In the Shadow of 9/11 (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

FRONTLINE PBS | OfficialAug 10, 2021
From the acclaimed director of “Leaving Neverland,” the story of the Liberty City Seven and the biggest alleged Al Qaeda plot since 9/11, told for the first time as a documentary feature.

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This feature-length FRONTLINE film from Dan Reed explores the case of the Liberty City Seven, a group of Black men from Miami accused of planning an Al Qaeda plot to blow up U.S. buildings, including the Sears Tower in Chicago. ¬¬ Their trial marked the federal government’s first major post-9/11 counterterrorism sting within the U.S. Yet the accused men had no weapons and had never communicated with anyone from Al Qaeda. Through interviews with former Department of Justice officials and FBI agents, counterterrorism experts, attorneys, journalists, family members and several of the Liberty City Seven themselves, “In the Shadow of 9/11” offers a window into how law enforcement confronted the terror threat at home in the wake of 9/11 and the ramifications of a desperate search to hunt down the “enemy within.”

The Point: Ambassadors discuss the future of globalization

CGTNAug 10, 2021
For more: https://www.cgtn.com/video

A defining future of globalization is the cross-border movement of goods, services, capital and people. As the COVID-19 #pandemic continues to constrain global mobility, efforts need to recharge the momentum of global trade, investment and mobility. How to strike a balance between safety and mobility? How to advance cross-border trade, cooperation, #multilateral and bilateral arrangements? Find out in the second part of The Point special edition of Ambassadors’ Roundtable. #Coronavirus

Guests: Djauhari Oratmangun, Ambassador of Indonesia to China Wim Geerts, Ambassador of Netherlands to China Clare Fearnley, Ambassador of New Zealand to China Siyabonga Cyprian Cwele, Ambassador of South Africa to China Bernardino Regazzoni, Ambassador of Switzerland to China Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri, Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to China

Ethiopia PM Abiy Ahmed calls on civilians to join Tigray war – BBC News

Ethiopia’s prime minister has called on civilians to join the army in its fight against rebels in the Tigray region.

Abiy Ahmed asked “all capable Ethiopians” to “show their patriotism” by joining the war, which is raging across the north of the country.

Fighting has escalated since June when the rebels, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), recaptured much of Tigray in an offensive.

This came after the federal army had withdrawn and declared a ceasefire.

In his statement, Mr Abiy – a Nobel Peace Prize winner – said the whole country had to get behind the battle to defeat the TPLF.

“The media, artists and social activists are expected to contribute towards strengthening the people’s support for the country,” he said.

“Every Ethiopian must work closely with the security forces in being the eyes and ears of the country in order to track down and expose spies and agents of the terrorist TPLF.”

The TPLF has been designated a terrorist organisation by the government. But the group says it is the legitimate regional government of Tigray.

Fighting broke out in November 2020 between government troops and the TPLF, which ruled Ethiopia for decades and now controls Tigray.

The conflict has forced over two million people to flee their homes, with hundreds of thousands pushed into famine conditions.

…(read more).

The Great Climate Migration Has Begun

Amanpour and Company – May 24, 2021

The climate crisis is forcing thousands around the world to flee as their homes become increasingly uninhabitable. Abrahm Lustgarten is a Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter and has spent years looking at how climate migration will reshape the world. He speaks with Hari Sreenivasan about his latest project.

The Latest IPCC Report Is a Catastrophe – The Atlantic

A new United Nations–led report from hundreds of climate scientists around the world makes it clear: The human-driven climate crisis is now well under way. Earth is likely hotter now than it has been at any moment since the beginning of the last Ice Age, 125,000 years ago, and the world has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius, or nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the Industrial Revolution began—an “unprecedented” and “rapid” change with no parallel in the Common Era. What’s more, the recent spate of horrific heat waves, fire-fueling droughts, and flood-inducing storms that have imperiled the inhabited world are not only typical of global warming, but directly caused by it.

These are the conclusions of the newest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-sponsored body that has periodically released a synthesis of current climate science since its founding in 1988. The group’s reports tend to punctuate the otherwise slow immiseration of climate change; its previous synthesis report, released in 2013, helped inform international climate policy, including the writing of the Paris Agreement.

This is its sixth report and its most definitive. The group’s findings must be agreed to by 195 countries; this famously makes it more conservative than some scientists believe is prudent. But compared with previous reports, there is little restraint here. In its strongest statement of culpability ever, the IPCC declared that humanity is “unequivocally” responsible for climate change. “In past reports, we’ve had to make that statement more hesitantly. Now it’s a statement of fact,” Gregory Flato, a vice chair of the group that authored the report and a senior research scientist within the Canadian government, told me.

Some of the worst impacts of climate change can still be avoided. “There are still emissions pathways that would lead us to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, but they require deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions,” Flato said. “That leaves a glimmer of optimism that we could limit warming to levels like that.” But it would require much more expedient action from the United States than is contemplated in, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress is currently considering.

…(read more).

