An investigation carried out by the UK-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) said that 18 companies in 10 Chinese provinces confirmed their use of CFC-11 for making foams used to insulate buildings and appliances.
“Producers and traders of polyurethane foam blowing agent repeatedly told EIA sources that the majority of China’s foam industry continues to use CFC-11 due to its better quality and lower price.”
Some companies appear to produce CFC-11 themselves. But traders were also supplied by factories in undisclosed locations, the EIA said.
Several companies also referred to the ease with which CFC-11 could be exported in the pre-blended polyol compound used to make the foams, it added.
This comes in the wake of “shocking evidence showing significant and unexplained emissions of the ozone-destroying chemical CFC-11 in the atmosphere”, said EIA.
In May 2018 scientists revealed that atmospheric levels of CFC-11, a potent ozone depleting substance banned since 2010, were significantly higher than expected, leading them to conclude that new illegal production and use of CFC-11 was occurring in East Asia.
Traders and buyers of CFC-11 in China estimated that it is used in the majority of China’s rigid PU foam sector.
EIA’s calculations show that emission estimates associated with the level of use reported by these companies can explain the majority of emissions identified in the atmospheric study. In addition there is significant potential for illegal international trade in CFC-11 containing pre-formulated polyols for foam manufacturing in other countries.
“Several companies acknowledged the illegality of their actions and explained that it was used because it was cheaper and made more effective foams,” the report continued.
THE EIA report concluded by saying that “China has a significant compliance issue to address which requires an immediate clampdown on illegal production and use of CFC-11, along with policy reform and effective intelligence-led enforcement” and that the “scale of the compliance issue is such that it cannot be treated as a series of isolated incidents.”
Reuters, “Japanese PM visits flood disaster zone, new warnings issued”, 11 July 2018:
KUMANO, Japan (Reuters) - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited flood-stricken parts of Japan on Wednesday as the death toll from the worst weather disaster in 36 years reached 176 and health worries increased amid scorching heat and the threat of new floods.
Torrential rain unleashed floods and landslides in western Japan last week, bringing death and destruction in particular to neighborhoods built decades ago near steep slopes.
At least 176 people were killed, the government said, with dozens missing in Japan’s worst weather disaster since 1982.
Abe, who canceled an overseas trip to deal with the disaster, was criticized after a photograph posted on Twitter showed Abe and his defense minister at a party with lawmakers just as the rains intensified.
After observing the damage from a helicopter flying over Okayama, one of the hardest-hit areas, Abe visited a crowded evacuation center. He crouched down on the floor to speak with people, many of them elderly, and asked about their health. He clasped one man’s hands as they spoke.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 09 May 2018 07:11.
He’ll add sanctions as well, which will drive up oil prices to the delight of his Russian colleagues.
“Iran deal: Donald Trump may have put the Middle East on a path to disaster”
ABC, 9 May 2018:
Donald Trump announced US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, imposes sanctions on regime.
Donald Trump’s decision to violate the Iran nuclear deal and reimpose US sanctions will not lead us immediately to disaster. That may come later.
Right now, America is on one side of the argument while its key allies including the UK, Germany and France, stand with Iran. Australia, by the way, also opposed scrapping the deal.
The leaders of the UK, Germany and France, say as a result of the deal “the world is a safer place.” And, while Donald Trump seeks to hurt Iran economically, they are working with Iran to see what they can offer to keep the Iranians in the deal, “including through ensuring the continuing economic benefits to the Iranian people”.
The most immediate effect of the US decision will be the re-imposition of sanctions against Iran’s oil industry and its banking sector which will kick in over several months. The sanctions previously had a crushing effect on Iran’s oil exports and since the nuclear deal was implemented oil exports have more than doubled.
So make no mistake, they will cause a major financial hole which won’t be easy for the Europeans to fill. And, in an increasingly integrated global economy, it’s not easy to remain untouched by US sanctions.
A mini trade war?
Europe’s leaders might convince the US to effectively exempt European companies from the sanctions regime. Or they could pass laws to protect their companies and claw back penalties imposed by the US by imposing tariffs on US goods.
To some, a mini trade war and division among key NATO allies on a crucial global security issue may already count as a disaster. But it could get worse
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Abe with Russian President Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on 26 May 2018 CCby4.0
Recently, Discovery of Oil and Natural Gas in Sakhalin have given Russia a Milking cow in the region. Which was earlier used as Gulags.
Indigenous people of Sakhalin Island
Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is part of a group of Congress members pushing for a Green New Deal. (Charles Krupa / AP Photo)
WWF called for an ambitious global deal for nature and people
‘Life on earth is being wiped out by humans’ 
Puffin numbers in the UK have declined
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