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‘Double standards’: Western coverage of Ukraine war criticised
Social media users accuse the media of hypocrisy in its coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine compared with other conflicts.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/2 ... -criticism
Noam Chomsky:US Military Escalation Against Russia Would Have No Victorshttps://truthout.org/articles/noam-chom ... o-victors/
...škoda že si tohle nepřečtou lidé jako Bc.Lipavský
Ikea’s Race for the Last of Europe’s Old-Growth Forest. The furniture giant is hungry for Romania’s famed trees. Little stands in its way.
Logging season in Romania runs seven months, from mid-September through April, a frenzy of chain saws chewing through millions of spruce, pine, oak, maple, beech, fir. Some of the wood is cut legally; most of it is not, and violence between the logging industry and its opponents breaks out often. Early this season, two Bucharest-based documentary filmmakers, working on a project about the illicit wood trade, set out to find a large, treacherous-looking clear-cut in Suceava, a northern county where some of the country’s largest sawmills are based and where Ikea owns thousands of hectares.
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In an accident of geography and history, Romania is home to one of the largest and most important old-growth forests left in the world. Its Carpathian mountain chain, which wraps like a seat belt across the country’s middle and upper shoulder, hosts at least half of Europe’s remaining old growth outside Scandinavia and around 70 percent of the continent’s virgin forest. It’s been referred to as the Amazon of Europe, a comparison apt and ominous in equal measure, because of the speed at which it, like the Amazon itself, is disappearing.
Most of Europe was rapidly deforested during the industrial era; less than 4 percent of EU forestland remains intact. Romania, far enough from the continent’s industrial centers and long a closed-off member of the Soviet bloc, remained a shining exception. During the country’s communist period, the government converted the forests to public ownership and kept them off global export markets, enshrining the forest management trends of an ancien regime. The result is that Romania retains some of the rare spruce, beech, and oak forests that qualify as old- or primary-growth, having never been excessively logged, altered by human activity, or artificially replanted.
But the fall of communism in 1989 dissolved one layer of protection for those forests, and the subsequent wave of privatization inaugurated widespread corruption. In 2007, Romania’s entry to the European Union created a massive, liberated market for the country’s cheap, abundant timber and the inexpensive labor required to extract it, conditions that encouraged Austrian timber companies and Swedish furniture firms to set up shop. Succeeding fractious, ineffectual regimes enacted further pro-market reforms and did little to curb corruption; in the final months of 2021, the country’s prime minister designate found himself unable to form a government at all. Add to that the astronomical growth of the fast furniture industry, which particularly relies on the spruce and beech that populate these forests, and the result has been a delirium of deforestation.
There’s one obvious, notable beneficiary of this situation: Ikea. The company is now the largest individual consumer of wood in the world, its appetite growing by two million trees a year. According to some estimates, it sources up to 10 percent of its wood from the relatively small country of Romania, and has long enjoyed relationships with mills and manufacturers in the region. In 2015, it began buying up forestland in bulk; within months it became, and remains, Romania’s largest private landowner.
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As is often the case in trades dominated by illegality, violence is never far behind, and around the time of Ikea’s purchases, a wave of high-profile, logging-related attacks commenced. In 2015, Romanian environmentalist Gabriel Paun was beaten unconscious by loggers in an ambush caught on camera; he eventually fled the country and has spent years living in hiding. Doina Pana, the former minister of waters and forests, announced that she had been poisoned with mercury in 2017 after attempting to crack down on illegal logging. In late 2019, two forest rangers, Raducu Gorcioaia and Liviu Pop, were murdered in separate attacks in the span of just a handful of weeks.
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With so little formal law enforcement—Romania’s Forest Guard was chartered in 2015 as a 617-person unit that doesn’t work nights or weekends—the task of protecting the forests has often fallen to activists and volunteers, a responsibility that has proved treacherous. All told, at least six patrolmen have been killed in recent years; in another 650 registered incidents, people have been beaten, shot at, or otherwise attacked in relation to illegal logging. Neither 2019 case went to trial; Paun’s attackers, caught on film, remain free.
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One might think the [European Commission] infringement proceeding would slow deforestation; if anything, the opposite has been true. The threat of new legislation that would protect both privately and publicly owned old-growth forests has sparked a race to extract timber from those areas as quickly as possible. In 2018, an infringement hearing from the commission shut down all logging in Poland’s Bialowieza forest, also an old-growth Natura 2000 site, after evidence emerged of logging 100-year-old trees. “Obviously, there is now increased pressure,” Andrei told me. “If you want to remove large volumes of wood without being asked questions, you do it now. If you wait until next year, you might not be able to do it.” Logging in a given area can degrade the surrounding forest enough to make it ineligible for protection, and this adds further motivation.
