News round-up, Monday, January 09, 2023

“Just imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets. All you would have to do is just eat them. Your teeth would sink into real meat, yet no animal would have lost its life for your meal. It will have been grown in the laboratory from a single chicken cell. Imagine that there would suddenly be enough meat from the laboratory to feed everybody in the world. Hunger would be a thing of the past. The land now used to grow corn for animal feed could be repurposed, perhaps even for a forest that could draw CO2 out of our atmosphere. Industrial livestock farming would no longer be needed.”

— Spiegel

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In 2022, we were unstoppable in accelerating the future of energy.

Let's reflect on our some of our best moments:

1. We announced our intent to exit coal by the end of 2025 and increased our ownership of AES Andes from 67% to 98%.

2. Fast Company ranked AES in the top ten of its “Best 100 Workplaces for Innovators” list.

3. We helped restore power to the people of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Fiona. Like Hawaii, we are also helping Puerto Rico in its energy transition by deploying solar plus storage on the island.

4. We released our IRP for AES Indiana, which serves as a roadmap for the company’s power generation goals. It included renewables, storage, and converting coal facilities to cleaner energy .

5. Together with Air Products, we announced a $4 billion mega-scale green hydrogen production facility in the United States, the largest green hydrogen project in the nation.

Reforestation day…

Since July 2015, Seaboard has been sponsoring a permanent brigade to contribute to the sustained work of recovering the forested area in the Upper Ozama River Basin.

Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…

Cooperate with ethical thinking -

UK Government gives go-ahead for nuclear plant development with EDF

Plans for the Sizewell C nuclear plant were approved on Thursday, with French energy giant EDF saying the plant would generate about 7% of the UK's electricity needs.

By Eric Albert (London (United Kingdom) correspondent)

Published on November 18, 2022

After a series of last-minute delays over the last two months in the UK, and the recent political instability in the country, an agreement now appears to have been reached between the British government and EDF to develop a new nuclear power plant.

While delivering the autumn statement on Thursday, November 17, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt announced the official decision to acquire a stake in Sizewell C, an EPR (European Pressurised Reactor, a nuclear reactor) project in the east of England, to be built and managed by the French electricity company.

"The government will proceed with the new nuclear power plant at Sizewell C," said Mr. Hunt. "Subject to final government approvals, the contracts for the initial investment will be signed with relevant parties, including EDF, in the coming weeks." The French utility company said it was "delighted" with the announcement.

Huge construction site

This agreement is not yet a green light for a new EPR to be built. One key element is missing: nearly €25 billion in financing. For now, the project for the plant, in which EDF and the British government will each hold a 50% stake, will be developed.

This will allow them to sideline the Chinese General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), which had been involved in Sizewell C for several years, and to bring in new cash to finance the cost of the development. The British government will contribute £700 million (€800 million) to the project.

EDF is already the operator of the UK's eight active nuclear power stations. It is also building Hinkley Point C in western England, two new EPRs with a total capacity of 3.2 gigawatts, the first of which is set to open in 2026. This huge construction site, on which more than 7,500 people work every day, was launched in 2016 and has been the subject of controversy.

At the time, the British government refused to pay a penny and EDF decided to finance the project with its own funds. However, the cost was prohibitive, and in January 2021, it was revised upwards to the cost of "£22 billion to £23 billion" (at 2015 prices; adjusted for inflation, it is close to £28 billion to £29 billion today). This decision led to the resignation of EDF's financial director, who felt that the risk was too great.

To soften the blow, the French company adopted a two-pronged approach. First, it signed an extraordinary contract with the British government, which guaranteed the sale price of electricity at £92.50 per megawatt-hour (at the time, double the market price) for 35 years. Second, it brought in CGN, which financed one-third of Hinkley Point C. At the same time, CGN took a 20% stake in the Sizewell C development project and was promised the opportunity to build a power plant using its own technology at Bradwell in northern England.

Finding investors

This all sounded brave during the "golden age" of UK-China relations proclaimed by then-Prime Minister David Cameron. Now, due to growing tensions with Beijing, the British government wants nothing to do with CGN. The Bradwell project will not see the light of day, and CGN is being asked to withdraw from Sizewell C.

To this end, the current agreement with EDF is to be signed, probably by the end of November. The British government and EDF will jointly oversee the development project, which alone requires a fairly substantial investment of around £1.5 billion.

All that remains is the trickiest part: finding investors. This time around, EDF does not want to – and cannot – finance the project from its own funds. The energy company has been trying for years to attract large North American pension funds or funds specializing in infrastructure projects which might be interested in an almost guaranteed return over a very long period, while the British government increasing its stake is an important gesture intended to reassure the French electric company. EDF hopes to conclude finance talks and make the final investment decision within 12 to 18 months.

Bolsonaro Supporters Lay Siege to Brazil’s Capital

Backers of former President Jair Bolsonaro ransacked government offices, denouncing what they falsely claim was a rigged election. Hundreds were arrested.

By Jack Nicas and André Spigariol

Jack Nicas reported from Rio de Janeiro and André Spigariol reported from Brasília. They have covered right-wing attacks on Brazil’s election systems since 2021.

Published Jan. 8, 2023Updated Jan. 9, 2023, 1:40 a.m. ET

Thousands of supporters of Brazil’s ousted former president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices on Sunday to protest what they falsely claim was a stolen election, the violent culmination of years of conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies.

In scenes reminiscent of the Jan. 6 storming of the United States Capitol, protesters in Brasília, Brazil’s capital, draped in the yellow and green of Brazil’s flag surged into the seat of power, setting fires, repurposing barricades as weapons, knocking police officers from horseback and filming their crimes as they committed them.

“We always said we would not give up,” one protester declared as he filmed himself among hundreds of protesters pushing into the Capitol building. “Congress is ours. We are in power.”

For months, protesters had been demanding that the military prevent the newly elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office on Jan. 1. Many on the right in Brazil have become convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that October’s election was rigged.

For years, Mr. Bolsonaro had asserted, without any proof, that Brazil’s election systems were rife with fraud and that the nation’s elites were conspiring to remove him from power.

Mr. Lula said Sunday that those false claims had fueled the attack on the plaza, known as Three Powers Square because of the presence of the three branches of government. Mr. Bolsonaro “triggered this,” he said in an address to the nation. “He spurred attacks on the three powers whenever he could. This is also his responsibility.”

Late Sunday, Mr. Bolsonaro criticized the protests, saying on Twitter that peaceful demonstrations are part of democracy, but that “destruction and invasions of public buildings, like what occurred today,” are not. But he also rejected Mr. Lula’s accusations, saying they were “without proof.”

At his inauguration, Mr. Lula said that uniting Brazil, Latin America’s largest country and one of the world’s biggest democracies, would be a central goal of his administration. The invasion of the capital suggests that the nation’s divisions are more profound than many had imagined, and it saddles the new president with a major challenge just one week into his administration.

After Mr. Lula was inaugurated, protesters put out calls online for others to join them for a massive demonstration on Sunday. It quickly turned violent.

Hundreds of protesters ascended a ramp to the roof of the congressional building in Brasília, the capital, while a smaller group invaded the building from a lower level, according to witnesses and videos of the scene posted on social media. Other groups of protesters splintered off and broke into the presidential offices and the Supreme Court, which are in the same plaza.

The scene was chaotic.

Protesters streamed into the government buildings, which were largely empty on a Sunday, breaking windows, overturning furniture and looting items inside, according to videos they posted online.

The crowds shouted that they were taking their country back, and that they would not be stopped. Outnumbered, the police fired what appeared to be rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear-gas canisters, including from two helicopters overhead.

“Police are cowardly trying to expel the people from Congress, but there is no way, because even more are arriving,” said one protester in a video filmed from inside Congress and showing hundreds of protesters on multiple floors. “No one is taking our country, damn it.”

Eventually Brazilian Army soldiers helped retake control of some buildings.

Mr. Lula, who was not in Brasília during the invasion, issued an emergency decree until Jan. 31 that allows the federal government to take “any measures necessary” to restore order in the capital. “There is no precedent for what these people have done, and for that, these people must be punished,” he said.

The president, who arrived in the capital late in the day to inspect the damage, said that his government would also investigate anyone who may have financed the protests.

Mr. Bolsonaro appeared to be in Florida. He flew to Orlando in the final days of his presidency, in hopes that his absence from the country would help cool off investigations into his activity as president, according to a friend of the president’s who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. He planned to stay in Florida for one to three months, this person said.

What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Mr. Bolsonaro has never unequivocally conceded defeat in the election, leaving it to his aides to handle the transition of power and skipping the inauguration, where he was supposed to pass the presidential sash to Mr. Lula, an important symbol of the transition of power for a country that lived under a 21-year military dictatorship until 1985.

After the election, he said he supported peaceful protests inspired by “feelings of injustice in the electoral process.”

But before departing for Florida, Mr. Bolsonaro suggested to his supporters that they move on. “We live in a democracy or we don’t,” he said in a recorded statement. “No one wants an adventure.”

His calls were ignored.

The next day, thousands of his supporters remained camped outside the Army headquarters in Brasília, with many convinced that the military and Mr. Bolsonaro were about to execute a secret plan to prevent Mr. Lula’s inauguration.

“The army will step in,” Magno Rodrigues, 60, a former mechanic and janitor, said in an interview on Dec. 31, the day before Mr. Lula took office. He had been camped outside the army’s headquarters for nine weeks and said he was prepared to stay “for the rest of my life if I have to.”

One of Mr. Lula’s central challenges as president will be to unify the nation after a bitter election in which some of his supporters framed Mr. Bolsonaro as genocidal and cannibalistic, while Mr. Bolsonaro repeatedly called Mr. Lula a criminal. (Mr. Lula served 19 months in prison on corruption charges that were later thrown out.)

Surveys have shown that a sizable chunk of the population say they believe Mr. Lula stole the election, fueled by false claims that have spread across the internet and a shift among many right-wing voters away from traditional sources of news — problems that have also plagued American politics in recent years.

President Biden, who was visiting the southern U.S. border, called the protests “outrageous,” and Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, said the United States “condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil.”

“Our support for Brazil’s democratic institutions is unwavering,” Mr. Sullivan wrote on Twitter. “Brazil’s democracy will not be shaken by violence.”

Some far-right provocateurs in the United States however, cheered on the attacks, posting videos of the riots and calling the protesters “patriots” who were trying to uphold the Brazilian Constitution. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald J. Trump, called the protesters “Brazilian Freedom Fighters” in a social-media post. Mr. Bannon has had close ties with one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s sons.

At first, the rioters had a relatively easy time breaching the buildings. State police officers tried to hold them back, but they were far outnumbered. The demonstrations had been advertised widely on social media for days.

“It was scary, it was insanity,” said Adriana Reis, 30, a cleaner at Congress who witnessed the scene. “They tried hard, with pepper spray, to drive them off, but I don’t think the police could handle them all.” After protesters streamed in, “we ran away to hide,” she said.

Videos from inside Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential offices quickly filled social-media feeds and group chats, showing protesters wearing their national flag and trudging through the halls of power, not exactly sure what to do next.

They sat in the padded chairs of the Chamber of Deputies, rifled through paperwork in the presidential offices and posed with a golden coat of arms that appeared to be ripped from the wall of the Supreme Court’s chambers. Federal officials later distributed images and videos from the presidential offices that showed destroyed computers, art ripped from frames and firearm cases that had been emptied of their guns.

The protesters were ransacking buildings that have been hailed as gems of Modernist architecture. Designed by the celebrated Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s, the Supreme Court, for instance, features columns of concrete clad in white marble that echo the fluttering of a sheet in the wind. And Congress is known for being capped with both a dome, under which the Senate is located, and a sort of bowl, under which the House is located.

Outside the presidential offices, they raised the flag of the Brazilian Empire, a period in the 19th century before Brazil became a democracy, and they sang Brazil’s national anthem. Videos of the rampage showed many protesters with phones aloft, filming the scene.

“There is no way to stop the people,” one protester declared as he live-streamed hundreds of protesters charging onto the roof of Congress. “Subscribe to my channel, guys.”

Several news outlets said their journalists were attacked and robbed during the rioting. And Ricardo Stuckert, Mr. Lula’s official photographer, had his passport and more than $95,000 worth of equipment stolen from a room in the presidential offices, according to his wife, Cristina Lino.

By late afternoon, military trucks had arrived.

Armed soldiers entered the presidential offices through a back door to ambush rioters inside. Shortly after, protesters began to stream out of the building, including some escorted by law enforcement officers.

By 9 p.m., more than seven hours after the invasions began, Brazil’s justice minister, Flávio Dino, said the buildings had been cleared. He said officials had arrested at least 200 people. The governor of Brasília said the number of arrests had exceeded 400.

Valdemar Costa Neto, the head of Mr. Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party, criticized the protesters.

“Today is a sad day for the Brazilian nation,” he said in a statement. “All orderly demonstrations are legitimate. Disorder has never been part of our nation’s principles.”

The Brazilian flag draped around many of the rioters on Sunday includes three words: “Order and progress.”

Reporting was contributed by Ana Ionova, Yan Boechat, Leonardo Coelho, Laís Martins and Gustavo Freitas.

Can Stem Cell Meat Save the Planet?

Eggs, chicken and fish from the laboratory: Singapore is the first country in the world to approve the sale of meat produced from stem cells. Will it be enough to feed the world?

By Maria Stöhr

06.01.2023, 20.56 Uhrken from the laboratory: Is this the future of food?

For our Global Societies project, reporters around the world will be writing about societal problems, sustainability and development in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The series will include features, analyses, photo essays, videos and podcasts looking behind the curtain of globalization. The project is generously funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Just imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets. All you would have to do is just eat them. Your teeth would sink into real meat, yet no animal would have lost its life for your meal. It will have been grown in the laboratory from a single chicken cell. Imagine that there would suddenly be enough meat from the laboratory to feed everybody in the world. Hunger would be a thing of the past. The land now used to grow corn for animal feed could be repurposed, perhaps even for a forest that could draw CO2 out of our atmosphere. Industrial livestock farming would no longer be needed.

To be sure, solutions that sound so simple should be approached with caution. But there is a place where the utopia described above isn’t as far away as it might sound. Where such laboratory chicken can be tasted and where the nuggets are being served up on real plates. That place is Singapore.

Singapore is the first and, thus far, the only country in the world where meat grown in laboratories can be marketed to and eaten by consumers. The government is hopeful that the country can become home to the technologies behind the food of the future. It is likely, after all, to become an extremely profitable industry, with investors around the world already injecting billions of dollars into the new food sector. Alternative sources of protein, including lab-grown meat, currently make up 2 percent of the global meat market. By 2035, that share is expected to be five times as high. And now that food prices have skyrocketed due to the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, adding to the hunger and environmental crises already afflicting the world, some experts believe that meat grown from stem cells could develop into a technological revolution.

Beyond that, Singapore is also dependent on food imports, with 90 percent coming from abroad. The country has hardly any of its own farmland. The government wants to change the situation by 2030 and is funding startups that might be able to help, such as one that is looking into ways to produce a replacement for eggs, and another that produces intelligent rooftop garden systems where heads of lettuce grow on self-watering, vertical columns. Much of the focus, though, is on stem cell technologies aimed at producing things like milk, fish and meat from stem cells.

In brief, the idea is as follows: Stem cells are taken from animals through a biopsy and are then frozen in liquid nitrogen to preserve them for several years. To produce meat, the cells are multiplied in a bioreactor. The technology isn’t quite yet ready for mass production, but theoretically, a single biopsy would be sufficient to produce hundreds of tons of meat.

The American startup Eat Just, based in Silicon Valley, is currently in the process of opening a laboratory in Singapore. The company’s focus is on producing chicken meat, which it plans to introduce to supermarkets in the coming years. In early November, the company invited a group of test subjects to the fancy Marriott Hotel in the center of Singapore to be served a dish of the future: investors, food technicians, company founders – and me.

The Dinner

During the meal, the lighting is dimmed, and a film is projected onto the wall about the climate crisis, damaged farmland, hungry populations and rising sea levels. The first three courses, all of which are vegan, even have names that recall the challenges our environment is facing: "Forest Floor," "Fields of Corn" and "Flooded Future."

We learn how people have spent millennia breeding fowl, resulting in the chicken as we know it today – one of the most important sources of protein for the global population. There are 23 billion chickens on Earth, and the video recounts how the process of feeding, slaughtering, refrigerating and transporting them requires a huge amount of energy and land, which is helping to fuel the climate crisis. All because people continue to want to eat excessive quantities of meat, even though it’s not necessary.

Finally, the course is brought in for which everyone has been waiting for this evening: chicken nuggets from the laboratory. The waitress serves the plates and presents the dish:

Throughout human history, advancements in food technology have had the power to change the way people live, things like fermenting fruit, baking bread, iodizing salt, controlling fire and domesticating animals. But for a new foodstuff, which may make sense in theory, to actually be accepted in practice, it must be affordable and available in large quantities. And more than anything, it has to taste good.

The Flavor

The knife slices through the breading and then through the meat itself. My first thought: It seems like normal chicken meat and can almost be cut through with a fork. I scratch off a bit of breading to get a better view of the meat itself. Its color is a bit lighter than normal chicken meat, a whitish-gray shade. The first bite: soft, not much resistance, a bit stringy and reminiscent of tofu. It’s a little watery. But it definitely tastes and smells like chicken.

One person at the table comments that there is room for improvement, while another says that if she had the choice, she would opt for a soybean schnitzel over one made from stem cells. They taste better, she says. But I find myself wondering, would people really be able to taste the difference on the street, given the way chicken nuggets are normally eaten – namely quickly, in large quantities and by hand? I give the meat a rating of five out of 10. Everyone at the table agrees that it’s not good enough yet. Innovation must grab your attention. Meat from the laboratory has to be better than the cheap chicken meat used by fast food chains.

But what about the other criteria? Price, availability and authorization? It’s time to head for the lab.

In the Laboratory

Serene Chng puts on a white lab coat. She is a biologist and works for Shiok Meats, a Singapore company that hopes to bring seafood made from stem cells to the market. It’s her job to find the highest quality cells to use as a starting point, those that reproduce the best.

Chng leads the way through the laboratory, where lobster, shrimp and crab stem cells are extracted and then examined. "We learn here what the cells like to eat and how often they must be fed," says Chng, referring to the nutrient solutions, full of carbohydrates, amino acids and minerals, that replace the blood that nourishes cells in living animals. "What you see here is the beginning of a revolution."

She leads the way past microscopes, UV lamps, centrifuges and devices for analyzing metabolism. The technology behind stem cell meat is borrowed from the processes used to produce certain medical drugs and vaccines. The corona vaccine produced by AstraZeneca, for example, is made using a similar process.

Chng’s coworker opens the top of the cryotank, which contains the stem cells. Nitrogen steams out of it. The most potent stem cells are kept inside, cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius. Just one of the cells can produce as much shrimp meat as you want, says Chng. That process takes place nearby in large, stainless-steel reactors, where the cells reproduce. I had imagined entire lobsters growing in the machines, but that’s not entirely accurate. Only muscle and fat cells are reproduced, growing in a kind of soup that gets thicker and thicker until it reaches the consistency of ground meat. The cell soup is ready after six to eight weeks before being enriched with plant fibers in a process that Shiok Meats prefers not to describe in detail. The result is a kind of meat paste out of which foodstuffs can be produced. In other words, the final product like the chicken nugget, is not 100 percent meat.

Criticism of Lab-Grown Meat

As promising as the technology might sound, criticism of laboratory meat abounds. The primary focus of such criticism is the amount of energy necessary for its production, particularly for the fabrication of large quantities. If a significant share of the global population is to be fed with cultivated meat, huge bioreactors, sophisticated machinery and complex production facilities will be necessary.

I have a few questions of my own. Is lab-grown meat actually meat?

The founder of Shiok Meats, Sandhya Sriram, a stem-cell researcher, says: "Yes. It is 100 percent meat. Just imagine it like vegetables that are grown in a greenhouse instead of in nature. The result is the same, but the route taken isn’t the natural one, but a technological one."

Can vegetarians eat it as well?

Sriram: "Vegetarians who refrain from eating meat out of concern for the well-being of animals and the climate crisis are extremely interested in lab-grown meat. In cruelty-free meat."

Why is there a need for yet another meat alternative? We already have burgers made from soy, mungo beans and chickpeas.

Sriram: "It is naïve to hope that a majority of people will soon switch to vegetarianism. The consumption of meat is rising, as is the global population. Our approach is: Let people eat their meat and fish, but let’s make it sustainable."

If meat produced from stem cells is supposed to solve so many problems, why can’t I find it in the supermarket?

Two terms are consistently used when discussing the problems faced by lab-grown meat: Scaling and price. They are concerns held by stem-cell researcher Sandhya Sriram as well: "We rely on extremely expensive technologies and devices from the pharmaceutical industry, and we are using them to produce food." It will take time before sufficient lab-grown meat can be produced to sate the appetites of billions of people, she says, along with larger, cheaper bioreactors. Progress has been made, she says, but only in tiny steps.

Several years ago, says Sriram, the price of a kilogram of shrimp meat from Shiok Meats was around $10,000. Since then, though, the company has been able to reduce the price to around $50 per kilo. More time is still needed before meat from the bioreactor can come close to competing with meat from industrial livestock farming. But she believes that lab-grown meat products could become competitive within the next decade. And they must then be approved for sale. But such a process could be difficult in the European Union, since individual member states must give their thumbs up, and it is unclear how many of them might decide to protect their domestic meat industries instead.

Singapore is funding alternative food technologies, such as the company Agritisan, which constructs intelligent rooftop gardening systems so that more people can feed themselves.

Founder Alexander Tan shows one of his prototypes. Heads of lettuce grow on these vertical gardens, watered automatically from the inside of the column and powered by a solar cell on the top.

When it comes to the approval of lab-grown meat, Asia could end up taking the lead. Many countries in Asia are far more open to the technology than European countries, says Sandhya Sriram. That could be a function of the greater challenges the continent is facing when it comes to hunger and climate change-related catastrophes. Every year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issues a "code red for humanity." In 2021, more than a million people in Asia didn’t have sufficient access to food, with farmers struggling with their harvests and fishing boats returning to port with smaller and smaller catches. Forecasts indicate that the region, currently home to 4.7 billion people, will grow by another 600 million people in the next 30 years.

A new technology to combat hunger and which can fill up more stomachs with fewer resources? That is a bit of good news.

Back to dinner at the hotel in Singapore. After the chicken nugget, the chef comes out to the dining room with yet another course he has prepared. It is again lab-grown chicken, but this time it’s "the next generation," he says. Satay skewers with peanut sauce.

Again, the aroma of grilled chicken fills the room. I pull the meat from the wooden skewers, some of it sticking. This time, the texture of the meat is firmer.

Can the world be saved by chicken nuggets or grilled chicken skewers? Will people ever buy foodstuffs produced in a manner similar to a COVID vaccine? I don’t have the answers. I pick up the last of the three satay skewers from the plate and take a bite of the chicken that was produced in a cellular soup inside a stainless-steel vat. It is saturated in marinade and peanut sauce. I’ve certainly eaten worse chicken. Seven out of 10 points.

This piece is part of the Global Societies series. The project runs for three years and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lubmin, the German village where the pipeline runs dry (Le Monde)

“Usually, the Baltic Sea is calm. Along the four kilometers of snow-covered beach that form the coastline of Lubmin, in northeast Germany, there’s nothing to suggest the presence of the famous Nord Stream pipelines. However, from this town of 2,100 inhabitants in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in the former GDR, the underwater infrastructure that connects St. Petersburg, Russia, to the European continent has been providing cheap gas to all of Germany since 2012. In September 2022, a mysterious explosion damaged those facilities and buried this partnership, which had already been called into question by the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Since then, the price of gas has almost tripled in the region.”

— Le Monde

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In 2022, we were unstoppable in accelerating the future of energy.

Let's reflect on our some of our best moments:

1. We announced our intent to exit coal by the end of 2025 and increased our ownership of AES Andes from 67% to 98%.

2. Fast Company ranked AES in the top ten of its “Best 100 Workplaces for Innovators” list.

3. We helped restore power to the people of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Fiona. Like Hawaii, we are also helping Puerto Rico in its energy transition by deploying solar plus storage on the island.

4. We released our IRP for AES Indiana, which serves as a roadmap for the company’s power generation goals. It included renewables, storage, and converting coal facilities to cleaner energy .

5. Together with Air Products, we announced a $4 billion mega-scale green hydrogen production facility in the United States, the largest green hydrogen project in the nation.

Reforestation day…

Since July 2015, Seaboard has been sponsoring a permanent brigade to contribute to the sustained work of recovering the forested area in the Upper Ozama River Basin.

Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…

Cooperate with ethical thinking -

By  Lucas Minisini

Published on January 7, 2023

FeatureOn the Baltic Sea coast, the village is the endpoint for the Nord Stream pipelines through which Germany can tap into cheap Russian gas. But since the war in Ukraine, the tap has been turned off.

Usually, the Baltic Sea is calm. Along the four kilometers of snow-covered beach that form the coastline of Lubmin, in northeast Germany, there's nothing to suggest the presence of the famous Nord Stream pipelines. However, from this town of 2,100 inhabitants in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in the former GDR, the underwater infrastructure that connects St. Petersburg, Russia, to the European continent has been providing cheap gas to all of Germany since 2012. In September 2022, a mysterious explosion damaged those facilities and buried this partnership, which had already been called into question by the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Since then, the price of gas has almost tripled in the region.

Since the beginning of the war, Lubmin has become famous worldwide. 'Even President Joe Biden knows about us,' said a resident.

In the village battered by icy winds, at the entrance of the only hotel in Lubmin, the Hotel Seebrücke, 74-year-old owner Heidrun Moritz asked the question that most of the residents have been wondering about: "Why not simply reopen Nord Stream?" Wearing a flowery apron, and with her eyes fixed on the sea, she was worried about the winter. The temperatures, already negative on this December 14, are expected to continue to drop, and she doesn't know how long she'll be able to heat her 12 rooms, which she has been renting out non-stop since 1983.

The once bustling restaurant in Lubmin has become a shadow of its former self due to rising prices that have deterred customers from indulging in their favorite ice cream or fish dishes while enjoying Christmas music in the background. The owner, a biology graduate who learned Russian in school, expressed frustration at the stalled construction of the planned extension to the one-story building, which has been in progress for years. As she stands at the counter adorned with numerous owls of varying sizes, Heidrun Moritz deplored the fact that the residents of Lubmin are "all victims of geopolitics."

'Energy capital'

Lubmin has become a symbol of Germany's energy dependence on Russia. The presence of Nord Stream AG in the municipality has brought in an annual income of between €1.5 and €2 million in local taxes, earning it the nickname of the "energy capital" of the country. However, journalists are now unwelcome in the peaceful and well-maintained streets of Lubmin, as many residents have grown tired of the constant questioning about energy and Nord Stream. When contacted by email, Mayor Axel Vogt declined to meet with Le Monde, stating that the villagers of Lubmin would like nothing more than to return to a state of "peace and tranquility." As a politically unaffiliated mayor responsible for the operation of the municipality's port and a strong supporter of local energy policy, Mr. Vogt's perspective on the matter carries significant weight.

Many people have chosen to settle in Lubmin for their retirement, drawn to the comfortable houses on the edge of the forest, or to raise their children in a small town located about 30 kilometers from the university city of Greifswald. Despite being located in a region of Germany with high unemployment rates (around 9%), Lubmin has attracted new residents due to planned housing developments that will accommodate families or workers from across the European Union. The town has also accepted Ukrainian refugees, though this decision was met with hesitation from the town hall and with criticism from residents due to the village's historical ties to Russia. Since the beginning of the war, Lubmin has gained worldwide recognition. "Even Joe Biden, the president of the United States, knows about us," said one resident on an icy street with a touch of pride.

A new controversial project

As the end of 2022 approached, the town of Lubmin remained in the news due to the Neptune, a massive ship owned by TotalEnergies that is stationed offshore. Measuring 283 meters in length and 55 meters in height, the ship is filled with liquefied gas. Its purpose is to launch a methanol port, also known as an "LNG terminal," in Lubmin. The gas, largely exported from Qatar, is cooled to -160°C to maintain its liquid form before being transported to the mainland via small boats suitable for the shallow waters off the coast. Although the recent Qatargate controversy may complicate matters, Germany has plans to build a total of 11 terminals of this type, with the first one having been inaugurated on December 12 along the North Sea coast.

Funded by Stephan Knabe and Ingo Wagner, a tax consultant and real estate entrepreneur from Potsdam near Berlin, the port of Lubmin would provide 4.5 billion cubic meters of gas per year to thousands of households through their startup, Deutsche ReGas. A significant decrease from the 55 billion cubic meters per year transported by Nord Stream 1 before September. However, according to the Lubmin pastor Katrin Krüger, "no one wants this project." Despite the lack of support, Ms. Krüger wondered if the town truly has any other options. She has observed an increase in "depressed" worshippers at her 50-seat church, which was heated to only 17°C due to rising prices.

Environmental activists in the region are concerned about the potential danger of a gas terminal in Lubmin, which is located near the Rügen and Usedom islands, important fishing and biodiversity reserves. They warned that the constant movement of polluting boats could disrupt the flow of sand and hinder the creation of oxygen in the water, which is generated by currents. Susanna Knotz, a member of BUND, the German federation for the environment and nature conservation, said that "this project would endanger the most important swan molting area in northern Germany, located very close to Lubmin."

The environmental activist stated that, despite repeated requests from various NGOs, Deutsche ReGas has only provided temporary access to documents outlining the environmental impact of the project, rather than making them publicly and indefinitely accessible as required by law. The company cited "security reasons" for this decision, without providing further information. The launch of the gas terminal, which was originally scheduled for December 1, has been postponed for several weeks without any explanation. Deutsche ReGas's communication department has simply referred to a "complicated period" in a brief email.

A long golden age

Thanks to the energy industry, Lubmin has experienced a long golden age. In the late 1960s, a nuclear power plant was built there by the Soviet Union. Advertised as "the largest in the entire GDR," it supplied more than 10% of the electricity consumed in East Germany and employed a little over 8,000 people. A job that paid twice as much as a professor's position in the communist territory, which made everyone "very proud," said Olaf Strauss, 56, who is now a technology and innovation consultant at the University of Neubrandenburg, about 80 kilometers south of Lubmin.

Hired in 1983, the young man became responsible for transferring electricity produced in the east German network, under the strict control of the Stasi, the GDR's intelligence services, whose informants were present in every department. "There was even an office for spies in the building," said the professor with a smile, in a café in Greifswald, a city near Lubmin. At the time, the engineer with a mullet participated in football tournaments with the power plant team, drank beers with his colleagues, and often fell asleep on the beach in Lubmin after his night shift to enjoy the scenery.

The village, where dozens of houses were built in a few years, became one of the "biggest economic centers in the region," with a bright future. But everything stopped in 1990. The reunified Germany refused to continue the Soviet project and began a long process of dismantling the nuclear power plant (which today still employs a little over 800 people). Some of the former employees then applied to work in Western Germany's power plants while others preferred to change careers. Thousands of workers lost their jobs overnight. "But here, the ties with Russia never disappeared," said Mr. Strauss.

A grand opening

On November 8, 2011, the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was inaugurated with great fanfare. The then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, hailed a "new chapter in the partnership between Russia and the European Union" in front of 450 guests, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Prime Minister François Fillon, Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi officer close to Vladimir Putin and CEO of Nord Stream AG, and Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor, who arrived by helicopter.

"The Chancellor opened the gas pipeline herself, in front of the cameras and photographers of the world," said Volker Erckmann, a retired physicist, member of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science and founder of a research institute in Greifswald, who was present that day. After several projects rejected by the inhabitants, including a Danish coal plant and an incineration plant for the waste of the city of Naples, Italy, Lubmin rejoiced in this unique partnership and its seemingly endless financial windfall. "Nobody had imagined that an excessive dependence on Russia could become a problem," the 72-year-old scientist said, over slices of gingerbread and coffee in the living room of his spacious house, a few dozen meters from the sea.

The first doubts

The first doubts arose in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas region. The project for a Nord Stream 2 system, launched in 2018, which could double amounts sent to Western Europe, became a source of political tensions between the European Union and the United States, which was firmly opposed to the idea. According to Mr. Erckmann, the inhabitants of Lubmin rejected American doubts, which they considered as "outside interference."

Thanks to a "foundation for the protection of the environment and climate," a state organization that he almost entirely finances, the Russian energy giant Gazprom was able to bypass the economic sanctions planned by the United States to penalize western companies involved in the project. The construction of the new gas pipeline continued. Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021, but five months later, Russia invaded Ukraine and the 1,220-kilometer pipeline, which was operational, wasn't put into service in the end. "Everyone was extremely disappointed," said the physicist.

