(date: 2024-11-20 08:44:49)
date: 2024-11-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Nvidia, the company that produces chips used in AI, will report its earnings Wednesday after markets close. Susan Schmidt, portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources, explains why investors are paying such close attention. Also on the show today: a slightly weaker labor market for college graduates and a closer look at whether long-haul trucking is really facing a driver shortage.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/all-eyes-on-ai
date: 2024-11-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
President-elect Donald Trump has picked Howard Lutnick to head up the Commerce Department. Lutnick is the CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, co-chair of Trump’s transition team and has been instrumental in raising funds for Trump’s campaign. Plus, we speak with author Keith Ferrazzi about his new book, “Never Lead Alone, 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship,” and how organizations can and should adjust their mindset in this new era of post-pandemic work.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/who-will-lead-the-commerce-department
date: 2024-11-20, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: The northern Plains states could experience blizzard conditions this evening • A brush fire disrupted traffic in Upper Manhattan yesterday • It is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and very windy in the Italian village of Ollolai, which is offering cheap houses to Americans who are unhappy with the results of the 2024 presidential election.
About 600,000 customers are without power in Washington state this morning after an atmospheric river and a rapidly intensifying bomb cyclone converged over the Northwest. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the bomb cyclone’s central pressure was “approaching the record for the lowest central pressure ever recorded in the northeast Pacific Ocean.” (Generally, storms with lower barometric pressure are stronger.) Wind gusts reached nearly 80 mph in some parts of Washington, and even higher in Canada. The storm downed trees and left at least one person dead. Its next targets are Oregon and Northern California, which will begin to experience heavy rain and strong winds today.
Negotiations from COP29 remain painfully slow with just two full days left of the conference, and frustrations are mounting. “All the difficult issues – how much climate finance, who pays it and who can receive it, as well as mitigation and adaptation – remain unresolved,” Stephen Cornelius, WWF’s deputy global climate and energy lead, told Climate Home News. “These issues need political guidance as well as more technical work.” New draft texts on key issues including climate finance are expected at midnight Baku time this evening, and they are supposed to be more concise than previous versions, which had ballooned in length due to numerous options and sub-options. Negotiations are likely to go late into the night. Meanwhile, one early suggestion that the annual international government finance provision finance figure fall between $200 billion and $300 billion has been rejected by a group of large developing countries.
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One piece of good news from the COP29 summit is that a group of 25 countries and the European Union say they will publish new climate plans that include a pledge not to add any new unabated coal power, and push other nations to do the same. The plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), outline each country’s path to curbing its greenhouse gas emissions. New versions are due by February. The signatories on this effort include the U.K., Germany, and Canada, but not big emitters like China, India, or the U.S.
Eight times as many children around the world will be exposed to extreme heat waves by the 2050s (compared to the 2000s) if current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, climate mitigation and adaptation, and economic growth continue, according to Unicef’s State of the World’s Children 2024 report. The greatest increase in extreme heat risk will be in East Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and West and Central Africa. “The consequences for children’s health and well-being and for the stability and resilience of their communities are profound,” the report said. “More children will be at risk of chronic respiratory problems like asthma and cardiovascular diseases. And they will be living in places at greater risk of exposure to droughts, cyclones and floods, where a lack of safe water and food could become the new normal.”
Unicef
Coral that grows on tiles that have been infused with nutrients may be more resistant to extreme climate events, according to researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The theory was that tiles containing nutrients like manganese, zinc, and iron would help boost the corals’ immune systems, giving them a better chance of surviving heat waves and hurricanes. And indeed, “preliminary data collected during more than a year of lab experiments shows that corals that had the early benefit of multivitamins were more resistant and resilient to heat stress,” said Colleen Hansel, a senior scientist and marine chemist at WHOI. Now the team will embed these tiles on an artificial reef in the Virgin Islands so that coral can use them as a foundation and hopefully develop the same kind of resilience seen in the lab.
Across the world, air pollution is the second leading risk factor for death in children under the age of 5.
https://heatmap.news/climate/bomb-cyclone-washington-california
date: 2024-11-20, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: More than 1,900 people in the UK are taking legal action against the manufacturer of Johnson’s baby powder, claiming repeated use caused their cancers. Saudi Arabia’s multi-billion dollar Public Investment Fund — which is behind big projects in real estate, soccer and golf — is under fire for being used to bankroll vanity projects linked to human rights abuses. And a Russian software company has invited a seven-year-old coding prodigy to join its management team, when he’s old enough to take up paid employment.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/baby-powder-maker-taken-to-court
date: 2024-11-20, from: The Lever News
After gargantuan industry donations, the government is ready to go all-in on cryptocurrency — at the risk of consumers and the greater financial system.
https://www.levernews.com/the-crypto-triad-won-the-election/
date: 2024-11-20, from: Heatmap News
Here’s the bad news: The world is almost certainly going to miss the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. The needed emissions cuts are too large and the direction of policy too slow to lead to any other outcome. In the next few decades, global warming will slip past the 1.5 degree mark — and temperatures will keep rising.
What does that mean? What comes next? And how should we feel about that? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Kate Marvel, an associate research scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. We talk about why every 10th of a degree matters in the fight against climate change, the difference between tipping points and destabilizing feedback loops, and how to think about climate change in a disappointing time. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Kate Marvel: I was grouchy about the UN 1.5 degree report because I thought it was fan fiction. I was like, “We’re not going to do this, so why are you bothering to write this report?” And I was totally wrong, because that report landed with the public in a way that I’d never seen before. It was really galvanizing. It really got attention. It really got people incredibly engaged in the solutions. And that’s not something that I could have ever predicted.
And so for me, that is the most important legacy of the 1.5 degree target.
Jesse Jenkins: I think our challenge now is to ensure that, as we see reporting about temperatures exceeding 1.5 this year or over the next 10 years, that those that are concerned about climate change don’t take away a sense of defeat or failure that we have now lost and it’s time to give up, but rather a heightened sense of urgency, right? If we are missing this target, then we need to work even harder to hold the line and avoid 1.6 or 1.7 or, you know, to bend the curve as rapidly as possible.
I think there has been a bit of confusion in the public discourse — the way in which the science is translated out to the community. And I see this in particular in a lot of the young people that I teach, that come into my classes at Princeton, or that I engage with on college campuses, who often come out of my class with a very different sense than when they started. That, oh, actually, we do have agency here. There is something we can do, and that we’re not doomed in some permanent sense.
There are permanent tragedies. There’s losses and things that will … We talked about the coral reefs that we may never get back. But you don’t stop, right? That’s not the end of the line.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
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Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-s2e15-kate-marvel
date: 2024-11-20, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Distant, ancient galaxies are giving scientists more hints that a mysterious force called dark energy may not be what they thought.
Astronomers know that the universe is being pushed apart at an accelerating rate and they have puzzled for decades over what could possibly be speeding everything up. They theorize that a powerful, constant force is at play, one that fits nicely with the main mathematical model that describes how the universe behaves. But they can’t see it and they don’t know where it comes from, so they call it dark energy.
It is so vast it is thought to make up nearly 70% of the universe — while ordinary matter like all the stars and planets and people make up just 5%.
But findings published earlier this year by an international research collaboration of more than 900 scientists from around the globe yielded a major surprise. As the scientists analyzed how galaxies move they found that the force pushing or pulling them around did not seem to be constant. And the same group published a new, broader set of analyses Tuesday that yielded a similar answer.
“I did not think that such a result would happen in my lifetime,” said Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who is part of the collaboration.
Called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, it uses a telescope based in Tucson, Arizona to create a three-dimensional map of the universe’s 11-billion-year history to see how galaxies have clustered throughout time and across space. That gives scientists information about how the universe evolved, and where it might be heading.
The map they are building would not make sense if dark energy were a constant force, as it is theorized. Instead, the energy appears to be changing or weakening over time. If that is indeed the case, it would upend astronomers’ standard cosmological model. It could mean that dark energy is very different than what scientists thought — or that there may be something else altogether going on.
“It’s a time of great excitement, and also some head-scratching and confusion,” said Bhuvnesh Jain, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is not involved with the research.
The collaboration’s latest finding points to a possible explanation from an older theory: that across billions of years of cosmic history, the universe expanded and galaxies clustered as Einstein’s general relativity predicted.
The new findings aren’t definitive. Astronomers say they need more data to overturn a theory that seemed to fit together so well. They hope observations from other telescopes and new analyses of the new data over the next few years will determine whether the current view of dark energy stands or falls.
“The significance of this result right now is tantalizing,” said Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmouth College who is not involved with the research, “but it’s not like a gold-plated measurement.”
There’s a lot riding on the answer. Because dark energy is the biggest component of the universe, its behavior determines the universe’s fate, explained David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation. If dark energy is constant, the universe will continue to expand, forever getting colder and emptier. If it’s growing in strength, the universe will expand so speedily that it’ll destroy itself in what astronomers call the Big Rip.
“Not to panic. If this is what’s going on, it won’t happen for billions of years,” he said. “But we’d like to know about it.”
date: 2024-11-20, from: VOA News USA
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week visited the Philippines, where he met with its president and his defense counterpart to highlight the expansion and modernization of two countries’ alliance in just a few short years. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb has more.
date: 2024-11-20, from: VOA News USA
SEATTLE — A major storm swept across the northwest U.S. Tuesday evening, battering the region with strong winds and rain and causing widespread power outages and downed trees that killed at least one person.
The Weather Prediction Center issued excessive rainfall risks through Friday and hurricane-force wind warnings were in effect as the strongest atmospheric river — a large plume of moisture — that California and the Pacific Northwest has seen this season, overwhelms the region. The storm system is considered a “ bomb cyclone,” which occurs when a cyclone intensifies rapidly.
Downed trees struck homes and littered roads across northwest Washington state. In Lynnwood, Washington, a woman died Tuesday night when a large tree fell on a homeless encampment, South County Fire said in a statement on X. In Seattle, a tree fell onto a vehicle, temporarily trapping a person inside, the Seattle Fire Department reported. The agency later said the individual was in stable condition.
“Trees are coming down all over the city & falling onto homes,” the fire department in Bellevue, about 16 kilometers east of Seattle, posted on the social platform X. “If you can, go to the lowest floor and stay away from windows. Do not go outside if you can avoid it.”
Early Wednesday, over 600,000 houses in Washington State were reported to be without power on poweroutage.us. But the number of outage reports fluctuated wildly throughout the evening likely due in part to several weather and utility agencies struggling to report information on the storm because of internet outages and other technical problems. It wasn’t clear if that figure was accurate. More than 15,000 had lost power in Oregon and nearly 19,000 in California.
As of 8 p.m., the peak wind speed was in Canadian waters, where gusts of 163 kph were reported off the coast of Vancouver Island, according to the National Weather Service in Seattle. Along the Oregon coast, there were wind gusts as high as 127 kph Tuesday evening, according to the National Weather Service in Medford, Oregon, while wind speed of 124 kph was recorded at Mount Rainier in Washington.
Winds were expected to increase in western Washington throughout the evening, the weather service said.
The national Weather Service warned people on the West Coast about the danger of trees during high winds, posting on X, “Stay safe by avoiding exterior rooms and windows and by using caution when driving.”
In northern California, flood and high wind watches were in effect, with up to 20 centimeters of rain predicted for parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, North Coast and Sacramento Valley. Dangerous flash flooding, rockslides and debris flows were expected, according to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center.
A winter storm watch was issued for the northern Sierra Nevada above 1,066 meters of elevation, where 28 centimeters of snow was possible over two days. Wind gusts could top 120 kph in mountain areas, forecasters said.
The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for parts of southwestern Oregon through Friday evening, while rough winds and seas halted a ferry route in northwestern Washington between Port Townsend and Coupeville.
A blizzard warning was issued for the majority of the Cascades in Washington, including Mount Rainier National Park, starting Tuesday afternoon, with up to a20 centimeters of snow and wind gusts up to 97 kph, according to the weather service in Seattle. Travel across passes could be difficult if not impossible.
date: 2024-11-20, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed a “sanctuary city” ordinance to protect immigrants living in the city, a policy that would prohibit the use of city resources and personnel to carry out federal immigration enforcement.
The move by the Southern California city, the second most populated city in the U.S. after New York City, follows President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.
The ordinance codifies the protection of migrants in municipal law. Council member Paul Krekorian said the measure addresses “the need to ensure that our immigrant community here in Los Angeles understands that we understand their fear.”
Pro-immigrant protesters spoke on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall before the vote, holding up signs saying, “Los Angeles Sanctuary City Now!” They chanted in Spanish “What do we want? Sanctuary. When do we want it? Now.”
The city is home to 1.3 million migrants, council members said, without specifying how many entered the country legally.
“We are extremely concerned, given that this is a city where about a third of the population is immigrants,” Shiu-Ming Cheer said at the rally. She is deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigration Policy Center.
People were “afraid that the National Guard or other people are going to be forced to execute Trump’s mass deportation plans,” she said. “But, you know, we’re also organized.”
Eleven states have, to varying degrees, taken steps toward reducing cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, according to the non-profit Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Trump, winner of the Nov. 5 election, takes office on Jan. 20.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
date: 2024-11-20, from: VOA News USA
NEWLAND, N.C. — The Cartner family had known since last year that one of their farm’s Christmas trees would be headed to the White House this winter.
But then Hurricane Helene struck, unleashing a deadly deluge across western North Carolina, including Avery County, where Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm has stood for decades. Though the farm lost thousands of trees to a mudslide, many more survived, including a 20-foot conical tree that dwarfs most of the others on the sprawling farm.
That one will soon be cut down, lifted by a crane and put on a truck bound for the nation’s capital.
“We wanted to really be an uplifting symbol for the other farmers and other people in western North Carolina that have experienced so many losses,” said Sam Cartner Jr., one of three brothers who owns the farm.
From the back of the farm property, where the White House tree is located, it’s hard to see the extent of Helene’s damage. Countless rows of dark green trees stand in formation, contrasting against the lighter, mossy green shade of the rolling hills. It’s mostly quiet, aside from chirping birds and rustling leaves.
As Cartner ventures back to the front of the property in his SUV, the damage from Helene comes into view. A section of one of the grassy hills looks like it was clawed out to expose the brown earth beneath it — the aftermath of a mudslide that took out between 5,000 to 6,000 trees, Cartner said. Luckily, those trees were smaller and not market-size, meaning it wasn’t an immediate problem for this harvest season, he said.
Culverts and gullies on the property were also washed out from the storm, making immediate access to certain parts of the farm treacherous. It took a few weeks to fill in the dirt roads twisting through the farm, Cartner said, but it could have been much worse.
“We’re looking forward to a relatively normal harvest,” Cartner said. “Others will have a much harder time.”
The biggest challenge for Christmas tree farmers across western North Carolina has been fixing infrastructure on their property, including roads, said Jennifer Greene, North Carolina Christmas Tree Association executive director. Despite tree losses on some farms, Greene said farmers across the region — who harvest between 4-5 million Christmas trees annually — are persevering. She doesn’t anticipate Helene’s damage drastically affecting this harvest season, but it’s still uncertain how the devastation will affect future seasons.
“They’re resourceful, and you know, so they’re going to find a way, you know, to make it happen,” Greene said of the area’s Christmas tree farmers. “I mean, they have to.”
From a small farm to sprawling acres of Christmas trees
Cartner’s parents, Sam and Margaret Cartner, founded the farm in 1959, where they grew Fraser firs, a tree species indigenous to the Appalachians. They later passed the farm on to Cartner Jr. and his two brothers.
The farm started off small, raising cows, cabbage and beans alongside the Fraser firs, Cartner said. The family initially planted their trees on the steepest field because they didn’t want to use up their best land for them, Cartner said.
Now, Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm has grown to about 500 planted acres of land. Most of the farm’s business is selling wholesale to independent garden centers and stores around the country.
Their staffing operation is also much larger, as the farm employs temporary workers from Mexico to continue the year-round duties of maintaining the land, such as trimming trees. The task in recent days has been loading trees of various sizes into trailers ready to ship.
“We say we’ve touched a tree over 100 times by the time it gets to the consumer, and that’s all manual labor,” Cartner said.
Selecting the right tree for the White House
All of that work led to Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm being named the 2024 grand champion at the National Christmas Tree Association’s contest. Winning the competition traditionally means the champion will supply the White House’s official Christmas tree that year.
The visit to Cartner’s Christmas Tree Farm by White House staff was initially delayed because of damaged roads, Greene said. When the staff made their selection in late October, they adorned their tree of choice with a red, white and blue ribbon that was larger than a basketball, Cartner said.
The selected tree is about 25 years old and weighs between 180 to 230 kilograms — so heavy that a crane will be brought in to bring the tree to its transport truck ahead of its travels to Washington. Its “wonderful verdant color” and short limbs were just a few reasons Cartner listed off that may have drawn White House staff to the tree, in addition to meeting certain size requirements for display.
Cartner and his family will present the tree to first lady Jill Biden in front of the White House. Then, Cartner said they plan to return in December to see it decorated in the White House’s Blue Room.
Cartner’s tree represents hope for western North Carolina
While the buzz about the White House Christmas tree has been exciting, Cartner said he will be “glad to have all this behind us.” It’s been a tough year because of Helene, and harvest season is already difficult enough as is, he said.
“You’ve got to cut and ship that number of trees in two to three weeks, you put a hurricane on top of that, White House tree and all the activities, it gets almost overwhelming,” he said.
And work has already begun for next year. The farm has some obstacles to overcome, including finding places to buy seedlings after Helene devastated some greenhouses. There’s also paperwork to fill out for workers to return to the farm next season, as well as several orders to make for fertilizer and insecticide.
It’s a large-scale operation that has come a long way from when Cartner’s parents started it. While his parents wouldn’t have liked all the attention the farm has received, Cartner said they would be proud that they were representing western North Carolina during a time of hardship for many after Helene.
“They would want this tree to represent the faith, and hope, and love, and joy and family and generosity, all those good things of mankind that we need to stop and recognize,” he said.
date: 2024-11-20, from: VOA News USA
Back in May, former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to suppress damaging information ahead of his 2016 election. His sentencing was delayed until after the election, but now that he is president-elect, what happens next is less clear. Tina Trinh reports.
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-sentencing-in-hush-money-case-remains-uncertain/7870213.html
date: 2024-11-20, from: Market Place
Blackstone just bought a majority stake in Jersey Mike’s, a sub shop with 3,000 locations. Surprised? Don’t be. Since the pandemic started, private equity has been gobbling up restaurants, especially fast-casual ones. But struggling chains and sit-down establishments can also be attractive investments. We’ll chew on why. Also in this episode: Homebuilders are cautiously optimistic and central banks around the globe are nervous about a flare-up of inflation.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace/private-equitys-appetite-for-restaurants
date: 2024-11-20, from: Market Place, Make me Smart
Today we’re talking about American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States is a uniquely virtuous nation and a “shining city on a hill.” It’s a belief that’s long shaped how the U.S. acts on the global stage and how Americans see themselves, the economy and democracy. In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, many Americans are questioning the idea of exceptionalism.
Journalist Suzy Hansen challenges the notion of American exceptionalism in her book “Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World.” On the show today, she explains where the idea of American exceptionalism comes from, how it has shaped today’s world, and why many Americans are disillusioned with it. Plus, is a new version of national pride the answer to the pitfalls of American exceptionalism?
Then, we’ll get into the creative ways the European Union is preparing for President-elect Donald Trump’s promised tariffs. Plus, perspectives from an American abroad and thoughts on mandatory national service.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
We love to hear from you. Email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart/the-myth-america-exported-to-the-world
date: 2024-11-19, from: The Lever News
Trump says he will nominate the TV doctor, who has been paid to push Medicare privatization while investing in health care giants.
https://www.levernews.com/dr-oz-can-now-pull-off-his-medicare-privatization-scheme-2/
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
New Orleans, Louisiana — The teaching of America’s racial history is dividing voters as state governments and federal judges weigh in on what is known as critical race theory.
“What we are seeing is that America is having a very public argument about how to discuss race in our country,” explained Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks. “It is a conversation about how we talk about the racist incidents in our past but also about how the past continues to shape inequalities in the present.
