Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen had a warning for corporations pretending everything will be fine after President Donald Trump ends his trade war. According to Olsen, the only people Trump treats worse than his enemies are his friends.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro got the same treatment. After running like Trump in his own election and praising the American leader, Bolsonaro's rude awakening came when Trump tweeted he was reinstating tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from Brazil and Argentina
Olsen explained it didn't seem as if the Latin American countries knew it was coming.
Bolsonaro seemed "taken by surprise," Olsen described when the press asked him about the decision. He said he'd “call Trump,” and he has “an open channel with him.”
Olsen went on to call Trump "far too obsessed" with the agriculture community, saying in his tweet that the tariffs were because Brazil and Argentina are weakening their currencies, "which is not good for our farmers."
"But what about the U.S. firms that import steel or aluminum from these countries, in part because they had been exempted from prior tariffs while steel and aluminum from China was not?" asked Olsen. "They will now have a significant price hike in a key input material and might have to again switch their source countries, something that takes time and costs money. Don’t they deserve consideration, too?"
It adds to the long line of strange policy announcements via tweet that the markets and allied countries must face when Trump wakes up each morning.
"Trump is flying to London today to meet with our 28 NATO allies. After this debacle, many world leaders are surely dreading his arrival, wondering whether a similar fate awaits them after he lands," Olsen closed.
President Donald Trump branded Democrats a "disgrace" Monday for holding impeachment proceedings while he attends a NATO summit in England and rejected participating in what he called "a hoax."
"The Democrats, the radical-left Democrats, the do-nothing Democrats, decided when I'm going to NATO -- this was set up a year ago -- that when I'm going to NATO, that was the exact time," Trump said angrily on departing the White House.
"It's an absolute disgrace what they're doing to our country," he said. "The whole thing is a hoax. Everybody knows it."
While Trump is away, House Democrats will ramp up what appears to be inevitable momentum to making the real estate tycoon only the third president ever impeached.
This starts Wednesday with a hearing in the Judiciary Committee at which experts will weigh whether Trump's alleged crimes in pressuring Ukraine to investigate a domestic political opponent meet the constitutional impeachment bar.
AFP/File / Olivier Douliery House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a longtime political nemesis of President Donald Trump, will lead the process to draw up articles of impeachment against him
Trump's chief White House lawyer, Pat Cipollone, told the Democratic leader of the committee, Jerry Nadler, on Sunday that he was rejecting an invitation to send representatives to the session.
"We cannot fairly be expected to participate... while it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the President a fair process through additional hearings," Cipollone wrote.
Cipollone did not rule out White House participation in subsequent hearings. Throughout the drama, however, Trump has opted for stone-walling and flat-out resistance to what his supporters say amounts to a "coup."
- Trump touts Zelensky interview -
Trump got a boost Monday from an interview in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted he had not come under pressure from Trump.
AFP / Gal ROMA The US impeachment process
The US president is accused of brazenly using a hold-up in hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to Ukraine to force Zelensky to announce a politically embarrassing probe into Joe Biden, one of the lead Democrats challenging Trump for the presidency in 2020.
A stream of high-level diplomats and several White House officials have testified in Congress about Trump's back-channel communications with Zelensky.
But Zelensky said Monday that he'd not been forced into anything.
"I did not speak with US President Trump in those terms: 'you give me this, I give you that,'" Zelensky said in an interview with several publications, including Germany's Der Spiegel magazine.
Trump says he was right to raise his concerns over alleged corruption by Biden and his son Hunter, who was controversially named to the board of a Ukrainian energy company accused of corrupt practices.
AFP / Nicholas Kamm US President Donald Trump, together with First Lady Melania Trump, is heading to Britain for a NATO summit but his impeachment scandal will follow him
And he repeatedly echoed the Zelensky interview on Monday, saying "the Ukrainian president came out and said very strongly that President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong."
"That should be case over," Trump said.
Democratic lawmakers say that Zelensky, a neophyte politician facing armed conflict with Russia, was desperate to please Trump from the outset and remains unable to speak his mind for fear of losing support.
