#New top story from Time: ‘It’s So Good to Be Home.’ Journalists Working for Australian

[oddcoupler222]

Do you have any book recs like yours and w. epic love scenes like yours?

I appreciate anything I’ve written being called epic in any way :) 

I don’t really know if I could accurately compare any books I’ve read to my own but I do have some book recs that I adore! I’ll give you my top ten lesfics for some variety

- Behind the Green Curtain by Riley LaShea (my ultimate fave romance)

When Caton’s sleazy boss offers her a position as his wife’s personal assistant, she accepts the job with reservations, certain Jack Halston has ulterior motives. After meeting Jack’s wife Amelia, though, it’s Caton’s motivations that begin to unravel. As vicious as she is beautiful, Amelia threatens Caton’s position and her sense of decorum. As the attraction between the two women spirals into a torrid affair, Caton is drawn deeper into Jack and Amelia’s world of privilege and prestige, where everything is at stake and nothing is what it seems. 

- All That Matters by Susan X  Meagher

Life is going damned well for Blair Spencer. She's a very successful real estate agent, happily married to a man who encourages her to live the independent life she loves; and they're actively working to have a baby. The wrench in the works is that Blair favors adoption, while her husband David desperately wants to have a biological child. The fates are against them, and they finally seek the help of a group of reproductive specialists. One of the doctors, a surgeon named Kylie Mackenzie, eventually becomes a good friend to Blair. And she needs all of the friends she can get when things start to go horribly wrong at home. As her marriage teeters on the brink of collapse, she relies more and more on Kylie's friendship. Kylie's happily gay; Blair's happily straight. But the way they structure their relationship leads friends and family to privately question whether the pair is setting themselves up for heartache. They eventually come to a crossroads, which could either destroy their friendship or turn it into what each of them has been seeking. The question is whether each woman can change her view of herself and her needs. The answer is all that matters.

- Alone by EJ Noyes 

Half a million dollars will be Celeste Thorne’s reward for spending four years of her life in total isolation. No faces. No voices. No way to leave.

Since Celeste has never really worried about being alone, the generous paycheck she’ll receive for her participation in the solitary psychological experiment seems like easy money.

When she finds an injured hiker in the woods bordering her living compound, her strictly governed world is thrown into disarray. But even as she struggles with the morality of breaking the rules of the experiment, Celeste can’t deny her growing attraction to the kind and enigmatic Olivia Soldano. Still, how much can you really trust a stranger? And how much can you trust yourself when you know all the faces you’ve seen and voices you’ve heard for the past three years have only been your imagination?

But what’s real? Celeste’s reality may lie somewhere between the absolute truth and a carefully constructed deception. (the concept of this is just INcredible. and the execution as well - perfect)

- The Goodmans by Clare Ashton

The lovely doctor Abby Hart lives in her dream cottage in the quintessential English border town of Ludbury, home to the Goodmans. Maggie Goodman, all fire and passion, is like another mother to her, amiable Richard a rock and 60s-child Celia is the grandmother she never had. But Abby has a secret. Best friend Jude Goodman is the love of her life, and very, very straight. Even if Jude had ever given a woman a second glance, there’d also be the small problem of Maggie – she would definitely not approve. But secrets have a habit of sneaking out, and Abby’s not the only one with something to hide. Life is just about to get very interesting for the Goodmans. Things are not what they used to be, but could they be even better? (there are not one but TWO perfectly written romances intertwined in this *chef kiss*)

- Pretending in Paradise by M Ullrich

When travelwisdom.com assigns PR specialist Caroline Beckett and travel blogger Emma Morgan to cover a hot new couples retreat, they're forced to fake a relationship to secure a reservation. Ten days in paradise would be a dream assignment, if only they'd stop arguing long enough to enjoy it. Reputations are Caroline's business. Too bad she was forced out of her previous job when an ex smeared hers all over the office grapevine. She's never getting involved with a coworker again, especially not one as careless and unprofessional as Emma. Emma knows that life is too short to play by the rules. But when she goes too far and a defamation lawsuit puts her job in jeopardy, she has to make nice with Caroline, the image police, and deliver the best story of her career.

Only pretending to be in love sure feels a whole lot like falling in love. When their story goes public, ambition and privacy collide, and their chance at making a fake relationship real might just be collateral damage. (there’s just SOMETHING about this that is super freaking cute)

- The Brutal Truth by Lee Winter

Australian crime reporter Maddie Grey is out of her depth in New York, miserable, and secretly drawn to her powerful, twice-married, media mogul boss, Elena Bartell, who eats failing newspapers for breakfast. As work takes them to Australia, Maddie is goaded into a brief, seemingly harmless bet with her enigmatic boss—where they have to tell the complete truth to each other. It backfires catastrophically.

A lesbian romance about the lies we tell ourselves.

- The Red Files by Lee Winter (kudos to her for being the only author that makes it to this list with two separate books)

Ambitious Daily Sentinel journalist Lauren King is chafing on LA’s vapid social circuit, reporting on glamorous A-list parties while sparring with her rival—the formidable, icy Catherine Ayers. Ayers is an ex-Washington political correspondent who suffered a humiliating fall from grace, and her acerbic, vicious tongue keeps everyone at bay. Everyone, that is, except knockabout Iowa girl King, who is undaunted, unimpressed and gives as good as she gets. One night a curious story unfolds before their eyes: One business launch, 34 prostitutes and a pallet of missing pink champagne. Can the warring pair work together to unravel an incredible story? This is a lesbian fiction with more than a few mysterious twists. (as someone who is usually pretty bored by any plot other than the romance, I actually enjoyed this mystery)

- Tricky Wisdom/Tricky Chances by Camryn Eyde

(for tricky wisdom)  Darcy Wright is a closeted lesbian who has been infatuated with her best friend, Taylor, since junior high. Leaving her small northeast Minnesota town for Harvard in a quest to become a doctor, she moves in with med-student Olivia Boyd, a neurotic, anal, gigantic pain in the backside. The first year of juggling medical school is grueling, but it’s nothing compared to living with Olivia.

Coming out to her friends and family with an anti-climactic flop, Darcy uses her newly publicized sexuality to try and win Taylor’s affections through an ill-hatched scheme that crosses uncomfortable lines. The result is as unexpected to Darcy as Darcy’s affinity for medicine is to Olivia.

The first year of medical school is a nerve-wracking encounter in medicine, learning lessons the hard way, and finding what her heart desires.

Tricky Chances is the sequel to Wisdom, but it’s the only lesfic sequel that i truly felt added to the first one and was just as gripping! Plus, the first book is only 48k words so the followup is perfect to come right after

- Who’d Have Thought by G Benson

Top neurosurgeon Samantha Thomson needs to get married fast and is tightlipped as to why. And with over $200,000 on offer to tie the knot, no questions asked, cash-strapped ER nurse Hayden Pérez isn’t about to demand answers.

The deal is only for a year of marriage, but Hayden’s going into it knowing it will be a nightmare. Sam is complicated, rude, kind of cold, and someone Hayden barely tolerates at work, let alone wants to marry. The hardest part is that Hayden has to convince everyone around them that they’re madly in love and that racing down the aisle together is all they’ve ever wanted. What could possibly go wrong? (this book comes in 9th because i don’t love it QUITE as much as i do all the others, but it was the one that got me into lesfic so! it’s good stuff)

And in a guest pick from the only other voracious lesfic reader i know, @debbie-eagan - 

Beautiful Dreamer by Melissa Brayden - 

Philadelphia real estate broker Devyn Winters is at the peak of her career, closing multimillion-dollar deals and relishing it. She’s pretty much blocked out her formative years in Dreamer’s Bay, where the most exciting thing to happen was the twice a year bake sale. Unfortunately, a distress call hauls her back home and away from the life she’s constructed. Now the question is just how long until she can leave again? And when did boring Elizabeth Draper get so beautiful?

Elizabeth Draper loves people, free time, and a good cup of coffee in the warm sunlight. In the quaint town of Dreamer’s Bay, she’s the only employee of On the Spot, an odd jobs company. She remembers Devyn Winters as shallow in high school, but now everything about Devyn makes her lose focus. Though her brain knows Devyn is only home temporarily, her heart didn’t seem to get the memo (I’m personally not a huge Brayden fan but a lot of other lesfic readers are so I reached out for a second opinion on this matter)

I hope you enjoy!

[phooll123]

(CANBERRA, Australia) — The last two journalists working for Australian media in China have left the country after police demanded interviews with them, the Australian government and their employers reported on Tuesday.

Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s Bill Birtles and The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith landed in Sydney after flying from Shanghai on Monday night, both news outlets reported.

Both had sheltered in Australian diplomatic compounds in recent days.

The journalists left after Australia revealed last week that Australian citizen Cheng Lei, business news anchor for CGTN, China’s English-language state media channel, had been detained.

Australian embassy officials in Beijing told Birtles last week that he should leave China, ABC reported.

Birtles was due to depart Beijing on Thursday and was holding a farewell party on Wednesday when seven police officers arrived at his apartment and told him he was banned from leaving the country, ABC said.

Birtles was told he would be contacted on Thursday to organize a time to be questioned about a “national security case,” ABC said.

Birtles went to the Australian embassy where he spent four days while Australian and Chinese officials negotiated.

Birtles agreed to given police a brief interview in return for being allowed to leave the country.

Smith had similarly holed up at the Australian consulate in Shanghai.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne confirmed that her government had provided consular support to the two journalists to assist their return to Australia.

“Our embassy in Beijing and Consulate-General in Shanghai engaged with Chinese government authorities to ensure their wellbeing and return to Australia,” she said.

Australia’s travel warning of the risk of arbitrary detention in China “remains appropriate and unchanged,” she added.

ABC news director Gaven Morris said Birtles was brought back to Australia on the Australian government’s advice.

“This bureau is a vital part of the ABC’s international newsgathering effort and we aim to get back there as soon as possible,” Morris said.

“The story of China, its relationship with Australia and its role in our region and in the world is one of great importance for all Australians and we want to continue having our people on the ground to cover it,” he added.

The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury and editor Paul Bailey described the situation as “disturbing.”

“This incident targeting two journalists, who were going about their normal reporting duties, is both regrettable and disturbing and is not in the interests of a co-operative relationship between Australia and China,” they said in a statement.

Relations between China and Australia were already strained by Australia outlawing covert interference in politics and banning communications giant Huawei from supplying critical infrastructure. They have worsened since the Australian government called for an independent inquiry into the origins of and international responses to the coronavirus pandemic.

Birtles told reporters at Sydney airport that his departure was a “whirlwind and … not a particularly good experience.”

“It’s very disappointing to have to leave under those circumstances and it’s a relief to be back in a c country with genuine rule of law,” Birtles said.

Smith told his newspaper: “The late-night visit by police at my home was intimidating and unnecessary and highlights the pressure all foreign journalists are under in China right now.”

Smith said at the airport he had felt “a little bit” threatened in China.

“It’s so good to be home, so happy, I can’t say any more at the moment, it’s such a relief to be home, so really happy,” Smith said.

“It was a complicated experience but it’s great to be here,” he added.

[blog-cosmosuniverse1]

THE STUPIDITY HAS NOT BEEN LIMITED TO CANADA AND THE USA

THE STUPIDITY HAS NOT BEEN LIMITED TO CANADA AND THE USA

With more and more disastrous results from the vax, the world is starting to crumble.

It will not last much longer in the USA because Americans, used to freedom from tyranny, will not put up with this nonsense much longer.

Will Canada be able to follow?  Our coming election may just turn the tide to get our freedoms back from the stupidity.

A Prison IslandAustralia is going back to its 1788 history as a penal colony, isolated and cut off from the world. Today, the island is once again home to prisoners—25 million of them.Australia’s first big step away from democracy came when international borders closed in March 2020. International arrivals have been limited ever since. The decision was made under the Biosecurity Act. In an emergency, the health minister is granted sweeping powers to prevent and control the arrival of diseases. When covid-19 arrived, the government was quick to test that power to its full potential.All those arriving are subjected to two weeks of quarantine at their own expense, costing thousands of dollars. More troubling still, the government has banned most people from leaving. Australia has one of the harshest border policies in the world. By banning its own citizens from going to otherwise welcoming countries, Australia is taking a page out of North Korea’s book.With the public safely contained, the government could turn its hand to the economy.Economic SuicideAustralia’s covid-19 response has delivered a staggering blow to the economy. Repeated snap-lockdowns have decimated businesses and families alike. Often giving less than a day’s notice, state leaders are forcing businesses to lock down on the spot. Only businesses deemed “essential work” can remain open in such times. For many, these measures are unsustainable. The result is an unemployment rate that has risen to 5.5 percent.Retail and hospitality have recorded an astounding 25 percent drop in income.During the latest lockdown, the federal government paid families au$700 per week to cope with the effect of being confined to their homes. To put that in context, the average rent in Sydney is $520 per week. Meanwhile, the unelected “health officials” who advise the state governments continue to rake in $12,000 per week.Between the loss of business and the government aid, the past two months have cost the government $17 billion. That represents a 2.5 percent hit to the gross domestic product in the September quarter. Sydney alone is bleeding out $1 billion per week.Economists and politicians are quick to assure the public that the economic suicide will be well worth it. “We’ve avoided 48,000 deaths on a per capita basis compared to what’s gone on in other countries, so you have to keep all of this in perspective,” amp Capital chief economist Shane Oliver told the Sydney Morning Herald. This is the opposite of perspective.Australia is a nation of 25 million people. Tens of thousands of families have had their savings obliterated. Countless businesses have been shut down for good. The elites who provide this “perspective” are not taking into account the debt future generations will be left with. Tens of thousands of lives are truly being destroyed.Normalizing MadnessTo keep the broader nation on their side, the federal and state governments must continually barrage the public with facts and figures. Every state has its daily briefings, where the waiting journalists are peppered with “new hot spots,” “case numbers” and “new restrictions.” (The death toll is rarely mentioned since it is so low.)The barrage of facts and misleading figures serves to normalize the increasingly deranged decisions made at the top levels of the Australian government. And the public seems blithely unaware—or at best accustomed—to the hysteria.But just take a snapshot of recent comments and consider if Australians would have stood for such nonsense two years ago.Victorian Premier Dan Andrews used his August 22 press conference to warn Australians of the risk of a sunny weekend: “Sunday is going to be quite a nice day, at home. … Otherwise, it will be lots of Sundays spent in hospital.” Such a statement two years ago would have garnered a deep belly laugh from Perth to Point Danger, but not anymore. We have become acclimatized to the madness.The South Australian chief health officer warned that spectators shouldn’t catch a football kicked into the crowd

lest they catch covid-19. You can’t sing karaoke, but you can sing at a wedding. You can eat in public, but it has to be sitting down.Perhaps we could laugh if the ramifications were not so dire. But the lunacy takes an increasingly dark tone when it is backed by action.Last week a rescue shelter in New South Wales shot all its dogs to prevent people traveling in to adopt them. A man who was videotaped sneezing in an elevator became the subject of a nationwide manhunt. Weddings, funerals, travel and other such vital and meaningful events in life are being limited or banned. Loved ones cannot visit a senior care facility or hospital without a jab. You can’t have guests in your house. Workplaces are moved from an office to home. Schools are either closed or kids must wear masks.The daily interactions that mankind not only desires but needs are being curtailed. The mental and emotional damage to the national and individual psyche is evident in the spike in depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide.God makes an explicit warning to our leaders in the end time: “Woe to those who issue harsh decrees, penning orders that oppress, robbing the weak of their rights and defrauding the poor of their dues” (Isaiah 10:1; Moffatt translation). God will not sit idly by while a nation like Australia—which once knew God through its ties to the British Empire—carries on down such a path.Australia keeps pushing on, driving a deep wedge into our communities. In states such as Queensland, mask wearing has become mandatory. A muffling barrier of light blue wherever you go is a good example of the barrier now forming in human relationships. The covid-19 crisis is, according to Joe Biden, “a crisis of the unvaccinated.” The mentality is very much the same in Australia.As vaccination rates gradually rise, more pressure is being applied to those who have refused the jab. The federal government has promised not to make the jab mandatory. However, Canberra has given businesses the green light to fire people who refuse.In the community, it is breeding an “us vs. them” mentality. The media is quick to stir the pot with a name-and-shame campaign. Lockdown violators are not just subjected to the iron fist of the law, but their lives are also plastered over the Internet. This happened two weeks ago with an “illegal” engagement party in Melbourne and a church group gathering in Sydney.The bitter divide is only set to widen as communities are punished for their low vaccination and high infection rates.Police StateAs frustration mounts against the state and federal governments, protests have begun to spark. To quell the dissent and enforce their non-science, nonsense policies, the states are turning to overwhelming police force.While most mainstream media refused to cover the story, videos have emerged of the heavy-handed response against unarmed lockdown protesters on the streets of Melbourne. More than 700 police descended on the protest, some on horseback and many more in full riot gear. With police helicopters overhead, the masked police forces fired rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray into the crowds.In disturbing scenes last month, a 12-year-old girl was pepper-sprayed by police after she and her sister refused to wear a mask at a western Sydney shopping center.In many of the lockdown cities, residents are limited to a 3-mile radius from their home. To enforce this, police are being taken away from other duties. Images of three or four police officers surrounding a sunbather or someone sitting alone on a park bench are becoming commonplace. One man of Polish descent told me his mother remembered having to carry papers to show the Nazis if you ever wanted to leave your own suburb. While Australia is no Nazi-Germany, there is no denying Australia is sliding down a path toward authoritarianism or even totalitarianism. And anyone who stands up against such measures is being shut down, shut up and shut in.As the police clamp down, remember that since mid-July Australia has averaged roughly

1.5 covid deaths per day, in a country of 25 million people. In the words of Tucker Carlson, “That has been enough to justify the end of Australia and totalitarianism.”The CureAs the nation continues to undergo its ghastly transformation, we are told by our political elites that there is cause for cheer. At 70 percent vaccination, we are assured the nation will unlock—maybe. Or when state health officials see lower numbers, they throw tidbits to the masses. For instance, last week New South Wales State Premier Gladys Berejiklian proclaimed that those who are vaccinated will receive a welcome reward; they can visit a hairdresser again. As if in some way this is good news in the light of all the aforementioned man-made catastrophe.Australia is the perfect example of a nation being poisoned to death by its own cure.Where is the hope? After all, in the nuclear age there are far more destructive forces than the coronavirus. The Bible is full of such warnings for us today. If Australia cannot handle covid-19, how can it stand up to a real threat like China? The truth is, there is no hope in man.