The inhabitants then decided to fight. One week after the sabotage of Nord Stream, in September 2022, which completely stopped the shipment of Russian gas (whose volumes had already been gradually reduced by Gazprom), 1,800 people gathered in Lubmin to demand the opening of the two pipelines. At the demonstration in front of the town hall, near the old railway station, Russian flags were displayed alongside slogans against the restrictions linked to Covid-19 and T-shirts with Nazi symbols, which can be seen in a video by the local media outlet Katapult present at the gathering.

Three Ukrainian refugees were threatened by demonstrators for holding up signs condemning the "murderous" Russian state: "You should leave, you don't want to know what will happen to you if you stay here," warned one of them, according to several journalists on the spot. Far-right political figures, such as the Austrian Martin Sellner, leader of the Identitären Bewegung Österreich movement, close to the American alt-right, crowded in front of the entrance to the Nord Stream power plant, amidst smoke bombs and declarations in favor of Vladimir Putin. The 30-year-old, banned from entering the United Kingdom, demanded the reopening of the facilities, without success.

Today, protests continue, but the Russian gas pipeline has taken a back seat to the now primarily anti-government demands. According to Mr. Erckmann, who has nevertheless decided to enjoy his retirement in this "turbulent" village, Nord Stream has become a source of frustration in the quiet streets of Lubmin. With a sad smile, the 70-year-old concluded: "Here, all projects end up failing..."

Looking for new sources of revenue

Today, the people of Lubmin are a bit lost. Recently, the town council has started building a museum about the history of the village, mainly to tell its long tradition of fishing, the former local livelihood, which is now almost extinct. Since the end of Nord Stream, local businesses are struggling to find new sources of income, potentially more environmentally friendly. "Plans have been drawn up for the construction of a hydrogen power plant," explained Rainer Sauerwein, 77, an environmental activist based on the island of Usedom, about 50 kilometers to the east. To power it, the wind turbines in the nearby village of Wusterhusen could be requisitioned. Several dozen new, more powerful models should also be built on the island of Rügen, opposite Lubmin.

The latest idea, a bio-fuel power plant, which runs on agricultural waste, has just been launched on the site of the old nuclear power plant. But for the German environmentalist, these are just "fantasies" aimed at camouflaging the region's investments in fossil fuels. Only tourism has remained stable in the small seaside resort on the Baltic Sea. A few tens of thousands of people travel to the guesthouses each summer to enjoy the long beach, which is less crowded than those on the neighboring islands. "The big hotel chains have never invested here," said the former scientist. "They were afraid of the energy industry, which is still quite dominant."

On the outskirts of the city, near the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, right next to the marina, it's impossible to talk to employees working for Nord Stream AG. They have all been instructed not to talk to the press. Contrary to expectations, almost no one lost their job. Wearing fluorescent safety vests, several dozen of them are still working in the facilities, mostly to maintain the pipes. Many of the residents hope this is a sign that the pipelines may one day return to service.

Note: if you are interested in this subject, Germán & Co has written a series of essays on this topic.

The Riddle Of Non-Nord Stream Return... | Energy Central

News round-up, Friday, January 06, 2023

“What are the chances of a soft landing?
If the strained U.S. economy is going to unwind rather than unravel, it will need multiple double-edged realities to be favorably resolved.
For instance, many retail industry analysts think the holiday season may have been the last hurrah for the pandemic-era burst in purchases of goods. Some consumers may be sated from recent spending, while others become more selective in their purchases, balking at higher prices.”

— NYT

---

In 2022, we were unstoppable in accelerating the future of energy.

Let's reflect on our some of our best moments:

1. We announced our intent to exit coal by the end of 2025 and increased our ownership of AES Andes from 67% to 98%.

2. Fast Company ranked AES in the top ten of its “Best 100 Workplaces for Innovators” list.

3. We helped restore power to the people of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Fiona. Like Hawaii, we are also helping Puerto Rico in its energy transition by deploying solar plus storage on the island.

4. We released our IRP for AES Indiana, which serves as a roadmap for the company’s power generation goals. It included renewables, storage, and converting coal facilities to cleaner energy .

5. Together with Air Products, we announced a $4 billion mega-scale green hydrogen production facility in the United States, the largest green hydrogen project in the nation.

Reforestation day…

Since July 2015, Seaboard has been sponsoring a permanent brigade to contribute to the sustained work of recovering the forested area in the Upper Ozama River Basin.

Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…

Cooperate with ethical thinking -

Even a Soft Landing for the Economy May Be Uneven

Small businesses and lower-income families could feel pinched in the months ahead whether or not a recession is avoided this year.

By Talmon Joseph Smith

Jan. 6, 2023

One of the defining economic stories of the past year was the complex debate over whether the U.S. economy was going into a recession or merely descending, with some altitude sickness, from a peak in growth after pandemic lows.

This year, those questions and contentions are likely to continue. The Federal Reserve has been steeply increasing borrowing costs for consumers and businesses in a bid to curb spending and slow down inflation, with the effects still making their way through the veins of commercial activity and household budgeting. So most banks and large credit agencies expect a recession in 2023.

At the same time, a budding crop of economists and major market investors see a firm chance that the economy will avoid a recession, or scrape by with a brief stall in growth, as cooled consumer spending and the easing of pandemic-era disruptions help inflation gingerly trend toward more tolerable levels — a hopeful outcome widely called a soft landing.

“The possibility of getting a soft landing is greater than the market believes,” said Jason Draho, an economist and the head of Americas asset allocation for UBS Global Wealth Management. “Inflation has now come down faster than some recently expected, and the labor market has held up better than expected.”

What seems most likely is that even if a soft landing is achieved, it will be smoother for some households and businesses and rockier for others.

In late 2020 and early 2021, talk of a “K-shaped recovery” took root, inspired by the early pandemic economy’s split between secure remote workers — whose savings, house prices and portfolios surged — and the millions more navigating hazardous or tenuous in-person jobs or depending on a large-yet-porous unemployment aid system.

In 2023, if there’s a soft landing, it could be K-shaped, too. The downside is likely to be felt most by cash-starved small businesses and by workers no longer buoyed by the savings and labor bargaining power they built up during the pandemic.

In any case, more turbulence lies ahead as fairly low unemployment, high inflation and shaky growth continue to queasily coexist.

Generally healthy corporate balance sheets and consumer credit could be bulwarks against the forces of volatile prices, global instability and the withdrawal of emergency-era federal aid. Chief executives of companies that cater to financially sound middle-class and affluent households remain confident in their outlook. Al Kelly, the chief executive of Visa, the credit card company, said recently that “we are seeing nothing but stability.”

But the Fed’s projections indicate that 1.6 million people could lose jobs by late this year — and that the unemployment rate will rise at a magnitude that in recent history has always been accompanied by a recession.

“There will be some softening in labor market conditions,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said at his most recent news conference, explaining the rationale for the central bank’s recent persistence in raising rates. “And I wish there were a completely painless way to restore price stability. There isn’t. And this is the best we can do.”

Will the bottom 50 percent backslide?

Over the past two years, researchers have frequently noted that, on average, lower-wage workers have reaped the greatest pay gains, with bumps in compensation that often outpaced inflation, especially for those who switched jobs. But those gains are relative and were often upticks from low baselines.

According to the Realtime Inequality tracker, created by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, inflation-adjusted disposable income for the bottom 50 percent of working-age adults grew 4.2 percent from January 2019 to September 2022. Among the top 50 percent, income lagged behind inflation. But that comparison leaves out the context that the average income for the bottom 50 percent in 2022 was $25,500 — roughly a $13 hourly pay rate.

“As we look ahead, I think it is entirely possible that the households and the people we usually worry about at the bottom of the income distribution are going to run into some kind of combination of job loss and softer wage gains, right as whatever savings they had from the pandemic gets depleted,” said Karen Dynan, a former chief economist at the Treasury Department and a professor at Harvard University. “And it’s going to be tough on them.”

Consumer spending accounts for roughly 70 percent of economic activity. The widespread resilience of overall consumption in the past year despite high inflation and sour business sentiment was largely attributed to the savings that households of all kinds accumulated during the pandemic: a $2.3 trillion gumbo of government aid, reduced spending on in-person services, windfalls from mortgage refinancing and cashed-out stock gains.

What’s left of those stockpiles is concentrated among wealthier households.

After spiking during the pandemic, the overall rate of saving among Americans has quickly plunged amid inflation.

The personal saving rate -- a monthly measure of the percentage of after-tax income that households save overall -- has dropped precipitously in recent months. 

Note: The personal saving rate is also referred to as "personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income." Personal saving is defined as overall income minus spending and taxes paid.

Most major U.S. banks have reported that checking balances are above prepandemic levels across all income groups. Yet the cost of living is higher than it was in 2019 throughout the country. And depleted savings among the bottom third of earners could continue to ebb while rent and everyday prices still rise, albeit more slowly.

Most key economic measures are reported in “real” terms, subtracting inflation from changes in individual income (real wage growth) and total output (real gross domestic product, or G.D.P.). If government calculations of inflation continue to abate as quickly as markets expect, inflation-adjusted numbers could become more positive, making the decelerating economy sound healthier.

That wonky dynamic could form a deep tension between resilient-looking official data and the sentiment of consumers who may again find themselves with little financial cushion.

Does small business risk falling behind?

Another potential factor for a K-shaped landing could be the growing pressure on small businesses, which have less wiggle room than bigger companies in managing costs. Small employers are also more likely to be affected by the tightening of credit as lenders become far pickier and pricier than just a year ago.

In a December survey of 3,252 small-business owners by Alignable, a Boston-based small business network with seven million members, 38 percent said they had only one month or less of cash reserves, up 12 percentage points from a year earlier. Many landlords who were lenient about payments at the height of the pandemic have stiffened, asking for back rent in addition to raising current rents.

Unlike many large-scale employers that have locked in cheap long-term funding by selling corporate bonds, small businesses tend to fund their operations and payrolls with a mix of cash on hand, business credit cards and loans from commercial banks. Higher interest rates have made the latter two funding sources far more expensive — spelling trouble for companies that may need a fresh line of credit in the coming months. And incoming cash flows depend on sales remaining strong, a deep uncertainty for most.

A Bank of America survey of small-business owners in November found that “more than half of respondents expect a recession in 2023 and plan to reduce spending accordingly.” For a number of entrepreneurs, decisions to maintain profitability may lead to reductions in staff.

Some businesses wrestling with labor shortages, increased costs and a tapering off in customers have already decided to close.

Susan Dayton, a co-owner of Hamilton Street Cafe in Albany, N.Y., closed her business in the fall once she felt the rising costs of key ingredients and staff turnover were no longer sustainable.

She said the labor shortage for small shops like hers could not be solved by simply offering more pay. “What I have found is that offering people more money just means you’re paying more for the same people,” Ms. Dayton said.

That tension among profitability, staffing and customer growth will be especially stark for smaller businesses. But it exists in corporate America, too. Some industry analysts say company earnings, which ripped higher for two years, could weaken but not plunge, with input costs leveling off, while businesses manage to keep prices elevated even if sales slow.

That could limit the bulk of layoffs to less-valued workers during corporate downsizing and to certain sectors that are sensitive to interest rates, like real estate or tech — creating another potential route for a soft, if unequal, landing.

The biggest challenge to overcome is that the income of one person or business is the spending of another. Those who feel that inflation can be tamed without a collapse in the labor market hope that spending slows just enough to cool off price increases, but not so much that it leads employers to lay off workers — who could pull back further on spending, setting off a vicious circle.

What are the chances of a soft landing?

If the strained U.S. economy is going to unwind rather than unravel, it will need multiple double-edged realities to be favorably resolved.

For instance, many retail industry analysts think the holiday season may have been the last hurrah for the pandemic-era burst in purchases of goods. Some consumers may be sated from recent spending, while others become more selective in their purchases, balking at higher prices.

That could sharply reduce companies’ “pricing power” and slow inflation associated with goods. Service-oriented businesses may be somewhat affected, too. But the same phenomenon could lead to layoffs, as slowdowns in demand reduce staffing needs.

In the coming months, the U.S. economy will be influenced in part by geopolitics in Europe and the coronavirus in China. Volatile shifts in what some researchers call “systemically significant prices,” like those for gas, utilities and food, could materialize. People preparing for a downturn by cutting back on investments or spending could, in turn, create one. And it is not clear how far the Fed will go in raising interest rates.

Then again, those risk factors could end up relatively benign.

“It’s 50-50, but I have to take a side, right? So I take the side of no recession,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “I can make the case on either side of this pretty easily, but I think with a little bit of luck and some tough policymaking, we can make our way through.”

Kevin McCarthy hopes for deal as US House Speaker fight hits day four

Kevin McCarthy's attempt to become House speaker has been frustrated by members of his party

By Kathryn Armstrong & Anthony Zurcher in London and Washington

Le Monde

Members of the US House of Representatives will try for a fourth day to elect a Speaker on Friday in an attempt to end a political impasse.

The frontrunner, Republican Kevin McCarthy, has so far failed to reach the 218 votes required for election.

And there is still no clear sign that any deal will win over enough colleagues to get him over that mark.

There have so far been 11 failed votes - a paralysis of government not seen since the pre-Civil War era.

The reason for him falling short is a right-wing cohort within his own party refusing to vote for him.

Mr McCarthy needs to ease the concerns of enough Republican holdouts - 16 out of 20 - to win him the speakership.

This is nearly always a formality in US politics at the start of a Speaker's two-year term following congressional elections.

For more than a day now, there has been talk of concessions Mr McCarthy could make to win them over. As talks proceed, the outlines of a potential deal have become more clear.

His hope at this point seems to be that if he can convince some of them to back him, there will be sufficient pressure on the others to throw in the towel and give up the fight.

Progress is slow and, as some McCarthy supporters grow restless, a resolution - if it comes - could still be days away.

Mr McCarthy had already offered compromises that would have weakened the Speaker's role in the House. However, these haven't been enough to break the impasse.

The Speaker of the House is the second in line to the presidency, after Vice-President Kamala Harris. They set the agenda in the House, and no legislative business can be conducted there without them.

Without a Speaker, some key functions of the House cannot be conducted - including the swearing in of members, forming committees and the passing of bills.

The so-called "Never Kevins" who are standing in Mr McCarthy's way are sceptical of the California congressman's conservative bona fides, despite his endorsement from former President Donald Trump.

Their votes are crucial because Republicans took over the House in November's midterm elections by only a slender margin of 222 to 212 in the 435-seat chamber.

There haven't been many indications that a deal is imminent, however.

One staunch member of the holdout group, Congressman Matt Gaetz, told reporters on Thursday night that he won't support any deal that "results in Kevin McCarthy becoming speaker".

The last ballot that took place on Thursday before the House was adjourned saw Mr McCarthy earn 200 votes, while 12 Republicans voted for Byron Donalds and seven for Kevin Hern. Mr Gaetz cast a protest ballot for Mr Trump to serve in the role.

Not since 1860, when the United States' union was fraying over the issue of slavery, has the lower chamber of Congress voted so many times to pick a Speaker. Back then it took 44 rounds of ballots.

Meanwhile, the minority Democrats continued to vote in unison for their leader, New York's Hakeem Jeffries, the first black person ever to lead a party in Congress. But it still seems unlikely that he could win over six Republican defectors to become Speaker.

Friday's voting will also take place on the second anniversary of the US Capitol riots, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying the Republican's 2020 election defeat.

The Kraken COVID variant is coming — but not yet

XBB.1.5 might drive higher COVID infections in Europe, but not within the next month, says the ECDC.

The good news is that Europe has some time to prepare for if and when cases go vertical | Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty images

BY CARLO MARTUSCELLI

POLITICO EU

JANUARY 6, 2023

The EU's disease control agency has good news and bad news when it comes to XBB.1.5, the coronavirus sub-variant nicknamed Kraken that is ripping through America and keeping epidemiologists up at night.

The bad news is that XBB.1.5 is spreading quickly, most likely because it has some big advantages over the currently dominant Omicron strains. The good news is that Europe has some time to prepare for if and when cases go vertical.

"There is a possibility that this variant could have an increasing effect on the number of COVID-19 cases in the EU/EEA, but not within the coming month as the variant is currently only present in the EU/EEA at very low levels," writes the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in its recent assessment of XBB.1.5.

On Wednesday, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove said that the health agency was concerned with how quickly the sub-variant was replacing other variants in circulation. In the U.S., it went from 4 percent of cases sequenced to 40 percent in a few weeks, according to the White House's COVID-19 Response Coordinator.

Is the cost of living crunch starting to ease?

By Johanna Treeck

However, it is not yet known whether it causes more severe infection.

The ECDC writes that the elevated pace of spread is likely due to XBB.1.5's ability to dodge immune system protection granted by previous infections or vaccination. It also has a mutation on its spike protein — the part of the virus that binds to host cells — which might provide some advantage.

For now, the sub-variant is just a blip on the radar in Europe in terms of case numbers, said the ECDC, though it has been detected in Denmark, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Iceland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Portugal, and Ireland. Data coming out of the U.S. suggests XBB.1.5 spreads aggressively, with cases doubling every nine days.

The danger is that an explosion of cases coincides with an already-difficult influenza and respiratory syncytial virus season, straining hospitals. In Belgium, public health authorities declared a flu epidemic due to surging cases, with the peak expected in three or four weeks.

But just because the sub-variant is exploding in the U.S. doesn't necessarily mean that Europe will soon be in the eye of the storm. "[M]ajor differences in variant circulation have been observed between North America and Europe several times during the pandemic," writes the ECDC.

Note: if you are interested in this subject, Germán & Co has written a series of essays on this topic.

The Riddle Of Non-Nord Stream Return... | Energy Central

News round-up, Thursday, January 05, 2023

“After two days of chaos and confusion on the House floor, Republicans have made it abundantly clear who is leading their party: absolutely no one.”

— NYT

---

In 2022, we were unstoppable in accelerating the future of energy.

Let's reflect on our some of our best moments:

1. We announced our intent to exit coal by the end of 2025 and increased our ownership of AES Andes from 67% to 98%.

2. Fast Company ranked AES in the top ten of its “Best 100 Workplaces for Innovators” list.

3. We helped restore power to the people of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Fiona. Like Hawaii, we are also helping Puerto Rico in its energy transition by deploying solar plus storage on the island.

4. We released our IRP for AES Indiana, which serves as a roadmap for the company’s power generation goals. It included renewables, storage, and converting coal facilities to cleaner energy .

5. Together with Air Products, we announced a $4 billion mega-scale green hydrogen production facility in the United States, the largest green hydrogen project in the nation.

Reforestation day…

Since July 2015, Seaboard has been sponsoring a permanent brigade to contribute to the sustained work of recovering the forested area in the Upper Ozama River Basin.

Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…

Cooperate with ethical thinking -

NEWS ANALYSIS

‘Nobody Is in Charge’: A Ragged G.O.P. Stumbles Through the Wilderness

With no unified agenda or clear leadership, Republicans face the prospect that the anti-establishment fervor that has powered the party in recent years could now devour it.

By Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein

Jan. 5, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

After two days of chaos and confusion on the House floor, Republicans have made it abundantly clear who is leading their party: absolutely no one.

From the halls of Congress to the Ohio Statehouse to the back-room dealings of the Republican National Committee, the party is confronting an identity crisis unseen in decades. With no unified legislative agenda, clear leadership or shared vision for the country, Republicans find themselves mired in intraparty warfare, defined by a fringe element that seems more eager to tear down the House than to rebuild the foundation of a political party that has faced disappointment in the past three national elections.

Even as Donald J. Trump rarely leaves his Florida home in what so far appears to be little more than a Potemkin presidential campaign, Republicans have failed to quell the anti-establishment fervor that accompanied his rise to power. Instead, those tumultuous political forces now threaten to devour the entire party.

Nowhere was that on more vivid display than the House floor, where 20 Republicans on Wednesday stymied their party from taking control for a second day by refusing to support Representative Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker.

The uncertainty continued into the evening on Wednesday. After Mr. McCarthy failed on his sixth attempt to win the leadership position, the House — by a two-vote margin — agreed to adjourn until noon Thursday, a result greeted by hoots and hollers by Democrats hoping to extend his misery late into the night.

“Nobody is in charge,” John Fredericks, a syndicated right-wing radio host and former chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia, said in an interview. “Embrace the chaos. Our movement is embracing the chaos.”

That ideology of destruction defies characterization by traditional political labels like moderate or conservative. Instead, the party has created its own complicated taxonomy of America First, MAGA and anti-Trump — descriptions that are more about political style and personal vendettas than policy disagreements.

This iteration of the Grand Old Party, with its narrow majority in the House empowering conservative dissidents, represents a striking reversal of the classic political maxim that Democrats need to fall in love while Republicans just fall in line.

“The members who began this have little interest in legislating, but are most interested in burning down the existing Republican leadership structure,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who embodies the party’s pre-Trump era. “Their behavior shows the absence of power corrupts just as absolutely as power does.”

Mr. Fredericks, who is typically one of the most aggressive pro-Trump voices in the conservative news media, said that even the former president’s renewed endorsement of Mr. McCarthy on Wednesday would do little to shore up the would-be speaker’s support.

A New Congress Begins

The 118th Congress opened on Jan. 3, with Republicans taking control of the House and Democrats holding the Senate.

• A Divided House: House Republicans began their new majority rule by failing to elect a speaker. The infighting has exposed a big rift in the party.

• George Santos: The new congressman from New York, a Republican who has made false claims about his background, education and finances, brings his saga to Capitol Hill.

• Pelosi Era Ends: Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to become House speaker, leaves a legacy that will be difficult for the new leadership of both parties to reach.

• Elise Stefanik: The New York congresswoman’s climb to MAGA stardom is a case study in the collapse of the old Republican establishment, but her rise may also be a cautionary tale.

Indeed, none of Mr. McCarthy’s opponents reversed course after receiving calls from Mr. Trump encouraging them to do so. Rather, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado took to the floor to urge her “favorite president” to change his view and tell Mr. McCarthy to withdraw his bid.

“The movement has eclipsed its Trump leadership,” Mr. Fredericks said on Wednesday. “We found 20 new leaders.”

That’s a very different definition of a leader from the traditional image of a legislator muscling policy through Congress and reshaping American life. In the new conservative ecosystem, leaders are born of the outrage that drives news coverage on the right and fuels online fund-raising.

The new political dynamics distinguish this class of Republican agitators from the self-styled revolutionaries who took control under former Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994 or the Tea Party lawmakers who clashed with Speaker John Boehner after the party’s 2010 triumph. Those insurgent movements aspired to change the vision of the party. This group of House lawmakers, their Republican critics say, are focused far more on their personal power.

“There’s been a growing tolerance of people who do not act in good faith who consistently diminish the institution for their personal gain and advancement,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who was in the House for the first two years of the Trump administration. “This is the most dramatic manifestation of that toxic culture.”

While few voters are likely to be following every twist in the arcane congressional procedure, several Republicans acknowledged that the party’s infighting in the House could saddle it with an enduring perception of dysfunction.

Matt Brooks, the executive director of the powerful Republican Jewish Coalition, called for the “infidels” to pay a “real price” for their opposition, adding, “There are elements of us looking like the Keystone Kops.”

At least a few Republicans worried that the drama could have long-term effects, as the party heads into what increasingly looks like a contentious battle for the 2024 presidential nomination.

“We have to get this speakership settled and we have to go forward if we want to be successful in 2024 as a united party,” Ronna McDaniel, who faces a stiff challenge this month to her leadership of the Republican National Committee, said on Fox News on Tuesday. Pleading for lawmakers to unify behind Mr. McCarthy, she said, “This Republican-on-Republican infighting is only hurting one thing: our party.”

The uproar on the House floor even prompted some Republicans to praise a Democrat who has for years been one of their most reviled figures.

“Nancy Pelosi is the most effective speaker this country has ever had,” said former Representative Billy Long of Missouri, who claims to have coined the phrase “Trump Train” in 2015. “She never missed. She would get her people. She’d get the votes by hook or by crook.”

For their part, Democrats largely declined to comment on the spectacle. They didn’t need to: The images from President Biden’s appearance on Wednesday in Kentucky — where he shook hands with Senator Mitch McConnell in front of a bridge project funded by their bipartisan legislation — cut a sharp contrast with the arguments and pained glances on the House floor.

“It’s a little embarrassing it’s taking so long, and the way they are dealing with one another,” Mr. Biden said of House Republicans on Wednesday as he left the White House. “What I am focused on is getting things done.”

The Republican unrest has trickled down to places like the Ohio Statehouse, where State Representative Jason Stephens, a moderate Republican, joined with Democrats this week to snatch the speakership from State Representative Derek Merrin, who has co-sponsored some of the chamber’s most conservative legislation. The surprising outcome reflected the Republican caucus’s inability to unify behind a single candidate despite holding a two-thirds majority.

The Republican National Committee is also facing questions over Ms. McDaniel’s leadership. Like Mr. McCarthy, she predicted sweeping victories before the November election, and she is now being challenged by Harmeet Dhillon of California, an R.N.C. member who has argued that there must be consequences for the party’s failure to meet expectations.

Both Republican conflicts have split the conservative news media, with Tucker Carlson of Fox News backing the insurgencies while his prime-time colleagues have urged Republicans to coalesce behind Mr. McCarthy.

As in the House, the R.N.C. fight isn’t about conservative bona fides or fund-raising prowess or even fealty to Mr. Trump. Ms. Dhillon’s case against Ms. McDaniel is that the party didn’t perform strongly enough in November — and that if more Republicans had won in competitive House races, Mr. McCarthy would not be beholden to the members who have held hostage his bid to be speaker.

For House Republicans on either side of the speaker’s drama, one big question is how their constituents react. Representative Darin LaHood, a McCarthy supporter who represents a conservative district in central and Northern Illinois, said there was “no support in my district for what these guys are doing.”

Martha Zoller, a conservative talk radio host in northeast Georgia, said she had heard this week from several local party organizations that are upset with Representative Andrew Clyde, the area’s Republican congressman, over his opposition to Mr. McCarthy.

Yet while Ms. Zoller said she was partial to Mr. McCarthy as a House Republican leader, she said she and others in her corner of Georgia would like to see Republicans move on from Ms. McDaniel, whom she blamed for the party’s poor midterm showing.

“She orchestrated a lot of losses,” Ms. Zoller said. “It’s kind of like being a head football coach. When you lose, sometimes you’ve got to take the hit, even when it wasn’t your fault, and you’ve got to move on.”

In Washington, Republicans aligned with Mr. McCarthy found themselves increasingly agitated at a turn of events that had left their party paralyzed.

“I don’t blame the public if they take a negative view,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who labeled the anti-McCarthy cadre “the Taliban 19” before its numbers grew. “This is dysfunctional, and I hate it myself. I can understand if the public does, too.”

Erdogan asks Putin to declare 'unilateral' Ukraine ceasefire

The Turkish and Russian leaders held a telephone conversation to discuss recent developments in Ukraine.

Le Monde

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to declare a "unilateral" ceasefire in Ukraine on Thursday, January 5.

"President Erdogan said that calls for peace and negotiations should be supported by a unilateral ceasefire and a vision for a fair solution," the Turkish presidency said following a telephone conversation between Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Putin.

Every morning, a selection of articles from Le Monde In English straight to your inbox

Mr. Erdogan was due to hold a separate conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later on Thursday.

The Turkish leader, who refused to join Western sanctions on Russia, has used his relations with both Moscow and Kyiv to try and mediate an end to the war. Turkey hosted two early rounds of peace talks and helped strike a United Nations-backed agreement restoring Ukrainian grain deliveries across the Black Sea.

Mr. Erdogan has also repeatedly tried to bring Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky to Turkey for a peace summit.

Russia's spiritual leader, Patriarch Kirill, called for a one-day ceasefire in Ukraine on Orthodox Christmas, celebrated this week by both countries.

Putin's Man at the BND?German Intelligence Rocked By Russian Espionage Scandal

Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, has been rocked by an espionage scandal centered around one of its staffers. The man, who is suspected of having spied for Russia, works in a department that provides critical intelligence in the Ukraine war.

By Maik Baumgärtner, Jörg Diehl, Matthias Gebauer, Martin Knobbe, Roman Lehberger, Ann-Katrin Müller, Fidelius Schmid und Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt

Spiegel

04.01.2023

Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, had clear words when he spoke about Russian intelligence services before the federal parliament, the Bundestag, in mid-October. He called Russia an "aggressive actor with dishonest means and motives." Two years earlier, he had already warned of an "alarming brutalization" of its methods. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he said, represented an "aggravation of all previous factors."

To the left of Haldenwang, wearing a blue shirt with a purple tie and rimless glasses, sat Bruno Kahl, the president of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. He seemed relaxed on October 17, likely unaware at that time that his own agency had probably become a victim of that Russian aggression. Or he didn't let on about it.

On December 21, officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) arrested Carsten L., the head of a BND unit, in Berlin. German Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank has accused him of providing Russia with classified intelligence information.

Two months after that October session in parliament, Kahl was forced to admit on the Thursday before Christmas Eve that there was "a possible case of treason" within his own ranks. "Restraint and discretion" are "very important in this particular case," Kahl said, adding that any details that become public would benefit Russia.

But what could be more useful to Moscow than a source right at the heart of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, with access to a whole trove of secret documents?

Was the Danger Underestimated?

It appears that the worst espionage case in years may currently be brewing in Germany. And it is hitting the very agency that didn't exactly shine with its foresight in the run-up to the Russian attack on Ukraine, long dismissing warnings from the United States and British intelligence services about the impending war.

The case is weighing heavy on the entire German government, which dithered over arms deliveries to Ukraine, at least in the first months of the invasion. Now it must face questions from its partner services around the world about a Russian mole inside the BND. Did the Germans underestimate the danger?

Berlin remained silent on the issue over the holidays. Only Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) commented, making a desperate attempt to spin the whole affair into a success. He said that an "important blow against Russian espionage" may have been struck.

Sebastian Fiedler, the point man for criminal policy for the parliamentary group of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in the Bundestag, considers this reaction to be "somewhat exaggerated." Ultimately, the operation against Carsten L. had been a success. "But above all, we now see what Russia is willing and capable of doing – in agencies, the economy and politics."

It's not a short list. Former KGB agent Vladimir Putin has upgraded his intelligence services to become the most important pillar of his power apparatus. They are a key element of his broad offensive  against the West.

Russian intelligence services influence political parties in democracies and elsewhere, interfere in free elections, foment protests in the West with false information, infiltrate the computer networks of Western governments, assassinate dissidents and compromise Western public servants.

Warnings from German Authorities Ignored

But decision-makers in Germany preferred to pretend that the shadow war with Russia was over. They largely ignored warnings from Germany's own security authorities, and they underestimated the ambition for supremacy held by Putin, who has been Russia’s president since late 1999, with one interruption when he served as prime minister due to term limits.

When incidents did occur, such as the murder  of Georgian asylum-seeker Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Kleiner Tiergarten park in Berlin at the behest of the Russian domestic intelligence service FSB, the German government expelled a moderate number of Russian diplomats from the country. They apparently didn’t want to upset the other side too much and were afraid that they would no longer be able to run their own embassy in Moscow properly if the Kremlin expelled just as many diplomats in return.

For years, the counterintelligence departments of the BfV and the Military Counterintelligence Service suffered from chronic staff shortages. Counter-intelligence efforts at the BND – the investigation and infiltration of foreign intelligence services – were discontinued during the tenure of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a friend of Putin’s, in 2002. Even within the security authorities, many viewed the decision as a mistake.

Marc Polymeropoulos, the former head of operations for the CIA in Europe and Eurasia, says his warnings about Russian spies repeatedly "fell on deaf ears" in Germany. "Russia treated Europe like its playground," he says.

Officials with Eastern European intelligence services sometimes express themselves even more sharply: They were long treated by Berlin with arrogance, says one source. The source says the BND dismissed them as not being objective. "Nobody understands Russia as well as we do," was the subtext coming from the ranks of the BND, says the source.

The BND first moved to reestablish its own counterintelligence unit in 2017. German intelligence officers had to start from scratch in many places and undergo the painstaking process of acquiring new sources. Until recently, only around three dozen BND employees worked in this area.

Still, counterintelligence at the BfV domestic intelligence agency has been significantly beefed up. Recently, several Russian informers were caught in the net – though they were rather small fish: a man who passed on property plans of the German Bundestag, a Russian-born doctoral student at the University of Augsburg who had provided information to the foreign intelligence service SWR and a security guard at the British Embassy in Berlin.

Tip from Abroad Led to Suspected Double Agent

But the case of Carsten L., even if BND head Kahl has tried to present it as such, cannot be cited as evidence of increased efforts by the German intelligence services.

Shortly before Christmas, Kahl said the service had learned about the case "in the course of its intelligence work." It sounded as though the agency had discovered the suspected traitor within its ranks on its own. But that’s not what happened.

L.'s undoing was that another Western intelligence service discovered a data set in the Russian apparatus that was clearly attributable to the BND. The data included findings about Russia. It's possible that it also contained information on the BND's methods and sources. The data reportedly included findings from telecommunications surveillance that may have just been photographed from a screen.

It was only after the warning that the BND succeeded in identifying Carsten L. as the suspected mole. The agency spent weeks observing him.