[reportáž]
That reality is critical for the furniture industry, which is forecast to grow from $564 billion in 2020 to $850 billion by 2025. It’s especially important for Ikea, which is not only the largest furniture company in the world, but the largest buyer and retailer of wood. Having doubled its consumption in the last 10 years, it now devours 1 percent of the world’s timber annually, with a particular regional reliance on Romania and its surrounds. “Ikea’s growth goes really hand in glove with the forestry sector in Eastern Europe and Russia,” said Tara Ganesh, head of timber investigations at the U.K.-based NGO Earthsight. Ganesh has worked on multiple investigations of the company, whose presence in the region, she said, is “massive.”
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The company’s reliance on FSC certification as a working synonym for sustainability helps explain. A small international NGO, the FSC sets a standard based on its 10 principles—for example, compliance with national laws, a commitment to enhancing the well-being of workers, an updated forest management plan—that is then conferred upon forestry operations by smaller, independent auditors, who are contracted by the logging and manufacturing companies to perform preannounced, scheduled reviews. If those groups refuse to grant certification, logging operations can simply shop around until they find an auditor willing to take the check and confer the stamp. Perhaps it goes without saying that such a system initiates a race to the bottom. Ever since the FSC came into being in 1993, it has provoked criticism among environmentalists; in 2018, Greenpeace called the organization “a tool for forestry and timber extraction.” It doesn’t help that Ikea is the largest wood consumer in the FSC network and was a founding member of the council. (Ikea “is only one of 1000+ members,” a spokesperson for FSC wrote me. “Our global standards are discussed and agreed by our members globally.”)
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Ikea bought its land from an unlikely source: the Harvard University endowment, which snatched up Romanian property after a post-communist land restitution law left an antic privatization system in its wake, handing over half of the country’s public forestland to private interests. Starting in 2004, the university, using various shells and nonprofit formations, began buying big with the help of a Romanian businessman, Dragos Lipan. A number of these holdings were fire sales of dubious restitution claims, and Harvard soon found itself in legal hot water. By 2015, Lipan had received a three-year suspended sentence for bribery and money laundering related to those deals, and Harvard was in court fighting for the legitimacy of its claims. The same year, the university, ready to wash its hands of the deal, found a willing buyer in Ikea. With an investment arm, the company purchased almost 34,000 hectares from Harvard. In 2016, it added another 12,800 hectares to its haul, bringing its holdings to 46,700 hectares in total. Today, the largest owner and operator of Ikea retail stores, Ingka Investments, has an estimated 50,000 hectares in its portfolio. As the holdings have changed hands, the stain of illegality has grown fainter and fainter. The company faces no serious risk of losing those holdings in court.
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Alexander Sammon
February 16, 2022
The New Republic
The New Filter Mandate Bill Is An Unmitigated Disaster
The new proposal, cynically titled the SMART Copyright Act, gives the Library of Congress, in “consultation” with other government agencies, the authority to designate “technical measures” that internet services must use to address copyright infringement. In other words, it gives the Copyright Office the power to set the rules for internet technology and services, with precious little opportunity for appeal.
Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported. Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark.
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These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.
Neural implants—devices that interact with the human nervous system, either on its periphery or in the brain—are part of a rapidly growing category of medicine that’s sometimes called electroceuticals. Some technologies are well established, like deep-brain stimulators that reduce tremors in people with Parkinson’s disease. But recent advances in neuroscience and digital technology have sparked a gold rush in brain tech, with the outsized investments epitomized by Elon Musk’s buzzy brain-implant company, Neuralink. Some companies talk of reversing depression, treating Alzheimer’s disease, restoring mobility, or even dangle the promise of superhuman cognition.
Not all these companies will succeed, and Los Angeles–based Second Sight provides a cautionary tale for bold entrepreneurs interested in brain tech. What happens when cutting-edge implants fail, or simply fade away like yesterday’s flip phones and Betamax? Even worse, what if the companies behind them go bust?
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Spectrum pieced together Second Sight’s story by interviewing half a dozen patients, a company cofounder, and eight doctors or researchers involved with the company. In their telling, the company took hundreds of patients on a roller-coaster ride of technological innovations, regulatory successes, medical and financial setbacks, and a near-total meltdown. Now, as the company fades away, the future of high-tech vision implants seems blurrier than ever.