[davidjjohnston3]

7.24.2021'Reflections of a Russian-Romantic-Orthodox-Post-Soviet Obstetrician / Aspiring Catholic-Post-Reformation-Unified-Church Pediatric Neurosurgeon (Divider of Freak-Conjoined Child-Brains) cum. Bethlehem College and Seminary M. Div. Global Studies + Savior of Worldwide North Korean Studies + Policy  + Final Flaming Sword Destroyer of Democrat Intellectual Arrogance, Child-Hate, God-Hate and Anti-Korean Racism' Flaming swords that divide people, change the world, change souls... Russia's determination to remember tragedy as well as mercy and a spirit of gentle adoption whereby they treat students and other young people much different from what I did; also Russian anti-Nazism - everlasting I imagine - in an age when respect-me-or-die attitudes, moral purity, intellectual hubris and Scientism, messianic corporatism and much else are either being accelerated or badly necromanced as everyone tries to settle every little score (an easy way to forget all the starvation, organ-harvesting, betrayal of human promise that is going on every second).  I'm only writing this because it's 7:08 in the morning and it's easier to write than not to write.  Lately I developed the habit of 'Holding the Dream' to paraphrase the title of a Nora Roberts novel about children that I tried to turn in to 'Project 521' in a gentler time.  I read a C.S. Lewis essay though I forget which one, perhaps 'Home,' about being known.  When I read this essay at night it reminds me of a more trusting whole time as does Knausgaard's 'A Time for Everything' whose title is a joke at several levels; a book I'll finish reading, if I even finish 'Autumn' which is my favorite work of his about an unborn daughter, a 'notebook-letter-bouquet' which is a genre I appreciate.For a while I felt I was close to greatness and that my mind and heart were in unison with those I most respect around this globe such as Chancellor John Piper with respect to abortion-culture - playing God - but no matter what I say this is a Maoist era in which power has to be backed by guns or other 'hard' resources.  I was also compelled or perhaps tempted to provide background for my spiritual development which in retrospect attracted 'assassins' who were only interested in cherry-picking my worst moment. I honestly came to feel that there is some 'unconditional evil, unconditional hatred' in some that makes them - no matter how nobly they speak or how hard they worked in the past - determined to destroy something at the end rather than build something or help someone or do what they said they would do.I wondered if I blasphemed someone or something so that God allowed the Prince of Darkness through these people, every professing Christians or family-members.  People are talking about spirit and intellect and insight but forget that Lucifer has all these in abundance.  I've had some delusions and kept responding to people outside of myself.  I learned a lot about people whom understanding was without purpose or profit as a) telling them to themselves, that their expectations were wrong or criminal or sadistic or nihilistic or of the party of 'the protest of ultimate futility' - the messaging whereby someone says ultimately nothing matters or you don't matter - was never going to alter their mindsb) this increased experience of human / spiritual evil didn't really constitute increase of knowledge, wisdom, understanding but only more 'CCP-esque pimp-love lie-fare gas-lighting brain-damage; brick to the head' or to put it more gently a wrong emphasis of factors which distorted mood or disposition as an orchestra with good rehearsal, preparation, and conductor could be eroded in the wrong hands over time, and people were just trying to wear me down in a 'Bleed France White' war of attrition against everything I've tried to be and do  I also realized of late the time had come to give up certain perquisites that I had had in mind to one day gain or 'help myself to.'  At the bottom of my soul I guess I always wanted to cash in; someone else on FB after the miraculous sparing of my life in 2012 started spreading around an experience that I had had with a student in 2012 which was nothing like the K-wave NC-17 version could have been the CCP deepfake character-assassination pretext for WW3 or Covid unrestricted biowarfare against white guys.  Words can't fly back in to the mouth that once let them out and at this point I have no idea what my legacy could be - or in a way hopefully no one even cares anymore although I suspect they keep some version of the story somewhere for a dinner-party IDK why I am saying this; you can reason with some people / try and teach them but if they have no compelling reason to change they might just savage youI wondered lately whether some people really believe.  They want life but their interpretation / understanding or imago of life - who knows?  'Tomorrow will be like today only more so' (Isaiah, mutatis mutandis).  They might love life or hate life but they want it and they also often don't care where it comes from, which is part of why right now the debate over social justice or the fact that so much in the United States comes from outside of the United States, or the fact that poor Millennials et al. are often still unable to get married and have children while Boomers ride emperor-on-palanquin- style on top of the Social Security system and reproach us for believing, like the title of a novel about Shanghai, 'What We Were Promised' at the breakfast-table or in (public, Democrato-Maoist-intellectual-town-bike-fruitbasket) schools about freedom, self-esteem, magic - world peace, nuclear disarmament, the 'salvation' of the natural environment, outer space, technology, non-traditional families, racial reconciliation, international adjudication of breaches of international law and esp. enforcement of human rights.  It struck me several times in recent months and years that the rulers, the sovereigns, the princes and great captains of the nations I admire such as Israel and Korea were often either a) special forces soldiers (such as Moon Jaein, Ehud Barak)b) human rights lawyers (Roh Moohyun, Moon Jaein again)c) spies (the individual who might actually have closest to total control of world-events right now; or at least the ultimate veto of everything and everyone, with variable selectivity and specificity / detail) I don't know if I was overreacting or what; I was comfortable with my 'modest income' from mental illness and felt adequately justified since I was engaged in respectable activities; I felt I hadn't really had a moment's rest in life since I was about 4, constantly shot at, judged, abused, thrown to wolves etc. and blamed for my own problems since I 'didn't "make" daddy____.'   I even believed I had a chance to re-emerge since everyone amid Covid appears to be essentially on the same side.  Before recent events I event felt an 'FDR-moment' / 'New Deal moment' was feasible under Biden though I now see clearly I believe that JRBJr. can't control his underlings, staff, et al. as FDR was able to do; and America and the world are simply too complicated.  Vladimir Putin was saying - and he doesn't always lie - basically that constitutional democracies are too weak.  Neoliberal+ shills, 'Wahh bureaucracy, Milton Friedman, grist for our mill, cliche, cliche, eat the poor, abandon the weak, post-partum-abortion, God is dead' but a lot of these people are part of a bureaucracy as well and Russia's got government bureaus, CCP does, Korea does.  Anyone who ever loved or admired Confucius or studied China knows - though many such as Ezra Vogel and Tu Weiming and some dumb-ass Australians and Indian-Singaporean pervert this knowledge for pleasure and profit - what can be achieved through sincere, spiritual, loving, reverent, educated, talented, qualified, also beauty-loving, statecraft.I guess the only question in a way is whether Microsoft themselves have nuclear weapons or Google built the guidance-systems or something and that's not an LRB title though if I had lived a purer life to this point I might be on staff there or at least they'd welcome me in the cake-shop.  Howbeit at this point my 'last wish' is kind of to die in Korea where they journalists are NOT affected or mercenary, and the rag-picking of ppl like me is not fake or ultimately egocentric / meretricious / simulacrum or sham-virtue (again I hate to talk about Nietzsche since I wanted to move on to just David Platt, Saint Augustine, John Piper, John MacArthur, global Christianity 2022).  Korea's also, I noticed, a country where the Covid body-account appears to be honest and I know for a fact, as Dr., Prof, much else Eric Feigl-Ding has been talking about on Twitter about 25 hours a day, a country in which the Democrat mentality of 'you got sick you're stupid' or the Milwaukee mentality of 'you got sick bypass watch you die joke at bar but we're still good Christians South Park Satan must be good to be evil sometimes' isn't in effect and people have resolved to do everything they can both to prevent and to mitigate as well to contain or pocket though no one wants to talk much about that.  Like I said the other day I wish I were in Korea; I also had a dream about one of those free-standing station-stops in rural Japan that reminded me of 'Cafe Lumiere' by Hou Hsiao Hsien and a conversation I had with Prof. Ban Wang fmr. Rutgers and last I checked Stanford about how Japan had built these intricate rail-systems in order to help preserve rural culture.  Another good film about rural Japan is 'Hanamizuki' although IDK if post-Covid anyone is going to want to talk again about micro-sized kindergartens, the Iraq War, fishing, the meanings of trees, following through on commitments or promises, or returning gratitude and love.  IDK whether the stuff I read over the last 5-10 years about housing-prices in places like rural Japan or, alternatively, Vladivostok are as low as I've read but if they have good internet I might go if only b/c  people there aren't interested in teaching you every lesson or extracting the max. from you then leaving you to die in the name of 'getting to know one.'  There's a short Somerset Maugham book called 'The Moon and Sixpence' though I don't admire Maugham that much and prefer his literary criticism / critical appreciations of other writers and cultures to his fiction but it feels like what some people are looking for today is more like 'huge amounts of money, charming personality, offer we can't refuse, satisfying sexual favor or we either vivisect you or pozz you up with 1st-gen anti-psychotics / kill you with ECT and still deny the exist of God, as well as demons.'My other privileged Millennial friends are all mad at me for not bearing fruit and my 'last love' said I dishonored my parents but Koreans  & maybe they don't get just how much Mark Johnston et al. are totally committed to reversing course at the most destructive possible moments and never paying what they said they'd pay; like how terrorists will sometimes detonate one bomb for the civilians and another for the first responders on the scene - though maybe I just ran out of chances.

[pemdasblog]

PEMDAS -- 11•19•20

Welcome to the new PEMDAS Blog! My work on PEMDAS keeps expanding each week so it needs a bigger home. She loves The Overwhelm.

My main goal is to have a one glance spot for all things news/entertainment. I want it to contain as much detail as possible without being too cluttered. Striking the balance is hard. If you have feedback, please share it with me.

Open below for PEMDAS!

POLITICS/NEWS 

U.S. Coronavirus Numbers

More than 11,695,500 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 251,100 have died.

The number of people who have died from Coronavirus in the U.S. is equivalent to 84 times the number of U.S. citizens who died in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It is 56 times the number of U.S. soldiers who died in the war against Iraq. It is 7 times the number of U.S. citizens who died from the flu last year.

On Nov. 18: 1,923 deaths (+52% 14-day change), 172,391 infections (+77% 14-day change)

The rates of infection and death remain disproportionately high in the Native American communities across the country. Just last weekend, 600 Native people died on the Navajo reservation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley from Iowa has contracted coronavirus. The nation mourns :-(

Global Coronavirus Numbers

The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 56,661,800 people, according to official counts. As of Thursday afternoon, at least 1,355,100 people have died.

On Nov. 18: 11,133 deaths (+13% 14-day change), 598,877 infections (+25% 14-day change)

Election 2020

President-Elect Biden claims that Trump’s refusal to concede the election is preventing him from accessing critical data about the U.S. outbreak and that this could slow the vaccine distribution process.

President-Elect Biden names Cecilia Muñoz as part of his transition team. Muñoz served as a top immigration advisor for Obama, justifying harsh immigration policies, including the deportation of thousands of Central American children and the killing of an executive order that would have halted deportations.

Nancy Pelosi is re-elected as Speaker of the House.

World News

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo toured an illegal Israeli settlement and said he has plans to tour another in the occupied Golan Heights. This violates multiple U.N. resolutions and the Geneva Conventions. He also labelled the B.D.S. movement “anti-Semitic.”

In Central America, at least 30 people have died from Hurricane Iota. About 160,000 Nicaraguans and 70,000 Hondurans were forced to flee from their homes.

The head of the Australian military has apologized to the people of Afghanistan after Australian special forces committed war crimes by killing 39 noncombatants in Afghanistan over the past 4 years.

A nearly three-decade-old ceasefire has ended in occupied Western Sahara — what many consider to be Africa’s last colony. Fighting has broken out in several areas between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement seeking independence, after the Moroccan military broke into a no-go buffer zone in southern Western Sahara.

Winners of the National Book Awards 2020

Fiction: Interior Chinatown •• Charles Yu

Nonfiction: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X •• Les Payne and Tamara Payne

Translated Literature: Tokyo Ueno Station •• Yu Miri and Morgan Giles

Young People’s Literature: King and the Dragonflies •• Kacen Callender

EDUCATION — Topic: this Candace Owens tweet

“There is no society that can survive without strong men. The East knows this.“

Both of these sentences separately are not true; both of them together are not true.

Here is an article about a village in China (”the East”) with women running the show.

Here is a list of several others, mostly in “the East.”

“In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence.“

First of all, Marx has not been an outright advocate for a gender-queer society.

Second of all, I think she’s right. Socialism and gender/queer theory are intertwined in so many ways.

“It is an outright attack.“

And I think she’s right about this, too. Socialism and gender/queer theory all are an attack on the cis-hetero white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

“Bring back manly men.“

Okay, this is where I think she’s wrong again.

1) "Manly men” haven’t gone anywhere...

2) Is she basically arguing that a couple of men wearing dresses means every man is no longer “manly?” This makes no sense.

3) In a society, “manly men” can coexist with “feminized” men. There is enough room for everyone. And there will always be men who want to take up the “manly” MANtle. And there will be queer/trans masc people who will want to do the same, though I’m sure Candace would hate that.

MEDIA (OTHER) 

BOOKS - Tuesday, November 24

Ready Player Two •• Ernest Cline

How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (Folk of the Air) •• Holly Black

Saving Freedom: Truman, the Cold War, and the Fight for Western Civilization •• Joe Scarborough

Bright Shining World •• Josh Swiller

Ruinsong •• Julia Ember

The Awakening (Dragon Heart Legacy #1) •• Nora Roberts

Dark Tides •• Philippa Gregory

Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology •• edited by S.B. Divya & Mur Lafferty

The Thirty Names of Night •• Zeyn Joukhadar

MOVIES

Friday, November 20

Jiu Jitsu •• Dimitri Logothetis •• In Theaters

The Last Vermeer •• Dan Friedkin •• In Theaters

Run •• Aneesh Chaganty •• Hulu

Soros •• Jesse Dylan •• In Theaters

Sound of Metal •• Darius Marder •• In Theaters

The Twentieth Century •• Matthew Ranking •• In Theaters

Vanguard •• Stanley Tong •• In Theaters

Sunday, November 22

Belushi •• R. J. Cutler •• Showtime

Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square •• Debbie Allen •• Netflix

Monday, November 23

Shawn Mendes: In Wonder •• Grant Singer •• Netflix

Tuesday, November 24

Hillbilly Elegy •• Ron Howard •• Netflix

Wednesday, November 25

The Christmas Chronicles 2 •• Chris Columbus •• Netflix

The Croods: A New Age •• Joel Crawford •• In Theaters

Happiest Season •• Clea DuVall •• Hulu

Stardust •• Gabriel Range •• In Theaters

Thursday, November 26

Mosul •• Matthew Michael Carnahan •• Netflix

Superintelligence •• Ben Falcone •• HBO Max

TV SHOWS

Friday, November 20

Animaniacs •• Season 1 •• Hulu

The Mandalorian •• Season 2, Episode 4 •• Disney+

Marvel’s 616 •• Season 1 •• Disney+

The Pack •• Season 1 •• Prime Video

Small Axe •• Mangrove •• Prime Video

Voices of Fire •• Season 1 •• Netflix

Saturday, November 21

Between the World and Me •• Special •• HBO

Sunday, November 22

American Music Awards 2020 •• Special •• ABC

Host: Taraji P. Henson

Performances

Bad Bunny x Jhay Cortez

Bebe Rexha x Doja Cat

Bell Biv DeVoe

Billie Eilish

BTS

Dan + Shay

Dua Lipa

Jennifer Lopez x Maluma

Justin Bieber x Benny Blanco

Katy Perry

Lewis Capaldi

Lil Baby

Machine Gun Kelly

Megan Thee Stallion

Nelly

Shawn Mendes

The Weeknd x Kenny G

Monday, November 23

Black Narcissus •• Miniseries •• FX

His Dark Materials •• Season 2, Episode 2 •• HBO

Tuesday, November 24

Big Sky •• Season 1, Episode 2 •• ABC

Wednesday, November 25

Saved by the Bell •• Season 1 •• Peacock

The Wonderful World of Disney: Magical Holiday Celebration 2020 •• Special •• ABC

Hosts: Derek Hough, Julianne Hough, Trevor Jackson

Sneak peek of Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure attraction and of Pixar’s Soul

VIDEO GAMES

Friday, November 20

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity •• NS

Katamari Damacy REROLL •• PS4, XBO

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin •• PS4, NS

The Skylia Prophecy •• NS

Monday, November 23

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands •• PC

Tuesday, November 24

Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues •• NS

Football Manager 2021 •• XBX, XBO, PC, Mac

Just Dance 2021 •• PS5, XBX

Wednesday, November 25

Out of Space: Couch Edition •• PS4, XBO, NS

Star Renegades •• PS4

Vigor •• PS4

Thursday, November 26

Maid of Sker •• NS

DIRECT ACTIONS/DONATIONS 

Give $5 to... Unicorn Riot: on-the-ground journalists covering and capturing footage of the revolution!