In the process, another person working for the BND also came into the investigators' sights. The federal prosecutor has listed the second person as a defendant in the proceedings. She is also alleged to have opened documents on her work computer that are relevant to the investigation. However, insiders report that it is now considered unlikely that the person in question worked for the Russians. They say it is more likely that Carsten L. had tried to divert suspicion from himself through her.

Prosecutors Suspect Serious Treason

Investigators from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the BKA are still working to clarify the full scope of the incident and much remains unclear. Carsten L. hasn't yet commented on the accusations, with his defense attorneys thus far declining to comment.

One thing that remains hazy is a possible motive: nothing is known about any possible financial worries the suspect may have had. The officer from the Bundeswehr armed forces was working for the BND and lived with his wife and children in Bavaria. He had reportedly encountered frustrations in his job, but that's not so unusual.

The federal prosecutor is investigating the BND agent not on suspicion of "intelligence agent activity" but of "aggravated treason." It’s a far more serious accusation.

If that crime is proven, Carsten L. would have created "the risk of serious detriment to the external security of the Federal Republic of Germany" by betraying a state secret and abusing his position of responsibility to do so. That's what Section 94 of the German Criminal Code states. So, this isn't just about a civil servant providing a few official secrets. The defendant could face a prison sentence of five years to life.

The case would be unique in the recent history of the BND. The only other case that has shaken the foreign intelligence service to a similar degree is that of Markus R.

When the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution tracked down the official in 2014, they thought they were on the trail of a traitor working on Moscow’s behalf. He had offered secret documents to the Russian Consulate General in Munich. But it only became clear after his arrest that R. had actually been working for the CIA, the intelligence service of Germany's most important ally. A court sentenced him to eight years in prison.

Carsten L. also had access to a wealth of documents in his function as a unit head in the Technical Intelligence (TA) department. Investigators are still in the dark over how much information he may have supplied to Russian services and over what period of time.

A Life of Its Own

The TA department has been the source of scandals in the past. As the investigative committee on the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal, which was in session until 2017, showed, it had developed a life of its own that neither top authorities nor the Chancellery could control.

As such, former BND President Gerhard Schindler also considers it a mistake that more than 1,000 employees with the TA unit remained in Pullach, Bavaria, at the time the BND moved its headquarters to Berlin. "That, of course, makes administrative supervision difficult," he says.

At the same time, Technical Intelligence has become something of the heart of the intelligence enterprise. Employees comb through internet data streams, intercept emails and tap into phone calls and radio traffic. Around half of the several hundred reports that the BND produces each day come from the TA.

Even if the intelligence service hasn't always been respected by its partners in recent times, the TA had an excellent international reputation. One reason is that the BND still uses an outdated wiretapping method that other intelligence agencies have abandoned, and is thus able to intercept Russian military communications, for example. Since the outbreak of the war, the findings from signals intelligence at Pullach have been among the West's strongest information that they have been able to supply to the Ukrainian armed forces in the war against Russia.

And now it is this unit that has been hit by what is likely to be a dramatic leak. The consequences are hard to foresee.

Intelligence Services Need a Radical Overhaul

"The threats and hostilities against our democracy are currently massive. Illegitimate efforts to assert influence, propaganda and espionage are relevant and acute areas where our security agencies need to be much better, more resilient and sharper," says Konstantin von Notz, a member of the parliament with the Green Party and the chairman of the Parliamentary Oversight Panel for the intelligence services. It's not just the military that Germany needs to radically overhaul, he says, but "also in the area of intelligence services, and that's why we have to underpin that legally as part of the reorganization of the law for these security agencies."

The extent of the Russians' espionage activities in Europe is illustrated by cases from other countries. The Netherlands caught an "illegal" with the military intelligence GRU, who was to be smuggled in as an intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In Norway, investigators uncovered a scientist who had been spying for the Russians. Meanwhile, Sweden caught two GRU operatives who had infiltrated the security agencies there. And DER SPIEGEL and its reporting partners exposed a GRU spy who had been targeting NATO and U.S. naval bases for years.

Note: if you are interested in this subject, Germán & Co has written a series of essays on this topic.

The Riddle Of Non-Nord Stream Return... | Energy Central

News round-up, Wednesday, January 04, 2023

“Everyone is afraid of this winter and tough times,” said Lorand Csurkuj Kalaman, a 42-year-old Roma from the northern Romanian region of Maramureș with five children, who says his monthly bills exceed his monthly income of €550.”

— Politico EU

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Winter energy emergency ‘a question of life and death’ for Europe’s Roma

Experts fear soaring energy bills may push Roma communities to the brink.

BY VICTOR JACK

POLITICO EU

DECEMBER 21, 2022 12:45 PM CET

Europe's energy price emergency is hitting the Continent's vulnerable people the hardest — and some of the most at-risk are its 12 million Roma.

The EU is scrambling to figure out how to rein in soaring natural gas prices, which has sent power prices spiraling. Those higher bills are a disaster for people already living on the edge.

“Everyone is afraid of this winter and tough times,” said Lorand Csurkuj Kalaman, a 42-year-old Roma from the northern Romanian region of Maramureș with five children, who says his monthly bills exceed his monthly income of €550.

“It affects me very hard,” he said, adding that his family relies on firewood for heating and has received no support from local authorities for heating despite submitting the relevant documents.

In Romania, for example, the 2 million Roma earn 40 percent less than the median salary, according to Alin Banu, the national coordinator at the local Roma NGO Aresel, who adds that average utility bills there are now roughly double what a family receives from the state each month.

Getting enough support from the state this winter will be a crucial lifeline for the country's Roma, for whom this is now “a question of life and death,” he said.

Romania's government said that it “provides support for home heating to all citizens that require it ... regardless of their ethnicity” including up to €418 in aid per individual, and Bucharest has “taken measures to reduce the negative impact of the crisis, such as limiting excessively high prices of firewood.”

Roma face tough times across the region.

In Serbia, where there are roughly 500,000 Roma, local nonprofit Opre Roma Serbia has helped organize regular protests on behalf of a Roma community over perceived inaction by local authorities that's left dozens of families without electricity for seven months.

“A lot of kids are getting cold because of the weather,” said Opre Roma Serbia's Jelena Reljić. “I cannot even imagine how hard it is, how hard it is for them to actually live without electricity.”

Serbia's energy ministry is now signaling it might connect residents to the grid, according to the charity.

Roma families without regular grid connections can sometimes buy electricity illegally from neighbors and can fall into debt by borrowing from loan sharks. All of this means the “tragic scenario” of increased numbers of Roma freezing to death this winter is “quite possible,” Banu said.

Falling through the cracks

In Western Europe, “many communities live in relatively better conditions,” ERRC’s Lee said.

In Britain, about four-fifths of Roma people live in permanent housing rather than traveler sites, but “the general housing situation for the Roma in the U.K. is that they live in the poorer areas … in overcrowded housing situations,” said Mihai Calin Bica, a policy coordinator at the London-based NGO Roma Support Group.

Nicoleta, a 41-year-old Roma single mother and housekeeper who lives in a one-bedroom flat in north London, says she’s more than £400 in debt to her landlord after she used her rent money to pay energy bills. 

Almost half of Europe’s Roma people are classed as “working poor” | José Sena Goulao/EPA-EFE

“I can't even remember the last time I used the oven” thanks to surging energy costs, she said. “I work three, four days per week and I barely survive.”

A November survey by Scottish NGO Romano Lav found that 91.5 percent of Roma people in Glasgow’s Govanhill area were worse off than six months ago, while 86 percent were scared of running out of money for food — even if they recieve £66 off their energy bills as part of Britain’s energy support scheme.

Of the nomadic Roma living in campsites, roughly one-third in southeastern England can't access energy bill support since this requires a direct contract with an electricity provider — and often the local authority is the only contractor at camp sites, according to Abbie Kirkby of the nonprofit Friends, Families and Travellers.

And since 97 percent of these sites have no access to mains gas, people instead rely on gas bottles — and those prices have also surged, she said.

With months of winter ahead, “the crunch is not quite there” yet Kirkby said, adding: “It's going to be very challenging year for gypsy and traveller families.”

Czech industrial model shaken by energy crisis

Heavily dependent on the automotive sector, cheap energy and Germany, the Czech economy will experience one of the biggest slowdowns in Eastern Europe in 2023.

By Marie Charrel

Published on January 4, 2023

Officially, the decision had only been postponed, but it would have come at the right time to brighten up the Czech economic outlook, which is very gloomy for the months to come. On Friday, December 9, the Volkswagen Group announced that due to economic uncertainties, it would not immediately choose the location of its next electric battery gigafactory, planned for Eastern Europe.

The Czech government had been campaigning for months to have the site in Plzen, in the east-central part of the country, over its Hungarian, Slovakian and Polish competitors. "If there's the option of building a battery factory in Europe, where electricity costs €0.15 per kilowatt hour, but it's possible to get it in China or America for €0.02 or €0.03, we are not in a position to say that we will make this choice out of solidarity," said Thomas Schäfer, the group's boss, immediately after the announcement.

For the Czech Republic, the stakes are colossal: "This gigafactory is decisive for the future of our automotive industry and, above all, for its ability to make the shift to electric," said Jiri Dvorak, a specialist on this issue at the Grant Thornton consulting firm in Prague. And, more broadly, it is crucial for the whole country: The automotive industry alone counts for 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP), 8% of jobs and 25% of exports.

Worsened by the energy crisis

Highly dependent on Germany, which takes in a third of its manufacturing, the Czech industrial sector as a whole represents nearly 30% of GDP – the highest level in Europe. "However, it has been particularly badly affected since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic" in early 2020, explained Grzegorz Sielewicz, a regional specialist at French credit insurer Coface. Penalized by the collapse of demand and the German economic slowdown, the industry has, in the meantime, faced shortages of semiconductors. This hindered manufacturing recovery in 2021.

The government was slow to respond and then introduced a cap on gas and electricity prices in November 2022

"Can you imagine, the Volkswagen model I ordered in October 2021 won't arrive until April 2023?" said Mr. Dvorak. Not surprisingly, the energy crisis has made the situation even worse. Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the country was 52.5% dependent on fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas largely imported from Russia); 40.8% nuclear power, thanks to its two power plants; and only 6.7% renewable energy.

In November, inflation climbed to 17.2%, including 34.3% for gas, electricity and fossil fuels, according to Eurostat. "For our electro-intensive industries, such as glass, metallurgy and chemicals, which are large consumers of gas, the shock is brutal," observed Oldrich Sklenar, a researcher at the Association for International Affairs, an independent research center based in Prague. The government was initially slow to react and then introduced a cap on gas and electricity prices for households and small businesses in November 2022. This was later extended to large companies.

It also plans to build a new nuclear reactor at the Dukovany plant (the American-Canadian Westinghouse, the French EDF and the Korean KHNP have submitted bids) in order to reduce its dependence on hydrocarbons. "But the cap will not be enough to limit the effects of price increases already recorded," warned Nicholas Farr, a country specialist at Capital Economics. "The weight of industry means that the Czech economy will experience the greatest slowdown in Eastern Europe," added Frantisek Taborsky at ING.

'We are at a turning point'

In fact, the European Commission expects growth of only 0.1% in 2023 – lower than in Slovakia (0.5%), Poland (0.7%) and the European average (0.3%). Business activity will be largely pulled down by Germany, which is expected to be in recession in 2023 (-0.6%). This is all while the Czech Republic has not yet recovered its pre-pandemic GDP level. "Beyond the emergency, it's the very economic model of the country that's being called into question," said David Marek, chief economist at Deloitte Consulting in Prague.

"Now industry must shift upmarket, and we also have to diversify into services," David Marek, chief economist at Deloitte Consulting, Prague

"We are at a turning point. Industry will no longer be able to rely on cheap energy, as it has for the past 40 years," added Pavel Sobisek, an economist at UniCredit in Prague. But the country still has a solid foundation and a long industrial tradition. Bohemia was the manufacturing heartland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – Skoda Auto, its flagship car company bought by Volkswagen in 1991, was founded in 1895. And Czechoslovakia was one of Europe's leading industrial powers when it gained independence in 1918.

After the communist period and collectivization of the means of production, the country succeeded in modernizing its factories by turning to the West. "Now industry must shift upmarket, and we also have to diversify into services," said Mr. Marek. Skoda Auto is preparing for this in earnest: "We're going to increase the share of electric vehicles to 70% of production by 2030, with nearly €5.6 billion of investment over the next five years," said the company.

But the country will have to deal with another major obstacle: the dizzying lack of labor. Despite the economic downturn, the unemployment rate was only 2.1% in October, according to Eurostat. "Companies are struggling to recruit for all types of labor, skilled and unskilled, and this is a real obstacle to innovation," concluded Mr. Marek.

G.O.P. Fight Over Speaker Enters Its Second Day

The House is set to reconvene at noon to continue a historic floor fight — the first in a century — prompted by the Republican leader’s failure to secure a majority to become speaker.

By Catie Edmondson

NYT

Jan. 4, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Republicans began their second day in control of the House on Wednesday without a leader and deadlocked about how to move forward, after Representative Kevin McCarthy of California lost three votes for the top job amid a hard-right rebellion that has prompted a historic struggle on the House floor.

Mr. McCarthy’s successive defeats on Tuesday marked the first time in a century that the House has failed to elect a speaker on the first roll call vote, and it was not clear how or when the stalemate would be resolved. After adjourning with no leader, the House was set to reconvene at noon on Wednesday to try to resolve the impasse.

A mutiny waged by ultraconservative lawmakers who for weeks have held fast to their vow to oppose Mr. McCarthy paralyzed the chamber on the first day of Republican rule, delaying the swearing in of hundreds of members of Congress, putting off any legislative work and exposing deep divisions that threatened to make the party’s House majority ungovernable.

Mr. McCarthy has vowed not to back down until he secures the post, raising the prospect of a grueling stretch of votes that could go on for days.

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“I’m staying until we win,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters between the second and third votes on Tuesday. “I know the path.”

House precedent dictates that members continue to vote until someone secures the majority needed to prevail. But until Tuesday, the House had not failed to elect a speaker on the first roll call vote since 1923, when the election stretched for nine ballots.

It was not clear how long it might take for Republicans to resolve their stalemate this time, or what Mr. McCarthy’s strategy, if any, was for coming back from an embarrassing series of defeats. He worked into the night on Tuesday, surrounded by allies, to try to secure votes.

No viable challenger has emerged, but if Mr. McCarthy continues to flounder, Republicans could shift their votes to an alternative, such as his No. 2, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

On Tuesday, right-wing Republicans coalesced behind Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founding member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, as an alternative to Mr. McCarthy, but Mr. Jordan, a onetime rival who has since allied himself with Mr. McCarthy, pleaded with his colleagues to unite instead behind the California Republican.

But the party has so far refused to do so. The failed votes on Tuesday showed publicly the extent of the opposition Mr. McCarthy faces. With all members of the House present and voting, Mr. McCarthy needs to receive 218 votes to become speaker, leaving little room for Republican defections since the party controls only 222 seats.

He fell short again and again, drawing no more than 203 votes — far below a majority and fewer than the votes received by Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader whose caucus remained united behind him.

News round-up, Tuesday, January 03, 2023

“Absence of Jair Bolsonaro
Lula is back in power. But the day had finished. The Brazilian republic loves symbols and Lula was preparing to address the people. After a brief military review, with a tired face, the new president headed to the Three Powers Plaza. There, 30,000 supporters dressed in bright red faced the Parlatorium, the large marble platform in the Planalto Palace, from which the head of state traditionally delivers his speeches to the nation.”

— Le Monde

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Lula sworn in as reconciliatory president, rising from ashes of Brazilian politics

By  Bruno Meyerfeld (Brasilia, special correspondent)

Published on January 2, 2023

Brazil's new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (4-L) takes his dog "Resistencia" by the leash as he walks up the ramp upon being welcomed by indigenous Brazilian leader and environmentalist Raoni Metuktire, known as Chief Raoni (3-L) and other community representatives at Planalto Palace after his inauguration ceremony at the National Congress, in Brasilia, on January 1, 2023. SERGIO LIMA / AFP

On the first day of 2023, at close to 5 pm, Brazil was shaking with emotion. In the Three Powers Plaza, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 77 years old, was about to become Brazil's president for the third time. He walked up the Planalto presidential palace's long marble ramp, a symbol of Brazilian power. But beside him, there were no officials or generals in front of the tens of thousands of supporters. Holding onto Lula's arm, an Indigenous chief walks by his side: Raoni Metuktire.

The president and the cacique. The steelworker and the Kayapo. The symbolic force of the two together was irresistible. The senior Raoni, at 93 years old, recognizable by his golden feather headdress and his legendary lip plate, physically diminished, was present for this historic moment; the swearing-in of the 39th president of Brazil, seen as a moment of great national reconciliation.

The two men were not alone on the ramp. In addition to the first lady, Rosangela da Silva, the vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, and his wife, Maria Lucia, Lula brought his dog, Resistencia, who was held on a leash. Also by his side was a garbage collector, an influencer with a disability, a teacher, a metal worker, and a 10-year-old Black boy in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. The varied faces of Brazil.

'It's carnival and revolution!'

They are the ones, in the absence of Jair Bolsonaro, who placed the presidential sash around Lula's neck: the culmination of a day of celebration, which saw this extraordinary political figure make an unprecedented comeback. Barely three years ago, the miserable child of the Nordeste, who became a trade unionist and then the president of a golden decade for Brazil (2003-2011), was in prison and condemned to end his days there in shame. Now he is back leading his country.

For Lula's supporters, the party had actually started the night before. On January 1, 2023, at midnight, Jair Bolsonaro was already officially no longer the president of Brazil. In the capital, taken by storm by left-wing supporters, people kissed for the first time of the new year under fireworks fired from Lake Paranoa. Further on, on the Ministries Esplanade, the cleaning teams were busy. Its marble halls were being washed with water.

By the early morning, there were hundreds of thousands of Lula supporters all the way up to Brazil's Monumental Axis, a grandiose avenue of 16 kilometers where the country's institutions are lined up. A gastronomic fair and a large stage were set up on the lawn with concerts scheduled until 4 am. "It's carnival and revolution!" laughed Thalis, a 41-year-old theater actor who was holding a horse costume in his hand.

Lula 'the savior'

It was a hot morning. Firemen refreshed the vast crowd with water jets and sang at the top of their lungs. "It is a cry, an emotion, which springs from the depths of our being," said Donizeti Nogueira, an executive of the Workers' Party (PT) in Tocantins (Nordeste), wearing a red fedora on his head. For those on the left, the celebration is a question of recovering their dignity after a cursed decade, which saw former president Dilma Rousseff impeached, Lula imprisoned and Jair Bolsonaro victorious. There was no holding back: "This is the greatest democratic victory of the 20th, 21st and 22nd centuries!," Donizeti enthused.

Supporters of President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva arrive at the Esplanada dos Ministerios to attend his inauguration ceremony in Brasilia on January 1, 2023. DOUGLAS MAGNO/AFP

Firefighters spray water over supporters of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gathering to attend his inauguration as new president outside the Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, January 1, 2023. SILVIA IZQUIERDOI/AP

Two young men pass in jerseys of the Seleçao, the Brazilian national team, which had been adopted as a rallying symbol by Jair Bolsonaro's supporters. "With my husband, we wanted to reclaim these symbols, confiscated by the fascists!" said Ricardo, an engineer in his thirties. On the Esplanade, generations cross paths and pass on the baton. Juliana, 41 years old came with her daughter Anna, 17 years old. With makeup, T-shirt, dyed hair, earrings, and a strawberry sorbet in hand, the two women had covered themselves in red. "It's very important to be here together today," insisted the mother. "Lula, for me too, is the only reference, the savior," added her daughter.

"But we are only dressing like this for today. Tonight, we will go back to the hotel, and we won't come out anymore. We are too afraid of violence...," Juliana added. The threat of an attack hovered over this day. More than 8,000 police and military personnel, as well as drones and snipers, had been deployed to ensure the safety of Lula and his supporters. Some went as far as to offer him a bulletproof vest and an armored car. The new president firmly declined.

Several notable absentees

Shortly after 2:30 pm, Lula emerged from the presidential Rolls-Royce: a 1952 model of the gleaming black Silver Wraith convertible. Escorted by the Presidential Guard Battalion of Brazil on horseback, decked out in red and white uniforms, the procession set off from Brasilia's cathedral in the direction of the Congress. It was there, under its two iconic domes and in front of the assembled members of the legislative and judicial branches, that the inauguration took place.

In the austere Chamber of Deputies amphitheater, decorated with dark metal bars, the whole of Brasilia stood solemnly. Several foreign presidents also made the trip: the "comrades" of the left like the Chilean Gabriel Boric, the Argentine Alberto Fernandez, the Colombian Gustavo Petro and the ex-president of Uruguay, "Pepe" Mujica (to whom Lula reserved a particularly warm embrace). Also in attendance were King Felipe VI of Spain and the German, Angolan and Portuguese heads of state.

The assembly, however, had several notable absentees. Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, who had been approached for a while, did not make the trip in the end. Joe Biden, who had at one time considered sending US Vice President Kamala Harris, finally sent Deb Haaland, the secretary of the interior. Emmanuel Macron was represented by Olivier Becht, the trade minister. A disappointment for those in Lula's camp.

'We bear no spirit of revenge'

Upon arrival, the president-elect greeted his distinguished guests. In order to respect protocol, he was quickly invited to take an oath and sign the act of his inauguration. He swore to "uphold, defend and apply the Constitution, observe the laws, promote the common good of the Brazilian people, support unity, integrity and independence." It was at exactly 3:06 pm that Lula became the 39th president of Brazil.

Brazil's new president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva delivers a speech after swearing in during his inauguration ceremony at the National Congress in Brasilia, on January 1, 2023. MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP

The Federative Republic of Brazil acclaimed its new leader. As if by magic, the republic was reconciled. But Lula does not have only friends in this assembly. Rosa Weber, president of the Federal Supreme Court, voted in 2018 to imprison him. Arthur Lira, president of the Chamber of Deputies, and Augusto Aras, attorney general, were until recently very loyal allies of Jair Bolsonaro.

A shrewd and skillful politician, Lula knows how to be magnanimous. Faced with the establishment that had buried him too soon, he decreed forgiveness and called for unity. "We bear no spirit of revenge against those who tried to enslave the nation to their personal and ideological designs," said the new head of state, adding that "Today, after this terrible challenge we overcame, we must say: democracy forever!"

Absence of Jair Bolsonaro

Lula is back in power. But the day had finished. The Brazilian republic loves symbols and Lula was preparing to address the people. After a brief military review, with a tired face, the new president headed to the Three Powers Plaza. There, 30,000 supporters dressed in bright red faced the Parlatorium, the large marble platform in the Planalto Palace, from which the head of state traditionally delivers his speeches to the nation.

Brazil's new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (center) with Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and their wives, First Lady Rosangela da Silva and Maria Lucia Ribeiro Alckmin, during his inauguration ceremony at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, January 1, 2023. CARL DE SOUZA / AFP

In the noble salon, his closest companions awaited him. PT leaders in suits and ties crossed paths with Favela activists in sneakers and caps; feathered Indigenous chiefs spoke with babalorishás, priests of the Afro-Brazilian religions, in immaculate tunics. Standing straight on her chair in the front row was a woman with a smile on her face. "This story will not end like this (...) We will come back!" Dilma Rousseff had promised in 2016 in this same palace on the day of her impeachment. She was savoring her revenge.

Jair Bolsonaro, on the other hand, had been gone for two days. Gone was the captain of the far right, who headed to Florida for several weeks. The outgoing president refused to participate in the ceremonies and to pass on the traditional sash to his successor. On December 31, 2022, reporters spotted him in the streets of Orlando, eating fried chicken from KFC and taking selfies with a handful of supporters.

The day before, Mr. Bolsonaro had given up the ghost during a final online live broadcast, recorded in the Alvorada Palace library, the residence of the head of state. From this refined place, from where he spread lies and the most delirious rumors for four years, the outgoing president appeared distraught. Trembling, nervous, the outrageous captain curiously called for "tranquility," "respect for one's neighbor," and the "search for peace and harmony."

'This nightmare has ended'

His last words were perplexing, to say the least: "Thank you very much to all of you, I embrace you all, in the struggle, and a good 2023 to all... God bless our Brazil," Mr. Bolsonaro said with a broken voice and an imploring look, both hands placed flat on the table. A long breath and a look at the ceiling followed. "Let's move forward," he concluded.
The man who had smashed through the doors of power with a battering ram finally left Brasilia through the window and on tiptoe.

Back to the Parlatorium. Lula wanted his address to be personal. During the 27 minutes, the president, with a hoarse voice, broke into tears several times. "What the Brazilian people have suffered in recent years is the slow and progressive construction of a genocide," he lamented, referring to an era of shadows, uncertainty and much suffering. But "this nightmare has come to an end," Lula promised, lyrically, calling on his supporters to use "the weapons our opponents fear most: truth, which has defeated lies; hope, which has defeated fear; and love, which has defeated hate."

This January 1st, Lula did not stop at words. Within minutes of taking office, the leftist president immediately made a myriad of decisions that ended the Bolsonarist legacy: an extension of social assistance and fuel tax exemptions; revocation of decrees liberalizing gun ownership and illegal gold mining; lifting of secrecy over administrative acts; the re-establishment of an international fund for the preservation of the Amazon.

Supporters of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gather to attend his inauguration as new president outside the Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, January 1, 2023. SILVIA IZQUIERDO/AP

It was a question of moving quickly because the new government has no state of grace. According to the Datafolha Institute, barely one Brazilian in two thinks that the current government will be able to do better than the previous one. At nightfall, a final cocktail party was organized at the Itamaraty, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decorated with colonnades and a water garden. But Lula only stayed for a short time. The next day, he had to fly to Santos to attend Pelé's funeral. The death of a "king" for the advent of a president.

Space and Astronomy: What to Expect in 2023

By Michael Roston

Jan. 3, 2023

As years in space and astronomy go, 2022 is going to be a tough act to follow.

NASA wowed us with cosmic scenes captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The DART mission slammed an asteroid into a new orbit. Artemis I set humanity on a course back to the moon. China finished building a new space station in orbit. SpaceX launched and landed 61 rockets in 12 months. And the invasion of Ukraine imperiled Russia’s status as a space power.

It’s a lot to measure up to, but 2023 is bound to have some excitement on the launchpad, the lunar surface and in the sky. Once again, you can get updates on your personal digital calendar by signing up for The New York Times’s Space and Astronomy Calendar. Here are some of the major events you can expect. Not all of them have certain dates yet, but Times journalists will provide additional information as it emerges.

Never miss an eclipse, meteor shower, rocket launch or other event that’s out of this world again with The Times Space and Astronomy Calendar.

New Rockets

NASA got its giant Space Launch System off the ground for the first time in 2022, lighting up the night in Florida with an incredible stream of flame as it carried the Artemis I mission toward the moon. That shifted attention to SpaceX, which is building a next generation rocket, Starship, that is also central to NASA’s crewed Artemis III moon landing attempt.

SpaceX cleared a key environmental review that would allow it to launch an uncrewed orbital test flight from South Texas if it met certain conditions. But the rocket wasn’t ready for flight in 2022. The company has not announced a date for a test this year, but regular ground tests of Starship equipment indicate it is working toward one.

The pathfinder first stage of the Vulcan Centaur, a new rocket by United Launch Alliance that will eventually replace that company’s Atlas V.Credit...United Launch Alliance

Numerous other rockets may take flight for the first time in 2023. The most important, Vulcan Centaur by United Launch Alliance, will eventually replace that company’s Atlas V, a vehicle that has been central to American spaceflight for two decades. The Vulcan relies on the BE-4 engine built by Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos. The same engine will in turn be used in Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which may have a test flight late this year.

A number of American private companies are expected to test new rockets in 2023, including Relativity and ABL. They could be joined by foreign rocket makers, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries which could test Japan’s H3 rocket in February, and Arianespace, which is working toward a test flight of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket.

New Lunar Landings

We’re guaranteed at least one lunar landing attempt in 2023. A Japanese company, Ispace, launched its M1 mission on a SpaceX rocket in December. It’s taking a slow, fuel-efficient route to the moon and is set to arrive in April, when it will try to deploy a rover built by the United Arab Emirates, a robot built by Japan’s space agency, JAXA, as well as other payloads.

There could be as many as five more lunar landing attempts this year.

NASA has hired a pair of private companies to carry payloads to the lunar surface. Both of them, Intuitive Machines of Houston and Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, faced delays in 2022, but may make the trip in the coming months.

They could be joined by three government space programs’ lunar missions. India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission was delayed last year but could be ready in 2023. A Japanese mission, Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, aims to test the country’s lunar landing technologies. Finally, Russia’s Luna-25 mission was postponed from last September, but Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, may try this year.

New Space Telescopes

Scientists in 2019 at work with the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft, which will study energy and dark matter. Its 2022 launch was postponed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Credit...S. Corvaja/European Space Agency

Scientists in 2019 at work with the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft, which will study energy and dark matter. Its 2022 launch was postponed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Credit...S. Corvaja/European Space Agency

The Webb telescope wowed space enthusiasts and scientists with its views of the cosmos, but we may get new vantages from a variety of orbital observatories.

The most significant may be Xuntian, a Chinese mission setting off later in the year that will be like a more sophisticated version of the Hubble Space Telescope. The spacecraft will survey the universe at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths in an orbit around Earth close to the country’s Tiangong space station.

A Japanese-led mission, XRISM, pronounced chrism, could launch earlier in the year as well. The mission will use X-ray spectroscopy to study clouds of plasma, which could help to explain the universe’s composition. A European space telescope, Euclid, may also launch on a SpaceX rocket after the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in the spacecraft losing its seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket. It will study the universe’s dark energy and dark matter.

New Planetary Missions

A new spacecraft will head toward Jupiter this year, aiming to become the first to ever orbit another planet’s moon. The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, or JUICE, will launch from an Ariane 5 rocket as early as April 5 to set off to the Jovian system, arriving in 2031. Once it reaches the gas giant, it will move to conduct 35 flybys of three of the giant world’s moons: Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, all of which are believed to have subsurface oceans. In 2034, JUICE will begin orbiting Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

The story behind Pope Benedict XVI’s red shoes

Pope Benedict XVI wearing brilliant red shoes arrives to attend an interreligious gathering at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center on April 17, 2008, in Washington, D.C.

By Katie Yoder

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 1, 2023

When Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, he stepped down as the bishop of Rome — and out of his famous red leather shoes.

During his reign as pope, Benedict’s red shoes became something of a trademark, inspiring ABC News to call him a “fashionista” and Esquire to name him “accessorizer of the year.” At another point, his loafers sparked controversy after false rumors claimed they were crafted by the high-end Italian fashion house Prada.

Benedict’s choice of shoes stands out because his predecessor and successor — St. John Paul II and Pope Francis — opted for alternatives. But popes have walked in red for centuries.

In photos of Benedict's mortal remains released by the Vatican today, he is dressed in red and gold vestments and ordinary black clerical shoes.

Pope Benedict XVI is greeted by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (R) following his arrival in Australia ahead of World Youth Day 2008 at Richmond RAAF Base on July 13, 2008, in Sydney, Australia. Sergio Dionisio/Getty Images

Far from a fashion statement, in the Catholic faith, red symbolizes martyrdom and the Passion of Christ.

In other words, they signify the pope following in the footsteps of Christ.

Two Italian cobblers are credited with fashioning Benedict’s shoes during his pontificate: Adriano Stefanelli and Antonio Arellano.

Stefanelli, an Italian craftsman, has created shoes for a long list of notable leaders, including St. John Paul II, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, according to Italy’s ANSA news.

He first delivered shoes to the Vatican when he witnessed John Paul II in pain in 2003, CNA previously reported. He asked himself what he could do, personally, to help. He decided on shoes. 

That tradition continued with Benedict XVI.

The “greatest satisfaction is to see, looking at the photos and images of Benedict XVI, that the shoe is, as they say informally, well ‘used and carried,’ [and] therefore comfortable,” he told L’Osservatore Romano.

Another artisan, Arellano, mended shoes for Benedict back when he was a cardinal. Originally from Trujillo, Peru, Arellano moved to Rome in 1990 to open a shoe repair shop by the Vatican. 

When his friend the cardinal became pope, he was elated.

“Everyone was running through the streets, and I saw Cardinal Ratzinger appear on television,” he previously told CNA. “I was amazed because he was my customer and I was so happy.”

Arellano said he remembered Benedict’s shoe size — 42 — and decided to give the new pope a pair of red shoes during a general audience at the Vatican.

“When we got there to greet him, the pope recognized me, smiled, and said, ‘Here is my shoemaker.’ It was a wonderful moment, because he makes you feel important,” Arellano remembered. “He gave a blessing to me and my family and we said goodbye.”

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Benedict XVI: thinker, preacher, saint? Scholars and former students discuss legacy

That gift resulted in the Vatican requesting another pair of shoes for the pontiff to wear during the beatification of John Paul II. 

