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George Russell hopes to put to good use in the future the lessons learned from a tough maiden season in F1 with Williams.

The Grove-based outfit’s depressed level of performance this year has confined its drivers to the back of the field.

But Russell is making the best of his challenging debut season, insisting he wouldn’t change his plight as it’s allowed him to gain a wealth of knowledge at no cost.

    Williams aiming at 2020 with latest test components

“I wasn’t 100 percent sure what to expect but I’m really happy with how the season has gone generally,” Russell said on Thursday in Suzuka.

“From the good moments personally to the tougher times I wouldn’t change anything at all because especially from the tougher times I’ve learned a huge amount.

“Generally being in the position I have been, at the back of the grid, it’s given me an opportunity to just explore a bit more and go under the radar and hopefully that will help me out in years to come when we should be fighting.”

While Williams overall position in the pecking hasn’t changed since Melbourne, Russell insists the team’s FW42 has evolved while the British squad has also built itself a good foundation for 2020.

“It’s definitely improved a lot, just in the driveability side of things,” explained Russell.

“So, from within, it’s definitely a nicer car to drive. It is obviously, always difficult to make huge leaps forward for any team but I think the foundations we have in place now are really positive going into next year.

“We’re trialling a new front wing this weekend, which shouldn’t necessarily bring much performance to this year’s car but should hopefully unlock quite a lot for us moving into 2020, so I’ve got faith we should be fighting.

“Probably towards the lower end of the midfield but hopefully in the mix much more than we are at the moment.”

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Hamilton admits Mercedes caught out by Ferrari pace

November 15, 2019 | News | No Comments

Lewis Hamilton and his Mercedes squad were left reeling by the sudden improvement in speed and performance from their Ferrari rivals in today’s qualifying session for the 2019 Singapore Grand Prix.

Mercedes came into the weekend the clear favourites to pick up pole for the race thanks to the superior corner handling of the W10, while Ferrari were presumed to have the upper hand when it came to straight line speed.

But on Saturday, Ferrari – and in particular Charles Leclerc – proved more than a match for Hamilton in the final moments of Q3.

  • Brilliant Leclerc stuns Hamilton for Singapore GP pole

The young Monegasque’s best effort of 1:36.217s ended up being almost two tenths faster than Hamilton’s own last effort.

It meant the five-time world champion was denied pole and had to settle for a front row spot on the grid instead, one place ahead of Leclerc’s team mate Sebastian Vettel.

“I don’t know where Ferrari picked up their pace today,” Hamilton admitted afterwards when interviewed by Paul di Resta in parc fermé.

“It’s not expected to be one of their circuits, but they did a great job. Charles obviously put some great laps in.

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“I really needed something special at the end so I gave it everything I had,” he insisted. “It was very, very close – I’m sure I touched the wall a couple of times.

“It was as much as I could get out of the car,” he insisted. “I’m really, really happy to be on the front row and in the mix with them so that we can try and divide them tomorrow.”

“I think tomorrow we can be aggressive,” he added.

Hamilton has won the Singapore Grand Prix on four occasions. But he’s also aware that eight times in the last 11 years the event has been won by the driver starting on pole position.

On the other hand, at least Hamilton is aware that Ferrari won’t be able to exploit their traditional straight line speed superiority on the tight and twisty Marina Bay Street Circuit.

“It’s a street track, but we’ll see,” he shrugged.

With Hamilton’s team mate Valtteri Bottas only managing to qualify in fifth place on the grid, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted that it had not been a good day for the team.

“This is a circuit where you would have thought the Red Bulls and the Mercedes are going to battle for pole like in Hungary,” he told Sky Sports F1. “But it’s an odd circuit, it’s different.

“Ferrari did a good job today, their car is fast and we’ve just got to get our act together tomorrow,” he acknowledged.

“They are gaining a few tenths on the straights, but they are also very quick in the corners. They are just quicker everywhere.

“The statistics are against us I guess, but the race hasn’t started yet,” Wolff added. “If Lewis has a decent start, and if Valtteri is maybe able to improve a position or two, then we are in a good position.”

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Formula 1 chiefs Chase Carey and Ross Brawn sat down with the drivers in Russia to address their convcerns over potential changes in the future to the sport’s weekend format.

Formula 1’s managers are seeking to spice up the action on the track going forward and they’ve tabled the idea of experimenting next year with various concepts such as qualifying races on Saturday or reverse grids.

