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Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. My name is Zoya Teirstein. We’ve heard it time and again: Despite what the science says, climate change does not rank high among Americans’ priorities in the ballot box. When we launched this series in August, however, we made the case that climate disasters can influence voting and elections — not just locally, but nationally. We’ve just seen proof of that in Hurricane Helene.
Two weeks ago, the Category 4 storm carved a deadly path through the U.S. Southeast — the first time in American history that a major disaster has hit two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, just weeks ahead of a presidential election.
“Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
— Rachel Goldwasser, Southern Poverty Law CenterOn social media and on trips to the disaster zone, former President Donald Trump has made one bogus claim after another about the federal response to the storm, falsely alleging that President Joe Biden has been ignoring federal aid requests from Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, and that the Biden administration — and Vice President Kamala Harris, specifically — spent FEMA money on housing for illegal immigrants.
Trump proxies like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, aided by an online army of bots, helped fuel a veritable deluge of disinformation about Helene and its origins, include a barrage of claims that FEMA is confiscating community-donated supplies. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X last week, legitimizing a viral conspiracy that the government aimed the hurricane at Republican counties in order to swing the presidential election.
“We’ve moved into a space where conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream,” said Rachel Goldwasser, who tracks far-right activity and disinformation at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. “Every tinfoil hat out there that says the government controls the weather now feels validated because Marjorie Taylor Greene said so, too.”
The online conspiracies have real-world consequences: False reports about FEMA and federal aid efforts are drowning out real information people in western North Carolina and other ravaged states need in order to begin the recovery process, and false claims about government malfeasance are galvanizing far-right militia activity in the region, Goldwasser said. There have been multiple reports of Proud Boys, the neo-fascist militant organization, on the ground in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Roxanne Brooks mounts an American flag to a stack of cinderblocks outside her friend’s destroyed mobile home (at right) in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene flooding in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Mario Tama / Getty ImagesMeanwhile, in western North Carolina, election officials are racing to figure out how to make sure residents can still cast their ballots during early voting and on November 5. Several polling locations are shut down, and the U.S. Postal Service can’t deliver mail-in ballots to multiple ZIP codes because of washed-out roads and damaged vehicles. “This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of the state’s top election officials, said last week.
On Monday, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to loosen voting rules for counties most affected by the storm. Thirteen counties in the western half of the state can develop new early-voting processes, establish more voting sites, and appoint new poll workers if existing ones are unable to serve, among other authorizations.
“Early voting may look different in some of the 13 hardest-hit counties, but it will go on,” Brinson Bell told reporters. Read the full story on how Helene could impact voting in North Carolina.
Milton approaches
“There are no good scenarios.”
— Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist for WFLA, Tampa Bay’s NBC affiliateHurricane Milton exploded to Category 5 intensity yesterday as it barreled eastward across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida. The storm’s precise track is still unclear, but the majority of models predict it will make landfall tomorrow in or near Tampa Bay, one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to hurricane storm surge. The city hasn’t seen a direct hit from a hurricane in a century, but if Milton lands in the wrong spot, the bay would act as a kind of funnel for storm surge, pushing a huge wall of water into the heart of one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.
Hurricane Milton at 16:30 on Monday, October 7, 2024. CIRA / NOAATo make matters worse, coastal communities in western Florida are still emerging from post-Helene chaos. Thousands of tons of debris are strewn along roadways, flooded residents are mucking out their houses, and FEMA is just starting to distribute displacement assistance to the victims of last month’s storm. Governor Ron DeSantis last week sent many of the state’s rescue and repair crews up to North Carolina to aid in the disaster response there, but he recalled those crews over the weekend and is now pushing to clean up as much debris as possible before Milton makes landfall.
My colleague Matt Simon has more on how Milton gained strength so fast — read the full story here.
