The climate is not only changing globally, it’s changing in Washington. With Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, climate change is on the agenda again. Some Democrats are proposing what they call the Green New Deal, an ambitious and controversial program to transform the nation’s energy supply. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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Month: February 2019
It’s a stretch but with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we thought we’d talk about the heart, but with a tech twist. Each heart is different, and that can make surgery challenging. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports on new technology that creates a 3D model of a specific patient’s heart to help a doctor prepare for surgery.
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Democrats pushed on Tuesday for a nationwide paid family leave system in the United States, the only developed nation that does not guarantee pay to workers taking time off to care for children or other relatives.
The proposal would establish a national insurance program to provide workers with up to 12 weeks paid leave per year for the birth of a child, adoption or to care for a seriously ill family member.
The lack of paid family leave takes a particular toll on women who tend to care for children and aging relatives, and the proposed Family Act would bring national policy in line with other countries, supporters say.
The United States is one of only five nations that have no guaranteed paid maternity leave, the other four being Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, according to the World Policy Analysis Center, a research group at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Family leave legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress in previous years but been unsuccessful.
Now, with Democrats controlling the lower House of Representatives and a record 127 women in the House and Senate, it could have a fighting chance, said Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a sponsor of the bill.
“Now we have a majority. We have a real shot at getting this passed, and I am so optimistic we can get this done,” said Gillibrand in a statement.
Gillibrand recently announced her intention to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Guaranteed paid leave exists in a handful of states but not on the national level.
President Donald Trump has voiced support for six weeks of paid leave but his proposal does not cover care for sick family members.
Opponents say paid leave could be too costly for small businesses to shoulder. Supporters of the Family Act say it could be funded through paycheck deductions at an average weekly cost of $1.50 to workers.
“It’s shameful that America has lagged behind for so long on paid maternity leave,” Toni Van Pelt, head of the National Organization for Women, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy institute, estimates more than $20 billion in U.S. wages are lost each year due to workers lacking access to paid family and medical leave.
One in every four U.S. mothers returns to work 10 days after giving birth, according to Paid Leave for the United States, a group promoting family leave.
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Five months after fire gutted Brazil’s 200-year-old National Museum, the site that once held some of the nation’s greatest treasures remains a ruin of scorched walls, twisted metal and piles of ash.
Museum director Alexander Kellner said Tuesday that plans to rebuild the structure have just gotten underway, starting with a contract to restore the facade. Financial help is being provided by the Brazilian government as well as U.N. cultural agency, which is helping with restoration efforts and building repairs.
“We are very excited about the great prospect of reconstruction,” Kellner said outside the museum.
But the scale of the task was evident as authorities gave journalists a tour through the ruins.
Teams of volunteers are still using large sieves to sort through ash and other debris to hunt for fragments that might have survived the Sept. 2 blaze, working in summer heat with the roof burned away to leave just the sky.
Researchers said in December that they had recovered more than 1,500 surviving pieces, including indigenous arrows, a Peruvian vase and a pre-Colombian funeral urn.
In October, researchers recovered skull fragments and a part of the femur belonging to “Luzia,” the name that scientists gave to a woman who lived 11,500 years ago.
But those are just a tiny fraction of the more than 20 million pieces, including irreplaceable historical documents, that were in the museum when the fire ravaged the building. A large meteorite sits almost intact in the otherwise bare lobby.
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A movie premiering in Berlin tells the true story of a young boy from a famine-stricken village in Malawi who studies books about energy then builds a wind turbine that enables farmers to irrigate their land.
Directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” tells the story of William, an engineering enthusiast who resorts to secretly using the school library to learn when he is expelled from school because his father – a poor farmer – cannot afford to pay the fees.
The farm land around the village gets flooded, ruining the crops, and then later dries out, leaving people with hardly any food. Desperate villagers steal food from William’s family and they end up with just enough for one meal per day.
Less educated villagers doubt William’s turbine idea will work and his father initially refuses to give him the bike – one of the family’s few possessions – that he needs to make it, telling him to start helping on the farm instead of studying.
The father later gives in and William uses the bike, some wood and junk that he finds in a scrapyard to build the towering construction that powers a water pump. At the end of the movie, he climbs the turbine to see green plants shooting out of what was previously dry, cracked and barren land.
“I was struck and continue to be struck by just what an extraordinary achievement it was,” Ejiofor said. “What his story represents is really living in the solution, not living in the problems.”