However, a few prominent drivers are not impressed with the suggestions that have been brought forth so far, with Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel calling the reverse grid “complete bullshit”, while Lewis Hamilton wondered if those in charge “know what they are talking about”.

    Hamilton and Vettel rubbish ‘bullshit’ reverse-grid idea

Carey and Brawn took the opportunity to meet with the drivers at Sochi at the regular Friday evening drivers’ briefing.

Once again, the pair emphasized the experimental nature of the trials that could take place at a handful of events in 2020.

“They might want to do some experiments, but they didn’t say they are going to do a Saturday race,” said Max Verstappen, quoted by Motorsport.com.

“But I think it’s good they come to us and just explain it very well. That’s what the meeting was basically about, not ‘we’re going to do this and this’.

“These are the ideas, we’re coming to you guys now to explain what is happening or is maybe happening, just to let you guys know we’re really trying our best to make it better.

“The drivers, we really feel what is going on in the car or what it’s lacking. So, I think it would be good if we could be more involved in it.”

Mercedes Valtteri Bottas said a “good chat” had taken place, and that no drastic decisions would be taken without a the drivers being properly consulted.

“We had a good chat yesterday with Chase and Ross, they were explaining the thinking behind it,” said the Finn..

“They were just going through all the ideas and possibilities, and we asked as drivers to be kind of talked to about it because we have a pretty good view of what we think would make the racing good or not.

“Before they make decisions they agreed to talk to us and have our opinions.

“So that is nice because it’s just one thing we don’t want as drivers, if they make a decision suddenly without us knowing and being already knowing it’s not going to work.”

Haas’ Romain Grosjean agreed that the drivers should be an integral part of the decision process.

“I just think we have a certain amount of expertise and we have a very specific way of looking at things, and we’re the only ones who really have that view, because a lot of these other guys in the decision-making have never driven a race car,” said the Frenchman.

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“So I think it’s good and I think it was very good yesterday to see Ross and Chase come and open up to us, and kind of give and get some feedback.

“And I think hopefully there’ll be more of that in the future, and hopefully they will use us drivers are a bit more and have us influence a bit more.”

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Perez hit with grid penalty following FP3 mishap

November 15, 2019 | News | No Comments

Sergio Perez will start his Singapore Grand Prix five spots down from where he qualifies this evening as a result of a grid penalty linked to a gearbox change on his Racing Point RP19.

Perez hit the outside wall at Marina Bay’s Turn 22 left-hander and while he was able to bring his car back to the pits, despite a broken right rear wheel, his Racing Point crew diagnosed a damaged gearbox.

“After our inspection we found some damage, so we had to change it,” said Racing Point sporting director Andy Stevenson, quoted by Motorsport.com.

Toro Rosso’s Dany Kvyat also underwent a component change following an oil leak that erupted in FP3.

Ahead of qualifying, the Faenza-based team was hard at work replacing Kvyat’s power unit, although the change is penalty-free for the Russian.

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This post may be updated as new information becomes available…

Update (12:25 PM EDT):

Tweets about Jo Cox

British Labour Party MP Jo Cox died on Thursday after being both stabbed and shot following an event in Yorkshire with local constituents.

As the nation responded to the news with shock and sadness, the police said they are continuing their investigation amid some reports suggesting the killing was politically motivated.

Dee Collins, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, confirmed to reporters that a suspect is in custody but said investigators are not able to discuss possible motives at this time.

The Guardian newspaper has posted a powerful obituary of the 41-year-old wife, mother of two, and humanitarian turned lawmaker. In addition, the paper’s editorial board published a sharp rebuke to the violence that took her life and the politics of hatred and divisiveness that may have played a role in motivating her murder.

“What nobler vision can there be than that of a society where people can be comfortable in their difference?” it read in part. “And what more fundamental tenet of decency is there than to put first and to cherish all that makes us human, as opposed to what divides one group from another? These are ideals that are often maligned when they are described as multiculturalism, but they are precious nonetheless. They are the ideals which led Ms Cox to campaign tirelessly for the brutalised and displaced people of Syria, and – the most painful thought – ideals for which she may now have died.”

Following confirmation of her death, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued the following statement:

The whole of the Labour party and Labour family – and indeed the whole country – will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.

Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity. She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen – where she was born and grew up.