The Judiciary Committee is expected to consider at least four articles of impeachment, including abuse of power, bribery, contempt of Congress and obstruction of justice. A full vote in the Democratic-led House is currently expected before Christmas, with the Republican-dominated Senate holding a trial -- with acquittal seen as all-but-assured -- next year.
- Top Trump officials claim immunity -
Democrats say they want to hear from former national security adviser John Bolton, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. All three are believed to have direct knowledge of Trump's actions toward Ukraine.
So far they have refused to testify, claiming "absolute immunity" as confidants of the president.
AFP/File / Brendan SmialowskiDemocrats want to hear from former national security adviser John Bolton, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R)
But as the Judiciary Committee hearings unfold, the White House may yet decide to send representatives to get their message across in what will likely be combative and at times raucous live television events.
"We'll see where the process goes," senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News.
She said the Democrats were inventing the entire scandal because "they have no idea how to beat him in 2020. They fear he will be reelected."
But another 2020 Democratic candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar, says it's the Republicans who are talking fiction.
Compared to the scandal which brought down president Richard Nixon, she told NBC television, this is "a global Watergate."
The gas, said one, "doesn't allow us to breathe, so we're only feeling so-so."
Three Chilean children on Sunday told an interviewer they are protesting against their country's government and economic system in order to ensure a better future for the country.
In a brief conversation with a member of hip-hop collective Rebel Diaz, the three kids—aged 10, 11, and 8—said they were out on the streets braving the effects of police-fired teargas to fight for better salaries for Chileans, healthcare, the indigenous Mapuche, and more.
"For the grandparents who need money," said one child when asked why the trio were protesting.
"For the struggle," said another.
As Common Dreamsreported, protests kicked off around Chile in October after a fare hike on the subway in the capitol Santiago. Billionaire right-wing President Sebastián Piñera endorsed a rewrite of the Latin American country's constitution in an attempt to placate the movement, but the demonstrations have continued due to systemic issues of inequality and poverty under the nation's neoliberal economy.
Piñera's police and security forces have taken harsh measures against the protest movement and a number of demonstrators have disappeared, evoking memories of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s.
The three children told Rebel Diaz that police teargas "doesn't allow us to breathe, so we're only feeling so-so."
When asked, "was it fair what the police did," referring to the teargas, the children replied in unison, "No!"
"No one can escape this challenge by themselves. There is no wall that can protect any country, regardless of how powerful it is."
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez kicked off COP 25 in Madrid, Spain on Monday by condemning the "handful of fanatics" who continue to deny the reality of the climate crisis as it wreaks havoc across the globe and threatens to render large swathes of the planet uninhabitable.
Sánchez, leader of the Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and proponent of a Green New Deal for Spain, did not condemn any nations or world leaders by name. But Sánchez implored the international community to combat "alternative facts," an apparent shot at the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
"No one can escape this challenge by themselves. There is no wall that can protect any country, regardless of how powerful it is."
—Pedro Sánchez, Spanish prime minister"For years, several versions of climate change denial were in circulation," said Sánchez. "Today, luckily only a handful of fanatics deny the evidence. No one can escape this challenge by themselves."
"There is no wall that can protect any country, regardless of how powerful it is," Sánchez added in another thinly veiled jab at the TrumpWhite House, which took the first step toward withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord last month.
Sánchez said Spain will "lead by example" by crafting climate policy that phases out fossil fuels with sufficient urgency while ensuring a just transition for workers and vulnerable communities.
The PSOE emerged victorious in parliamentary elections in April and November after running on a Green New Deal platform. Following its November win, the PSOE agreed to form a coalition with the left-wing Podemos party as the far-right, climate-denying Vox party quickly gained ground in parliament.
As HuffPost's Alexander Kaufman wrote Sunday, "if Sánchez's center-left vision of a Green New Deal could be criticized for not being ambitious enough, the inclusion of the anti-austerity Podemos could make the country the first to seriously attempt the kind of Green New Deal progressives elsewhere have laid out to curb soaring economic inequality and planet-heating emissions."
"Green New Dealers on both sides of the Atlantic argue that addressing both crises at once is key to staving off a resurgent neo-fascist right wing," Kaufman wrote.
During his speech on Monday, Sánchez stressed the importance of ensuring that the "ecological transition" away from fossil fuels is fair and equitable.