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At the nonprofit Lighthouse International, a senior fellow in vision science named Aries Arditi was a principal investigator for the Argus II clinical trial. Arditi says his experiences with patients slowly soured him on the technology. He tells Spectrum that in his decades of work with people who were born sighted and later lost their vision, he’s learned that “they often develop a desperate hope for something that will help and are willing to try anything.” Arditi feels that Second Sight promised more than it delivered. “I found it very disturbing that [Second Sight] sold so many of these devices to patients who were relying on hope rather than proven performance.”
Arditi also says that he did a research study including nearly all the U.S. participants in the Argus II clinical trial that showed “weakness” with the device’s vision quality. He says Second Sight wouldn’t let him publish or present the results; the company says it disagreed with his analysis and discouraged him from publishing.
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Greenberg’s relationship with Second Sight’s investors had been worsening over the years; he stepped down as CEO in 2015 and then left the board of directors in 2018, a move that he has characterized as a forced departure but that he declined to discuss with Spectrum because of a non disclosure agreement (NDA).
On 18 July 2019, Second Sight sent Argus patients a letter saying it would be phasing out the retinal implant technology to clear the way for the development of its next-generation brain implant for blindness, Orion, which had begun a clinical trial with six patients the previous year. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding that trial as a $6.4 million project over five years.
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In February 2020, the senior director of implant R&D left the company, swiftly followed by its CEO. On 30 March, Second Sight laid off the majority of its remaining employees and announced its “ intention to wind down operations,” citing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its ability to secure financing. Within weeks, most of its physical assets—including manufacturing equipment, scientific instruments, laptops, and shelving—went up for sale at auction.
Second Sight didn’t inform any of its patients of the company’s collapse. “No letter, email, or telephone call,” Ross Doerr wrote on Facebook after weeks of fruitlessly trying to contact the company. “Those of us with this implant are figuratively and literally in the dark.”
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Failure is an inevitable part of innovation. The Argus II was an innovative technology, and progress made by Second Sight may pave the way for other companies that are developing bionic vision systems. But for people considering such an implant in the future, the cautionary tale of Argus patients left in the lurch may make a tough decision even tougher. Should they take a chance on a novel technology? If they do get an implant and find that it helps them navigate the world, should they allow themselves to depend upon it?
Abandoning the Argus II technology—and the people who use it—might have made short-term financial sense for Second Sight, but it’s a decision that could come back to bite the merged company if it does decide to commercialize a brain implant, believes Doerr.
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Eliza Strickland Mark Harris
February 15, 2022
IEEE Spectrum
Rollups: A Chinese Corner in Chassis and Containers
Effectively all standard containers used in global shipping are made by Chinese state-owned enterprises. The dangers of that circumstance revealed themselves during the pandemic.
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This can be counteracted with abundant supply of core equipment: containers and chassis. But an unheralded report from a commissioner on the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) reveals a shocking truth: Almost all of the containers and chassis in the world are made in China, by state-owned monopolies that have the power to manipulate prices and weaken global rivals.
Three large Chinese companies—CIMC, Dong Fang, and CXIC—produce approximately 82 percent of all containers, according to the report. Combined with some smaller firms, China makes over 95 percent of these containers, and the only other ones produced are for specific regional markets or in nonstandard sizes.
So essentially all standard-sized containers used in global shipping, roughly 44 million boxes, were manufactured in China, as well as around 86 percent of all intermodal chassis. China’s state-owned container manufacturers benefit from large government subsidies and other benefits. And in seemingly coordinated fashion, they slowed production of new containers when demand initially rose during the pandemic, leading to prices nearly doubling from early 2020 to today.
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The seeming manufacturing suppression coincided with a host of shipping delays in the pandemic. Initially, as spending of all kinds slowed in the lockdown, fewer vessels were put into service to transport goods. This meant that empty containers stayed at ports and were not repositioned to where they would be needed. When demand spiked as consumers turned to goods spending over services, equipment was not available where it needed to be to move those goods along. China in particular has major needs for empty containers because of its trade surplus.
The surge also led to large backups at the ports that can handle mega-ships. Every day a large container ship sits in the ocean means that those containers are out of operation. Reduced workforce at the ports due to chronic COVID infections and safety measures also slowed the turnaround time for containers, from 60 days to 100 days. Whereas a container once did 10 to 12 round trips across the Pacific annually, that number went down to three to five round trips.
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Shipping companies that were “desperate for more capacity” raised prices to account for the lack of availability. Increased ocean shipping rates alone are responsible for 1.5 percent of global inflation, according to a U.N. report, which doesn’t take into account increases for trucking and rail and other cargo fees.
