“The Biden administration in July issued a warning to US companies: Doing business in Hong Kong is increasingly risky. The advisory, released jointly by the departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, and Homeland Security, was basically a giant red flag cautioning companies and investors against the complications that are emerging under China’s national security law.
China imposed the sweeping legislation a little more than a year ago. It has since stifled Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and undermined its autonomy, rule of law, and free speech traditions.
This tenuous political climate has shaken Hong Kong, but it has not yet upended its status as a global financial capital. The United States’s advisory is recognition that this might change as China continues its crackdown in the territory. International businesses — and their employees — could soon find themselves entangled in national security law enforcement.”
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“China, for its part, is banking that Hong Kong’s infrastructure and economic climate will still make it a destination for foreign businesses in Asia despite the crackdown. After all, trade wars, tense Washington-Beijing relations, Beijing’s atrocious human rights record, and US sanctions have yet to stop most US firms from doing business in mainland China. And that may keep Hong Kong’s economic might intact while doing little to stop its democracy from crumbling.”
“The most egregious case happened in May, when Belarusian fighter jets diverted a Ryanair plane that was flying over Belarus en route to Lithuania from Greece and forced it to land in Minsk. Officials claimed (with laughably flimsy evidence) they had received a credible bomb threat against the plane. It was merely a pretext to arrest a prominent Belarusian opposition journalist, Roman Protasevich, and his girlfriend, who were aboard the flight (along with 170 other passengers).”
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/leylah-fernandez-father-jorge-emotionally-shares-canadian-immigrant-experience-012904434.html
“prior efforts to restrict the franchise frequently placed unnecessary hurdles in the way of voters, such as by requiring them to show certain forms of ID or by limiting where and when voters can cast their ballot. These sorts of laws are troubling, but they can be overcome by determined voters.
SB 202, by contrast, is part of a new generation of election laws that target the nuts and bolts of election administration, potentially allowing voters to be disenfranchised even if they follow the rules.”
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ climate science research group, concluded in a major report that it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the skies, waters, and lands, and that “widespread and rapid changes” have already occurred in every inhabited region across the globe. Many of these changes are irreversible within our lifetimes.
This is the first report of its kind in eight years, and a lot has changed. Scientists have backed away from many of the best-case scenarios. They’re more confident than ever that human-caused climate change is already worsening deadly weather events, from flooding to heat waves. And they’re investigating culprits of climate change that warm the planet even more than carbon dioxide.”
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“The goal of these reports is to compile the best available science and create a solid foundation for decision-makers to act, whether that’s to invest in clean energy, relocate people from high-risk areas, or help the most vulnerable places cope with unavoidable impacts.”
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“While researchers have better answers now on some fronts, they are also blunt about the things they still don’t know, which could have huge effects on the livability of the planet. Certain tipping points, feedbacks, and currently unappreciated mechanisms could further tilt the climate out of balance in ways that are hard to predict.”
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“in the eight years since the last comprehensive IPCC report and the six years since the Paris accords, humanity’s output of heat-trapping gases has only grown. Even with a dip in emissions stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reached a record high this year, topping 419 parts per million, a level the planet has not seen for at least 2 million years.
This rise in emissions has given scientists unprecedented opportunities to study climate change in real time. Alongside improvements in computer simulations, measurement technology, laboratory experiments, and historical records, scientists have gained far more insight to, and confidence in, humanity’s role in cranking up the planet’s thermostat.”
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“According to the report, it now seems impossible that the world will get lucky and warming will somehow stay within the Paris agreement targets without massive action to limit emissions, starting right away.”
“Multiple investigations, including by United Nations officials, have determined the Rohingya were victims of genocide or that there was strong evidence of it. Dozens of countries, led by The Gambia, have pushed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Myanmar of genocide.”
“When I came back to Afghanistan [in 2011], it was a very, very different paradigm. The IED techniques had migrated from Iraq. You couldn’t drive anywhere. When I was [in Afghanistan in 2001], we were on horseback or we’re on foot or we’re in light-skinned vehicles. Now, you couldn’t get from A to B without being in an armored vehicle or flying a helicopter.
But the biggest problem—the big point where I said, things aren’t going as well as I had hoped for — was dealing with these district governors, whom I dealt with frequently. They didn’t have a long view. They were not invested in the central government. There were a lot of reasons for that. Every day was a new day to them and it was a fight for survival. They had no incentive to build these relationships that we designed for them.
For example, we were paying nine and a half dollars per gallon to ship gas from Karachi to outlying districts. And when I approached the district governor—’Hey, you need to learn how to use your own bureaucratic requisition systems’—he said, ‘Why should I do that when you’re doing it for me?’ And he was dead serious. And of course, he died a couple of months later, as probably 60 percent of the guys who I worked with did on the Afghan side.”
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“We made a lot of efforts to pacify villages that were more hostile to us. And we succeeded in some cases by putting an Afghan National Police checkpoint in a village that didn’t have one to help deter the Taliban from launching rockets at the base. [In one instance] we convinced a village elder, who was a Ghilzai Pashtun, to support us, which was a big deal because many of the people to whom he had tribal ties were Taliban supporters.
But he was assassinated. Then his brother stood up and took his place and said, ‘We’ll stand with the government, the Americans.’ And he was assassinated. By that point, the Taliban had essentially regained control of the village. I spoke to one gentleman on the side of the road one day, and he was subsequently beheaded for talking to me and made an example of.
I saw through that that some of these things were almost Pyrrhic victories because we were doing the things that, [per] the counterinsurgency manual, doctrinally, we were doing the right things. And we were succeeding in some cases. But at the end of the day, the sacrifice and the loss of trust in the villages was starting to hamper our effectiveness in getting people to want to work with us, to follow our goals and objectives, to cooperate with us and to resist the Taliban and ultimately for us to succeed. I think they were going to have to resist them on their own. We couldn’t maintain a permanent presence of U.S. forces indefinitely to keep them safe or to deter the Taliban.”