"It must be the lever of change against inequality, it must imply justice and equity," said Sánchez. "Our country has assumed that mandate and is determined to act. Progress, if not sustainable, does not deserve to be called progress."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday took to a treadmill to stress the country will remain in stalemate until he talks to Russian leader Vladimir Putin at a key summit next week.
The 41-year-old former comedy actor who took office in May posted a video on his presidential office's Facebook page where he addresses the nation while gently jogging on a running machine.
He says his first meeting with the Russian strongman for direct talks at a four-way summit in Paris next week, which some Ukrainians oppose, is needed to move forward and bring an end to the country's five-year conflict with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
"You know what they say, what dialogue can there be between Zelensky and Putin?", he says, acknowledging the criticism that he is caving in to Russian demands.
"You know, it's possible to go on without this dialogue, but it's something like (...) running on this running machine," Zelensky says, dressed in a dark stripped T-shirt and jogging pants.
"You do something, you burn calories, but you are still on the same spot," he adds.
"We don't want just to be on the same spot, we want all of this to end."
Putin and Zelensky are likely to have a one-on-one meeting during the four-way summit talks in Paris next Monday, joined by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The encounter will attempt to end a conflict which saw pro-Moscow separatists declare unrecognised breakaway republics in Ukraine's eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk and has left more than 13,000 dead since 2014.
Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Moscow of giving financial and military backing to separatists, which Russia denies.
An American woman who claims she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with Prince Andrew criticised the royal's "ridiculous excuses" in an interview to be broadcast Monday.
The interview was recorded before Andrew's own BBC interview, which prompted him to stand down from public duties because of a backlash at his defense of his friendship with Epstein.
But Virginia Giuffre called on the British public to support her as she dismissed claims initially made by the prince's backers that a photograph apparently showing him with his arm around her might not be genuine.
"The people on the inside are going to keep coming up with these ridiculous excuses like his arm was elongated or the photo was doctored," she told the BBC's Panorama program.
"I'm calling BS (bullshit) on this. He knows what happened, I know what happened. And there's only one of us telling the truth," she said in clips released in advance.
Andrew himself doubted the authenticity of the photograph during his badly-received interview, saying "nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored."
Giuffre has alleged she was trafficked to have sex with friends of Epstein when she was 17. Epstein was found dead in a New York prison in August awaiting sex trafficking charges.
She accused Epstein of bringing her to London in 2001, where she was introduced to Andrew and disgraced financier Epstein's socialite girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.
She said the prince asked her for a dance at a nightclub, telling Panorama he was "the most hideous dancer I've ever seen in my life.
"His sweat was like it was raining basically everywhere," she added.
"I was just like grossed out from it but I knew I had to keep him happy because that's what Jeffrey and Ghislaine would have expected from me."
- 'Ill-judged' friendship -
The prince told the BBC that he did not remember the photograph with Giuffre being taken.
He also said he was unable to sweat at the time due to a medical condition he developed after serving as a helicopter pilot in the Falklands War in 1982.
After the nightclub, Giuffre -- then known as Roberts -- said that Maxwell told her: "I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey and that just made me sick."
She and Queen Elizabeth II's second son later had sex at Maxwell's house in central London, she alleged.
Andrew, 59, said he did not remember meeting Giuffre and that he "absolutely and categorically" did not have sex with her.
Giuffre said in her interview: "I implore the people in the UK to stand up beside me, to help me fight this fight, to not accept this as being OK.
"This is not some sordid sex story. This is a story of being trafficked, This is a story of abuse and this is a story of your guys' royalty."
After his BBC interview, Andrew issue statement in which he said "I ... unequivocally regret my ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein" and "deeply sympathize with everyone who has been affected and wants some form of closure".
A statement from Buckingham Palace said they "emphatically denied that The Duke of York (Andrew) had any form of sexual contact or relationship with Virginia Roberts.
"Any claim to the contrary is false and without foundation," it added.
About a quarter of children in the United States are born two to three weeks before their due date, which qualifies them as “early term.” Pregnancies typically last 40 weeks, so you might think that being born two to three weeks early wouldn’t matter. But, children born just two or three weeks early are at slightly higher risks of respiratory problems, like asthma, later in childhood. About 1 in 10 children in the U.S. are born more than three weeks before their due date, which qualifies them as “preterm” and puts them at higher risks for much worse outcomes.