ALBUMS 

separated from her twin, a dying android arrives on a mysterious island [EP] •• Ada Rook

distanceless gentleness

time dilation

total memory failure

otherworld

Self Help •• Badge Époque Ensemble

Sing a Silent Gospel (ft. Meg Remy & Dorothea Paas)

Unity (It’s Up to You) [ft. James Baley]

Cloud

The Sound Where My Head Was

Just Space for Light (ft. Jennifer Castle)

Birds Fly Through Ancient Ruins

Extinct Commune

BE •• BTS

Life Goes On

내 방을 여행하는 법

Blue & Grey

Skit

잠시

병

Stay

Dynamite

Hypoluxo •• Hypoluxo

Seth Meyers

Ridden

Nimbus

Tenderloin

Appetizer

Night Life

Pointer Finger

Shape Ups

Shock

Sweat

Harmony •• Josh Groban

The World We Knew (Over and Over)

Angels

Celebrate Me Home

Shape of My Heart (Duet with Leslie Odom Jr.)

Your Face

Both Sides Now (Duet with Sara Bareilles)

She

The Impossible Dream

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

It’s Now or Never

I Can’t Make You Love Me

The Fullest (feat. Kirk Franklin)

Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞ •• Kali Uchis

la luna enamorada

fue mejor (w/ PARTYNEXTDOOR)

//aguardiente y limón %ᵕ‿‿ᵕ%

¡aquí yo mando! (w/ Rico Nasty)

vaya con dios

que te pedí//

quiero sentirme bien

telepatía

de nadie

no eres tu (soy yo)

te pongo mal (prendelo) [w/ Jowell y Randy]

la luz (Fín) [w/ Jhay Cortez]

ángel sin cielo

III •• Lindstrøm x Prins Thomas

Grand Finale

Martin 5000

Small Stream

Oranges

Harmonia

Birdstrike

Good News •• Megan Thee Stallion

Shots Fired

Circles

Cry Baby (ft. DaBaby)

Do It on the Tip (ft. City Girls)

Sugar Baby

Movie (ft. Lil Durk)

Freaky Girls (ft. SZA)

Body

What’s New

Work That

Intercourse (ft. Popcaan)

Go Crazy (ft. Big Sean & 2 Chainz)

Don’t Rock Me To Sleep

Outside

Savage Remix (ft. Beyoncé)

Girls in the Hood

Don’t Stop (ft. Young Thug)

Copycat Killer [EP] •• Phoebe Bridgers x Rob Moose

Kyoto (Copycat Killer Version)

Savior Complex (Copycat Killer Version)

Chinese Satellite (Copycat Killer Version)

Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)

Euphoric Sad Songs [EP] •• RAYE

Love Me Again

Change Your Mind

Regardless (ft. Rudimental)

Secrets (ft. Regard)

Natalie Don’t

All Dressed Up

Please Don’t Touch

Walk on By

Love of Your Life

Dimensional Stardust •• Rob Mazurek - Exploding Star Orchestra

Sun Core Tet (Parable 99)

A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling

Galaxy 1000

The Careening Prism Within (Parable 43)

Abstract Dark Energy (Parable 9)

Parable of Inclusion

Dimensional Stardust (Parable 33)

Minerals Bionic Stereo

Parable 3000 (We All Come From Somewhere Else)

Autumn Pleiades

While the World Was Burning •• SAINt JHN

Sucks to Be You

Switching Sides

Freedom Is Priceless

Gorgeous

High School Reunion, Prom (ft. Lil Uzi Vert)

Monica Lewinsky, Election Year (ft. A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie & DaBaby)

Roses (Remix) [ft. Future]

Pray 4 Me (ft. Kanye West)

Quarantine Wifey (ft. JID)

Time for Demons

Ransom (ft. 6lack & Kehlani)

Back on the Ledge

Roses (Imanbek Remix)

ALIAS •• Shygirl

TWELVE

SLIME

FREAK

TASTY

LENG

BAWDY

SIREN

Coping Mechanisms •• Tayla Parx

Sad

Dance Alone

System

Stare

Fixerupper

Bricks

Residue

Justified

NonChalant

Nevermind

Last Words

You Don’t Know

LIVE DRUGS •• The War on Drugs

An Ocean Between the Waves (Live)

Pain (Live)

Strangest Thing (Live)

Red Eyes (Live)

Thinking of a Place (Live)

Buenos Aires Beach (Live)

Accidentally Like a Martyr (Live)

Eyes to the Wind (Live)

Under the Pressure (Live)

In Reverse (Live)

SINGLES

NEW

“Revolutionary Love” •• Ani DiFranco

“Dido’s Lament” •• Annie Lennox

“My Head & My Heart” •• Ava Max

“Endless Me, Endlessly” •• Baio

“What Do You Say When I’m Not There?” •• Baio

“45” •• Bleachers

“chinatown” •• Bleachers x Bruce Springsteen

“Thousand Pills” •• Boldy James x Stove God Cooks

“gf haircut” •• dad sports

“Scratchcard Lanyard” •• Dry Cleaning

“Angel Rock” •• Dua Saleh

“Best Rapper in the Fuckin World” •• GoldLink

“Anywhere” •• Hannah’s Little Sister

“Love Not War (The Tampa Beat)” •• Jason Derulo x Nuka

“Pick Up Your Feelings” •• Jazmine Sullivan

“Daddy Boyfriend” •• Jessica Lea Mayfield

“Emotional Abandonment” •• Jessica Lea Mayfield

“Hitman” •• Kelly Rowland & NFL

“Summertime The Gershwin Version” •• Lana Del Rey

“Undone” •• Lande Hekt

“Man’s World” •• MARINA

“Prisoner” •• Miley Cyrus x Dua Lipa

“The Lighthouse Keeper” •• Sam Smith

“Is It Just Me?” •• Sasha Sloan x Charlie Puth

“Shameika Said” •• Shameika x Fiona Apple

“Monster” •• Shawn Mendes x Justin Bieber

“Hey Boy” •• Sia

“nhs” •• slowthai

“Plead Insanity” •• Spring Silver x Sad13 x Bartees Strange

“feel good” •• Tierra Whack

“Peppers and Onions” •• Tierra Whack

“Flawed” •• Wale x Gunna

“Tried to Tell You” •• The Weather Station

REMIXES

“Valley of One Thousand Perfumes (Orchestral Version)” •• Mary Timony

“Lifetime (Planningtorock ‘Let It Happen’ Remix)” •• Romy x Planningtorock

“Boys Who Don’t Wanna Be Boys (U.S. Girls Live from The Peppermint Lounge Remix)” •• Seth Bogart x U.S. Girls

COVERS

“Waverly” (Samia cover) •• Anjimile

“Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays” •• Betty Who

“Deacon Blues” (Steely Dan cover) •• Bill Callahan x Bonnie Prince Billy x Bill McKay

“Christmas Will Really Be Christmas” •• Black Pumas

“Clementine” (Elliott smith cover) •• Bonny Light Horseman

“The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” (Roberta Flacke cover) •• James Blake

“The First Noel” •• Jazmine Sullivan x Cory Henry

“A Dreamer’s Holiday” (Perry Como cover) •• Julien Baker

MUSIC VIDEOS

“JUMPING SHIP” •• Amaarae x Kojey Radical x Cruel Santino (dir. Remi Laudat)

“34+35″ •• Ariana Grande (dir. Director X)

“Shameika” •• Fiona Apple (dir. Matthias Brown)

“Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun” •• Kevin Morby (dir. Johnny Eastlund x Dylan Isbell)

"Star” •• LOOΠΔ (dir. MOSWANTD)

“Waverly” •• Samia (dir. Samia Finnerty x Matt Hixon)

“Kerosene” •• Yves Tumor x Diana Gordon (dir. Cody Critcheloe)

[giancarlonicoli]

METRO

Legendary Post columnist Steve Dunleavy dead at 81

By Gabrielle Fonrouge and Bruce Golding

June 24, 2019 | 10:48pm | Updated

Steve Dunleavy, the hard-hitting, hard-drinking journalist who helped define The New York Post as a crime reporter, editor and premier columnist, died Monday at his home on Long Island. He was 81.

The cause was unknown.

“Steve Dunleavy was one of the greatest reporters of all time,” said Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Post.

“Whether competing with his own father in the famous Sydney, Australia, tabloid wars, or over the last 40 years in New York, Steve’s life story is littered with great scoops. He was much loved by both his colleagues and editors.”

“His passing is the end of a great era,” Murdoch added.

Over the course of his epic career, Dunleavy scored countless exclusives, including interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and confessed “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo. The rapist also posed in the nude for Dunleavy, who had smuggled a camera into prison for the story.

Dunleavy also flew to California to entice three members of Elvis Presley’s “Memphis Mafia” bodyguards to reveal the singer’s drug addiction.

The ensuing series of stories boosted the circulation of the Star tabloid, where Dunleavy was then working, from 2 million to 3 million, and also led to the publication of a best-selling book, “Elvis: What Happened?” shortly before Presley’s death.

Fans of the King responded with death threats that followed Dunleavy to The Post — where someone even sent a hearse with instructions to pick up his body.

That tale is one of many inspired by the legendary newsman, many of which start in a tavern.

Perhaps the most memorable involves a snowy night at the Upper East Side media hangout Elaine’s, where Dunleavy met the Norwegian fiancée of an Australian journalist.

While his pals decamped to another bar across the street, Dunleavy and the fiancée wound up outside, “humping in the snow, arses going up and down,” former Daily Mail correspondent George Gordon told The New Yorker for a profile of Dunleavy in 2000.

“As we were watching, a snowplow came up the street and ran over Dunleavy’s foot,” Gordon said.

“By this time, the entire bar was in uproarious laughter.”

Dunleavy “was so loaded, it didn’t matter,” Gordon said, but was eventually taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken foot.

Upon learning of the incident, rival journalist Pete Hamill bitterly sniped, “I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

Another incident at Elaine’s ended with Dunleavy socking since-disgraced record producer Phil Spector in the nose — one of many brawls sparked by liquid courage.

“Countless fights, yes, but alas, not a good won/loss record,” Dunleavy once lamented.

Veteran Post columnist Steve Cuozzo recalled the time Dunleavy phoned the newsroom on a Saturday morning and told the assistant who answered, “Mate, this is Dunleavy. Take down this number.” After reciting the digits, Dunleavy had the assistant repeat them to him.

“Great. Now call me back and tell me where I am,” Dunleavy replied.

Dunleavy also came up with a snappy comeback when The Post was pilloried at the time for the now-classic Page 1 headline, “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” Cuozzo recalled.

“What should we have said?” Dunleavy wondered.

‘Decapitated cerebellum in tavern of ill repute?’”

A second-generation journalist and native of Australia, Dunleavy quit school at 14 and began working as a copy boy at The Sun, a Sydney tabloid that employed his dad as a photographer.

He left the paper for the rival Daily Mirror and was made a cub reporter, eventually proving the extent of his competitiveness by slashing the tires on his father’s car when they were both covering a story about a group of lost hikers.

Dunleavy claimed not to know who owned the car, but the older man got his revenge when they were both chasing a story about a criminal dubbed the “Kingsgrove Slasher.”

When Dunleavy found a laundry room where he thought the Slasher was hiding, he went in, hoping “to catch him single-handedly” — only to hear a dead-bolt snap behind him, “My father had locked me in. I was trapped for hours,” Dunleavy told The New Yorker.

“When I got out, I went home and said, ‘Dad, you could have got me fired.’ He said, ‘Remember the Blue Mountains.’ ”

Dunleavy left Australia for a job with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, then freelanced his way across Asia and Europe before winding up in London, working on the city’s Fleet Street for the United Press International wire service.

Dunleavy later “fooled around” in the Bahamas before heading to New York, where he claimed to have arrived on Dec. 28, 1966, with seven dollars in his pocket.

He lived in coffee shops for a week before landing a job with UPI, which led to him meeting fellow Aussie and News Corp founder Murdoch, whose American correspondents had offices in the same building.

Murdoch hired Dunleavy in 1967 to write stories for his papers in Australia and Britain, then tapped him as news editor of the National Star tabloid, which Murdoch launched in 1974.

At the Star, Dunleavy also wrote a column titled “This I Believe” that so impressed the far-right John Birch Society that it named him its “American of the Year” — despite the fact that he wasn’t a citizen.

Dunleavy continued the column after becoming The Post’s top crime reporter when Murdoch bought the paper in 1976.

He soon launched into coverage of the “Son of Sam” murders. Dunleavy’s ingenuity included dressing in what looked like scrubs to sneak into a hospital and interview a victim’s family.

“I lost count of the number of times I posed as a cop, a public servant or a funeral director,” Dunleavy told writer William Shawcross, author of a 1993 Murdoch biography.

In 1986, Murdoch made Dunleavy one of the first reporters for “A Current Affair,” a tabloid-style TV program produced for Murdoch’s then-fledgling Fox broadcast TV network.

During nearly a decade with the show, Dunleavy beat ABC’s “Nightline” out of an exclusive interview with Jessica Hahn, the mistress of televangelist Jim Bakker, by going to her house and telling an ABC driver that Hahn had been taken to a hospital.

Dunleavy’s blanket coverage of Amy Fisher’s shooting of Mary Jo Buttafuoco — amid Fisher’s affair with Mary Jo’’s husband, Joey Buttafuoco — also led The New Yorker to say that story “at times, appeared to run exclusively on Fox.”

When Dunleavy was let go in a shake-up shortly before “A Current Affair” was canceled, he returned to The Post, becoming a columnist who crusaded against liberal politicians and celebrities, while championing members of the NYPD and FDNY.

“You walk under the portals of One Police Plaza, and above are the etched names of 713 cops who have fallen in the line of duty protecting this city,” he once wrote.

“Turn to your right, and then to your left, and you are surrounded by heroes. It makes someone like myself feel very small.”

Former top cop Ray Kelly on Monday described Dunleavy as “a diehard supporter of the NYPD, particularly street cops.”

“As someone so deeply knowledgeable about the city, he knew how difficult and demanding the job is,” Kelly said.

When The Post moved from its offices on South Street to its current headquarters in Midtown, Dunleavy routinely spent his afternoons across the street at the since-shuttered Langan’s bar, conducting interviews and taking calls from editors.

His failing health led him to retire from The Post in 2008, when he was feted with a blowout party.

In an interview tied to his retirement, Dunleavy told The New York Times, “I always had dreams of dying at the desk.”

“It’s frustrating not doing what I love best, and serving — I know it sounds corny — the one who I admire the most. Murdoch. The Boss,” he said.

In 2017, he was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame, which lauded his “rambunctious, swashbuckling and hard-drinking career” and said he “earned the term ‘legendary reporter’ through his whatever-it-takes, larger-than-life approach to journalism.”

Dunleavy is survived by his wife, Gloria, and their sons, Peter and Sean.

Additional reporting by Keith J. Kelly

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: February 2020

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of February 2020 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

The issue with the Tory government being stuffed with morons and sociopaths is that it leads to solutions such as their new immigration policy which equates anyone earning less than £24k a year with being an “unskilled worker” so therefore not eligible for a visa...when in reality that is unreasonably raising the bar, which becomes immediately obvious when you realise that the majority of entry-level positions within the NHS are paid less than that per annum.  But fret not, they also have a solution in the sudden gap of 8m in the workforce, namely having the “economically inactive” fill the gap...even though that figure is primarily made up by the elderly, the terminally ill, and students who are currently working on that “low skilled” issue whose post-graduation salaries are estimated at around £18k a year 

Unelected bureaucrat/organ grinder Dominic Cummings had a genius idea for proven liar Boris Johnson’s first cabinet reshuffle: eliminate anyone who might possibly have any semblance of an idea of their own (plus Esther McVey) and install a bunch of unthinking drones into the cabinet who will all follow his specific instructions...which sounds a lot like communism, doesn’t it?

We should almost thank Andrew Sabitsky for proving exactly what Dominic Cummings’ directive of “misfits and weirdos” really meant, namely that what Cummings wanted was somebody whose track record includes saying that black people are intellectually and genetically inferior on multiple occasions, calling for forced contraception for the lower classes and attending eugenics conferences, and that’s somebody who fits the profile of being appointed special advisor to the Prime Minister

In the latest example of The Department of Work and Pensions appearing to exist for the sole purpose of committing an ideological genocide on the lower classes, it emerged that they had been destroying reports of former claimants who committed suicide after their benefits were stopped - and had been doing so since at least 2015

Has anyone noticed that proven liar Boris Johnson didn't show up in Yorkshire with a mop and bucket when it was flooded again?  Or did anyone notice that, when the official line was given that he didn't want to cause a media frenzy by showing up and instead wanted to put his feet up at a lakeside mansion to do...whatever it was that he was doing, it appears to have forgotten that he didn't mind showing up in flood-hit areas with the resulting media frenzy when there was an election campaign going on?