Jo was dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights – and she brought those values and principles with her when she became an MP.

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all.

Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo’s husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.

Meanwhile, Brendan Cox, her husband and the father of their two young daughters, sent out this solemn, wordless tweet:

Subsequently, he released the following statement:

Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo’s friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.

Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.

Earlier:

British Labour Party MP Jo Cox is in critical condition after being shot and stabbed during a violent attack on Thursday, according to breaking news reports in the UK.

Though details remain incomplete, Cox was reportedly in the town of Birstall when the attack occurred and witness accounts suggest the violence may have been politically motivated.

According to an eye-witness account reported on the Mirror’s live coverage page, the suspected gunman—who was subsequently detained by police—shouted “Britain First” as he gunned down Cox. That phrase is a reference to the upcoming referendum in the UK on whether or not the country will stay in the European Union. Cox, a left-wing member of Parliament and former head of policy and humanitarian campaigning for Oxfam, has been an outspoken critic of the so-called “Brexit” from the EU.

Far-right and nationalist factions of the Leave Campaign have been roundly criticized for using xenophobic language and bigotry against immigrants and refugees as they argue in favor of the Brexit.

And as Liam O’Hare, a journalist with RTUK, noted on Twitter, “If true that Jo Cox’s attacker shouted ‘Britain First’ then this should be categorised as a far-right terrorist attack.”

According to Sky News, the witness said the shooter looked to be in his 60s or 70s—though police later stated the man in their custody was in his early 50s.

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Though the possible motivations behind Thursday’s violence remain unknown as of this writing, if it is confirmed that political views played a role it would not be the first time Cox has experienced physical aggression from #VoteLeave advocates. As this tweet from Cox’s husband from Wednesday of this week shows:

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn responded to the news on Twitter. “Utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox,” Corbyn wrote. “The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time.”

Progressive columnist Owen Jones tweeted: “Horrendous. All my thoughts with [Jo Cox].”

Following the attack, local police released the following statement:

At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition.

A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries.

Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area. There are no further details at present.

Police presence in the area has been increased as a reassurance to the community.

Live Sky News coverage continues:

A worker shovels snow from a sidewalk in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. Forecasters expect temperatures to drop around 10 degrees by Wednesday.

Record-breaking cold and snowfall is numbing many parts of the U.S. from the Great Plains to the East Coast and north through New England. By Wednesday the cold snap is expected to spread farther south to the upper Texas coast in what is being described as an “arctic outbreak” by the National Weather Service.

The dead-of-winter temperatures come with roughly five weeks of fall remaining on the calendar.

“The arctic airmass that has settled into the Plains will continue to spread record cold temperatures south and eastward into the Ohio Valley and down into the southern Plains,” according to the National Weather Service.

It adds: “Low temperatures in the teens and 20s will be common along much of the East Coast, the Ohio Valley, and down as far south as the upper Texas coast, making it feel like the middle of winter for these areas.”

An estimated 300 cold-weather records are expected to be tied or broken by Wednesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 30% of the continental U.S. is covered by snow.

Even Texas, where weather is typically mild this time of year, saw temperatures drop nearly 40 degrees in a 24-hour period between Monday morning and Tuesday morning.

According to an NWS tweet, temperatures in the Texas cities of Galveston, Sugar Land and College Station dropped by 31 degrees, 33 degrees and 37 degrees, respectively.

Forecasters say a “freeze and hard freeze warnings” are in effect from the Texas coast to coastal South Carolina, with temperatures beginning to gradually rise by Thursday.

A massive storm dumped nearly a foot of snow at the Buffalo, N.Y., airport, according to NWS, as of Tuesday afternoon.

The Buffalo News called the storm “record-shattering,” saying it broke a Nov. 11 snowfall total that had stood for the city for 77 years. The paper writes: “Monday’s snow totaled 8.7 inches, well above the old record of 5.3 set on Nov. 11, 1942. The record was actually surpassed before 9 p.m., when the snowfall hit 5.9 inches, but it kept coming down overnight.”

The Buffalo News notes the city of Rochester, N.Y., about 75 minutes east of the city, “also smashed its record Monday as its 8.2 inches of snow broke the mark of 5.2 set on Nov. 11, 1991.”

In the Chicago area, a storm being dubbed “snowvembruary” set single-day snowfall records for Nov. 11 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport (3.4 inches) and in Rockford, Ill., (3.2 inches).