“But what makes the topic especially charged,” he added, “is that this is a debate that has reached our children and their classrooms.”
Banks says part of the issue is disagreement over an approach to the subject known as critical race theory.
Liberals largely see it as a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, while conservatives view it as a divisive discourse aimed at shaming white Americans for past atrocities while further dividing the country’s racial groups.
“I have no problem with the teaching of history,” explained Cody Clark, a Republican voter from Denton, Texas. “But I don’t like the idea of teachers telling our children that some of them are privileged and some of them are oppressed. I think that just passes our divisions to the next generation.”
Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry this year signed an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, making the Pelican State the 18th in the country to limit or ban the subject.
Public school teachers and civil rights attorneys are responding. Civil rights attorneys in Little Rock are arguing before a federal judge that an Arkansas law banning critical race theory in schools violates the U.S. Constitution.
Louisiana public school teacher Lauren Jewett calls the bans misguided.
“I think it’s laughable and insulting in the same breath,” she told VOA. “K-12 teachers don’t teach critical race theory. It’s not in the state standards or our curricula and, to be honest, we don’t even have enough time to eat our lunches or meet all our students’ needs, let alone create new material.”
What is critical race theory?
While Jewett says laws banning critical race theory in public schools are political stunts, she also calls accurate accounts of American history essential.
“Our country has many uncomfortable and violent truths such as slavery, colonization, segregation, and mass incarceration,” she said. “It is important for our students to understand why things in the current day are the way they are and how history informs that. But that is not critical race theory.”
To understand what critical race theory is, Stanford Law professor Banks says you need to go back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
“The decision said that racial segregation of our public schools was unconstitutional,” he told VOA, “but more than a decade later, civil rights leaders noticed nothing had changed. Black students were still going to different schools of a lower quality than their white peers.”
Banks says critical race theory was developed to help understand why — even when Americans passed laws to create equality — inequality seemed to prevail.
Civil rights lawyers including Derrick Bell, whose thought was vital to the development of critical race theory, concluded that racial bias is inherent in Western society’s legal and social institutions, as the race with the most political power had material reasons to protect that power at the expense of other races.
Well-developed among legal scholars in the 1970s, the theory was largely unknown to the public.
“Critical race theory was so obscure it wasn’t even something taught at most law schools,” Banks says. “It wasn’t in practice in corporate law or even civil rights law, but more like a framework or approach some academics might use to understand race-based issues.
“But that all changed after George Floyd was killed.”
Bogeyman in the mainstream
Banks says critical race theory grew to prominence largely as the target of Republican reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement that rose from the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minnesota.
Critical race theory “was a good target because it embodies three things that tend to give many Americans a lot of anxiety,” Banks said. The idea that “being critical of this country isn’t considered part of ‘the American spirit;’ [that] we have strains of anti-intellectuals that make theories repulsive; and we don’t feel comfortable talking about our racist past as if it’s unresolved.”
A 2023 poll by the Black Education Research Center at Columbia University found that 85% of respondents agreed that public school students should learn about the history of racism and slavery in the United States and its impact on events today.
That consensus evaporates when it comes to the government’s role in righting past wrongs.
“Of course, I think students should be learning about how our government has been prejudiced in the past in dealing with minorities through policies like slavery or not allowing mixed marriages,” explained Rebecca Urrutia, a Republican voter in Tolland, Connecticut. “I also think we need to teach about revisiting our laws to change any that are still unfair today.
“But I don’t think it makes sense to be teaching things like critical race theory to our kids,” she added. “If teachers are trying to convince white students that they have an inherent tendency toward privilege and discrimination against Black people, then I think this perpetuates the very cycle they claim they are trying to escape. Instead, teach our true history and our progress so we can learn from our mistakes and successes.”
Some Democratic voters view attacks on critical race theory as part of an effort to discredit movements that would promote the interests of minorities in the United States.
“They’re trying to turn critical race theory into a political bogeyman, and the result is getting closer and closer to censorship,” says California Democrat Evante Daniels.
“These anti-CRT laws are so unclear that schools become unsure what they can and can’t teach. Are LGBTQ clubs and ethnic studies okay? How about culturally relevant teaching? What happens when teachers are afraid to effectively teach about our past because they don’t know if they’re breaking a purposely ambiguous law?”
Banks of Stanford Law has similar fears.
“I actually understand if a parent has a concern about their second grader learning about things like white privilege,” he said. “That’s a valid concern. But if a teacher doesn’t know what is and isn’t allowed, they operate from fear and leave important parts of lessons out. The result, unfortunately for our kids and our country, is an impoverished education.”
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
CHEYENNE, Wyoming — A state judge on Monday struck down Wyoming’s overall ban on abortion and its first-in-the-nation explicit prohibition on the use of medication to end pregnancy.
Since 2022, Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens has ruled consistently three times to block the laws while they were disputed in court.
The decision marks another victory for abortion rights advocates after voters in seven states passed measures in support of access.
One Wyoming law that Owens said violated women’s rights under the state constitution bans abortion except to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases involving rape and incest. The other made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, though other states have instituted de facto bans on the medication by broadly prohibiting abortion.
The laws were challenged by four women, including two obstetricians, and two nonprofit organizations. One of the groups, Wellspring Health Access, opened as the state’s first full-service abortion clinic in years in April 2023 following an arson attack in 2022.
“This is a wonderful day for the citizens of Wyoming — and women everywhere who should have control over their own bodies,” Wellspring Health Access President Julie Burkhart said in a statement.
The recent elections saw voters in Missouri clear the way to undo one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans in a series of victories for abortion rights advocates. Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota, meanwhile, defeated similar constitutional amendments, leaving bans in place.
Abortion rights amendments also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Nevada voters also approved an amendment in support of abortion rights, but they’ll need to pass it again in 2026 for it to take effect. Another that bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy outcomes” prevailed in New York.
The abortion landscape underwent a seismic shift in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that ended a nationwide right to abortion and cleared the way for bans to take effect in most Republican-controlled states.
Currently, 13 states are enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, and four have bans that kick in at or about six weeks into pregnancy — often before women realize they’re pregnant.
Nearly every ban has been challenged with a lawsuit. Courts have blocked enforcement of some restrictions, including bans throughout pregnancy in Utah and Wyoming. Judges struck down bans in Georgia and North Dakota in September 2024. Georgia’s Supreme Court ruled the next month that the ban there can be enforced while it considers the case.
In the Wyoming case, the women and nonprofits who challenged the laws argued that the bans stood to harm their health, well-being and livelihoods, claims disputed by attorneys for the state. They also argued the bans violated a 2012 state constitutional amendment saying competent Wyoming residents have a right to make their own health care decisions.
As she had done with previous rulings, Owens found merit in both arguments. The abortion bans “will undermine the integrity of the medical profession by hamstringing the ability of physicians to provide evidence-based medicine to their patients,” Owens ruled.
The abortion laws impede the fundamental right of women to make health care decisions for an entire class of people — those who are pregnant — in violation of the constitutional amendment, Owens ruled.
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced late Tuesday his selection of Linda McMahon as his nominee to lead the Department of Education.
McMahon served as the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s previous term in office, and was well known for her decades-long role in helping lead World Wrestling Entertainment.
“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump said in a statement. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”
Earlier Tuesday, Trump nominated Wall Street financier Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary in his new administration.
The 63-year-old billionaire is co-chair of Trump’s transition team, helping to consider and vet numerous people to assume top-level government jobs after Trump takes office on January 20. Lutnick has been an outspoken Trump supporter in recent months.
The CEO and chairman of the Cantor Fitzgerald global financial services firm, Lutnick was reported to be in contention to become Treasury secretary, another top job Trump has yet to fill. But Trump associates say Lutnick fell out of favor for the Treasury job amid conflicts with another leading candidate, investor Scott Bessent.
If confirmed by the Senate, Lutnick could play a leading role in implementing the president’s economic and trade policies.
Trump has proposed widespread increases in tariffs on imported goods, an effort to boost American manufacturing of the same products but one that in the near term threatens to increase prices for American consumers and disrupt the global economy.
The Commerce Department oversees an array of federal business policies, including on semiconductors, cybersecurity and patents, and helps promote new businesses and economic growth in the United States, the world’s biggest economy.
Lutnick has donated to Democrats and Republicans in the past. He also once appeared on Trump’s NBC reality TV show “The Apprentice” before Trump was first elected president in 2016.
The Cantor Fitzgerald firm that Lutnick heads lost more employees — 658 out of 960 — than any other business in the September 11, 2001, al-Qaida terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Another 46 contractors and visitors who were in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices that day were killed when the towers collapsed.
Lutnick’s brother Gary was among those killed when hijackers flew commercial jetliners into the skyscrapers, hitting the North Tower just below where Cantor Fitzgerald occupied floors 101 to 105. Howard Lutnick would have been there as well but was taking his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten.
Back at the site, Lutnick survived the collapse of the South Tower by taking cover under a nearby car. He later created the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund to assist families of victims of the attacks and natural disasters.
On Tuesday, Trump also named Dr. Mehmet Oz, a longtime television show host, as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees the government’s two key health insurance programs for older Americans and impoverished people. Trump backed Oz’s failed attempt to win a Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022.
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
California’s public health department reported a possible case of bird flu in a child with mild respiratory symptoms on Tuesday, but said there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus and that the child’s family members tested negative.
California officials said they have sent test specimens from the child to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for confirmation.
A CDC spokesperson said the agency is aware of the presumptive positive case of H5 avian influenza, is collaborating with the state’s investigation, and will provide further updates promptly. The agency has said the risk to the general public remains low.
Although human infections in the United States have been rare, bird flu has infected 53 people since April, according to the CDC, most recently a person in Oregon last week tied to a bird flu outbreak in a commercial poultry operation in the state.
In Canada, officials earlier this month reported that a teen infected with bird flu in British Columbia was in critical condition.
The child in California was in daycare with mild symptoms before the illness was reported, the state said.
Local health officials have contacted potentially exposed caregivers and families to check for symptoms and offer preventive treatment and testing if they become symptomatic.
The child and all close family members have been treated with preventive medication, the state said. The child had no known contact with an infected animal, but public health experts are investigating possible exposure to wild birds.
“It’s natural for people to be concerned, and we want to reinforce for parents, caregivers and families that based on the information and data we have, we don’t think the child was infectious,” said California health department director Dr. Tomas Aragon, adding, “and no human-to-human spread of bird flu has been documented in any country for more than 15 years.”
Most U.S. bird flu cases, including 26 in California, have occurred among farm workers working with poultry or dairy cows that were infected with the virus.
Because bird flu viruses can mutate and gain the ability to spread more easily between people, California public health officials said they are monitoring animal and human infections carefully.
The state urged residents to avoid contact with sick or dead wild birds and renewed the warning against consuming raw milk or raw milk products, which have not undergone pasteurization to inactivate the bird flu virus and other harmful pathogens.
https://www.voanews.com/a/california-reports-possible-bird-flu-case-in-child/7869685.html
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — New York prosecutors oppose any effort to dismiss President-elect Donald Trump’s hush money conviction, but they expressed some openness Tuesday to delaying sentencing until after his impending second term.
In a court filing Tuesday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said Trump’s forthcoming presidency isn’t grounds for dropping a case that was already tried. But “given the need to balance competing constitutional interests,” prosecutors said, “consideration must be given” to potentially freezing the case until after he’s out of office.
The former and future president was convicted in May of falsifying business records to cover up a scheme to influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to suppress a story of extramarital sex. Trump denies the allegations.
His sentencing had been set for November 26. But after Trump’s election win this month, his lawyers urged Judge Juan M. Merchan to throw out the case. They wrote that it must be scrapped “to facilitate the orderly transition of executive power — and in the interests of justice.”
Merchan gave prosecutors until Tuesday to weigh in on how to proceed.
VOA’s Kim Lewis spoke with Claire Finkelstein, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, about Trump’s case. Finkelstein said a suspended sentence for Trump “would not hamper” his ability “to carry out his constitutional duties as president.” After his term is finished, Finkelstein said, Trump could then serve his time.
A sentence for a president, the professor said, would only be an issue “if that sentence were to be carried out as president.”
Manhattan prosecutors said Tuesday they “are mindful of the demands and obligations of the presidency” and realize that Trump’s return to the White House “will raise unprecedented legal questions.”
“We also deeply respect the fundamental role of the jury in our constitutional system,” they said.
Watch related video by Tina Trinh:
No decision has been made, and Merchan has not said when he will rule. Still, Trump spokesperson and incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung cast Tuesday’s filing from prosecutors as “a total and definitive victory for President Trump” in a case that he has long deplored as a “witch hunt.”
“President Trump’s legal team is moving to get it dismissed once and for all,” Cheung said in a statement.
A dismissal would erase Trump’s historic conviction, sparing him the cloud of a criminal record as well as a possible prison sentence.
Merchan could also decide to delay the case for some other length of time, wait until a federal appeals court rules on Trump’s parallel effort to get the case moved out of state court or choose some other option.
Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels to suppress her claim that they had sex a decade earlier. The payment was made shortly before the 2016 election.
Trump says they did not have sex and denies any wrongdoing.
https://www.voanews.com/a/prosecutors-oppose-dismissing-trump-s-hush-money-conviction/7869671.html
date: 2024-11-19, from: Heatmap News
Donald Trump first took the office of the president in January 2017, having called climate change a Chinese-invented hoax and promising to “end the war on coal.” He quickly went to work reversing the climate policy of the previous administration, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and tossing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which restricted greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. He opened up public lands for oil and gas development and jacked up tariffs on solar panels. His budgets continually called for slashing energy research and development done by the federal government’s national laboratories.
And yet emissions fell. In 2016, U.S. annual emissions from industry and energy were 5.25 billion tonnes. In 2021, after Trump left office and in spite of all his many major policy reversals, they were 5.03 billion, more than 4% lower than when he started.
Can it happen again? Trump is returning to Washington amidst a vastly different energy, economic, and climate moment. To meet even looser versions of international climate goals (the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit set in Paris is now essentially dead) requires drastic emissions cuts, beyond the business-as-usual reductions Trump oversaw in his first four years in office. Even those passive cuts may be harder to come by this time around, however, as the dirtiest fuels now make up a smaller portion of the energy mix and electricity demand looks to grow quickly for the first time in decades.
One reason for the steady reductions during Trump’s first term was that the “war on coal” continued apace, driven as much by market forces as anything else. Buoyed by the availability of natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables and depressed by the mounting costs of maintaining aging plants and directed activism against coal investment, plants shut down by the thousands of megawatts every year of Trump’s presidency.
“You have Trump promising to bring back coal: Not only do emissions continue to decline over the course of the Trump administration, on autopilot — to some degree, coal plants close faster in the Trump administration than the Obama administration,” Alex Trembath, deputy director of the energy-focused environmental group The Breakthrough Institute, told me, though he added: “These are secular trends in the short term that the presidency does not have a lot of influence over.”
While Trump has promised to aggressively pursue more drilling and fracking for oil and gas — and nominated an oil-and-gas state governor and a fracking executive to be his Secretaries of the Interior and Energy, respectively — there has been little to no talk of coal this time around. That’s not for lack of specificity. When Trump announced Chris Wright’s nomination to be Secretary of Energy, he mentioned nuclear, solar, geothermal, oil, and gas by name. When Burgum was announced, there were references to “liquid gold” and “ALL” forms of energy.
The coal industry sees hope in the new Trump administration, but its
savior from senescence may be rising demand for electricity as much as
public policy.
Even as the occupant of the White House changed in 2017, one thing that did not change was the continued slow growth in electricity demand. For about the first 20 years of this century, electricity load growth averaged about half a percent a year, including from 2017 to 2021. This made coal-to-gas switching easier to pull off.
“There was effectively no load growth — not just in those four years, from effectively 2008 to 2022,” Dennis Wamstad, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions stopped meaningfully rising in the early part of this century and finally peaked in 2009, according to Global Carbon Budget and Our World In Data, thanks to slow load growth, the recession, and the ascendance of natural gas in electricity generation. With next-to-no demand growth, utilities and energy companies could afford to retire their least efficient plants — and indeed, “declines in coal generation appear to be the largest driver of power sector emissions reductions” during the first Trump term, John Bistline, an energy analyst at the Electric Power Research Institute, told me in an email.
Since 2020 when electricity use dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a combination of economic growth, electrification of home heating and transportation, new factories, and data centers have boosted five-year energy demand growth projections from 2.6% to 4.7%, a figure that the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies says may still be an underestimate.
This has meant some stalling on emissions reductions from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will flatten out in this year and next “because of small, counteracting changes in emissions from coal, natural gas, and petroleum products.” The EIA has also projected a slowdown in coal plant retirements, with this year on pace for the fewest since 2011. Several utilities and electricity markets have pushed out retirement dates to maintain reliability on the grid in the face of sudden demand spikes, including those in Georgia, Maryland, and possibly Indiana.
The chief financial officer of Duke Energy, which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, told Bloomberg that the company’s plans to convert coal plants to co-fire with natural gas could be scrapped or delayed based on the new Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules. “The pace of the energy transition could change,” he told Bloomberg.
Large coal retirements are still forecast for the rest of the decade, but planned shutdowns have shrunk from 34.2 gigawatts of coal capacity retired over the next three years to 30 gigawatts, a greater than 12% reduction, according to data from S&P Global Commodities Insights.
“American citizens cast their votes for change, a change for the working class, a change that will improve the economy, a change for thoughtful approaches to our energy future,” Emily Arthun, the chief executive officer of the American Coal Council, told me in an e-mailed statement. “Coal is a critical resource needed for the well-being of our economy and the well-being of our citizens.”
Wamstad, the energy analyst, argues that this slowdown is just that: a slowdown, and that the economic case against coal is still overwhelming. “We actually think that structural change is going to continue in the 2020s, regardless of demand growth,” Wamstad told me. “Our findings are more aggressive than EIA or S&P. We expect by end of decade we will have retired another 100,000 megawatts of coal capacity, and by 2030 or 2031 we’ll have retired two-thirds of all capacity.”
Trembath was a little more circumspect about the ability of renewables to meet the lost capacity from shut-down coal, especially if Trump takes an ax to the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting difficulties persist, especially for wind.
“There are quite a few bottlenecks on current trends that will make
sustained decarbonization more difficult than it was [from] 2017 to
2021,” Trembath told me. Load growth will put pressure on renewables and
other non-carbon sources to keep up, while natural gas turbine providers
are
seeing orders double. “You have big announcements about small
and advanced nuclear reactors, but a lot has to happen for new steel in
the ground or Three Mile Island to reopen,” he said, referring to the
splashy
announcement Microsoft and Constellation made about restarting
the 835-megawatt facility. “I think the most likely thing to meet a
bunch of that load growth is natural gas.”
Even that may be a glass-half-full perspective, however.
“We have gas that is cheaper and we have renewables that are clearly cheaper and available now,” Wamstad said. Even if coal plants are kept open for another few years due to higher demand, “that’s a bad thing,” Wamstad said. “That doesn’t really change the direction we’re going — it changes the end date.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct the time
horizon for Grid Strategies’ load growth projections
https://heatmap.news/climate/trump-emissions
date: 2024-11-19, updated: 2024-11-19, from: RAND blog
Climate migration is complex, with many factors influencing why and where people move. While some may relocate due to climate change, most stay put. Effective policies are needed to help people adapt, relocate safely if necessary, and integrate into new communities.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/11/understanding-climate-migration.html
date: 2024-11-19, from: Capital and Main
South Los Angeles pastor is demanding better for herself and others with dementia.
The post Dismissive Doctors, Crowded Clinics and Memory Loss appeared first on .
https://capitalandmain.com/dismissive-doctors-crowded-clinics-and-memory-loss
date: 2024-11-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Nippon Steel is racing to finalize its deal to purchase U.S. Steel before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. But the Biden administration just threw a wrench in that plan, imposing higher tariffs on the Japanese company, despite Nippon’s promise not to import foreign-made steel into the U.S. Also: we discuss market reactions to rising Ukraine-Russia tensions and speak with Rosina Samadani, CEO of Oculogica, a medical device company that has developed a new method of diagnosing concussions.
date: 2024-11-19, from: The Lever News
At a major fossil fuel summit, Chris Wright, Trump’s choice to run the Energy Department, declared, “There Is No Climate Crisis.”
https://www.levernews.com/what-trumps-energy-secretary-pick-says-behind-closed-doors/
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
MANILA, Philippines — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday condemned China’s dangerous actions against the Philippines and renewed a warning that the United States would defend its treaty ally if Filipino forces come under an armed attack in the increasingly volatile waters.