The estate of George Orwell will want a word with Lee Cain following his role in proven liar Boris Johnson’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” moment where he divided journalists into two groups before a Downing Street briefing, before telling journalists from one of the groups - who were from the Mirror, Independent, Huffington Post and PoliticsHome, that they should leave as they are not welcome

In the latest example of Question Time being an echo chamber for the far-right, they bussed in two-time National Front candidate Sherri Bothwell to sit front and centre of the audience and be the person to ask the first question of the show...if going off on a rant about how we should close our borders constitutes a “question” - although it does constitute a blatant violation of editorial guidelines

Smirking cretin Priti Patel demonstrated her statesmanlike credentials when facing a question about forced deportations in the House of Commons...by getting the hell out of the chamber before she could even hear the full question, presumably because staying in the chamber would potentially involve having to face scrutiny or criticism and that’s not how the Tories work

It’s no surprise that the FBPE mob responded to the first anniversary of the formation of The Independent Hashtag Group for Hashtag Change UK Hashtag Ltd by hand-wringing about how a potential force for good in British politics failed, because if they didn’t they might have to accept that their blindly believing in one “centrist” neoliberal careerist after another, from Chuka Umunna to Jo Swinson to Jess Phillips and numerous other examples aside, played a large part in why man of the people/proven liar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is currently Prime Minister

Good to see the Chinese government coming up with the best possible solution to the Super Magic Chinese Megaflu of DEATH epidemic by...adding World War Z to the ever-growing list of books banned by the Chinese government.  I don’t know why, though, it's not like it says Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh or anything...

Of course the English media responded to the Irish election result, where the incumbent Fine Gael lost out to a combination of Sinn Fein gaining the most first-choice votes and Fianna Fail getting the most second choice votes by reporting why this was the case...oh who am I kidding, of course they bloody didn’t, they only looked at through the usual English-centric prism and assumed that Britait was the reason why Fine Gael lost out, completely ignoring there was a unique consensus between all three parties that Britait is A Bad Idea that has also led the bigheaded gobshites from across the water to treat the irish like some second-class citizens who should shut up and fall in line behind their imperialistic masters

Once again the point-missers of the internet seem to think that you can use suicide rates as the basis for a game of Top Trumps, as there was a depressingly vocal section who responded to Caroline Flack’s suicide by comparing the number of suicides related to Love Island to the number related to The Jeremy Kyle Show as if it’s a football match and Love Island is currently “winning” 3-2

It was a busy day for smirking cretin Priti Patel as she had to simultaneously deny *deep breath* that MI5 have been actively withholding sensitive information from her as they see her as a threat to national security (and have grounds to see her as one...), that she hasn’t been bullying Home Office staff since getting her feet under the desk, that she didn’t force anyone out of the Home Office because they wouldn’t blindly follow every insane directive she could think of and it’s just a coincidence that attempts were made to remove Sir Philip Rutnam from the department...at least until Rutnam called her a liar, that is

Self-appointed voice of all Jewish football fans David Baddiel was as predictable as he was vocal in his disgust at the Oxford English Dictionary changing the definition of the word “Yid” to include Tottenham fans, leading to him howling about how Spurs fans have no right to reclaim the word while pretending that he doesn’t know the reason why Spurs have reclaimed the word, namely their regularly being serenaded with chants about Auschwitz, gas chambers and the Holocaust by Chelsea fans since the 1970s due to the club’s Jewish identity.  Chelsea fans such as...David Baddiel

Littlest Englander contender Douglas Carswell gleefully took to Twitter on February 1st to say the UK hadn’t collapsed into a pit after leaving the EU...meaning that either he doesn't understand that the UK is still in the EU as part of a transition period, or he knows this but knows that his followers don’t know this so thinks doing a victory lap during the warm-ups is normal

You would think that The Jewish Chronicle admitting that they fabricated stories of Louise Ellman being an antisemite and having to pay her damages would have gained more traction, but by complete coincidence they were being drowned out by David Baddiel and Stephen Pollard coincidentally throwing out a lot of think pieces about how Tottenham fans are the Third Reich unlike those nice, reasonable Chelsea supporters... 

Of course Blizzard were going to have to issue a statement addressing the launch of Warcraft 3: Reforged going so well that the game has a record Metacritic user score of 0.5 at one point, but Blizzard being Blizzard the “apology” was more along the lines of saying they were sorry that fans didn’t get the game they wanted, in other words trying to transfer blame onto them that the game shown in the teasers bore no resemblance to those in the finished game while pretending that there hasn’t been a cascade of criticism about their new policy that says any user-created mods will become Blizzard’s own property, in other words admit fault...which they never will

The latest non-logic from the BBC states that, if a Tory MP refuses to appear on any of their programming, they will cancel the appearance of whichever Labour MP that was also booked, in other words responding to the Dominic Cummings issuing a media blackout by silencing the Opposition in his stead

What better advertisement for Australian policing than Mark Thompson taking a moment to forget that he was Detective Inspector for the murders of Hannah Baxter and her children when her estranged husband set their car on fire before killing himself and instead decided to suggest that maybe she nagged him too much and that’s what led to the tragedy

Becoming a homeopathic mentalist hasn't done Gwyneth Paltrow any favours, considering that the second that there was so much as a whiff of criticism about he waffling about coffee enemas solving all ills on her Netflix show she responded by howling about how valid criticism from qualified health professionals is “clickbait” and not, say, valid criticism from qualified health professionals

Nobody seemed to explain to Dele Alli that posting a video on social media cracking jokes about coronavirus isn't a good idea as people are going to see it, and more than anything else spend a good couple of days flooding Tottenham’s Twitter feed with “DID YOU KNOW DELE ALLI MADE A RACIST POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA???” more times than anyone is willing to count

What a great piece of advice Ninja gave to everyone, namely that if you lose in a video game the only sane and rational response is to get angry and, if you don’t, this makes you “weak”

So much for “Mad” Mike Hughes and his attempt to prove that the earth is flat by using a homemade steam-powered rocket, as instead he made a reasonably-sized crater in the San Bernardino desert which proved that the earth is pretty goddamn hard when you plow into it from several thousand feet in the air while going at an estimated 350mp

Good to see that Jess Phillips is handling her failure in the Labour leadership race well, with her mouthing off at an event commemorating female journalists by harrumphing that it’s a pity that Labour has never had a female leader...while both Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy remain in the leadership contest

And finally, a little more puffed up than usual, is Donald Trump and his sociopathic response to the Republicans allowing him to slither out from the sights of impeachment which was rewarded by him bringing down the axe on anyone who put the party (or, you know, country) ahead of him, which somehow looks less deranged than him mouthing off about Parasite winning Best Picture at the oscars because something something trade deal

[urbanwronski]

  Three weeks after its slender election victory, the Morrison government is all at sea. Three Chinese warships steam into Sydney Harbour uninvited. Spring our ring of steel. Laugh at our border security. PLA navy sailors roam The Emerald City, on a four day sleepover. And a shop. Cans of infant formula walk out the door. Sailors can double their money re-selling Aptamil back in China. Pooh-poohing “conspiracy theorists”, The Australian eagerly spins a yarn that the Chinese warships are on a “baby milk raid”.

Taken by surprise, but never taken aback, ScoMo is OS. Unplugged. He plucks a ukulele, which he gifts to a grateful Manasseh Sogavare, newly-elected pro-China PM of our newly-rediscovered Pacific nation “family” in The Solomon Islands Honiara. The PM’s stunt is all part of a cunning plan to woo The Hapi Isles back to us.  The mass logging operations on “the lungs of the world” on the tiny island of Vangunu by Axiom Holdings, of which self-described “corporate doctor” Malcolm Turnbull was chairman, 1991-2, part of an act of catastrophic environmental vandalism, are not mentioned.

Multinational timber companies have logged ninety per cent of Solomon Island rainforest. Now logging is decimating remaining trees at 19 percent the sustainable rate. Its national forest will disappear by 2036. Whilst Unilever has been a major exploiter of local rainforest in the past, today eighty percent of timber is exported to China.

Embedded reporters spurn rainforest issues; focus, instead, on helping ScoMo spin his warship story, ” It’s a regular, reciprocal, visit.” The PLA is on its way home after “anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden”, a mere 12,271 km away? Shiver me timbers.

Inexplicably also missing the PLA visit memo, former Raytheon employee, Andrew Hastie pal, Defence Minister Brigadier (ret) Linda Reynolds is a big fan of the Libs’ “merit-based” exclusion of women. She’s not on hand to greet sailors personally. It’s no big snub. Linda probably has her work cut out not instructing the AFP to raid the ABC, not calling Ben Fordham at Nine’s 2GB and certainly not putting the wind up Annika Smethurst, News Corp’s Sunday Telegraph political editor.

So much not to do, so little time. It’s a week of surprise visits, lightning raids on our nation’s credibility, our attenuated, attention-span and an orchestrated attack on the heart, the liver and the lights of our democracy, our free press. And plausible deniability.

As with the week’s AFP raids on a free press, China’s visit to Sydney is not what it seems. Parading 700 well-armed fighting men along with your latest, state-of-the-art frigate and supply ship and amphibious landing craft is no show of force. No upstaging of Morrison’s diplomacy. No coincidence with the eve of the Tiananmen Square anniversary. It’s just part of today’s beaut “rules-based global system” keeping us safe.

So what if the warships dock in Sydney just as ScoMo tries to bribe Honiara with offers of loans to help them build an undersea Huawei-free communications cable to spike China’s influence in the Pacific? Why would our PM be in Sydney just to honour a visit from our major trading partner? ScoMo is in The Solomons, en route to the UK where important myths about D-Day, saving Europe from fascism, and presenting HM The Queen with Winx The Authorised Biography all demand to be commemorated or performed in person.

Luckily Morrison has time to announce his government’s catchy new policy of “Pacific step-up” a revamp which turns out to be just as bad as the old in ignoring climate change. Even older is his bold, new, back-to-the-future Kanaka 2.0 offer.

In the 1860s, Australian blackbirders began to lure what would amount to at least 30,000 Solomon Islanders to work on sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji. New recruits got six pounds per year, a fixed rate for forty years, despite wage inflation elsewhere. Blackbirders and entrepreneurs, Robert Towns and John Mackay are commemorated in Queensland place names and in civic statues today.

Following this having a go but decidedly not a fair go tradition, Australia will gift $2.7 million over three years to Honiara’s government to help it fly Solomon Island FIFO workers here to be wage slaves on Aussie farms where they’ll “fill labour shortages in Australia” or undercut local workers by being paid lower wages and working longer hours in harsh conditions.  Half of all our migrant, temporary workers are underpaid. Hundreds of workers and millions of dollars in underpayment are involved.

The exploitation of migrant workers in Australia, a key report published last March, after a two-year inquiry by the federal Migrant Workers’ Taskforce, concludes that wage theft is widespread. A third of Australia’s foreign workers are paid less than half the minimum wage, and wage theft is especially severe in fruit and vegetable picking, according to Wage Theft in Australia, a survey undertaken by academics Bassina Farbenblum at UNSW and Laurie Berg at UTS. The Fair Work Ombudsman, they say, needs help.

Apart from the brutal legacy of its colonial past and its involvement in post-colonial exploitation, Australia may be belatedly realising how its climate change denialism and its cult of thermal coal; its abject failure to curb its own greenhouse gas emissions and its cuts to foreign aid help our Pacific neighbours reach out to China for aid instead.

But, in a post neoliberal, post-truth, Trumpian universe nothing is ever our own fault. Like Sydney’s Chinese warship fiasco. It isn’t true and it’s someone else’s fault.

Why, look!  The visit’s just something else retired Defence Minister, Pyne, forgot to pass on. Not a show of force by China at all, on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  Papa Morrison says there is no need for over-analysis by experts or media. Nothing remotely resembling gunboat diplomacy to see here.

NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian is also in the dark, but leaving Premiers out of the loop is part of ScoMo’s Trumpista leadership style. Speak up more in COAG, Gladys.

Similarly, the Chinese government obliges by sparing its own citizens from overthinking. It gets a scratch crew of two million��online censors to block internet sites which might tell its people how Chinese government troops brutally fired on student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen 4 June 1989. Precise figures are impossible to obtain, even with a free press, but two thousand may have been killed. As many as ten thousand are believed to have been arrested.

Thousands of other uprisings which spread to other centres, including Shanghai city, were also brutally repressed.

The Sydney PLA display catches ScoMo off-guard but he rallies later. Perhaps it’s jet-lag after nearly thirty hours in flight. Is he into the Tories’ class A recreational drugs enjoyed by so many otherwise promising successors to Theresa May? Unlikely.

ScoMo’s off and racing, wowing the Queen with, “How good is Winx?” a half-hour riff on a single platitude. A torrent of reports quote him explaining how well it all went. Her Majesty is spell-bound. Pity Phil is otherwise engaged. Taking the air. A twenty minute session becomes thirty-five. Or does it just seem longer? Lucky Queen.

Meanwhile, Dutton’s stakes rise as he wins the Alter-Copy-Erase media trifecta as a top staffer in Defence, or somewhere in the vast and powerful Home Affairs super-ministry, kits out his AFP with extraordinary warrants to raid the press on three separate occasions while both his PM and he, himself are OS. Nothing to see here.

A steward’s inquiry would just be a waste of time. Any Senate estimates committee will be treated with what in six years has become a show of open Coalition contempt for accountability and a painful reminder of the politicisation of the Public Service. Consider how the former minister for Environment, Melissa Price, was bullied by Queensland���s coal-pushers Matt Canavan and James Paterson into passing Adani’s flawed plans for water and wildlife conservation even if it meant the abdication of due diligence.

No-one’s home in government, Sunday, when a group of leading water scientists slam Adani’s “flawed” plan to protect groundwater near its Carmichael mine. Seven leading experts, from four major universities, warn that Adani’s water plan jeopardises Doongmabulla Springs seven kilometres south-west of its proposed excavation site.

The mine will bring extinction to a range of flora and fauna which currently depend upon the springs. Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science will meet this week to review Adani’s water management proposals. Yet, as we’ve seen with earlier federal government approvals, it’s important that we don’t get too carried away with the facts.

Cayman Island MDB company bagman and Energy Minister, Oxonian old boy, Angus Taylor finally nails how to evade our rising carbon emissions. It’s all good news. Everyone else in the world will breathe easier by burning our LNG. Official statistics can’t be trusted. So our greenhouse gas emissions are rising for the third year in a row? The good news is how our gas exports lower pollution in other countries. Genius. Gus wins most far-fetched stretch of credibility at less a canter than a rising trot.

Labor’s climate change and energy spokesman, Mark Butler, notes soberly that the data shows we are not on track to meet our Paris targets. “Not only did Angus Taylor not release emissions data by the deadline set by the Senate last Friday … the Liberals will try every trick in the book to avoid scrutiny of their record on tackling climate change.”

Best trick of the week for avoiding scrutiny, however, is getting the AFP to raid journalists for their sources, a reminder of the police state we’ve become. Important laws have been broken? National security is at risk? Spare us.

“The point is that politicians have constructed a repressive legal regime designed to protect the executive branch of government, impede accountability to the public and exert a chilling effect on the press,” Denis Muller writes in The Conversation.

“Quiet Australians” go wild with silent joy this week as ScoMo’s Stasi, the Department of Home Affairs, sends an AFP goon squad to frighten Annika Smethurst, News Corp’s Sunday titles’ political editor, Wednesday for her 2018 story that Home Affairs wants to spy on everyone. Their seven hour search of her Canberra home, includes her recipe books and underwear drawer. “You’re knickered” some flustered Federal cop is, doubtless, just itching to say on camera. Remarkably, Smethurst keeps her cool.

Of course, there’s more. The ABC is raided the next day. Two years ago, ABC broadcast a seven part series, The Afghan Files which investigates misconduct by Australian SAS troops engaged in our longest and most futile war; a campaign which not even our masters, the United States, can explain, let alone justify. The report documents possible unlawful killings. It includes fresh details of notorious incidents, including how Australians severed hands of slain Afghan Taliban fighters.

That our national broadcaster is subjected to a search in which the AFP have almost unlimited search powers is shocking; their warrant enables them to search almost everything – and copy – alter or delete files; in brief, tamper with the evidence. But even more alarming is the way in which the raid seems calculated to intimidate; prevent other journalists from risking speaking truth to power. This is not the act of a democratic government; a free, just and open society based on the rule of law. It is tyranny.

Even 2GB Drive’s Ben Fordham is harassed Monday for reporting that six refugee boats tried to reach Australia. Are random police raids part of the price we pay to live in ScoMo’s police state? It’s a state where, over time, the government has acquired extraordinary powers of surveillance, while citizens have been progressively stripped of their right to speak up; blow the whistle or just to report the truth.

An hour after his report goes to air, Fordham’s producer is contacted by the Department of Home Affairs to advise the refugee material was “highly confidential”. “In other words, we weren’t supposed to know it,” Fordham tells Sydney listeners.