“It was awesome, because then I really did feel like I was the Holy Father’s shoemaker,” he said, adding that “it’s one thing to give the pope a present; it’s another for them to call you to specifically make some shoes for him.”

When he retired, the pope emeritus put away his red shoes in favor of leather loafers designed by a Mexican Catholic cobbler, Armando Martin Dueñas. Those three pairs — two burgundy, one brown — came to him as another gift.

Experts question the viability of the future H2Med hydro-product between Barcelona and Marseille (abc.es)

“The execution of the project will turn Spain into the world’s first renewable hydrogen hub by incorporating the first axes of the national backbone network that will connect the green hydrogen production centres with domestic demand and the two international interconnections with France and Portugal”

— abc.es

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They are committed to hydrogen production being close to demand…

Written in Spanish by Javier González Navarro

Translation by Germán & Co

Madrid

abc.es

03/01/2023

The future H2Med hydro-product that will connect Barcelona with Marseille from at least 2030 has been submitted to the call for Projects of Common Interest (PCI) to receive European funding, since its cost is estimated at around 3,000 million euros.

"The execution of the project will turn Spain into the world's first renewable hydrogen hub by incorporating the first axes of the national backbone network that will connect the green hydrogen production centres with domestic demand and the two international interconnections with France and Portugal", the Ministry for Ecological Transition stresses.

Promoted by the governments of Spain, Portugal and France, H2Med includes two cross-border infrastructures, one between Celorico da Beira (Portugal) and Zamora, and another, underwater, between Barcelona and Marseille (France), which are promoted by the respective gas system transporters and managers: Enagás on the Spanish side, REN on the Portuguese side, and GRTgaz and Terega on the French side. The underwater section will be some 400 kilometres long. Both sections will be linked to the backbone that runs from Huelva to Gijón and from there to Catalonia.

This infrastructure, announced with great fanfare by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in an attempt to cover up the failure suffered with the MidCat - the gas pipeline that would cross the Pyrenees and which has been flatly rejected by the French President, Enmanuel Macron -, has the approval of the Spanish gas sector, although some experts question its viability.

Uncertainties

Firstly, because the countries involved have not confirmed a timetable for the project. In addition, major uncertainties have arisen in relation to the purpose, demand, technology, costs, financing and the general need for it, they stress.

The construction of this hydroproduct to transport green hydrogen to France in the long term is based on the assumption that Spain and Portugal will be able to produce enough renewable hydrogen to meet domestic demand and have a surplus for export. Both countries have increased their renewable energy generation, but this may not be enough, according to the Hydrogen Science Coalition.

"If this hydro-product is built, it will be an unnecessary expense paid for by public funds that will not alleviate the current gas crisis and, on the contrary, will further exacerbate costs for energy consumers. The leaders of France, Spain, Portugal and other countries involved must prevent H2Med from becoming another failed project turned into a stranded asset paid for by consumers like MidCat," the experts stress.

Spanish hydrogen backbone

Light blue rhombus storage centres

Image source: Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge / ABC

Source: Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge / ABC

 "Studies have shown that hydrogen-based fuels should be used mainly in sectors such as aviation or industrial processes that cannot be electrified. The use of hydrogen-based fuels instead of direct electrification alternatives requires between two and fourteen times the amount of electricity generation depending on the application and the respective technologies."

Worse than burning gas

The experts also suggest that "transporting hydrogen over long distances is potentially worse for the climate than burning natural gas and therefore it is better to produce hydrogen close to where the demand is. Producing hydrogen locally will help reduce energy dependence and improve security of supply where it is needed most.

David Cebon, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cambridge (UK) and member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, says, "While it is true that we will need renewable hydrogen to accelerate the energy transition, particularly for sectors that already use 'dirty' hydrogen today, we are just at the beginning of developing a clean hydrogen supply and a clear use case. This means that the quantity and location of future hydrogen demand remains highly uncertain. Linking the justification for new gas infrastructure to future hydrogen use before we are clear on where both demand and supply of hydrogen will come from is irresponsible.

The Hydrogen Science Coalition is an international group of independent academics, scientists and engineers working to bring an evidence-based viewpoint to the hydrogen policy debate.

The cost and funding of the project are not yet clearly defined. H2Med is expensive to build and requires financial backing from buyers to reach the Financial Investment Decision (FID).

New subsea hydrogen transport lines are estimated to cost around USD 7.1 million per kilometre. The length of the H2Med pipeline could vary between 300 and 400 kilometres, so this pipeline could cost approximately 3 billion euros.

Long-term hydrogen buyers

Clean hydrogen industries in Europe and Asia highlighted the three main factors delaying their FIDs at a recent Bloomberg NEF roundtable: the need to find long-term buyers for clean hydrogen, complicated renewable energy licensing rules, and the wait to capture all available financing.

Inés Bouacida, Climate and Energy researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, explains that "it is not yet clear whether the project will go ahead, which will depend on the technical and financial feasibility assessments of the countries involved (MidCat was rejected by French regulators, among other things, as uneconomic)". He adds that "it is not yet clear whether it will be attractive to transport hydrogen between the Iberian Peninsula and France".

The green hydrogen pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille will not be in place until the next decade

He adds that low-carbon hydrogen production "is currently almost non-existent and the consumption channels are still partly to be built, although it seems clear that hydrogen will be used mainly for the decarbonisation of industry. Therefore, production and consumption areas are still in the definition phase, which makes it difficult to plan the infrastructures for the production and consumption of hydrogen.

News round-up, Monday, January 02, 2023

“Dangerous

”In 2021, Russian gas exports to the European Union amounted to 140 billion cubic meters. They fell to 60 billion in 2022, and it is likely that in 2023 there will be no more Russian gas in our systems,” Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency’s executive director, said at a press conference in Brussels on December, 12.”

— Le Monde

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2022, a fitful year for commodity and energy prices

Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused upheaval and fears of shortages in the energy and commodities sectors. Experts warn of shocks in a volatile market.

Le Monde

By Laurence Girard and Marjorie Cessac

Published on January 2, 2023 at 10h15, updated at 10h51 on January 2, 2023

"The year of gas and grain." The expression is Philippe Chalmin's, a professor with Université Paris-Dauphine, when he was asked to describe 2022, a year that will likely be reminded as a special of its kind in the annals of commodities.

Market tensions were high, with speculative surges resulting in historic prices, followed by sharp declines.

"Through volatility, markets reflect the anxieties of the planet," Mr. Chalmin said, anxieties which, although very real, can be amplified by financial or political entities. In 2021 already, commodity prices were on the rise, propelled by Chinese purchasing and post-pandemic economic recovery which resulted in supply tensions. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia earlier this year further boosted prices.

In the energy sector, gas prices rose strongly as Russian deliveries to Europe were drying up. On the futures markets, they culminated to an average of €100-125 per megawatt-hour (MWh), with peaks of more than €300 per MWh during the summer, compared to €20-30 before the war started.

A slight respite took hold in December in Europe, where below-average temperatures, high gas inventory levels and a shrinking demand caused by imposed frugality allowed prices to fall back to around €85, or pre-February-24 levels. Electricity prices, which had also been soaring throughout the year, were also halved in December alone, returning to below €300 per MWh.

Patrice Geoffron, director of France's Center of Geopolitics of Energy and Raw Materials (CGEMP) said 2022 "unquestionably" marked a turning point. "As in 1973, there will be a before and after. Back then, we switched from oil to nuclear power to produce electricity. This time, we have no more Russian gas and, in all likelihood, we will not go back, unless peace returns, which is now more than hypothetical," he said.

Dangerous

"In 2021, Russian gas exports to the European Union amounted to 140 billion cubic meters. They fell to 60 billion in 2022, and it is likely that in 2023 there will be no more Russian gas in our systems," Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency's executive director, said at a press conference in Brussels on December, 12.

This would "leave an even bigger hole in the European and world gas supply," he said, adding this would translate into consequences in the coming winters.

Until now, supplies have been partly offset by purchases of liquefied natural gas, notably from the United States and Qatar, but this cannot be sustained in the long run given the impact on climate. In addition, demand is likely to increase if China's activity picks up again.

At a historical high, reached in mid-May, a ton of milling wheat was trading at €438 on Euronext, a dangerous price level for the poorest countries' populations.

Grain was also in the news. The sudden halt of exports from Black Sea ports affected by the war in Ukraine cast a shock. The importance of Ukrainian, and even more so Russian, grain exports was brought to light.

The fear of wheat shortage triggered speculation. At a historical high, reached in mid-May, a ton of milling wheat was trading at €438 on Pan-European stock exchange Euronext, a dangerous price level for the poorest countries' populations, which rely heavily on imports.

An agreement sealed at the end of July between Moscow and Kyiv – under the aegis of Turkey and the United Nations – to secure grain exports from Ukrainian ports cooled the pressure, especially since it was renewed in mid-November for 120 days.

"Thanks to this deal, five million tons of agricultural products are exported from Ukraine each month," Arthur Portier, with agricultural intelligence company Agritel, said. Meanwhile, the world's granaries filled up, with a record harvest in Russia and Australia, and a decent one in Europe. "There is no shortage of wheat today," Mr. Portier said. The same is true for corn, even if production has been lower, and rapeseed.

'In the brains of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping'

Prices retreated as a result. In December, wheat fell below €300 per ton, returning to its end-February level but still up 20% this year. Corn, which had been priced at €377 per ton, fell back to €283 while rapeseed returned to its price of a year ago, above €550 a metric ton, after a peak close to €850.

"Cereal prices are down again, but everything is relative. Levels remain good," Benoît Piétrement, who chairs a large-scale-crop council at FranceAgriMer, a state agency in charge of allocating national as well as EU agricultural subsidies.

Similar curves were behind metal prices, whether it was copper, zinc, aluminum or nickel, all saw valuations decline, after peaking in early March. "Overall, most markets for industrial metals and non-ferrous ores are in surplus," Mr. Chalmin said.

Fears of a recession and questions over China's recent decision to loosen Covid-19 regulations are also on investors' minds. The sharpest correction affected ocean freight as logistical tensions appeared to be easing. "The freight rate for a 40-foot [12-meter] container from China to Europe fell from $10,000 to $3,000," said Mr. Chalmin.

What will happen in 2023? "A balance has been found," Mr. Piétrement said. "The market is walking a tightrope," added Mr. Portier. On the energy front, "we are assured to have to deal with higher, more unstable fossil fuel prices and shortages in Europe," said Mr. Geoffron.

"Even if we were to imagine a swift return to peace, it is obvious that Europeans will aim at reducing reliance on Russia in many areas and source elsewhere to diversify, which will be mechanically more expensive because it will be further away, requiring new infrastructure and new contracts."

Oil prices – which have been hovering around $80-85 since October, after reaching $120 in March – will also be on the radars, especially as an EU embargo on Russian crude has been active on December, 5. In retaliation, Moscow said it was ready to cut production by 5-7% in the coming days.

The decision came as North America was hit by "the blizzard of the century" and China was reopening, fueling a return of bullish trends on oil and other resources. "To make predictions, you'd have to be in the brains of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping," Mr. Chalmin said.

The rate rises by two tenths of a point in December after the European Central Bank's latest interest rate hike.

The Euribor is out of control: is it a good time to amortise and take off part of the mortgage?

Taking out a mortgage now costs nine times more than a year ago

Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World

The invasion of Ukraine, compounding the effects of the pandemic, has contributed to the ascent of a giant that defies easy alignment. It could be the decisive force in a changing global system.

By Roger Cohen

Dec. 31, 2022

NYT

Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.

Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A “world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests.”

Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, turned Moscow into its largest oil supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West. Far from apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked.

“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call it out.”

In other words, with its almost 1.4 billion inhabitants, soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, India has a need for cheap Russian oil to sustain its 7 percent annual growth and lift millions out of poverty. That need is nonnegotiable. India gobbles up all the Russian oil it requires, even some extra for export. For Mr. Jaishankar, time is up on the mind-set that “Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s,” as he put it in June.

The Ukraine war, which has provoked moral outrage in the West over Russian atrocities, has caused a different anger elsewhere, one focused on a skewed and outdated global distribution of power. As Western sanctions against Russia have driven up energy, food and fertilizer costs, causing acute economic difficulties in poorer countries, resentment of the United States and Europe has stirred in Asia and Africa.

Carrying a gas canister in the Old City of Delhi. India gobbles up all the Russian oil it requires, and even some extra for export.

A tangle of electrical wires in Delhi’s Old City. For India’s leadership, the need for cheap Russian oil is nonnegotiable.

A production line at a tea manufacturer near Chennai, southeastern India. The Ukraine war and the pandemic have pushed more corporations to use India to diversify supply chains.

Grinding trench warfare on European soil seems the distant affair of others. Its economic cost feels immediate and palpable.

“Since February, Europe has imported six times the fossil fuel energy from Russia that India has done,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “So if a $60,000-per-capita society feels it needs to look after itself, and I accept that as legitimate, they should not expect a $2,000-per-capita society to take a hit.”

Here comes Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, pursuing its own interests with a new assertiveness, throwing off any sense of inferiority and rejecting unalloyed alignment with the West. But which India will strut the 21st-century global stage, and how will its influence be felt?

The country is at a crossroads, poised between the vibrant plurality of its democracy since independence in 1947 and a turn toward illiberalism under Mr. Modi. His “Hindu Renaissance” has threatened some of the core pillars of India’s democracy: equal treatment of all citizens, the right to dissent, the independence of courts and the media.

Democracy and debate are still vigorous — Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost a municipal election in Delhi this month — and the prime minister’s popularity remains strong. For many, India is just too vast and various ever to succumb to some unitary nationalist diktat.

The postwar order had no place for India at the top table. But now, at a moment when Russia’s military aggression under President Vladimir V. Putin has provided a vivid illustration of how a world of strongmen and imperial rivalry would look, India may have the power to tilt the balance toward an order dominated by democratic pluralism or by repressive leaders.

Which way Mr. Modi’s form of nationalism will lean remains to be seen. It has given many Indians a new pride and bolstered the country’s international stature, even as it has weakened the country’s pluralist and secularist model.

12 Workouts to Try in 2023

A playground on the outskirts of Chennai. India has almost 1.4 billion inhabitants and will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a mixture of East and West through education and upbringing, described the country as “some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed” without any of those layers being effaced.

He was convinced that a secular India had to accommodate all the diversity that repeated invasion had bequeathed. Not least, that meant conciliation with the country’s large Muslim minority, now about 200 million people.

Today, however, Mr. Nehru is generally reviled by Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist party. There are no Muslims in Mr. Modi’s cabinet. Hindu mob attacks on Muslims have been met with silence by the prime minister.

“Hatred has penetrated into society at a level that is absolutely terrifying,” the acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy said.

That may be, but for now, Mr. Modi’s India seems to brim with confidence.

The Ukraine war, compounding the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, has fueled the country’s ascent. Together they have pushed corporations to make global supply chains less risky by diversifying toward an open India and away from China’s surveillance state. They have accentuated global economic turbulence from which India is relatively insulated by its huge domestic market.

2022: A rollercoaster ride

Written in Spanish translation by Germán & Co

John Müller

ABC.es

Madrid, 31/12/2022

At first it was the verb: the game was called 'Wordle' and 'The New York Times' paid more than a million dollars for it. It was mainly circulating on Twitter, a social network that would become the talk of the town months after Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy it. But in January, the volcano was already sleeping on La Palma and the euro was twenty years old. Rafael Nadal was enjoying his greatness in Australia and Daniel Ortega was beginning the fourth consecutive term of his dictatorship in Nicaragua. Omicron complicated Covid's exit. Until the ides of February arrived and everything changed.

The Popular Party became the Spanish Tory party, when we did not yet know how low the British Tories could sink with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Pablo Casado committed political suicide in front of his own creature - Isabel Díaz Ayuso - and gave way to Alberto Núñez Feijóo. That was on 23 February, but on the 24th, the following day, Putin, the man with the extra-long tables, invaded Ukraine and changed our future. There, 2022 became a real rollercoaster, never better said. It took us a while to realise that Putin was not crazy. His justifiers said the war was NATO's fault for trying to camp out in Russia's front yard like Chris Rock was responsible for Will Smith's slap at the Oscar ceremony. Unwittingly, the Russian leader enlarged NATO - Sweden and Finland asked to join - consolidated Ukraine as a national entity and united Europe. Then came the nuclear threat, the food crisis, the prominence of missiles, drones and anti-tank weapons, and the unexpected effectiveness of the Ukrainian resistance.

It was in March that Pedro Sánchez decided to change horses on the Sahara and support Morocco's plan, a Copernican turn in Spanish foreign policy that we learned about because Rabat was kind enough to publish the Spanish president's letter. Feijóo, without opening his mouth, jumped in the polls to Sánchez's beard without anyone being able to explain it properly. In April, the Galician asked for the VAT on food to be lowered. Sanchez heeded him in December.

Summer of fire

The summer scorched the Culebra mountain range and completely dried out Europe, but San Fermín returned to Pamplona. There was another tragedy at the Melilla fence, and the government showered the Moroccan gendarmes with praise. There was tension in Taiwan and a constant display of North Korean missiles. It was the year we deflected a meteorite with a rocket. The US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and reminded us that Roe's baby was born, named Shelley, is 51 years old and has offspring (Roe's granddaughters) despite the fact that they wanted to abort her.

It was the year of the monkey pox, the cryptocurrency crash, the rise and fall of NFTs and the stock market values of digital platforms. Bendodo skated with Spain's 'plurinationality' and the Chileans shook it off by rejecting their 'woke' Constitution. Moreno Bonilla fixed it all with an unexpected absolute majority in Andalusia.

A wretch stabbed Salman Rushdie, on the orders of the ayatollahs, and another fanatic killed Shinzo Abe, the ruler who disguised himself as Mario Bros. And queens and kings died: Elizabeth II, the global grandmother; King Pelé, pop queen Olivia Newton-John and the last Soviet king, Mikhail Gorbachev. We still don't know who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Iran is walking on the edge of a revolution sparked by a young woman, Mahsa Amini, and Xi renewed his autocratic mandate, but stumbled against the Covid, who has tabled a motion of no confidence in him. Sombrero' Castillo was tempted by a coup in Peru and ended up in jail. ABC interviewed Pope Francis. Oh, and Argentina won the World Cup, Spain won the Eurobasket and Real Madrid won the European Championship again! Today, the greatest threat to economic prosperity is geopolitics and, for freedom, the degradation of our democracies.

News round-up, Friday, December 30, 2022

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Israel's democracy has become an illusion

EDITORIAL

Le Monde

The new Israeli government is sympathetic to Jewish extremists and the ultra-Orthodox and plans to expand settlements, perpetuating a domination that should come at a political and diplomatic price.

Published on December 30, 2022

The composition of the new Israeli government sworn in on December 29, and the share obtained by the most radical parties ever represented in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament), highlight an unprecedented evolution of the Jewish state. While the illiberal and reactionary shift that emerged from the ballot box concerns only the Israelis themselves, the same cannot be said of the desire to dominate the Palestinian territories, which is the other key issue for this government. The vision is no longer that of two states, but that of an annexation fraught with great peril.

More than 50 years after the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank by force, the Israeli military regime there can no longer be considered a temporary occupation. In half a century, regardless of a failing Palestinian authority, this state of exception has continued to be refined as the Israeli authorities have facilitated the settlement of Jewish Israeli citizens within these conquered territories, in violation of international law.

In recent months, there have been heated protests against the use of the term "apartheid" by human rights organizations to describe the system to which Palestinians are subjected. Israel's defenders are used to this activism, especially as the battle is not only semantic, given its potential legal implications for the International Criminal Court, which is investigating crimes committed in these territories.

The strength of this reaction cannot mask the only reality that counts, and which should provoke the only acceptable indignation: a regime is allocating different rights on the same land to different populations defined by ethnic criteria. While the Palestinians are locked up in enclaves at the whim of the occupier, a specific legal framework that benefits only Israelis of the Jewish faith guarantees the continuity between the state recognized by the international community and these occupied lands. This state of affairs is the consequence of the strategy that leads to annexation.

Israel's allies have resigned themselves to this situation, as have many Arab countries, which normalized their relations with the Jewish state without batting an eyelid. But this does not detract from the monstrosity that has been created, as illustrated by the systematic expropriation of land, the lack of freedom of movement and the use of unequal violence with complete impunity, among other things. The withdrawal from Gaza has never prevented Israel from exerting ruthless pressure on its inhabitants, as shown by the inhuman blockade imposed on this suffering territory.

To sustain this domination over the entire territorial area stretching from the Mediterranean to the border with Jordan comes at a political and diplomatic price. Israel's democratic nature is becoming an illusion. The 5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are subjected to a regime that governs every detail of their lives.

The issue also concerns the Western allies of the Jewish state. They have long exalted common values to hide their failures to act on matters related to Palestine, but these principles are nowhere to be found. They should therefore not be surprised that they arouse the indifference of a part of the world when they call, elsewhere, for the respect of the rights of peoples.

The Euribor rate rises by 3.5 points in 2022 and closes the year at 3%, the highest level since the real estate crisis.

The rate rises by two tenths of a point in December after the European Central Bank's latest interest rate hike.

The Euribor is out of control: is it a good time to amortise and take off part of the mortgage?

Taking out a mortgage now costs nine times more than a year ago

Madrid

30/12/2022

ABC.ES

Translation by Germán & Co

The Euribor has spent months climbing a mountain whose peak is still not in sight. The index to which most mortgages in Spain are referenced closes December and, therefore, the year 2022 slightly above 3%. A level that has not been exceeded as a monthly average since the real estate crash in 2008.

The new data represents a new acceleration with respect to November, having climbed another two tenths of a percentage point. Thus, in just one year the Euribor has gone from -0.502% in December 2021 to 3.01% in the same month of 2022. This represents a rise of 3.5 percentage points, the highest ever seen in the index's historical series, which began in 1999.

This is the monthly average, which is used to calculate the revision of mortgage repayments and new loans. Because the daily index has already comfortably exceeded 3%. The figure for 30 December, the last for 2022, leaves the daily Euribor at almost 3.3%, which indicates that January will see another monthly increase if this trend continues.

More and more users are turning to this type of solution to ask for a loan, given the facilities it offers.

This evolution is due to the rise in the price of money. In July, the European Central Bank (ECB) raised its benchmark interest rates for the first time in eleven years. This decision was followed by others in September, October and this December, bringing them to 2.5%.

The Euribor is closely linked to rate hikes. The index is the rate at which banks lend money to each other; if the price of money rises, so does the interest at which banks lend to each other. And this is directly reflected in the Euribor. In fact, the Euribor usually anticipates the ECB's rate hikes, as has been the case so far in 2022.

The rate started to rise at the beginning of the year and returned to positive territory in April. Since then it has not stopped rising, with the big acceleration occurring in September with a rise of one percentage point in just thirty days. It is now at 3%, but experts believe it still has some way to go.

Upward trend

Economists expect the ECB's reference rate to be above 3% in the short term. There is even talk that they could reach 4% before the end of 2023. The Euribor is already discounting these increases and, in theory, would anticipate the monetary institution's decisions.

What analysts expect is that by the middle of next year the index will be around 3.5%, putting more pressure on both variable mortgages whose repayments will have to be revised and new home loans that are taken out, which will be more expensive. As ABC reported, taking out a mortgage now is nine times more expensive than a year ago.

GOLDEN BOY

Pele the brilliant and beloved icon who never had a bad word for anyone… except, perhaps, Diego Maradona

Dave Kidd

Published: 30 Dec 2022

The Sun

A LONG-RUNNING spat with Diego Maradona, ham acting in Escape to Victory and even adverts for Viagra.

Ask anyone under the age of 50 what they actually remember about Pele and these are the likely themes.

Pele and Diego Maradona had a long-running rivalry - but now may now 'kick a ball together in the sky'Credit: EPA

Before Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo emerged, Pele and Maradona were out on their own in the debate over who was the greatest footballer of all time.

After Maradona played such a dominant role in Argentina’s 1986 World Cup victory — in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium, like Pele’s finest hour — the Brazilian suddenly had a genuine rival for his crown as the finest player in history.

And there was little love lost between the pair, with Maradona usually the poisonous protagonist.

At various times, both men recognised the greatness of the other but there was often a barb, with Maradona once chastising Pele for supposedly allowing his former team-mate Garrincha to die in poverty.

Pele — outspoken about drug abuse in the game — often responded that he would not criticise Maradona when he was ‘ill’ due to substance abuse.

And following the Argentine’s death in 2020, Pele even said: “One day we’ll kick a ball together in the sky above.”

The Brazilian was certainly the more gallant of the two.

And to those of us who never saw him play live, Pele had a saintly glow, as if his No 10 shirt should have come with a halo.

Yet in an era when legalised violence was very much a part of football, Pele could give as good as he got.

Jimmy Greaves, an expert teller of anecdotes, had a wonderful ability to humanise the Gods of the game when I was ghostwriter for his column.

He told a gem of a story about Pele from the Little World Cup, a four-team tournament in 1964 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Brazilian FA.

Greaves and the rest of the England squad, who were due to play Portugal the next day, were in the stadium in Sao Paulo watching Pele’s Brazil take on Argentina.

Pele was being man-marked by muscular defender Jose Mesiano and after one kick too many from the Argentine, Pele leapt several feet in the air and floored his antagonist with a head-butt.

Greaves recalled the incident starting a near riot, with England players fearing for their safety, but the ref missed the flashpoint.

Despite getting off scot-free, Pele had an ineffective match and Argentina ran out 3-0 winners.

It was shocking to hear of Pele’s violent side and almost as surprising to be told that he’d ever had a poor game.

For those of us a generation or so younger than Pele, there were two regular sightings of him on television — frequent replays of his 1970 World Cup highlights reel and then the war movie Escape to Victory.

No Christmas was complete without a rerun of this classic 1981 film, with cast including Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Bobby Moore, as well as Pele himself.

The movie is about a match between an allied prisoner of war team and a German army side — a thrilling 4-4 draw in which Pele’s character, Corporal Luis Fernandez, scores a spectacular overhead bicycle kick.

Before the match, Caine — player-manager of the POW XI — gives­ a detailed team talk at his blackboard of the passing game he wants his men to employ.

But Pele grabs the chalk and illustrates how he intends to dribble around the entire Nazi team and score a solo goal.

There was never any chance of him winning an Oscar for that performance — but his greatness on the football pitch was never in doubt.

And you didn’t need to have seen him play for real to understand that.

News round-up, Thursday, December 29, 2022

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Russia launches one of the biggest attacks of the war on Ukraine's energy infrastructure

A hail of missiles on New Year's Eve knocks out power to 90% of homes in the city of Lviv and 40% of those in Kiev.

New Russian missile airstrike leaves Ukrainian population without electricity

Written in Spanish

Translation Germán & Co

ByMaría R. Sahuquillo

El País

Kiev (Special Envoy) - 29 DEC 2022

On the eve of celebrations to welcome in the new year, Russia on Thursday launched a hail of missiles over Ukraine. The sound of explosions could be heard reverberating from just after dawn in towns and cities across the country. The attack, involving 69 cruise missiles and kamikaze drones, according to the government in Kiev, is one of the largest of the Kremlin's war in Ukraine, and has been aimed primarily at Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Since the temperatures began to drop, Russia has been heavily targeting power plants. It was the tenth attack on vital infrastructure since September.

 Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to plunge the country into darkness and cold to break the resistance of a population already enduring a war that has entered its eleventh month. Ukraine's anti-aircraft defences have intercepted 54 of the 69 missiles the Kremlin has fired in abundance. However, Thursday's attacks have left more than 90% of the city of Lviv without power, according to the mayor's office, which also warned of severe water shortages. In Kiev, 40% of homes have been left in darkness, according to its mayor, Vitali Klitschko.

One of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles fell in Belarus without reported casualties, according to BelTA, the Belarusian state news agency. The Belarusian defence ministry is investigating whether it was shot down by its air defence systems or whether it was a missile that missed its target and fell on its territory bordering Ukraine.

As the first rays of sunlight began to dawn in the Kiev sky, the drone of missiles and a grey trail swept across the sky. The anti-aircraft alarms had warned earlier that the capital, like the whole country, was under missile attack alert. Moscow fired 16 missiles at the Ukrainian capital on Thursday. All were intercepted by anti-aircraft defences, according to the Ukrainian authorities. However, remnants of the shells hit two houses, a children's playground and a factory, injuring three people, including a 14-year-old girl, according to the mayor's office.

The attacks also damaged infrastructure in the port city of Odessa, in Zitomir and in Kharkov in the north-east of the country. Several buildings, a power line and a gas pipeline were damaged in shelling outside the south-central city of Zaporiyia, according to the governor, Oleksandr Starukh. In Kherson, recaptured by Ukraine in November after months of Russian occupation, a missile hit a medical centre, according to local authorities. Two people were injured. "They dream that Ukrainians will celebrate the New Year in the dark and cold. But they cannot defeat the Ukrainian people," the Ukrainian defence ministry said on social media.

Russia has launched the large-scale attack on Ukraine from at least two ships and 13 strategic bombers, from which it fired cruise missiles, according to the Ukrainian air force leadership. Shortly before the missile barrage, Moscow dispatched swarms of kamizake drones, mostly Iranian-made aircraft, with which Kremlin troops seek to distract anti-aircraft defences before unloading the missile barrage. On Thursday, the buzzing of a swarm of at least 13 Iranian Shahed-136 drones flooded the skies over the city of Kharkov; 11 of them were shot down, officials said. In Dnipro, in the centre of the country, a strategic city, communications hub and important logistics centre, anti-aircraft defences shot down five drones, followed by a barrage of missiles. Ukraine's southern command has warned that three Russian missile-carrying ships are in combat position in the Black Sea.

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky had warned a few days ago that Russia was preparing another large-scale bombardment during the festive season. "With the arrival of the Christmas season, Russian terrorists may become active again," he said a few days ago. "They despise Christian values and any values in general," he added.

Thursday's massive bombardment comes just days after a drone struck a strategic Russian air base from which Moscow has begun bombing Ukraine's vital infrastructure, in an attack that killed at least three Kremlin soldiers and exposed new cracks in Russia's anti-aircraft defences and the design of the invasion. The attack was the second drone strike against the same Engels base in the Saratov region. As in previous raids, the Ukrainian government maintains cryptic language about the drone attack: they do not claim direct responsibility for it but have pointed to it as a consequence of the Kremlin's war.

2022, a pivotal year for the environment

The year is closing with a series of agreements on climate and biodiversity, but the commitments remain insufficient and implementing them will prove hard.

By Audrey Garric

Le Monde

Published on December 29, 2022

Did 2022 mark a leap forward in international action for the environment? While real success is still far away, the year is at least ending on some positive notes.

At the last United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), which ended on December 19 in Montreal, countries managed to adopt a new global framework to "halt and reverse" the collapse of biodiversity on Earth by 2030. A few weeks earlier, at the equivalent climate conference, COP27 in Egypt, an agreement was found to create a fund for the irreversible damage caused by global warming. Negotiations also began to develop a legally binding international treaty aiming at ending plastic pollution.

At the same time, the European Union reached a series of agreements to accelerate its cuts in greenhouse gas emissions: reforming its carbon market, introducing a carbon border tax, and stopping the sale of new combustion engine vehicles in 2035. It also agreed to imports of products linked to deforestation, such as soy, beef and cocoa.

Across the Atlantic, the United States succeeded in passing its Inflation Reduction Act, a colossal investment plan of around €350 billion for a low-carbon transition.

While he refutes the idea of a turning point, Sébastien Treyer, executive director of the independent policy research institute IDDRI, conceded much had been achieved "with opportunities to accelerate."

With the Paris Agreement on climate change adopted in 2015, the agreement on biodiversity and the Sustainable Development Goals, "we now have all the necessary framework for action. States no longer have any excuses," Pierre Cannet, director of advocacy and campaigns at World Wildlife Fund France.

'Shared leadership'

Progress was far from certain, in the context of multiple crises (energy, food, inflation and debt). Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has shaken multilateralism. "Before COP27 and COP15, we saw the return of postures opposing the West to the South, with compensation demands for the environmental crisis, and also for colonialism," Mr. Treyer said. "There was a very strong risk that development inequalities would scupper everything."

If countries have finally managed to cooperate, it is primarily because the Global North has recognized the Global South's financial needs and has guaranteed that there will be solidarity. "The countries of the South have agreed to extend their ambition [in protecting biodiversity and fighting global warming], even if all the money they need is not on the table," Mr. Treyer said.

Under "shared leadership" of the EU and US, developing countries "are now trying to do their part," Mr. Treyer said. China, which was initially playing a minor role, finally worked hard to reach compromise positions between developed and developing countries on the new global framework for biodiversity as it chaired COP15.

India, which is chairing the G20 for a year since December 1, intends to present itself as a climate champion. South Africa, Brazil and Colombia are also showing a new proactive approach.

At a European level, the Green Deal, which has been moving "from the high-level strategy stage to the legislation stage," according to Diana-Paula Gherasim, an energy and climate researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, is materializing.

