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Thursday, September 23, 2021

Racism, climate and divisions top UN agenda as leaders meet (AP) Racism, the climate crisis and the world’s worsening divisions will take center stage at the United Nations on Wednesday. China’s President Xi Jinping warned that “the world has entered a period of new turbulence and transformation.” Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö said: “We are indeed at a critical juncture.” And Costa Rica’s President Carlos Alvarado Quesada declared: “The future is raising its voice at us: Less military weaponry, more investment in peace!” Speaker after speaker at Tuesday’s opening of the nearly week-long meeting decried the inequalities and deep divisions that have prevented united global action to end the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed nearly 4.6 million lives and is still raging, and the failure to sufficiently tackle the climate crisis threatening the planet. Perhaps the harshest assessment of the current global crisis came from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who opened his state of the world address sounding an “alarm” that “the world must wake up.” “Our world has never been more threatened or more divided,” he said. “We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes.” “We are on the edge of an abyss—and moving in the wrong direction,” the secretary-general warned.

Shutdowns and Showdowns (1440) Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a pair of legislative showdowns over the next week and a half, set in motion by two decisions over the past two days. The first focuses on government funding and the debt ceiling. If Congress does not provide funding for fiscal year 2022 by midnight Sept. 30, the federal government will face a shutdown. Similarly, the Treasury Department has said Congress must raise the debt ceiling by mid-October to avoid default. House Democrats passed yesterday a bill pairing short-term funding through Dec. 3 with a debt ceiling increase—a move requiring the support of at least 10 Republican senators. Separately, House Democrats said they planned to bring a $1.2T bipartisan infrastructure deal up for a vote, separate from a $3.5T social spending budget bill. The move pits moderates against progressives, with the latter previously saying they would only support the infrastructure deal if a vote on the budget bill came at the same time. It’s unclear how many House Republicans will support the $1.2T bill.

Haiti Deportations (Foreign Policy) The United States will continue deportation flights to Haiti today as it seeks to repatriate nearly 15,000 migrants who have crossed into U.S. territory in recent days. Videos of federal authorities mistreating the mostly Haitian migrants at a camp in Del Rio, Texas—a town on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border—has led to fierce criticism from Democratic lawmakers and adds to a warning from the head of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR that the deportations may violate international law. The move could also be seen as hypocritical; just over 7 weeks ago, on Aug. 3, the Biden administration extended protected status to Haitian migrants in the United States, in light of what the Department of Homeland Security called a “deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses” in their home country. The legal authority under which Biden has carried out the expulsion has also been called into question. Title 42, a Trump-era authorization implemented at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic to expel asylum seekers immediately on the grounds that they could spread disease, has been maintained by the Biden administration. Last week, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the policy, a decision that is now being appealed by the U.S. government. Amid a surge of migrants crossing into the United States this year, Title 42 has been applied regularly; figures from U.S. customs authorities show roughly 700,000 expulsions took place under the Biden administration to date, nearly twice the amount that took place under President Donald Trump.

Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns (Reuters) Lithuania’s Defense Ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities. Flagship phones sold in Europe by China’s smartphone giant Xiaomi have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement”, Lithuania’s state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday. The capability in Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the “European Union region”, but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Defence Ministry’s National Cyber Security Centre said in the report.

Toxic gas, new rivers of molten lava endanger Spanish island (AP) As a new volcanic vent blew open and unstoppable rivers of molten rock flowed toward the sea, authorities on a Spanish island warned Tuesday that more dangers lie ahead for residents, including earthquakes, lava flows, toxic gases, volcanic ash and acid rain. Several small earthquakes shook the island of La Palma in the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa on Tuesday, keeping nerves on edge after a volcanic eruption on Sunday. The rivers of lava, up to six meters (nearly 20 feet) high, rolled down hillsides, burning and crushing everything in their path, as they gradually closed in on the island’s more densely populated coast. Canary Islands government chief Ángel Víctor Torres said “when (the lava) reaches the sea, it will be a critical moment.” The meeting of the lava, whose temperature exceeds 1,000 degrees Celsius (more than 1,800 F), with a body of water could cause explosions and produce clouds of toxic gas. A change in the wind direction blew the ashes from the volcano across a vast area on the western side of the island, with the black particles blanketing everything. Volcanic ash is an irritant for the eyes and lungs. The volcano has also been spewing out between 8,000 and 10,500 tons of sulfur dioxide—which also affects the lungs—every day, the Volcanology Institute said.

Germany’s diversity shows as immigrants run for parliament (AP) Ana-Maria Trasnea was 13 when she emigrated from Romania because her single, working mother believed she would have a better future in Germany. Now 27, she is running for a seat in parliament. “It was hard in Germany in the beginning,” Trasnea said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But I was ambitious and realized that this was an opportunity for me, so I decided to do whatever I can to get respect and integrate.” Trasnea, who is running for the center-left Social Democrats in Sunday’s election, is one of hundreds of candidates with immigrant roots who are seeking a seat in Germany’s lower house of parliament, or Bundestag. While the number in office still doesn’t reflect their overall percentage of the population, the country’s growing ethnic diversity is increasingly visible in politics. There are about 21.3 million people with migrant backgrounds in Germany, or about 26% of the population of 83 million.

Europe’s defense (Foreign Policy) EU leaders will discuss plans for a more coordinated defense posture in an upcoming summit in October, European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic told reporters on Tuesday. “I think that after Kabul, after AUKUS, this was, I would say the natural conclusion, that we need to focus more on the strategic autonomy,” Sefcovic said, referring to the recent trilateral defense pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Kremlin’s party gets 324 of 450 seats in Russian parliament (AP) Russia’s ruling party will get 324 of the 450 seats in the next national parliament, election authorities announced Tuesday. The number is less than the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, won in the previous election but still an overwhelming majority. Retaining the party’s dominance in the State Duma was widely seen as crucial for the Kremlin ahead of Russia’s presidential election in 2024. President Vladimir Putin’s current term expires that year, and he is expected either to seek reelection or to choose another strategy to stay in power. A parliament the Kremlin can control could be key to both scenarios, analysts and Kremlin critics say. Most opposition politicians were excluded from the parliamentary election that concluded Sunday, which was tainted by numerous reports of violations and voter fraud.

Queued (WSJ) As of Sunday, there were 73 ships waiting to unload cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a brutal logjam just as holiday cargo hits U.S. shores. There are few options around it, given that last year the ports handled 8.8 million containers, more than double the runner-up port of New York and New Jersey which handled 3.9 million. Oakland and Seattle aren’t big enough to handle the hundreds of thousands of boxes handled in L.A. and Long Beach every week, and while some shippers had been heading to East Coast ports for a while, word about that hack got around rather quickly, and so it’s getting just as bad on the Atlantic, with 20 ships queued at Savannah.

Wednesday’s autumnal equinox (Washington Post) Summer often seems to last deep into September these days. However, the autumnal equinox—which arrives Wednesday at 3:21 p.m. Eastern time—is a reminder from Mother Nature that fall is finally on our doorstep. We are now seeing just over 12 hours of daylight, having reached the halfway point between our longest and shortest days of the year. The autumnal (or fall) equinox, which usually falls on Sept. 22 or 23, is technically not a day-long astronomical event. It’s a brief moment in time when the sun appears directly over the Earth’s equator before crossing into the Southern Hemisphere. Like the spring equinox in March, the fall equinox is one of only two days each year when most of the Earth experiences about 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. Day and night are nearly equal because we are at a point in our orbit when neither hemisphere is tilted away from or toward the sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox means we are entering the dark season and inching closer toward winter.

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