Everyone is under suspicion – just as with the reversal of the onus of proof under Robo-Debt, the jewel in our anti-welfare state crown, where Centrelink demands you pay back money they reckon you owe. Unless you can prove you don’t. It can be stressful, especially when you have no documents. Some Australians kill themselves as a result.

Some of us die as a result of just getting a letter. 2030 people don’t survive receiving their first Robo-Debt letter. The initial letter doesn’t specify how much you must pay back. Instead it asks you to confirm your previously submitted income information. Of those who are subsequently told they owe money to the department, 812 are dead.

It would, of course, be rash to make any connection. Former Minister Keenan is quick to voice caution. It’s a bit like the common explanation denying the role of climate change in extreme weather events. Causation is complex, therefore, don’t blame government.

“Any number of factors in an individual’s life could have contributed to their death during such an extended period and it would be foolhardy to draw a link to one particular cause without evidence to support such a claim,” he reassures us. And warns us off.

Acting AFP terror head Neil Gaughan is a star as Chief Inquisitor. He knows what fear can do. He can’t say, he says, whether some journalists will be charged with offences. He knows this leaves fear of prosecution dangling over as many heads as possible.

The leaks are sources of information about matters which the AFP should have been investigating -its primary focus – instead the sources become the target. The raids testify to the peril this poses to both reporters and their sources. Some have proposed law reforms protecting journalists but as many others point out, this involves all of us.

The New York Times notes: “… the real affront is to democracy, which flounders in the absence of a free press. It should be self-evident to the guardians of Australian security that rogue soldiers and overreaching surveillance are the true risk to Australia’s security, and that such threats will become far more dangerous if the wall of secrecy is made impregnable.”

ABC chair Ita Buttrose issues a statement in which she reports her protest and notes,

“In a frank conversation with the Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts, Paul Fletcher, yesterday, I said the raid, in its very public form and in the sweeping nature of the information sought, was clearly designed to intimidate.

It is impossible to ignore the seismic nature of this week’s events: raids on two separate media outfits on consecutive days is a blunt signal of adverse consequences for news organisations who make life uncomfortable for policy makers and regulators by shining lights in dark corners and holding the powerful to account.” 

In the meantime, ScoMo better get a fresh set of musical instruments to present and more books on racehorses on order if he is to continue his amazing foreign policy triumphs. He may just be able to find himself a diplomatic post to the Solomons or somewhere equally remote and low-lying when he loses office in Peter Dutton’s coup.

ScoMo embraces police state in shocker of week. Three weeks after its slender election victory, the Morrison government is all at sea. Three Chinese warships steam into Sydney Harbour uninvited.

[phooll123]

New top story from Time: ‘It’s So Good to Be Home.’ Journalists Working for Australian Media Leave China After Sheltering in Diplomatic Compounds

(CANBERRA, Australia) — The last two journalists working for Australian media in China have left the country after police demanded interviews with them, the Australian government and their employers reported on Tuesday.

Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s Bill Birtles and The Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith landed in Sydney after flying from Shanghai on Monday night, both news outlets reported.

Both had sheltered in Australian diplomatic compounds in recent days.

The journalists left after Australia revealed last week that Australian citizen Cheng Lei, business news anchor for CGTN, China’s English-language state media channel, had been detained.

Australian embassy officials in Beijing told Birtles last week that he should leave China, ABC reported.

Birtles was due to depart Beijing on Thursday and was holding a farewell party on Wednesday when seven police officers arrived at his apartment and told him he was banned from leaving the country, ABC said.

Birtles was told he would be contacted on Thursday to organize a time to be questioned about a “national security case,” ABC said.

Birtles went to the Australian embassy where he spent four days while Australian and Chinese officials negotiated.

Birtles agreed to given police a brief interview in return for being allowed to leave the country.

Smith had similarly holed up at the Australian consulate in Shanghai.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne confirmed that her government had provided consular support to the two journalists to assist their return to Australia.

“Our embassy in Beijing and Consulate-General in Shanghai engaged with Chinese government authorities to ensure their wellbeing and return to Australia,” she said.

Australia’s travel warning of the risk of arbitrary detention in China “remains appropriate and unchanged,” she added.

ABC news director Gaven Morris said Birtles was brought back to Australia on the Australian government’s advice.

“This bureau is a vital part of the ABC’s international newsgathering effort and we aim to get back there as soon as possible,” Morris said.

“The story of China, its relationship with Australia and its role in our region and in the world is one of great importance for all Australians and we want to continue having our people on the ground to cover it,” he added.

The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury and editor Paul Bailey described the situation as “disturbing.”

“This incident targeting two journalists, who were going about their normal reporting duties, is both regrettable and disturbing and is not in the interests of a co-operative relationship between Australia and China,” they said in a statement.

Relations between China and Australia were already strained by Australia outlawing covert interference in politics and banning communications giant Huawei from supplying critical infrastructure. They have worsened since the Australian government called for an independent inquiry into the origins of and international responses to the coronavirus pandemic.

Birtles told reporters at Sydney airport that his departure was a “whirlwind and … not a particularly good experience.”

“It’s very disappointing to have to leave under those circumstances and it’s a relief to be back in a c country with genuine rule of law,” Birtles said.

Smith told his newspaper: “The late-night visit by police at my home was intimidating and unnecessary and highlights the pressure all foreign journalists are under in China right now.”

Smith said at the airport he had felt “a little bit” threatened in China.

“It’s so good to be home, so happy, I can’t say any more at the moment, it’s such a relief to be home, so really happy,” Smith said.

“It was a complicated experience but it’s great to be here,” he added.

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[anishkksingh-blog]

Here are the top transit tips that Oxygen Journalist Yolisha Qunta found helpful during her recent holiday to Tanzania.

Holidays, Vacations, Getaways.

Whatever you call it, there is no better phrase to describe a much-deserved break from life. According to a 2016 finding published by Roy Morgan Research, 77% of Australians planning a holiday in the next 12 month reported feeling more optimistic than those who had not planned one.

There is something wonderful in even the simple planning of a getaway. Personally, I like to spend hours looking at reviews of the destination online, scrutinizing every detail.

Part of the joy of getting away is the welcome break from routine, and experimenting in a new place.

This means anything from ditching the calorie counting to a new sleep routine and anything in between. The types of holidays I normally take involve shopping, taking a million photos to feed the beast that is my social media feed, and eating everything in sight.

This time around I am going to try to do things a little differently. One of the goals was to tweak my vacation habits so they became more sustainable and in line with the other amazing goals I was trying to achieve. It is a jump to go from being a hedonist on holiday to a more mindful approach but this is the year I’m trying to do and be better. So, when I got the opportunity to go on safari to the Selous Game Reserve, a very remote area in Tanzania, it seemed like the perfect time to try a more holistic way of holidaying.

Start with specific intentions:

Maybe part of the reason my previous holidays were fun but chaotic was that I never really had an end goal. The plan was mostly to tick off some must – sees, eat a lot, spend all my money and not to miss my flight back home. This time around I told myself that I wanted to have a great time, but do so in a much calmer manner. A great life coach once told me that the more specific you make your goals; the easier it is to reach them. So thinking about exactly what a mindful vacation looks and feels like is definitely worth spending time on before departure. I started with being mindful of my packing. Because I knew there would be no partying.

My travelling wardrobe was stripped down to comfortable clothes. I had also decided that I did not want to completely abandon my exercise routine so in went the sports bras, leggings and a skipping rope. In terms of my nutrition, luckily for me I knew that Azura Selous (where we were staying) was a small luxurious property, meaning the chefs would be more accommodating about menu change requests. This meant I didn’t have to be too concerned with packing enough healthy snacks for the destination. However, airport food courts are notorious for drawing you in with their endless, and often unhealthy, food options. So, make sure you are well-equipped to resist the temptation (the majority of the time).

Be flexible with your Exercise Routine:

When I’m home I run three times a week. However, all the horror movies I’ve watched convinced me that jogging through an unfenced area where wildlife lives, may not be the best or safest idea. Hence the skipping rope. When I was doing research prior to my trip, I saw that walking safaris were available – and made a mental note to explore that option. Aside from the private plunge pool in every villa, there was a gorgeous swimming pool in the communal area – so I packed a swimming costume in case I felt like doing laps. Each tented villa also had a wooden deck overlooking the river and I decide it would be the perfect spot to practice some gentle yoga.

The ultimate goal is to try to incorporate some movement into the vacation. In other destinations, this could include walks on the beach, hiking scenic routes, horse riding or exploring the area by bicycle.

Go with the Flow:

A holiday is meant to be a time of relaxation. But, as with anything else in life, unexpected events crop up. Being in a remote area meant I was forced to take an unplanned digital detox. I have a fairly unhealthy relationship with my phone, so that was a shock to the system. Unfortunately, I am one of those slightly shallow people who think that if I do not post perfect, carefully filtered pictures of my holiday then I’m missing half the fun.

There was Wi-Fi available but only in the lounge and it was often so slow that I muttered some words that were not Zen to me, before finally giving up on my beloved Instagram. Adding insult to injury, on the return leg of the trip our flight was delayed so we were stuck in an airport with inadequate air conditioning for two hours.

When the unforeseen happens, take a deep breath then decide on the most realistic, chilled way to get the vacation back on track. Take a walk around the airport to get your steps up, listen to a podcast, explore duty-free or just the fact that it will be an interesting story when you get back home and relax.

Remember to have Fun:

I was initially worried that a mindful holiday might turn out to be more boring than the adventures I’m used to. Instead, I ended up having an amazing time. I had lots of interesting conversations with the chef about the food, and ate healthy and delicious food for most of the trip.

On two occasions, I over-indulged in carbs when we were eating local cuisine because it felt like the respectful thing to do, which was totally fine! As a wine lover, I was pleased to find a complimentary bottle of champagne from the owner’s vineyard in France in the minibar. I sipped the ice-cold bubbles alone in the plunge pool on a hot afternoon (it would’ve been rude not to, right?!). Evening game drives also always involved a cold glass of wine overlooking a scenic spot. Without the distraction of mobile phones during dinner was a lively affair with non-stop conversation and laughter.

Be Kind to yourself:

I went on this trip with a lot of good intentions and ideas I wanted to tick off. Some of them worked quite well. Other days I felt the morning was too chilly for yoga on the deck or I fell asleep trying to meditate. Normally I would take these perceived failures to heart and beat myself up about it.

New me decided that there would be another time to catch up on that activity and focused on enjoying myself. This is great advice for everyday life too. Cultivating the habit of self-love and being gentle with yourself is not always easy. But it is a wonderful habit to sustain at home and abroad. And remember, whether your holiday is local or in a far off place, the key is to be present and enjoy every moment as it happens.

The post Top Transit Tips for Health conscious Jetsetters appeared first on .

[cars4starters]

I have to admit to being a car and motoring tragic for all my (thankfully) quite long life.

In fact, my late mother always said that after I had mastered “mum” and “dad” my next words were “red car.”

One of the benefits of this motoring passion is that I’ve been fortunate to own and enjoy some interesting cars.

Those that especially come to mind when I look back on my more than five decades behind the wheel are my first car – an original Mini – an XM Falcon Futura hardtop, an HK GTS V8 Monaro, an Alfasud Ti, Ford Capri 3000 GT, BMW 633 CSI, Porsche 928S and my current toy – a Nissan 350Z roadster.

Gazumping all of those – certainly in terms of exotic rarity – was my 1959 MG A Twin Cam roadster.

At the time of its acquisition, I was a very young journalist on the Launceston Examiner and as well as doing police rounds and courts and some sport, I was extremely fortunate that the Editor, the late F G N “Goodie” Ewence – added motoring to my responsibilities.

Until the arrival at the Examiner of young Crawford, as well as running the paper “Goodie”, in the absence of anyone else who knew anything about cars and motoring, had been doing the motoring section himself.

Mr Ewence was a serious motoring enthusiast and in fact drove to work each day in a somewhat tatty Triumph TR 2.

He was also one of the driving forces behind the wonderful Tasman Series races held at the equally wonderful but long-since defunct Longford road circuit.

I had seen a white MG A roadster driving around town on a few occasions and wondered why it had steel disc wheels with knock-offs.

I soon discovered that it was Tasmania’s only Twin Cam and that it was in fact for sale.

One drive and I knew I had to have it, so the little Mini 850 with the twin carbs and noisy exhaust was traded and the MG was mine.

To find out more about the Twin Cam and its history in Australia, I discovered some years ago the Australian MG A Twin Cam Register that is run by Melbourne enthusiast Bob Somerville.

He says that 75 Twin Cams were sold new in Australia and another five were imported in the period before 1965.

Another 23 were imported in the 1990s and eight were exported.

Bob says that of Australia’s original 80 cars, 18 are lost – sadly, including mine.

He says that while I supplied him with the photo that’s with this story, I no longer had engine and chassis numbers so tracing it all these years later was virtually impossible.

Bob did, however, float the theory that the car might have been bought by a father for a son who subsequently wrecked it.

In all, the register says 1788 Twin Cam roadsters were produced between 1958 and 1960, as well as a much smaller number of coupes.

The car’s engine was based on the Morris B-series motor and was modified to run an aluminium cross-flow head and the twin-cam set-up.

The engine was fitted with 1 3/4-inch SU carbies and a fuel-consumption figure of 10.2L/100km was claimed.

The 1588cc engine was good for 80.5kW at 6700rpm and 142Nm that was on tap at 4500rpm – modest figures by today’s performance-car standards – but pretty spirited back then.

The engine was mated with a four-speed gearbox that came without synchromesh on first.

Other features that set the Twin Cam apart from the “mere-mortal” MG As were the aforementioned Dunlop steel wheels (like the ones Jaguar ran on D-Types) with knock-off central locking and 11-inch un-boosted disc brakes.

The only other way you could pick a Twin Cam was it if had three “Twin Cam” badges – one atop each front guard near the air vents plus another on the boot lid.

Road tests at the time gave the car a top-speed of 185km/h and sprint time to 100km/h of 9.1 seconds.

Twin Cams have done a lot of racing over the years and in fact a coupe, driven by British drivers Ted Lund and Colin Escott was 12th overall and first in the 2.0-litre class at the 1960 Le Mans 24-hour classic.

In terms of my time with the Twin Cam, after a couple of years of enjoyable (and much too rapid) motoring, the engine ran a big-end bearing and developed the associated unhealthy-sounding rattle from the bottom end.

Before this happened, I had become conditioned by the engine’s propensity to oil up plugs.

To manage this problem, I kept a small sugar-bag containing a plug socket and about 20 spark plugs in the boot.

After the bearing went, a mate of mine at the time, who was much better with a spanner than I, generously offered to help me do a full engine recondition.

Another mate had an empty garage behind his shop and that’s where all the work was undertaken.

The engine was removed and pulled down, the block was sent to the then Repco Bearing Company plant to have the bore honed, the crankshaft ground and new big-end and main bearings were ordered.

Once the block came back with Repco’s bore measurements, pistons were sourced from the UK, flown out and the engine rebuilt.

The alloy rocker covers and the SU “bells” were all polished and the engine looked a million dollars.

For something like 1500km I carefully ran the engine in before changing the oil and giving the car a serious high-speed run down the beautiful road on the western side of the Tamar River.

It was in fact the day this photograph was taken and I was travelling with a newspaper photographer colleague to cover a story.

On the way back there was a nasty noise from the engine, a lot of smoke and a serious loss of power.

After limping back to Launceston, I gave my mechanic mate the bad news and remarkably, he again helped me rebuild the engine.

What we found was that Repco had given us an incorrect reading of the bore size and we had fitted under-sized pistons.

Not only that, they had not cleaned out the oil ducts in the crank shaft and our beautiful new bearings were badly scored.

Needless to say they blamed us for not checking everything.

They were probably right but my mate and I were not happy. In my case, heartbroken would not be over-stating it.

Another month or so with he and my then girlfriend (now wife) working into the early hours of the morning and the engine was again like new.

A week or so after we had the car back on the road, Tasmania’s first Falcon XM hardtop – a top-spec pale metallic-blue Futura – arrived in the local Ford dealer’s showroom.

Back then – and still today for that matter – it was a seriously sexy car and I decided that it had to be mine.

I just couldn’t face the prospect of another engine rebuild – and I was heartily sick of forever changing plugs.

The upshot was that I traded the Twin Cam on the Futura and received the princely sum of 1000 quid for the car.

Needless to say I shuddered when, in February 2017, Shannons sold a Twin Cam Roadster just like mine for $85,000 (except it had red leather where mine had black).

So that’s the story of my Twin Cam. It was to a degree a love/hate relationship, but I still remember the good times and the great drives.

But there’s a remarkable sequel to the story and it’s one of the spookiest experiences of my life.

About 10 years ago during my time as motoring editor of the Canberra Times I was in Hobart on a Mini media launch.

We travelled about 20 minutes by bus from our city hotel to a winery restaurant for dinner.

Unbeknown to us, the PR people had arranged for around 20 members of the Hobart Mini club to chauffeur us, one to a car, back to the hotel after dinner.

We were told to choose a car and head off with its driver.

It was a delightful touch.

Jumping into a Cooper S fitted with a huge Weber carby, I introduced myself to the driver – a great bloke a few years younger than me.