The film is based on an autobiographical book with the same title written by the real-life William Kamkwamba. Kamkwamba said he hoped people who had not read the book would see the movie and learn about his story, adding: “They might get inspired by my work that I did, so I’m very excited.”
Maxwell Simba, who plays William, said he was struck by William’s determination to fight for what he believes in despite his difficult relationship with his father and despite being expelled from school.
“If you are really determined to go get what you want, then the universe has its own way of working out for you to achieve at the end of the day what you wanted to achieve,” he said.
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American whiskey makers are feeling the pain after their major overseas markets imposed hefty duties on their liquor in retaliation against President Donald Trump’s tariffs on aluminum imports.
U.S. global whiskey exports, which include rye and bourbons, recorded a nifty 28 percent year-over-year increase in the first six months 2018, the Distilled Spirits Council said on Tuesday.
But once levies from Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union took effect, the collective whiskey exports from 37 U.S. states fell by 8 percent in the period from July to November last year, compared with the same five months in 2017, according to the Washington-based industry trade group.
The tariff-induced drop wiped out the overseas sales gain the industry had enjoyed in the first half of 2018, the group’s data showed.
“Tariffs are starting to have a negative effect on exports,” Christine LoCascio, the group’s senior vice president of international trade, told a press conference. “Many of the small distillers have felt the effect on day one.”
In 2017, American whiskey producers exported $1.1 billion worth of their products. Nearly 60 percent was shipped to the EU, 12 percent to Canada and the rest to other countries, including China.
On the other hand, the distillers fared better at home.
In 2018, American whiskey rang up a 6.6 percent increase in revenues from a year earlier to $3.6 billion, the group’s data showed.
In the wake of the EU’s imposing 25 percent tariffs last June, U.S. whiskey exports fell 8.7 percent in the following five months, compared with the same period in 2017.
Canada’s 10 percent duties that took effect on July 1 resulted in an 8.3 percent sales decline in that country for American whiskey producers in the July-November period compared with the same period a year earlier, the group said.
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NASA is trying one last time to contact its record-setting Mars rover Opportunity, before calling it quits.
The rover has been silent for eight months, victim of one of the most intense dust storms in decades. Thick dust darkened the sky last summer and, for months, blocked sunlight from the spacecraft’s solar panels.
NASA said Tuesday it will issue a final series of recovery commands, on top of more than 1,000 already sent. If there’s no response by Wednesday — which NASA suspects will be the case — Opportunity will be declared dead, 15 years after arriving at the red planet.
Team members are already looking back at Opportunity’s achievements, including confirmation water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity was, by far, the longest-lasting lander on Mars. Besides endurance, the six-wheeled rover set a roaming record of 28 miles (45 kilometers.)
Its identical twin, Spirit, was pronounced dead in 2011, a year after it got stuck in sand and communication ceased.
Both outlived and outperformed expectations, on opposite sides of Mars. The golf cart-size rovers were designed to operate as geologists for just three months, after bouncing onto our planetary neighbor inside cushioning air bags in January 2004. They rocketed from Cape Canaveral a month apart in 2003.
It’s no easier saying goodbye now to Opportunity, than it was to Spirit, project manager John Callas told The Associated Press.
“It’s just like a loved one who’s gone missing, and you keep holding out hope that they will show up and that they’re healthy,” he said. “But each passing day that diminishes, and at some point you have to say ‘enough’ and move on with your life.”
Deputy project scientist Abigail Fraeman was a 16-year-old high school student when Opportunity landed on Mars; she was inside the control center as part of an outreach program. Inspired, Fraeman went on to become a planetary scientist, joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and ended up deputy project scientist for Opportunity.
“It gives you an idea just how long this mission has lasted,” she said. “Opportunity’s just been a workhorse … it’s really a testament, I think, to how well the mission was designed and how careful the team was in operating the vehicle.”
Rather than viewing the dust storm as bad luck, Callas considers it good luck that we skirted so many possible storms over the years. Global dust storms typically kick up every few years, and “we had gone a long time without one.”
Unlike NASA’s nuclear-powered Curiosity rover still chugging along on Mars, Opportunity and Spirit were never designed to endure such severe weather.
Cornell University’s Steve Squyres, lead scientist for both Opportunity and Spirit, considers succumbing to a ferocious storm an “honorable way” for the mission to end.