A day after an American Eagle flight slid off the runway at O’Hare Airport during a storm, the Chicago Tribune reports conditions at both O’Hare and Midway international airports “improved slightly” after thousands of flights were delayed or canceled because of the weather.

None of the crew members or passengers on the flight were injured.

“One hundred flights had been canceled at O’Hare and another 729 were delayed. At Midway, five flights were canceled and 89 were delayed,” the Tribune reports.

The weather is also being blamed for deaths.

Icy conditions in Kansas were said to have caused the death of an 8-year-old girl in a three-vehicle crash in Osage County, southwest of Kansas City on Monday, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol.

In the Lansing, Mich., area, the Eaton County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook on Monday that deputies responded to a two-vehicle crash.

“Upon arrival, deputies discovered that all three occupants in one vehicle were deceased. There was one male, age 57, and two females, ages 64 and 81 in this vehicle that died in the crash,” the sheriff’s office reported.

Meanwhile for the West, NWS predicts “persistent warm and dry weather” which it says elevate concerns for fire weather, particularly in Southern California.

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Correction Nov. 12, 2019

An earlier version of this story mistakenly said temperatures in the Texas cities of Galveston, Sugar Land and College Station dropped by 31%, 33% and 37%, respectively. The temperatures actually dropped 31 degrees, 33 degrees and 37 degrees, respectively. Also, an earlier version mistakenly said Texas saw temperatures drop nearly 40% in a 24-hour period between Monday morning and Tuesday morning. The drop was actually nearly 40 degrees.

The global spiral downwards towards less peace continues, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) finds.

The findings are laid out in the think tank’s latest Global Peace Index (GPI), now in its 10th edition, released Wednesday. It ranks 163 states and territories based on 23 indicators covering domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and a country’s militarization.

Book-ending the 2016 index (pdf) are Iceland, ranking as the most peaceful country, and Syria, which ranks dead last. The United States comes in at 103, just behind Uganda and Guinea, while the UK comes in much further ahead at 47.

Putting a precise figure on the downward trend, the authors of the new index say the world has become 2.44 percent less peaceful since 2008. While 77 countries improved over the past decade, 85 countries fell.

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Driving the decline is the impact of terrorism and political instability. Deaths from terrorism shot up 80 percent, while the number of countries suffering more than 500 deaths as a result of terrorist acts jumped from 5 to 11. And only 23 percent of all the countries on the index have been spared terrorist activity.

While the latest index shows that more countries improved than deteriorated (81 to 79) compared to the prior index, the level of deterioration outweighed the gains.

Europe is the most peaceful of the nine geographical regions on the new index, with North America coming in as the second. Not only did the Middle East and Africa (MENA) again rank last, it was also the region with the biggest drop since the previous index. Three of the five that fell compared to the prior year are also in that region: Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain.

“As internal conflicts in MENA become more entrenched,” stated Steve Killelea, Founder and Executive Chairman of the IEP, “external parties are increasingly becoming more involved and the potential for indirect or ‘war by proxy’ between nation states is rising. This was already evident in Syria with the conflict between the Assad regime and multiple non-state actors, and is now spilling into countries such as Yemen. There is a broader proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and more recently both U.S. and Russia have increased their level of involvement.”

On top of that region’s conflicts, the report notes that the UN Refugee Agency described over 57 million people in 2015 as refugees, internally-displaced people, or others of concern.

Among the highlights, as noted in the report:

  • Two indicators improved by more than ten percent, external conflicts fought and UN peacekeeping funding.
  • The total number of deaths from terrorism rose from less than 10,000 in 2008 to over 30,000 in 2014.
  • Terrorism is at historical levels, battle deaths are at a 25-year high, and the number of refugees is at a level not seen in sixty years.
  • Internal peace and the societal safety and security domain declined every year for the past eight years.
  • Nine countries have more than ten percent of their population displaced in some form, with Somalia and South Sudan both having more than 20 percent and Syria over 60 percent.

Another finding, as noted by the Independent, is that “only Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica, Japan, Mauritius, Panama, Qatar, Switzerland, Uruguay and Vietnam are free from conflict.”

There’s another sobering point in the report: while the ten-year trend downward has continued, there’s been more spending on violence than peace. The price tag on the violence added up to $13.6 trillion in 2015, or 13.3 percent of gross world product. Investments in peacekeeping and peacebuilding, in contrast, totaled $15 billion.