In a context of soaring energy prices and war in Ukraine, "it was important for the EU to show that it could fight several battles in parallel and that the fight against climate change is structurally part of its action," she said.

The context of multiple crises could also help to advance environmental action because it favors a "return of state interventionism," said Mr. Treyer. It also provides substance to measures that seemed impossible to implement until now, such as a tax on fossil fuels or on air and sea transport.

The proliferation of climate disasters this year – floods in Pakistan, heat waves, droughts and fires in Europe, the devastating hurricane Ian in Cuba and Florida, etc. – has also increased awareness.

"Some taboos are finally beginning to be lifted," said Mr. Cannet, as countries spoke at the COP about fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) – the main causes of global warming – subsidies that are harmful to the climate and biodiversity, and the problem of pesticides and plastics.

More than illustrating a new impetus, the WWF expert considers that the recent agreements reached on the environment are rather a "catch-up in terms of ambition." "We are still far from being on the right trajectory, and the step to take is immense," he said.

Seven years after the Paris Agreement, countries' commitments are still likely to result in a climate warming of 2.5°C at the end of the century, far from the goal of limiting it to 1.5°C.

Loose commitments

Not only are the promises insufficient, but their implementation has also been poor so far too, as both agreements are non-binding and do not come with sanction mechanisms in case of non-compliance.

"The commitments [made during the Paris agreement] have not yet been sufficiently transformed into national actions and especially impacts," Janet Ranganathan, executive director of the World Resources Institute (WRI), said. "They have not decreased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere."

With regard to the unprecedented decline of species and ecosystems, achieving the ambitious targets adopted in Montreal will be a real challenge, as each state must now align its national strategies and plans with the global framework.

In order to avoid a total failure in eight years – as was the case for the targets adopted during the previous decade – countries have agreed this time on a more robust mechanism for monitoring and regular evaluation of progress.

The rapid implementation of new financial commitments will also be crucial to ensure that the Kunming-Montreal agreement is truly followed by action.

Within the EU, the implementation of the new legislation will require a "massive and sustained effort on the part of governments to deploy renewable energies and infrastructure, for example for recharging electric vehicles, or to renovate buildings," Ms. Gherasim said.

Recent progress should not obscure setbacks. The year 2022 has also seen an increased reliance on fossil fuels in the context of the energy crisis, a postponement of the European regulation to halve the use of pesticides, u-turns on European agro-ecological transition and the suspension of international negotiations on the protection of the high sea. COP27 failed to tackle fossil fuels, and the majority of countries have not raised their climate targets.

Turning the end of this year's little music into next year's allegro can only be done under certain conditions. "We will have to tackle the three systems together – food, energy and urban – which are the causes of both biodiversity erosion and climate change," said Ms. Ranganathan.

Countries of the Global North will also have to "define a new financial pact with the South," at a summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron in June, Mr. Treyer explained. The summit will have to hold a reform of the international financial system in order to raise substantial sums in the face of environmental crises.

Ahead of COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, which will mark an occasion for a first assessment of countries' climate commitments, the United Nations secretary general has announced a climate ambition summit in September. Antonio Guterres was clear: "The price of admission is non-negotiable: [we want] credible and serious new climate action and nature-based solutions."

Covid in China: US imposes Covid testing for visitors from China

China is starting to reopen borders after three years

By Alys Davies and Frances Mao

BBC News

The US has become the latest country to impose Covid testing on visitors from China, after Beijing announced it would reopen borders next week.

Italy, Japan, Taiwan and India also announced mandatory tests, but Australia and UK said there were no new rules for travellers from China.

After three years of being closed to the world, China will let people travel more freely from 8 January.

But the country's ongoing Covid surge has sparked wariness.

China is reporting about 5,000 cases a day, but analysts say such numbers are vastly undercounted - and the daily case load may be closer to a million. Hospitals are overwhelmed and residents are struggling to find basic medicines, according to reports.

On Wednesday, the US said a lack of "adequate and transparent" Covid data in China had contributed to the decision to require Covid tests from 5 January for travellers entering the country from China, Hong Kong and Macau.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this was needed "to help slow the spread of the virus as we work to identify... any potential new variants that may emerge".

But Beijing's foreign ministry on Wednesday had said coronavirus rules should only be instated on a "scientific" basis and accused Western countries and media of "hyping up" the situation.

Some people reacted angrily on China's censored social media.

"I thought all of the foreign countries had opened up. Isn't this racism?" read one comment that was liked 3,000 times on Weibo. The US has said testing is required of anyone coming from China, or via a third country, regardless of nationality.

But others said they understood the reason for the conditions: "This is nothing compared to all the restrictions we had for people coming into China," one user wrote.

Beijing only announced on Monday its decision to end quarantine for arrivals - effectively reopening travel in and out of the country for the first time since March 2020. Until this week, anyone entering China had to undergo quarantine in state facilities.

Before the pandemic, China had been the world's largest outbound tourism market. But it's unclear how many Chinese people will travel abroad after 8 January given that the number of flights are limited, and many citizens need to renew their passports.

The international community's reaction has varied with the UK and Australia saying they were monitoring China's Covid situation but were not planning on announcing new testing requirements.

Others have moved swiftly to announce restrictions:

• In Japan, from Friday, travellers from China will be tested for Covid upon arrival. Those who test positive will have to quarantine for up to seven days. The number of flights to and from China will also be restricted

• In India, people travelling from China and four other Asian countries must produce a negative Covid test before arriving. Positive passengers will also be put in quarantine

• Taiwan says people arriving on flights from China, as well as by boat at two islands, will have to take Covid tests on arrival from 1 January to 31 January. Those who test positive will be able to isolate at home

• Meanwhile Malaysia has put additional tracking and surveillance measures in place

• Italy has also imposed mandatory Covid testing on travellers from China

The European Commission said its health security committee would convene on Thursday to discuss "possible measures for a coordinated EU approach" to China's Covid surge.

But Italy, an EU member state and an epicentre of the virus in late 2019 and 2020, said it was moving first to "ensure the surveillance and identification" of any new variants of the virus.

Flights arriving in Milan this week were already testing passengers from China. Authorities found 52% of passengers were infected with Covid on one flight that landed on 26 December.

Initial tests of Covid-positive travellers arriving from China showed that 15 of them had Omicron variants that were already present in Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said. She described the news as quite reassuring.

Italy is one of 26 European countries in the border-free Schengen zone and Ms Meloni is calling for EU-wide testing of Chinese passengers, arguing that Italy's own measures might otherwise be ineffective.

China's foreign ministry said on Wednesday that "currently the development of China's epidemic situation is overall predictable and under control".

However, the true toll of daily cases and deaths in China is unknown as officials have stopped requiring cases to be reported, and changed classifications for Covid deaths. On Sunday, officials said they would also stop releasing daily case counts.

"The infection surge in China is on expected lines," Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, an Indian epidemiologist and health systems specialist told the BBC in a recent interview.

"If you have a susceptible population that is not exposed to the virus, cases will rise. Nothing has changed for the rest of the world."

China's decision to reopen its borders marks the end of the country's controversial zero-Covid policy, which President Xi Jinping had personally endorsed.

Even as the rest of the world transitioned to living with the virus, Beijing insisted on an eradication policy involving mass testing and stringent lockdowns.

The economy took a hit and people grew both exhausted and angry - in November, the frustration spilled onto the streets in rare protests against Mr Xi and his government. Week later, Beijing began to roll back the restrictions.

News round-up, Wednesday, December 28, 2022

“Huge responsibility
This introspection should involve Europeans just as much: The outcome of the war in Ukraine will be critical for their future too. The vast majority of the 34 countries still considered to be liberal democracies by the Swedish V-Dem Institute are on their soil. On Tuesday, December 27, while talking about the heroic struggle of Iranian women, the Franco-Iranian director, writer and artist Marjane Satrapi told France Inter radio: “Today, the guardian of democracy is Europe.”

The trauma of Donald Trump’s tenure as president of the United States has consistently tarnished the image of American democracy. The shining “city on a hill” extolled by his predecessor Ronald Reagan is now a cliché.”

— Le Monde

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“Eight rings, one for each of the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbek, and one final one for Mr. Putin himself. It’s hard not to think that this is a reference to the nine rings in The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, published in 1954.

It’s not by chance, the Kremlin established the parallel with the story “in full awareness,” according to political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann. The presidential spokesman denied this, referring to the parallel as “a simple memory.” In the British writer’s book, Sauron forged the nine rings in order to enslave men.”

— Le Monde

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'The problem of universalism is not the failure of freedom and democratic values, is the failure to implement them'

COLUMN

Sylvie Kauffmann

Authoritarian regimes have enjoyed momentum since the beginning of the 21st century. But those who fight them share the same ideals. It is up to Europe to modernize them.

Published on December 28, 2022

It is a fact, a rough and indisputable one, as well as a solid trend typical of the beginning of the 21st century, that 2022 could not change: Liberal democracy is declining globally, autocratic regimes have advanced and the "strong man" model is still up and running. This tendency was meticulously documented by two independent institutions, Freedom House and V-Dem.

While the phenomenon is real, it is only part of the story. The other part has been told for more than 100 days by Iranian demonstrators, for more than 300 by the citizens of Ukraine, for more than 20 months by Afghan women and for more than 20 years by Russian democrats, who are now forced today to do so from exile.

This list, of course, is by no means exhaustive. Millions of freedom-loving people in Africa, Asia and elsewhere have their place in it. It is also this part of the story that Oleksandra Matviichuk, president of the Ukrainian non-governmental organization Center for Civil Liberties, eloquently told on December 10 in Oslo, when she received the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Russian association Memorial and the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski.

Two days earlier, in Berlin, a conference brought together numerous Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian democracy activists and European experts on the theme: "In search of lost universalism." Two of the organizers, Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov, belong to the generation of Soviets who believed in the universalism of Enlightenment values and the rule of law.

When the USSR collapsed, they set out to educate their fellow citizens in civics to accompany the birth of democracy. At that time, it was thought things could only go in this direction. European institutions helped them. Universalism was booming.

Only resort

The financial crisis of 2008 and then the decade of 2010 and the rise of autocracy have put a stop to this progressive vision of history. Thirty years after the fall of the USSR, Ms. Nemirovskaya and Mr. Senokossov, seen as "foreign agents" in their country, are living in exile in Riga, and their school of civic education attracts mostly teachers.

Neither they nor their friends gathered in Berlin have found anything better than the values of universalism to fight the authoritarian model. They remain the only resort – in all of these autocratic regimes, it is in their name that revolutionary movements arise. Even in China, beyond a certain point, deprivation of freedom is no longer tolerated.

The problem of "lost universalism" has nothing to do with the failure of freedom and democratic values, it is the failure to implement them. We should not have let our guard down. "Human rights cannot be upheld once and for all," Ms. Matviichuk pleaded in Oslo. "The values of modern civilization must be protected."

Now, everyone is looking back at the mistakes made as anti-democratic forces gradually regained pace, looking for ways not to repeat them. "What we were able to obtain in the 1990s happened too easily. Thinking that this transition would be quick was an illusion," Memorial historian Irina Scherbakova said.

Huge responsibility

This introspection should involve Europeans just as much: The outcome of the war in Ukraine will be critical for their future too. The vast majority of the 34 countries still considered to be liberal democracies by the Swedish V-Dem Institute are on their soil. On Tuesday, December 27, while talking about the heroic struggle of Iranian women, the Franco-Iranian director, writer and artist Marjane Satrapi told France Inter radio: "Today, the guardian of democracy is Europe."

The trauma of Donald Trump's tenure as president of the United States has consistently tarnished the image of American democracy. The shining "city on a hill" extolled by his predecessor Ronald Reagan is now a cliché.

The European Union certainly has its share of illiberal democracies and far-right parties in process of normalization but Ms. Satrapi is right: Along with a few democracies in the Asia-Pacific, it remains the bastion of the universalism of liberal values and law. It is up to the EU to modernize them, prove their effectiveness and defend them.

This is a huge responsibility, which it can only live up to by transforming itself to face a more hostile environment than it did 30 years ago. In Oslo, Ms. Matviichuk said: "Yes, the law doesn't work right now. But we do not think it is forever. We have to break this impunity cycle and change the approach to justice for war crimes." She was talking about Russia's war crimes in Ukraine, but there is a broader need for change.

In a book about the strongmen of authoritarian regimes, The Strongmen. European Encounters with Sovereign Power, political scientist Hans Kribbe describes the process by which Europe, understanding that force prevails over law in global relations, finds it cannot resign itself to being dominated.

It is not a question, he explains, of giving up on liberal values, but of becoming aware that the world is organized around divergence and no longer around the West or its ideas. To face and overcome this hurdle, Europe is discovering the path of power. Let's hope it finds it in 2023.

Sylvie Kauffmann

Vladimir Putin, the lord of the rings

As part of the meeting of the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group of former Soviet Republics, the Kremlin chief offered eight rings to his guests and reserved the ninth for himself.

By Benoît Vitkine (Moscow (Russia) correspondent)

Published on December 28, 2022 at 08h56, updated at 09h09 on December 28, 2022

An informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 27, 2022, including from left to right, Tajik President Emomali Rahmone, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov. ALEXEY DANICHEV / AFP

The delicate art of official gift-giving demands a subtle mix of restraint and daring, especially in the post-Soviet space, where mostly elderly male leaders pose as staunch conservatives.

During the annual end-of-year meeting of the heads of state and government of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) held on Monday, December 26 in Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin chose to remain determinedly unexpected. As the host of this informal summit, the Russian leader presented his counterparts with stunning white and yellow gold rings engraved with the symbol of the regional organization and the words "Russia" and "Happy New Year 2023."

Eight rings, one for each of the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbek, and one final one for Mr. Putin himself. It’s hard not to think that this is a reference to the nine rings in The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, published in 1954.

It’s not by chance, the Kremlin established the parallel with the story "in full awareness," according to political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann. The presidential spokesman denied this, referring to the parallel as "a simple memory." In the British writer’s book, Sauron forged the nine rings in order to enslave men.

A replica of the document accompanying the rings given by Russian President Vladimir Putin to his CIS counterparts, posted to @Pul Pervogo's Telegram account on December 26, 2022. TELEGRAM @PUL PERVOGO

Social media has been abuzz with this gift

It's particularly striking since the Ukrainian conflict is rife with references to The Lord of the Rings. In Kyiv, they often compare Ukraine to a peaceful Shire under attack by an absolute evil from Moscow’s Mordor. Russian soldiers are often referred to as "Orcs" in everyday language, as well as by Ukrainian officials, and some Russians have now defiantly reappropriated the term.

Mr. Putin's intriguing gift caused a furor on social media, with the more impertinent commenters pointing out his resemblance to Gollum, a creature who became a slave to his ring. In the minds of others, the Russian president's goal is to "keep the CIS together by the power of magic." The joke tackles a sensitive subject; the recurrent tensions between members of the organization that have led to armed clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

As part of the meeting on Monday, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian reiterated his frustration with Moscow, which continues to remain passive in the face of Azerbaijan's takeover of the Lachin corridor, which links Yerevan with Nagorno-Karabakh and is supposedly protected by Russian forces.

It was also observed that, among those present, only Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been photographed wearing the ring. The Kremlin ally's ironclad loyalty is a hollow reminder of the regional tension caused by the "special military operation" in Ukraine.

U.S. Scrambles to Stop Iran From Providing Drones for Russia

As the war in Ukraine grinds on, some officials have become convinced that Iran and Russia are building a new alliance of convenience.

By David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt

Dec. 28, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has launched a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.

In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned “kamikaze” aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.

The breadth of the effort has become clearer in recent weeks. The administration has accelerated its moves to deprive Iran of the Western-made components needed to manufacture the drones being sold to Russia after it became apparent from examining the wreckage of intercepted drones that they are stuffed with made-in-America technology.

U.S. forces are helping Ukraine’s military to target the sites where the drones are being prepared for launch — a difficult task because the Russians are moving the launch sites around, from soccer fields to parking lots. And the Americans are rushing in new technologies designed to give early warning of approaching drone swarms, to improve Ukraine’s chances of bringing them down, with everything from gunfire to missiles.

But all three approaches have run into deep challenges, and the drive to cut off critical parts for the drones is already proving as difficult as the decades-old drive to deprive Iran of the components needed to build the delicate centrifuges it uses to enrich near-bomb-grade uranium. The Iranians, American intelligence officials have said in recent weeks, are applying to the drone program their expertise about how to spread nuclear centrifuge manufacturing around the country and to find “dual use” technologies on the black market to sidestep export controls.

In fact, one of the Iranian companies named by Britain, France and Germany as a key manufacturer of one of the two types of drones being bought by the Russians, Qods Aviation, has appeared for years on the United Nations’ lists of suppliers to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. The company, which is owned by Iran’s military, has expanded its line of drones despite waves of sanctions.

The administration’s scramble to deal with the Iranian-supplied drones comes at a significant moment in the war, just as Ukraine is using its own drones to strike deep into Russia, including an attack this week on a base housing some of the country’s strategic bombers. And it comes as officials in Washington and London warn that Iran may be about to provide Russia with missiles, helping alleviate Moscow’s acute shortage.

Officials across the Western alliance say they are convinced that Iran and Russia, both isolated by American-led sanctions, are building a new alliance of convenience. One senior military official said that partnership had deepened quickly, after Iran’s agreement to supply drones to the Russians last summer “bailed Putin out.”

The Biden administration, having abandoned hopes of reviving the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran, has been adding new sanctions every few weeks.

In the effort to stop the drone attacks, Mr. Biden’s aides are also engaging an ally with a long history of undermining Iran’s nuclear program: Israel.

In a secure video meeting last Thursday with Israel’s top national security, military and intelligence officials, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, “discussed Iran’s growing military relationship with Russia, including the transfer of weapons the Kremlin is deploying against Ukraine, targeting its civilian infrastructure and Russia’s provision of military technology to Iran in return,” the White House said in a summary of the meeting. The statement did not offer details about how the two countries decided to address the issue.

But the fact that the administration chose to highlight the discussion, in a quarterly meeting normally focused on disrupting Iran’s nuclear capabilities, was notable. Israel and the United States have a long history of operating together in dealing with technological threats emanating from Tehran. Together they developed one of the world’s most famous and sophisticated cyberattacks, using computer code that was later called “Stuxnet,” to attack Iran’s nuclear centrifuge facilities.

Since then, Israel has made little secret of its attempts to sabotage nuclear enrichment centers.

In a statement, Adrienne Watson, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, acknowledged the scope of the broad drive against Iran’s drone program.

“We are looking at ways to target Iranian U.A.V. production through sanctions, export controls, and talking to private companies whose parts have been used in the production,” she said, using the acronym for “unmanned aerial vehicles.”

She added, “We are assessing further steps we can take in terms of export controls to restrict Iran’s access to technologies used in drones.”

Years in the Making

Iran’s drone program had been slow to progress until recent years.Credit...Iranian Army Office

Iran’s interest in drones dates back more than three decades, as the country looked for ways that it could monitor, and harass, ships in the Persian Gulf. The Mohajer I, a predecessor to one of the drones now being sold to the Russians, made its first flight in 1986.

Progress was slow, but may have been aided in 2011 when the Central Intelligence Agency took a stealthy, unarmed RQ-170 from the Pentagon’s fleet in Afghanistan and flew it over Iran, in what appeared to be an effort to map some of the hundreds of tunnels dug by the Iranians to hide elements of their nuclear program.

A malfunction led to the aircraft landing in the desert, and President Obama briefly considered sending in a Navy SEAL team to blow it up before it fell into the hands of Iranian engineers, senior officials later reported. He decided not to take the risk, and within days the Iranians paraded the drone through the streets of Tehran, a propaganda victory.

But American intelligence officials later concluded that the aircraft likely proved a bonanza for Iranian drone designers, who could reverse engineer the craft.

It was not until 2016 that Iran announced it was beginning to develop attack drones, some in cooperation with Russia. Many of the first were placed in the hands of Iranian-backed militias, including Houthi rebels in Yemen, and they were used most effectively in 2019 in attacks on two Saudi oil processing facilities run by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company.

American officials said the experiences in Saudi Arabia, and the targeting of American forces in Syria and elsewhere, gave them an appreciation of Iranian drone capabilities, and the challenge of dealing with kamikaze raids in which a small explosive is secured in the drone’s nose. But the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine underscored that Iran knew how to mass produce the aircraft, a particular worry at a moment when there are discussions of opening an Iranian plant inside Russia.

The Iranian program has hardly been without its problems. Deliveries so far have come episodically, as Russia and Iran retrofitted the drones to operate in the cold of a Ukrainian winter. And Iran has run into supply chain issues, a problem the United States is seeking to worsen.

Iran’s interest in drones dates back more than three decades, as the country looked for ways that it could monitor, and harass, ships in the Persian Gulf. The Mohajer I, a predecessor to one of the drones now being sold to the Russians, made its first flight in 1986.

Progress was slow, but may have been aided in 2011 when the Central Intelligence Agency took a stealthy, unarmed RQ-170 from the Pentagon’s fleet in Afghanistan and flew it over Iran, in what appeared to be an effort to map some of the hundreds of tunnels dug by the Iranians to hide elements of their nuclear program.

A malfunction led to the aircraft landing in the desert, and President Obama briefly considered sending in a Navy SEAL team to blow it up before it fell into the hands of Iranian engineers, senior officials later reported. He decided not to take the risk, and within days the Iranians paraded the drone through the streets of Tehran, a propaganda victory.

But American intelligence officials later concluded that the aircraft likely proved a bonanza for Iranian drone designers, who could reverse engineer the craft.

It was not until 2016 that Iran announced it was beginning to develop attack drones, some in cooperation with Russia. Many of the first were placed in the hands of Iranian-backed militias, including Houthi rebels in Yemen, and they were used most effectively in 2019 in attacks on two Saudi oil processing facilities run by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company.

American officials said the experiences in Saudi Arabia, and the targeting of American forces in Syria and elsewhere, gave them an appreciation of Iranian drone capabilities, and the challenge of dealing with kamikaze raids in which a small explosive is secured in the drone’s nose. But the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine underscored that Iran knew how to mass produce the aircraft, a particular worry at a moment when there are discussions of opening an Iranian plant inside Russia.

The Iranian program has hardly been without its problems. Deliveries so far have come episodically, as Russia and Iran retrofitted the drones to operate in the cold of a Ukrainian winter. And Iran has run into supply chain issues, a problem the United States is seeking to worsen.

Nonetheless, despite years of sanctions on Iran’s defense sector, Iranian drones still are built largely with American and Western parts. When photographs began to circulate of circuit boards from downed drones, visibly packed with chips from American manufacturers, the White House ordered a crackdown, including calls to the firms whose products had been discovered. Almost all had the same reaction: These are unrestricted, “dual use” items whose circulation is almost impossible to stop.

The administration is trying anyway.

In September, the Biden administration tightened sanctions, specifically naming companies involved with building the aircraft for Russia. That was followed by further action in November against companies like Safiran Airport Services, a Tehran-based firm that it accused of shipping the drones on behalf of the Russian government.

In November, the Treasury Department sanctioned two companies based in the United Arab Emirates, a key U.S. ally, accusing them of collaborating with Safiran.

Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va., said that the sanctions were hardly an instant solution.

“Export controls are going to have an effect, but you have to be realistic about the timelines on which they will work,” Mr. Kofman said.

“Sanctions delay and make costly acquisition of components,” he said. “But determined countries will get their hands on tech for narrow defense applications, or adjust their weapon designs to what they can get, even if it’s less reliable.”

As the war grinds on, the United States, Britain, France and Germany are pressing the secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, to launch a formal investigation into whether Russia and Iran are, together, violating the terms of a U.N. restriction on the export of sophisticated arms from Iran.

Mr. Guterres has made clear that his top priority is executing a deal with Russia over the export of Ukrainian grain, to alleviate shortages, and his aides say now is not the time to risk that agreement with an investigation whose conclusion seems predictable.

Tracking the Drones

There is growing evidence that the military relationship between Iran and Russia may be a two-way street. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Iran appears to be flying drones to Russian forces on cargo aircraft, usually over routes that leave little opportunity to intercept them. That means attempting to attack them on the ground — no easy task.

Until a little more than a month ago, American and British government officials say, the drones were largely based in Crimea. Then they disappeared for a number of days, reappearing in Russian-occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia province. The movements have been tracked by American and Ukrainian officials, some sitting side by side in military intelligence centers. But the drones are highly mobile, with launch systems mounted on trucks, and the Russians know they are being hunted — so they move them to safer locations, which makes tracking and striking them a difficult proposition.

“The change of launch site is likely due to Russian concerns about the vulnerability of Crimea, while it is also convenient for resupply from the weapons’ likely arrival point in Russia, at Astrakhan,” a British military assessment earlier this month said.

There is growing evidence that the military relationship may be a two-way street. Britain has accused Russia of planning to give Iran advanced military components in exchange for hundreds of drones.

“Iran has become one of Russia’s top military backers,” Britain’s defense minister, Ben Wallace, told Parliament last week.

“In return for having supplied more than 300 kamikaze drones, Russia now intends to provide Iran with advanced military components, undermining both Middle East and international security — we must expose that deal,” Mr. Wallace said.

A number of American companies, including the Edgesource Corporation and BlueHalo, both based in Virginia — have provided training or technology to help detect and defeat the Russian drones, U.S. officials said.

Edgesource has donated about $2 million in systems, including one called Windtalkers, to help Ukraine locate, identify and track incoming hostile drones more than 20 miles away, while at the same time identifying Ukraine’s own drones in the same air space, said Joseph Urbaniak, the company’s chief operating officer.

The United States has provided Ukraine with other technology to counter drones, most recently as part of a $275 million shipment of arms and equipment the Pentagon announced on Dec. 9. But American officials have declined to provide details on the specific assistance, citing operational security.

Stanley Whittingham, Nobel laureate in chemistry: "Companies are more concerned about next month's stock market than the long term". (El País)

“If today you can charge a mobile phone in less than an hour and use it all day long, it is because it has a lithium-ion battery. The same battery that goes into laptops, electric vehicles, and renewable energy storage plants. Although it has been on the market since the 1990s, its first version was created two decades earlier. During the oil crisis in the 1970s, the US company Exxon (now ExxonMobil) hired chemist Stanley Whittingham (Nottingham, UK, 1941) to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The goal was to get electric vehicles off the ground and the researcher, who had studied at Oxford and Stanford, laid the foundations for the element that would change the behaviour of mankind.”

— El País

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Stanley Whittingham, Nobel laureate in chemistry: "Companies are more concerned about next month's stock market than the long term".

GERMAN TORO GHIO 6,435

Germán & Co

37 items added with 11,031 views

Written in Spanish, By EMANOELLE SANTOS, El País, 27 DEC 2022

Translation by Germán & Co

If today you can charge a mobile phone in less than an hour and use it all day long, it is because it has a lithium-ion battery. The same battery that goes into laptops, electric vehicles, and renewable energy storage plants. Although it has been on the market since the 1990s, its first version was created two decades earlier. During the oil crisis in the 1970s, the US company Exxon (now ExxonMobil) hired chemist Stanley Whittingham (Nottingham, UK, 1941) to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The goal was to get electric vehicles off the ground and the researcher, who had studied at Oxford and Stanford, laid the foundations for the element that would change the behaviour of mankind.

His work with superconducting materials culminated in the first prototype lithium-ion battery, which was functional but not as safe. Ten years later, physicist John Goodenough demonstrated that, by changing some elements, he could store more energy. A breakthrough that was improved by engineer Akira Yoshino, who pioneered the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery in 1991.

All three received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the joint development of lithium-ion batteries. In his speech, Whittingan stressed the importance of interdisciplinarity and international collaboration to find the solutions the world needs. The main technical challenge is to improve the capacity of today's batteries, while at the global level, the supply chain for the elements needs to be changed and recycling needs to be encouraged. "Right now, some of the materials travel 50,000 miles (more than 80,000 kilometres) from the mine to the finished product, which doesn't make any sense," says the researcher, who stopped by the Ramón Areces Foundation, Madrid, in November to share a lecture on climate change and the critical role of energy storage.

Question: What is it like to see everyone using something you invented?

Answer. It's amazing, but we expected it. When we started working with lithium batteries, the focus was on electric vehicles. There was nothing like iPhones and laptops. It was the communications revolution that started lithium batteries.

We have to go for renewables, and I include nuclear as one of them.

Q. ExxonMobil was the big backer of this invention. What are companies doing today?

A. When I joined Exxon, most of the big companies had what they called corporate research labs. We did fundamental research related to the company. That all disappeared around 1990 and 1995. Companies should do it today because they are the only ones who can directly research future business, but I think they are more concerned about next month's stock market performance rather than what's going to happen in five or ten years. In the 1970s, they were much more concerned about the long term.

Q. Back then, they didn't invest more in improving lithium batteries because they thought it was too early and they didn't need to. Is it too late now?

A. We have to do it now. We can't burn coal and we have to get rid of most of the oil. So we must have new renewable energy sources and that requires storage. More research needs to be done to make batteries better, safer and cheaper. We have no other choice.

Q. His work with superconducting materials culminated in the first prototype lithium-ion battery, which was functional but not as safe. Ten years later, physicist John Goodenough showed that, by changing some elements, he could store more energy. A breakthrough that was improved by engineer Akira Yoshino, who pioneered the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery in 1991.

All three received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the joint development of lithium-ion batteries. In his speech, Whittingan stressed the importance of interdisciplinarity and international collaboration to find the solutions the world needs. The main technical challenge is to improve the capacity of today's batteries, while at the global level, the supply chain for the elements needs to be changed and recycling needs to be encouraged. "Right now, some of the materials travel 50,000 miles (more than 80,000 kilometres) from the mine to the finished product, which doesn't make any sense," says the researcher, who stopped by the Ramón Areces Foundation, Madrid, in November to share a lecture on climate change and the critical role of energy storage.

Q. In most countries, the energy that is stored comes from coal, oil and gas.

A. We must have green energy in the first place. New York State no longer generates electricity from coal. I have seen that England wants to get electricity from solar panels in Morocco and they are putting a very big power cable there. In Scandinavia, almost all the power is hydroelectric. So I think countries are going to change. The energy problems that were born out of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine teach us that you cannot depend on other countries for gas and oil. We have to go for renewables, and I include nuclear energy as one of them. The battery is just a means to store energy until the moment you want to use it.

Q. What is the next step you hope to see?

A. We want to double the energy density, the energy storage of lithium batteries. In US terms, to go down from $120 per kWh to about $60. We have to get rid of some of the materials we use now, like cobalt. We probably have to stop using a lot of nickel. Also, improve the electrolyte, which is the liquid inside the battery. What I call dummy batteries have no electronic protection inside, so they can catch fire.

Q. Would increasing the energy density increase the risk of explosions?

A. Whenever energy is stored it is not particularly safe. If the gasoline engine were invented today, we would not allow 20 gallons (75 litres) of gasoline to be put under a car and then put a child's seat right on top of it. We have got used to it and it will be the same with electric vehicles. But the batteries need to be safer and we may have to stop buying the super-cheap models from certain countries.. In most countries, the energy that is stored comes from coal, oil and gas.

Q. In your Nobel lecture, you said that a good battery can last forever. Are the ones on the market of good quality?

A. A battery is designed to last as long as the device it is used in. Nobody wants to pay for a 20-year battery to put in their phone and change it every three or four years. But if you change it, you have to make sure it's a really good battery. What I call fake batteries have no electronic protection inside, so they can catch fire.

The first thing is to save energy. That's the easiest way to help the energy transition.
Q. Are governments doing enough to regulate them?

R. They should insist that any battery in circulation meets national standards. In the US, many don't and there have been fires because people charge them indoors. The controls are not good, but they are on the market and they are cheap. You have to be careful.

Q. Is recycling the solution to ensure that supply meets demand?

A. The goal in the United States is to have all batteries recycled and in New York State they are not allowed to be thrown away. Mobile phone batteries are 100% cobalt, so they are worth a lot of money. So we should encourage people to recycle them. Batteries are one example, semiconductors are another, the same with plastics. Sometimes, even when it goes for recycling, you don't know if it is actually recycled or if it (the waste) is sent to developing countries. The companies that manufacture them should be forced to recycle them at source. That has to come from governments.

Q. Elon Musk is the owner of the world's largest electric vehicle company. Should he use his influence to encourage recycling?

A. It's not clear to me that he's interested in that sort of thing. One of his former engineers has set up a recycling company right next to a large battery plant in Nevada (USA). They also claim it's going to be a mining company: they're mining old batteries for all the materials they contain. Nobody trusts him these days.

Q. China has given a lot of subsidies to make it cheaper to buy an electric vehicle. Why don't the US and Europe do it in a more significant way?

A. The US and Europe could sell many more cars if they had the batteries and materials. The wait is 12 to 24 months in the US. It's a supply chain problem. We don't have the manufacturing facilities, we don't have the mines, we don't have the skilled people. Many of the big battery factories are South Korean companies, like LG, Samsung and SK, who are now building manufacturing plants in the US. What we really want is for Americans to make their own batteries; I imagine European governments want the same thing. We need to move away from this global supply chain that doesn't work. We saw that during Covid-19 we couldn't get face masks. Now we can't get semiconductors. We have to regionalise everything.