“You could have lost a lot of money over the years betting against Opportunity,” Squyres told the AP Tuesday.
The rovers’ greatest gift, according to Squyres, was providing a geologic record at two distinct places where water once flowed on Mars, and describing the conditions there that may have supported possible ancient life.
NASA last heard from Opportunity on June 10. Flight controllers tried to awaken the rover, devising and sending command after command, month after month. The Martian skies eventually cleared enough for sunlight to reach the rover’s solar panels, but there was still no response. Now it’s getting colder and darker at Mars, further dimming prospects.
Engineers speculate the rover’s internal clock may have become scrambled during the prolonged outage, disrupting the rover’s sleep cycle and draining on-board batteries. It’s especially frustrating, according to Callas, not knowing precisely why Opportunity — or Spirit — failed.
Now it’s up to Curiosity and the newly arrived InSight lander to carry on the legacy, he noted, along with spacecraft in orbit around Mars.
As for Opportunity, “It has given us a larger world,” Callas said. “Mars is now part of our neighborhood.”
The climate in New York City in 60 years could feel like Arkansas now. Chicago could seem like Kansas City and San Francisco could get a Southern California climate if global warming pollution continues at the current pace, a new study finds.
In 2080, North Carolina’s capital, Raleigh, could feel more like Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, while the nation’s capital will have a climate more akin to just north of the Mississippi Delta, if the globe stays on its current carbon pollution trend. Miami might as well be southern Mexico and the beautiful mornings in future Des Moines, Iowa, could feel like they are straight out of Oklahoma.
That’s according to a study Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications that tries to explain climate change better.
“The children alive today, like my daughter who is 12, they’re going to see a dramatic transformation of climate. It’s already under way,” said study lead author Matt Fitzpatrick. He’s an ecology professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Sciences in Frostburg, Maryland, which won’t quite measure up to its name with climate more like current day southern Kentucky.
But if the world cuts back on its carbon dioxide emissions, peaking around 2040, then New York’s climate can stay closer to home, feeling more like central Maryland, while Chicago’s climate could be somewhat like Dayton, Ohio’s.
Fitzpatrick looked at 12 different variables for 540 U.S. and Canadian cities under two climate change scenarios to find out what the future might feel like in a way a regular person might understand. He averaged the climate results from 27 different computer models then found the city that most resembles that futuristic scenario.
He put the results on a website that allows people to check how their nearest city could feel.
“Wow,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini, who wasn’t part of the study. “The science here isn’t new but a great way to bring impacts to the local scale user.”
Biggest change
The 540 cities on average move 528 miles (850 kilometers) to the south climate-wise, if carbon emissions keep soaring. If the world cuts back, the cities move on average 319 miles (514 kilometers).
The city that moves the most is Wasilla, Alaska, which if emissions aren’t cut back could feel like eastern Wisconsin, 11 degrees warmer in the summer. It’s a change of about 2,720 miles (4,379 kilometers).
“Visualizations that tap into our own lived experiences make a lot of sense,” said Oregon State University climate scientist Kathie Dello, who wasn’t part of the study and doesn’t like what it shows for her region. “Telling people in historically mild Portland that the climate in the late 21st century will be more like the hot Central Valley of California is jarring.”
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The governing body for chess launched a campaign on Tuesday for the game to be included at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) called for faster formats of traditional chess, called rapid and blitz, to be included on the Olympic program.
FIDE said in a statement that the game of chess has a “genuine global appeal” and that it has 189 national federations and 600 million people who practice chess globally.
The International Olympic Committee recognized chess as a sport in 1999 and a year later it was an exhibition event at the Sydney Olympics.
A bid by chess officials to be included in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics failed.
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Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell traveled Tuesday to a historically black university in the Mississippi Delta to deliver a message that the nation’s prosperity has not been felt in many such areas around the country.
Powell said that many rural areas had been left out and needed special support, such as access to affordable credit to start small businesses and high-quality education to train workers.
In his comments, Powell did not address the future course of interest rates or the Fed’s decision last month to announce that it planned to be “patient” in its future interest rate hikes. That decision triggered a big stock market rally from investors worried that the Fed was in danger of pushing rates up so much it could bring on a recession.
Addressing the current economy, Powell said that economic output remained solid and he did not feel the possibility of a recession “is at all elevated.” He noted that unemployment is currently near a 50-year low.