Hot weather is one potential risk factor in early deliveries because heat exposure can increase the mother’s level of oxytocin, a hormone that regulates delivery. Despite the plausible link, questions remain about the number of deliveries affected by hot weather every year in the U.S. or if hot weather accelerates the timing of delivery by hours, days or weeks.
I’m an economist who has spent much of my decadelong career investigating how weather affects human health, with a focus on child and maternal health. I got started down this career path in 2008 because I wanted to understand why infant health is much worse today in hotter parts of the U.S., like Louisiana. Now, I work on these issues to help identify unknown health-related threats from climate change.
New evidence on temperature and delivery risk
My latest work with Jessamyn Schaller at Claremont McKenna, published in the Dec. 2, 2019 issue of Nature Climate Change, focuses on the effect of hot weather on early deliveries. We compiled 56 million birth records from the United States over the 1969-1988 time period. We then matched the recorded county of birth to daily weather data to see if hot weather does, in fact, lead to earlier deliveries.
But, there were two data challenges we needed to overcome.
To get around this challenge, we analyzed time periods with unpredictably hot weather, which we define as an excess of days with maximum temperatures of 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) or higher for a given county and time of year. This approach controls for slow-moving societal changes that affect infant health independent of the weather, like access to health care.
Second, measuring pregnancy duration (or what obstetricians call gestational length) is difficult. Pregnancies technically begin on the start of the last menstrual period prior to conception. Some mothers might recall this date, but the data suggest that there’s a lot of guessing going on, either on the hospital’s or the mother’s side.
Here’s where our study gets creative. We tested for shifts in the timing of deliveries. Take a hypothetical example: We might observe 10 more births than average in DeKalb County, Georgia, one of many counties in our data, on an unusually hot day for that time of year. Supposing the hot weather caused those births to occur two days early, we should observe 10 fewer births than average for DeKalb County two days later after the hot weather subsides. With this approach, we only need data on weather and birth dates, and not the start date of the pregnancy.
Our estimates imply that about 5% more children are born on unpredictably hot 90 degree-plus Fahrenheit days than would be expected. In total, hot weather caused about 25,000 babies each year to be born earlier than they would have otherwise in the United States. The average loss is about six days of gestation. But, the losses were potentially as large as two weeks for some births.
Lessons for climate change
This isn’t the first study to consider how weather might influence fetal health. A number of studieslook at preterm delivery (less than 37 weeks gestation), although using very small samples. Our creative approach and large dataset enabled us to calculate weather-related reductions in gestational lengths across the entire U.S.
Unfortunately, we can’t give the specific reason why hot weather causes earlier deliveries. It may or may not be because hot weather increases oxytocin and induces labor. And, it’s not clear how much worse off these children will be as they grow into adulthood for being born a little early, especially since we can’t tell whether the births qualify as preterm or early term. But, one recent study did find that fetal exposure to hot weather has lasting impacts into adulthood.
The risks for women delivering early are likely to increase in the coming years with climate change. Of course, the exact reductions in gestational length are difficult to predict because it’s unclear what our future world is going to look like once 90 degree-plus F (32 degree-plus C) days become much more frequent.
But, to give you a sense of the magnitude, we predicted that more hot weather from climate change would induce about 42,000 additional deliveries annually in the United States by the end of century. That’s more than 1 in every 100 births.
Air conditioning is likely to be an important solution, and is something we see in our data. But, without using greener air conditioners and renewable energy sources it will make climate change worse.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear Monday that the United States did not plan a military intervention in Venezuela even as he vowed that leftist leader Nicolas Maduro would one day fall.
In a speech on Latin America, Pompeo renewed President Donald Trump's promise to battle socialism across the hemisphere but said his policy in Venezuela is "mixed with restraint."
"We've seen folks calling for regime change through violent means, and we've said that all options are on the table to help the Venezuelan people recover their democracy and prosperity," Pompeo said at the University of Louisville.
"That is certainly still true. But we've learned from history that the risks from using military force are significant," he said.