During a visit to the Philippine province of Palawan next to the disputed South China Sea, Austin was asked if the strong U.S. military support to the Philippines would continue under incoming President Donald Trump, including $500 million in new military funding.
Austin expressed the belief that the strong alliance “will transcend” changes of administration.
“We stand with the Philippines, and we condemn dangerous actions by the PRC against lawful Philippine operations in the South China Sea,” he said, using the acronym of China’s official name.
He added: “The behavior of PRC has been concerning. They’ve used dangerous and escalatory measures to enforce their expansive South China Sea maritime claims.”
China has also had recent territorial spats with smaller coastal states, including Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, over the key global trade and security route. Brunei and Taiwan are also involved in long-unresolved disputes.
The outgoing Biden administration has taken steps to strengthen an arc of military alliances across the Indo-Pacific region to better counter China, including in any future confrontation over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, which Beijing has claimed almost in its entirety.
That has dovetailed with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s thrust to strengthen his country’s external defenses, given an alarming escalation of territorial confrontations between Chinese and Filipinos forces in the South China Sea.
There has been intense speculation over how Trump would steer U.S. military engagements in Asia.
Marcos told reporters Tuesday that he congratulated Trump on his presidential election victory in a telephone call and renewed Philippine commitment to continue strengthening its alliance with the U.S.
“I expressed to him our continuing desire to strengthen that relationship between our two countries, which is a relationship that is as deep as can possibly be because it has been for a very long time,” Marcos said.
Austin was speaking during a joint news conference with his Philippine counterpart, Gilberto Teodoro, in the military headquarters in Palawan.
They were given a demonstration of an unmanned vessel the U.S. has funded for use by the Philippine Navy for intelligence-gathering and defense surveillance.
Austin “reaffirmed the ironclad U.S. commitment to the Philippines” and reiterated that the allies’ Mutual Defense Treaty covers both countries’ armed forces, public vessels and aircraft…“anywhere in the South China Sea.”
He also reaffirmed his department’s “commitment to bolstering the Philippines’ defense capabilities and capacity to resist coercion,” according to a joint statement.
Austin and Teodoro signed an agreement on Monday to secure from possible leakages the exchange of highly confidential military intelligence and technology in key weapons the U.S. would provide to Manila.
The Department of National Defense in Manila said the agreement aims to ensure the security of classified military information exchanges and would “allow the Philippines access to higher capabilities and big-ticket items from the United States.”
Neither side provided more details or released a copy of the agreement.
Two Philippine security officials, however, have told The Associated Press that such an agreement, similar to those Washington has signed with other allied countries, would allow the U.S. to provide the Philippines with higher-level intelligence and more sophisticated weapons, including missile systems.
It would also provide the Philippine military access to U.S. satellite and drone surveillance systems with an assurance that such intelligence and details about sophisticated weapons would be kept secure to prevent leaks, the two officials said on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive issue publicly.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said in Beijing on Monday that no military agreement “should target any third party … nor should it undermine regional peace or exacerbate regional tensions.”
date: 2024-11-19, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Ecuador has declared a 60-day state of emergency to battle wildfires • Londoners were treated to rare snow flurries this morning • Storm Sara, having caused deadly flooding in Honduras, is set to drench the Gulf Coast.
The first atmospheric river of the season will slam into the Pacific Northwest this week, bringing heavy rain, strong winds, mountain snow, and possibly major flooding to California and Oregon. A foot of rain or more could fall in Northern California between today and Friday, triggering landslides and bringing “life-threatening impacts” to the 400,000 acres or so left scorched by this summer’s Park Fire. Along the coast, wind gusts could reach 90 mph.
AccuWeather
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, New York City’s drought watch has been upgraded to a drought warning. The warning applies to at least 10 counties across the Hudson Valley. Residents are being encouraged to use less water. If the situation worsens, a drought emergency will be declared, and mandatory water restrictions will be put in place.
Just three days remain in the official schedule for the COP29 climate summit, and hopes are dimming that negotiators will agree on an ambitious new climate finance goal. When it comes to helping developing nations prepare for and adapt to climate change, the main questions are: Who pitches in? How much do they pay? And what counts as climate finance? Consensus has proven difficult to find. “It is deeply disturbing to witness the climate finance negotiations come to a standstill,” Harjeet Singh, global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told The New York Times. “Developed nations continue to display a disturbing level of apathy, viewing vital climate finance as mere investments rather than the lifeline that developing countries urgently need.” The last time the climate talks ended in a stalemate was 2009.
Some 7,000 miles away, in Brazil, G20 leaders are trying to keep up the climate action momentum by publishing a “communique” urging successful negotiations in Baku, backing scaling up finance from billions to trillions, and reiterating support for the push to triple renewables and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements. While the document doesn’t directly mention transitioning away from fossil fuels, it does “fully subscribe” to the outcomes of COP28, where such a landmark commitment was made.
Meanwhile, a new analysis from Carbon Brief suggests that China’s historical carbon emissions have surpassed those of the EU. China’s special envoy for climate change, Liu Zhenmin, told a Shanghai-based newspaper that it would be “impossible” for China to contribute to a new climate finance goal and that developed countries bear that responsibility. Earlier this week the White House confirmed that the U.S. had reached President Biden’s goal of contributing $11 billion a year in international climate finance. This makes the U.S. “the largest bilateral provider of climate finance in the world.”
President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Sean Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation. Duffy is a former Wisconsin congressman and is co-host of the Fox Business show “The Bottom Line.” Last week Trump tapped another Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, as his defense secretary. Trump said Duffy will “maintain and rebuild our Nation’s Infrastructure, and fulfill our Mission of ushering in The Golden Age of Travel, focusing on Safety, Efficiency, and Innovation. Importantly, he will greatly elevate the Travel Experience for all Americans!” As Transportation Secretary, Duffy would oversee the nation’s rail, automotive, aviation, and other transportation sectors. He would likely be tasked with rolling back the Biden administration’s vehicle emissions rules, and “face pressure to ease rules for self-driving cars sought by Tesla and other automakers,” Reuters reported.
The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday approved Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to roll out congestion pricing in the city. The $9 fee to enter lower Manhattan is expected to come into effect in early January. It’s much lower than the $15 charge that Hochul initially proposed – then walked back – earlier this year. It will deliver an estimated $15 billion to help improve the city’s mass transit system. Critics argue the fee will do little to reduce gridlock and could dump traffic and pollution into low-income neighborhoods.
The physics professor who rocked the energy world last year when he claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor has left the University of Rochester, the Wall Street Journal reported. An investigation into the academic, Ranga Dias, revealed he engaged in research misconduct, and the Nature article featuring the superconductor “breakthrough” was subsequently retracted. At the time the paper was published, the Journal reported that such a discovery “could mean longer-lasting batteries, more-efficient power grids, and improved high-speed trains.” The university didn’t confirm the terms of Dias’ departure.
The first onshore wave energy system in the United States has been granted permitting approval. The pilot project will be installed by Eco Wave Power in the Port of Los Angeles, and is expected to be completed early next year.
https://heatmap.news/climate/sean-duffy-trump-transportation
date: 2024-11-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The U.S. government has been fighting with Google for years, accusing it of holding an illegal monopoly. And in one of those antitrust cases, the government wants a harsh fix: a break up of the tech giant’s search business, more specifically, to split off its Chrome browser into a separate company. Plus, how international students play a key role in the finances of U.S. colleges and universities, and why loan applicants are facing a tougher approval process this year.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/could-google-really-get-broken-up
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
RIO DE JANEIRO — With just two months remaining in President Joe Biden’s administration, the United States is ramping up financial, military and diplomatic support for Kyiv’s effort to defend itself against Russian aggression.
At the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Biden and leaders of 20 of the world’s largest economies are meeting, U.S. officials are pushing for the “strongest possible” language on Ukraine, deputy national security adviser Jon Finer told VOA during a briefing Monday.
Western diplomats have renewed their push for stronger criticism on Moscow following Russia’s weekend airstrike, its largest on Ukrainian territory in months.
They’ve also warned that increased Russian war efforts could have a destabilizing effect beyond Europe. Earlier this month, the U.S. and Ukraine announced that North Korea has sent more than 10,000 troops to help Moscow reclaim territory seized by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region.
However, the final leaders’ statement did not include the language the U.S. pushed for. It highlights human suffering and the negative impacts of the war in Ukraine to the global economy without any condemnation to Russia. On Gaza, it called for cease-fire in Gaza and in Lebanon and commitment to the two-state solution, without mentioning Israel’s right to defend itself.
Finer acknowledges that finding a consensus on global conflicts is elusive given the diversity of the G20. In addition to mostly like-minded countries of the G7, the G20 also includes Russia, China and nations of the Global South.
Ever since the G20 summit in Bali in 2022 — held months after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — the global grouping has faced challenges hammering out a response to the conflict.
Long-range missiles authorized
The U.S. has been surging its military assistance to Kyiv. It is also authorizing Ukraine to use American-supplied long-range missiles to strike inside Russia, according to media reports quoting officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Finer declined to confirm but said it is “consistent” with the U.S. approach of tailoring its response to meet developments on the ground to “allow the Ukrainians to continue to defend their territory and their sovereignty.”
On Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that if true, authorization for Kyiv to strike inside Russia with U.S. long-range missiles, “will mark a qualitatively new round of tensions and level of Washington’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict.”
Last week in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to reassure European allies that Biden is “committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20,” the date of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Trump has been critical of using American taxpayer’s money to help Kyiv. Without providing details, Trump often boasts he can swiftly end the war — a statement that many in Europe fear would mean forcing Ukraine to capitulate.
Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he wants a “just end” to the war, and that a swift end “means losses.” On Saturday, he told Ukrainian public radio that under the Trump administration, “the war will end faster.”
“This is their approach, the promise to their country,” he said. “And for them, it is also very important.”
At the State Department, spokesperson Matthew Miller told VOA during Monday’s briefing that the U.S. seeks an end to the war in Ukraine that upholds the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, while ensuring it does not “reward a dictator” intent on seizing land by force.
The sentiment is shared by many European leaders, but they may ultimately be forced to accept a new political reality.
“No government in Europe is going to officially endorse a land-for-peace deal at this point. It’s diplomatically and legally impossible to do that,” said Edward Hunter Christie, a former NATO official and now senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
Behind the scenes, however, some European leaders believe Ukraine’s chances are not strong enough, Christie told VOA, especially if the U.S. under Trump does not continue its assistance to Ukraine.
The U.S. is racing to disburse $20 billion as part of a Biden-driven G7 initiative agreed in June to provide Kyiv with $50 billion in loans. The funds are to be paid back using interest income from Russian assets frozen in Western financial institutions.
A senior administration official briefing reporters in Rio told VOA they are “working full speed” to get the loan disbursed before the end of the year.
Climate change, poverty alleviation
G20 host Brazil has worked to keep the focus of talks away from global conflicts and more on addressing divisions in the ongoing U.N. conference on climate change in Azerbaijan, as well as accelerating efforts to reduce global hunger and poverty — an initiative championed by summit host President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Lula’s approach to resist pressures from the G7 and the rest of the G20 on Ukraine and Gaza reflects Brazil’s strategy of “multi-alignment” in an increasingly fragmented global landscape, said Bruna Santos, director at the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute.
However, “neutrality risks alienating all sides in an increasingly polarized world,” Santos told VOA.
Negotiators in Rio have also been struggling to find consensus on shared language on climate financing, said diplomatic sources who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.
Western nations have been pushing for China and wealthy Middle Eastern countries to join them in contributing to global funds for climate change mitigation — a proposal resisted by Brazil and other member countries of the Global South.
Another Lula proposal, a 2% tax on the super-rich that Brazil says can potentially generate up to $250 billion per year to help the world’s poor, has also met new resistance.
Argentinian right-wing President Javier Milei rejected the proposal after visiting Trump at his Florida residence, the first foreign leader to visit the president-elect.
Milei’s rejection is an example of how as president-elect, Trump has already affected dynamics among world leaders and upended Biden’s international priorities.
The senior administration told VOA that the U.S. was “really supportive” of Lula’s proposal, which was “very much in line” with the fiscal policy Biden has pushed in his term.
In the G20 joint statement released Tuesday, leaders agreed to work to “ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.”
State Department bureau chief Nike Ching contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/cracks-in-g20-consensus-over-ukraine-as-us-ramps-up-aid/7868375.html
date: 2024-11-19, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The G20 group of nations has struck a new agreement to tax the ultra-rich in order to fund sustainable development projects. Plus, UK farmers are protesting in London over plans for a new estate tax on agricultural land worth more than $1.2 million. And how is the Egyptian economy faring with the Suez Canal still not back to full capacity following Houthi attacks?
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Arthur Frommer, whose “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take budget vacations abroad, has died. He was 95.
Frommer died from complications of pneumonia, his daughter Pauline Frommer said Monday.
“My father opened up the world to so many people,” she said. “He believed deeply that travel could be an enlightening activity and one that did not require a big budget.”
Frommer began writing about travel while serving in the U.S. Army in Europe in the 1950s. When a guidebook he wrote for American soldiers overseas sold out, he launched what became one of the travel industry’s best-known brands, self-publishing “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day” in 1957.
“It struck a chord and became an immediate best-seller,” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the book’s debut.
The Frommer’s brand, led today by his daughter Pauline, remains one of the best-known names in the travel industry, with guidebooks to destinations around the world, an influential social media presence, podcasts and a radio show.
Frommer’s philosophy — stay in inns and budget hotels instead of five-star hotels, sightsee on your own using public transportation, eat with locals in small cafes instead of fancy restaurants — changed the way Americans traveled in the mid- to late 20th century. He said budget travel was preferable to luxury travel “because it leads to a more authentic experience.” That message encouraged average people, not just the wealthy, to vacation abroad.
It didn’t hurt that his books hit the market as the rise of jet travel made getting to Europe easier than crossing the Atlantic by ship. The books became so popular that there was a time when you couldn’t visit a place like the Eiffel Tower without spotting Frommer’s guidebooks in the hands of every other American tourist.
Frommer’s advice also became so standard that it’s hard to remember how radical it seemed in the days before discount flights and backpacks. “It was really pioneering stuff,” Tony Wheeler, founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company, said in an interview in 2013. Before Frommer, Wheeler said, you could find guidebooks “that would tell you everything about the church or the temple ruin. But the idea that you wanted to eat somewhere and find a hotel or get from A to B – well, I’ve got a huge amount of respect for Arthur.”
“Arthur did for travel what Consumer Reports did for everything else,” said Pat Carrier, former owner of The Globe Corner, a travel bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The final editions of Frommer’s groundbreaking series were titled “Europe from $95 a Day.” The concept no longer made sense when hotels could not be had for less than $100 a night, so the series was discontinued in 2007. But the Frommer publishing empire did not disappear, despite a series of sales that started when Frommer sold the guidebook company to Simon & Schuster. It was later acquired by Wiley Publishing, which in turn sold it to Google in 2012. Google quietly shut the guidebooks down, but Arthur Frommer — in a David vs. Goliath triumph — got his brand back from Google. In November 2013 with his daughter Pauline, he relaunched the print series with dozens of new guidebook titles.
“I never dreamed at my age I’d be working this hard,” he told the AP at the time, age 84.
Frommer also remained a well-known figure in 21st century travel, opinionated to the end of his career, speaking out on his blog and radio show. He hated mega-cruise ships and railed against travel websites where consumers put up their own reviews, saying they were too easily manipulated with phony postings. And he coined the phrase “Trump Slump” in a widely quoted column that predicted a slump in tourism to the U.S. after Donald Trump was elected president.
Frommer was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, and grew up during the Great Depression in Jefferson City, Missouri, the child of a Polish father and Austrian mother. “My father had one job after another, one company after another that went bankrupt,” he recalled. The family moved to New York when he was a teenager. He worked as an office boy at Newsweek, went to New York University and was drafted upon graduating from Yale Law School in 1953. Because he spoke French and Russian, he was sent to work in Army intelligence at a U.S. base in Germany, where the Cold War was heating up.
His first glimpse of Europe was from the window of a military transport plane. Whenever he had a weekend leave or a three-day pass, he’d hop a train to Paris or hitch a ride to England on an Air Force flight. Eventually he wrote “The GI’s Guide to Traveling in Europe,” and a few weeks before his Army stint was up, he had 5,000 copies printed by a typesetter in a German village. They were priced at 50 cents apiece, distributed by the Army newspaper, Stars & Stripes.
Shortly after he returned to New York to practice law at the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he received a cable from Europe. “The book was sold out, would I arrange a reprint?” he said.
Soon after he spent his month’s vacation from the law firm doing a civilian version of the guide. “In 30 days I went to 15 different cities, getting up at 4 a.m., running up and down the streets, trying to find good cheap hotels and restaurants,” he recalled.
The resulting book, the very first “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day,” was much more than a list. It was written with a wide-eyed wonder that verged on poetry: “Venice is a fantastic dream,” Frommer wrote. “Try to arrive at night when the wonders of the city can steal upon you piecemeal and slow. … Out of the dark, there appear little clusters of candy-striped mooring poles; a gondola approaches with a lighted lantern hung from its prow.”
Eventually Frommer gave up law to write the guides full-time. Daughter Pauline joined him with his first wife, Hope Arthur, on their trips starting in 1965, when she was 4 months old. “They used to joke that the book should be called ‘Europe on Five Diapers a Day,’” Pauline Frommer said.
In the 1960s, when inflation forced Frommer to change the title of the book to “Europe on 5 and 10 Dollars a Day,” he said “it was as if someone had plunged a knife into my head.”
Asked to summarize the impact of his books in a 2017 Associated Press interview, he said that in the 1950s, “most Americans had been taught that foreign travel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially travel to Europe. They were taught that they were going to a war-torn country where it was risky to stay in any hotel other than a five-star hotel. It was risky to go into anything but a top-notch restaurant. … And I knew that all these warnings were a lot of nonsense.”
He added: “We were pioneers in also suggesting that a different type of American should travel, that you didn’t have to be well-heeled.”
To the end of his life, he said he avoided traveling first class. “I fly economy class and I try to experience the same form of travel, the same experience that the average American and the average citizen of the world encounters,” he said.
As Frommer aged, his daughter Pauline gradually became the force behind the company, promoting the brand, managing the business and even writing some of the content based on her own travels. Her relationship with her father was both tender and respectful, and she summed it up this way in a 2012 email to AP: “It’s wonderful to have a working partner whose mind is a steel trap, and who doesn’t just have smarts, but wisdom. His opinions, whether or not you agree with them, come from his social values. He’s a man who puts ethics at the center of his life, and weaves them into everything he does.”
In addition to Pauline, Frommer’s survivors include his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld, and four grandchildren.
https://www.voanews.com/a/arthur-frommer-travel-guide-innovator-has-died-at-95/7868870.html
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
The U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee is set to meet Wednesday to decide whether to release its investigative report on former Representative Matt Gaetz, who was accused of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use before he was picked by President-elect Donald Trump to be attorney general in his new administration.
Several U.S. senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, are demanding that the report be released so they can consider the scope of Gaetz’s background as they undertake their constitutionally mandated role of confirming or rejecting a new president’s Cabinet nominees.
Last Wednesday, Trump named Gaetz, 42, a Republican congressman from Florida for eight years, to become the country’s top law enforcement official. Hours later, Gaetz resigned from Congress, even though he had just been reelected to a fifth term. His resignation ended the House Ethics Committee’s investigation, which had been nearing a conclusion.
But it remained uncertain whether the panel would divulge what conclusions it had reached.
The committee, with five Democrats and five Republicans, had been looking into allegations that Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and used drugs illicitly. Gaetz has denied the allegations. The Justice Department, which Gaetz hopes to lead, investigated the case but declined last year to bring any charges.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who leads the narrow Republican majority in the chamber, has contended that no ethics report should be made public because Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress. However, there have been instances where that has occurred in the past.