“We know that prosperity has not been felt as much in some areas, including many rural places,” Powell said in an address to a conference on economic development at Mississippi Valley State University. “Poverty remains a challenge in many rural communities.”
He noted that 70 percent of the 473 counties in the United States designated as having persistent levels of poverty were in rural areas. Among the problems being faced in the Mississippi Delta, Powell said, were the loss of jobs in agriculture and low-skilled manufacturing because of automation and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.
Powell said many rural communities have limited access to education resources.
“Mississippi is one of several mostly rural states where nearly half of residents lack access to good quality childcare, which is the main source of early childhood education,” Powell said.
Decades of research has shown that children who grow up in areas with better quality K-12 classes and with higher-quality teachers fare better later in life, Powell said. Rural areas also are at a disadvantage because of inadequate work training programs, he said.
“Rural areas where traditional industries are declining and where new employers may be moving in often experience a mismatch between the skills of local workers and those demanded by the new employers,” Powell said.
Powell also noted the impact from a long-term decline in the number of community banks due to consolidation in the industry. The Fed last year held discussions with community leaders in rural areas that had recently experienced the closure of a branch bank.
“We found that small businesses, older people and people with limited access to transportation are most affected,” Powell said.
He said the Fed had renewed its efforts to avoid unnecessary regulations on community banks to make sure federal rules were not contributing to the decline in community banks.
Asked about the Community Reinvestment Act, the 1977 law that requires the Fed and other federal banking regulators to encourage financial institutions to help meet the credit needs of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, Powell said the Fed was committed to finding ways to provide better delivery of credit to under-served communities and not weaken the law.
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The proportion of Americans found to be “alarmed” by climate change has doubled in just five years, the pollsters behind a nationwide survey revealed on Tuesday.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the poll conducted last December by Yale and George Mason universities were in the alarmed category — an all-time high — and twice the percentage of those surveyed in 2013.
More than 1,100 adults across the United States were asked about their beliefs, attitudes and behaviors toward climate change.
The answers were then used to classify respondents into six groups, from dismissive, or least worried about climate change, to alarmed, for those most worried.
Those deemed dismissive of global warming represented 9 percent of respondents, a drop of five points compared to 2013.
‘Green New Deal’
The findings come amid a growing polarization of the political debate over the issue of global warming in the United States.
The decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris climate deal has fired up his base, while opponents have championed a “Green New Deal” that seeks to eliminate the nation’s heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions within a decade.
The 2015 Paris accord, agreed by nearly 200 nations, seeks to wean the global economy off fossil fuels in the second half of this century, limiting the rise in average temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
The increased visibility of global warming such debates generate could explain Americans’ rising concern, said Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor emeritus at Hunter College in New York City.
“The more information you get there more interested that you are,” he said.
Academic research has further shown that growing exposure to bouts of extreme weather may also change minds, he added. “And it results in higher concern.”
Climate change influences economy
Climate change will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, hitting everything from health to infrastructure, according to a 2018 government report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II.
Meanwhile, three of the five costliest hurricanes in the United States — Harvey, Maria and Irma — occurred in 2017, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Commerce Department.
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The U.S. military wants to expand its use of artificial intelligence in warfare, but says it will take care to deploy the technology in accordance with the nation’s values.
The Pentagon outlined its first AI strategy in a report released Tuesday.
The plan calls for accelerating the use of AI systems throughout the military, from intelligence-gathering operations to predicting maintenance problems in planes or ships. It urges the U.S. to advance such technology swiftly before other countries chip away at its technological advantage.
“Other nations, particularly China and Russia, are making significant investments in AI for military purposes, including in applications that raise questions regarding international norms and human rights,” the report says.
The report makes little mention of autonomous weapons but cites an existing 2012 military directive that requires humans to be in control.
The U.S. and Russia are among a handful of nations that have blocked efforts at the United Nations for an international ban on “killer robots” — fully autonomous weapons systems that could one day conduct war without human intervention. The U.S. has argued that it’s premature to try to regulate them.
The strategy unveiled by the Department of Defense this week is focused on more immediate applications, but even some of those have sparked ethical debates.
The Pentagon hit a roadblock in its AI efforts last year after internal protests at Google led the tech company to drop out of Project Maven, which uses algorithms to interpret aerial video images from conflict zones. Other companies have sought to fill the vacuum, and the Pentagon is working with AI experts from industry and academia to establish ethical guidelines for its AI applications.