Even a meager improvement could bring about big dollar value. Killelea notes that “peacebuilding and peacekeeping spending remains proportionately small compared to the economic impact of violence, representing just 2% of global losses from armed conflict. Addressing the global disparity in peace and achieving an overall 10% decrease in the economic impact of violence would produce a peace dividend of $1.36 trillion. This is approximately equivalent to the size of world food exports.”

Achieving sustainable peace is paramount, the report notes, as “international cooperation on an unprecedented scale” is needed to address the “unparalleled challenges” facing the world including “climate change, decreasing biodiversity, increasing migration, and over-population.”

After his double-digits win in Wisconsin last night, Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign has a fair amount of momentum behind it. Still, many are asking what comes next, and how to carry the political revolution forward — whether he wins the Democratic nomination or not.

Lessons for Sanders might come from the movement that formed around another white-haired progressive challenger to the political establishment: British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Riding the wave of his country’s emergent social movements, Corbyn’s rise to the top of the party last summer marked a break with Tony Blair’s “New Labour” brand. It also christened a new generation of Labour Party activists, eager not just for a better candidate but a new kind of politics.

Formed just weeks after Corbyn’s election, the grassroots organization Momentum is channeling the energy of Corbyn’s campaign into “a mass movement for real transformative change.” Over a hundred local groups are now running campaigns at the local level and pushing for a more democratic Labour Party, holding a mix of rallies, town hall-style meetings and pop-up political education events.

To learn more about Momentum and what it might mean for the future of the Sanders campaign, I spoke with James Schneider, a national organizer with Momentum and a journalist who’s been involved with the group since its formation.

Where did Momentum come from? Why did it start?

In the simplest form, Momentum is the continuation of the Corbyn campaign. Over the course of three months last summer, the left of the Labour Party went from being tiny and much-maligned to a popular movement. Party membership doubled. It’s nothing in comparison to Sanders’s half-million volunteers, but by the end of the campaign we had 17,000 activists throughout the country. In the United Kingdom that’s massive. It was bigger than the three other campaigns combined, and it had a popular political energy that hadn’t been seen for some time.

Throughout the summer people like [writer and activist] Owen Jones went around the country saying, “These are the seeds of the biggest progressive movement in this country for a generation.” In one very real sense, Momentum was an attempt to give that some sort of organization. There was now a left leadership of a mainstream party of government. But also there were tens of thousands of people throughout the country who wanted to be politically active and do a lot of work. It’s not as if Corbyn turned up and everyone went, “Oh God, I thought everything was fine before.” The overwhelming majority of people know all too well things are screwed up. But now there’s hope. There’s a project for people to engage with. That all built onto something that gets less coverage, which was an attempt for three years to bring the fragmented parts of the Labour Party left together. This effort and the campaign combined into Momentum.

A Momentum rally in Oxford, England in February. (Facebook / Momentum)

Are there things Momentum does that a social movement can’t? How does it work?

It’s a very peculiar organization. It straddles this divide between a more traditional party form and labor and social movements and civil society. None of these are monolithic. But we sit within all four of them and try to bridge divides. There are bits of Momentum that — if you’re used to more traditional movement things — you might find bureaucratic or compromising. But that’s because it is linked to actually existing labor struggles, which necessarily have degrees of political compromise within them. And it is linked to a political party whose organizational form is still very bureaucratic and 20th century in its political technology. We’ve also had 20 years of centralization within the party under New Labour to strengthen its hierarchy.

So there are tensions between those things. But the benefit of having movements that are associated with parties is that movements can directly influence them, not just from pressure from the outside — which has to carry on, and is very important — but also through having this kind of umbilical link. You can make the party more of a movement party.

I imagine people are talking about what happens after Bernie in the same way that we were talking nine months ago, saying, “He might win, he might not win. Regardless, we’ve got to build something with this.” You’ve got the benefit of the Democratic Party being really hollow, but the drawback of it not having any kind of meaning. If he does win, the campaign needs to open up incredibly quickly into being a citizens’ campaign, with citizen assemblies across the country. He’s not going to be able to pursue his agenda from above.

What kind of space did the general election in May open up, when former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband lost to Prime Minister David Cameron?