Johnson told CNN on Sunday that senators reviewing the Gaetz nomination as the country’s top law enforcement official will “have a vigorous review and vetting process,” but that they did not need to see the House Ethics Committee’s report. Some senators have suggested they could move to subpoena it if it is not turned over to them voluntarily.
Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin on Sunday told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the panel should share its report with the Senate.
“The Senate should have access to that,” Mullin said. “Should it be released to the public or not? That I guess will be part of the negotiations.”
Gaetz is one of several Trump appointees to his Cabinet who do not have the credentials normally seen in candidates for high-level government jobs.
Over the weekend, a lawyer for another Trump choice, Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host named to be defense secretary, revealed that Hegseth several years ago paid an undisclosed amount to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017 to avert the threat of what he viewed as a baseless lawsuit becoming public.
Trump has stood by his Cabinet nominees, refusing to withdraw their nominations. But the controversies surrounding Gaetz, Hegseth and others could threaten their confirmations by the Senate to be in Trump’s Cabinet.
The president-elect also has sought — with little success so far — to get the Senate, in Republican control come January when he takes office, to agree to recess at times so he could name and install his Cabinet members without the need for contentious and time-consuming confirmation hearings.
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday that he is nominating former Wisconsin Representative Sean Duffy, now a Fox News host, to be transportation secretary.
If confirmed, Duffy will oversee aviation, automotive, rail, transit and other transportation policies at the department with about a $110 billion budget as well as significant funding that remains under the Biden administration’s 2021 $1 trillion infrastructure law and EV charging stations.
Trump has vowed to reverse the Biden administration’s vehicle emissions rules. He has said he plans to begin the process of undoing the Biden administration’s stringent emissions regulations finalized earlier this year as soon as he takes office. The rules cut tailpipe emissions limits by 50% from 2026 levels by 2032 and prod automakers to build more EVs.
Duffy will face a number of major transportation issues.
U.S. traffic deaths have fallen this year but still remain sharply above pre-COVID levels. The fatality rate remains higher this year than in any pre-pandemic year since 2008. He will face pressure to ease rules for self-driving cars sought by Tesla and other automakers.
Trump said Duffy will prioritize “Excellence, Competence, Competitiveness and Beauty when rebuilding America’s highways, tunnels, bridges and airports. He will ensure our ports and dams serve our Economy without compromising our National Security.”
Duffy will oversee the continuing enhanced oversight of Boeing. The Federal Aviation Administration, which is part of USDOT, capped production at 38 737 MAX planes per month in January after a door panel missing four key bolts flew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in midair that month, exposing serious safety issues at Boeing.
If confirmed, Duffy will also decide whether to continue the Biden administration’s aviation passenger rights push and whether to approve more airline joint ventures.
He will also be in charge of oversight of companies run by Elon Musk, who has been closely involved in Trump’s transition.
USDOT is investigating Tesla Autopilot, while the FAA has proposed to fine SpaceX for violating space license rules. Musk has called for the resignation of FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker.
A persistent shortage of controllers has delayed flights and, at many facilities, while a series of near miss incidents involving passenger jets have raised safety concerns.
Congress also has been considering significant rail safety reforms in the aftermath of the February 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio.
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
When President-elect Donald Trump takes office for the second time in January, two of his highest-profile supporters will be handed the keys to a new operation designed to slash government spending and improve its performance.
The Department of Government Efficiency, which, despite its name, will likely be an advisory committee rather than an actual department, will be co-chaired by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and wealthy former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy.
The operation’s name, which can be reduced to the acronym DOGE, pronounced like “dohj,” appears to be a product of Musk’s sense of humor. The world’s richest man, Musk has long been a proponent of a fringe cryptocurrency known as Dogecoin.
Musk and Ramaswamy have set July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — as the target date for completing their work, which is expected to reach into all corners of the sprawling U.S. government in search of spending to cut and bureaucracy to eliminate.
Big promises
In a statement announcing the creation of DOGE, Trump said it “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
Musk has publicly speculated that it should be possible to identify some $2 trillion in potential cuts to the federal budget. That would represent nearly one-third of the $6.1 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2023 and could not be accomplished without drastic reductions in government services and programs.
Ramaswamy has indicated that such cuts are precisely what he and Musk will be suggesting. In an appearance on Fox News this Sunday, he was asked if they intend to shut down entire government departments.
He replied, “We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts, among federal contractors and others, who are overbilling the federal government.”
He added, “I think people will be surprised by how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes.”
First since Reagan
Organizations that press for closer oversight of federal spending were cautiously optimistic about the creation of DOGE.
Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, told VOA that DOGE will be “the first significant and comprehensive private sector review of the federal government” since President Ronald Reagan created the Grace Commission, a committee to recommend improvements to government efficiency, in 1982.
How impactful DOGE will ultimately be, Schatz said, will depend on a number of factors outside the commission’s control.
“It all depends on what President Trump does with the recommendations,” Schatz said. “Recommendations have to be implemented, either through executive orders or legislation … but it takes leadership, and it takes really Congress, in many cases, to carry out the recommendations.”
In a statement released after Trump announced the creation of DOGE, Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, praised the idea behind the effort, but warned that it would take bipartisan cooperation to see real changes implemented.
“Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas,” MacGuineas said. “The recommendations will need congressional buy-in, further emphasizing the need for this to be an effort reaching across the aisle and leaving all options on the table to address our fiscal imbalances.”
Massive budget
The commission overseen by Musk and Ramaswamy will be applying its scrutiny to a federal budget in which much of the government’s outlays are dedicated to what is known as “mandatory” spending.
Mandatory spending is made up of payments that the government is obligated by law to make, and in 2023 that accounted for $3.8 trillion of the $6.1 trillion budget.
The largest single line item was $1.3 trillion paid out by Social Security, the federal program that provides income to retirees, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The government spent another $448 billion on income support payments for other Americans, including the unemployed and low-income parents. Spending on Medicare, the health care program for older Americans was $839 billion, while spending on Medicaid, which supports health care for low-income Americans was $616 billion.
A second major category of spending is considered “discretionary.” These are payments that Congress authorizes with each budget cycle, and they accounted for $1.7 trillion in spending in 2023.
Discretionary spending funds the day-to-day operation of the federal government, with nearly half — $805 billion in 2023 — going to the defense budget. The remaining $917 billion funds the major government departments, Congress and the White House, and other functions of the government.
A final major category, interest on the federal debt, exists in a gray area between mandatory and discretionary spending. While the government can theoretically choose not to service its debt, the decision to do so could be catastrophic for the U.S. and global economies. Debt service accounted for $659 billion in spending in 2023.
Structure unclear
It remains unclear exactly how DOGE will be structured. If it is established by an executive order, it could be subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. That law requires certain steps be taken to ensure transparency and has rules regarding conflicts of interest.
The latter could be problematic for Musk, whose various companies have billions of dollars’ worth of contracts with the federal government.
However, if DOGE is constituted as a wholly private enterprise, whose leaders just happen to have the ear of the president, those rules would not apply.
https://www.voanews.com/a/department-of-government-efficiency-faces-a-daunting-task/7868816.html
date: 2024-11-19, from: VOA News USA
dubai/washington — The U.S. special envoy to Sudan traveled to the African country for the first time on Monday to seek an increase in the flow of aid to millions of people in need and an end to a devastating war.
Tom Perriello, who was named Washington’s envoy for Sudan in February, traveled to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, the de facto capital for the army-led government.
It marked the first visit to the country by a senior U.S. official since the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out in April 2023 and the U.S. embassy was evacuated.
“We feel an enormous amount of urgency to end this crisis and to ensure that we can … help to get food and medicine and life-saving support to the 20 million people plus that are in need,” a State Department official said before the trip.
The U.N. says more than 25 million people — half of Sudan’s population — need aid as famine has taken hold in one region and more than 11 million people have fled their homes.
Perriello met with Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as well as humanitarian, government and tribal leaders, a statement by the country’s sovereign council said.
In a meeting the council said was “lengthy, comprehensive, and frank,” the two men discussed ways to deliver humanitarian aid and a political process to end the war.
“The U.S. envoy presented several suggestions which the head of the sovereign council agreed to,” the statement said.
U.S.-mediated talks in Geneva earlier this year failed to achieve progress toward a cease-fire as the army refused to attend, but did secure promises from the warring parties to improve aid access.
The war erupted more than a year ago amid a power struggle between the army and the RSF ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule.
Perriello discussed “the need to cease fighting, enable unhindered humanitarian access, including through localized pauses in the fighting to allow for the delivery of emergency relief supplies, and commit to a civilian government,” a State Department statement said.
While the U.S. would continue to pursue a more comprehensive cease-fire and negotiations, “right now, I think there’s a really key opportunity to build on the expansion of humanitarian aid,” the State Department official said, highlighting the need for relief corridors to the most battle-ravaged areas including al-Fashir, Sennar and parts of the capital Khartoum.
Sudan’s sovereign council said last week it would extend a temporary opening of the Adre border crossing with Chad, which aid agencies say is a vital corridor for food and other supplies to areas of the Darfur and Kordofan regions at risk of famine.
The State Department official said Washington was concerned that the number of foreign actors beginning to engage in the conflict was growing, adding that there has been an increased number of mercenary fighters from the Sahel arriving to fight with the RSF as well as other actors, including Russia and Iran, playing a role with the army.
The visit came as the RSF continues revenge attacks in eastern El Gezira state and a campaign to take over the army’s last Darfur stronghold, al-Fashir.
In a news conference in Nairobi, an RSF representative said they were still open to peace but doubted the army’s willingness.
“They do not listen to any language but that of the rifle, and so we will continue to talk to them in the language they understand,” said Brigadier General Omar Hamdan.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-sudan-envoy-meets-army-chief-burhan-on-first-visit-/7868525.html
date: 2024-11-18, from: Market Place
There are various ways to measure economic inequality. Sure, pandemic-era aid programs helped low-income Americans grow their wealth. And overall, wages have gone up since COVID hit. But did the gap between the wealthiest and poorest shrink? We’ll get into it. Also in this episode: Walmart is expected to report a robust third quarter tomorrow, boosted by e-commerce and affordable prices. Plus, retailers fret over a holiday shopping slowdown and the U.S. dollar grows stronger.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace/a-more-equal-nation
date: 2024-11-18, from: Market Place, Make me Smart
Some critics of President-elect Donald Trump are preparing for the possibility of being prosecuted when he takes office. We’ll discuss Trump’s “retribution” agenda. Then, we’ll get into his pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission. Plus, what a meeting between “Morning Joe” hosts and Trump represents about access to information during the next administration. And, we’ll smile at the woman behind the curtain who inspired the “Wicked” lore.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
We love to hear from you. Email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/make-me-smart/trumps-revenge-agenda
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
The U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee is set to meet Wednesday to decide whether to release its investigative report on former Representative Matt Gaetz, who was accused of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use before he was picked by President-elect Donald Trump to be attorney general in his new administration.
Several U.S. senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, are demanding that the report be released so they can consider the scope of Gaetz’s background as they undertake their constitutionally mandated role of confirming or rejecting a new president’s Cabinet nominees.
Last Wednesday, Trump named Gaetz, 42, a Republican congressman from Florida for eight years, to become the country’s top law enforcement official. Hours later, Gaetz resigned from Congress, even though he had just been reelected to a fifth term. His resignation ended the House Ethics Committee’s investigation, which had been nearing a conclusion.
But it remained uncertain whether the panel would divulge what conclusions it had reached.
The committee, with five Democrats and five Republicans, had been looking into allegations that Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and used drugs illicitly. Gaetz has denied the allegations. The Justice Department, which Gaetz hopes to lead, investigated the case but declined last year to bring any charges.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who leads the narrow Republican majority in the chamber, has contended that no ethics report should be made public because Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress. However, there have been instances where that has occurred in the past.
Johnson told CNN on Sunday that senators reviewing the Gaetz nomination as the country’s top law enforcement official will “have a vigorous review and vetting process,” but that they did not need to see the House Ethics Committee’s report. Some senators have suggested they could move to subpoena it if it is not turned over to them voluntarily.
Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin on Sunday told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the panel should share its report with the Senate.
“The Senate should have access to that,” Mullin said. “Should it be released to the public or not? That I guess will be part of the negotiations.”
Gaetz is one of several Trump appointees to his Cabinet who do not have the credentials normally seen in candidates for high-level government jobs.
Over the weekend, a lawyer for another Trump choice, Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host named to be defense secretary, revealed that Hegseth several years ago paid an undisclosed amount to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017 to avert the threat of what he viewed as a baseless lawsuit becoming public.
Trump has stood by his Cabinet nominees, refusing to withdraw their nominations. But the controversies surrounding Gaetz, Hegseth and others could threaten their confirmations by the Senate to be in Trump’s Cabinet.
The president-elect also has sought — with little success so far — to get the Senate, in Republican control come January when he takes office, to agree to recess at times so he could name and install his Cabinet members without the need for contentious and time-consuming confirmation hearings.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7868504.html
date: 2024-11-18, from: Heatmap News
When the American people elected Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States earlier this month, a large portion of climate world went into a tailspin. In the groggy reckoning of Wednesday morning, MIT Technology Review deemed the outcome a “tragic loss for climate progress;” the next day, a Guardian columnist reminded readers that “Trump has pledged to wage war on planet Earth.” Arielle Samuelson, writing for Heated, reported that given the incoming administration’s history and intentions, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels was “dead” (although to be fair, that has likely been the case for some time).
But to that segment of the population who approach issues of energy, the environment, and climate change from the right, the post-election mood ranged from cautiously optimistic to jubilant. “The biggest thing we’re excited about is the momentum around this next year and the next administration,” Stephen Perkins, a conservative strategist and the chief operating officer of the American Conservation Coalition, told me.
What Trump will or won’t do in office remains an open question (the picture is getting clearer by the day, however, and we’re tracking it closely here at Heatmap). But while Trump 1.0 rolled back more than a hundred environmental rules and regulations and Trump 2.0 could, by one estimate, add enough carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere by 2030 that it would negate all the savings from clean energy over the past five years, many in the conservative climate sphere believe that regulations have hamstrung the clean energy economy and that an “all-of-the-above” approach could help to lower global emissions by transitioning coal-reliant countries to U.S.-produced liquified natural gas, which expels less greenhouse gas and other pollutants when it’s burned.
What is the first priority on the conservative climate wishlist for the Trump administration? Far and away, it’s clearing red tape. Perkins pointed out that one of Elon Musk’s first tweets when it became clear Republicans would take back the White House on election night was the promise that “soon, you will be free to build again.”
“I give it a 99% to 100% chance we’re going to see permitting reform,” Heather Reams, the president of the center-right group Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, told me from her hotel room at COP29.
Nick Loris, the vice president of public policy at C3 Solutions, a nonpartisan public policy group that advocates for free-market solutions to climate, environment, and energy problems, echoed that prediction. “I’m most excited about a renewed and more aggressive push for permitting reform,” he told me, explaining that the election “affords the opportunity for Republicans in both the House and the Senate to come together with even more ambitious plans to reduce red tape in all forms of energy — and I really hope it is for all forms of energy, not just for selected technologies and resources that Republicans tend to like.”
There was also consensus on the value of clearing the path for the export of LNG, which marks one of the more significant ideological breaks of the climate right with the climate left. “I think there’s going to be an immediate push [by the Trump administration] to reduce the pause on liquified natural gas exports,” Loris predicted. (The pause ended in July and the Department of Energy resumed issuing export permits in September, but Trump is expected to expedite the process.) Reams said she expects that during his first 100 days in office, Trump will reverse Biden’s methane emissions fee, which “some considered punitive,” and that she was looking for him to prioritize “protecting fracking, interstate pipelines, [and] exports of crude oil and other petroleum products.” As she explained, “displacing coal or dirtier forms of natural gas with higher life cycle emissions in place of using the U.S. LNG that has lower life cycle emissions” will ultimately help global emissions “go down.” (Others have argued that LNG is far worse over its lifespan than coal.)
Other items on the conservative climate wishlist include reforming regulations governing the mining of critical minerals to ensure a more reliable, less risky schedule for opening new mines and creating a domestic supply chain for the clean energy build-out; accelerating geothermal development and taking the baton from the Biden administration on nuclear energy; and a general streamlining of government programs. “Part of the near-term goal is going to be having an understanding from within the Department of Energy of what’s not working and why isn’t the money flowing out the door in a faster, in a more efficient way?” said Loris of C3 Solutions, citing what he perceived to be the DOE’s lack of urgency on the commercial high-assay, low-enriched uranium program, a key part of establishing a domestic nuclear supply chain.
Spending in the form of clean energy tax credits and incentives presents a thornier problem for the climate right to navigate. Reams told me that all the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act will be “up for grabs” as the Trump administration readies its plan to preserve and extend its 2017 tax cuts, and that each must be defended on its merits. “The Trump tax credits expire at the end of 2025, so if you’re looking at one or the other, that’s really the value proposition: Do you want green tax credits, or do you want $2,000 more in your pocket each year per household?” Reams said. “It’s hard to say you want a tax credit for clean energy without understanding the benefits to your household.” Perkins of the ACC added that he doesn’t object to clean energy investments, per se — “red districts overwhelmingly stand to benefit” from such programs, he said — but rather the concern from the right relates “everything else that gets looped into those bills,” such as opposition to IRA provisions connected to prescription drug prices. No one made any promises against pruning.
On other issues, some Republican climate and energy groups break with the Trump administration entirely. “We are very much going to be pushing back on the extensive and aggressive use of tariffs that might come from this administration, which could not just run counter to the administration’s promise to reduce costs for families and businesses but also stymie the deployment of cleaner energy sources as well,” Loris told me of C3 Solution’s plans.
RepublicEN, an education- and communication-oriented group that positions itself as the “EcoRight” answer to the environmental Left, broke with the incoming administration more completely, publishing a series of tepid blog posts in the election’s aftermath. Bob Inglis, the group’s executive director and a former South Carolina Republican congressman, told me that he believes a “substantial percentage of Trump voters” support climate policies and might serve as a local-level bulwark against any climate-unfriendly policies — if “those constituents are visible and audible to their members of Congress.” He’s optimistic that the Republican Party has largely moved on from its “dark days” of climate denialism, and that the next four years might see more reaching across the aisle in pursuit of a common goal.
Is such a thing even possible in this day and age? Inglis hesitated. “I surely hope so,” he finally said. He believes Republicans can “breathe easier now” that they’ve had such resounding electoral wins. “The water’s coming up here in Charleston,” he added. “Let’s do something about it.”
If there was one hope I heard across the board from conservative proponents of climate action, however, it was this: that there should be more compromise between the parties on the issues they agree are important. “As much as some people in the climate space may view this as a challenging time for bipartisanship, we actually think it is the moment for bipartisanship,” Perkins told me. “We’re going to see some incredible things done over the next four years.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/conservative-climate-trump
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
fergus falls, minnesota — Nearly three years after a couple from India and their two young children froze to death while trying to cross the border from Canada into the U.S., two men went on trial Monday on human smuggling charges, accused of being part of a criminal network that stretched around the world.
Prosecutors say Indian national Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, 29, ran part of the scheme and recruited Steve Shand, 50, of Florida, to shuttle migrants across the border. Both men have pleaded not guilty in federal court in Minnesota. They’re standing trial before U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, with proceedings expected to last about five days. They each face four counts related to human smuggling.
On January 19, 2022, Shand was allegedly waiting in a truck for 11 migrants, including the family of four from the village of Dingucha in Gujarat state. Prosecutors say 39-year-old Jagdish Patel; his wife, Vaishaliben, who was in her mid-30s; the couple’s 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi; and 3-year-old son, Dharmik, died after spending hours wandering fields in blizzard conditions as the wind chill reached minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 38 Celsius).
Prosecutors say when Jagdish Patel’s body was found, he was holding Dharmik, who was wrapped in a blanket.
Before jury selection began Monday morning, defense attorneys objected to prosecutors’ plan to show seven photos of the frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel and his family, including close-up images of the children.