Pointing to hard-hitting US sanctions that include curbs on Venezuela's key export of oil, Pompeo said that US efforts have been "realistic, within the capacity of American power."
Trump since January has been demanding the resignation of Maduro, a leftist firebrand who presides over a crumbling economy that has led millions of people to flee.
But Maduro remains in power with the support of Russia and China and opposition efforts to install Juan Guaido, the young head of the National Assembly, have fizzled.
Pompeo nonetheless voiced confidence that Maduro would fall and suggested he may share the inglorious fate of Romania's communist dictator.
"In July of 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu said capitalism would come to Romania when apples grew on poplar trees -- and by December he was hanging from a rope," Pompeo said.
"The end will come for Maduro as well. We just don't know what day."
Trump repeatedly has said that "all options are on the table" -- words that Maduro sees as evidence of a US plan for a coup -- but has spoken less on Venezuela as the months pass by.
Unlike on many of its international priorities, the Trump administration has found support on Venezuela, with most Western and Latin American nations also considering Guaido the interim president.
Right-wing parties frequently position themselves as opposed to government power — in particular, reducing the state is rhetorically linked with the Republican Party in American politics.
But as Daphne Halikiopoulou and Sofia Vasilopoulou explained in an analysis for the Washington Post, a close examination of the voting patterns in Europe reveal a different, more complicated picture.
"Europe’s economic crisis in 2008 was socially disruptive," they wrote. "This might have been expected to lead to increased support for left-wing populist parties that promised to look after voters’ material needs. But instead, it was far-right populists who have won over voters, by promising to restore national sovereignty and govern in the name of the people. This has been true of the National Rally (RN) in France (formerly the National Front), the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), the Austrian Party for Freedom (FPÖ), the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Italian Northern League, among others."
The truth is, they argue, that right-wing populists don't dislike government power — they just prosper politically when people are dissatisfied with how it's being used.
"Citizens interact with state institutions every day. They need to navigate public benefits. They worry about the quality of local hospitals and schools, corruption, neighborhood crime levels, and the conditions determining job security. When citizens see these institutions as legitimate and working well, they are less likely to be discontent with society. These routine interactions with the state shape both the economic and cultural dimensions of discontent," they wrote.
"The far right has risen in Europe because of changes in how citizens view the government," they continued. "When citizens are critical of the state’s capacity to deliver, they tend to resort to protest. Protest voting implies punishing those who are held responsible, and therefore accountable, for poor policies that lack legitimacy. The 'punished' tend to be the incumbent or mainstream parties, associated with existing state policies. When citizens vote for protest parties, they are saying that they are unhappy with how the state is working."
Immigration, they argued, touches on a huge number of state programs and functions, and thus serves as a "litmus test" for many voters about whether the government is working at all.
"However, not all voters are equally skeptical of immigration," they wrote. "Voters with strong anti-immigrant views are the far right’s core electorate, but to win elections they also need to appeal to voters with more-moderate anti-immigrant views. This is where perceptions of the state come in. Our research shows that as the electorate becomes more content with the government, those with more-moderate views over immigration are less likely to support the far right and have fewer incentives to cast a protest vote. However, even if improving the government drives moderate voters away from the far right, it makes strongly anti-immigrant voters more likely to vote for extreme right-wing parties. This seems like a puzzling finding, but it may suggest that these anti-immigrant voters want to restrict access to state benefits so that they are provided only to their own in-group."
"Unpopular state institutions make far-right nationalism more appealing to those with both moderate and extreme views on immigration," they concluded. "However, when citizens trust the state, immigration moderates are less likely to support far-right parties. That makes it harder for these parties to appeal to voters outside their regular voting base."
Tributes were paid on Monday to victims of the London Bridge terror attack, as the government said it was reviewing the early release from prison of dozens of convicted terrorists.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the main opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and London Mayor Sadiq Khan all joined a vigil to honor Jack Merritt, 25, and 23-year-old Saskia Jones.
They were both killed on Friday when Usman Khan, who was wearing a fake suicide device, went on a knife rampage before being shot dead by armed police.
Khan, 28, had been released early from a 16-year prison sentence for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to attack central London after being deemed to no longer be a risk to the public.