I don’t think it started with that election. If you think about the time when Ed Miliband was leader (2010-2015), you saw the “There Is No Alternative” line being rigidly enforced through institutional mechanisms around Europe. Some of those were being challenged from within and outside of Parliament as we got into 2015. That’s what helped Corbyn emerge.

What could this and the rest of Momentum’s experience teach Sanders supporters?

If Sanders doesn’t win you’ve got to decide what the Democratic Party is. Do you want to put a lot of effort into remaking the party? Can it be turned out of its corporatist form, and become a new party of the 21st century that is engaged with movements? Will you run an insurgent campaign at all levels to transform that party? Or will Sanders momentum go into something else?

If he doesn’t win the nomination, the strategy needs to be made clear very early on. Elections are easy to run: they’re time limited, so people know that they can give up a lot of time, but know when that will end. There’s a unifying cause, and because it’s time-limited you can suppress disagreements temporarily. Afterward, when you have a series of goals — some of which may compete for time and energy and people — energy can dissipate. It would be important for some legitimate figure to hold it together. It’d probably have to be Bernie Sanders himself. I understand the problematic elements of saying that you need a singular authority figure in order to launch a sustainable democratic movement, but I think that is the case.

If he does win the nomination, the campaign will carry on as an electoral campaign. It needs to become citizen-based, not party-based — and not Sanders partisan, either. You’re going to need citizens councils, public assemblies and other democratic tools to run alongside it. The party exists for purely electoral purposes. This isn’t really about the party. It is about engagement with the state, and particularly the local state. You’ll need to develop a dual power which is about mobilizing people for the provision of services, and taking quite direct political action within communities to take on a semi-state role. That would give a focus for people who want to push forward the political revolution and make it real and permanent. It would maintain popular support, and it carries an implicit critique of the way the state has been set up and organized.

That’s if he becomes the president. He’ll die if he’s on his own in there. You can’t just use the power of the presidency to negotiate with forces that are antithetical to what you want to do.

It’ll also need popular councils to arrive at policies. Bernie’s been fairly light on the specifics of how he’ll govern. He kind of necessarily has to be. It’s difficult to say, “first we’ll be in a joint process of engaging with and changing the system fundamentally, and through that process will emerge the kind of outcomes you want to see.” You also can’t just say we’ll give 5 percent more spending to education, because that’s not a political revolution. It’s good and that should happen, but it’s not a political revolution.

Outside of an election, how can Momentum influence something like, say, the budget?

If you’re out of power within our system you can’t change policy that much directly, although you can indirectly. The budget is a good example of that. The effect of Corbyn on the political discourse in under a year has been dramatic. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary — the person who spent the last six years orchestrating cuts — said, in resigning last month, that austerity is more of a political than an economic choice, which is completely the Corbyn line. Now, Smith is on the right of the Conservative Party. He’s not had some kind of left conversion. But Corbyn has moved basic political common sense.

This budget has made the austerity agenda seem both straight-up mean and straight-up incompetent. It’s easy to see the impacts of Corbyn’s leadership on that. For months he argued that our priorities should be different on moral grounds. But then the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, laid out Labour’s alternative economic strategy, and has been bit by bit tearing pieces of the Tory’s economic credibility.

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Momentum’s role in that is popularizing and spreading those core themes within society. We’ve got a lot of public political and economic education courses that are starting up around the country. There’s a real thirst for people to get alternative political and economic views; not necessarily to agree with them, but to be able to critically engage. There’s a real feeling among people that, “Some of the consensus might be completely right. Maybe we do need austerity, but I don’t trust the people who are saying it anymore because the system that it supports seems corrupt. And it does seem like there are substantial conflicts of interest, so we want to find out things for ourselves.”

What else is Momentum working on now?

We’ve got 130 groups across the country. Depending on where they are they do different things. Generally, they’ll meet once a month in a community center or town hall and discuss what local campaigns they want to do and collectively run them. There’s a huge diversity of things that people are doing across the country. One thing we need to do way more of is to knit those together more, for mutual support between campaigns but also to show the scale of grassroots political activism that is taking place. It falls below the media radar, but — more importantly — it falls below the radar of other people who might be interested in doing this. If you see that they’re trying to close a ward in your hospital and you know about six other campaigns that are trying to stop the same thing, then you’re way more empowered to do something.

On the national level, we started with the voter registration drive because there’s a kind of gerrymandering taking place, knocking over two million people off the electoral register by changing the way voter registration works. Up next are important local and regional elections, and elections in Scotland and Wales. So we’re doing a lot of traditional campaigning to get people out and voting for Labour candidates.