Shand’s attorney, Aaron Morrison, said the heart-wrenching images could cause “extreme prejudice to the jury” and asked for the photos to be removed as evidence.
Prosecutors argued the photos were necessary to show the family was not adequately prepared by Shand and Harshkumar Patel for the frigid conditions.
Tunheim allowed the images to remain evidence.
Patel is a common Indian surname and the victims were not related to Harshkumar Patel. Federal prosecutors say Harshkumar Patel and Shand were part of an operation that scouted clients in India, got them Canadian student visas, arranged transportation and smuggled them into the U.S., mostly through Washington state or Minnesota.
The U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending this Sept. 30. By 2022, the Pew Research Center estimates more than 725,000 Indians were living illegally in the U.S., behind only Mexicans and El Salvadorans.
Harshkumar Patel’s attorney, Thomas Leinenweber, told The Associated Press that his client came to America to escape poverty and build a better life for himself and now “stands unjustly accused of participating in this horrible crime. He has faith in the justice system of his adopted country and believes that the truth will come out at the trial.” Attorneys for Shand did not return messages.
Court documents filed by prosecutors show Patel was in the U.S. illegally after being refused a U.S. visa at least five times, and that he recruited Shand at a casino near their homes in Deltona, Florida, just north of Orlando.
Over a five-week period, court documents say, Patel and Shand often communicated about the bitter cold as they smuggled five groups of Indians over a quiet stretch of border. One night in December 2021, Shand messaged Patel that it was “cold as hell” while waiting to pick up one group, the documents say.
“They going to be alive when they get here?” he allegedly wrote.
During the last trip in January, Shand had messaged Patel, saying: “Make sure everyone is dressed for the blizzard conditions, please,” according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say Shand told investigators that Patel paid him about $25,000 for the five trips.
Jagdish Patel grew up in Dingucha. He and his family lived with his parents. The couple were schoolteachers, according to local news reports.
Satveer Chaudhary is a Minneapolis-based immigration attorney who has helped migrants exploited by motel owners, many of them Gujaratis. He said smugglers and shady business interests promised many migrants an American dream that doesn’t exist when they arrive.
“The promises of the almighty dollar lead many people to take unwarranted risks with their own dignity, and as we’re finding out here, their own lives,” Chaudhary said.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is requesting nearly $100 billion in emergency disaster aid after Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and other natural disasters, telling lawmakers that the money is “urgently needed.”
The letter Monday to House Speaker Mike Johnson comes as lawmakers meet during a lame-duck session to finish key priorities before making way for a new Congress and the incoming Trump administration. Biden said he has met firsthand with those harmed by the storms and he heard what residents and businesses needed from the federal government.
“Additional resources are critical to continue to support these communities,” Biden said.
The largest share of the money, about $40 billion, would go to the main disaster relief fund at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Biden said the fund would face a shortfall this budget year without additional money. He said that would not only affect the agency’s ability to provide lifesaving assistance to survivors, but also would slow recovery efforts from prior disasters.
An additional $24 billion would help farmers that have experienced crop or livestock losses, and $12 billion would go toward community development block grants administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Some $8 billion more would help rebuild and repair highways and bridges in more than 40 states and territories. The administration is also seeking $4 billion for long-term water system upgrades to mitigate future damage from natural disasters. Several other agencies would also receive emergency funds if Congress agrees to the request.
Lawmakers were expecting a hefty number from the administration. Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said Congress will evaluate the request and “we’ll make sure we deliver for the hurricane victims and the people that have suffered from that.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to hear Wednesday from the heads of several of the government agencies that would receive funding through Biden’s request. It’s possible that emergency aid could be attached to any spending bill designed to keep federal agencies operating after current funding expires Dec. 20.
Biden noted that Congress had provided more than $90 billion in aid after Hurricane Katrina nearly two decades ago, and more than $50 billion after Hurricane Sandy in 2013. He urged Congress to take “immediate action.”
“Just as the Congress acted then, it is our sworn duty now to deliver the necessary resources to ensure that everyone in communities reeling from Hurricanes Helene and Milton — and those still recovering from previous disasters — have the Federal resources they need and deserve,” Biden wrote.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
ISANTI, Minn. — The young Buddhist lama sat on a throne near an altar decorated with flowers, fruits and golden statues of the Buddha, watching the celebrations of his 18th birthday in silence, with a faint smile.
Jalue Dorje knew it would be the last big party before he joins a monastery in the Himalayan foothills – thousands of kilometers from his home in a Minneapolis suburb, where he grew up like a typical American teen playing football and listening to rap music.
But this was not an ordinary coming-of-age celebration. It was an enthronement ceremony for an aspiring spiritual leader who from an early age was recognized by the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist leaders as a reincarnated lama.
From the stage, he saw it all: The young women in white long bearded masks who danced, jumping acrobatically and twirling colorful sticks to wish him luck in a tradition reserved for dignitaries. The banging of drums. The procession of hundreds – from children to elderly – who lined up to bow to him and present him with a “khata” – the white Tibetan ceremonial scarves that symbolize auspiciousness.
From a throne reserved for lamas, he smelled the aroma of Tibetan dishes prepared by his mother over sleepless nights. He heard the monks with shaved heads, in maroon and gold robes like his own, chant sacred mantras. Behind them, his shaggy-haired high school football teammates sang “Happy Birthday” before he cut the first slice of cake.
One of his buddies gave him shaker bottles for hydrating during training at the gym; another, a gift card to eat at Chipotle Mexican Grill.
“I was in awe!” Dorje recalled later. “Usually, I’d be at the monk section looking up to whomever was celebrating. But that night it was for me.”
Watching Monday Night Football and memorizing ancient Buddhist prayers
Since the Dalai Lama’s recognition, Dorje has spent much of his life training to become a monk, memorizing sacred scriptures, practicing calligraphy and learning the teachings of Buddha.
After graduation in 2025, he’ll head to northern India to join the Mindrolling Monastery, more than 11,500 kilometers from his home in Columbia Heights.
Following several years of contemplation and ascetism, he hopes to return to America to teach in the Minnesota Buddhist community. His goal is “to become a leader of peace,” following the example of the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi.
“There’s going to be a lot of sacrifice involved,” Dorje said. But he’s not new to sacrifices.
He remembered all the early mornings reciting ancient prayers and memorizing Buddhist scriptures, often rewarded by his dad with Pokémon cards.
“As a child, even on the weekend, you’re like: ‘Why don’t I get to sleep more? Why can’t I get up and watch cartoons like other kids.’ But my dad always told me that it’s like planting a seed,” he said, “and one day it’s going to sprout.”
It all began with the process of identifying a lama, which is based on spiritual signs and visions. Dorje was about four months old when he was identified by Kyabje Trulshik Rinpoche, a venerated master of Tibetan Buddhism and leader of the Nyingma lineage. He was later confirmed by several lamas as the eighth Terchen Taksham Rinpoche — the first one was born in 1655.
After the Dalai Lama recognized him at age 2, Dorje’s parents took him to meet the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism when he visited Wisconsin in 2010.
The Dalai Lama cut a lock of Dorje’s hair in a ceremony and advised his parents to let their son stay in the U.S. to perfect his English before sending him to a monastery.
Dorje is fluent in English and Tibetan. He grew up reading the manga graphic novel series “Buddha,” and is an avid sports fan. He roots for the Timberwolves in basketball, Real Madrid in soccer, and the Atlanta Falcons in football. He even keeps a rookie card of wide receiver Drake London pasted to the back of his phone, which he carried wrapped in his robes during his party.
On the football field, playing as a left guard, his teammates praised his positivity, often reminding them to have fun and keep losses in perspective.
“It’s someone to look up to,” said Griffin Hogg, 20, a former player who took Dorje under his wing. He said they learned from each other and credits Dorje with helping him find his spirituality. “I’m more of a relaxed person after getting to know him and understanding his own journey.”
While Dorje tries to never miss Monday Night Football, he’s always there to help with any event hosted by the local Tibetan community, one of the largest in the United States.
“He has one foot in the normal high school life. And he has one foot in this amazing Tibetan culture that we have in the state of Minnesota,” said Kate Thomas, one of his tutors and the teachings coordinator at Minneapolis’ Bodhicitta Sangha Heart of Enlightenment Institute.
“You can see that he’s comfortable playing a role of sitting on a throne, of participating and being honored as a respected person in his community, as a religious figure. And yet, as soon as he has the opportunity, he wants to go and hang out with his high school buddies,” she said. “That’s testimony to his flexibility, his openness of mind.”
Listening to rap and making Tibetans proud
For years, he has followed the same routine. He wakes up to recite sacred texts and then attends school, followed by football practice. He returns home for tutoring about Tibetan history and Buddhism. Then he might practice calligraphy or run on a treadmill while listening to BossMan Dlow, Rod Wave and other rappers.
Although he was officially enthroned in 2019 in India, an estimated 1,000 people gathered at the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota for his recent ceremony.
“He unites us – Jalue is always here for us,” said Zenden Ugen, 21, a family friend and neighbor who performed Tibetan dances at the event.
“I wish him the best in life because being born and not being able to choose your life must be very hard,” Ugen said. “But he has a responsibility and him being able to take on that responsibility, I’m very inspired by him. I just hope he keeps being who he is.”
Dorje’s proud uncle, Tashi Lama, saw him grow up and become a Buddhist master.
“He’s somebody who’s going to be a leader, who’s going to teach compassion and peace and love and harmony among living beings,” he said about his nephew, often referred to as “Rinpoche” – a Tibetan word that means “precious one.”
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. on Monday imposed sanctions on organizations and firms involved in illegal settlement development in the occupied West Bank, including a well-established decades-old group that has close ties with Israeli leadership.
Treasury sanctioned Amana, the largest organization involved in illegal settlement development in the West Bank, and its subsidiary Binyanei Bar Amana Ltd. Already sanctioned by Britain and Canada, Amana is one of the major funders and supporters of unauthorized settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Peace Now, a settlement tracking group, says its assets are valued at around 600 million Israeli shekels, or about $160 million, and that it has a yearly budget stretching into tens of millions of shekels.
Amana, which is based in the West Bank and has no known connection to the U.S. appliance maker, over the past few years has underwritten loans, signed contracts, bought equipment and funded infrastructure projects for new settlements, according to Peace Now. The settlements, small farming outposts, have become some of the primary drivers of violence and displacement of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Additionally, the State Department imposed diplomatic sanctions on Eyal Hari Yehuda Co., which provides construction logistics to sanctioned groups, as well as company owner Itamar Yehuda Levi. The co-founder of the already sanctioned nonprofit group Hashomer Yosh, Shabtai Koshlevsky, and Israeli citizen Zohar Sabah, who has perpetrated acts of violence on Palestinians, also were hit with sanctions.
The penalties come as settlers in the territory celebrate the incoming Trump administration, believing it will likely take a more favorable approach to the settlements. During his first term, Trump took unprecedented steps to support Israel’s territorial claims, including recognizing Jerusalem as its capital and moving the U.S. Embassy there, and recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.
Treasury’s Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said the U.S. “remains committed to holding accountable those who seek to facilitate these destabilizing activities, which threaten the stability of the West Bank, Israel, and the wider region.”
Among other things, the sanctions deny the people and firms access to any property or financial assets held in the U.S. and prevent U.S. companies and citizens from doing business with them.
In February, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that targets Israeli settlers in the West Bank who have been accused of attacking Palestinians and Israeli peace activists in the occupied territory. That order is used to justify the financial penalties against the companies and men.
In response, Texans for Israel, a Christian nonprofit, Israeli nonprofit Regavim and others in August sued the Biden administration in Amarillo, Texas, over its sanctions against Israeli extremists in the West Bank.
Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer who has spent years campaigning for the sanctions on violent West Bank settlers, said the sanctions on Amana were “an earthquake for the settlement project and especially the shepherds farms.” He called on the U.S. to extend the sanctions now to firebrand Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, also a far-right settler in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet.
Amana’s leadership has appeared at pro-settlement events alongside Cabinet members. Peace Now says the group’s secretary-general, Zeev Hever, was greeted by Smotrich at a June conference where Smotrich laid out his plans for the West Bank.
Violence against Palestinians and their displacement have only picked up since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023. Around 8,000 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank during that time and over 700 killed, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Palestinian health officials.
The Associated Press previously reported that the sanctions measures have had minimal impact, instead emboldening settlers as attacks and land-grabs escalate, according to Palestinians in the West Bank, local rights groups and sanctioned Israelis who spoke to AP. Additionally, Smotrich has previously vowed to intervene on sanctioned settlers’ behalf.
Israel captured the West Bank along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want those territories for their hoped-for future state.
Settlement growth and construction have been promoted by successive Israeli governments stretching back decades, but it has exploded under Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, which has settlers in key Cabinet posts. There are now well over 100 settlements and 500,000 Israeli settlers sprawling across the territory from north to south — a reality, rights groups say, dimming any hopes for an eventual two-state solution.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said “we once again call on the Government of Israel to take action and hold accountable those responsible for or complicit in violence, forced displacement, and the dispossession of private land. The United States will continue to promote accountability for those who further destabilize conditions in the West Bank and support extremist violence in the region.”
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Warsaw — Many in Ukraine see the Biden administration’s decision to allow Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russian territory as a turning point in the war but welcome it with a mix of gratitude and frustration.
“Strikes are not made with words,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address. “The missiles will speak for themselves.”
His tone reflects the high stakes involved in this decision, which comes as Ukraine braces for intensified Russian offensives following the reported deployment of 12,000 North Korean troops to bolster Moscow’s efforts.
Ukrainian officials and analysts see the U.S. authorization as a crucial move, allowing Ukraine to target key military installations in Russia, particularly in the Kursk region, where new threats are emerging. However, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, former Minister of Defense (2019–2020) and adviser to the government, said the delay in granting such permissions has cost Ukraine dearly.
“Ukraine has been asking for this for years, not months,” Zagorodnyuk told VOA. “The administration’s fear of escalation led to an overcautious approach. This reactive, piecemeal strategy — responding to Russian provocations rather than implementing a comprehensive plan — has not brought us closer to resolving the war. Instead, it has allowed Russia to escalate further.”
Critical stage
The decision follows an escalation of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, yet the timing raises questions about the long-term strategy of Western allies.
Mark Voyger, director of the master’s program in Global Management at American University Kyiv, emphasized the operational and psychological importance of the decision. “Operationally, these missiles can target Russian storage facilities, command centers, and even North Korean troops preparing for offensive actions,” Voyger explained.
“Better late than never, the time for inaction and … psychological [self-constraint] due to some presumed fear of escalation is over.” Voyger highlighted the risks of delay. “This decision should have been made earlier to save lives and give Ukraine a stronger hand on the battlefield. The reactive approach only emboldens Russia to escalate further.”
Zagorodnyuk echoed these sentiments, warning that the U.S. policy of incremental aid has hindered Ukraine’s ability to gain the upper hand. “This piecemeal strategy, like doing little steps, step by step, as a reaction [to] some escalation from Russia’s side, is, first of all, escalatory itself. And secondly, [it] is not bringing us to any resolution of the war. Because we [are] essentially supporting Russia escalating the war.”
Russian reaction
Moscow condemned the U.S. decision as an escalation of U.S. involvement in the war and warned of serious consequences.
“If such a decision was really formulated and brought to the attention of the Kyiv regime, then, of course, this is a qualitatively new round of tension and a qualitatively new situation in terms of the involvement of the United States in this conflict,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian media.
Russian state media have amplified narratives accusing the U.S. of directly fueling the conflict, potentially laying the groundwork for further rhetorical or military escalations.
US leadership transition
The approaching U.S. transfer of power adds another layer of uncertainty.
There are fears in Kyiv that Washington’s critical support will be reversed, following President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises to end the war quickly with no clear outline of a strategy.
“Unlike [U.S. President Joe] Biden, Trump immediately announced his ultimate goal to stop the war. The question is — how is he going to do that?” Zagorodnyuk said. While Ukrainians would welcome an end to the war, “some people suggest all kinds of concessions from Ukraine,” which he said, “is not going to stop the war.”
In a VOA interview, Voyger added that the Biden administration’s timing of this decision might reflect concerns about securing support for Ukraine before a potential political shift. “If a new administration pulls back on military aid or restricts Ukraine’s ability to strike, it could significantly weaken Ukraine’s position on the battlefield and at the negotiating table,” he said.
Stopping the war
Both analysts agree that stopping the war needs a robust and proactive Western strategy. This includes providing Ukraine with sufficient long-range missiles, expanding the scope of permissible targets, and ensuring consistent support regardless of political changes in Washington.
“The West needs to empower Ukraine to not just defend itself, but to achieve the operational success that forces Russia to reconsider its aggression,” Voyger said.
Zagorodnyuk agrees the only way to force Russian President Vladimir Putin into serious negotiations is to put him in a position where he risks losing not just on the battlefield but also his hold on power. “The ideal situation for Ukraine would be that NATO allies, and first of all the United States, would provide us with the means to reach the effect [of] Putin [and Russia] losing its operations.
“Ukraine can successfully do a series of counteroffensive operations [that] would bring Putin to a situation where he would understand that unless he stops the war, he would be losing tremendously, and that would impact his regime and his power.”
date: 2024-11-18, from: Capital and Main
Mythology aside, nearly 2 million undocumented immigrants are the backbone of some industries, and pay billions in taxes for services they will never receive.
The post Why Mass Deportations Would Cripple California’s Economy appeared first on .
https://capitalandmain.com/why-mass-deportations-would-cripple-californias-economy
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Pentagon — The Pentagon dismissed a new round of Russian accusations that the United States is pushing the war in Ukraine into ever more dangerous territory as “reckless” rhetoric, calling out Moscow and its allies for escalating tensions.
U.S. defense officials Monday declined to confirm media reports that President Joe Biden has decided to allow Kyiv to use Washington-supplied, long-range missiles to strike deeper inside Russian territory. But they said Moscow has no grounds for any complaints.
“What’s adding fuel to the fire is the fact that DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] soldiers are now entering a fight,” said Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh, in response to a question from VOA.
“We’re talking about North Korean soldiers being used to take sovereign territory, Ukrainian sovereign territory, and continue to push this war forward,” Singh said. “That certainly we view as escalatory.”
The U.S. estimates that there are at least 11,000 North Koreans troops moving into the Kursk region in southern Russia, which Ukraine captured in a surprise attack in August and still holds.
Singh said Monday, “We have every expectation that they would be engaging in combat operations.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov slammed the reported U.S. decision on long-range missiles earlier Monday, saying it marks a “new spiral of tensions and a qualitatively new situation from the point of view of the U.S.’s engagement in the conflict.”
Peskov claimed that Western countries supplying long-range weapons also provide targeting services to Kyiv. “This fundamentally changes the modality of their involvement in the conflict,” Peskov said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not comment publicly, but Peskov referred journalists to a Putin statement in September, in which he said allowing Ukraine to target Russia would significantly raise the stakes in the conflict.
It would change “the very nature of the conflict dramatically,” Putin said at the time. “This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.”
Singh, however, pushed back, calling the Russian threats “reckless.”
“Any type of nuclear saber rattling is incredibly dangerous,” she said, adding, “It’s something that we’re going to continue to monitor, but we haven’t seen any changes to their [nuclear] posture.”
Russian officials have previously suggested that increased support for Ukraine by the U.S. and NATO could allow Moscow to respond with nuclear weapons.
Until now, the United States had allowed Ukraine to deploy shorter-range American weapons, like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems the U.S. donated in the first months of the war, to hit Russian targets over the border from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. The range of these rockets was around 80 kilometers, but the Biden decision will allow the use of Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, rockets that can reach targets of up to about 300 kilometers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had lobbied Washington for months to be allowed to use the longer-range rockets against military targets deep inside Russia, contending they were needed to hit rocket arsenals and other weaponry being stored by Russia before their use targeting Ukraine’s cities and electrical grids.
Biden, until now, had resisted allowing use of the longer-range missiles for fear it would escalate the war and tensions with the U.S.-led NATO military alliance. But North Korea’s deployment of troops to fight alongside Moscow’s forces alarmed Washington.
ATACMS are long-range guided missiles produced by U.S. aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin. The missiles carry a 227-kilogram fragmentation warhead and are tough to intercept due to their high speed.