The incident has provoked questions about legislation, and triggered accusations that the government was seeking to make political capital from the tragedy before a general election.
The memorial event in the City of London financial district, a short distance from the scene of the attack, involved members of the emergency services and the public.
Mayor Khan told them: "The best way to defeat this hatred is not by turning on one another but by focusing on the values that bind us."
People should "take hope from the heroism of ordinary Londoners and our emergency services who ran towards danger, risking their lives to help people they didn't even know".
"It is also by drawing inspiration from Jack and Saskia, who from an early age chose to dedicate themselves to helping others," he added.
A minute's silence was also held in Cambridge, where the two victims were university graduates, and were working on a prisoner rehabilitation scheme that Khan had attended.
Among those at the Cambridge vigil was Merritt's girlfriend Leanne O'Brien, who broke down in tears and clutched a cuddly toy.
- Political fallout -
Johnson has ordered the security services to step up monitoring of convicted terrorists released early, saying the cases of 74 individuals were being scrutinized.
As part of the review, the West Midlands Counter-Terrorism Unit in central England said officers had arrested a 34-year-old man "on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts".
British media identified the man as Nazam Hussain, who was jailed with Khan in 2012 and also released early after successfully appealing against his original indeterminate sentence.
West Midlands Police said the man had been "recalled to prison due to a suspected breach of his licence conditions".
The Daily Telegraph newspaper said a number of convicted terrorists could be returned to prison within days.
The Metropolitan Police said a 23-year-old man was arrested in north London on Sunday "on suspicion of breaching notification requirements under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008".
Scotland Yard said the arrest "was not linked in any way to the London Bridge terror attack".
Johnson, however, has criticised the 2008 legislation and said he would introduce minimum 14-year sentences if he is returned to office after polls on December 12.
His governing Conservatives have traditionally portrayed themselves as the party of law and order.
But Merritt's family has warned against a knee-jerk reaction to his death.
"We know Jack would not want this terrible, isolated incident to be used as a pretext by the government for introducing even more draconian sentences on prisoners, or for detaining people in prison for longer than necessary," they said.
Justice minister Robert Buckland told BBC radio he was meeting officials on Monday to review the licence conditions of every convicted terrorist released from prison.
Buckland said it would also look at those "about to be released and also a wider group who weren't convicted of terrorism offenses but who present an extremist risk".
Buckland said any prisoner on early release had been stopped from going to events similar to the rehabilitation conference attended by Usman Khan near London Bridge on Friday.
Russia and China on Monday launched a giant gas pipeline linking the countries for the first time, one of three major projects aimed at cementing Moscow's role as the world's top gas exporter.
Presiding by video link-up over an elaborate televised ceremony, Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping hailed the "Power of Siberia" pipeline as a symbol of cooperation.
"Today is remarkable, a truly historic event not only for the global energy market, but first of all for us and for you, for Russia and China," Putin said.
Xi said the project served as a model of cooperation.
"China-Russia relations are entering a new era," Xi said. "Everyone worked hard."
The ceremony featured hard-hatted gas workers and videos showing the pipeline's difficult path from remote areas of eastern Siberia to Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border.
Workers burst into applause and celebratory music played as the CEO of Russian gas giant Gazprom, Alexei Miller, speaking from the Amur region, ordered a valve opened for the gas to flow across the border.
- 'Hedging its bets' -
The 3,000-kilometre (1,850-mile) pipeline -- which Putin has called "the world's biggest construction project" -- will supply China with 38 billion cubic metres (1.3 trillion cubic feet) of gas annually when fully operational in 2025.
INTERPRESS/AFP/File / ALEXANDER DROZDOV Russian energy giant Gazprom and the Kremlin are hedging their bets by developing new pipelines that serve Europe and China, analysts say
Russia and China signed the 30-year, $400 billion construction deal in 2014 -- Gazprom's biggest ever contract.
The pipeline is part of Russia efforts to develop ties with Asia -- in particular top energy importer China -- amid longstanding tensions with the West.
Gazprom stressed that the pipeline ran through "swampy, mountainous, seismically active, permafrost and rocky areas with extreme environmental conditions".