He asked me who I wrote for and I explained it was the Canberra Times, although I did it out of Melbourne.

I explained that actually, I had started writing about cars some 40 years earlier when I was a kid on the Examiner.

He immediately and with some excitement said: “ You used to have an exotic sports car – a white MG A Twin Cam with black leather.”

I was flabbergasted.

Of the 20 Minis I had to choose from, I chose this one with this bloke at the wheel.

He explained that he used to see the car parked outside the newspaper office and how he often used to hear it go past his school, and how much he loved its exhaust note.

To finish off the story, my new Mini-driving mate told me he had actually driven in the car.

This came about because one of the Ford dealer’s salesmen lived in the same street and he had brought the car home one day and took the then schoolboy for a ride.

As they say, it’s a small world.

Looking back, there’s no doubt the Twin Cam – even in the often cold Tasmanian weather – instilled in me a love of top-down motoring.

This was confirmed three years ago when I bought a Mazda MX-5 roadster I found for sale outside a nearby house.

My wife and I loved going for top-down drives in the little Mazda but it was just a tad small for me.

We now have a Nissan 350z roadster and wind-in-the hair motoring (not that I have much these days) is still very much a part of our lives.

And it all started with the Twin Cam.

Spooky tale of Tassie sportster I have to admit to being a car and motoring tragic for all my (thankfully) quite long life.

[keepon--keepinon]

The 10 Stories That Defined Energy Storage in 2017

Energy storage proved itself in 2017.

The industry stepped up with two major, high-speed deployments to resolve grid emergencies. Utility-scale projects got bigger and longer lasting. Major international conglomerates bought up storage startups. And all the major solar developers started getting into the game.

Much of the action remained at the pilot stage. But some projects showed that storage economics already make sense without subsidies, grants or other interventions -- in the right circumstances, of course.

GTM will be diving deep on these themes at the Energy Storage Summit in San Francisco December 12-13. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the key developments from 2017.

Storage backs up Southern California grid after record gas leaks

Aliso Canyon just might be the biggest energy storage story ever. 

The details are well known in the industry -- not so much outside of it.

Here's the gist: California suffered the worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, resulting in constraints gas for peak power generation around L.A. and San Diego; to meet the shortfall, the state deployed 100 megawatts of storage across several sites in a stunning six months.

The episode showed that storage can respond to capacity constraints far more quickly than traditional power plants, and can slip more easily into populous areas like suburban San Diego and Los Angeles.

That success -- the feared blackouts never materialized over the summer peak season -- puts storage in the toolkit for future grid crises. And it bolsters the case for using distributed batteries to meet local capacity needs, shifting away from reliance on gas plants. 

This could only happen because California had already prioritized storage policy and built out a regulatory understanding of the technology. If other states want the flexibility to respond to surprises as quickly as California did, they need to put in the work now.

Solar-plus-storage contracts drive prices to new lows

The year started with a solar-plus-storage record: AES inked a contract for a Kauai project at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will combine 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with 20 megawatts of five-hour duration batteries, producing 11 percent of the island's electricity.

That project managed to outsize an earlier Tesla/SolarCity deal on the island and shave a few cents off the unit price. In May, another project made this one look like an appetizer.

Tucson Electric Power contracted with NextEra Energy Resources to build out a major solar-plus storage project at a 20-year PPA rate below 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will pair 100 megawatts of solar generation with a 30 megawatt/ 120 megawatt-hour storage system. (That's as big as the AES Escondido system, which was the largest of its kind until Tesla outdid it in Australia).

That announcement turned heads and set of a flurry of number crunching, as analysts and rivals tried to unpack how such a low price could be possible. The investment tax credit plays a role, as does NextEra's ability to source equipment at aggressive price points. 

Crucially, this is happening in sunny Arizona, where the abundance of solar generation is creating value for dispatchable power. Storage thrives when its flexibility is compensated, and Arizona's regulated utilities can do just that.

Non-wires alternatives start to pencil out on their own

New York authorized its utilities to make money by avoiding more expensive grid upgrades.

Some of these non-wires alternatives utilize batteries, like the Marcus Garvey Apartments microgrid that went up this spring. That project showed that creative regulatory changes and targeted incentives can encourage innovative projects.

More impressive is the storage project that works without such assistance.

Arizona Public Service pulled off this feat with its Punkin Center project, which utilizes a 2 megawatt/ 8 megawatt-hour battery system from AES to avoid a wires upgrade for a remote desert town.

Load growth there would have required a 20-mile cable upgrade, but APS determined it could fix the issue with a locally-sited battery for less than half the upfront cost. This wasn't driven by a regulatory imperative to re-envision the grid or fight climate change; it simply made economic sense.

Leaders from both companies will discuss the project during a fireside chat at the Energy Storage Summit.

Big energy companies bought their way into storage

Legacy energy companies snapped up storage startups throughout the year.

It started with Demand Energy's acquisition by European utility and renewables developer Enel in January. Then the Finnish engine company Wartsila bought Greensmith in May. Scottish mobile power provider Aggreko picked up Younicos in July for $52 million.

Later on, AES signed a joint venture with Siemens to merge their storage practices under the name Fluence.

This continues a trend from last year, in which Engie took a controlling stake in Green Charge and French energy giant Total picked up Saft in the largest battery acquisition ever.

The impact of these acquisitions hasn't fully materialized yet. Once complete, though, the deals promise to expand the storage industry in meaningful ways.

They give once small companies a major balance sheet to assure customers and financiers they can be trusted with a large contract. They also give storage startups the resources to expand faster than they would otherwise.

Green Charge, Greensmith and Demand Energy have all hinted at international expansion to come, although we haven't seen that materialize just yet. AES explicitly referenced Siemens' sales presence in 160 companies as a motivation for the partnership. That expansion may materialize in the coming year.

It's official: All the biggest solar developers are looking at storage too

Solar-plus-storage has inspired eager chatter for some time now, but this year companies finally started to follow through on the premise.

The top utility-scale solar installers have either developed storage or are actively pursuing it, GTM reported in June. Many of them have begun bidding hybrid projects, which means we could start seeing a bump in deployments in the next two or three years. Installed and operating projects are still rare.

GTM Research analyst Daniel Finn-Foley will dissect recent solar-plus-storage PPAs with executives from Cypress Creek and Borrego Solar at Energy Storage Summit. Later on, journalist Jeff St. John will lead a debate over whether centralized or distributed storage locations make more sense.

Meanwhile, the residential solar leaders expanded their storage pairings as well.

SolarCity combined with Tesla via a merger. Sunrun pushed ahead with its BrightBox solar-plus-storage package, which now accounts for 10 percent of its direct sales in California. Vivint formed a partnership with Mercedes-Benz Energy to deliver residential batteries, although it's been quiet since.

Storage remains a tiny slice of these installers' business, but that's in large part because few markets have compelling economics for it. By at least getting started, these companies will gain experience before the markets for firmed solar or distributed storage heat up.

Virtual power plants become more of real thing

It's a lot easier to talk about virtual power plants than to build one. This year, though, some real, sizable projects gained steam.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions launched the first phase of its flagship deal with Southern California Edison in November. The first batch included 2 megawatts of capacity, but more will phase in over the year to come. After years of pitching the concept of virtual power plants, the company gets to show the goods.

In October, Sonnen announced a contract to put its batteries into a development of 2,900 high-performance homes in Arizona. Earlier, Sunrun launched a partnership with National Grid to deliver BrightBox systems in New York, with a goal of aggregating the resources for grid services.

And the drumbeat of smaller pilots continued. Austin is building distributed storage and solar across the city. Sunverge announced small utility pilots with APS, Green Mountain Power and Lakeland Electric, but deployed 250 units with Australian utility AGL.

The hype is likely to outshine the reality for some time, but these early projects build evidence that distributed power resources can be valuable to the grid.

Carmakers and countries commit to electric vehicles

China, the world's largest car market, announced in September that it's researching a ban on internal combustion engines. Such a measure could drastically accelerate the speed of uptake for electric vehicles.

California may follow suit. Other markets have already committed: Norway pledged to sell only electric cars by 2025; France targeted 2040; the U.K. soon followed with its own 2040 pledge.

Carmaker Volvo said all its cars would have electric motors starting in 2019 (many of them will still burn gas or diesel as hybrids). General Motors signaled its commitment to a "zero emissions future" with a roster of new electric offerings, although it stayed shy on how long it would take to realize that vision.

All these promises will need to be backed up by action; pledging a major change in 2040 means nothing without concrete intermediate results. Some commenters think EVs will have taken over by then on the strength of market forces alone.

These promises do amount to a widespread endorsement of EVs over the coming years, and that means more battery production. The EV industry's success fuels the manufacturing scale and cost declines that the stationary storage needs for its own growth.

New York still hasn't figured out how to use storage

New York's Reforming the Energy Vision project is reshaping the grid to support cleaner power and more efficient utilization of resources. Storage sounds like a perfect fit for those goals, but almost no capacity has been deployed in the years since REV got started.

The challenges, detailed here, include unfinished storage tariffs, lack of long term contracts for capacity, a fire code that keeps New York City mostly off limits, and utilities that dragged their feet on deployments long enough to get an explicit rebuke from regulators.

The year ended with a bang: five months after the state legislature unanimously passed a bill to create a storage target, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to sign it into law. That triggers a process of setting an appropriate target and creating government programs to help meet it.

Whether these efforts produce a real market remains to be seen, but the state set itself on track for more storage activity in the coming years.

Storage might beat out a gas peaker plant for the first time

Storage developers have spoken hungrily about their ability to take the place of gas plants for peak power. Now it might actually happen.

NRG's efforts to build the Puente gas plant in Oxnard, California, ran into opposition in the final stages of regulatory approval. A coalition of clean energy advocates, environmental justice advocates and the city itself pushed back against the proposal, saying that a gas plant would be an unnecessary expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure when cleaner alternatives exist.

Those arguments had been heard elsewhere, but this time, the grid operator agreed. CAISO studied the local grid needs and determined storage and other distributed assets could do the job of the gas plant. That just left the question of relative cost, which CAISO said could only really be determined by industry bids in a request for offers.

The regulators reviewing the case announced they planned to reject the plant. Then NRG asked for a suspension of the approval process to allow for the RFO, and the regulators granted it. 

This story is still developing. It's not yet clear just how competitive the storage bids will be compared to the cost of a gas plant, or how much regulators will weigh the value of clean, flexible resources relative to gas burning infrastructure that would only rarely operate.

The gas plant could still win out, but if it doesn't, this will be the first time storage triumphs in a head-to-head peaker contest.

Tesla promises the world's biggest battery in less than 100 days...and delivers

After betting he could deliver the world's largest battery in 100 days or it would be free, Elon Musk followed through. 

The 100 megawatt/129 megawatt-hour facility began testing in South Australia just about when Americans sat down for their Thanksgiving feasts. Much like Aliso Canyon, it showcased the unique speed with which storage can arrive on the grid in response to urgent needs. 

When it comes to the flagship projects, the company delivers in a big way. Back on the home front, though, Tesla has had trouble maintaining timely deliveries of batteries to its typical storage customers. 

As the company matures, it will need to balance rapid response to emergency opportunities with steady and reliable shipments to customers. It's currently ramping up Gigafactory production to that end, while working out kinks in the manufacturing line for the Model 3.

That's an important step, because grid emergencies like South Australia won't stop coming, and Tesla could be called on again for rapid response mega-batteries before too long.  

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265708 http://ift.tt/2AvPecF via IFTTT

[thephandragon]

The 10 Stories That Defined Energy Storage in 2017

Energy storage proved itself in 2017.

The industry stepped up with two major, high-speed deployments to resolve grid emergencies. Utility-scale projects got bigger and longer lasting. Major international conglomerates bought up storage startups. And all the major solar developers started getting into the game.

Much of the action remained at the pilot stage. But some projects showed that storage economics already make sense without subsidies, grants or other interventions -- in the right circumstances, of course.

GTM will be diving deep on these themes at the Energy Storage Summit in San Francisco December 12-13. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the key developments from 2017.

Storage backs up Southern California grid after record gas leaks

Aliso Canyon just might be the biggest energy storage story ever. 

The details are well known in the industry -- not so much outside of it.

Here's the gist: California suffered the worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, resulting in constraints gas for peak power generation around L.A. and San Diego; to meet the shortfall, the state deployed 100 megawatts of storage across several sites in a stunning six months.

The episode showed that storage can respond to capacity constraints far more quickly than traditional power plants, and can slip more easily into populous areas like suburban San Diego and Los Angeles.

That success -- the feared blackouts never materialized over the summer peak season -- puts storage in the toolkit for future grid crises. And it bolsters the case for using distributed batteries to meet local capacity needs, shifting away from reliance on gas plants. 

This could only happen because California had already prioritized storage policy and built out a regulatory understanding of the technology. If other states want the flexibility to respond to surprises as quickly as California did, they need to put in the work now.

Solar-plus-storage contracts drive prices to new lows

The year started with a solar-plus-storage record: AES inked a contract for a Kauai project at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will combine 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with 20 megawatts of five-hour duration batteries, producing 11 percent of the island's electricity.

That project managed to outsize an earlier Tesla/SolarCity deal on the island and shave a few cents off the unit price. In May, another project made this one look like an appetizer.

Tucson Electric Power contracted with NextEra Energy Resources to build out a major solar-plus storage project at a 20-year PPA rate below 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will pair 100 megawatts of solar generation with a 30 megawatt/ 120 megawatt-hour storage system. (That's as big as the AES Escondido system, which was the largest of its kind until Tesla outdid it in Australia).

That announcement turned heads and set of a flurry of number crunching, as analysts and rivals tried to unpack how such a low price could be possible. The investment tax credit plays a role, as does NextEra's ability to source equipment at aggressive price points. 

Crucially, this is happening in sunny Arizona, where the abundance of solar generation is creating value for dispatchable power. Storage thrives when its flexibility is compensated, and Arizona's regulated utilities can do just that.

Non-wires alternatives start to pencil out on their own

New York authorized its utilities to make money by avoiding more expensive grid upgrades.

Some of these non-wires alternatives utilize batteries, like the Marcus Garvey Apartments microgrid that went up this spring. That project showed that creative regulatory changes and targeted incentives can encourage innovative projects.

More impressive is the storage project that works without such assistance.

Arizona Public Service pulled off this feat with its Punkin Center project, which utilizes a 2 megawatt/ 8 megawatt-hour battery system from AES to avoid a wires upgrade for a remote desert town.

Load growth there would have required a 20-mile cable upgrade, but APS determined it could fix the issue with a locally-sited battery for less than half the upfront cost. This wasn't driven by a regulatory imperative to re-envision the grid or fight climate change; it simply made economic sense.

Leaders from both companies will discuss the project during a fireside chat at the Energy Storage Summit.

Big energy companies bought their way into storage

Legacy energy companies snapped up storage startups throughout the year.

It started with Demand Energy's acquisition by European utility and renewables developer Enel in January. Then the Finnish engine company Wartsila bought Greensmith in May. Scottish mobile power provider Aggreko picked up Younicos in July for $52 million.

Later on, AES signed a joint venture with Siemens to merge their storage practices under the name Fluence.

This continues a trend from last year, in which Engie took a controlling stake in Green Charge and French energy giant Total picked up Saft in the largest battery acquisition ever.

The impact of these acquisitions hasn't fully materialized yet. Once complete, though, the deals promise to expand the storage industry in meaningful ways.

They give once small companies a major balance sheet to assure customers and financiers they can be trusted with a large contract. They also give storage startups the resources to expand faster than they would otherwise.

Green Charge, Greensmith and Demand Energy have all hinted at international expansion to come, although we haven't seen that materialize just yet. AES explicitly referenced Siemens' sales presence in 160 companies as a motivation for the partnership. That expansion may materialize in the coming year.

It's official: All the biggest solar developers are looking at storage too

Solar-plus-storage has inspired eager chatter for some time now, but this year companies finally started to follow through on the premise.

The top utility-scale solar installers have either developed storage or are actively pursuing it, GTM reported in June. Many of them have begun bidding hybrid projects, which means we could start seeing a bump in deployments in the next two or three years. Installed and operating projects are still rare.

GTM Research analyst Daniel Finn-Foley will dissect recent solar-plus-storage PPAs with executives from Cypress Creek and Borrego Solar at Energy Storage Summit. Later on, journalist Jeff St. John will lead a debate over whether centralized or distributed storage locations make more sense.

Meanwhile, the residential solar leaders expanded their storage pairings as well.

SolarCity combined with Tesla via a merger. Sunrun pushed ahead with its BrightBox solar-plus-storage package, which now accounts for 10 percent of its direct sales in California. Vivint formed a partnership with Mercedes-Benz Energy to deliver residential batteries, although it's been quiet since.

Storage remains a tiny slice of these installers' business, but that's in large part because few markets have compelling economics for it. By at least getting started, these companies will gain experience before the markets for firmed solar or distributed storage heat up.

Virtual power plants become more of real thing

It's a lot easier to talk about virtual power plants than to build one. This year, though, some real, sizable projects gained steam.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions launched the first phase of its flagship deal with Southern California Edison in November. The first batch included 2 megawatts of capacity, but more will phase in over the year to come. After years of pitching the concept of virtual power plants, the company gets to show the goods.