“Everything we’ve seen is with a human decision-maker in the loop,” said Todd Probert, a vice president at Raytheon’s intelligence division, which is working with the Pentagon on Maven and other projects. “It’s using technology to help speed up the process but not supplant the command structure that’s in place.”
The Pentagon’s report follows President Donald Trump’s Monday executive order prioritizing AI research across the government.
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Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that the U.S. Senate will vote on a Green New Deal introduced by Democrats that aims to slash U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to negligible levels in a decade.
“I’ve noted with great interest the Green New Deal, and we’re going to be voting on that in the Senate, give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal,” McConnell said.
The document introduced last week marked the first formal attempt by lawmakers to define legislation to create big government-led investments in clean energy, infrastructure and social programs. The goal is to transition the U.S. economy away from burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, rising sea levels and severe storms.
The initiative was unveiled by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising political star, and Senator Edward Markey. The initiative has the backing of almost all the Democrats declared as candidates seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential election.
Co-sponsor Markey said McConnell’s call for a vote before hearings and a national debate on the Green New Deal was an attempt to sabotage the plan.
“They have offered no plan to address this economic and national security threat and want to sabotage any effort that makes Big Oil and corporate polluters pay,” he said in a statement.
Republicans have used the Green New Deal to try to sow discord within the Democratic party, painting their political rivals as shifting to the left and embracing extreme policies.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had called the Green New Deal a “green dream” and some Democrats in fossil fuel-dependent or rural districts have stayed quiet on their position.
Republican criticism
Republican Senator John Barrasso, chair of the Senate environment committee, said Democrats were proposing a plan that “raises taxes, that overthrows really a productive energy market that we have right now in this country, raises energy costs, forces people out of work who are working in the energy field.”
Barrasso represents the coal-producing state of Wyoming.
The plan outlines some of the most aggressive climate goals ever put forward by Democratic lawmakers and clashes dramatically with the Trump administration’s efforts to advance domestic oil, gas and coal production by rolling back environmental protections.
Some Democrats hit back at the Republican attempt to call for a vote on the resolution before hearings and debates take place, calling it a “cynical” move.
“Instead of trying to cause mischief, the #Republican Party should put forward its own serious proposal to address #climatechange,” Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse wrote Tuesday on Twitter.
Trump response
President Donald Trump’s administration opposes action on climate change and favors boosting U.S. production of oil, gas and coal.
On Monday, Trump poked fun at the Green New Deal at his campaign rally in El Paso, Texas, making exaggerated claims that the policy would force people to give up air travel and owning cows, a source of methane emissions.
“I really don’t like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane rights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ of you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!” Trump said at the rally.
The name, Green New Deal, references the New Deal of the 1930s that President Franklin Roosevelt implemented to aid Americans suffering in the Great Depression by embarking on huge government-led infrastructure projects.
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The national debt has passed a new milestone, topping $22 trillion for the first time.
The Treasury Department’s daily statement showed Tuesday that total outstanding public debt stands at $22.01 trillion. It stood at $19.95 trillion when President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017.
The debt figure has been rising at a faster pace following passage of Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut in December 2017 and action by Congress last year to increase spending on domestic and military programs.
Michael Peterson, head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, says “our growing national debt matters because it threatens the economic future of every American.”
Peterson said that interest on the national debt already costs more than $1 billion daily, and “as we borrow trillion after trillion, interest costs will weigh on our economy and make it harder to fund important investments for our future.”
The national debt is the total of the annual budget deficits. The Congressional Budget Office projects this year’s deficit will be $897 billion, which would be a 15.1 percent increase over last year’s imbalance of $779 billion. The CBO is projecting that the deficit will keep rising in coming years and will top $1 trillion annually beginning in 2022 and never drop below $1 trillion through 2029. Much of the increase will come from rising costs to fund Social Security and Medicare as baby boomers retire.
The Trump administration contends that its tax cuts will eventually pay for themselves by generating faster economic growth. However, that projection is disputed by many economists.
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“Piranhas,” a film about children wrapped up in the violence of the Neapolitan drugs trade, was inspired by crime journalist Roberto Saviano’s desire to understand the emotional lives of teenagers who knew they were heading for violent early deaths.
The film, based on his novel of the same name, is one of 16 in the running for the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award, and shows the naive beginnings and breakneck escalation of the criminal career of a young boy named Nicola.