Temperatures along the route plunge to below minus 60 degrees Celsius in Yakutia and below minus 40 C in the Russian Far East's Amur Region.
Work has also been completed on the first road bridge between Russia and China, further linking the two neighbours.
The bridge, which is to open next year, will connect the city of Blagoveshchensk and the northern Chinese city of Heihe.
Moscow however remains a key gas provider to Europe and is also planning to soon launch two more pipelines that will ramp up supplies to the continent while bypassing Ukraine -- TurkStream and Nord Stream 2.
Analysts said the three projects have long-term economic and political benefits for Russia, which has inserted itself between European markets to the west and the rapidly growing Chinese market to the east.
"Russia is not only creating new income streams, but hedging its bets and bolstering its position strategically," said energy analyst Andrew Hill.
"The ability to play one off against the other will not have been lost on either Gazprom or the Kremlin," Hill, who leads the S&P Global Platts EMEA gas and power analytics team, wrote in a blog.
- Questions about profitability -
But some analysts have said the project makes little economic sense, given its enormous costs, and should not have been built.
"This is not a commercial project," said Mikhail Krutikhin, estimating the pipeline's cost at some $100 billion, nearly double the $55 billion price tag announced by Gazprom.
"It will never pay for itself," Krutikhin told AFP.
The Power of Siberia launch came amid continued wrangling over Nord Stream 2.
Nord Stream-2, which would double gas volumes to Germany, is expected to go online in mid-2020, though it has faced opposition from the United States and countries in central and eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine.
AFP/File / Alexander NEMENOV The Bovanenkovo gas field illustrates Russia's ability to operate energy facilities in extremely cold conditions
Critics fear it will increase Europe's reliance on Russian energy supplies which Moscow could then use to exert political pressure.
TurkStream, which Putin and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan hope to launch in January, will transport Russian gas to Turkey, also bypassing Ukraine.
Running under the Black Sea, the pipeline consists of two lines -- the first intended for Turkish consumers, while the second will send gas to southern and southeastern Europe.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday that US officials no longer wanted a global deal on taxing multinational technology giants, and that Washington might be preparing penalities over a digital tax implemented by France this year.
The OECD is overseeing negotiations among 134 countries to forge a system to make firms pay taxes in the countries they operate, amid growing public anger over tax-avoidance techniques allowed under current laws.
France moved ahead with its own digital tax, drawing the ire of US President Donald Trump even though France has vowed to scrub the levy once a global accord is in place.
But on Monday, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is to announce the impacts of the French tax on US companies, and possibly retaliatory measures from Washington.
"Having demanded an international solution from the OECD, it (Washington) now isn't sure it wants one," Le Maire told France Inter radio.
"We can see that the United States is shifting into reverse," he said, adding that Trump "is going to content himself with imposing sanctions against France over its national tax."
The EU's incoming single market commissioner, Thierry Breton, also said that US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin could announce Washington's pullout from the OECD talks.
"I understand that we're going to have a response probably today by Mr Mnuchin telling us that finally it doesn't work," Breton told BFM television.
"If it doesn't work, we will consider the issue at the European level," he said.
But efforts last year to craft a European tax on digital giants failed after opposition from countries including Ireland, which has attracted the EU headquarters of Apple and other tech firms with low corporate taxes.
Under EU law, companies can declare their revenues from across in the bloc in a single jurisdiction, depriving other members of their share of the tax revenue.
That spurred France to set its own tax, expected to add 400 million euros ($444 million) to France's coffers this year, and Italy followed suit with its own tax in October.
Trump has called France's levy "very unfair" and threatened to tax French wines and other exports, though he and French President Emmanuel Macron said a truce had been reached during the G7 summit in France last August.
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon -- grouped together as GAFA in French -- have criticised France's unilateral move as discriminatory, prompting the investigation by US trade officials.
"My message will be clear: We will never, never abandon this justified determination to tax digital giants," Le Maire said Monday.
It’s well established that unsustainable human activity is damaging the health of the planet. The way we use Earth threatens our future and that of many animals and plants. Species extinction is an inevitable end point.
It’s important that the loss of Australian nature be quantified accurately. To date, putting an exact figure on the number of extinct species has been challenging. But in the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, our research has confirmed that 100 endemic Australian species living in 1788 are now validly listed as extinct.