In October, Sonnen announced a contract to put its batteries into a development of 2,900 high-performance homes in Arizona. Earlier, Sunrun launched a partnership with National Grid to deliver BrightBox systems in New York, with a goal of aggregating the resources for grid services.

And the drumbeat of smaller pilots continued. Austin is building distributed storage and solar across the city. Sunverge announced small utility pilots with APS, Green Mountain Power and Lakeland Electric, but deployed 250 units with Australian utility AGL.

The hype is likely to outshine the reality for some time, but these early projects build evidence that distributed power resources can be valuable to the grid.

Carmakers and countries commit to electric vehicles

China, the world's largest car market, announced in September that it's researching a ban on internal combustion engines. Such a measure could drastically accelerate the speed of uptake for electric vehicles.

California may follow suit. Other markets have already committed: Norway pledged to sell only electric cars by 2025; France targeted 2040; the U.K. soon followed with its own 2040 pledge.

Carmaker Volvo said all its cars would have electric motors starting in 2019 (many of them will still burn gas or diesel as hybrids). General Motors signaled its commitment to a "zero emissions future" with a roster of new electric offerings, although it stayed shy on how long it would take to realize that vision.

All these promises will need to be backed up by action; pledging a major change in 2040 means nothing without concrete intermediate results. Some commenters think EVs will have taken over by then on the strength of market forces alone.

These promises do amount to a widespread endorsement of EVs over the coming years, and that means more battery production. The EV industry's success fuels the manufacturing scale and cost declines that the stationary storage needs for its own growth.

New York still hasn't figured out how to use storage

New York's Reforming the Energy Vision project is reshaping the grid to support cleaner power and more efficient utilization of resources. Storage sounds like a perfect fit for those goals, but almost no capacity has been deployed in the years since REV got started.

The challenges, detailed here, include unfinished storage tariffs, lack of long term contracts for capacity, a fire code that keeps New York City mostly off limits, and utilities that dragged their feet on deployments long enough to get an explicit rebuke from regulators.

The year ended with a bang: five months after the state legislature unanimously passed a bill to create a storage target, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to sign it into law. That triggers a process of setting an appropriate target and creating government programs to help meet it.

Whether these efforts produce a real market remains to be seen, but the state set itself on track for more storage activity in the coming years.

Storage might beat out a gas peaker plant for the first time

Storage developers have spoken hungrily about their ability to take the place of gas plants for peak power. Now it might actually happen.

NRG's efforts to build the Puente gas plant in Oxnard, California, ran into opposition in the final stages of regulatory approval. A coalition of clean energy advocates, environmental justice advocates and the city itself pushed back against the proposal, saying that a gas plant would be an unnecessary expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure when cleaner alternatives exist.

Those arguments had been heard elsewhere, but this time, the grid operator agreed. CAISO studied the local grid needs and determined storage and other distributed assets could do the job of the gas plant. That just left the question of relative cost, which CAISO said could only really be determined by industry bids in a request for offers.

The regulators reviewing the case announced they planned to reject the plant. Then NRG asked for a suspension of the approval process to allow for the RFO, and the regulators granted it. 

This story is still developing. It's not yet clear just how competitive the storage bids will be compared to the cost of a gas plant, or how much regulators will weigh the value of clean, flexible resources relative to gas burning infrastructure that would only rarely operate.

The gas plant could still win out, but if it doesn't, this will be the first time storage triumphs in a head-to-head peaker contest.

Tesla promises the world's biggest battery in less than 100 days...and delivers

After betting he could deliver the world's largest battery in 100 days or it would be free, Elon Musk followed through. 

The 100 megawatt/129 megawatt-hour facility began testing in South Australia just about when Americans sat down for their Thanksgiving feasts. Much like Aliso Canyon, it showcased the unique speed with which storage can arrive on the grid in response to urgent needs. 

When it comes to the flagship projects, the company delivers in a big way. Back on the home front, though, Tesla has had trouble maintaining timely deliveries of batteries to its typical storage customers. 

As the company matures, it will need to balance rapid response to emergency opportunities with steady and reliable shipments to customers. It's currently ramping up Gigafactory production to that end, while working out kinks in the manufacturing line for the Model 3.

That's an important step, because grid emergencies like South Australia won't stop coming, and Tesla could be called on again for rapid response mega-batteries before too long.  

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265708 http://ift.tt/2AvPecF via IFTTT

[kiimmmchhi]

The 10 Stories That Defined Energy Storage in 2017

Energy storage proved itself in 2017.

The industry stepped up with two major, high-speed deployments to resolve grid emergencies. Utility-scale projects got bigger and longer lasting. Major international conglomerates bought up storage startups. And all the major solar developers started getting into the game.

Much of the action remained at the pilot stage. But some projects showed that storage economics already make sense without subsidies, grants or other interventions -- in the right circumstances, of course.

GTM will be diving deep on these themes at the Energy Storage Summit in San Francisco December 12-13. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the key developments from 2017.

Storage backs up Southern California grid after record gas leaks

Aliso Canyon just might be the biggest energy storage story ever. 

The details are well known in the industry -- not so much outside of it.

Here's the gist: California suffered the worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, resulting in constraints gas for peak power generation around L.A. and San Diego; to meet the shortfall, the state deployed 100 megawatts of storage across several sites in a stunning six months.

The episode showed that storage can respond to capacity constraints far more quickly than traditional power plants, and can slip more easily into populous areas like suburban San Diego and Los Angeles.

That success -- the feared blackouts never materialized over the summer peak season -- puts storage in the toolkit for future grid crises. And it bolsters the case for using distributed batteries to meet local capacity needs, shifting away from reliance on gas plants. 

This could only happen because California had already prioritized storage policy and built out a regulatory understanding of the technology. If other states want the flexibility to respond to surprises as quickly as California did, they need to put in the work now.

Solar-plus-storage contracts drive prices to new lows

The year started with a solar-plus-storage record: AES inked a contract for a Kauai project at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will combine 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with 20 megawatts of five-hour duration batteries, producing 11 percent of the island's electricity.

That project managed to outsize an earlier Tesla/SolarCity deal on the island and shave a few cents off the unit price. In May, another project made this one look like an appetizer.

Tucson Electric Power contracted with NextEra Energy Resources to build out a major solar-plus storage project at a 20-year PPA rate below 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will pair 100 megawatts of solar generation with a 30 megawatt/ 120 megawatt-hour storage system. (That's as big as the AES Escondido system, which was the largest of its kind until Tesla outdid it in Australia).

That announcement turned heads and set of a flurry of number crunching, as analysts and rivals tried to unpack how such a low price could be possible. The investment tax credit plays a role, as does NextEra's ability to source equipment at aggressive price points. 

Crucially, this is happening in sunny Arizona, where the abundance of solar generation is creating value for dispatchable power. Storage thrives when its flexibility is compensated, and Arizona's regulated utilities can do just that.

Non-wires alternatives start to pencil out on their own

New York authorized its utilities to make money by avoiding more expensive grid upgrades.

Some of these non-wires alternatives utilize batteries, like the Marcus Garvey Apartments microgrid that went up this spring. That project showed that creative regulatory changes and targeted incentives can encourage innovative projects.

More impressive is the storage project that works without such assistance.

Arizona Public Service pulled off this feat with its Punkin Center project, which utilizes a 2 megawatt/ 8 megawatt-hour battery system from AES to avoid a wires upgrade for a remote desert town.

Load growth there would have required a 20-mile cable upgrade, but APS determined it could fix the issue with a locally-sited battery for less than half the upfront cost. This wasn't driven by a regulatory imperative to re-envision the grid or fight climate change; it simply made economic sense.

Leaders from both companies will discuss the project during a fireside chat at the Energy Storage Summit.

Big energy companies bought their way into storage

Legacy energy companies snapped up storage startups throughout the year.

It started with Demand Energy's acquisition by European utility and renewables developer Enel in January. Then the Finnish engine company Wartsila bought Greensmith in May. Scottish mobile power provider Aggreko picked up Younicos in July for $52 million.

Later on, AES signed a joint venture with Siemens to merge their storage practices under the name Fluence.

This continues a trend from last year, in which Engie took a controlling stake in Green Charge and French energy giant Total picked up Saft in the largest battery acquisition ever.

The impact of these acquisitions hasn't fully materialized yet. Once complete, though, the deals promise to expand the storage industry in meaningful ways.

They give once small companies a major balance sheet to assure customers and financiers they can be trusted with a large contract. They also give storage startups the resources to expand faster than they would otherwise.

Green Charge, Greensmith and Demand Energy have all hinted at international expansion to come, although we haven't seen that materialize just yet. AES explicitly referenced Siemens' sales presence in 160 companies as a motivation for the partnership. That expansion may materialize in the coming year.

It's official: All the biggest solar developers are looking at storage too

Solar-plus-storage has inspired eager chatter for some time now, but this year companies finally started to follow through on the premise.

The top utility-scale solar installers have either developed storage or are actively pursuing it, GTM reported in June. Many of them have begun bidding hybrid projects, which means we could start seeing a bump in deployments in the next two or three years. Installed and operating projects are still rare.

GTM Research analyst Daniel Finn-Foley will dissect recent solar-plus-storage PPAs with executives from Cypress Creek and Borrego Solar at Energy Storage Summit. Later on, journalist Jeff St. John will lead a debate over whether centralized or distributed storage locations make more sense.

Meanwhile, the residential solar leaders expanded their storage pairings as well.

SolarCity combined with Tesla via a merger. Sunrun pushed ahead with its BrightBox solar-plus-storage package, which now accounts for 10 percent of its direct sales in California. Vivint formed a partnership with Mercedes-Benz Energy to deliver residential batteries, although it's been quiet since.

Storage remains a tiny slice of these installers' business, but that's in large part because few markets have compelling economics for it. By at least getting started, these companies will gain experience before the markets for firmed solar or distributed storage heat up.

Virtual power plants become more of real thing

It's a lot easier to talk about virtual power plants than to build one. This year, though, some real, sizable projects gained steam.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions launched the first phase of its flagship deal with Southern California Edison in November. The first batch included 2 megawatts of capacity, but more will phase in over the year to come. After years of pitching the concept of virtual power plants, the company gets to show the goods.

In October, Sonnen announced a contract to put its batteries into a development of 2,900 high-performance homes in Arizona. Earlier, Sunrun launched a partnership with National Grid to deliver BrightBox systems in New York, with a goal of aggregating the resources for grid services.

And the drumbeat of smaller pilots continued. Austin is building distributed storage and solar across the city. Sunverge announced small utility pilots with APS, Green Mountain Power and Lakeland Electric, but deployed 250 units with Australian utility AGL.

The hype is likely to outshine the reality for some time, but these early projects build evidence that distributed power resources can be valuable to the grid.

Carmakers and countries commit to electric vehicles

China, the world's largest car market, announced in September that it's researching a ban on internal combustion engines. Such a measure could drastically accelerate the speed of uptake for electric vehicles.

California may follow suit. Other markets have already committed: Norway pledged to sell only electric cars by 2025; France targeted 2040; the U.K. soon followed with its own 2040 pledge.

Carmaker Volvo said all its cars would have electric motors starting in 2019 (many of them will still burn gas or diesel as hybrids). General Motors signaled its commitment to a "zero emissions future" with a roster of new electric offerings, although it stayed shy on how long it would take to realize that vision.

All these promises will need to be backed up by action; pledging a major change in 2040 means nothing without concrete intermediate results. Some commenters think EVs will have taken over by then on the strength of market forces alone.

These promises do amount to a widespread endorsement of EVs over the coming years, and that means more battery production. The EV industry's success fuels the manufacturing scale and cost declines that the stationary storage needs for its own growth.

New York still hasn't figured out how to use storage

New York's Reforming the Energy Vision project is reshaping the grid to support cleaner power and more efficient utilization of resources. Storage sounds like a perfect fit for those goals, but almost no capacity has been deployed in the years since REV got started.

The challenges, detailed here, include unfinished storage tariffs, lack of long term contracts for capacity, a fire code that keeps New York City mostly off limits, and utilities that dragged their feet on deployments long enough to get an explicit rebuke from regulators.

The year ended with a bang: five months after the state legislature unanimously passed a bill to create a storage target, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to sign it into law. That triggers a process of setting an appropriate target and creating government programs to help meet it.

Whether these efforts produce a real market remains to be seen, but the state set itself on track for more storage activity in the coming years.

Storage might beat out a gas peaker plant for the first time

Storage developers have spoken hungrily about their ability to take the place of gas plants for peak power. Now it might actually happen.

NRG's efforts to build the Puente gas plant in Oxnard, California, ran into opposition in the final stages of regulatory approval. A coalition of clean energy advocates, environmental justice advocates and the city itself pushed back against the proposal, saying that a gas plant would be an unnecessary expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure when cleaner alternatives exist.

Those arguments had been heard elsewhere, but this time, the grid operator agreed. CAISO studied the local grid needs and determined storage and other distributed assets could do the job of the gas plant. That just left the question of relative cost, which CAISO said could only really be determined by industry bids in a request for offers.

The regulators reviewing the case announced they planned to reject the plant. Then NRG asked for a suspension of the approval process to allow for the RFO, and the regulators granted it. 

This story is still developing. It's not yet clear just how competitive the storage bids will be compared to the cost of a gas plant, or how much regulators will weigh the value of clean, flexible resources relative to gas burning infrastructure that would only rarely operate.

The gas plant could still win out, but if it doesn't, this will be the first time storage triumphs in a head-to-head peaker contest.

Tesla promises the world's biggest battery in less than 100 days...and delivers

After betting he could deliver the world's largest battery in 100 days or it would be free, Elon Musk followed through. 

The 100 megawatt/129 megawatt-hour facility began testing in South Australia just about when Americans sat down for their Thanksgiving feasts. Much like Aliso Canyon, it showcased the unique speed with which storage can arrive on the grid in response to urgent needs. 

When it comes to the flagship projects, the company delivers in a big way. Back on the home front, though, Tesla has had trouble maintaining timely deliveries of batteries to its typical storage customers. 

As the company matures, it will need to balance rapid response to emergency opportunities with steady and reliable shipments to customers. It's currently ramping up Gigafactory production to that end, while working out kinks in the manufacturing line for the Model 3.

That's an important step, because grid emergencies like South Australia won't stop coming, and Tesla could be called on again for rapid response mega-batteries before too long.  

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[kimberlydenis]

The 10 Stories That Defined Energy Storage in 2017

Energy storage proved itself in 2017.

The industry stepped up with two major, high-speed deployments to resolve grid emergencies. Utility-scale projects got bigger and longer lasting. Major international conglomerates bought up storage startups. And all the major solar developers started getting into the game.

Much of the action remained at the pilot stage. But some projects showed that storage economics already make sense without subsidies, grants or other interventions -- in the right circumstances, of course.

GTM will be diving deep on these themes at the Energy Storage Summit in San Francisco December 12-13. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the key developments from 2017.

Storage backs up Southern California grid after record gas leaks

Aliso Canyon just might be the biggest energy storage story ever. 

The details are well known in the industry -- not so much outside of it.

Here's the gist: California suffered the worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, resulting in constraints gas for peak power generation around L.A. and San Diego; to meet the shortfall, the state deployed 100 megawatts of storage across several sites in a stunning six months.

The episode showed that storage can respond to capacity constraints far more quickly than traditional power plants, and can slip more easily into populous areas like suburban San Diego and Los Angeles.

That success -- the feared blackouts never materialized over the summer peak season -- puts storage in the toolkit for future grid crises. And it bolsters the case for using distributed batteries to meet local capacity needs, shifting away from reliance on gas plants. 

This could only happen because California had already prioritized storage policy and built out a regulatory understanding of the technology. If other states want the flexibility to respond to surprises as quickly as California did, they need to put in the work now.

Solar-plus-storage contracts drive prices to new lows

The year started with a solar-plus-storage record: AES inked a contract for a Kauai project at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will combine 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with 20 megawatts of five-hour duration batteries, producing 11 percent of the island's electricity.

That project managed to outsize an earlier Tesla/SolarCity deal on the island and shave a few cents off the unit price. In May, another project made this one look like an appetizer.

Tucson Electric Power contracted with NextEra Energy Resources to build out a major solar-plus storage project at a 20-year PPA rate below 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will pair 100 megawatts of solar generation with a 30 megawatt/ 120 megawatt-hour storage system. (That's as big as the AES Escondido system, which was the largest of its kind until Tesla outdid it in Australia).

That announcement turned heads and set of a flurry of number crunching, as analysts and rivals tried to unpack how such a low price could be possible. The investment tax credit plays a role, as does NextEra's ability to source equipment at aggressive price points. 

Crucially, this is happening in sunny Arizona, where the abundance of solar generation is creating value for dispatchable power. Storage thrives when its flexibility is compensated, and Arizona's regulated utilities can do just that.

Non-wires alternatives start to pencil out on their own

New York authorized its utilities to make money by avoiding more expensive grid upgrades.

Some of these non-wires alternatives utilize batteries, like the Marcus Garvey Apartments microgrid that went up this spring. That project showed that creative regulatory changes and targeted incentives can encourage innovative projects.

More impressive is the storage project that works without such assistance.

Arizona Public Service pulled off this feat with its Punkin Center project, which utilizes a 2 megawatt/ 8 megawatt-hour battery system from AES to avoid a wires upgrade for a remote desert town.