— Jake Bittle
What we’re reading
Presidential candidates flex their disaster chops: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both visited areas affected by Hurricane Helene last week, with Trump touring damaged areas in Valdosta, Georgia, and Harris surveying a destroyed town in North Carolina. Each candidate accused the other of not doing enough to help storm victims.
Read moreFEMA is out of money: President Joe Biden over the weekend urged Congress to return to Washington and pass a bill replenishing FEMA’s drained disaster relief fund. The agency has said it lacks the resources to respond to a major disaster like Hurricane Milton, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on Sunday that he wouldn’t commit to calling lawmakers back.
Read moreHelene and manufactured housing: When Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend, it struck a region where a large portion of the housing stock consists of mobile and manufactured homes, which are extremely vulnerable to wind and flood damage. These homes, which aren’t subject to local building codes, are a last resort for residents who can’t find affordable housing — and a loophole for those who can’t afford to build to hurricane standards.
Read moreWho’s going to pay for Helene?: Preliminary damage estimates for Hurricane Helene suggest the storm could cost more than $200 billion, but almost none of that loss will be covered by insurance. That’s because traditional homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover flood damage, and most people in North Carolina and other inland states don’t carry additional flood insurance.
Read moreA word from Al Gore: My colleague Kate Yoder sat down with former vice president Al Gore at Climate Week to get his thoughts on where we stand in the climate fight. The Inconvenient Truth creator, who lost the 2000 election by a hair, said even he has been surprised by how difficult it has been to make climate progress, a fact he attributed to the strength of the oil and gas lobby.
Read moreDeSantis is dodging Harris: As Category 5 Hurricane Milton draws near Tampa, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is dodging Vice President Kamala Harris’s calls about storm recovery in his state, NBC News reports. The vice president’s calls “seemed political,” a DeSantis aide said. DeSantis twice chose not to meet last week with President Joe Biden, who was in Florida surveying the damage.
Read moreThis story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Helene changes the election on Oct 8, 2024.
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Read a version of this story in Korean
North Korean farm managers who are not carefully harvesting their potato crops – leaving some behind – are getting in trouble with authorities, residents with links to the agricultural sector told Radio Free Asia.
Inspectors recently swooped down on several collective farms in the northern potato-growing region of Ryanggang province to check the fields. “The inspectors drove around in cars and dug up every nook and cranny of the potato fields on the farm,” a resident who works in agriculture said on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“If the inspectors conclude that the fall harvest was not done properly, the farms must redo it until they pass the inspection,” another provincial resident said.
The reason behind the checks appears to be that farmers are spending more time tending their personal fields than the collective farm’s lots, the sources said.
In North Korea’s collective farming system, farmers are paid the standard government salary to work the land, and then all crops are collected by the state and distributed to the people. But since the collapse of the country’s economy in the 1990s, that salary is nowhere near enough to live on.
Bales of straw in North Korean fields after the rice harvest, as seen from the Ganghwa Peace Observatory across the border in South Korea, Sept. 23, 2024. (Yonhap News) So the farmers, like everyone else, must support themselves by other means – and are planting their own personal potato patches–usually on land surrounding their homes. The potatoes grown there are either eaten or sold for extra income.
When harvest time comes around, citizens are mobilized to provide free labor to the farm managers, who order them to quickly dig up the collective farms just to make quota by the Sept. 30 deadline.
The farm managers have a tendency to not to watch the collective farms too, and they acknowledge that they are mostly going through the motions, the first resident said. “They are working so irresponsibly to the point that they joke that the mobilized workers are ‘digging for potatoes with their eyes closed,’” he said.
Farmers beware
But the government wants them to be more thorough, so it is sending inspection teams to check.
“The Cabinet Agricultural Commission dispatched a 20-member harvest inspection team in Hyesan City on Sept. 26,” the second Ryanggang resident said, referring to a city in the province.