We have to move away from this global supply chain that doesn't work. We saw it with masks during Covid-19. It's happening now with semiconductors.
 

Q. Will this problem be solved in the next few years?

A. There is a huge trend in the US to become more independent from Asia. We can't have 100% of something coming from one place, no matter where it is. We need more diversity.

Q. If you were starting your research now, what would you do?

A. The most interesting areas in science right now are not chemistry and physics, but somewhere in between these two disciplines. Another one is everything related to biomedicine, which is in between biology, engineering, chemistry and medicine. Those are the two big areas that I find most exciting. I like to do what I call focused research, which starts from fundamental research but with a practical goal in the future.

Q. On a personal level, how can you contribute to this energy transition?

A. The first thing is to save energy. The easiest way is to use less energy in everything we do. One person in the US uses about twice as much energy as each person in Europe. We can certainly cut back. And I hope that people in Europe can also cut back. We need more public transport, people not driving their cars themselves. When I worked for Exxon, we all shared a car. It was normal. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.

Q. In your Nobel lecture, you said that a good battery can last forever. Are the ones on the market of good quality?

R. A battery is designed to last as long as the device it is used in. Nobody wants to pay for a 20-year battery to put in their phone and change it every three or four years. But if you change it, you have to make sure it's a really good battery. What I call fake batteries have no electronic protection inside, so they can catch fire. The first thing is to save energy. That's the easiest way to help the energy transition.

Q. Are governments doing enough to regulate them?

R. They should insist that any battery in circulation meets national standards. In the US, many don't and there have been fires because people charge them indoors. The controls are not good, but they are on the market and they are cheap. You have to be careful.

Q. Is recycling the solution to ensure that supply meets demand?

R. The goal in the United States is to have all batteries recycled and in New York State they are not allowed to be thrown away. Mobile phone batteries are 100% cobalt, so they are worth a lot of money. So we should encourage people to recycle them. Batteries are one example, semiconductors are another, the same with plastics. Sometimes, even when it goes for recycling, you don't know if it is actually recycled or if it (the waste) is sent to developing countries. The companies that manufacture them should be forced to recycle them at source. That has to come from governments.

P. Elon Musk is the owner of the world's largest electric vehicle company. Should he use his influence to encourage recycling?

R. It's not clear to me that he's interested in that sort of thing. One of his former engineers has set up a recycling company right next to a large battery plant in Nevada (USA). They also claim it's going to be a mining company: they're mining old batteries for all the materials they contain. Nobody trusts him these days.

P. China has given a lot of subsidies to make it cheaper to buy an electric vehicle. Why don't the US and Europe do it in a more significant way?

R. The US and Europe could sell many more cars if they had the batteries and materials. The wait is 12 to 24 months in the US. It's a supply chain problem. We don't have the manufacturing facilities, we don't have the mines, we don't have the skilled people. Many of the big battery factories are South Korean companies, like LG, Samsung and SK, who are now building manufacturing plants in the US. What we really want is for Americans to make their own batteries; I imagine European governments want the same thing. We need to move away from this global supply chain that doesn't work. We saw that during Covid-19 we couldn't get face masks. Now we can't get semiconductors. We have to regionalise everything.

We have to move away from this global supply chain that doesn't work. We saw it with masks during Covid-19. It's happening now with semiconductors.
Q. Will this problem be solved in the next few years?

A. There is a huge trend in the US to become more independent from Asia. We can't have 100% of something coming from one place, no matter where it is. We need more diversity.

Q. If you were starting your research now, what would you do?

A. The most interesting areas in science right now are not chemistry and physics, but somewhere in between these two disciplines. Another one is everything related to biomedicine, which is in between biology, engineering, chemistry and medicine. Those are the two big areas that I find most exciting. I like to do what I call focused research, which starts from fundamental research but with a practical goal in the future.

Q. On a personal level, how can you contribute to this energy transition?

A. The first thing is to save energy. The easiest way is to use less energy in everything we do. One person in the US uses about twice as much energy as each person in Europe. We can certainly cut back. And I hope that people in Europe can also cut back. We need more public transport, people not driving their cars themselves. When I worked for Exxon, we all shared a car. It was normal. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.

News round-up, Friday, December 23, 2022

“Peace in a world of paradoxes and petty interests is my wish for you in this holiday season.
A heartfelt —thank you— to everyone who has read along with Germán & Co. Thank you very much; in only a short time’s period, we have already exceeded over two hundred thousand page views...
I hope that you and your loved ones have a year of good health, mutual respect, and joy in 2023.”

— Germán & Co

---

Air Products and AES Announce Plans to Invest Approximately $4 Billion to Build First Mega-scale Green Hydrogen Production Facility in Texas

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Seaboard’s CEO in the Dominican Republic, Armando Rodriguez, explains how the Estrella del Mar III, a floating hybrid power plant, will reduce CO2 emissions and bring stability to the national grid…

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Jan. 6 Panel Issues Final Report, Placing Blame for Capitol Riot on ‘One Man’

The report expanded on this summer’s televised hearings, describing in detail what it called former President Donald J. Trump’s “multipart plan” to overturn the 2020 election.

By Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman

Published Dec. 22, 2022

WASHINGTON — Declaring that the central cause of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was “one man,” the House committee investigating the assault delivered its final report on Thursday, describing in extensive detail how former President Donald J. Trump had carried out what it called “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and offering recommendations for steps to assure nothing like it could happen again.

It revealed new evidence about Mr. Trump’s conduct, and recommended that Congress consider whether to bar Mr. Trump and his allies from holding office in the future under the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists.

“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report said. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”

The release of the full report was the culmination of the panel’s 18-month inquiry and came three days after the committee voted to formally accuse Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. While the referrals do not compel federal prosecutors to take any action, they sent a powerful signal that a select committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.

“Our institutions are only strong when those who hold office are faithful to our Constitution,” Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, wrote in the report, adding: “Part of the tragedy of Jan. 6 is the conduct of those who knew that what happened was profoundly wrong, but nevertheless tried to downplay it, minimize it or defend those responsible.”

The report contains the committee’s legislative recommendations, which are intended to prevent future presidents from attempting a similar plot. The panel has already endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to exploit on Jan. 6 in an attempt to cling to power. The House is scheduled to give final approval to that overhaul on Friday.

Among committee recommendations were a possible overhaul of the Insurrection Act and strengthening the enforcement of the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists holding office.

The panel also said Congress should consider legislation to bolster its subpoena power and increase penalties against those who threaten election workers. And it said bar associations should consider whether any of the lawyers who aided Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election should be punished.

In addition to its focus on Mr. Trump’s actions, the report went into great detail about a supporting cast of lieutenants who enabled him. Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers John Eastman, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro were named as potential “co-conspirators” in Mr. Trump’s various attempts to cling to power.

Mr. Trump bashed the report on his social media site, Truth Social, calling it “highly partisan.”

In a statement, Mr. Clark dismissed the committee’s report as a “last gasp” of a panel that is set to dissolve as Republicans take control of the House in January.

“This committee is now largely dead and will be fully dead on Jan. 2, 2023,” said Mr. Clark, whose phone was seized as part of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department in connection with his role in aiding Mr. Trump’s efforts.

The committee had already released the report’s executive summary, a lawyerly, 154-page narrative of Mr. Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election by seven million votes.

The report that follows the summary was largely an expanded version of the panel’s widely watched set of hearings this summer — which routinely drew more than 10 million viewers — with its chapter topics mirroring the themes of those sessions.

Those included Mr. Trump’s spreading of lies about the election, the creation of fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by President Biden, and the former president’s pressure campaign against state officials, the Justice Department and former Vice President Mike Pence. The committee’s report documents how Mr. Trump summoned a mob of his supporters to Washington and then did nothing to stop them as they attacked the Capitol for more than three hours.

The committee’s report is the result of an investigation that included more than 1,000 witness interviews and a review of more than one million pages of documents, obtained after the panel issued more than 100 subpoenas.

It documented how, at times, even Mr. Trump did not believe or take seriously some of the outlandish claims about election fraud being promoted by him and his allies. During a conference call two weeks after Election Day, the lawyer Sidney Powell asserted that “communist money” had flowed through countries like Venezuela, Cuba and perhaps China to interfere with the election.

According to testimony provided to the committee by Hope Hicks, a former top aide to Mr. Trump, he “muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, ‘This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’”

At the same time, it showed how Mr. Trump encouraged his most extreme supporters to back him as he energized protesters massing in Washington on Jan. 6, with an organizer of his rally that day noting that he “likes the crazies.”

The committee on Wednesday and Thursday also released more than 40 witness testimony transcripts, a few of which provided extensive new detail about the investigation while others showed nearly three dozen witnesses invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. More of them will be released before the end of the year.

The nine-member panel was made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom gained new prominence through the tightly scripted and highly produced televised hearings, which redefined the way in which congressional investigations could be presented to the public.

“Our country has come too far to allow a defeated president to turn himself into a successful tyrant by upending our democratic institutions, fomenting violence and, as I saw it, opening the door to those in our country whose hatred and bigotry threaten equality and justice for all Americans,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman, wrote in a foreword to the report.

Among those who received significant criticism in the report was Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, whom he assigned to find ways to stop Mr. Biden from assuming power and Mr. Trump from losing it.

The committee’s report traced Mr. Giuliani’s postelection behavior from the moment Mr. Trump put him in charge of legal strategy shortly after the election to his efforts to directly pressure officials in battleground states, in some cases after the election had been certified.

“Rudy was just chasing ghosts,” the report quotes Mr. Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, as saying of the earliest days after the election.

In one of the more glaring examples of Mr. Giuliani’s pressure, the report cites a call he placed to an official in Maricopa County, Ariz., asking for a return call. “Maybe we can get this thing fixed up,” he said in his message. “You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans sort of are both in this, kind of, situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve this for everybody.”

The committee also took note of state officials willing to be particularly helpful to Mr. Trump’s cause, such as Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator who later became the Republican nominee for governor. Mr. Mastriano’s emails suggest that he spoke with Mr. Trump over three days at the end of December, and that Mr. Trump’s assistant told the White House legislative affairs director that Mr. Trump wanted letters from state senators asking Republican congressional leaders to reject the Pennsylvania electoral votes.

The bulk of the report is made of eight chapters intended to tell a narrative story of Mr. Trump’s efforts to hang on to power.

“The Big Lie,” the first chapter, recounts how Mr. Trump engaged in a premeditated plan starting on election night to falsely claim that he had won and claim that outstanding votes were fraudulent — and that he went on making those claims for months even after being informed repeatedly by his aides that he was wrong and had lost. Attorney General William P. Barr told the committee that Mr. Trump never showed any “indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

“Donald Trump was no passive consumer of these lies,” the report said. “He actively propagated them. Time and again President Trump was informed that his election fraud claims were not true. He chose to spread them anyway. He did so even after they were legally tested and rejected in dozens of lawsuits.”

Chapter 2, titled “I Just Want to Find 11,780 Votes,” recounts how Mr. Trump sought to pressure officials in Georgia to find the votes he needed to swing the state, which had been won by Mr. Biden, into his column. It goes on to explore Mr. Trump’s largely unsuccessful pressure campaign on a wide array of officials in other swing states he had lost to find ways to reverse the outcome.

At one point, the report says, the White House switchboard left a message for the chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors to call Mr. Trump, who was pushing for investigations into voting machines there. (The chairman decided not to return the phone call from the president of the United States.)

Subsequent chapters cover the genesis of the so-called fake electors scheme, in which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to promote alternative slates of electors from states he had lost to try to block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, and Mr. Trump’s campaign to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into using his role overseeing the congressional certification process as president of the Senate to bring the fake elector plan to fruition.

Mr. Trump was largely reliant on Mr. Eastman to provide legal justification for Mr. Pence in effect unilaterally deciding whether to accept the outcome of the election, but the report shows that he turned to other aides to help make the case as well. It says that either Mr. Trump or Mr. Meadows “tasked John McEntee, the director of the Presidential Personnel Office, with researching the matter further. Though McEntee was one of President Trump’s close advisers, he was not a lawyer and had no relevant experience.”

As Mr. Pence resisted and Mr. Trump castigated him publicly, officials became increasingly concerned about the vice president’s safety. On the morning of Jan. 6, the report says, “an agent in the Secret Service’s intelligence division was alerted to online chatter “regarding the V.P. being a dead man walking if he doesn’t do the right thing.’”

Chapter 6, called “Be There, Will Be Wild!,” recounts how Mr. Trump “summoned a mob for help” through a Twitter post on Dec. 19 that promoted a pro-Trump protest scheduled for Jan. 6 in Washington — a message, the report said, that “focused his supporters’ anger on the joint session of Congress” that would take place that day.

Far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys mobilized, as did adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, the report said. One of the hosts on Alex Jones’s Infowars show told viewers in late December that they might have to end up “storming right into the Capitol.”

The report documents how some of the protesters came to Washington believing that Mr. Trump would march with them to the Capitol on Jan. 6. “Trump speaking to us around 11 am then we march to the capital and after that we have special plans that I can’t say right now over Facebook,” one member of a militia-affiliated group in Texas posted early that day.

The report goes on to describe Mr. Trump’s three hours of inaction as violence swept across Capitol Hill and some of his supporters called for Mr. Pence to be hanged.

At one point, Mr. Trump was informed that the Capitol Police had shot a rioter, later identified as Ashli Babbitt. “1x civilian gunshot wound to chest @ door of House chaber,” read a note on a White House pocket card that was preserved by the National Archives and seen by a White House employee on the table in front of Mr. Trump as he watched the riot unfold on television, the report said.

The eighth chapter analyzes the attack on the Capitol itself, showing how the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers appeared to storm the building in a deliberate, organized fashion, and how many individual protesters came to Washington with firearms. Eleven minutes after protesters breached the Capitol building, Mr. Trump tweeted angrily about Mr. Pence. The violence would continue for hours.

The committee later asked Mr. McEntee about Mr. Trump’s demeanor during a phone call between the two of them at the end of the day after the violence had been quelled — and specifically about whether Mr. Trump expressed sadness. “No,” Mr. McEntee said, according to the report. “I mean, I think he was shocked by, you know, it getting a little out of control, but I don’t remember sadness, specifically.”

The report contains four appendices that the committee’s investigative staff argued to include. Two are the work of the panel’s “Blue Team,” which investigated law enforcement failures and the delayed response of the National Guard to the riot.

The first detailed the flood of threats about the potential for violence that law enforcement officials received before Jan. 6, and concluded that the failure to share and act on those threats “jeopardized the lives of the police officers defending the Capitol and everyone in it.”

More than 150 officers were injured during the day’s bloody assault.

For instance, on Dec. 26, 2020, the Secret Service received a tip about the Proud Boys having “a large enough group to march into D.C. armed and will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped.”

It stressed, “Their plan is to literally kill people,” adding: “Please, please take this tip seriously and investigate further.”

The report also documented the growing frustration inside the D.C. National Guard as soldiers were forced to sit on the sidelines while rioters were storming the Capitol.

At one point, the guard’s commander, Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, now the House sergeant-at-arms, blurted out: “Should we just deploy now and resign tomorrow?”

A third appendix, the work of the committee’s “Green Team,” focused on how Mr. Trump and his allies raised millions off the lie of a stolen election, and a fourth investigated the extent to which foreign actors played a role in the events surrounding the 2020 election, concluding that investigators found no “interference” but that Mr. Trump’s lies were a benefit to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The final report did not include information about some of the panel’s witnesses, including Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. Ms. Thomas was among allies of Mr. Trump who promoted efforts aimed at overturning the results even as the Supreme Court was considering cases related to the election. The committee’s investigators had largely viewed Ms. Thomas as a tertiary figure who was not central to the events of Jan. 6.

After US trip, Zelensky meets Poland's Duda on way back to Ukraine

The Ukrainian president said the two leaders 'discussed strategic plans for the future' during his short visit to Poland.

Le Monde with AFP

Published on December 22, 2022 at 19h47

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday, December 22, that he stopped in Poland on his return to Ukraine after visiting the United States and met President Andrzej Duda.

"On the way home, I had a meeting with a friend of Ukraine – President of Poland Andrzej Duda. We summed up the year, which brought historic challenges due to a full-scale war," Mr. Zelensky said in a statement on social media.

"We discussed strategic plans for the future, bilateral relations and interactions at the international level in 2023," Mr. Zelensky added.

Ukraine's neighbor Poland has been one of its staunchest allies against Moscow's invasion.

Zelensky said he "thanked Andrzej Duda for the strong support to Ukrainians from Poland and its citizens."

The two leaders "discussed a wide range of topics with an emphasis on strengthening the defense capabilities of the Ukrainian state and humanitarian issues," the Ukrainian presidency said. Mr. Zelensky was on his way back from the United States, where he appealed for long-term US support on his first foreign trip since Russia's invasion.

Le Monde with AFP

Paris shooting: Two dead and several injured in attack…

BBC.UK

A gunman has opened fire in central Paris, killing two people and wounding four others.

The shooting took place not far from Gare de l'Est station near a Kurdish cultural centre and a hairdresser's.

A suspect aged 69 was quickly detained by police in connection with the attack.

Authorities appealed for people to avoid the area in Rue d'Enghien, in the 10th district in Strasbourg-Saint Denis.

There is no indication yet as to the motive or the target of the shooting, although reports suggest the suspect is a French national who is known to police for two attempted killings.

"It's total panic, we've locked ourselves in," one shopkeeper told AFP news agency.

The witness said she had heard seven or eight bursts of gunfire. Two of those wounded in the shooting are said to be in a critical condition and two others were seriously injured.

Police detained the suspect without resistance and they reportedly recovered the weapon used in the attack. Prosecutors said they had opened a murder investigation. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo praised police for their decisive action.

The street close to Château d'Eau metro station has several restaurants and shops as well as the cultural centre. Local Mayor Alexandra Cordebard said it was a very lively area.

Another witness said the street was now full of emergency services and they were waiting to be able to leave.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said he was heading to Paris to visit the scene of the "dramatic shooting", adding that his thoughts were with the victims' friends and family.

News round-up, Wednesday, December 21, 2022

“Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.”

— NYT

---

Air Products and AES Announce Plans to Invest Approximately $4 Billion to Build First Mega-scale Green Hydrogen Production Facility in Texas

View fullsize

Seaboard’s CEO in the Dominican Republic, Armando Rodriguez, explains how the Estrella del Mar III, a floating hybrid power plant, will reduce CO2 emissions and bring stability to the national grid…

“The final act of Donald Trump’s presidency played out in the House of Representatives, on December 19. At the end of its work, the select committee formed after the attack by militiamen and Trump supporters against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspired by his incendiary and conspiracy rhetoric, recommended that the Department of Justice initiate criminal proceedings against the man it believes instigated the events.”

— Le Monde

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Clean Energy Quest Pits Google Against Utilities

Google says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities, particularly in the Southeast, that lack a competitive market.

By Peter Eavis

Reporting from Atlanta

Dec. 20, 2022

It was the sort of dry panel discussion that occurs at hundreds of industry conferences every year — until a Google representative decided it was time to unleash.

“This is personal for me,” Jamey Goldin, an energy regulation lawyer at Google, told those attending a May conference in Atlanta on renewable energy in the Southeast. He said he had grown up on a ridge overlooking Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant northwest of Atlanta owned by Georgia Power, the dominant electricity utility in the state, and then directed his comments at a lobbyist for the utility’s parent company, also on the panel: “Y’all got a lot of coal running up there, a lot of smoke going up in the air.”

Overturning the system that puts nearly all power generation in the Southeast in the hands of utilities like Georgia Power would “get a lot more renewable energy online and a lot of that dirty power offline,” Mr. Goldin added.

But the outburst was more than personal. It was part of a far-reaching campaign by Google to power its operations with increasing amounts of electricity from wind, solar and other generating sources that do not emit carbon.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have made eliminating their carbon emissions a prominent corporate goal — and have set not-too-distant deadlines to get there. Google wants to buy enough carbon-free electricity to power all its data centers and campuses around the world without interruption by the end of this decade.

The corporate quest to rapidly secure vast new amounts of renewable energy faces big challenges, however — not least in the Southeast, one of the country’s fastest-growing regions. And Google’s battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what’s good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region’s electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so.

Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies.

“We absolutely are superior in every regard to those markets over time,” Thomas A. Fanning, chief executive of Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company, said in an interview.

A Revolution Avoided

Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities — a revolution that bypassed the Southeast.

Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.

Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM.

Now supporters of the approach have an opportunity to usurp the utilities in the Southeast. South Carolina passed a law in 2020 to explore setting up a power market, a move considered remarkable because of the influence the utilities have in state capitals; similar legislation failed to advance in North Carolina last year.

Tom Davis, a Republican state senator in South Carolina who spearheaded the bill, said the current regulatory system financially rewarded utilities even when they messed up. “It’s not incentivizing them to go out there and try to find somebody who’s built a better mousetrap and can generate power more cheaply,” he said.

Setting up a power market within South Carolina is one option, but Caroline Golin, Google’s global head of energy market development and policy, went further at a legislative hearing in July, raising the possibility of South Carolina’s breaking out of the Southeast utility system and joining PJM.

“We can be a model for the rest of the region, and actually be a model for the rest of the country,” she said.

Markets and Renewables

The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it’s not enough.

In the region, the proposed solar projects’ generating capacity is equivalent to just over a fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80 percent for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

“Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers,” Mr. Norris said.

To show how markets can stoke the growth of renewables, supporters sometimes point to Texas, whose power market, ERCOT, is one of least regulated in the country. Last year, wind power accounted for nearly 23 percent of Texas’ generation, up from 8 percent in 2011.

Critics say the Texas market system led to much of the fragility that caused power outages during the winter storm that was responsible for over 200 deaths in 2021. But others note that ERCOT was structurally isolated from neighboring power markets, preventing it from drawing power from those areas when plants in the ERCOT market froze up in the storm.

In addition, some experts question the degree to which markets drive the growth of renewables, saying certain states’ geography and weather lend themselves to wind and solar power. With its vast and gusty unpopulated spaces, Texas is naturally set up for wind power.

“We happen to have seen more wind and solar in areas where markets have been deregulated,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in the economics of renewable energy. “But I think that’s more of a geographic and political phenomenon than a market phenomenon.”

And in the Southeast there is evidence that government mandates can do more than markets to promote the growth of renewables.

In North Carolina, where lawmakers have long pushed the development of solar energy, the power source made up 7.6 percent of net generation last year, well above the national average and double the share in neighboring Virginia, in a market.

“We expect North Carolina to continue to be a leading state for solar,” said Erin Culbert, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, which is a major utility operator in the Southeast.

United States: The Capitol attack and Donald Trump's devastating legacy

EDITORIAL

Even after the January 6th committee recommended prosecution against the former president, the Republican Party still finds itself unable to stand up to him.

Le Monde

Published on December 20, 2022

The final act of Donald Trump's presidency played out in the House of Representatives, on December 19. At the end of its work, the select committee formed after the attack by militiamen and Trump supporters against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspired by his incendiary and conspiracy rhetoric, recommended that the Department of Justice initiate criminal proceedings against the man it believes instigated the events.

The charges are serious: inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstructing an official proceeding (the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election), and making false statements. The severity of these charges reflects a situation unprecedented in the history of the United States: a full-fledged coup attempt.

These recommendations add a full stop to a presidential term of sound and fury, punctuated by two impeachments in the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Democrats but where Republicans will have the majority in January. With the exception of a handful of conservative elected officials who paid for it with their political careers, the Republicans did everything to prevent the work of this committee from having a cathartic effect, to the great misfortune of American institutions.

It will now be up to Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed on November 18 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to decide whether or not to prosecute all or some of these charges. He will face the delicate task of investigating a man who has already declared himself a candidate for the next presidential election and who is determined to denounce, once again, once too many, a political maneuver.

Blindness

Mr. Smith will have at his disposal thousands of documents accumulated by the select committee during its work. This makes for rich material, despite the refusal to testify from close advisers to the former president, some of whom the committee also recommends prosecuting.

Two lessons can already be drawn from this provisional epilogue. The first is about the Republican Party, which is apparently incapable of opposing the man who has been dragging them down since he became their mentor. If they end up turning away from him, it will be less out of a democratic reflex than out of the realization that Mr. Trump is making his side lose by being unable to get out of denial about Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election – as evidenced by the midterm election results. This blindness is all the more regrettable seeing as the defeats suffered by the candidates most mired in the lie of a stolen election show that it has become a red line for many voters in the United States.

The second lesson, fed by the work of the House select committee, is in fact a reminder. The most serious threats to American democracy today come from a supremacist far right, whose rhetoric Mr. Trump has trivialized. The weight of militias that were at the forefront of the January 6 attack are evidence of this. This situation is, unfortunately, not unique to the United States. The dismantling of an extremist network in Germany that also targeted the country's institutions bears witness to the same insurrectionary temptation. This calls for increased vigilance.

News round-up, Wednesday, December 21, 2022

“Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.”

— NYT

---

Air Products and AES Announce Plans to Invest Approximately $4 Billion to Build First Mega-scale Green Hydrogen Production Facility in Texas

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Seaboard’s CEO in the Dominican Republic, Armando Rodriguez, explains how the Estrella del Mar III, a floating hybrid power plant, will reduce CO2 emissions and bring stability to the national grid…

“The final act of Donald Trump’s presidency played out in the House of Representatives, on December 19. At the end of its work, the select committee formed after the attack by militiamen and Trump supporters against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspired by his incendiary and conspiracy rhetoric, recommended that the Department of Justice initiate criminal proceedings against the man it believes instigated the events.”

— Le Monde

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Clean Energy Quest Pits Google Against Utilities

Google says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities, particularly in the Southeast, that lack a competitive market.

By Peter Eavis

Reporting from Atlanta

Dec. 20, 2022

It was the sort of dry panel discussion that occurs at hundreds of industry conferences every year — until a Google representative decided it was time to unleash.

“This is personal for me,” Jamey Goldin, an energy regulation lawyer at Google, told those attending a May conference in Atlanta on renewable energy in the Southeast. He said he had grown up on a ridge overlooking Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant northwest of Atlanta owned by Georgia Power, the dominant electricity utility in the state, and then directed his comments at a lobbyist for the utility’s parent company, also on the panel: “Y’all got a lot of coal running up there, a lot of smoke going up in the air.”

Overturning the system that puts nearly all power generation in the Southeast in the hands of utilities like Georgia Power would “get a lot more renewable energy online and a lot of that dirty power offline,” Mr. Goldin added.

But the outburst was more than personal. It was part of a far-reaching campaign by Google to power its operations with increasing amounts of electricity from wind, solar and other generating sources that do not emit carbon.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have made eliminating their carbon emissions a prominent corporate goal — and have set not-too-distant deadlines to get there. Google wants to buy enough carbon-free electricity to power all its data centers and campuses around the world without interruption by the end of this decade.

The corporate quest to rapidly secure vast new amounts of renewable energy faces big challenges, however — not least in the Southeast, one of the country’s fastest-growing regions. And Google’s battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what’s good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region’s electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so.

Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies.

“We absolutely are superior in every regard to those markets over time,” Thomas A. Fanning, chief executive of Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company, said in an interview.

A Revolution Avoided

Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities — a revolution that bypassed the Southeast.

Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.

Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM.

Now supporters of the approach have an opportunity to usurp the utilities in the Southeast. South Carolina passed a law in 2020 to explore setting up a power market, a move considered remarkable because of the influence the utilities have in state capitals; similar legislation failed to advance in North Carolina last year.

Tom Davis, a Republican state senator in South Carolina who spearheaded the bill, said the current regulatory system financially rewarded utilities even when they messed up. “It’s not incentivizing them to go out there and try to find somebody who’s built a better mousetrap and can generate power more cheaply,” he said.

Setting up a power market within South Carolina is one option, but Caroline Golin, Google’s global head of energy market development and policy, went further at a legislative hearing in July, raising the possibility of South Carolina’s breaking out of the Southeast utility system and joining PJM.

“We can be a model for the rest of the region, and actually be a model for the rest of the country,” she said.

Markets and Renewables

The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it’s not enough.

In the region, the proposed solar projects’ generating capacity is equivalent to just over a fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80 percent for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

“Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers,” Mr. Norris said.

To show how markets can stoke the growth of renewables, supporters sometimes point to Texas, whose power market, ERCOT, is one of least regulated in the country. Last year, wind power accounted for nearly 23 percent of Texas’ generation, up from 8 percent in 2011.

Critics say the Texas market system led to much of the fragility that caused power outages during the winter storm that was responsible for over 200 deaths in 2021. But others note that ERCOT was structurally isolated from neighboring power markets, preventing it from drawing power from those areas when plants in the ERCOT market froze up in the storm.

In addition, some experts question the degree to which markets drive the growth of renewables, saying certain states’ geography and weather lend themselves to wind and solar power. With its vast and gusty unpopulated spaces, Texas is naturally set up for wind power.

“We happen to have seen more wind and solar in areas where markets have been deregulated,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in the economics of renewable energy. “But I think that’s more of a geographic and political phenomenon than a market phenomenon.”

And in the Southeast there is evidence that government mandates can do more than markets to promote the growth of renewables.

In North Carolina, where lawmakers have long pushed the development of solar energy, the power source made up 7.6 percent of net generation last year, well above the national average and double the share in neighboring Virginia, in a market.

“We expect North Carolina to continue to be a leading state for solar,” said Erin Culbert, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, which is a major utility operator in the Southeast.

United States: The Capitol attack and Donald Trump's devastating legacy

EDITORIAL

Even after the January 6th committee recommended prosecution against the former president, the Republican Party still finds itself unable to stand up to him.

Le Monde

Published on December 20, 2022

The final act of Donald Trump's presidency played out in the House of Representatives, on December 19. At the end of its work, the select committee formed after the attack by militiamen and Trump supporters against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, inspired by his incendiary and conspiracy rhetoric, recommended that the Department of Justice initiate criminal proceedings against the man it believes instigated the events.

The charges are serious: inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstructing an official proceeding (the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election), and making false statements. The severity of these charges reflects a situation unprecedented in the history of the United States: a full-fledged coup attempt.

These recommendations add a full stop to a presidential term of sound and fury, punctuated by two impeachments in the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Democrats but where Republicans will have the majority in January. With the exception of a handful of conservative elected officials who paid for it with their political careers, the Republicans did everything to prevent the work of this committee from having a cathartic effect, to the great misfortune of American institutions.

It will now be up to Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed on November 18 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to decide whether or not to prosecute all or some of these charges. He will face the delicate task of investigating a man who has already declared himself a candidate for the next presidential election and who is determined to denounce, once again, once too many, a political maneuver.

Blindness

Mr. Smith will have at his disposal thousands of documents accumulated by the select committee during its work. This makes for rich material, despite the refusal to testify from close advisers to the former president, some of whom the committee also recommends prosecuting.

Two lessons can already be drawn from this provisional epilogue. The first is about the Republican Party, which is apparently incapable of opposing the man who has been dragging them down since he became their mentor. If they end up turning away from him, it will be less out of a democratic reflex than out of the realization that Mr. Trump is making his side lose by being unable to get out of denial about Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election – as evidenced by the midterm election results. This blindness is all the more regrettable seeing as the defeats suffered by the candidates most mired in the lie of a stolen election show that it has become a red line for many voters in the United States.

The second lesson, fed by the work of the House select committee, is in fact a reminder. The most serious threats to American democracy today come from a supremacist far right, whose rhetoric Mr. Trump has trivialized. The weight of militias that were at the forefront of the January 6 attack are evidence of this. This situation is, unfortunately, not unique to the United States. The dismantling of an extremist network in Germany that also targeted the country's institutions bears witness to the same insurrectionary temptation. This calls for increased vigilance.

News round-up, Monday, December 19, 2022

“Since 2005, the most polluting industries (power generation, steel, cement, and so on), which account for 40% of the EU’s CO2 emissions, have been required to buy “polluter permits” on the emissions trading scheme (ETS). The idea is to encourage decarbonization and create revenue for the energy transition. But this “polluter pays” principle has not made heavy industry reduce its carbon emissions. It benefits from millions of free allowances, created to avoid relocation, and the price per ton of CO2 has long remained too low to be an incentive.”

— Le Monde

---

Air Products and AES Announce Plans to Invest Approximately $4 Billion to Build First Mega-scale Green Hydrogen Production Facility in Texas

View fullsize

Seaboard’s CEO in the Dominican Republic, Armando Rodriguez, explains how the Estrella del Mar III, a floating hybrid power plant, will reduce CO2 emissions and bring stability to the national grid…

“The tiny desert state, a thumb-shaped peninsula, craved nothing more than to be better known, to be a player on the world stage, when in 2009 it launched what seemed like an improbable bid to stage the men’s soccer World Cup, the most popular sporting event on earth. Hosting the tournament has cost more than anyone could have imagined — in treasure, in time, in lives.”