The rockets are fitted with a specialized GPS and carry cluster munitions. When the clusters open in the air, hundreds of bomblets are released rather than a single warhead.
Whether the Biden decision to supply the missiles — and how many — remains in place when President-elect Donald Trump takes office January 20 is uncertain. Trump has expressed skepticism about continued U.S. support for Ukraine, declining during a September political debate to say that he wanted Ukraine to win the war.
Trump has claimed he would broker an end to the war before he takes office but not said how he would accomplish that.
The president-elect has not commented publicly on the Biden decision to supply Ukraine with the longer-range missiles, but his son, Donald Trump Jr., quickly criticized it.
“The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives,” he said on social media.
Biden’s policy shift came as a Russian ballistic missile with cluster munitions on Sunday evening struck a residential area of Sumy, a city in northern Ukraine, killing 11 people, including two children, and injuring 84 others.
On Monday, another Russian missile attack started fires in two apartment blocks in Odesa, in southern Ukraine. At least eight people were killed and 18 were injured, including a child, regional Gov. Oleh Kiper said.
The Sumy attack on Sunday followed a massive Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s power infrastructure earlier in the day.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine and its allies should focus on “really forcing Russia to end the war.”
“Today marked one of the largest and most dangerous Russian attacks in the entire war — 210 drones and missiles launched simultaneously — including hypersonic and aeroballistic ones,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address on Sunday.
Some material in this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
date: 2024-11-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
There’s news today Spirit Airlines has filed for protection from its creditors, after years of losses and a failed merger. But the airline promises tickets are still good and schedules remain unchanged. Also on the program, we continue our discussion of angel investors with Loretta McCarthy, co-CEO and managing partner of Golden Seeds Venture Fund, a network that connects investors with startups founded by women.
date: 2024-11-18, from: Heatmap News
The optimistic case for the Inflation Reduction Act — even under a Trump presidency, even with a Republican trifecta in Washington — rests on a “public investment first” view of climate policy. Public investment in the clean energy economy is not merely a second-best policy option to carbon pricing or other punitive regulations, the argument goes, but instead the first-best option in the marathon of politically durable decarbonization.
I am an outspoken proponent of this view. Public investment provides and encourages investment to drive down the cost of clean energy technologies, make them more market-competitive, and thereby reduces emissions by permanently shifting demand away from fossil fuel-dependent ones. Public investment in clean energy technologies can also create the conditions for new constituencies to gain political clout and defend their role in the economy, and for further policy ambition in the future.
The first major sign that public investment under the IRA might prove durable came in August, when a group of 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson in support of the clean energy tax credits that are the cornerstone of the legislation, emphasizing the job creation benefits of the policy. Even the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce said back in May that they would support the IRA under a Trump presidency. Driving down costs? Check. New constituencies? Check.
It’s tempting to see this glimmer of change in favor of clean energy incentives as the consequence of groundswell political support, as voters see benefits arrive in their communities. Journalist Kate Aronoff calls this “pool party politics,” named after the New Deal’s high-visibility spending on public pools which curried popular favor in the 1930s. The IRA’s benefits do tilt heavily toward red districts, so it would be nice to imagine that Republican elected officials are hearing bottom-up support and dutifully reflecting constituent interest — democracy in action.
Let’s call that the optimist’s view. My view, which one might call the “cynical optimist’s,” is that politicians — red or blue — are often more responsive to the concentrated interests and influence of lobbyists and donors than the electorate. The IRA may have gained popularity in Congress, including among Republicans, as financial and corporate interests — “capital” — started becoming IRA fans. Tim Sahay of the Net Zero Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins has called the IRA’s tax credits a “bottomless mimosa bar” for the financial market, and bankers are swanning up to get smashed on unlimited tax incentives for clean energy investment.
I favor the cynical optimist’s view because I believe it to be a more accurate picture of why the IRA is good politics. The “cynical” part recognizes that capital exerts disproportionate influence over the political process; the “optimist” part celebrates that the IRA is a powerful vehicle to appeal to their economic values. Bottomless mimosa bars aren’t just booze giveaways — they work by bringing in new customers who then stay and pay for their meals. Reformulating the interests of capital through public investment is a pragmatic and necessary antidote to the inertia of the incumbent fossil fuel industry.
A great example of the IRA gaining new types of fans is its program of expanded, transferable clean energy tax credits. Not only do these tax credits redirect tax revenue toward clean energy investment, making more projects economically justifiable, they may also develop their own market momentum. I advise Basis Climate, a platform for clean energy tax credit transfers, and when I asked co-founder Erik Underwood to tell me who is actually buying these tax credits, he told me it has mostly been savvy business people focused on minimizing their tax payments. Many of these buyers have never or only marginally participated in renewable energy deployment previously.
The tax credit transfer market has grown to $20 billion to 25 billion in a mere 20 months. By comparison, voluntary carbon markets have for decades attempted to enable green projects by creating a market for tradeable credits, yet the market is expected to reach just $2 billion globally in 2024.
In other words, the market for clean energy tax buyers has vastly expanded the base of corporates benefiting from and supporting clean energy projects, led by transactional people who want to avoid paying taxes. Now, there are tax-hating business types of all political colors, but one can already see that the politics of the IRA are shaping up differently than, say, a pollution tax that steadily gets harsher over time.
All that said, it is important not to overstate the case in favor of the IRA’s durability. Those 18 House Republicans are down to no more than 14 post-election, and the remainder may find that falling in line with the President politically safer were he to mount a full-scale attack on the IRA. They and corporate America may also love clean energy tax credits in the abstract but happily give them up to pay for a juicy tax cut for the wealthy.
Still, the most clearly durable part of the IRA are the $78 billion in public spending and whopping $493 billion in business and consumer energy investment that it has already catalyzed as of June 2024, an estimated 71% increase in private investment from the two years before the IRA. That investment won’t be undone with policy change, and it will radically change the economics of many clean energy technologies. It also lays the foundation for later policymaking, as distant as that possibility may now feel. By creating an expanded tent of clean economy interests, the “carrot” of public investment may also help future politicians and their constituencies find “stick” policies more feasible. Penalties on high-carbon products — from gas cars to steel — become much more palatable if they are merely driving substitution to other technologies that compete on price and quality, than if they’re just making the only serviceable option more expensive.
This more nuanced telling of the politics, though, means you don’t need a star-eyed, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington view of the American political process to see how the IRA is delivering political dividends. Whatever the fate of the IRA come January, the longer the benefits flow — to communities and to capitalists — the more difficult it will be to roll back the tide.
https://heatmap.news/ideas/ira-tax-credits
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
The Holocaust Museum LA recently installed a new exhibit on its roof: a German-made freight car that was used to deport Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. From Los Angeles, Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
In New York City, where some communities have limited access to fresh produce, a unique classroom program is teaching students how to grow their own food and improve their eating habits. Aron Ranen has more on how gardening is shaping healthier futures for kids.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
President-elect Donald Trump will come into office in January 2025 with unified control of the U.S. Congress. Republicans will hold majorities in both the Senate and House as the result of a mandate from American voters. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from Capitol Hill.
date: 2024-11-18, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Super Typhoon Man-yi made two landfalls across the Philippines over the weekend, becoming the country’s fourth typhoon in 10 days • Parts of Europe are bracing for a cold snap • The Jennings Creek Wildfire along the New York-New Jersey border is 90% contained.
Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump tapped Chris Wright, CEO of the oilfield services firm Liberty Energy and a major Republican donor, to lead the Department of Energy. Wright had been endorsed by several figures from the fossil fuel industry in the days leading up to Trump’s official announcement, including Oklahoma oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and informal advisor. While under current Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the DOE has become a locus of climate change and green energy policy. The sprawling department oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, its national laboratories, and its energy efficiency standards, in addition to a variety of energy programs. Wright is a deep s keptic of the idea that there’s a climate crisis or energy transition happening at all. To wit: “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year. He also wrote that “climate crisis, energy transition, carbon pollution, clean energy, and dirty energy,” were “Five commonly used words around Energy and Climate that are both deceptive and destructive.” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin said one of Wright’s first priorities will likely be to unblock the federal permitting process for new liquefied natural gas export terminals.
We’re now entering the second week of COP29. Negotiations so far have not yielded much in the way of a new collective goal for climate finance, but this could change as climate ministers finally join the summit. Meanwhile, leaders at the G20 summit in Brazil seem to be taking matters into their own hands after U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell penned a letter over the weekend asking them to take action on climate finance. On Sunday, G20 negotiators reportedly agreed on a text that mentions developing countries’ (voluntary) climate finance contributions. This line could help address a key sticking point for rich countries, who want some of the richer developing nations – China, for example – to contribute to a new climate finance goal. The G20 breakthrough “could unlock bigger numbers for the [New Collective Quantified Goal], as developed countries say this expanding of the contributor base is a condition of them raising their climate finance promise above $100 billion,” wrote Climate Home News.
On his way to the G20 summit, President Biden made a pit stop in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the natural wonder. He was given a tour by helicopter, met with Indigenous leaders, and signed a U.S. proclamation designating November 17 as International Conservation Day. “The world’s forest trees breathe carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and yet each minute, the world is chopping down the equivalent (of) 10 soccer fields worth of forest,” Biden said during the visit. “The fight to protect our planet is literally a fight for humanity.” He said climate change has been a pillar of his presidency, and declared that nobody could reverse the energy transition that is underway.
X/POTUS
President Biden plans to finalize a clean fuel tax credit rule before his term ends, a White House official told Reuters. The program would provide tax credits for producers of sustainable aviation fuel and other low-emissions transportation fuels. He’s also reportedly thinking of pushing for an agreement among the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) aimed at reducing financing for foreign fossil fuel projects. Such a deal couldn’t be dismantled by his successor. “If the U.S. moves forward, this would be more meaningful than anything they will do at COP and more Trump-proof,” Kate DeAngelis, international finance program manager for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, told Bloomberg. “It will shift billions of dollars away from fossil fuels.”
Northern India’s smog emergency continues to worsen, with air quality in New Delhi reaching levels that are 60 times the World Health Organization’s recommended limits. The city’s IQAir measurement climbed above 1,600. For context, readings over 301 are considered dangerous. Schools are closed, a medical emergency has been declared, and people are being urged to stay indoors. Much of the smog is coming from fires set by farmers, which is made worse by colder temperatures that trap pollutants.
New MethaneSAT data just dropped. The latest snapshots from the methane-spotting satellite support the theory that smaller emissions, scattered across wide areas, are responsible for a large share of total methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. Here are some images from the Permian basin in the U.S., and a basin in Turkmenistan:
MethaneSAT
MethaneSAT
https://heatmap.news/climate/g20-climate-finance-cop29
date: 2024-11-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
A new report finds women now make up nearly half of angel investors, a field once dominated by men. These investors fund early-stage startups in return for partial ownership. Today, we speak with Deb Kemper, managing partner at Golden Seeds Venture Fund, and a seasoned pro in this risky business of getting promising new ventures off the ground. But first, we’ll look at what’s driving consumer spending as the holiday season kicks off.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/the-risks-of-being-an-angel-investor
date: 2024-11-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Set against a backdrop of political turmoil, it’s going to be a big ask for the leading rich and developing nations to sign up to any meaningful declarations. In India’s capital, Delhi, restrictions are being tightened on construction and vehicles — air quality has become so bad that a blanket of toxic smog is covering the city. And we visit Madagascar, off the coast of southern Africa, where we look at some solutions to wide-scale environmental damage.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/brazil-prepares-to-host-the-g20-summit
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Spirit Airlines said Monday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection and will attempt to reboot as it struggles to recover from the pandemic-caused swoon in travel and a failed attempt to sell the airline to JetBlue.
Spirit, the biggest U.S. budget airline, has lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020 and faces looming debt payments totaling more than $1 billion over the next year.
Spirit said it expects to operate as normal as it works its way through a prearranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy process and that customers can continue to book and fly without interruption.
Shares of Miramar, Florida-based Spirit dropped 25% on Friday, after The Wall Street Journal reported that the airline was discussing terms of a possible bankruptcy filing with its bondholders. It was just the latest in a series of blows that have sent the stock crashing down by 97% since late 2018 — when Spirit was still making money.
CEO Ted Christie confirmed in August that Spirit was talking to advisers of its bondholders about the upcoming debt maturities. He called the discussions a priority, and said the airline was trying to get the best deal it could as quickly as possible.
“The chatter in the market about Spirit is notable, but we are not distracted,” he told investors during an earnings call. “We are focused on refinancing our debt, improving our overall liquidity position, deploying our new reimagined product into the market, and growing our loyalty programs.”
People are still flying on Spirit Airlines. They’re just not paying as much.
In the first six months of this year, Spirit passengers flew 2% more than they did in the same period last year. However, they are paying 10% less per mile, and revenue per mile from fares is down nearly 20%, contributing to Spirit’s red ink.
It’s not a new trend. Spirit failed to return to profitability when the coronavirus pandemic eased and travel rebounded. There are several reasons behind the slump.
Spirit’s costs, especially for labor, have risen. The biggest U.S. airlines have snagged some of Spirit’s budget-conscious customers by offering their own brand of bare-bones tickets. And fares for U.S. leisure travel — Spirit’s core business — have sagged because of a glut of new flights.
The premium end of the air-travel market has surged while Spirit’s traditional no-frills end has stagnated. So this summer, Spirit decided to sell bundled fares that include a bigger seat, priority boarding, free bags, internet service and snacks and drinks. That is a huge change from Spirit’s longtime strategy of luring customers with rock-bottom fares and forcing them to pay extra for things such as bringing a carry-on bag or ordering a soda.
In a highly unusual move, Spirit plans to cut its October-through-December schedule by nearly 20%, compared with the same period last year, which analysts say should help prop up fares. But that will help rivals more than it will boost Spirit. Analysts from Deutsche Bank and Raymond James say that Frontier, JetBlue and Southwest would benefit the most because of their overlap with Spirit on many routes.
Spirit has also been plagued by required repairs to Pratt & Whitney engines, which is forcing the airline to ground dozens of its Airbus jets. Spirit has cited the recall as it furloughed pilots.
The aircraft fleet is relatively young, which has made Spirit an attractive takeover target.
Frontier Airlines tried to merge with Spirit in 2022 but was outbid by JetBlue. However, the Justice Department sued to block the $3.8 billion deal, saying it would drive up prices for Spirit customers who depend on low fares, and a federal judge agreed in January. JetBlue and Spirit dropped their merger two months later.
U.S. airline bankruptcies were common in the 1990s and 2000s, as airlines struggled with fierce competition, high labor costs and sudden spikes in the price of jet fuel. PanAm, TWA, Northwest, Continental, United and Delta were swept up. Some liquidated, while others used favorable laws to renegotiate debts such as aircraft leases and keep flying.
The last bankruptcy by a major U.S. carrier ended when American Airlines emerged from Chapter 11 protection and simultaneously merged with US Airways in December 2013.
date: 2024-11-18, from: The Lever News
A radical magic contest reveals the secrets of manipulation in a post-truth world.
https://www.levernews.com/the-art-of-deception/
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Manila, Philippines — The Philippines and the United States signed on Monday a military intelligence-sharing deal in a further deepening of defense ties between the two nations facing common security challenges in the region.
Visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed the agreement with his Philippine counterpart, Gilberto Teodoro, at Manila’s military headquarters where both officials also broke ground for a combined coordination center that will facilitate collaboration between their armed forces.
Called the General Security of Military Information Agreement or GSOMIA, the pact allows both countries to share classified military information securely.
“Not only will this allow the Philippines access to higher capabilities and big-ticket items from the United States, it will also open opportunities to pursue similar agreements with like-minded nations,” said Philippines’ defense ministry spokesperson Arsenio Andolong.
Security engagements between the United States and the Philippines have deepened under President Joe Biden and his Philippine counterpart Ferdinand Marcos Jr., with both leaders keen to counter what they see as China’s aggressive policies in the South China Sea and near Taiwan.
The two countries have a mutual defense treaty dating back to 1951, which could be invoked if either side came under attack, including in the South China Sea.
“I want to start by underscoring our ironclad commitment to the Philippines,” Austin said during the groundbreaking ceremony for the coordination center.
Austin said the coordination center should enable real-time information sharing between the two defense treaty allies and boost interoperability.
’’It will be a place where our forces can work side by side to respond to regional challenges,” Austin said.
The Philippines has expressed confidence the alliance will remain strong under incoming U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
Both the Philippines and the United States face increasingly aggressive actions from China in the South China Sea, a conduit for more than $3 trillion in annual ship-borne commerce, which it claims almost entirely as its own.
In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague said China’s claims had no legal basis, siding with the Philippines, which brought the case.
But China has rejected the ruling, leading to a series of sea and air confrontations with the Philippines that have turned the highly strategic South China Sea into a potential flashpoint between Washington and Beijing.
“The United States’ presence in the Indo Pacific region is essential for maintaining peace and stability in this region,” Teodoro said during the inauguration, echoing previous remarks made by Marcos.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
U.S. President Joe Biden began a historic trip to Brazil Sunday, becoming the first sitting American president to visit the Amazon rainforest to mark his efforts on fighting climate change. He will attend the summit of the 20 largest economies, the G20, Monday in Rio de Janeiro, where climate, poverty reduction and other global clauses will be discussed. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara is traveling with the president and has this report from Rio.
https://www.voanews.com/a/in-heart-of-amazon-biden-marks-climate-legacy-/7867473.html
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
NEW ORLEANS — Two people were killed and 10 others were wounded in two separate shootings along a New Orleans parade route and celebration attended by thousands on Sunday, authorities said. There were no immediate arrests.
Officers responding to reports of gunfire shortly after 3:30 p.m. on an avenue in the city’s St. Roch neighborhood found eight victims with gunshot wounds, according to a news release from the New Orleans Police Department. All eight were taken to hospitals in unknown condition. Police later said a ninth wounded person arrived at a hospital via a private car.
About 45 minutes later, police received another report of gunfire as revelers were crossing the Almonaster Avenue Bridge, just over .8 km to the north. One person died at the scene and another died at a hospital, police said. A third victim was driven to a hospital in a private vehicle and is in stable condition, police said.
No arrests were announced and no suspect information was released. The St. Roch neighborhood is outside the city’s French Quarter that is popular with tourists, located several blocks northeast of the quarter.
Thousands had gathered for the annual outing of the Nine Times Social Aid & Pleasure Club in the 9th Ward, organizer Oscar Brown told NOLA.com.
“It is a wonderful event, and we want to keep it a wonderful event,” Kirkpatrick said.
The Almonaster Bridge was closed in both directions during the investigation.
Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said detectives didn’t immediately know if the incidents were related.
“They were … different kinds of approaches,” she said of the shootings, which occurred in the area where a “second line,” a celebration following a parade, was taking place.
It was the second major shooting in the South since gunfire marred a homecoming weekend at Tuskegee University in Alabama on Nov. 10, leaving one person dead and injuring 16 others, a dozen of them by gunfire, authorities said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/killed-10-wounded-in-shootings-near-new-orleans-parade-route/7867440.html
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
U.S. officials would allow increased logging on federal lands across the Pacific Northwest in the name of fighting wildfires and boosting rural economies under proposed changes to a sweeping forest management plan that’s been in place for three decades.
The U.S. Forest Service proposal, released Friday, would overhaul the Northwest Forest Plan that governs about 99,000 square kilometers in Oregon, Washington and California.
The plan was adopted in 1994 under President Bill Clinton amid pressure to curb destructive logging practices that resulted in widespread clearcuts and destroyed habitat used by spotted owls. Timber harvests dropped dramatically in subsequent years, spurring political backlash.
But federal officials now say worsening wildfires due to climate change mean forests must be more actively managed to increase their resiliency. Increased logging also would provide a more predictable supply of trees for timber companies, officials said, helping rural economies that have suffered after lumber mills shut down and forestry jobs disappeared.
The proposal could increase annual timber harvests by at least 33% and potentially more than 200%, according to a draft environmental study. The number of timber-related jobs would increase accordingly.
Harvest volumes from the 17 national forests covered by the Northwest Forest Plan averaged about 445 million board feet annually over the past decade, according to government figures.