Punishments for farm officials who fail inspections can be harsh, he said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspects potato fields and agricultural machinery warehouses while touring a farm in Samjiyon county, Ryanggang province, in July 2018. (Yonhap News) Last year, many farm officials in the province were expelled from the Workers’ Party, and they lost all the housing and employment privileges that go with membership, and some were even sent to prison because they were sloppy in their management of the harvest.
“Farm officials can’t sleep at night because they think something like that could happen to them right now,” the first resident said.
At a farm in the city of Hyesan, the harvest was completed on Sept. 27, but then the workers were remobilized, that is, called to provide unpaid labor once again, when they heard that the inspection team had arrived.
“They even mobilized middle and high school students to complete the harvest again,” he said. “The farm officials would rather miss the deadline than fail the inspection.”
Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
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Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.
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In the first half of the show, international human rights lawyer Karnig Kerkonian joins the show to discuss Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of the Artsakh Armenians from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Karnig outlines the genocidal intent of President Ilham Aliyev, what the US knew and didn’t do to stop it, and how the international community should respond, not least of all as this year’s climate summit, COP29 is being held so ironically in what Karnig calls the petrol-dictatorship of Azerbaijan. Next up, journalist, researcher and policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent Chip Gibbons joins the show to discuss Israel’s targeted and mass killing of journalists on the ground in Gaza. Chip highlights the vehement hypocrisy with which the US pretends to uphold freedom of the press while not only ignoring the murder of journalists but while pushing for a media blackout and censorship of reports from Gaza.
The post Greenwashing Genocide in Armenia & Targeting the Truth in Palestine appeared first on Project Censored.
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Britain’s only remaining coal power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire generated electricity for the last time on Monday after powering the United Kingdom for 57 years.
The power plant came to the end of its life in line with the government’s world-leading policy to phase out coal power which was first signaled almost a decade ago.
The closure marks the end of Britain’s 142-year history of coal power use which began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, the Holborn Viaduct power station, began generating electricity in 1882.
The shutdown has been hailed by green campaigners as a major achievement for the government in reducing the U.K.’s carbon emissions, providing international climate leadership, and ensuring a “just transition” for staff in Britain’s coal industry.
On Monday, Michael Shanks, the minister for energy, said: “Today’s closure at Ratcliffe marks the end of an era and coal workers can be rightly proud of their work powering our country for over 140 years. We owe generations a debt of gratitude as a country.”
The U.K. became the first country to set an end date for coal power from 2025 after putting in place increasingly stringent green regulations to reduce the running hours of its coal plants.
Read Next Ministers strengthened the U.K.’s leadership on phasing out coal by calling for the deadline to come forward by a year, shortly before the U.K. hosted the U.N.’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow in late 2021.
Ratcliffe’s 170 remaining staff were invited to gather in the canteen on Monday where a livestream from the power plant’s control room showed the moment that its generating units were turned off for the last time.
Peter O’Grady, Ratcliffe’s plant manager, said: “This whole year has been a series of poignant moments. I’m sure there will be a few tears as the whole thing stops and as people leave.”
The coal plant once employed 3,000 engineers but its workforce has declined in line with its power output over recent years. Coal power made up 80 percent of the U.K.’s electricity in the early 1980s, and 40 percent in 2012, before petering out in the last decade due to costly carbon taxes and the rise of cheaper renewables.
“This is the final chapter of a remarkably swift transition from the country that started the industrial revolution,” said Phil MacDonald, managing director of global energy think tank Ember.
A report by Ember found that coal power has halved among member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, since reaching a peak in 2007. Coal power made up 17 percent of electricity generated by OECD countries last year, according to Ember, but 27 of the 38 member states have pledged to be coal-free by the end of the decade.
Ed Matthew, a director at climate crisis think tank E3G, said: “The U.K. was the first country to build a coal-fired power station. It is right that it is the first major economy to exit coal power. This is true global leadership, lighting the path for other countries to follow.”
Tony Bosworth, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: “The priority now is to move away from gas as well, by developing as fast as possible the U.K.’s huge homegrown renewable energy potential and delivering the economic boost that will bring. But this vital green transition must be fair, by protecting workers and benefiting communities.”