— NYT

Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…

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EU carbon market reform: A major step forward for Europe's 2030 climate goal

An agreement was reached on Sunday between the Commission, the European Parliament and member states. The Council and MEPs still need to vote on it.

By Audrey Garric

Published on December 19, 2022

The European Parliament in Strasbourg, December 12, 2022. JEAN-FRANCOIS BADIAS / AP

It's the centerpiece of its climate plan. After lengthy negotiations, the European Union (EU) reached an agreement on Sunday, December 18, on a far-reaching reform of its carbon market. The agreement marks an important step in advancing the climate ambitions of the EU-27. It is part of the extensive legislative package presented by the Commission in July 2021 to reduce European emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

The agreement reached on Sunday in trialogue between the Commission, the European Parliament and member states, must still be confirmed by a vote by the Council in December and MEPs in January or February 2023.

Since 2005, the most polluting industries (power generation, steel, cement, and so on), which account for 40% of the EU's CO2 emissions, have been required to buy "polluter permits" on the emissions trading scheme (ETS). The idea is to encourage decarbonization and create revenue for the energy transition. But this "polluter pays" principle has not made heavy industry reduce its carbon emissions. It benefits from millions of free allowances, created to avoid relocation, and the price per ton of CO2 has long remained too low to be an incentive.

To put pressure on the market, the number of polluter rights will be gradually reduced. As a result, the sectors covered by the carbon market will have to reduce their emissions by 62% by 2030 compared to 2005, ahead of a previous target reduction of 43%. The price of carbon – currently around €85 per ton of CO2 – "will be around €100 for these industries. No other continent in the world has such an ambitious carbon price," said Pascal Canfin, Renew MEP and chair of the European Parliament's environment committee. He described the new European agreement as "major" for the climate. NGOs from Climate Action Network Europe noted that a 70% reduction in these emissions would have been necessary for the EU to do its "fair share" in limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

The carbon market will be extended for the first time to the maritime sector and to intra-European air travel. Waste incineration sites will also be subject to it from 2028, or 2030 at the latest, according to a study by the Commission.

Social Climate Fund

Revenues from this carbon market will have to be entirely devoted to "climate-related activities." While the majority of EU countries have not done so until now, "this is a step forward. "Unfortunately, the content of this spending remains at the discretion of member states. This means that they could continue, as before, to use this money to subsidize coal and fossil gas," warned Romain Laugier, climate and energy officer at WWF Europe, lead author of a study on the subject.

Sunday's agreement established a second carbon market (ETS 2) for road transport fuels and building heating, a reform pushed by the Commission and Germany in particular, but which is particularly controversial. Suppliers of fuel, gas and heating oil will have to buy allowances to cover their emissions, an additional cost that they could pass on to households. To limit the social impact in the context of soaring energy prices and the war in Ukraine, and four years after the Yellow Vests movement, MEPs argued for limiting this measure initially to office buildings and heavy vehicles.

Ultimately, households will be affected from 2027, but the price of carbon will not exceed €45 until 2030. "For France, it will be a matter of replacing the current carbon price of €44 with a European mechanism of €45," said Mr. Canfin. And if the current surge in energy prices continues, implementation would be postponed to 2028. All revenues from this new carbon market will have to be "devoted to an equitable transition," Mr. Canfin continued.

These revenues will be used to finance a social climate fund, the counterpart to the new carbon market, which will start operating in 2026. Forecast to raise €86.7 billion by 2032, it will finance both temporary measures to support vulnerable households and micro-enterprises, and long-term investments in building renovation and low-carbon transport.

'Billions of euros in gifts'

Another particularly thorny issue is that free allowances, which industrial companies benefited from under the first carbon market, will be gradually phased out between 2026 and 2034. By 2030, 48.5% of them will have disappeared. The pace of reduction adopted is less ambitious than that proposed by the Parliament, with a start that is also much slower than what the Commission proposed. "This is a step in the right direction. We will finally have a real carbon price for industry," enthused Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, director of the EU program at the Institute for Climate Economics.

Conversely, some associations are very disappointed. "The big polluters will continue to receive billions of euros in gifts over the next decade to the detriment of climate action," lamented Camille Maury, in charge of decarbonization at the WWF's European office. According to the NGO's calculations, industrialists, who have already received the equivalent of €98.5 billion in free allowances between 2013 and 2021, could still receive more than €200 billion between 2026 and 2032 (at the current price of a ton of carbon), which is two and a half times more than the social fund for the climate.

The border carbon tax, which the EU agreed to on Tuesday, will be ramped up at the same rate as free allowances are phased out. This mechanism – which will allow goods imported from third countries without comparable carbon pricing to be taxed in the most polluting sectors – will start in 2026 and be fully implemented in 2034. This was the condition to avoid double protection for European manufacturers.

The European Parliament also wanted to ensure that manufacturers who decarbonize their production are not at a disadvantage when exporting to third countries. By 2025, the Commission will assess the risk of "carbon leakage" and, if necessary, present legislative proposals to address it. Finally, the European Innovation Fund, which helps companies invest in the energy transition, will be increased to nearly €50 billion. "We now need to build a European investment plan over time, for example within 15 years, to enable families and businesses to make a success of their green transition," Mr. Pellerin-Carlin added.

Audrey Garric

Qatar Got the World Cup It Wanted

In the end, after a tournament shadowed by controversy since the host rights were awarded, Qatar had the turn in the global spotlight it sought.

By Tariq Panja

Tariq Panja has reported on Qatar’s quest to host and stage the World Cup since the start of its bid for the tournament in 2009.

Published Dec. 18, 2022Updated Dec. 19, 2022, 3:33 a.m. ET

DOHA, Qatar — In the end, Qatar got what it wanted.

The tiny desert state, a thumb-shaped peninsula, craved nothing more than to be better known, to be a player on the world stage, when in 2009 it launched what seemed like an improbable bid to stage the men’s soccer World Cup, the most popular sporting event on earth. Hosting the tournament has cost more than anyone could have imagined — in treasure, in time, in lives.

But on Sunday night, as the fireworks filled the sky above Lusail, as the Argentina fans sang and their star, Lionel Messi, beamed while clasping a trophy he had waited a lifetime to touch, everyone knew Qatar.

The spectacular denouement — a dream final pitting Argentina against France; a first World Cup title for Messi, the world’s best player; a pulsating match settled after six goals and a penalty shootout — made sure of that. And as if to make sure, to put the nation’s final imprint on the first World Cup in the Middle East, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, stopped a beaming Messi as he made his way to collect the biggest trophy in the sport and pulled him back. There was one more thing that needed to be done.

He pulled out a golden fringed bisht, the black cloak worn in the Gulf for special occasions, and wrapped it around Messi’s shoulders before handing over the 18-karat gold trophy.

The celebration ended a tumultuous decade for a tournament awarded in a bribery scandal; stained by claims of human rights abuses and the deaths and injuries suffered by the migrant workers hired to build Qatar’s $200 billion World Cup; and shadowed by controversial decisions on everything from alcohol to armbands.

Yet for one month Qatar has been the center of the world, pulling off a feat none of its neighbors in the Arab world had managed to achieve, one that at times had seemed unthinkable in the years since Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president, made the stunning announcement inside a Zurich conference hall on Dec. 2, 2010, that Qatar would host the 2022 World Cup.

It is improbable the sport will see such an unlikely host again soon. Qatar was perhaps among the most ill-suited hosts for a tournament of the scale of the World Cup, a country so lacking in stadiums and infrastructure and history that its bid was labeled “high risk” by FIFA’s own evaluators. But it took advantage of the one commodity it had in plentiful supply: money.

Backed by seemingly bottomless financial resources to fuel its ambitions, Qatar embarked on a project that required nothing less than the building, or rebuilding, of its entire country in service to a monthlong soccer tournament. Those billions were spent within its borders — seven new stadiums were constructed and other major infrastructure projects were completed at enormous financial and human cost. But when that was not enough, it spent lavishly outside its boundaries, too, acquiring sports teams and sports rights worth billions of dollars, and hiring sports stars and celebrities to support its cause.

And all that was on display Sunday. By the time the final game was played in the $1 billion Lusail Stadium, Qatar could not lose. The game was being shown across the Middle East on beIN Sports, a sports broadcasting behemoth set up in the aftermath of Qatar’s winning the World Cup hosting rights. It also could lay claim to the two best players on the field, Argentina’s Messi and the French star Kylian Mbappé, both of whom are under contract to the Qatar-owned French club Paris St.-Germain.

Mbappé, who had scored the first hat trick in a final in over a half-century, finished the game sitting on the grass, consoled by President Emmanuel Macron of France, an invited guest of the emir, as Argentina’s players danced in celebration all around him.

The competition delivered compelling — and sometimes troubling — story lines from the outset, with the intensely political opening at Al Bayt Stadium, an enormous venue designed to look like a Bedouin tent. That night, Qatar’s emir had sat side by side with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, less than three years after the latter had led a punishing blockade of Qatar.

For a month, deals were discussed and alliances were made. Qatar’s team was not a factor in its World Cup debut; it lost all three of its games, exiting the competition with the worst performance of any host in the competition’s history.

There would also be other challenges, some of Qatar’s own making, like a sudden prohibition on the sale of alcohol within the stadium perimeters only two days before that first game — a last-minute decision that left Budweiser, a longtime sponsor of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, to fume on the sideline.

On the tournament’s second day, FIFA crushed a campaign by a group of European teams to wear an armband to promote inclusivity, part of efforts promised to campaign groups and critics in their home countries, and then Qatar quashed efforts by Iranian fans to highlight ongoing protests in their country.

But on the field, the competition delivered. There were great goals and great games, stunning upsets and an abundance of surprising score lines that created new heroes, most notably in the Arab world.

First came Saudi Arabia, which can now lay claim to having beaten the World Cup champion in the group stage. Morocco, which had only once reached the knockout stage, became the first African team to advance to the semifinals, pulling off a succession of barely believable victories over European soccer heavyweights: Belgium, Spain and then Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal.

Those results sparked celebration across the Arab world and in a handful of major European capitals, while also providing a platform for fans in Qatar to promote the Palestinian cause, the one intrusion of politics that Qatari officials did nothing to discourage.

In the stands, the backdrop was a curious one, with several games appearing short of supporters and then mysteriously filling up in the minutes after kickoff, when gates were opened to grant spectators — many of them the South Asian migrants — entry free of charge. The true number of paying spectators is unlikely to ever be known, their empty seats filled by thousands of the same laborers and migrants who had built the stadium and the country, and who kept it running during the World Cup.

That group, largely drawn from countries like India, Bangladesh and Nepal, was the most visible face of Qatar to the estimated one million visitors who traveled to the tournament. They worked as volunteers at stadiums, served the food and manned the metro stations, buffed the marble floors and shined the hand rails and door knobs at the scores of newly built hotels and apartment complexes.

By the end of the tournament, most of those fans had gone, leaving the Argentines — an estimated temporary population of 40,000 — to provide the sonic backdrop to the final game. Dressed in sky blue and white stripes, they converged on the Lusail Stadium, creating the type of authentic World Cup atmosphere — bouncing and singing throughout 120 minutes of play, and then long afterward — that no amount of Qatari wealth could buy.

They had gotten exactly what they wanted from the World Cup. And so did Qatar.

Tariq Panja covers some of the darker corners of the global sports industry. He is also a co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade,” an exposé on soccer’s multibillion-dollar player trading industry. @tariqpanja

Our weapons are computers’: Ukrainian coders aim to gain battlefield edge

Delta software developed to help collect and disseminate information about enemy’s movements

Julian Borger in Zaporizhzhia

Sun 18 Dec 2022 14.11 GMT

In a nondescript office building on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian soldiers have been honing what they believed will be a decisive weapon in their effort to repel the Russian invasion.

Inside, the weapon glows from a dozen computer screens – a constantly updated portrayal of the evolving battlefield to the south. With one click on a menu, the map is populated with hordes of orange diamonds, showing Russian deployments. They reveal where tanks and artillery have been hidden, and intimate details of the units and the soldiers in them, gleaned from social media. Choosing another option from the menu lights up red arrows across the southern Zaporizhzhia region, showing the progression of Russian columns. Zooming in shows satellite imagery of the terrain in sharp detail.

It is called Delta, a software package developed by Ukrainian programmers to give their armed forces an advantage in a contest of which side can see the battlefield more clearly and therefore predict the enemy forces’ moves and strike them faster and more accurately.

While many scenes from the war in Ukraine look like a throwback to the first world war, with muddy trench networks and blasted landscapes, the conflict is also a testing ground for the future of warfare, where information and its dissemination in instantly usable form to individual soldiers will be critical to victory or defeat.

A screen showing battlefield positions, past and present. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Vitalii, a computer expert at the defence’s ministry’s centre for innovation and development of defence technologies, said Ukraine had a natural advantage as it had a younger, less hierarchical political culture.

“The biggest differences between the Russian army and Ukrainian army are the horizontal links between the units,” Vitalii said. (Like other soldiers at the innovation centre, he provided only his first name.) “We are winning mainly because we Ukrainians are naturally horizontal communicators.”

The suite of offices in Zaporizhzhia house one of six “situational awareness centres” that Ukraine’s armed forces have set up on different fronts. A seventh is being established in the Donbas.

The Zaporizhzhia site, contributed by a local businessman, is the centre’s sixth location – it has had to move repeatedly for security and logistical reasons. It is due to be transferred to a more permanent, custom-fitted home underground this month.

Delta is run by the innovation centre, whose staff have been drawn to a large degree from a volunteer organisation of drone operators and programmers called Aerorozvidka (aerial reconnaissance).

Positions of Russian tanks spotted by drone. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Tatiana, another official at the innovation centre, said the nature of its origins, as a private-public partnership, also gave it an edge.

“These were not bureaucrats from the defence ministry. They were from the corporate sector who were mobilised to serve in the army,” she said. “They started to make Delta with their own minds and hands, because they had this culture of agile development. The creative process has a short circle. You develop it, you test it, you launch it.”

Delta was first presented to Nato member states at the end of October, having been developed by Aerorozvidka coders in 2015 and been deployed on a growing scale over the past four years, during which time much of Aerorozvidka was absorbed into the innovation centre.

Its informal origins were evident inside the Zaporizhzhia hub, which had more the feel of a graduate computer science faculty than a military unit. The only person in uniform was a military intelligence officer, who went by the pseudonym Sergeant Shlomo.

The office at one end of the main corridor had been turned into a drone workshop where two engineers were working to perfect a bomb release mechanism activated by the light on commercially bought quadcopters. The release mechanism and the tailfin for the bombs were made on 3D printers. Boxes of armoured-piercing bomblets were stacked up by the door.

A drone with a bomblet to be used against Russian positions. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

At the other end of the corridor was the open source intelligence (Osint) department, where half a dozen young men were scrolling through masses of social media posts by Russian recruits, extracting date and location information from them, and feeding the results into Delta.

One screen showed a couple of soldiers from Dagestan striking martial poses for the camera. The picture and intelligence gleaned from it about their unit, its capabilities and orders would be accessible within minutes through one click on the Delta map near Melitopol, a Russian-held town 80 miles (130km) to the south, which is becoming one of the new focal points on the southern front.

The whiteboard in the Osint office recorded the fact that it was day 280 of the war, by which date it was estimated that 88,880 Russians had died. “Fuck them up” was the day’s message scrawled in marker alongside this tally.

The other main channels of information flowing into Delta come from satellite imagery supplied by Nato partners, which provided the foundation for the battlefield map; drone footage, which is uploaded daily; and photos and information supplied by a network of informers behind Russian lines, which are run in part by Shlomo.

All that information is embedded in layers on the Delta battlefield map, which is kept live and accessible to its military users through Starlink satellite communications. On the screen, Melitopol had the biggest concentration of orange diamonds and red arrows, showing Russian columns on the move.

A night-vision drone photo of a Russian tank. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

“We now understand their routes and how they have changed,” Shlomo said. “They are using Melitopol as a big logistics centre, and we are trying to understand the real purpose of the movements.”

They were looking in particular for sightings of tanks and mobile bridges, which could herald an intention to mount an imminent attack and warrant a particular red flag in the Delta chatrooms. Over recent days, Ukraine forces had targeted an army barracks and a bridge there.

Every day, each situational awareness centre puts together a digest of the latest developments in its sector, and there is a live briefing at 6pm summarising and discussing the conclusions.

“A small Soviet army cannot win against a large Soviet army. We have to evolve. We have to be smart,” Shlomo said. “The main task of the war for Ukraine now is to transform from a Soviet army to a Nato one. You have to change the army to a horizontal one.”

That change has been a struggle. The Ukrainian army grew out of its Soviet predecessors, and many of its older officers have been shaped by that experience. In 2020, the generals even shut down the Aerorozvidka unit; it was only restored by the defence ministry as the innovation centre months before the Russian all-out invasion.

The Donbas front is the last to establish its own situational awareness centre, in part because of resistance within the army, and as a result it has suffered most from lack of coordination and friendly fire, officials from the innovation centre argued. “It’s been total chaos,” one official said.

“I don’t think they’re quite there yet,” said Nick Reynolds, a land warfare analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “There are some centres of excellence within the Ukrainian armed forces, but it’s not blanket. The military culture imposed under the Soviet Union casts a very long shadow.”

However, Reynolds said the Ukrainians were far ahead of Russian forces in making their forces more connected and agile. “Ultimately, the Russian side has not fundamentally changed their structures or practices. They have some level of technological enablement, but on the human level they are still very Soviet.”

A screen showing a drone photo of a Russian tank. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

A Nato report on 30 November about Ukraine’s Delta programme, seen by the Guardian, noted that the software had yet to be formally adopted by Ukraine’s armed forces, and therefore was not universally used, meaning that intelligence shared by Nato allies was not making its way down to all the regional commands.

The infowarriors at the innovations centre say they are breaking Ukrainian army official doctrine by establishing horizontal links between military units with the use of Delta. “We can’t rewrite doctrine and fight at the same time,” Tatiana said. “We will write the doctrine after victory.”

The next step in spreading Delta, she said, was the establishment of Istar (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance) officers at the headquarters and brigade level, and then the creation of a dedicated Istar battalion.

Meanwhile, the innovation centre is asking western weapons donors to make available the software protocols that would allow new weapons systems to be seamlessly wired into Delta.

Shlomo said the integration of battlefield information across the army through Delta was a race Ukraine had to win. “This is the big story we are writing that will change the war,” he said. “Our weapons are computers. Our bullets are information.”

… as 2022 draws to a close, and you’re joining us today from Sweden, we have a small favour to ask. It’s been a challenging year for millions – from the war in Ukraine, to floods in Pakistan, heatwaves across Europe, protests in Iran, global economic turbulence, and continued repercussions from the global pandemic. The Guardian has delivered rigorous, fiercely independent reporting every day. It’s been no mean feat. Will you support our work today?

Being a reader-funded news publication allows us to keep our journalism open and free for everyone across the world. This feels more vital than ever. In 2022, millions have turned to us for trusted reporting on the events that shaped our world. We believe equal access to fact-checked news is essential for all of us.

Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner, so our reporting is always free from commercial and political influence. This emboldens us to seek out the truth, and fearlessly demand better from the powerful.

Energy Crisis Tracker Real-Time Statistics on Europe's Gas Supplies

“How much natural gas is flowing through pipelines to Europe? How full are gas storage facilities? And how much gas are Germans consuming? Keep your eye on the data with our live tracker.”

— Spiegel

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By Holger Dambeck, Lisa Goldschmidtböing, Frank Kalinowski, Ferdinand Kuchlmayr, Aída Márquez, Dawood Ohdah, Marcel Pauly, Matthias Stahl und Patrick Stotz

19.12.2022

How Dependent Is Europe on Russian Gas?

Only a few European countries produce a significant amount of natural gas themselves.

Almost all rely on imports, mainly by pipeline from Russia, Norway and Algeria. In addition, there are imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from various countries around the world. Deliveries are usually made by special tankers bound for ports with LNG terminals. The share of imports from Russia has fallen in recent months, but LNG deliveries have increased overall.

Dependence on Russia has been particularly high in Eastern Europe and Germany in recent years.

These countries are often located directly along Russian pipelines and usually don’t have their own LNG terminals or pipelines to other major gas exporters like Norway or Algeria. In absolute quantities, Germany has recently consumed the largest total volume of Russian gas of any European country.

How Does Gas Get to Europe?

Until recently, four main routes led from Russia to the European Union.

Recently, the focus was primarily on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which runs from Russia beneath the Baltic Sea to Lubmin, Germany, near the city of Greifswald. Pipeline operator Gazprom initially throttled deliveries in mid-June 2022 to 40 percent of normal capacity, purportedly due to technical problems. Then, following annual maintenance in July, Gazprom further reduced flows to 20 percent of capacity. At the end of August, Russia once again interrupted delivery, again for alleged maintenance work, and has not recommenced deliveries through the pipeline since then. In late September, a large leak in the pipeline was discovered. It is unclear if deliveries through the pipeline will ever resume.

In addition to Nord Stream 1, Russian gas supplies were also delivered

through the Yamal-Europe pipeline running through Belarus and Poland, and the Progress and Soyuz pipelines through Ukraine, as well as the Turkstream via Turkey in the south. No gas has been flowing through the Yamal pipeline since mid-May, after Russia halted deliveries. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is imported through various port terminals, most of which are located in Western Europe.

How Full Are Germany's Gas Storage Facilities?

Gas storage facilities serve as important reserves for the winter, but also as interim storage for large LNG deliveries.

If all of Germany’s storage facilities were filled to capacity, their gas volume of slightly less than 250,000 gigawatt-hours could not even cover a quarter of Germany’s annual demand, which was around 1 million gigawatt hours in 2021. To get through the winter unscathed, Germany thus needs not only for its storage facilities to be as full as possible, but also continuous supplies from pipelines or LNG terminals.

How Much Gas Does Germany Consume?

The amount of gas burned by households and industry depends on two primary factors:

the weather and the price of gas. The situation on the electricity market can also influence gas demand. During periods of low sunlight and low winds, gas-fired plants must be fired up to meet the electricity demand. The weather at the beginning of 2022 was significantly milder than the previous year, thus requiring less heat. In addition, people cut back on their use of gas, largely in industry – a direct response to the sharp increase in gas prices. That’s why consumption in 2022 was almost consistently below the average of previous years.

The beginning of the 2022/2023 heating season has made clear that private households and commercial customers are also using less natural gas.

Almost every week, they are consuming less gas than in weeks from the previous years in which temperatures were comparable.Haz que se destaque

How the efforts to save gas have developed over time is shown by the following comparison of actual consumption with expected consumption given the current temperatures.

Since as early as spring 2022, Germany has been consuming significantly less gas than in the same weather conditions in previous years. Most recently, the savings have been around 15 to 25 percent.

How Much Money Does Russia Generate with Its Gas Exports?

Overall, Russia has supplied less gas to Europe in recent months than in previous years.

Still, revenues from gas exports have increased. This is due to the sharp increase in global market prices. The main cause of the turbulence on the gas market is the conflict over Ukraine, which Russia has been waging as a war of aggression since February 2022.

How Have Gas Prices Developed for New Customers?

Recent turbulence hasn’t just been reserved for global gas prices.

Private households in Germany have also been affected. This has become particularly noticeable for new customers, for whom the average price per kilowatt hour has increased significantly since fall 2021. Further price jumps followed Russia’s attack on Ukraine and due to reduced gas deliveries starting in June 2022.

News round-up, Friday, December 16, 2022

“She was giving statements that were much more pro-Qatar than the Parliament’s position, pretending to speak on behalf of Parliament,” Ms. Neumann said in an interview with The Times.”

— NYT

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“The Baltic Sea Goes NATO

Even the Baltic Sea, which lies under the gray sky just a few paces behind Lenin’s pedestal, will soon no longer be the same. Finland expects to be admitted to NATO next year, together with Sweden. Northern Europe is saying goodbye to the idea of neutrality. And the inland sea will soon become almost completely under NATO control, with a bit of Russia at its easternmost tip. Over the summer, U.S. President Joe Biden said: “Putin was looking for the Finlandization of Europe. He’s going to get the ‘NATOization’ of Europe.””

— Spiegel

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Bribery Case Cracks Open European Parliament — and Finds Hidden Cash

Prosecutors say the glamorous lifestyle of a European lawmaker masked a Qatari corruption scandal. It exposed how vulnerable Brussels is to foreign influence.

Mr. Giorgi’s lawyer had no comment. Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper reported Thursday, citing sealed court documents, that Mr. Giorgi was cooperating with investigators.

Qatar has forcefully denied the allegations.

The investigation has jolted sleepy Brussels and unleashed a flurry of whispered accusations of corrupt behavior by lawmakers of all political stripes. It has also sparked scrutiny of foreign influence at a time when the European Union is asserting itself on issues like human rights and the war in Ukraine.

Apart from Qatar, the Belgian authorities are also investigating links to Morocco, a government official familiar with the matter said.

A Brief Guide to the 2022 World Cup

What is the World Cup? The quadrennial event pits the best national soccer teams against each other for the title of world champion. Here’s a primer to the 2022 men’s tournament:

Where is it being held? This year’s host is Qatar, which in 2010 beat the United States and Japan to win the right to hold the tournament. Whether that was an honest competition remains in dispute.

When is it? The tournament opened on Nov. 20, when Qatar played Ecuador. Over the two weeks that follow, four games will be played on most days. The tournament ends with the final on Dec. 18.

Is a winter World Cup normal? No. The World Cup usually takes place in July. But in 2015, FIFA concluded that the summer temperatures in Qatar might have unpleasant consequences and agreed to move the tournament to the relatively bearable months of November and December.

How many teams are competing? Thirty-two. Qatar qualified automatically as the host, and after years of matches, the other 31 teams earned the right to come and play. Meet the teams here.

How does the tournament work? The 32 teams are divided into eight groups of four. In the opening stage, each team plays all the other teams in its group once. The top two finishers in each group advance to the round of 16. After that, the World Cup is a straight knockout tournament.

How can I watch the World Cup in the U.S.? The tournament will be broadcast on Fox and FS1 in English, and on Telemundo in Spanish. You can livestream it on Peacock, or on streaming services that carry Fox and FS1. Here’s how to watch every match.

When will the games take place? Qatar is three hours ahead of London, eight hours ahead of New York and 11 hours ahead of Los Angeles. That means there will be predawn kickoffs on the East Coast of the United States for some games, and midafternoon starts for 10 p.m. games in Qatar.

“It has been a difficult week in Brussels,” Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, told E.U. leaders on Thursday. “There will always be some for whom a bag of cash is always worth the risk. It is essential that these people understand that they will get caught.”

Investigators in Washington, too, have tried to crack down on illegal foreign lobbying, including for Qatar, which has separately been accused of bribing its way into being awarded the World Cup. But while American law requires foreign lobbyists to publicly disclose their affiliations, Brussels has few disclosure requirements. Most such influence peddling occurs under the secretive umbrella of diplomacy.

That is especially true in the European Parliament, the least powerful but only directly elected institution in the European Union power structure. Its 705 lawmakers approve legislation and participate in the legislative process, but its debates, events and resolutions have mostly reputational impact for those involved.

“The Parliament is easily accessible and it has become an attractive ground for all kinds of lobbyists,” said Michiel van Hulten, the head of Transparency International E.U. and a former European lawmaker himself. “Because of this, it is relatively easy to operate under the radar and not get caught,” he added.

A Perfect Match

Eva Kaili, 44, and Francesco Giorgi, 35, started their relationship in Parliament’s labyrinthine halls in 2017, according to people who know them. She was in her first term in office. He was an aide to a senior member of Parliament, Pier Antonio Panzeri. Both were members of the center-left Socialists and Democrats group.

This account is based on interviews with two dozen lawmakers, E.U. and Belgian government officials, and aides directly familiar with the case and the people involved, as well as an examination of private correspondence, years of social media posts, policy drafts and voting records.

Most of those interviewed for this article requested anonymity because they did not want to get dragged into a high-profile criminal investigation.

Ms. Kaili and Mr. Giorgi documented their lives in social media posts that exuded success and confidence: sailing in the Aegean Sea, skiing Mont Blanc, visiting mosques in Oman and drinking cocktails in Minorca.

The couple spent the coronavirus lockdowns together mostly in Athens, Ms. Kaili told Greek tabloids that have long covered her private life, and last February, welcomed a baby girl into the world.

Mr. Giorgi is linked to the corruption investigation not just through his partner, but also his former boss. Mr. Panzeri, 67, was arrested last week at his home in Brussels, where the Belgian police found €600,000 euros ($632,000) in cash. His wife and daughter were also arrested in their hometown near Milan.

Mr. Panzeri’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

The authorities say Mr. Panzeri played a central role in cultivating relations with Qatari and Moroccan officials and facilitating the flow of cash to Brussels, including through a non-governmental organization he leads.

Before Kickoff

As the World Cup neared, Ms. Kaili’s and Mr. Giorgi’s advocacy of Qatar intensified. She argued against any attempt to condemn the human-rights abuses in Qatar, an absolute monarchy that criminalizes homosexuality and requires a woman under the age of 25 to obtain permission from a male guardian to travel abroad.

She pushed for visa-free travel for Qataris visiting the European Union.

Colleagues said she also undermined Parliament’s scrutiny of Qatar’s handling of the World Cup.

Hannah Neumann, a European lawmaker from Germany who chairs the committee on relations with the Arabian Peninsula, had planned a committee trip to Doha for over a year. Committee members were supposed to critically assess Qatar’s progress before the World Cup kickoff.

Then in late September, the Qatari government abruptly told her the trip had to be canceled because the building where they were to meet was under construction.

So Ms. Neumann said she was stunned and angry a month later, when Ms. Kaili showed up in Doha in her stead. In a whirlwind two-day trip, Ms. Kaili even held a meeting with the head of state, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, which she had seemingly organized herself, people familiar with her visit said.

“She was giving statements that were much more pro-Qatar than the Parliament’s position, pretending to speak on behalf of Parliament,” Ms. Neumann said in an interview with The Times.

Ms. Kaili’s lawyer and a spokesman for the Parliament’s president said that her trip was an official mission.

Two weeks later, in mid-November, a seemingly uncontroversial resolution criticizing Qatar’s human-rights record ran into unexpected resistance. “It was difficult to even put it on the agenda,” said the liberal lawmaker Katalin Cseh. “I was shocked.”

Even Ms. Kaili’s political allies were frustrated. “As social democrats, we should take the lead in putting the spotlight on the human-rights violations,” the Danish lawmaker Niels Fuglsang said in an interview. He said a resolution he drafted criticizing Qatar was opposed by at least one of the people now being investigated — he would not say who — and was ultimately rejected.

It was replaced by one that praised Qatar for reforms that are “an example for the Gulf region.” The new text said that Qatar had “already improved the working and living conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers.” Qatari officials have indeed implemented changes to their labor-sponsorship system, though activists say they are insufficient.

Set on softening the final resolution, Mr. Giorgi, working for a new member of Parliament, sent out an email to all socialist lawmakers to vote down an amendment that said that Qatar had bribed to win the hosting of the World Cup.

“The European Parliament should not accuse a country without evidences coming out from the competent judicial authorities,” said the email, sent in the name of the lawmaker Andrea Cozzolino. When the vote was held Nov. 24, he succeeded in getting the bribery language removed.

Since her arrest, Ms. Kaili has been stripped of her vice-presidential title and expelled from both her Greek party, Pasok, and her European Parliament political group, the Socialists and Democrats. The Greek authorities are also investigating her finances.

The European Parliament was set to vote this week on the Qatar visa-free travel proposal. That vote, and all other work relating to Qatar, has been suspended.

The Gray Zone

Ms. Kaili’s energetic lobbying for the tiny Gulf state was not entirely unusual for the European Parliament.

In the days since the arrests, lawmakers and operatives privately pointed fingers, accusing their rivals of similar clandestine efforts. But the ability to take undisclosed meetings with foreign agents is built into the rules of Parliament.

“It is not an accident that a gray zone exists in Brussels,” said Mr. van Hulten of Transparency International E.U. “This is how the institutions wanted it.”

Ms. Kaili’s statements may not have delivered policy changes, which are mostly crafted by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch. But the Parliament is perfectly suited to produce something Qatar needed: positive publicity.

The scandal could be particularly damaging to Qatar’s reputation abroad at a time when officials would rather focus on their hosting of the World Cup, which they’ve been building toward for more than a decade.

The tournament, which ends Sunday, has been the basis of a grand $220-billion nation-building project for a state the size of Connecticut, and is part of a broader push by Qatar’s rulers to garner influence around the world. Those efforts go beyond sports; they’ve established an international airline and a global media empire, Al Jazeera. And like its Gulf neighbors, Qatar has spent extensively on lobbying in Washington.

Scholars say that those efforts are at least partly motivated by the state’s political insecurity. Qatar is often overshadowed by larger, more powerful neighbors including Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The bribery charges have also highlighted a recent change in European Union policy toward Qatar. Amid an energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Commission has increasingly embraced Qatar as a source of natural gas. Ms. Metsola, the Parliament president, suggested reconsidering that pivot.