Cutting more trees would help reduce wildfire risk and make communities safer, the study concluded. That would be accomplished in part by allowing cuts in some areas with stands of trees up to 120 years old — up from the current age threshold of 80 years.
The change could help foster conditions conducive to growing larger, old growth trees that are more resistant to fire, by removing younger trees, officials said.
A separate pending proposal from President Joe Biden’s administration aims to increase protections nationwide for old growth trees, which play a significant role in storing climate change-inducing carbon dioxide.
“Much has changed in society and science since the Northwest Forest Plan was created,” Jacque Buchanan, regional forester for the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Region, said in a statement. He said the proposal would help the agency adapt to shifting conditions, as global warming increases the frequency of droughts and other extreme weather events.
The proposed plan also calls for closer cooperation between the Forest Service and Native American tribes to tap into tribal knowledge about forest management. Tribes were excluded when the 1994 plan was crafted.
Environmentalists greeted the proposal with skepticism. The group Oregon Wild said it was “deeply troubling” that the Forest Service would release the proposal just ahead of a change in presidential administrations.
“It appears that the Forest Service wants to abandon the fundamental purpose of the Northwest Forest Plan–protecting fish and wildlife and the mature and old-growth forests they need to survive,” John Persell, an attorney for the group, said in a statement.
During former President Donald Trump’s first term, administration officials sought to open millions of acres of West Coast forest to new logging by stripping habitat protections for the imperiled spotted owl. The move was opposed by government biologists and reversed under Biden.
A draft environmental study examined several potential alternatives, including leaving the existing plan’s components in place or changing them to either reduce or increase logging.
A timber industry representative who co-chaired an advisory committee on the Northwest Forest Plan said the proposed plan resulted from discussions involving committee members, the Forest Service and others.
“We want to see a modern approach to federal forest stewardship that protects us from catastrophic wildfires, reduces toxic smoke, meaningfully engages tribes, and delivers for our rural communities and workers,” said Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council.
The publishing of the proposal begins a 120-day public comment period. The Forest Service’s environmental review is expected to be completed by next fall and a final decision is due in early 2026.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Las Vegas, Nevada — Picketing continued Sunday outside a hotel-casino near the Las Vegas Strip that remained open with no talks scheduled between management and union members striking for a new contract.
Workers are seeking a pay raise and benefits comparable to pacts reached last year at other resorts.
The walkout by the Culinary Workers Union laborers at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas comes a week before the second annual Las Vegas Grand Prix is due to draw hundreds of thousands of fans for Formula 1 racing on the Strip and nearby streets. It’s the first open-ended strike since 2002 for the largest labor union in Nevada, which has about 60,000 members.
No new negotiations were scheduled, said union spokesperson Bethany Khan and Terri Maruca, media representative for Virgin Hotels, owner of the 1,500-room property.
Maruca said the company has fielded applications from more than 600 prospective contract and temporary workers since Friday. The union pays striking workers $500 per week for at least five days for picketing shifts.
Guest room attendants, cocktail and food servers, porters, bellmen, cooks, bartenders and laundry workers are among those carrying picket signs at the property, where workers also staged a 48-hour job action last May to call for Virgin Hotels to agree to a new five-year deal with expanded benefits and increased wages.
Other casinos on and off the Strip reached deadline agreements with the union just before the Formula 1 race a year ago, with contracts containing salary increases of about 32% over five years for tens of thousands of workers at properties including the Bellagio, Paris Las Vegas, MGM Grand and Caesars Palace.
In a statement on Sunday, Virgin Hotels called those contracts “economically unsustainable” and said it wants a “reasonable agreement” for its 1,710 employees. It has accused union leaders of refusing to engage in “meaningful negotiations.”
Culinary Union members last went on strike in 2002 for 10 days at the Golden Gate hotel-casino in downtown Las Vegas.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Firefighters in New York said Sunday that a voluntary evacuation overnight helped them protect more than 160 homes from a stubborn wildfire near the New Jersey border as officials in much of the Northeast coped with hundreds of brush fires in tinder-dry and windy conditions.
Communities in New England dealt with a similar surge in late fall fires, and many parts of the Northeast remained under red flag alerts this weekend. Across the country, California made good progress against a 83-square-kilometer fire in Ventura County that has destroyed more than 245 structures, most of them houses. The Mountain fire was 95% contained.
Windy conditions renewed a wildfire Saturday that escaped a containment line and prompted emergency officials to enact the voluntary evacuation plan affecting about 165 houses in Warwick, New York, near the New Jersey border. No structures were in danger as of Sunday afternoon as firefighters worked to tame the Jennings Creek blaze, New York Parks Department spokesman Jeff Wernick said. The voluntary evacuation will remain in place at least until Monday, Wernick said.
The wildfire had burned close to 20 square kilometers across the two states as of Friday and was burning primarily in New York’s Sterling Forest State Park, where the visitor center, the lakefront area at Greenwood Lake and a historic furnace area remained open. Woodland activities including hunting were halted, Wernick said.
It was 90% contained on the Passaic County, New Jersey, side of the border, and about 88% contained in Orange County, New York, where a state of emergency was extended on Sunday, officials said. New York Army National Guard and state police helicopters dropped water on the blaze to support ground crews’ efforts.
“Residents in the voluntary evacuation area are asked to continue sheltering so that crews can effectively suppress the fire,” according to a statement posted on Facebook by village officials in Greenwood Lake, New York, where schools will be closed on Monday. “There is currently no threat to structures but crews are actively working to ensure structure protection.”
The blaze claimed the life of an 18-year-old New York parks employee who died when a tree fell on him as he helped fight the fire in Sterling Forest on Nov. 9. The fire’s cause remains under investigation.
New York City’s Fire Department is creating its first-ever brush fire task force to respond to what officials say is a historic increase in brush fires throughout the city’s five boroughs, Commissioner Robert S. Tucker announced Sunday. From Nov. 1 to Nov. 14, the FDNY responded to 271 brush fires, marking the highest two-week period in New York’s history.
The task force will be made up of fire marshals, fire inspectors and tactical drone units in an effort to ensure rapid responses to brush fires and to help with investigations to determine their cause.
“Due to a significant lack of rainfall, the threat of fast-spreading brush fires fueled by dry vegetation and windy conditions have resulted in an historic increase of brush fires throughout New York City,” Tucker said in a statement.
In Massachusetts, which typically has about 15 wildland fires every October, there have been about 200 this year. State officials said more fires were expected because of weather conditions and dry surface fuels.
The National Weather Service in Boston warned Sunday that elevated fire risk continued across southern New England, given gusty winds and dry conditions. In Connecticut, a portion of Interstate 84 in Plainville was closed briefly Sunday because of a brush fire.
A volunteer firefighter in Haddam, Connecticut, was injured Saturday while fighting a fast-spreading brush fire sparked by downed power lines. The firefighter was treated at a hospital and released, according to a Facebook post by the Haddam Volunteer Fire Company.
Much-needed rain was predicted for Thursday in the region.
In southern New Hampshire, the fire danger risk was “very high,” state officials said.
The Maine Forest Service said the southern part of the state also faced high fire danger. Most of the state was abnormally dry or facing moderate drought conditions.
Some relief could be in sight in New York. The National Weather Service in Albany said Sunday that most of the region could see a “widespread soaking rain” of 0.5 to 1.5 inches beginning Wednesday night.
date: 2024-11-18, from: VOA News USA
Some of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks are being described as “controversial” in both Democratic and Republican circles. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson reminded critics Sunday that the American people voted to shake up the status quo, and that’s what these new Cabinet officials, if confirmed, will be tasked with doing. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias has the story. Video editing by Henry Hernandez.
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
Rio de Janeiro — U.S. President Joe Biden began a historic Brazil trip Sunday, becoming the first sitting American president to visit the Amazon rainforest to mark what the White House calls his “legacy” on fighting climate change, couching it in economic terms of the race between countries in “harnessing the clean energy revolution.”
Biden landed in Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, doorway to the world’s largest jungle. Biden announced that under his administration, the United States has surpassed the goal of providing $11 billion per year in international climate financing in 2024 – a key component in the fight against climate change lobbied by countries of the Global South.
“The fight to protect our planet is literally a fight for humanity for generations to come. It may be the only existential threat to all our nations and to all humanity,” Biden said. The remarks were delivered amid the backdrop of lush green vegetation at a nature reserve and “living museum” in Manaus that celebrates the Amazon rainforest and its biodiversity.
During his brief Manaus visit – sandwiched between the Asia Pacific Economic Forum meeting in Lima, Peru, and the summit of the 20 largest economies, the G20, in Rio de Janeiro – Biden announced U.S. investments in several climate initiatives, including $50 million for the Amazon Fund. He met with Indigenous leaders and toured the Amazon jungle via helicopter.
During the flight, Biden saw the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon River, and the ravages of shore erosion and fire damage to the jungle, according to the White House. The majority of fires in the Amazon are linked to deforestation.
In the past four years, the administration has “created a bold new playbook that has turned tackling the climate crisis into an enormous economic opportunity – both at home and abroad,” the White House said.
Scaling back climate efforts
Several diplomatic sources at APEC and the G20, who spoke with VOA under condition of anonymity to discuss a diplomatically sensitive matter, expressed concern that U.S. efforts will be dramatically scaled back under the incoming administration. President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated in January.
During his earlier administration, Trump sent shockwaves among climate activists when he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, the world’s main multilateral forum to mitigate climate change. He has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.”
Acknowledging the two months he has left in office, Biden said he is leaving his successor and the country a “strong foundation to build on, if they choose to do so.”
“It’s true, some may seek to want to deny or delay the clean energy revolution that’s under way in America, but nobody, nobody can reverse it,” Biden said, underscoring that the push toward clean energy has bipartisan support and that other countries are harnessing it for their economic progress.
“The question now is, which government will stand in the way, and which will seize the enormous economic opportunity,” he said, in what may be a reference to the future of U.S.-China rivalry on clean energy under his successor.
Biden’s remarks came a day after a meeting in Lima with Chinese President Xi Jinping, likely their last meeting while Biden is in office.
China is currently the world’s leader in electric vehicles, or EVs, accounting for more than half of global production and exports. Trump, meanwhile, is reportedly trying to roll back the $7,500 EV purchase tax credit for American consumers, part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Biden’s signature legislation on clean energy and climate change.
Celso Amorim, chief adviser to the president of the Federal Republic of Brazil, said he will not prejudge the incoming Trump administration.
“I judge actions, so we’ll see later how these actions evolve,” he told VOA Saturday, ahead of the G20 summit that Brazil is hosting. “For now, Biden has been a good partner for Brazil, for President [Luis Inacio] Lula [da Silva].”
Beginning Monday in Rio, Biden will focus on workers’ rights and clean economic growth and attend the launch of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. It is Lula’s initiative aimed at accelerating global efforts in the fight against hunger and poverty by 2030.
Asked about Biden’s message to world leaders concerned about the durability of U.S. commitments on various issues, including climate change and poverty reduction, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden is “focusing on the moment” and continuing progress achieved in the past four years for the remainder of his term.
A senior administration official briefing reporters after Biden’s Amazon visit left open the possibility that the incoming administration may continue the fight against climate change.
“Maybe he’ll come down here and see the forest and see the damage being done from the drought and other things and change his mind about climate change,” the official said, referring to Trump.
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
Two of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s key nominations – Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and former lawmaker Matt Gaetz as attorney general – have become embroiled in sex controversies that could threaten their Senate confirmations to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.
Hegseth, 44, paid an undisclosed amount to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017 to avert the threat of what he viewed as a baseless claim becoming public, his lawyer, Tim Parlatore, told U.S. news media this weekend.
Gaetz, 42, resigned abruptly last week from the House of Representatives near the end of his fourth two-year term, just days before the House Ethics Committee was nearing conclusion of an investigation into whether he had had sex with a 17-year-old girl and engaged in illicit drug use. Some lawmakers have described Gaetz showing nude cellphone pictures of his sexual conquests in the House chamber.
Gaetz has denied the allegations and federal authorities had earlier this year decided not to bring charges.
Hegseth’s lawyer, Parlatore, described Hegseth’s hotel sexual encounter with the woman after a Republican women’s event in Monterey, California, in 2017 as consensual. Local police, after an investigation, did not file any charges.
Parlatore told The Washington Post that Hegseth settled the woman’s claim a few years later because he believed the filing of her threatened lawsuit “would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” where he was the popular host of a weekend talk show.
“He was falsely accused, and my position is that he was the victim of blackmail,” Parlatore told The Associated Press, calling it a case of “successful extortion.” The woman’s name has not been made public, and U.S. news media do not usually disclose the names of alleged sexual assault victims without their consent.
Parlatore’s statements to news outlets came after a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser sent a detailed memo to the Trump transition several days ago detailing the Hegseth incident with his accuser. The accuser alleged that Hegseth had raped her after drinking at a hotel bar.
Trump so far has stood by Hegseth, an unconventional selection as the Pentagon chief.
Some Democratic and Republican lawmakers have raised concerns about Hegseth’s lack of a managerial background, either at the Defense Department or at a business. The Pentagon chief would oversee more than 2 million U.S. troops and a civilian work force of nearly 800,000 people.
In addition, some critics have raised concerns about a large tattoo on Hegseth’s upper right chest, which he characterizes as a Christian symbol, a “Jerusalem cross,” but what his critics say is a white nationalist symbol. Hegseth told one interviewer that he was removed by superiors from a National Guard detail handling security for President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 for fear that he was “an extremist” because of the tattoo.
When the allegations against Hegseth first emerged, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung contended that Hegseth “has vigorously denied any and all accusations. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”
Even though voters in his Florida district had just reelected him to a fifth term, Gaetz resigned from his office Wednesday, ending the investigation.
Several U.S. senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, are seeking access to the House Ethics Committee findings in the Gaetz investigation as they carry out their constitutionally mandated “advice and consent” role in reviewing Cabinet nominees made by an incoming president.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, the leader of the narrow Republican majority in the chamber, is balking at the release of what he told CNN’s “State of the Union” show was a report in “rough draft form.”
Johnson contended that no ethics report should be made public because Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress, although there have been instances where that has occurred in the past.
He said senators reviewing the Gaetz nomination as the country’s top law enforcement official will “have a vigorous review and vetting process” but that they did not need to see the House Ethics Committee’s report. Some senators have suggested they could move to subpoena it if it is not turned over to them voluntarily.
Trump has also stood by Gaetz’s nomination, but the president-elect also has sought – with little success so far – to get the Senate, in Republican control come January when he takes office, to agree to recess at times so he can name and install his Cabinet members without the need for contentious and time-consuming confirmation hearings.
Also Sunday, Trump named Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, as the new chairman of the agency.
The FCC is an independent agency that is overseen by Congress, and tasked with regulating broadcasting, telecommunications and broadband.
Carr is a longtime member of the commission and served previously as the FCC’s general counsel. He has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times and was nominated by both Trump and President Joe Biden to the commission.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
https://www.voanews.com/a/two-trump-cabinet-nominees-embroiled-in-sex-controversies/7867143.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
In a major policy shift, U.S. President Joe Biden has for the first time authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles to strike inside Russia, according to U.S. news accounts.
The reported decision comes two months before Biden leaves office and ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump. The incoming president has voiced skepticism of continued U.S. support for the government in Kyiv and claimed, without offering any details, that he will end Russia’s 33-month war on Ukraine before he takes office.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has for months pushed the United States to agree to use of the long-range missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, to help thwart Moscow’s continuing barrage of airstrikes and ground advances in eastern Ukraine.
But initially, the weapons are likely to be used in response to North Korea’s decision to send thousands of troops to Russia in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Pyongyang’s troops have been fighting alongside Moscow’s forces in Russia’s southern Kursk region at the Ukrainian border, which Kyiv invaded in August, shocking the Russian military command.
Trump sidestepped a direct question at his September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris about whether he wanted Ukraine to win in its war against Russia, saying simply, “I want the war to stop.”
He instead focused on the war’s human toll by saying that people were being killed “by the millions,” a number that far exceeds any confirmed death toll, although some estimates say about one million Russians and Ukrainians have been killed and injured.
Trump went on to say that if elected, he would negotiate a deal even before becoming president and suggested the United States was “playing with World War III” with its support for Ukraine against Russia.
Harris quickly claimed that if Trump had been president during the invasion, then “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe,” and that in such a scenario the Russian president would move on to Poland.
The U.S. support of Ukraine took a back seat among concerns for U.S. voters, who told pollsters they were most worried about the cost of consumers goods and the influx of undocumented migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico.
Trump swept through seven U.S. political battleground states in the November 5 election to easily defeat Harris. He is set to be inaugurated on January 20.
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Memes, inspirational quotes, and even dance videos have brought President-elect Donald Trump to a new height of fame on Chinese social media since his election.
On Xiaohongshu, a media platform most similar to Instagram, the search term “Trump” shows more than 200,000 posts on the topic and 880 million views, with recent top posts each accruing more than 72,000 views and thousands of comments.
Videos of the president-elect dancing to the song YMCA by the band Village People have been circulating in Chinese cyberspace.
Many commenters find the content funny, calling him a jokester or comedian, while others view it as inspirational, seeing the older soon-to-be two-time American president as a role model.
Trump’s popularity stems from a kind of vitality and enthusiasm that he displayed throughout his campaign, analysts said, attracting many young Chinese who grew up looking up to more somber and rigid communist idols within their own country.
Videos of Elon Musk at a pre-election Trump rally have also made an impression on Chinese social media platform users. On these posts, commenters describe him as “a good kind of capitalist” and “someone who will make America strong.”
‘They need an idol’
These impressions come amidst a general malaise facing the Chinese economy that has sparked the young Chinese people to ‘lie flat’, meaning to cease striving for a better life in face of a competitive job market and other pressures.
One comment commonly posted under many Trump-related posts reads: “He is 78 years old, was hit by a bullet in the ear and bled profusely, was convicted of a felony and nearly sent to jail, had appealed over 60 times but still continued to work hard to find a job and found the best job for himself. What excuse do you have for not working hard?”
Liu, a writer from Jiangsu province, said Trump’s difficult path back to the presidency is precisely what inspires Chinese youth when compared to the traditional Communist Party heroes. Liu only gave his surname, because talking to foreign media is dangerous, he says.
“They need an idol who represents the possibility of individual success. Trump fits this image: he gets stronger with each setback, continually fights back, and still works hard even at an older age,” Liu said, adding that “more importantly, young Chinese long for the kind of fair and just environment that has allowed Trump to succeed.”
Trump stands in direct contrast to many revered Chinese figures, such as Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, and communist soldier Lei Feng — a model hero in China.
“Their lives seem too hard and are not the kind of lives young people in China aspire to,” Liu said, adding that Trump stands for something different: the individualistic, opportunistic ‘American Dream’
“Whether you can wear a gold bracelet before New Years is all up to you!” comments one user ‘Sleepy Orange’ under a campaign rally video, referencing gold as an important gift typically exchanged on the Chinese New Year. It is a symbol of wealth and prosperity. More than 2,000 people liked this comment.
Liu said he also appreciates Trump’s straightforwardness, as he doesn’t preach lofty ideals and morals but is practical and realistic. Liu described Chinese authorities and their political slogans as “vague and empty.”
Popularity reflects dislike of Xi, says influencer
Chen Weiyu, a Chinese media influencer living in the United States, told VOA that Trump’s popularity on Chinese social media represents a deep disdain toward Chinese leaders, calling people’s engagement with his content a form of “deprogramming.”
“Rather than admiration for Trump himself, it’s more about a rejection and opposition to Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. By expressing their liking for Trump, they are in fact expressing their dislike and opposition to Xi Jinping,” Chen said.
She stressed that people at the bottom of society in China, struggling to survive in an economy controlled by communist elites, feel that no one is concerned about or advocating for them.
In contrast, working-class individuals facing unemployment in the United States can use their votes to elect a leader who they believe will represent their interests and create a better policy environment for them.
Chen also attributed the abundance of Trump content on Chinese platforms to the increasing prevalence of virtual private networks as a way of accessing information that is normally forbidden in China.