Last week we put out a survey to our supporters asking what their campaign priorities are. We’ll have a new set of national campaigns that will come out after the May elections. We’re now in support, at the national level, of all sorts of currently running campaigns, particularly the junior doctors strike.

How are those campaigns going?

You definitely can’t put this all down to Corbyn, but he has lit something. The junior doctors strike is an industrial action supported by two-thirds of the population. Britain’s steel industry is currently under threat of being completely closed down, and something like 62 percent of people want it to be nationalized. Eighteen percent don’t, and the rest don’t know. Nationalization is the argument being put forward by John McDonnell, and it’s got overwhelming support.

These are arguments that have not been put forward in Britain in a very long time. And now they’re getting an airing. That’s not to say that all we need to do is talk about socialism and then suddenly everyone will like socialism. There are still not the social blocs developed yet in society that are in a position to be able to actively transform it. But these are both big advances in that direction.

Any last words of advice to people who want to see the Sanders campaign’s momentum move forward?

Whatever happens, build on the thing that reduces the structural power gap between you and the real enemy, which isn’t the Clintonite, plutocratic wing of the Democrats. For Sanders, that’s the ability to have half-a-million people who are doing some kind of activism weekly, a highly decentralized ability to raise money, etc. Whether he wins the nomination or not, the campaign needs to clearly articulate the political strategy of this movement. And then, of course, figure out how people in the movement can then engage with the strategy and try to change it.

Another thing is that you’ve got to decide what the relationship is to the Democratic Party, in a variety of ways. If you’ve got half a million people you are the biggest movement of people being active. But how do you engage with all the other movements that are transforming the country? How does the Sanders movement relate to Black Lives Matter? Who does it relate to in the Fight for $15?

Kate Aronoff is an organizer and freelance journalist based in Philadelphia, PA. While in school, she worked extensively with the fossil fuel divestment movement on the local and national level, co-founding Swarthmore Mountain Justice and the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network (DSN). She is currently working to build a student power network across Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @katearonoff

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The Doomsday Clock

November 14, 2019 | News | No Comments

In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin’s statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.” The call condemned world leaders, who “have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe,” endangering “every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty — ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.

As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of “unchecked climate change.” Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, “broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat,” an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier “holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it’s on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.”

Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would “act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.” And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.

When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is “legally binding.” That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.

In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: “Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets.” And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.

“Because of the United States.” More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.

The conclusions are underscored in another Times piece on the Paris agreement. At the end of a long story lauding the achievement, the article notes that the system created at the conference “depends heavily on the views of the future world leaders who will carry out those policies. In the United States, every Republican candidate running for president in 2016 has publicly questioned or denied the science of climate change, and has voiced opposition to Mr. Obama’s climate change policies. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, who has led the charge against Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda, said, ‘Before his international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this is an unattainable deal based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that Congress has already voted to reject.’”

“The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world’s population in the past generation.”

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Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a “radical insurgency” that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With the rightward drift, the Republican Party’s dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that “they” are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.

In recent years, the Republican establishment had managed to suppress the voices of the base that it has mobilized. But no longer. By the end of 2015 the establishment was expressing considerable dismay and desperation over its inability to do so, as the Republican base and its choices fell out of control.

Republican elected officials and contenders for the next presidential election expressed open contempt for the Paris deliberations, refusing to even attend the proceedings. The three candidates who led in the polls at the time — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson — adopted the stand of the largely evangelical base: humans have no impact on global warming, if it is happening at all.

The other candidates reject government action to deal with the matter. Immediately after Obama spoke in Paris, pledging that the United States would be in the vanguard seeking global action, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to scuttle his recent Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions. As the press reported, this was “a provocative message to more than 100 [world] leaders that the American president does not have the full support of his government on climate policy” — a bit of an understatement. Meanwhile Lamar Smith, Republican head of the House’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, carried forward his jihad against government scientists who dare to report the facts.

The message is clear. American citizens face an enormous responsibility right at home.

A companion story in the New York Times reports that “two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to curb growth of greenhouse gas emissions.” And by a five-to-three margin, Americans regard the climate as more important than the economy. But it doesn’t matter. Public opinion is dismissed. That fact, once again, sends a strong message to Americans. It is their task to cure the dysfunctional political system, in which popular opinion is a marginal factor. The disparity between public opinion and policy, in this case, has significant implications for the fate of the world.