“We would rather be cold than bought,” she said this week.

The scandal seems set to ensnare more lawmakers, as the Belgian authorities have raided several aides’ residences. It has also caused deep mistrust.

“I thought the political fights we had were based on honest political assessments leading to different conclusions,” Ms. Neumann said. “But now I know that I was most likely fighting against a corruption network.”

Reporting was contributed by Vivian Nereim in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Koba Ryckewaert in Brussels; Elisabetta Povoledo in Milan; and Gaia Pianigiani in Siena, Italy.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Brussels bureau chief for The New York Times, covering the European Union. She joined The Times after covering East Africa and previously Europe for The Wall Street Journal. @MatinaStevis

Monika Pronczuk is a reporter based in Brussels. She joined The Times in 2020. @MonikaPronczuk

Tariq Panja covers some of the darker corners of the global sports industry. He is also a co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade,” an exposé on soccer’s multibillion-dollar player trading industry. @tariqpanja

Sarah Hurtes is a journalist based in Brussels. She joined The Times’s international investigations desk in 2022. @HurtesSarah

The Death of a Forced FriendshipRussian Invasion of Ukraine Ends an Era in Finland

Russia and Finland once maintained close relations that were partly imposed by Moscow. Since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, though, the Finns are strengthening their defenses and striving to join NATO. For many, it marks the end of an era.

By Nadia Pantel

15.12.2022

All that remains of Lenin is a bit of red glue on a marble pedestal. For 43 years, it stood in a small park in the southern Finnish coastal town of Kotka. At times, people smeared it with paint, and the local council regularly argued over whether its presence trivialized Stalinism. But Lenin remained. In 1995, a Polish artist gave him a left arm, which the statue had been lacking. And from then on, Lenin held a bronze cigarette in his hand.

DER SPIEGEL 50/2022

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 50/2022 (December 10th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.

Recent months, though, have seen movement on the issue. First, the city of Turku took down a Lenin statue, followed by a Soviet monument in Helsinki. In October, the Kotka City Council finally sent a demolition squad to Finland's last remaining Lenin.

Two-thirds of respondents had told the local newspaper that they could no longer stand the statue: Russia invades Ukraine, yet a Lenin statue installed by Moscow is still standing exactly where the Soviet army first attacked Kotka in 1939? It was too much.

Lenin had actually arrived as a friend. In 1979, Moscow commissioned an Estonian sculptor to create it as a symbol of Soviet-Finnish solidarity. But in 2022, the people of Kotka and Finland finally lost patience. Enough Lenin. Stay away Moscow.

The Baltic Sea Goes NATO

Even the Baltic Sea, which lies under the gray sky just a few paces behind Lenin's pedestal, will soon no longer be the same. Finland expects to be admitted to NATO next year, together with Sweden. Northern Europe is saying goodbye to the idea of neutrality. And the inland sea will soon become almost completely under NATO control, with a bit of Russia at its easternmost tip. Over the summer, U.S. President Joe Biden said: "Putin was looking for the Finlandization of Europe. He's going to get the 'NATOization' of Europe."

"Finlandization" was the term used in West Germany in the days of the Iron Curtain to describe the enforced closeness with which Moscow made Helsinki an acquiescent neighbor. Given that most Finns are polite people, they refrained from coining the term "Berlinization" to describe the period after the fall of the Wall - the phase during which Germany behaved as if defense and security issues were concerns of the past. It's an attitude that Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, could never afford.

Driving along that border, you learn that every city has a well-maintained system of air-raid shelters, which are currently being used as swimming pools, gymnasiums and storage rooms. After all, they want the present to be as normal as possible, but completely ruling out a Russian attack seemed cavalier. It is also a country that nonetheless maintained serene and pragmatic contact with its large neighbor. Russian tourists, businessmen and friends are quietly yet painfully missed in Finland.

When Lenin was brought to Kotka in 1979, Esa Lassi, the local representative of the Communist Party of Finland, picked up the Lenin sculptor from the ferry arriving from Tallinn. Lassi still has metal pins with a miniature version of the statue in his kitchen today. Like the original, without the left arm. When Lenin was dismantled this fall, Lassi wrapped a red flag around his walker and protested. Lassi isn't just Kotka's best-known communist. He is also a relic of "Finlandization."

"I would have loved to put the red flag around Lenin's shoulders as a farewell, but there were construction workers and they were stronger than me," Lassi says, sitting in his living room. His respirator is set on the bookshelf behind him on a tome about Scandinavian social democracy. There are pictures on the walls of Lenin and trips Lassi made with the Communist Party during his youth. During the 1970s, Lassi studied briefly in Moscow. For him, Russia represented the "promise of brotherhood and freedom." Although he wanted a communist Finland, he never wanted a Russian Finland.

Lassi considers Finland to be "an independent country that can defend itself." He finds his country's planned NATO membership to be just as sad as the demise of the Lenin statue. Yet not even Lassi would advise Ukraine to "Finlandize," to subordinate itself to Russia. "Putin is a traitor," Lassi says. A traitor to communism, a traitor to the former Soviet peoples. Of course Ukraine should be defending itself against his attack, he says. The way Lassi sees the world, Putin will fall out of power because of his war and Lenin will still be lying in his mausoleum in Red Square, and people will realize "that it is Lenin's thoughts that can save us."

There's one photo hanging on the wall with a laughing man with blond curls. "That's me," says Lassi. "I was 18, all the girls were after me." Communism was part of Lassi's youth, too. Lassi, though, is now an elderly man. And for Finland, which belonged to the Russian Empire until 1917, the forced closeness with Moscow is now a thing of what feels like the distant past.

Shopping Right at the Border

Just under 50 kilometers east of Kotka is the Vaalimaa border crossing. Marks in the road left behind by cars and trucks serve as a reminder that, until the summer, thousands of tourists and commuters from Russia drove into Finland every day or headed from Finland to Russia. Since September 30, though, the border has only been open in exceptional cases, for people who want to visit relatives or who have long-term visas.

Four years ago, a shopping center was built right next to the border crossing. It's called the Zsar Outlet Village, and there is a throne in the center where visitors can have their photo taken wearing a crown. Capitalism is tolerant – if Russians associate positive emotions with the czar, you give them a czar shopping experience. But just like the check-in counters at the border, the shopping center too has become a defunct backdrop to a bygone era. Most of the stores have closed, and the Outlet Village has filed for bankruptcy.

Pekka Aho, with his gray hair and a thick jacket, is one of the last customers. He just bought sports shoes for his sons. Aho lives nearby and works as a border guard. There aren't many other jobs around, he says, adding that it has grown extremely quiet. Until the end of the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain divided the world here in Vaalimaa, with rapprochement only beginning slowly in the 1980s. Vaalimaa went from being a dead end to a transit town – and it became the busiest border crossing on the way from Russia to Helsinki.

Russia's war has now made Vaalimaa the end of the road once again. "The last 20 years were good," says Aho. The Russian middle class grew, and so did the number of Russian tourists. Restaurants and stores opened in Vaalimaa, and Russia, at least that's how it seemed to Aho, gained more freedom and democracy. This year put a damper on the "actually strong optimism" that Aho says he has. "I now have to explain to my children why Russia won't attack us." He tells them about the strong Finnish army, and, more recently, also about NATO.

Because Aho doesn't want to be afraid, he has decided that Finland is actually worthless to Russia, anyway. "If they conquer us, they will just get more forests and more pristine nature. They have enough of that already."

And the path along the border actually does lead through endless forests. Sixty-five kilometers north of Vaalimaa, the trees are joined by water. It's the beginning of Saimaa, Finland's largest lake, which is even home to the Saimaa ringed seal. Lappeenranta is located on the shore, a city that under Swedish rule used to be called "Villmanstrand," the beach of the wild man. Today, you encounter the wild man as part of the town coat-of-arms, a hairy brute with a bare torso wielding a wooden club. "I really do thing that he'll now protect us," says Tuomo Sallinen, the town's deputy mayor.

Finland Doesn't Need to Catch Up Militarily

Just a year ago, Sallinen didn't think he needed any kind of special protection. Lappeenranta, with its 70,000 residents, has benefited from exchange and trade with Russia like hardly any other city in Finland. Relations were so close that Lappeenranta maintained its own representation in Saint Petersburg. "I thought, in economic terms alone, that we were so intertwined that it would make war impossible. I was wrong," says Sallinen. He has Russian friends and wanted to treat Russia like a normal neighbor. "That trust is now destroyed."

In conversations in Finland about Russia's attack on Ukraine, the same shock is evident that one encounters in Germany. And yet there is a crucial difference: Unlike Germany, the invasion isn't really requiring Finland to radically change its approach, to declare a "watershed," as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did immediately after the Russian attack, "Zeitenwende." Finland has never abolished compulsory military service, and defense spending is already 2 percent of gross domestic product, the target figure demanded by NATO that many countries, including Germany, have not yet reached. Finland saw itself as a neutral country, but not as one that didn't have to defend itself.

And the country's defenses also include more than just the army. Every two years, Sallinen and his staff have to undergo disaster training. For two days, they rehearse how to keep the city running if there is no electricity, if people are killed, if homes are burning. "Being prepared," Sallinen says, "is part of who we are as a nation."

It becomes more difficult for Sallinen when he is asked to talk about the city's future. We'll just have to adapt, he says. But at City Hall, they have calculated that every day the border to Russia remains closed, it costs the city 1 million euros. They had grown used to being the gateway to the east.

A few minutes' drive from City Hall, in the basement of an apartment building, 10 men are meeting on this Wednesday afternoon in Lappeenranta to mix 200 liters of salad dressing. They are members of the local Lions Club and are preparing for their charity booth at the local Christmas market. The bottling of the salad dressing is going smoothly, and the first beers have been popped open, but they don't expect it to be a very good holiday season. Almost everyone here is affected by the border closure.

There is Esa, who exported electrical technology to Russia. Joel, who sold expensive cheese to the Russians. Juho, who built luxury homes on the banks of the Saimaa for Russian millionaires. "I'd be happy if the Russians came back, but I wouldn't show it," Joel says. He's talking about tourists. Then he adds: "If the Russians, come, I know what I have to do. I'm a reservist." This time, he's talking about the soldiers.

Everyone here in the basement shares the feeling that they have been deceived. They didn't consider Russia to be dangerous, despite the annexation of Crimea in 2014, despite the Caucasus War in 2008. And they thought Finland could do well without NATO. "We're not afraid," says home-builder Juho. Then why does the country want to join NATO now? "Because we're realists. And as a realist, you adapt to external conditions."

For Katri Anttila, the new ice age between Finland and Russia is particularly painful. Anttila is the director of three Finnish-Russian schools in Lappeenranta and the surrounding area. Here in southeastern Finland, in Karelia, more than 5 percent of the population belongs to the Russian-speaking minority. In 2010, there were television reports about the Russian schools of Lappeenranta because there were so many applications. The Russian language was booming. "We were approached by parents who had no particular connection to Russia. They just wanted their children to learn a useful language," Anttila recalls. "Now, our Russian teachers are getting weird looks at the supermarket," Anttila says.

Lappeenranta's Russian school is housed in a brightly lit building. From the street, you can see the drawing of a matryoshka nesting doll. There's no Russian flag to be seen anywhere. "We don't talk about politics in school," Anttila says. But she can't deny that politics is pushing its way into her school. Since the beginning of the war, a growing number of students are arriving fresh from Russia. "These are families who had been thinking about emigrating for a long time and could no longer stand the situation," Anttila says.

Preparing for the Possibility of Attack

At the same time, the first Ukrainian refugees are now arriving at the school. It's easier for the children to arrive in a Russian-speaking environment, Anttila says. But she is also realizing what can happen when speaking about politics becomes taboo. It ends in great silence. Anttila long commuted between Finland and Russia. But since Russia attacked Ukraine, she hasn't visited her friends on the other side of the border. She says she is afraid they might say things she wouldn't be able to accept.

On the way out of the school, Anttila points to two heavy iron doors. Behind them is what looks like a storeroom for sports equipment, with cross-country skis leaning against shelves. But it's an air raid shelter. Large red cranks protrude from the wall. If the Russians use poison gas, they can manually set the air filters in motion inside. Both are possible at the Russian school in Lappeenranta: learning the language and the culture of their neighbor. And being prepared for a possible attack from that self-same neighbor.

A little further to the northeast, seven kilometers from Svetogorsk in Russia, lies the small town of Imatra. It is famous for its wild river and for the huge dam that was built to generate electricity. The Imatra rapids became a tourist attraction after Russian Czarina Catherine the Great visited them in 1772.

The Hole of a Shell Impact

Some of today's tourists find their way to a white house next to Imatra's main street. It's the place where Jarmo Ikävalko keeps his childhood toys and photos of his parents' youth, as well as military uniforms from World War II. He calls his collection the "Veteran's Museum." An idyllic mural with farmers and animals has been painted above the sofa in the living room. In front of the left hoof of a horse, there's a hole. In 1944, a Soviet army shell struck it. Ikävalko has left the shrapnel in the wall.

A visit to Ikävalko is not only about the past, but also about one of the most important strands of the Finnish national narrative: the battles of the Winter War. In 1939, the Red Army attacked Finland, with Stalin expecting to quickly overrun the country quickly, but the Finns resisted for much longer than expected. Finnish soldiers, Ikävalko's father among them, managed to stand up to the Soviet army for the entire winter. Until Moscow won. But without having conquered Finland.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine nine months ago, there was once again talk of the Winter War. Even outside of Finland. A small country attacked by its Russian neighbor and proves to be a determined adversary that wins international sympathy. That's how it was in 1939 and 1940 during the Winter War, and that is how it began in 2022 in Ukraine. Other parallels are difficult to draw. But for Finland, the Winter War is a memory that the country continues to draw on. When the men were preparing the salad dressing in the basement in Lappeenranta, one of them even mentioned it: "We have known since 1939 that one Finnish soldier is as strong as 10 Russians."

Ikävalko of the Veterans Museum doesn't want to give the impression that he is longing for the old days. He liked living on the border, he says. "We always have fireworks twice on New Year's Eve, first on the Russian side and an hour later on ours." For Ikävalko, Russia had always been "a friend." The idea that this can no longer be the case scares him. He says he considers Finland's NATO accession to be "reasonable," but quite unpleasant. Soon, his small museum will recall an era when Finland hoped to navigate independently through peacetime.

Earlier this month, Finnish Prime Minster Sanna Marin again stated that those days are over. "I'll be brutally honest with you, Europe isn't strong enough," she said in a speech given in Sydney, Australia, on December 2. She said the war has shown that Europe needs the United States and that the European defense industry needs to be strengthened. The Finnish population seems to agree with Marin: In a poll taken in November, 78 percent said they were in favor of joining NATO. Back in 2017, only 21 percent were.

An art nouveau villa stands 10 steps away from Ikävalko's museum. It's an aging luxury hotel with taxidermy adorning the room with the fireplace. It's here that the mayor of Imatra, Matias Hilden, has agreed to meet for an interview. Under Hilden's predecessor, Imatra still had close ties with the nearby Russian city of Svetogorsk. There were joint sports tournaments, business contacts and the municipal administrations occasionally worked together. Hilden, 35, has only been in office for seven months and is no longer familiar with that time. Svetogorsk is only 20 minutes away by car, but today it is the beginning of a completely different world.

"We wanted the Russians to know that the Ukrainians have our full support."

Up until July and August, Russian tourists were still coming to Imatra, as has always been normal for the city. "But this time it bothered people here," Hilden says. So, they thought about how to show the Russian guests what they think.

During the vacation season, they open the floodgates of their dam at 6 p.m. each evening. The riverbed becomes a waterfall for 16 minutes. To ensure the spectacle really touches everyone, the city plays a piece by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius over the loudspeakers. The rushing water meets swelling violins. This summer in Imatra, they played the Ukrainian national anthem instead of Sibelius. "We wanted the Russians to know that the Ukrainians have our full support," says Mayor Hilden. He says he couldn't tell whether the Russians had listened or turned a deaf ear.

No one is coming to visit right now, anyway. The loudspeakers take a winter break. Here, where up to 14 trains a day arrived with guests from St. Petersburg in the 19th century, Finland will erect its first border fence. It will be three meters high and will be topped by barbed wire and night vision cameras.

Finland intends to secure a total of 200 kilometers of the 1,430-kilometer border in this way, at an estimated cost of 380 million euros. With the Iron Curtain, Imatra's mayor says, there were only wooden markings in the forest. The era of fences is only just now beginning.

EU adopts 15% tax on multinational businesses (Le Monde)

““Today the European Union has taken a crucial step towards tax fairness and social justice,” EU economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said. “Minimum taxation is key to addressing the challenges a globalised economy creates.””

— Le Monde

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On Thursday, the EU passed the landmark agreement intended to stop governments racing to cut taxes to lure the world's richest firms to their territory.

Le Monde with AFP

Published on December 16, 2022

The European Union on Thursday, December 15, adopted a plan for a global minimum 15% tax on multinational businesses, after leaders gave final approval following months of wrangling. The landmark agreement between nearly 140 countries is intended to stop governments racing to cut taxes to lure the world's richest firms to their territory.

"Today the European Union has taken a crucial step towards tax fairness and social justice," EU economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said. "Minimum taxation is key to addressing the challenges a globalised economy creates."

The plan was drawn up under the guidance of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and already had the backing of Washington and several major EU economies. But the implementation of the minimum tax in the 27-nation European Union has already been delayed as member states raised objections or adopted blocking tactics.

Most recently, this week Poland blocked formal adoption of the measure while arguing about unrelated measures, such as sanctions on Russia. But at Thursday's summit such reticences were negotiated away, and the tax will now come into effect across the block at the end of next year.

Leaders hailed the decision. Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was a "project close to my heart" and France's President Emmanuel Macron said France had been pushing the idea for more than four years.

The global minimum tax is only one part, known as Pillar Two, of the OECD agreement. The first pillar, which provides for the taxation of companies where they make their profits to limit tax evasion, primarily targets digital giants. It requires an international agreement which is not yet finalised.

Le Monde with AFP

News round-up, Thursday, December 15, 2022.

“Germans have a disastrous view of Tesla, with company founder Elon Musk’s behavior hardly helping. Whether from a likeability or quality perspective, the Tesla brand is far behind its German competitors. ”

— Spiegel

---

Air Products and AES Announce Plans to Invest Approximately $4 Billion to Build First Mega-scale Green Hydrogen Production Facility in Texas

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Seaboard’s CEO in the Dominican Republic, Armando Rodriguez, explains how the Estrella del Mar III, a floating hybrid power plant, will reduce CO2 emissions and bring stability to the national grid…

Altice delivers innovative, customer-centric products and solutions that connect and unlock the limitless potential of its over 30 million customers over fiber networks and mobile…

Cooperate with ethical thinking -

The Federal Reserve signals more to come even as it slows rate increases.

Central bankers made a smaller rate move, but predicted that they will weigh the economy down more aggressively than previously expected

NYT

By Jeanna Smialek and Joe Rennison

• Published Dec. 14, 2022Updated Dec. 15, 2022, 2:22 a.m. ET

Federal Reserve officials on Wednesday slowed their campaign to cool the economy but indicated that interest rates would rise higher in 2023 than previously expected as inflation proves more stubborn than policymakers had hoped.

Fed officials voted unanimously at the conclusion of their two-day meeting to raise borrowing costs by half a percentage point, a pullback after four consecutive three-quarter point increases. Their policy rate is now set to a range of 4.25 to 4.5 percent, the highest it has been since 2007.

After months of moving rapidly to make money more expensive in an attempt to rein in an overheating economy, central bankers are entering a phase in which they expect to adjust policy more cautiously. That will give them time to see how the labor market and inflation are reacting to the policy changes they have already put in place.

Yet the Fed’s latest economic projections, released on Wednesday for the first time since September, sent a clear signal that slowing the pace of rate increases does not mean that officials are letting up in their battle against rapid inflation. Borrowing costs are expected to rise more drastically and inflict more economic pain than central bankers previously anticipated as policymakers attempt to wrangle stubborn price increases.

“We’ve continually expected to make faster progress on inflation than we have,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during his news conference after the release. He described the Fed’s new expectations as: “slower progress on inflation, tighter policy, probably higher rates, probably held for longer, just to get you to the kind of restriction that you need to get inflation down to 2 percent.”

Federal Reserve Raises Interest Rates at Slower Pace

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said officials would raise borrowing costs by half a percentage point, a pullback from previous increases, as signs show that inflation is beginning to cool.CreditCredit...Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

Officials are now expecting to raise their policy interest rate to 5.1 percent by the end of 2023, which would mean another three-quarter-point worth of adjustments and would push it half a percentage point higher next year than officials previously anticipated. Policymakers also expect to keep borrowing costs higher for longer.

“We have more work to do,” Mr. Powell said.

The Fed’s higher rates are expected to cool the economy notably next year. Central bankers predict that unemployment will jump to 4.6 percent from 3.7 percent now, and then remain elevated for years. Growth is expected to be much weaker in 2023 than previously anticipated, pushing the economy to the brink of a recession.

“I don’t think anyone knows whether we’re going to have a recession or not, and if we do, whether it’s going to be a deep one or not,” Mr. Powell said. “It’s not knowable.”

The central bank’s aggressive stance comes as central bankers worry that inflation will remain high for years to come. Though price increases are already beginning to moderate from the four-decade highs they reached this summer, the Fed’s economic projections make clear that policymakers think it is going to take years to return inflation fully to their 2 percent goal.

Despite the tough talk from the Fed, investors on Wednesday seemed unconvinced. Stock prices in the S&P 500 fluctuated higher and lower as Mr. Powell spoke at a news conference before ending the day down 0.6 percent.

And though the Fed expects to keep rates above 5 percent through the end of 2023, investors are still betting that the central bank will stop raising rates sooner and begin cutting them earlier.

“Financial markets want black and white, and you’re working in shades of gray,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, explaining that investors are not internalizing the Fed’s nuanced message.

That divergence could be a problem for central bankers. Higher stock prices and lower market-based interest rates make money cheaper and easier to borrow, helping to stimulate the economy — the opposite of the Fed’s goal as it tries to lower inflation.

“You hear the mantra, ‘Don’t fight the Fed,’ but at the moment the market is willing to fight the Fed,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities. “It’s an interesting dissonance that creates a risk for the market.”

Mr. Powell has repeatedly emphasized that his central bank is determined to keep fighting inflation until it is thoroughly vanquished, and on Wednesday he underlined that wrestling price pressures back under control is likely to take some time.

Macron urges Europe to act more quickly to counter US subsidies

EU leaders are meeting in Brussels on Thursday to find a way to counter Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

Le Monde with AFP

Published on December 15, 2022

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday, December 15, that the European Union would have to move more quickly to head off the threat to its industry from planned US subsidies.

Arriving at the EU summit in Brussels, Mr. Macron said the leaders would discuss their response to US President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

"To maintain fair competition," Mr. Macron said, Europe must simplify its own subsidy rules faster "to respond, to be the equivalent of what the Americans have done."

EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday will focus on a trade dispute with the United States, a key ally, that threatens to trigger a subsidy race between the economic superpowers.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen sent a letter ahead of the summit urging leaders to back a plan to compete with billions of dollars in new US subsidies and tax cuts for car makers.

Brussels views the "Buy American" condition for purchasers of electric vehicles mainly made in the United States as discriminatory against European car manufacturers.

It is also concerned Washington's plan will drain investment from the EU to the United States and that they violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules.

But, with US President Joe Biden refusing to change course beyond some promised "tweaks," the commission is now looking to match the US move by loosening its own state aid rules and boosting public investment in cleaner energy.

Ms. Von der Leyen said the e-vehicle subsidies contained in a broader US Inflation Reduction Act "risk un-leveling the playing field and discriminating against European companies".

The EU emphasizes its close cooperation with the United States – especially in supporting Ukraine and fighting climate change. But it is worried Washington is working up a trade advantage over it while it was going through an energy crunch, economic headwinds and was still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.

'China must radically transition away from the development path it took in the past'

China is facing major structural challenges that require a significant shift in its economic policy. However, the party is struggling to convince people of their ability to bring about real change.

By Camille Macaire

Published on December 15, 2022

The rise of social tensions in China has highlighted the population's frustration with the harsh and inconsistent zero-Covid-19 policy. But in the background, there's also growing anxiety among the youth, faced with record unemployment (20% according to official figures, probably much more in reality) and uncertainties about long-term prospects.

Beyond the strong impact of the Covid-19 crisis, China is facing major structural challenges, in particular demographic aging, which require a radical change in the economic model. However, the authorities are struggling to convince people of their ability to bring about real change. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party, held from October 16 to 22, has illustrated the choice of subordinating the economy to politics by placing national security and strategic autonomy at the heart of its priorities.

These objectives underlie the emphasis on technological self-sufficiency. China has proven its ability to move upmarket in digital technology, and the automotive sector, but it's still far from being able to do without external innovations. For the future, in addition to an emphasis on education, one of the tools mentioned is a strategy to attract foreign talent. But Xi Jinping's ideological withdrawal, which advocates independence from the outside world and strengthens state control over the manufacturing sector, seems to contradict this strategy. At the same time, US sanctions against Chinese semiconductor producers will slow down China's capacity for innovation.

Poor outlook

The commitment to the social component, based on a better sharing of wealth according to the principle of "common prosperity," seems to be losing steam. The reinforcement of safety nets, a long-standing objective but never followed by significant action, is only now appearing in the discourse.

In the short term, the outlook for China's economy is cloudy. New cases of Covid-19 are now occurring on a daily basis at more than double the average level observed during the outbreak that paralyzed the country between mid-March and the end of April, and are widely scattered across the country. The announcement on Wednesday, December 7 that the zero-Covid-19 policy, which had become unbearable, would be eased could lead to a rebound in activity, but will also cause major disruptions in the face of a lack of hospital capacity. The ongoing speeding up of vaccination among the elderly could lead to a gradual exit from the crisis, but it will take time: Only about 40% of people over the age of 80 are fully vaccinated in the country. However, household trust will remain permanently impacted, which will continue to weigh on domestic consumption.

Moreover, massive government support through debt or monetary easing isn't on the agenda. Since 2017, Beijing has made fiscal clean-up, primarily by reducing debts, an official goal to strengthen the resilience of the economic model. Despite the Covid-19-related crisis, the authorities have proven their strong will to stay the course: The BPC hasn't conducted asset buyback programs, unlike its foreign counterparts, and has maintained strong pressure on property developers to deflate their debt levels.

More meaningful energy commitments are urgently needed to give credibility to the promise of zero net CO2 emissions by 2060. China must radically transition away from the development path it took in the past. The target for reducing the carbon intensity of growth presented in the 2021-2025 five-year plan (-18% emissions per unit of GDP created) has only slowed the acceleration of emissions, in fact creating an increase of nearly 40% over the period.

Major reforms

One of the levers of action is to increase more rapidly the share of low energy-intensive sectors, such as services, in growth. But this requires far-reaching structural reforms (strengthening safety nets, making the labor market more flexible, or restructuring state-owned enterprises), which are lagging behind.

In addition to reducing emissions at home, China has positioned itself as a supplier of eco-friendly equipment to the rest of the world. For example, it enjoys a dominant position in the manufacturing of batteries and solar panels. The country could turn the global climate challenge into an opportunity, as a springboard for its long-term growth.

China is also deploying a strategy of strengthening economic and financial ties with developing countries, particularly in Asia, which represent a large pool of demographic and economic growth. It's now the largest trading partner of most emerging countries and the largest international donor, with outstanding bilateral loans estimated at nearly twice those of the Paris Club (which includes 22 lending countries).

It has established a network of agreements with some 40 countries, the vast majority of them emerging countries, to provide liquidity in the event of a crisis (swap lines). These links, which are based on the "New Silk Roads" project, could serve as a growth springboard for the Chinese economy by reorganizing production chains, guaranteeing access to raw materials and creating new outlets. But to preserve and strengthen those links in the long term, China must prove to its partners that they all have a shared interest. And it remains to be seen whether the country's ideological hardening won't undermine the foundations of this project.

Camille Macaire is the Banque de France's representative for the Asia-Pacific region and an associate researcher at the Centre d’Etudes Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII). This article reflects the personal views of the author and does not reflect the stance of the Banque de France on the subject.

Source Spiegel

Musk Destroys Tesla Image in Germany

Germans have a disastrous view of Tesla, with company founder Elon Musk's behavior hardly helping. Whether from a likeability or quality perspective, the Tesla brand is far behind its German competitors.

By Arvid Haitsch

14.12.2022

Elon Musk, it would seem, is eager to drag his followers into the abyss of conspiracy theory credulity – but is anyone taking the bait? The top dog of Tesla and Twitter has never been shy when it comes to polarizing statements, of course, but even by his standards, the last several days have been disturbing for his willingness to make right-wing positions his own. He went after the U.S. virologist Anthony Fauci, he has made light of people who want to determine their own sexual identity and he has generally declared war on "woke." During an appearance in San Francisco, Musk was booed for several minutes, and actor Billy Baldwin launched a trend with the hashtag #BoycottTesla.

In Germany, the calls for boycott were hardly necessary. That is the clear message of a survey conducted on behalf of DER SPIEGEL by the public opinion research institute Civey. Some 47 percent of the auto enthusiasts surveyed responded that Musk’s current behavior has had a "clearly negative" influence on their opinion of Tesla. An additional 16 percent said their reaction has been "rather negative." Only 3 percent said they have a "rather positive" impression of Musk’s recent behavior, and an additional 6 percent rated their impression as "clearly positive." The survey was carried out between Dec. 1 to 9, prior to Musk’s most recent outbursts.

In late October, after Musk took over control of Twitter, a number of public reactions already began indicating that the image of Tesla, the world’s leading electric car brand, was taking a beating. Alena Buyx, chair of the German Ethics Council, said at the time that she was no longer interested in buying a Tesla. "It’s something you can’t do anymore,” she said.

In the U.S., the public opinion research company Morning Consult  reported that Tesla’s popularity has suffered a nosedive primarily among supporters of the Democratic Party, which have traditionally dominated the e-car market. Since the beginning of the year, trust in the Tesla brand had been trending downward only slightly, says Morning Consult, but that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter "acted as a break in the dam." Elon Musk’s polarizing personality, the consulting company found, is negatively impacting Tesla.

The new survey commissioned by DER SPIEGEL has now revealed the same impact on the company’s image in Germany as that seen in the U.S. – just nine months after the carmaker opened up a new gigafactory outside of Berlin. And in contrast to the U.S., where Tesla seems poised to replace at least some of its disaffected supporters with new fans among pro-Trump Republicans, the same dynamic is nowhere to be seen in Germany. The broad rejection of Musk’s persona is apparent across all age, professional and educational groups in the country and it is independent of gender, region, family status, degree, religion and political affiliation.

The only exception is among those who proclaim to be supporters of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), with only 35 percent of such respondents saying they had a negative reaction to Musk’s behavior. But even within this group, the negative reactions outweighed the positive (23 percent).

Even without explicit mention of Musk, only 9 percent of Germans said they find Tesla to be "very" or "rather likeable." Fully 69 percent, by contrast, said they found the manufacturer to be "less" or "not at all likeable." That makes Tesla by far the least popular company among large carmakers with production sites in Germany, a finding once again independent of political party preference.

The survey revealed more polarization when it comes to Germany’s tradition-rich luxury brands like Mercedes, Porsche, BMW and Audi, which are generally viewed negatively on the left side of the political spectrum, but more positively on the right, with center-left Social Democrats also showing a weakness for Audi. Mass producers like Volkswagen, Opel and Ford, by contrast, tend to be more balanced, or they trigger very little reaction at all. Only Tesla is viewed negatively across all political parties. Musk’s company generates the highest likeability ratings among university students (27 percent), those under the age of 30 (22 percent), voters for the far-left Left Party (21 percent) and civil servants (17 percent). In all cases, though, Tesla supporters make up a clear minority.

Tesla also isn’t able to rely on its aura of being a technological leader. In response to the Civey question as to whether respondents view the vehicles produced by the different brands as high-quality products, only 21 percent answered positively when it came to Tesla.

That value puts Tesla at the very back of the pack, behind even Ford and Opel, both of which are also produced in Germany but which belong to foreign companies. Traditional German producers received top marks on the quality question. But Tesla has also been the focus of numerous negative reports  in the U.S. when it comes to quality and safety, in part because of the disastrous press its driver assistance system has received.

The survey does not allow for conclusions to be drawn on general attitudes in favor of or against electric vehicles. Tesla is the only manufacturer on the list to specialize entirely in e-autos and leads the segment both in Germany and elsewhere in the world when it comes to the number of vehicles registered. But other brands are offering more and more battery-powered vehicles. From January to November, 52,000 new Teslas were registered in Germany, according to the KBA, the German agency responsible for motorized vehicle registration. That represents around one-seventh of all fully electric vehicles in the country, with VW hot on its heels.