The Ramifications of China’s One-child Policy

VOA News – Aug 10, 2021

After over 35 years of one-child policy, though, changes’ impact not likely to be felt soon #onechildpolicy #China

Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation | Nature Climate Change

Boers, N. Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 680–688 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01097-4

Abstract

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a major ocean current system transporting warm surface waters toward the northern Atlantic, has been suggested to exhibit two distinct modes of operation. A collapse from the currently attained strong to the weak mode would have severe impacts on the global climate system and further multi-stable Earth system components. Observations and recently suggested fingerprints of AMOC variability indicate a gradual weakening during the last decades, but estimates of the critical transition point remain uncertain. Here, a robust and general early-warning indicator for forthcoming critical transitions is introduced. Significant early-warning signals are found in eight independent AMOC indices, based on observational sea-surface temperature and salinity data from across the Atlantic Ocean basin. These results reveal spatially consistent empirical evidence that, in the course of the last century, the AMOC may have evolved from relatively stable conditions to a point close to a critical transition.

Boston Public Radio Full Show: 6/24/21

Bill McKibben talked about increasing instances of extreme weather across the nation, explaining its relation to climate change. He also discussed the protests against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, a founder of 350.org, and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. He also writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s environmental newsletter. His latest book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”

Listen 22:52 Bill McKibben on BPR | June 24, 2021

Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop Investigate How Climate Change Impacts Most Vulnerable Populations

Flood waters go down Winthrop Shore Drive February 9, 2013 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. An overnight blizzard left one to two feet of snow in areas, and coastal flooding is expected as the storm lingers into the day.Darren McCollester / Getty Images
By Phillip Martin
Hannah Reale

August 4, 2021

Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop are launching a cooperative project to understand how climate change will specifically affect low income residents, people of color and other vulnerable residents.

The communities announced last week they are seeking to hire a consultant to conduct a Social Vulnerability Assessment through a new joint regional climate change project, the North Suffolk Office of Resilience and Sustainability.

Ultimately, the aim is to find gaps in the region’s approach to combatting climate change, centered first and foremost around the communities likely to be most affected by it, and then form recommendations about how to take them on.

The project is driven by the idea that, in order to proactively respond to the toll the changing climate will take on the region, first the region needs to understand who that toll will be taken on.

The communities are gathering data and trying to “analyze it and make that more transparent and accessible to really understand how climate vulnerability and social vulnerability to climate is happening,” said Cameron Peterson, the director of Clean Energy at the Boston-area regional planning agency Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

Both the office and the new assessment are funded by grants from MAPC and the Boston climate and education-focused Barr Foundation (which is also a GBH donor).The North Suffolk office, funded through 2022, develops regional projects to help Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop cope with and respond to the encroaching impacts of climate change.

For evidence of the impacts of structural racism and discrimination on people’s lives and livelihoods, skeptics need not look further than how COVID-19 hit Chelsea, says Roseann Bongiovanni, the executive director of the local Chelsea environmental organization GreenRoots. Infections in Chelsea reached six to seven times the state’s levels, she said.

“We always thought it was only climate and not necessarily a pandemic, and yet 18 months ago and throughout much of that pandemic, Chelsea was hit worst,” Bongiovanni said. “That’s really about structural racism and discrimination that has led to our community and communities like ours being so disproportionately burdened by years of environmental and public health threats.”

“As we see the tides rise, the sea rise, flooding become more and more prevalent, erratic weather becoming much more regular and heat impacts, it’s low income people and people of color who are being hit hardest and worst,” she said.

Environmental impacts are already being felt, even as the local governments look to head off the worst impacts and understand gaps in their plans.

“In those heavy winter storms in 2018, we already saw significant flooding,” Bongiovanni said. “The area that’s by the New England Produce Center was almost underwater. … We saw flooding at the Burma Road housing development, at the Mace public housing development, in our neighborhoods.”

…(read more).

‘No Logical Reason’ Why Line 3 Pipeline Should Be Expanded, Says Bill McKibben

By Hannah Uebele  June 24, 2021Boston Public Radio

Listen 22:52 Bill McKibben on BPR | June 24, 2021

President Joe Biden revoked the controversial Keystone XL pipeline’s permit back in January, and the project was officially terminated by its developer earlier this month. But critics are worried that Biden has yet to withdraw permits for another, very similar, pipeline called Line 3.

The Line 3 pipeline, which is being built by Enbridge Energy, would carry thousands of barrels of oil through the watersheds of Minnesota. Indigenous communities and activists have protested an expansion of the pipeline, saying it would go through tribal lands and sensitive waterways.

Climate activist and writer Bill McKibben spoke to Boston Public Radio on Thursday about the Biden administration’s stance on the Line 3 pipeline.

“It’s a pipeline of exactly the same size, carrying exactly the same stuff as Keystone XL,” McKibben said. “So if in 2015, Keystone XL fails Obama’s climate test, it’s hard to imagine how [Line 3] passes Biden’s in 2021.”

Biden’s stance could be an attempt not to “rattle anyone’s cages” during negotiations of a bipartisan infrastructure bill, McKibben noted. “But there’s no logical reason at all that we should be building a new tar sands pipeline designed to last for 50 years,” he said.

Bill McKibben is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, a founder of the advocacy group 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. He also writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s environmental newsletter. His latest book is “Falter: Has The Human Game Begun To Play Itself Out?”