Load growth there would have required a 20-mile cable upgrade, but APS determined it could fix the issue with a locally-sited battery for less than half the upfront cost. This wasn't driven by a regulatory imperative to re-envision the grid or fight climate change; it simply made economic sense.

Leaders from both companies will discuss the project during a fireside chat at the Energy Storage Summit.

Big energy companies bought their way into storage

Legacy energy companies snapped up storage startups throughout the year.

It started with Demand Energy's acquisition by European utility and renewables developer Enel in January. Then the Finnish engine company Wartsila bought Greensmith in May. Scottish mobile power provider Aggreko picked up Younicos in July for $52 million.

Later on, AES signed a joint venture with Siemens to merge their storage practices under the name Fluence.

This continues a trend from last year, in which Engie took a controlling stake in Green Charge and French energy giant Total picked up Saft in the largest battery acquisition ever.

The impact of these acquisitions hasn't fully materialized yet. Once complete, though, the deals promise to expand the storage industry in meaningful ways.

They give once small companies a major balance sheet to assure customers and financiers they can be trusted with a large contract. They also give storage startups the resources to expand faster than they would otherwise.

Green Charge, Greensmith and Demand Energy have all hinted at international expansion to come, although we haven't seen that materialize just yet. AES explicitly referenced Siemens' sales presence in 160 companies as a motivation for the partnership. That expansion may materialize in the coming year.

It's official: All the biggest solar developers are looking at storage too

Solar-plus-storage has inspired eager chatter for some time now, but this year companies finally started to follow through on the premise.

The top utility-scale solar installers have either developed storage or are actively pursuing it, GTM reported in June. Many of them have begun bidding hybrid projects, which means we could start seeing a bump in deployments in the next two or three years. Installed and operating projects are still rare.

GTM Research analyst Daniel Finn-Foley will dissect recent solar-plus-storage PPAs with executives from Cypress Creek and Borrego Solar at Energy Storage Summit. Later on, journalist Jeff St. John will lead a debate over whether centralized or distributed storage locations make more sense.

Meanwhile, the residential solar leaders expanded their storage pairings as well.

SolarCity combined with Tesla via a merger. Sunrun pushed ahead with its BrightBox solar-plus-storage package, which now accounts for 10 percent of its direct sales in California. Vivint formed a partnership with Mercedes-Benz Energy to deliver residential batteries, although it's been quiet since.

Storage remains a tiny slice of these installers' business, but that's in large part because few markets have compelling economics for it. By at least getting started, these companies will gain experience before the markets for firmed solar or distributed storage heat up.

Virtual power plants become more of real thing

It's a lot easier to talk about virtual power plants than to build one. This year, though, some real, sizable projects gained steam.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions launched the first phase of its flagship deal with Southern California Edison in November. The first batch included 2 megawatts of capacity, but more will phase in over the year to come. After years of pitching the concept of virtual power plants, the company gets to show the goods.

In October, Sonnen announced a contract to put its batteries into a development of 2,900 high-performance homes in Arizona. Earlier, Sunrun launched a partnership with National Grid to deliver BrightBox systems in New York, with a goal of aggregating the resources for grid services.

And the drumbeat of smaller pilots continued. Austin is building distributed storage and solar across the city. Sunverge announced small utility pilots with APS, Green Mountain Power and Lakeland Electric, but deployed 250 units with Australian utility AGL.

The hype is likely to outshine the reality for some time, but these early projects build evidence that distributed power resources can be valuable to the grid.

Carmakers and countries commit to electric vehicles

China, the world's largest car market, announced in September that it's researching a ban on internal combustion engines. Such a measure could drastically accelerate the speed of uptake for electric vehicles.

California may follow suit. Other markets have already committed: Norway pledged to sell only electric cars by 2025; France targeted 2040; the U.K. soon followed with its own 2040 pledge.

Carmaker Volvo said all its cars would have electric motors starting in 2019 (many of them will still burn gas or diesel as hybrids). General Motors signaled its commitment to a "zero emissions future" with a roster of new electric offerings, although it stayed shy on how long it would take to realize that vision.

All these promises will need to be backed up by action; pledging a major change in 2040 means nothing without concrete intermediate results. Some commenters think EVs will have taken over by then on the strength of market forces alone.

These promises do amount to a widespread endorsement of EVs over the coming years, and that means more battery production. The EV industry's success fuels the manufacturing scale and cost declines that the stationary storage needs for its own growth.

New York still hasn't figured out how to use storage

New York's Reforming the Energy Vision project is reshaping the grid to support cleaner power and more efficient utilization of resources. Storage sounds like a perfect fit for those goals, but almost no capacity has been deployed in the years since REV got started.

The challenges, detailed here, include unfinished storage tariffs, lack of long term contracts for capacity, a fire code that keeps New York City mostly off limits, and utilities that dragged their feet on deployments long enough to get an explicit rebuke from regulators.

The year ended with a bang: five months after the state legislature unanimously passed a bill to create a storage target, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to sign it into law. That triggers a process of setting an appropriate target and creating government programs to help meet it.

Whether these efforts produce a real market remains to be seen, but the state set itself on track for more storage activity in the coming years.

Storage might beat out a gas peaker plant for the first time

Storage developers have spoken hungrily about their ability to take the place of gas plants for peak power. Now it might actually happen.

NRG's efforts to build the Puente gas plant in Oxnard, California, ran into opposition in the final stages of regulatory approval. A coalition of clean energy advocates, environmental justice advocates and the city itself pushed back against the proposal, saying that a gas plant would be an unnecessary expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure when cleaner alternatives exist.

Those arguments had been heard elsewhere, but this time, the grid operator agreed. CAISO studied the local grid needs and determined storage and other distributed assets could do the job of the gas plant. That just left the question of relative cost, which CAISO said could only really be determined by industry bids in a request for offers.

The regulators reviewing the case announced they planned to reject the plant. Then NRG asked for a suspension of the approval process to allow for the RFO, and the regulators granted it. 

This story is still developing. It's not yet clear just how competitive the storage bids will be compared to the cost of a gas plant, or how much regulators will weigh the value of clean, flexible resources relative to gas burning infrastructure that would only rarely operate.

The gas plant could still win out, but if it doesn't, this will be the first time storage triumphs in a head-to-head peaker contest.

Tesla promises the world's biggest battery in less than 100 days...and delivers

After betting he could deliver the world's largest battery in 100 days or it would be free, Elon Musk followed through. 

The 100 megawatt/129 megawatt-hour facility began testing in South Australia just about when Americans sat down for their Thanksgiving feasts. Much like Aliso Canyon, it showcased the unique speed with which storage can arrive on the grid in response to urgent needs. 

When it comes to the flagship projects, the company delivers in a big way. Back on the home front, though, Tesla has had trouble maintaining timely deliveries of batteries to its typical storage customers. 

As the company matures, it will need to balance rapid response to emergency opportunities with steady and reliable shipments to customers. It's currently ramping up Gigafactory production to that end, while working out kinks in the manufacturing line for the Model 3.

That's an important step, because grid emergencies like South Australia won't stop coming, and Tesla could be called on again for rapid response mega-batteries before too long.  

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265708 http://ift.tt/2AvPecF via IFTTT

[markssailingthecrisscolfership]

The 10 Stories That Defined Energy Storage in 2017

Energy storage proved itself in 2017.

The industry stepped up with two major, high-speed deployments to resolve grid emergencies. Utility-scale projects got bigger and longer lasting. Major international conglomerates bought up storage startups. And all the major solar developers started getting into the game.

Much of the action remained at the pilot stage. But some projects showed that storage economics already make sense without subsidies, grants or other interventions -- in the right circumstances, of course.

GTM will be diving deep on these themes at the Energy Storage Summit in San Francisco December 12-13. In the meantime, here's a roundup of the key developments from 2017.

Storage backs up Southern California grid after record gas leaks

Aliso Canyon just might be the biggest energy storage story ever. 

The details are well known in the industry -- not so much outside of it.

Here's the gist: California suffered the worst natural gas leak in U.S. history, resulting in constraints gas for peak power generation around L.A. and San Diego; to meet the shortfall, the state deployed 100 megawatts of storage across several sites in a stunning six months.

The episode showed that storage can respond to capacity constraints far more quickly than traditional power plants, and can slip more easily into populous areas like suburban San Diego and Los Angeles.

That success -- the feared blackouts never materialized over the summer peak season -- puts storage in the toolkit for future grid crises. And it bolsters the case for using distributed batteries to meet local capacity needs, shifting away from reliance on gas plants. 

This could only happen because California had already prioritized storage policy and built out a regulatory understanding of the technology. If other states want the flexibility to respond to surprises as quickly as California did, they need to put in the work now.

Solar-plus-storage contracts drive prices to new lows

The year started with a solar-plus-storage record: AES inked a contract for a Kauai project at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will combine 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with 20 megawatts of five-hour duration batteries, producing 11 percent of the island's electricity.

That project managed to outsize an earlier Tesla/SolarCity deal on the island and shave a few cents off the unit price. In May, another project made this one look like an appetizer.

Tucson Electric Power contracted with NextEra Energy Resources to build out a major solar-plus storage project at a 20-year PPA rate below 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. The facility will pair 100 megawatts of solar generation with a 30 megawatt/ 120 megawatt-hour storage system. (That's as big as the AES Escondido system, which was the largest of its kind until Tesla outdid it in Australia).

That announcement turned heads and set of a flurry of number crunching, as analysts and rivals tried to unpack how such a low price could be possible. The investment tax credit plays a role, as does NextEra's ability to source equipment at aggressive price points. 

Crucially, this is happening in sunny Arizona, where the abundance of solar generation is creating value for dispatchable power. Storage thrives when its flexibility is compensated, and Arizona's regulated utilities can do just that.

Non-wires alternatives start to pencil out on their own

New York authorized its utilities to make money by avoiding more expensive grid upgrades.

Some of these non-wires alternatives utilize batteries, like the Marcus Garvey Apartments microgrid that went up this spring. That project showed that creative regulatory changes and targeted incentives can encourage innovative projects.

More impressive is the storage project that works without such assistance.

Arizona Public Service pulled off this feat with its Punkin Center project, which utilizes a 2 megawatt/ 8 megawatt-hour battery system from AES to avoid a wires upgrade for a remote desert town.

Load growth there would have required a 20-mile cable upgrade, but APS determined it could fix the issue with a locally-sited battery for less than half the upfront cost. This wasn't driven by a regulatory imperative to re-envision the grid or fight climate change; it simply made economic sense.

Leaders from both companies will discuss the project during a fireside chat at the Energy Storage Summit.

Big energy companies bought their way into storage

Legacy energy companies snapped up storage startups throughout the year.

It started with Demand Energy's acquisition by European utility and renewables developer Enel in January. Then the Finnish engine company Wartsila bought Greensmith in May. Scottish mobile power provider Aggreko picked up Younicos in July for $52 million.

Later on, AES signed a joint venture with Siemens to merge their storage practices under the name Fluence.

This continues a trend from last year, in which Engie took a controlling stake in Green Charge and French energy giant Total picked up Saft in the largest battery acquisition ever.

The impact of these acquisitions hasn't fully materialized yet. Once complete, though, the deals promise to expand the storage industry in meaningful ways.

They give once small companies a major balance sheet to assure customers and financiers they can be trusted with a large contract. They also give storage startups the resources to expand faster than they would otherwise.

Green Charge, Greensmith and Demand Energy have all hinted at international expansion to come, although we haven't seen that materialize just yet. AES explicitly referenced Siemens' sales presence in 160 companies as a motivation for the partnership. That expansion may materialize in the coming year.

It's official: All the biggest solar developers are looking at storage too

Solar-plus-storage has inspired eager chatter for some time now, but this year companies finally started to follow through on the premise.

The top utility-scale solar installers have either developed storage or are actively pursuing it, GTM reported in June. Many of them have begun bidding hybrid projects, which means we could start seeing a bump in deployments in the next two or three years. Installed and operating projects are still rare.

GTM Research analyst Daniel Finn-Foley will dissect recent solar-plus-storage PPAs with executives from Cypress Creek and Borrego Solar at Energy Storage Summit. Later on, journalist Jeff St. John will lead a debate over whether centralized or distributed storage locations make more sense.

Meanwhile, the residential solar leaders expanded their storage pairings as well.

SolarCity combined with Tesla via a merger. Sunrun pushed ahead with its BrightBox solar-plus-storage package, which now accounts for 10 percent of its direct sales in California. Vivint formed a partnership with Mercedes-Benz Energy to deliver residential batteries, although it's been quiet since.

Storage remains a tiny slice of these installers' business, but that's in large part because few markets have compelling economics for it. By at least getting started, these companies will gain experience before the markets for firmed solar or distributed storage heat up.

Virtual power plants become more of real thing

It's a lot easier to talk about virtual power plants than to build one. This year, though, some real, sizable projects gained steam.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions launched the first phase of its flagship deal with Southern California Edison in November. The first batch included 2 megawatts of capacity, but more will phase in over the year to come. After years of pitching the concept of virtual power plants, the company gets to show the goods.

In October, Sonnen announced a contract to put its batteries into a development of 2,900 high-performance homes in Arizona. Earlier, Sunrun launched a partnership with National Grid to deliver BrightBox systems in New York, with a goal of aggregating the resources for grid services.

And the drumbeat of smaller pilots continued. Austin is building distributed storage and solar across the city. Sunverge announced small utility pilots with APS, Green Mountain Power and Lakeland Electric, but deployed 250 units with Australian utility AGL.

The hype is likely to outshine the reality for some time, but these early projects build evidence that distributed power resources can be valuable to the grid.

Carmakers and countries commit to electric vehicles

China, the world's largest car market, announced in September that it's researching a ban on internal combustion engines. Such a measure could drastically accelerate the speed of uptake for electric vehicles.

California may follow suit. Other markets have already committed: Norway pledged to sell only electric cars by 2025; France targeted 2040; the U.K. soon followed with its own 2040 pledge.

Carmaker Volvo said all its cars would have electric motors starting in 2019 (many of them will still burn gas or diesel as hybrids). General Motors signaled its commitment to a "zero emissions future" with a roster of new electric offerings, although it stayed shy on how long it would take to realize that vision.

All these promises will need to be backed up by action; pledging a major change in 2040 means nothing without concrete intermediate results. Some commenters think EVs will have taken over by then on the strength of market forces alone.

These promises do amount to a widespread endorsement of EVs over the coming years, and that means more battery production. The EV industry's success fuels the manufacturing scale and cost declines that the stationary storage needs for its own growth.

New York still hasn't figured out how to use storage

New York's Reforming the Energy Vision project is reshaping the grid to support cleaner power and more efficient utilization of resources. Storage sounds like a perfect fit for those goals, but almost no capacity has been deployed in the years since REV got started.

The challenges, detailed here, include unfinished storage tariffs, lack of long term contracts for capacity, a fire code that keeps New York City mostly off limits, and utilities that dragged their feet on deployments long enough to get an explicit rebuke from regulators.

The year ended with a bang: five months after the state legislature unanimously passed a bill to create a storage target, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to sign it into law. That triggers a process of setting an appropriate target and creating government programs to help meet it.

Whether these efforts produce a real market remains to be seen, but the state set itself on track for more storage activity in the coming years.

Storage might beat out a gas peaker plant for the first time

Storage developers have spoken hungrily about their ability to take the place of gas plants for peak power. Now it might actually happen.

NRG's efforts to build the Puente gas plant in Oxnard, California, ran into opposition in the final stages of regulatory approval. A coalition of clean energy advocates, environmental justice advocates and the city itself pushed back against the proposal, saying that a gas plant would be an unnecessary expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure when cleaner alternatives exist.

Those arguments had been heard elsewhere, but this time, the grid operator agreed. CAISO studied the local grid needs and determined storage and other distributed assets could do the job of the gas plant. That just left the question of relative cost, which CAISO said could only really be determined by industry bids in a request for offers.

The regulators reviewing the case announced they planned to reject the plant. Then NRG asked for a suspension of the approval process to allow for the RFO, and the regulators granted it. 

This story is still developing. It's not yet clear just how competitive the storage bids will be compared to the cost of a gas plant, or how much regulators will weigh the value of clean, flexible resources relative to gas burning infrastructure that would only rarely operate.

The gas plant could still win out, but if it doesn't, this will be the first time storage triumphs in a head-to-head peaker contest.

Tesla promises the world's biggest battery in less than 100 days...and delivers

After betting he could deliver the world's largest battery in 100 days or it would be free, Elon Musk followed through. 

The 100 megawatt/129 megawatt-hour facility began testing in South Australia just about when Americans sat down for their Thanksgiving feasts. Much like Aliso Canyon, it showcased the unique speed with which storage can arrive on the grid in response to urgent needs. 

When it comes to the flagship projects, the company delivers in a big way. Back on the home front, though, Tesla has had trouble maintaining timely deliveries of batteries to its typical storage customers. 

As the company matures, it will need to balance rapid response to emergency opportunities with steady and reliable shipments to customers. It's currently ramping up Gigafactory production to that end, while working out kinks in the manufacturing line for the Model 3.

That's an important step, because grid emergencies like South Australia won't stop coming, and Tesla could be called on again for rapid response mega-batteries before too long.  

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8265708 http://ift.tt/2AvPecF via IFTTT