Staff were first told in 2021 that the plant would close in late 2022, but Ratcliffe’s owner, the German energy company Uniper, later said it would keep the plant running during the Europe-wide gas crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine under an agreement with the government.
Uniper has worked with unions to help many engineers into new jobs at the company’s other power plants or into training which could lead to work in other areas of the energy industry. More than 100 are expected to remain at the plant to carry out decommissioning work over the next two years.
Michael Lewis, Uniper’s chief executive, said: “For me, Ratcliffe has always been more than just a power station — it has been a pillar of the U.K.’s energy security for decades. Built during a time when coal was the backbone of industrial progress, Ratcliffe powered over 2 million homes and businesses — equivalent to the entire East Midlands region. It played a crucial role in boosting economic growth and supporting the livelihoods of thousands of people.
“This will be the first time since 1882 that coal has not powered Great Britain. As we close this chapter, we honor Ratcliffe’s legacy and the people working here, while embracing the future of cleaner and flexible energy,” he said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The end of an era: Britain’s last coal-fired power plant shuts down on Oct 5, 2024.
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When the bubonic plague reached England in the summer of 1348 — spread by fleas, lice, or infected humans, according to the latest theories — it reached a breeding ground for disease. Londoners’ immune systems had little defense against the new strains of plague that had been circulating throughout Europe, and London’s streets were a cesspit, ringed by overcrowded, poorly ventilated homes. The conditions high in the atmosphere were also conducive for an epidemic. The jet stream, the band of winds that sails above Europe, had shifted dramatically northward, bringing two years of cool, damp summers that sent people indoors, where disease spreads easily. By 1350, the Black Death had killed around a third of England’s population, if not more.
The patterns of Earth’s high winds have surprisingly widespread effects on life on the ground. A recent study in the journal Nature shows that when the summer jet stream over Europe veers north or south of its usual path, it brings weather extremes that can exacerbate epidemics, ruin crop harvests, and feed wildfires.
“The jet stream has caused these extreme conditions for 700 years in the past without greenhouse gases,” said Ellie Broadman, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Arizona. “To me, that’s a little scary, to think about the compound effects of simply adding more heat to the atmosphere and imagining how those extremes might get more extreme in the future.”
Understanding how the jet stream behaved in the past is crucial for figuring out how it might be changing as the Earth heats up. Scientists believe that these fickle high winds are shifting northward and becoming “wavier,” vacillating closer to the poles and then closer to the equator instead of going in a straight line. But it has been hard to draw firm conclusions since real-world measurements of the jet stream only go back 60 years, Broadman said. By that point, greenhouse gas emissions spewed during the Industrial Revolution had already begun to affect its patterns.
For the recent study, however, a team of researchers from the United States, China, and several countries in Europe used data from tree rings to reconstruct the position of the jet stream over the last 700 years. Then they sought to understand how these shifts affected people, comparing the results to records on epidemics, crop yields, and wildfires. According to Broadman, the years that the Black Death raged through England were among the times when the jet stream was the furthest north in the new records, which trace back to the year 1300.
“The big challenge now is to work out how we can really use this new information to test and improve our climate models, and to make more confident predictions about how the jet [stream] might vary in the future,” Tim Woollings, a climate science professor at the University of Oxford who wrote a book about the jet stream, said in an email.
The jet stream’s whims can lead to what the study calls cascading effects. For example, bad harvests can lead to malnutrition, which can compromise people’s immune systems, making epidemics worse. And when people are sick, they can’t work as much in the fields, limiting harvests further. The study points to what happened in Russia in 2010, when a “blocking” pattern in the jet stream — which deflects oncoming weather — caused a prolonged heat wave, exacerbating wildfires and leading to the death of an estimated 55,000 people. In the aftermath, the country’s wheat production plummeted by 25 percent.