“For the first time in international criminal history young kids have got to the highest levels of a criminal group,” said Saviano, author of the best-selling account of organized crime “Gomorrah,” ahead of the film’s premiere on Tuesday evening.
“There have always been children in these organizations but never as bosses. This is a unique case in history and that is what got me to work on it,” added the author, who lives under 24-hour guard because of his organized crime reporting.
Set in Rione Sanita, a deprived area near the center of Naples, the film startles the viewer with each sudden escalation in Nicola’s level of criminality.
The use of amateur actors recruited in the neighborhood itself lends authenticity to the drama, directed by Claudio Giovannesi.
Nicola (Francesco Di Napoli), first sells weed for the local gang so he can ask them to stop demanding protection money from his mother’s laundry shop. Before long, he is torching cars and murdering rivals, even while pursuing a quintessentially teenage romance with neighborhood waitress Letizia (Viviana Aprea).
“What does a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old feel when they make millions of euros, above all when they know they are heading for their death,” asked Saviano. “People are dying at 19 or 20, thinking they have lived a full life.”
Di Napoli said children like the one he portrayed were driven by a sense of having no alternative.
“If you come from an extremely poor family and have nothing at all, you have a hunger within you,” said Artem Tkachuk, who plays another gang member. “The alternative is to have a dream, to be able to fight for something they love.”
Saviano was critical of Italy’s political class for having “given up” trying to offer something for children, leaving them to take their fate into their own hands.
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The makers of “Watergate,” a film about the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, first intended to make a lightly humorous study of the affair. Then came Donald Trump.
The movie, having its European premier at the Berlin Film Festival, recounts the fall of President Richard Nixon, starting with the break-in by thieves seeking material to help his election campaign at the Democratic Party’s offices in Washington’s Watergate complex.
It blends interviews with participants in the affair with original footage and dramatized re-enactments of Nixon’s conversations, using tape recordings from the listening devices the Republican president installed in the Oval Office.
Director Charles Ferguson started making the film before Trump became a candidate. But once the real estate magnate and former reality television star won the White House, Ferguson felt he had to adjust the tone.
“The original film had more humor in it and was more of a real-life political thriller,” he told Reuters on Tuesday. “As all these parallels unfolded … I came to realize that just wasn’t appropriate and I had to make a very serious film.”
Trump’s presidency, like Nixon’s, has been conducted in the shadow of an investigation by a special prosecutor. In Trump’s case, Robert Mueller is investigating Russian influence in the election. Several of the president’s top campaign aides have been indicted or convicted. Trump calls it a witch hunt.
“Watergate – Or: How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President” shows scenes of tense conversations in the Oval Office between a Nixon who is by turns charming, bullying, paranoid or furious, and associates including Henry Kissinger and Bob Haldeman. Nixon is played by the Tony Award-winning British stage actor Douglas Hodge.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporters who first revealed that the Watergate break-in was more than a simple burglary, are also interviewed.
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Barcelona residents had until the end of January to submit suggestions for a plan to redevelop the green spaces of Montjuic, an iconic hill overlooking the Catalan capital.
Few people live on Montjuic itself, which sports a stadium built for the 1992 Olympic Games alongside museums, a castle and recreational areas, but there are dense residential streets at the bottom of the hill.
Inhabitants of those neighborhoods were given the chance to add their ideas on things like transport and environmental protection — both online and at meetings — to a draft of the city council’s action plan for Montjuic.
Barcelona often uses inclusive processes like this to gather citizens’ input on municipal projects — a trend that is growing worldwide at city and national levels.
Recent surveys in Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city, demonstrate that people want, and are able, to take part in shaping urban development.
But with municipal elections to be held in May, Fernando Pindado, commissioner for democracy and active participation at Barcelona City Council, said working methods needed to be strengthened so they remain consistent, no matter which political party is in charge.
And the city is still looking for the best ways to incorporate the views of a wider range of people, he added. “Not all citizens are the same — there are lots of foreigners, some have kids, some don’t,” he said. “The internet is very useful for extending social debates … but not everyone has internet access.”
Berlin’s refugees
Participatory processes are gradually emerging in cities around the world, as digital technology makes them simpler and faster for local authorities to implement.
Getting them to work effectively, however, can be challenging for governments and citizens alike, said Birgit zur Nieden, a commissioner in the Senate of Berlin, which governs the German city.
That was the case when the senate trialed a new way of designing a program to improve the lives of refugees in the capital, she said.