The shortages put container prices at a premium. In the second quarter of 2021, prices for a 40-foot container were $6,500, the highest level on record and four times the pre-pandemic rate. They settled down, but even now, according to the FMC report, the average price is $3,500 per cost equivalent unit, up from $1,800 in early 2020.
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The craziest part of the Chinese container and chassis monopolies is that they are standard goods, with standard dimensions and parts that are easily understood. It is simply not the case that only China can make containers or chassis. But the subsidization of the industry means they can significantly undercut rivals; and once their monopoly is secured, they can turn the dial on production to boost prices and harm competing exporters. Because reliability is central to a functioning supply chain, this monopoly endangers global commerce.
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The chassis market doesn’t start in the same place as containers, where really nothing is produced outside of China. The report notes that a new “smart” container, with tracking and security features and built with composite materials, has begun production in Maine, and there are similar efforts just under way in Europe. But competing against state-owned and -subsidized companies is difficult. And steel being more than half the cost of a container, as well as cheap Chinese steel given over to their container “national champions,” creates a bigger struggle.
Yet, Bentzel concludes, “the level of interconnectivity” in container shipping “poses the greatest threat to economic welfare,” and “the fact that the PRC controls an industry that has a near defacto worldwide monopoly in the production of shipping containers should be deeply concerning.” This dependence on China, just like Europe’s dependence on Russia for natural gas, could prove unsustainable.
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More realistically, breaking the container monopoly could align with the general business shift to diversify suppliers, rely more on domestic production, and avoid single points of failure in the supply chain. If more production is moved onshore, the impetus to build containers near those manufacturers would increase. And virtuous circles around domestic steel and other inputs could form.
It’s incredible that anyone could manage to secure a monopoly on a 40-foot box. But as the promise of globalization reveals itself as problematic, these absurdities may finally be rooted out.
David Dayen
April 6, 2022
The American Prospect
The Latest Threat to Independent Online Creators Is the Filter Mandate Bill
This filter mandate bill would task the Copyright Office with designating technical measures (DTMs instead of STMs) that internet services must use to address copyright infringement. Both the Copyright Office proceeding and this bill have the potential to result in the same thing: more copyright filters.
We speak with human rights and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who was released Monday from nearly 1,000 days of house arrest as part of a years-long legal ordeal that began after he successfully sued Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorian Amazonian Indigenous people. Donziger calls his misdemeanor sentencing and arrest “a retaliation play by Chevron and some of its allies in the judiciary,” meant to intimidate other human rights advocates and lawyers from pursuing environmental justice. “Chevron tried to use me as what I would say is a weapon of mass distraction so people wouldn’t focus on the environmental crimes they commited in Ecuador,” continues Donziger, who says, “I didn’t really understand freedom until it was taken away.”
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My disbarment was based on a finding of one judge here in New York who contradicted the findings of 28 appellate judges in Ecuador and Canada. But on that basis, I had my law license taken without a hearing. So one of the things I’m going to be focused on is getting my law license back. That said, I’m still in a position to advocate to help my clients. I’m not going to court anyway. There are other members of our legal team that play that particular role. But it is important to establish the principle that a human rights lawyer who does this kind of frontline important human rights work and Earth defense work not be disbarred, not be jailed for doing his or her job. And that’s what happened to me.
And I will say the larger issue — you know, this case goes well beyond me. I want to be very clear about that. Chevron tried to use me as what I would say is a weapon of mass distraction, so people wouldn’t focus on the environmental crimes they committed in Ecuador. This goes way beyond me, because, ultimately, if we allow this type of private corporate prosecution — I was prosecuted, by the way, not by the U.S. government, which rejected the charges against me that were filed by a federal judge, who then appointed a private law firm that had Chevron as a client. And that was my prosecutor, which explains this extraordinary length of detention for a misdemeanor. You know, I was in detention 993 days for a misdemeanor crime. I assert my innocence, but even if I were guilty, the maximum sentence is 180 days. So why was I in for 993 days?…
Amy Goodman
April 26, 2022
Democracy Now!
https://ria.ru/20220426/gaz-1785592763.html
Začíná to být zajímavé. Poláci nezaplatili za plyn a tak jsou bez dodávek. Cenu plynu to samozřejmě zvedá i nám.