We should, of course, have no illusions about a past “golden age.” Nevertheless, the developments just reviewed constitute significant changes. The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world’s population in the past generation. And this is not happening just in the U.S.; in Europe the impact may be even worse.

The Black Swan We Can Never See

Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.

The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.

We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. “In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin,” Goodman writes, “the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon’s risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets.”

We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.

Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that “the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm.”

This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.

Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, “a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order.” A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha “retransmitted an exercise… launch order as an actual real-world launch order.” In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. “But you get the drift here,” Blair adds. “It just wasn’t that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur.”

Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.

As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: “Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive.”

These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems.The Russian ones aredoubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.

“A War Is No Longer Unthinkable”

Sometimes the threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner in which it is commonly interpreted.

With this grim record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence.” The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even against nonnuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly used, in the sense that they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.” It also urges a “national persona” of irrationality and vindictiveness to intimidate the world.

Current doctrine is explored in the lead article in the journal International Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic doctrine. The authors explain that the United States is committed to “strategic primacy” — that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic behind Obama’s “new triad” (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike. The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy might induce China to react by abandoning its “no first use” policy and by expanding its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted region.

The same is true of NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany to become part of NATO — quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In the following years, NATO expanded to Russia’s borders; there are now substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia’s geostrategic heartland. One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.

Aside from that, Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia’s borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy — immunity from retaliation. Perhaps their mission is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia’s militant reactions are quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.

One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a “fateful geographical paradox”: that NATO “exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

The threats are very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing mission in Syria. It passed for a mere 17 seconds through a fringe of Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences.

“It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.”

In reaction, Russia announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be “ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.

Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that “U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War.” Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and “both believe a war is no longer unthinkable.”

Prospects for Survival

If that is so, both sides are beyond insanity, since a war might well destroy everything. It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.

But that is today’s world. And not just today’s — that is what we have been living with for 70 years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of policy formation there were no efforts — apparently not even expressed thoughts — to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just briefly sampled.

“Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course.”

That is the world we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded) by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme the calamity.

Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course. A large share of the responsibility is in our hands — the opportunities as well.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements. His most recent books include:  Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project, 2016); Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (with interviewer David Barsamian); Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions; Empire and Resistance, Hopes and Prospects; and Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order. Previous books include: 9-11: 10th Anniversary Edition, Failed States, What We Say Goes (with David Barsamian), Hegemony or Survival, and the Essential Chomsky.

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An estimated 10,000 people converged in Batangas City, Philippines on Wednesday to demand that the government halt the poisoning of “our land, water, and air” and cancel plans to build as many as 27 coal-fired power plants across the island nation.

Tweets about #piglasbatangas OR #piglasphilipinas OR #BreakFree2016

The march, which was planned as part of a massive global wave of opposition to fossil fuels, took place five days before the national elections, sending a message to the next administration that the Filipino people want a transition to renewable energy.

“We are facing a planetary emergency. Now more than ever, we need leaders who are pro-people and pro-environment, not pro-coal and pro-climate change,” said organizer Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelle.

Demonstrators chanted and held signs that read “Piglas Batangas! Piglas Pilipinas!,” highlighting a national campaign by that name, which roughly translates to “Free Bantangas!” Activists, local fishermen, and community members have been organizing against a proposed 600-megawatt coal plant planned to be built in Bantangas City by JG Summit Holdings, one of the nation’s largest conglomerates.

“Piglas is a call for the incoming president and other new government officials to scrap the Pinamucan coal plant and the other 26 proposed coal plants currently in the pipeline. It is also a demand for the phase-out of the 19 existing coal plants nationwide,” explained Ian Rivera, national coordinator of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. 

“The next administration must review the current one’s commitment to reduce 70 percent of our country’s emissions by 2030. It must also demand climate finance from developed countries, as well as mobilize its own resources, so it can implement a swift and just transition to clean and renewable energy,” added Ruel Cabile, national coordinator of Aksyon Klima Pilipinas.

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The international wave of civil disobedience, dubbed Break Free 2016, kicked off Tuesday in Wales when hundreds of activists shut down the UK’s largest open-cast coal mine. From May 3 through May 15, actions are set to take place across the world, including in Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, the U.S., and Brazil.