A corn field in southern Poland was flooded after intense rainfall from Storm Boris in September 2024. Dominika Zarzycka / NurPhoto via Getty Images That same kind of stalling pattern might have worsened the devastating floods in Central Europe in September, causing Storm Boris to get stuck and dump rain over the same area for days, leading to some of the heaviest rainfall the region has ever seen. Across countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania, the storm led to at least two dozen deaths and caused billions of euros in damage.
Tracking the jet stream’s movement back to Medieval times wasn’t a simple process. The researchers knew that when the jet stream shifts north, it leads to cold, wet summers in the British Isles, and hot, dry ones in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. (When the jet stream veers south, those conditions are flipped.) They also knew that the density of the wood cells in tree rings says something about the type of weather the tree endured that year. During hot, dry weather, trees get stressed, and they start adding on smaller and smaller wood cells, leading to a thin, dense band of wood, Broadman said.
So researchers sampled very old trees in different parts of Europe to see whether they could piece together the position of the jet stream based on that data. After showing that the method worked reasonably well for predicting the past 60 years of jet stream behavior, they used tree rings to estimate the jet stream’s position going back centuries further.
Then they matched up the data with what they knew about European history, examining historical records about diseases, grain prices, and more. They found that the most extreme positions of the jet stream tended to create their own extremes on the ground. In the Mediterranean, for instance, wildfires occurred mostly during the hot, dry years when the jet stream was further north, and grape harvests (and wine quality) were particularly bad during the cool, wet years when the jet stream veered south.
“The very wonderful, convenient thing about working in Europe is that people have been writing things down for a very long time,” Broadman said. “Like, monks in Ireland for centuries and centuries have been writing things down about famine and epidemics.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The shifting jet stream has magnified wildfires and plagues. What’s next? on Oct 4, 2024.
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When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.
The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers could also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.
During his tenure with Al Jazeera, for a time one of the funkiest outfits on the media scene, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation. Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr.
Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic. It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate, a measure that does little to encourage the fierce independence one hopes from either. Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.
With little wonder, Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck. Like so many of his craft, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist. This was stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. It ignored that most obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.
It is for this reason that Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917, intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.
In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) evidence of that ongoing fixation remained. Lazily avoiding the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online,” thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”
It was precisely this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange. Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.
Greste now wishes, with dictatorial sensibility, to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia. Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July, listing Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, as directors.
Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of Executive Director.
A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities. As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains, “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange-hue, a point well spotted by Mary Kostakidis, no mean journalist herself and not one keen on being straitjacketed by yet another proposed code.
Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism”. How will this be done? By showing accreditation – the seal of approval, as it were – from Journalism Australia. In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work. How utterly noble of them.
Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff. Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”
This is a shoddy business that should cause chronic discomfort, and demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate. Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment.
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Vietnam has denounced what it called the brutal behavior of Chinese law enforcement personnel who it said beat and injured Vietnamese fishermen on a boat intercepted near the Paracel Islands.
Vietnamese media said the Chinese attackers boarded the fishing boat near an atoll in the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea on Sunday and beat the crew with iron bars, seriously injuring four of them. They told Vietnamese authorities the men smashed the boat’s equipment and took away its catch.
China denied the accusations saying “on-site operations were professional and restrained, and no injuries were found.”
Both countries, as well as Taiwan, claim the islands but China occupies them entirely.
What are the Paracel Islands?
Known as Xisha in China and Hoang Sa in Vietnam, the archipelago consists of some 130 reefs and small coral islands, 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of central Vietnam and 350 km (220 miles) southeast of China’s Hainan island. They are 760 km (472 miles) north of the Spratly Islands, the other main disputed archipelago in the South China Sea.
The South China Sea is a strategically important shipping route with an estimated US$3.4 trillion worth of trade cruising through its waters every year.
The Paracels are believed to sit on top of large reserves of natural gas and oil though the extent is not known, as there has been little exploration of the area, partly due to territorial disputes over the islands.