“In 2015, many such people came — and Berlin failed in some regards to attend to their needs well,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The process, which lasted about nine months, involved inviting NGOs and other organizations that interact with migrants to take part in working groups on relevant topics.
The goal was to infuse their knowledge and understanding of refugees’ needs into the city program, she explained.
In practice, the design was complex, and the administration and civil society groups did not find it easy to work productively together, she said.
Nonetheless, it was useful to get to know each other and exchange expertise, she added.
Youthful edge
Beth Noveck, director of the Governance Lab at New York University, said harnessing new technology to engage the wider public in drafting laws was “a global phenomenon.”
But previously authoritarian states like Taiwan and Brazil are experimenting with it the most, she added.
“In countries that have long-established and highly rule-based legislative practices, innovation can be difficult in contrast to countries with younger democratic institutions,” she said.
In Taiwan, artificial intelligence and other technology was used to engage 200,000 people in crafting legislation on company shareholder requirements and internet alcohol sales, for instance, Noveck said.
The government uses an open source tool called Polis, which makes it possible to take the pulse of a large group using an algorithm that clusters their responses.
Brazil is using an app called Mudamos to allow ordinary people to digitally sign proposed bills relating to popular issues such as public cleanliness and municipal transport.
Meanwhile, in January, French President Emmanuel Macron launched a two-month “great national debate,” in response to ongoing “yellow vest” protests largely rooted in dissatisfaction over growing social inequalities.
Through a series of internet-based consultations, workshops and regional conferences, the government is canvassing citizens’ views on key themes including environmental policy, taxation, democracy and public services.
Transparency
In general, participatory processes are being used more at the local level because party politics are less dominant here, with cities like Reykjavik, Barcelona and Bogota pioneering the use of online engagement, Noveck said.
People also find it easier to spot problems, identify solutions and evaluate legislation that directly affects their daily lives, she noted.
But in Barcelona, for example, there is still a lack of transparency over how the proposals gathered are used, according to a research project into participatory processes called CrowdLaw Catalog, led by the Governance Lab.
In recent years, which ideas made it into the Municipal Action Plan and why has not been clear, the Catalog said, noting a statistical model could be used in future to measure this.
Barcelona City Council’s Pindado said the Spanish city had found it useful to set up an independent body to monitor citizen consultations, boosting confidence they would be protected from political interference.
While the level of public interest always depends on the topic, “we’re getting to a point where these participatory processes are no longer dependent on the government’s will,” he added.
“Sexist” data is making it harder to improve women’s and girls’ lives, the world’s leading philanthropic couple Bill and Melinda Gates said Tuesday in an open letter.
The couple warned that a lack of focus by researchers on gender and a disdain for what were perceived as “women’s issues” were resulting in “missing data” that could lead to better decisions and policies, enable advocacy and measure progress.
“The data we do have — data that policymakers depend on — is bad. You might even call it sexist,” Melinda Gates wrote in their annual letter discussing the work of their foundation, one of the largest private charities in the world.
Gender inequality is one of the greatest barriers to human progress, the United Nations said last year, with studies showing that when girls stay in education, they have more opportunities and healthier children, which boosts development.
But data often does not take gender into account and is flawed by biased questions, said the husband and wife team behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Because women in developing countries are primarily seen as wives and mothers, most of the data about them focuses on their reproductive health, not their earnings and assets, they said.
“You can’t improve things if you don’t know what’s going on with half the population,” wrote Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corp.
The couple said mobile phones offered a powerful tool to allow women to build new connections, gain economic freedom and challenge restrictive social norms, for example by buying contraceptives online.
“If you’re a woman who has never stepped into a bank, mobile banking offers you a foothold in the formal economy and a chance at financial independence,” said Melissa Gates.
“You gain opportunities to connect with customers, trainings, and professional organizations — all from your home.”
Safe toilets
Toilets also emerged as a feminist issue, with the couple hailing a next generation of facilities which can kill pathogens and produce useable by-products such as fertilizer.
Safe toilets worldwide would especially benefit women and girls, they said, who risk assault while using public facilities or may be forced to skip school when on their periods.
International aid groups agreed more of a focus on women and girls was needed.
“We can’t improve what we fail to measure,” Richard Morgan, international advocacy director at the child rights charity Plan International, told Reuters.
“Bringing visibility to girls and women is the first critical step in improving their lives.”
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