‘We Can Only Be Enemies’
One family’s experience of Vladimir Putin’s invasion offers a path to the end of the war.…
Soldiers ordered the terrified villagers to the surface, and then threw a grenade into the cellar, targeting any hidden Ukrainian soldiers. The Horbonoses—Irina, 55; Sergey, 59; and their 25-year-old son, Nikita—spent the next night in a neighbor’s cellar, but it was so wet and cold that they returned to theirs. Upon arrival, they found five Russian soldiers living inside.
“Where are we meant to live?” Irina asked. “This is our home.” The soldiers told the Horbonos family that they could return home—they could all live there together. And so the Horbonoses moved back in.
They would spend about three weeks with those five Russian soldiers, eating together, walking together, talking together. The Russian soldiers would make nonsensical declarations about their mission and ask alarmingly basic questions about Ukraine, yet also offer insights into their motivations and their morale; the Horbonoses would push back on their claims, angrily scream at them, and also drink with them, using that measure of trust to prod at the soldiers’ confidence in Vladimir Putin’s war.
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The Horbonoses’ home, a house they had been building for 30 years, was completely destroyed; their library burned for two days before collapsing into rubble. When Irina couldn’t take it anymore, she would begin to cry and scream at the soldiers in the darkness of the cellar: “We had everything! What are you doing here?” The Russians would only sit in the dark, silent.
One morning, she took them with her to gather wild herbs for tea. As they walked through what little was left of the Horbonoses’ lives, the soldiers apologized for all the destruction they had brought. It would be so much better, one said, if they could someday visit as guests. Sergey was livid. “You’ve come here to kill me and destroy my home,” he said, “and we are meant to be friends? We can only be enemies.” The Russians again apologized, and soon all of them began to say that the war was senseless. They even began calling it a war.
The Horbonos family also got unusual insight into the Russians’ motivations. When I asked Sergey what he thought drove them, he was unequivocal. The soldiers, he said, were propelled not by national pride or expansionary zeal but by money.
The soldiers all said they had debt—mortgages, loans, medical bills—and needed their army salaries. Even those wages weren’t enough. Their job as mechanics was to repair tanks, but their skill set meant they were also proficient at taking them apart. During breaks in the shelling, they would find damaged or destroyed Russian vehicles and smelt down plates with gold wiring. One plate would get them 15,000 rubles, or about $200, back home.
Other Russian soldiers were less creative. On the day the Russian army left the village, many grabbed everything they could. Their tanks were piled high with mattresses and suitcases; their armored vehicles were stuffed full of bedsheets, toys, washing machines. (When the Tatar soldier came to say goodbye, he told Sergey that he would soon retire, and promised to send the Horbonoses part of his pension.)
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The situation in the Horbonoses’ cellar was unique. Russians rarely have to confront reality or their victims so directly. But the Horbonoses’ experience points to a possible strategy to engage the Russian people—and speed up the end of Putin’s wars.
Counterintuitively, the war is not necessarily the topic to focus on. Instead, the issues that affect Russians’ lives and define their behaviors are what really matter—mortgages, medicine, schools, their children’s future, and their desire to be part of the wider world.
For his system to work, Putin depends on millions of people, including doctors, soldiers, academics, and police officers, to all be motivated and play along. That motivation is being sucked out of the system. Whether Putin has the repressive mechanisms necessary to rule purely through fear is unclear: The prisons are already packed. The endgame in Russia doesn’t involve anything as dramatic as regime change, to say nothing of revolution. All it needs is for people to stop pulling their weight, because they can see that the government is no longer competent or acting in their interests. (Something similar happened in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s: The system seized up as people gave up on it, leading to elites changing course. Back then, a senseless war in Afghanistan catalyzed despondency. Today, Ukraine could play an analogous role.)
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Backing the (now largely exiled) independent Russian media is vital. In the past, these outlets and organizations have typically appealed to an already prodemocracy audience. They and others must be encouraged to engage groups outside the liberal bubble, who have their own priorities.
It’s not just the agendas and audiences that need considering; it’s the genres too. We all know how the Kremlin conducts its foreign information war, using troll farms, conspiracy-peddling state media, and abusive officials who belittle and insult anyone who dares to criticize them. Democratic governments’ efforts to reach everyday Russians have to be utterly different. Think online town halls involving ordinary Russians, where Western celebrities who have large Russian fan bases, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose recent video appeal to his Russian fans got millions of views) envision a different Russia. Think responsive media, where Russians can ask for details about what is happening at the front, and receive evidence-based answers. Think online forums, where doctors discuss how ordinary people can manage the looming Russian health crisis, or YouTube channels where psychologists delve into the psychological stresses that Russians are experiencing.
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Peter Pomerantsev
May 1, 2022
The Atlantic