The archipelago is surrounded by rich fishing grounds that generations of Chinese and Vietnamese fishermen have worked.
A Vietnamese boat (L) that was rammed by a Chinese vessel and sank near the disputed Paracel Islands, seen near a Marine Guard ship (R) off Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province, on May 29, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Stringer History of the Paracel Islands
Both Vietnam and China say that the Paracels are mentioned in their ancient texts. The name Paracel, however, was adopted in the 16th century after Portuguese explorers named the islands “Ilhas do Pracel”. “Pracel”, or parcel, is a Portuguese term used by navigators to refer to a submerged bank or reef.
France claimed the archipelago as part of the French Indochinese Union in the 19th century and put it under the same colonial administration as Vietnam’s southern mainland, known at the time as Cochinchina. The Chinese nationalist Kuomintang, now one of the main political parties in Taiwan, claimed the Paracels as territory of the Republic of China in January 1921.
Japanese forces occupied the archipelago between 1939 and 1945. Disputes over the islands continued in later years between the governments of the then South Vietnam, which annexed some reefs, and the People’s Republic of China.
On Jan. 19, 1974, Chinese troops attacked and defeated South Vietnamese forces deployed on the islands, killing 74 South Vietnamese sailors and soldiers in the so-called Battle of the Paracel Islands. Chinese troops then occupied the whole archipelago.
China’s construction
In 2012, China established Sansha City, headquartered on Woody Island, the largest Paracel island, which China calls Yongxing. The administrative headquarters is in charge of all of the features China claims in the South China Sea, including the Paracels and the Spratlys to the south.
Aerial view of Sansha in the disputed Paracel chain, on July 27, 2012. (STR/AFP) According to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative think tank, China has at least 20 outposts in the Paracels. Three of them have harbors capable of handling large numbers of naval and civilian vessels and five have helipads. China opened the civil-military Sansha Yongxing Airport in 2014.
Woody Island has been developed into a complete urban hub protected by HQ-9 surface-to-air missile batteries. It is home to a growing civilian population of at least 2,300.
Upgrades of island facilities have included a kindergarten and primary school in 2015. The island also has a courthouse, a cinema, banks, hospitals, post offices and a stadium, according to a report in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post in May 2023.
Vietnam’s claim
Vietnam has not abandoned its claim over the Paracel islands, which it officially classifies as a district of Danang City, called the Hoang Sa District, established in 1997.
In its complaint about China’s treatment of the fishing crew, Vietnam’s foreign ministry referred to the islands as Vietnamese.
“Vietnam is extremely concerned, indignant and resolutely protests the brutal treatment by Chinese law enforcement forces of Vietnamese fishermen and fishing boats operating in the Hoang Sa archipelago of Vietnam,” foreign ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said in a statement on Oct. 2.
An anti-China protest to mark the 43rd anniversary of China’s occupation of the Paracel Islands, in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Jan. 19, 2017. (Reuters/Kham) Confrontations
In one of the most serious escalations of the dispute between Hanoi and Beijing over the archipelago, in May 2014 China moved an oil-drilling platform into waters near the Paracels, leading to a three-month standoff. The crisis triggered an unprecedented wave of anti-China protests in Vietnam, until China withdrew the oil rig a month earlier than scheduled.
Fishing crews from central Vietnam operate around the Chinese-occupied reefs and are often subjected to harassment by Chinese maritime militia and law enforcement personnel, fishermen say.
In 2020, a Chinese maritime surveillance vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat. Vietnam lodged an official protest, saying: “The Chinese vessel committed an act that violated Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Hoang Sa archipelago and threatened the lives and damaged the property and legitimate interests of Vietnamese fishermen.”