Alarmingly, this tally confirms that the number of extinct Australian species is much higher than previously thought.
A southern black-throated finch, which conservationists say is threatened by the Adani coal mine.
ERIC VANDERDUYS/BirdLife Australia
The most precise tally yet
Counts of extinct Australian species vary. The federal government’s list of extinct plants and animals totals 92. However 20 of these are subspecies, five are now known to still exist in Australia and seven survive overseas – reducing the figure to 60.
The states and territories also hold their own extinction lists, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature keeps a global database, the Red List.
An endangered Manning River turtle.
AUSTRALIAN REPTILE PARK
Our research collated these separate listings. We excluded species that still exist overseas, such as the water tassel-fern. We also excluded some species that, happily, have been rediscovered since being listed as extinct, or which are no longer recognised as valid species (such as the obscure snail Fluvidona dulvertonensis).
We concluded that exactly 100 plant and animal species are validly listed as having become extinct in the 230 years since Europeans colonised Australia:
4 frogs, including two species of the bizarre gastric-brooding frog which used its stomach as a womb
3 reptiles including the Christmas Island forest skink
1 fish, the Pedder galaxias.
A 19th century illustration of the Pig-footed bandicoot.
Wikimedia
Our tally includes three species listed as extinct in the wild, with two of these still existing in captivity.
The mammal toll represents 10% of the species present in 1788. This loss rate is far higher than for any other continent over this period.
The 100 extinctions are drawn from formal lists. But many extinctions have not been officially registered. Other species disappeared before their existence was recorded. More have not been seen for decades, and are suspected lost by scientists or Indigenous groups who knew them best. We speculate that the actual tally of extinct Australian species since 1788 is likely to be about ten times greater than we derived from official lists.
And biodiversity loss is more than extinctions alone. Many more Australian species have disappeared from all but a vestige of their former ranges, or persist in populations far smaller than in the past.
The geographical spread of extinctions across Australia. Darker shading represents a higher extinction tally.
Dating the losses
Dating of extinctions is not straightforward. For a few Australian species, such as the Christmas Island forest skink, we know the day the last known individual died. But many species disappeared without us realising at the time.
Our estimation of extinction dates reveals a largely continuous rate of loss – averaging about four species per decade.
Continuing this trend, in the past decade, three Australian species have become extinct – the Christmas Island forest skink, Christmas Island pipistrelle and Bramble Cay melomys – and two others became extinct in the wild.
Cumulative tally of Australian extinctions since 1788.
The extinctions occurred over most of the continent. However 21 occurred only on islands smaller than Tasmania, which comprise less than 0.5% of Australia’s land mass.
This trend, repeated around the world, is largely due to small population sizes and vulnerability to newly introduced predators.
We must learn from the past
The 100 recognised extinctions followed the loss of Indigenous land management, its replacement with entirely new land uses and new settlers introducing species with little regard to detrimental impacts.
Introduced cats and foxes are implicated in most mammal extinctions; vegetation clearing and habitat degradation caused most plant extinctions. Disease caused the loss of frogs and the accidental introduction of an Asian snake caused the recent loss of three reptile species on Christmas Island.
The causes have changed over time. Hunting contributed to several early extinctions, but not recent ones. In the last decade, climate change contributed to the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys, which lived only on one Queensland island.
The prospects for some species are helped by legal protection, Australia’s fine national reserve system and threat management. But these gains are subverted by the legacy of previous habitat loss and fragmentation, and the ongoing damage caused by introduced species.
Our own population increase is causing further habitat loss, and new threats such as climate change bring more frequent and intense droughts and bushfires.
But now is not the time to weaken environment laws further. The creation of modern Australia has come at a great cost to nature – we are not living well in this land.
The study on which this article is based was also co-authored by Andrew Burbidge, David Coates, Rod Fensham and Norm McKenzie.
AFP/File / Olivier Douliery 
AFP / Gal ROMA 
AFP / Nicholas Kamm 
AFP/File / Brendan Smialowski
INTERPRESS/AFP/File / ALEXANDER DROZDOV 
AFP/File / Alexander NEMENOV 