However, Zhou “Zuola” Shuguang, one of the first Chinese citizen journalists to relocate to Taiwan, said the popularity of Trump on Chinese social media may have the “tacit approval” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing’s censorship system is consistently strict about controlling content, so the fact that Trump-related content is able to spread widely on social media suggests that the CCP is intentionally allowing the content to be seen, Zhou told VOA.
“In other words, if Trump’s content appears on Chinese social media, it means that Trump is not seen as a major threat by the CCP,” he said.
While Trump-related content is getting clicks, not all of them are positive.
“It’s not a good thing for Trump to come back, God bless China” said a netizen in one comment. Others simply poke fun at the president-elect, the color of his hair and the way his makeup makes him look on stage.
“60% of the tariffs will be given to China, how many free trade enterprises are going to be suppressed,” reads another comment liked by nearly 1,000 people.
Katherine Michaelson, Samuel Hui contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/a-dancing-trump-finds-internet-fame-in-china/7866062.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
Sydney — Australia, Japan and the U.S. on Sunday committed to closer military cooperation in training their forces as the countries deepened their ties in a bid to counter China’s military strength.
Australia’s minister of defense, Richard Marles, hosted U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Japan’s Defense Minister Gen Nakatani on Sunday for the trilateral ministers’ meeting – the first to be held in Australia.
Under the new agreement, Japan’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade – an elite marine unit – will be deployed to Darwin to regularly work and train alongside Australian and U.S. forces.
“It is a very important statement to the region and to the world about the commitment that our three countries have in working with each other,” Marles said.
“This is going to build interoperability between our three countries.”
Austin said the partnership would increase intelligence “surveillance and reconnaissance activities” among the three countries, which will “advance our goals for a secure and peaceful Indo Pacific.”
The U.S. defense chief said he was proud of what his office had done to “strengthen alliances” in the region and work with “countries that share the vision of a free and open Indo Pacific.”
Canberra has drawn ever nearer to longtime ally the United States, bolstering its military in an attempt to deter the might of a rising China.
Besides rapidly developing its surface fleet, Australia plans to deploy stealthy nuclear-powered submarines in a tripartite deal with the United States and Britain known as AUKUS.
Some fear U.S. President-elect Donald Trump could jettison or try to rewrite the pact, returning to his “America first” style of foreign policy.
But Australian officials said this month they have a “great deal of confidence” that the pact will remain.
https://www.voanews.com/a/australia-us-and-japan-strengthen-military-cooperation/7866726.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump celebrated his election victory on Saturday night by attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship event with billionaire friend Elon Musk and cheering fans at a heavily guarded Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Known by some in the mixed martial arts world as the “Combatant in Chief,” Trump counts UFC President Dana White as a close friend and considers fans of the sport part of his political base.
Trump sat between White and Musk for much of the night and paid rapt attention to the fights, sometimes chatting with the fighters after their matches.
He entered the arena to loud music and waved to the crowd, many of whom returned the gesture. He spent hours at the event, watching five matches until past 1:30 a.m. on Sunday.
The headline event in the octagon at UFC 309 was a battle for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world between Jon Jones and Stipe Miocic. After Jones won, he thanked Trump in his victory speech and they shook hands.
Among those joining the president-elect were House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, Tesla CEO Musk, a close Trump adviser, singer Kid Rock and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he plans to nominate for secretary of health and human services.
Trump intelligence chief pick Tulsi Gabbard and country singer Jelly Roll were also in his entourage.
Trump’s visit to the storied Manhattan arena brought him back to the scene of a controversial campaign rally he held there on October 27, when a warm-up comedian mocked Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
A handful of visitors in Madison Square Garden, an arena with a seating capacity of nearly 20,000, wore red “Make America Great Again” hats.
One of them, Sean Allen, 22, traveled to the event from Monroe in upstate New York, where he lives and works for a county department.
He said he had voted for Trump and borrowed his MAGA hat from a friend after learning that the Republican president-elect, who won a decisive victory on November 5 over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, might come to the fight.
“I’d never voted before. That was my first time voting,” Allen said, adding that he could have voted at the previous election but did not care about politics.
“When I woke up, I was like, OK, wow, Trump won big.”
Nicholas Defilippo, 39, another visitor in a MAGA hat, also put it on to express his support for Trump after voting for him. Defilippo lives in New Jersey and works in law enforcement.
“He’s the most courageous man on the planet,” he said of Trump.
The president-elect’s self-styled “Trump Force One” plane left Palm Beach airport shortly after nightfall for the two-hour flight. It was only the second time Trump has left the Palm Beach, Florida, area since winning the presidential election on November 5.
The 78-year-old Republican flew to Washington on Wednesday to meet with President Joe Biden at the White House, and has otherwise been filling Cabinet positions for his incoming administration from his oceanfront Mar-a-Lago resort.
A heavy security presence was in place around Madison Square Garden.
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-in-new-york-for-ufc-fight-at-madison-square-garden/7866718.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
Bela Karolyi, the charismatic if polarizing gymnastics coach who turned young women into champions and the United States into an international power in the sport, has died. He was 82.
USA Gymnastics said Karolyi died Friday. No cause of death was given.
Karolyi and wife, Martha, trained multiple Olympic gold medalists and world champions in the U.S. and Romania, including Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton.
“A big impact and influence on my life,” Comaneci, who was just 14 when Karolyi coached her to gold for Romania at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, posted on Instagram.
Yet Karolyi’s strident methods sometimes came under fire, most pointedly during the height of the Larry Nassar scandal.
When the disgraced former USA Gymnastics team doctor was effectively given a life sentence after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting gymnasts and other athletes with his hands under the guise of medical treatment, over a dozen former gymnasts came forward saying the Karolyis were part of a system that created an oppressive culture that allowed Nassar’s behavior to run unchecked for years.
While the Karolyis denied responsibility — telling CNN in 2018 they were unaware of Nassar’s behavior — the revelations led to them receding from the spotlight. USA Gymnastics eventually exited an agreement to continue to train at the Karolyi Ranch north of Houston, though only after American star Simone Biles took the organization to task for having them train at a site where many experienced sexual abuse.
The Karolyis receded from the spotlight in the aftermath after spending 30-plus years as a guiding force in American gymnastics, often basking in success while brushing with controversy in equal measure.
The Karolyis defected from Romania to the United States in 1981. Three years later Bela helped guide Retton — all of 16 — to the Olympic all-around title at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. At the 1996 Games in Atlanta, he memorably helped an injured Kerri Strug off the floor after Strug’s vault secured the team gold for the Americans.
Karolyi briefly became the national team coordinator for USA Gymnastics women’s elite program in 1999 and incorporated a semi-centralized system that eventually turned the Americans into the sport’s gold standard. It did not come without a cost. He was removed from the position after the 2000 Olympics when it became apparent his leadership style simply would not work, though he remained around the sport after Martha took over for her husband in 2001.
While the Karolyis approach helped the U.S. become a superpower — an American woman has won each of the last six Olympic titles and the U.S. women earned the team gold at the 2012 and 2016 games under Martha Karolyi’s leadership — their methods came under fire.
Dominique Moceanu, part of the “Magnificent 7” team that won gold in Atlanta, talked extensively about her corrosive relationship with the Karolyis following her retirement. In her 2012 memoir, Moceanu wrote Bela Karolyi verbally abused her in front of her teammates on multiple occasions.
“His harsh words and critical demeanor often weighed heavily on me,” Moceanu posted on X Saturday. “While our relationship was fraught with difficulty, some of these moments of hardship helped me forge and define my own path.”
Some of Karolyi’s most famous students were always among his staunchest defenders. When Strug got married, she and Karolyi took a photo recreating their famous scene from the 1996 Olympics, when he carried her onto the medals podium after she vaulted on a badly sprained ankle.
Being a gymnastics pied piper was never Karolyi’s intent. Born in Clug, Hungary, (now Romania) on September 13, 1942, he wanted to be a teacher, getting into coaching in college simply so he could spend more time with Martha.
After graduating, the couple moved to a small coal-mining town in Transylvania. Looking for a way to keep their students warm and entertained during the long, harsh winters, Karolyi dragged out some old mats and he and his wife taught the children gymnastics.
The students showed off their skills to their parents, and the exhibitions soon caught the eye of the Romanian government, which hired the Karolyis to coach the women’s national team at a time when the sport was done almost exclusively by adult women, not young girls.
Karolyi changed all that, though, bringing a team to the Montreal Olympics with only one gymnast older than 14.
It was in Montreal, of course, where the world got its first real glimpse of Karolyi. When a solemn, dark-haired sprite named Nadia Comaneci enchanted the world with the first perfect 10 in Olympic history, a feat she would duplicate six times, Karolyi was there to wrap her in one of his trademark bear hugs.
Romania, which had won only three bronzes in Olympic gymnastics before 1976, left Montreal with seven medals, including Comaneci’s golds in the all-around, balance beam and uneven bars, and the team silver. Comaneci became an international sensation, the first person to appear on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Time and Newsweek in the same week.
Four years later, however, Karolyi was in disgrace.
He was incensed by the judging at the Moscow Olympics, which he thought cost Comaneci a second all-around gold, and the Romanian government was horrified that he had embarrassed the Soviet hosts.
“Suddenly, from a position where we’ve been praised and considered the foremost athletes in the country, I was stigmatized,” he once said. “I thought they could put me away for political misconduct.”
When he and Martha took the Romanian team to New York for an exhibition in March 1981, they were tipped off that they were going to be punished upon their return. Despite not speaking any English and with their then-6-year-old daughter, Andrea, still in Romania, they decided to defect.
“We knew what kind of risks we were taking, because nobody was guaranteeing us anything,” Martha Karolyi once said. “We started out with a suitcase and a little motel room. From there, it’s gradually improved.”
The couple made their way to California, where they learned English by watching television and Bela did odd jobs. A chance encounter with Olympic gold medalist Bart Conner — who would later marry Comaneci — at the Los Angeles airport a few months later led to the Karolyis’ first coaching job in the United States.
Within a year, their daughter had arrived in the U.S. and the Karolyis had their own gym in Houston. It soon became the center of American gymnastics, turning out eight national champions in 13 years.
Three years after the Karolyis left Romania, Retton became the first American to win the Olympic all-around title, scoring a perfect 10 on vault to claim gold at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. Retton also posted the highest score in the team competition as the Americans won the silver, their first team medal since 1948.
Four years later, Phoebe Mills, another Karolyi gymnast, won a bronze on balance beam. It was the first individual medal for an American woman at a non-boycotted games. And in 1991, Kim Zmeskal — “the little Kimbo,” as Bela Karolyi called her — became the first American to win the world all-around title.
“My biggest contribution was giving the kids the faith that they can be the best among the best,” Karolyi once said. “I knew that if the Americans could understand they were not inferior … then they can be groomed like international, highly visible athletes.”
But as Karolyi’s resume grew, so did the criticism.
Other coaches were irritated by his brash personality and ability to always find his way into the spotlight. When Retton won gold, Karolyi leaped a barrier — he had an equipment manager’s credential, not a coach’s — so he could scoop Retton up in a hug — right in front of the TV cameras, of course.
He could be a harsh taskmaster, calling his gymnasts names, taunting them for their weight and pushing them to their limits.
Even those warm embraces weren’t always quite what they seemed.
“A lot of those big bear hugs came with the whisper of ‘Not so good,’ in our ears,” Retton wrote.
Yet Retton and Comaneci remained close with Karolyi, making appearances with him at gymnastics events or sitting with him at competitions. Zmeskal had her wedding at the Karolyi ranch.
Karolyi briefly retired after the 1992 Games in Barcelona, where he led the Americans to their first team medal, a bronze, at a non-boycotted Olympics in 44 years. But he kept his gym and summer camps, and by 1994 was again coaching elite-level gymnasts after Zmeskal asked him to help in her attempt to make the Atlanta Games.
Zmeskal didn’t make the Atlanta squad. But two of Karolyi’s other gymnasts, Strug and Moceanu, did, and it was Strug who provided one of the signature moments of the Olympics.
The Americans went into their final event in team finals, vault, trying to hold off Russia for their first-ever title at an Olympics or world championships. Despite injuring her left ankle when she fell on her first vault attempt, Strug went ahead with her second attempt, believing — wrongly — the Americans needed her score to clinch the gold.
With Karolyi shouting, “You can do it!” Strug sprinted down the runway, soared high above the vault and landed on both feet — ensuring it was a clean vault — before pulling her left leg up. After saluting the judges, she fell to her knees and had to be carried off the podium. Tests would later show she had two torn ligaments in her ankle.
As the rest of the Americans gathered on the podium to receive their gold medals, Karolyi carried Strug back into the arena, cradling her in his arms.
But even that drew criticism. Many said Karolyi never should have encouraged Strug to vault on her injured ankle in the first place and then should have stayed out of the spotlight rather than carrying her to the podium.
“Bela is a very tough coach and he gets criticism for that,” Strug said at the time. “But that’s what it takes to become a champion. I don’t think it’s really right that everyone tries to find the faults of Bela. Anything in life, to be successful, you’ve got to work really hard.”
The Karolyis retired again after the Atlanta Olympics. But after the U.S. women finished last in the medal round at the 1997 world championships, USA Gymnastics asked Bela Karolyi to come back.
He agreed — but only if he could implement a semi-centralized training system. Rather than a patchwork system of individual coaches who had their own philosophies, Karolyi would oversee the entire U.S. program. Gymnasts could still train with their own coaches, but there would be regular national team camps to ensure they were meeting established training and performance standards.
Though the idea was sound, Karolyi was not the right person to be in charge. Coaches who had been his equal chafed at his heavy-handedness, and were annoyed by his grandstanding. Gymnasts resented his bluster and demands.
By the time the Americans left the Sydney Olympics, about the only thing everyone agreed on was that Karolyi needed to step away.
He stepped aside and was replaced by his wife. Martha Karolyi’s standards were just as high — if not higher — than her husband’s, but on the surface, she was more willing to listen to other opinions.
“She’s more diplomatic. Absolutely,” Bela Karolyi said before the 2012 Olympics. “I’m wild. The opposite.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/bela-karolyi-controversial-olympic-gymnasts-coach-dies-at-82-/7866705.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
On the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Lima, Peru, U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in their last in-person engagement before Donald Trump returns to the White House in January. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports from Lima.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-meets-with-china-s-xi-bids-farewell-to-apec-leaders-/7866687.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Health officials said Saturday they have confirmed the first U.S. case of a new form of mpox that was first seen in eastern Congo.
The person had traveled to eastern Africa and was treated in Northern California upon return, according to the California Department of Public Health. Symptoms are improving and the risk to the public is low.
The individual was isolating at home and health workers are reaching out to close contacts as a precaution, the state health department said.
Mpox is a rare disease caused by infection with a virus that’s in the same family as the one that causes smallpox. It is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals. Milder symptoms can include fever, chills and body aches. In more serious cases, people can develop lesions on the face, hands, chest and genitals.
Earlier this year, scientists reported the emergence of a new form of mpox in Africa that was spread through close contact including through sex. It was widely transmitted in eastern and central Africa. But in cases that were identified in travelers outside of the continent, spread has been very limited, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 3,100 confirmed cases have been reported since late September, according to the World Health Organization. Most of them have been in three African countries — Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Since then, cases of travelers with the new mpox form have been reported in Germany, India, Kenya, Sweden, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and the United Kingdom.
Health officials earlier this month said the situation in Congo appears to be stabilizing. The Africa CDC has estimated Congo needs at least 3 million mpox vaccines to stop the spread, and another 7 million vaccines for the rest of Africa. The spread is mostly through sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups.
The current outbreak is different from the 2022 global outbreak of mpox where gay and bisexual men made up most of the cases.
https://www.voanews.com/a/health-officials-report-first-case-of-new-form-of-mpox-in-us/7866681.html
date: 2024-11-17, from: VOA News USA
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has selected Chris Wright, the founder of an oilfield services company, to lead the Energy Department, as his new administration continues to take shape.
The transition team officially announced the choice on Saturday afternoon. On Friday, Trump announced a new National Energy Council to be led by his Interior Department pick, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.
In this role, Burgum will direct a panel that crosses all executive branch agencies involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation and transportation, Trump said in a statement. As chairman of the National Energy Council, Burgum will have a seat on the National Security Council, the president-elect said.
Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy based in Denver, Colorado, has no political experience. He is an advocate for the oil and gas industry, including fracking. In 2019, he drank fracking liquid to show that it was not dangerous.
According to a March 2024 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. has produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to its International Energy Statistics, for the past six years in a row. Average monthly U.S. crude oil production established a monthly record high in December 2023 at more than 13.3 million barrels per day.
Earlier announcements
The Trump-Vance transition team announced Steven Cheung will return to the Trump White House as communications director. He held the same position for the Trump-Vance 2024 presidential campaign and served in the White House during Trump’s first term as director of strategic response.
On Friday evening, Trump announced that his campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, would be his White House press secretary. She served as assistant press secretary in his previous term in office.
Trump has swiftly named an array of political loyalists to key Cabinet positions. Most of them are likely to win quick Senate approval after confirmation hearings.
Having won majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, Republicans are set to take full control of the U.S. government by the third week in January.
“Republicans in the House and Senate have a mandate,” newly reelected House Speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this week. “The American people want us to implement and deliver that ‘America First’ agenda.”
Trump will be sworn in as the country’s 47th president on January 20, two weeks after the new Congress has been seated.
The 78-year-old Trump campaigned on a sweeping agenda that Democrats will be largely powerless to stop.
Republicans will have a 53-47 edge in the Senate, and the tie-breaking vote of Vice President-elect JD Vance in the event of a 50-50 stalemate on any legislative proposal. Republicans have secured at least 218 seats in the 435-member House, pending the outcome of seven undecided elections for two-year terms.
During his bid to win a second, nonconsecutive four-year term, Trump called for the massive deportation of millions of undocumented migrants living in the United States to their home countries, an extension and expansion of 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of 2025, further deregulation of businesses, a curb on climate controls, and prosecution of his political opponents.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, newly elected by his fellow Republicans as the Senate majority leader, said, “This Republican team is united. We are on one team. We are excited to reclaim the majority and to get to work with our colleagues in the House to enact President Trump’s agenda.”
Trump also has called on Senate Republican leaders to allow him to make “recess appointments,” which could occur when the chamber is not in session and would erase the need for time-consuming and often contentious confirmation hearings.
Despite the likelihood that most of his nominees will be approved, Trump this week named four who immediately drew disparaging assessments from several Democrats and some Republicans for their perceived lack of credentials.
They are former Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general; former Democratic congresswoman turned Republican Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence; former junior military officer and Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary; and former presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.
The blowback presages tough confirmation fights for the four in the Senate, which reviews the appointments of top-level officials and then votes to confirm them or, on occasion, reject them, forcing the White House to make another choice.
The appointment of Gaetz, 42, could prove particularly problematic, with some senators openly questioning whether he can win a 51-vote majority to assume the government’s top law enforcement position.
A House ethics committee probe was in the final stages of investigating whether he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use when he announced his resignation from the chamber late Wednesday, ending the probe.
The Justice Department that Gaetz hopes to lead had decided not to pursue criminal charges. Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing.
Gabbard, 43, has been criticized for her lack of direct experience in intelligence and accused of disseminating pro-Russian disinformation. If confirmed, she would be tasked with overseeing 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. She won over Trump with her switch from being a one-time Democratic House member from Hawaii to changing parties and staunchly advocating for his election.
Critics have assailed Hegseth, a 44-year-old decorated former military officer, as someone who lacks managerial experience in the business world. A weekend anchor on Fox News, he has voiced his opinions on military operations, including his opposition to women serving in combat roles.
A descendant of the Kennedy family political dynasty, Kennedy, 70, for years has been one of the country’s most prominent proponents of anti-vaccine views. He also opposed water fluoridation.
On Thursday, Trump also selected former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton to be Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, and former Representative Doug Collins to be secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Trump named one of his personal criminal defense attorneys, Todd Blanche, to be deputy attorney general, and another of his attorneys, D. John Sauer, to be solicitor general.
The Associated Press provided some information for this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-chooses-oil-industry-executive-as-energy-secretary-/7866658.html