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Luna Pham for RFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Vice presidential hopefuls Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and J.D. Vance, the junior Republican senator from Ohio, faced off Tuesday night in New York. It was the first time the two men have debated, and likely the last debate of this year’s race to the White House. The evening began with a decidedly less awkward handshake than the one that kicked off the presidential debate a month ago, and quickly moved into a foreign policy question. One unknown at the outset, however, was to what extent the moderators or the candidates would bring up climate change.
At the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump last month, the climate question didn’t come until the tail end of the candidates’ sparring session. This time it was the second question that moderators asked, and both candidates tacked notably to the political center, with Walz endorsing “an all above energy policy” and Vance seeking to sidestep the question of whether human-caused climate change is happening.
The debate came amid a politically and climatically dramatic few months. Walz and Harris arrived to the race historically late and have been sprinting to make their views on a myriad of issues known, including climate change. And while climate ranks at the bottom of the list of voter concerns, climate change-fueled disasters have been battering the country, from flooding in Vermont to wildfires in California and, most recently, the tranches of devastation that Hurricane Helene wrought along the southeastern United States.
CBS News moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan pegged their question to Helene and pointed to research showing that climate change makes hurricanes “larger, stronger, and more deadly,” as well as polling showing that 7 in 10 Americans favor taking steps to address climate change.
Both candidates responded by expressing their condolences to the victims of the hurricane, with Vance calling it an “unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.” They differed, however, on both the causes and the solutions to the broader climate question.
Vance, who answered first, endorsed a robust federal response to help disasters victims before turning to the bigger picture. He avoided acknowledging the reality of human-caused climate change, instead referring to “crazy weather patterns” and global warming as “weird science.” For the sake of argument, Vance started from the premise that carbon emissions drive climate change — “Let’s just say that’s true,” he said. Vance argued that bringing manufacturing back to the United States would reduce emissions, falsely claiming that America has “the cleanest economy in the entire world.”
In regard to solutions, Vance derided the Biden administration’s incentivization of solar panels because, he said, their components often come from abroad. He alluded to the potential for building new nuclear energy facilities and explicitly called for more energy production domestically, without specifically mentioning oil or natural gas.
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senator from Ohio, at the vice presidential debate. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images If Vance hedged over the reality of climate change, Walz stated the problem emphatically. “Climate change is real. Reducing our impact is absolutely critical,” he said, touting the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest clean energy spending bill in history, which he said “has created jobs across the country.” In an awkward turn of phrase, Walz said, “We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current.”
He did not take the opportunity to highlight his own climate record, which is remarkably lengthy. As governor of Minnesota, he signed legislation that reformed clean energy permitting and requires the state’s utilities to get 100 percent of their energy from clean sources by 2040. Walz also failed to mention his support of the expansion of the Line 3 oil pipeline that runs through Minnesota, which is having the same climate impact as 50 new coal-fired power plants.
Ultimately, the climate consequences of this election could be enormous. It could, for instance, determine how close the U.S., which has emitted more greenhouse gases throughout history than any other country, comes to achieving the dramatic emissions cuts scientists say are needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. And even a casual debate viewer couldn’t miss the two candidates’ divergent views on America’s energy future.
The Democratic ticket has framed combating the climate crisis as a matter of protecting freedom, and has urged the continued investment in clean energy. The official GOP platform, on the other hand, includes a rollback of rules encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles and calls for the United States to become the world leader in oil, gas, and coal production. Some researchers have estimated that a second Trump term could add an extra 4 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2030, compared to a Democratic presidency.
Vance returned to the theme of domestic energy production throughout the debate, at one point saying that one of the quickest ways to address the housing crisis is to “drill, baby, drill.” His closing statement included an anecdote about how when he was growing up, his grandmother didn’t always have enough money to turn on the heat — and he argued that Biden and Harris’ energy policies are making it harder for everyday Americans to afford energy. (The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to save Americans $38 billion in electricity bills by 2030.) Climate and energy did not come up in Walz’s closing statement.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate was a top question at the VP debate. Both candidates actually answered — sort of. on Oct 2, 2024.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – October 1, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.
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