Category: The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com

A new report accuses a Chinese company of illegal deforestation in Congo, but there’s debate over which country is responsible.  

Over a six-month period last year, Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development exported $5 million – or about 30 million kilograms — in illegally logged hardwood to timber conglomerate Wan Peng through Zhangjigang Port, the environmental watchdog Global Witness found in its report.

The DRC’s Environment Ministry did not respond to questions about the findings, while the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., stressed that China places “great importance on protecting the environment.” The embassy declined to comment on the specific case in question.

“It is worth mentioning though, that the Chinese government always instructs the Chinese companies abroad to abide by local laws and regulations. That is our consistent position,” said an embassy spokesperson in an email to VOA.

But the Global Witness report made it clear that while there may be laws on paper preventing logging concessions in DRC, they were often ignored.  

Since 2002 there has been a government moratorium on new logging in the DRC due to the corruption in the sector, Global Witness said, but “despite this, vast swathes of forest have continued to be allocated to loggers in violation of the country’s own laws.”

A paradox

The report also pointed to the fact that in April 2022 the Congolese government suspended five concession agreements it had awarded to Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development or CKBFD, but logging continued in at least two of the concessions. After the suspension, between June and December, the company made $5 million in exported logs, it said.

 

When sent the evidence collected by Global Witness, Chinese Customs told the NGO that “as the logging has taken place in DRC and violated local laws, the DRC authority was responsible for enforcement.” The Chinese government could investigate evidence of Chinese companies or citizens being involved in illegal logging – if requested by the DRC government.  

This creates a paradox, analysts told VOA.  

“The Chinese government always preaches its companies to abide by the law, but in reality, the law is not always followed, especially in countries with weak governance…. In countries like DRC, laws are often negotiable with bribery,” Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, told VOA.  

“Beijing’s attitude is ‘we cannot be responsible for the law-making or law-enforcement of another country’, and ‘a few bad apples of Chinese companies do not equate the Chinese government,’” she added.

Christian Geraud Neema Byamungu, Africa Editor at the China Global South Project, himself Congolese, echoed this.  

“From China’s perspective, in this case, they’re not responsible, each country is responsible for what’s happening,” he said.

“Since they’re not backed by Beijing, there is absolutely no political reason for the DRC authorities not to implement and enforce regulations. But they’re not enforced because these Chinese individuals are backed or working for powerful Congolese authorities who can prevent and protect them from any legal action.”  

“So in that case, China’s answer would be ‘How am I responsible? The DRC is letting powerful individuals help Chinese individuals break their country’s rules,” wrote Byamungu to VOA.  

Planting forests

The spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy told VOA that China has been making major efforts in afforestation at home.  

“With four decades of afforestation, China has created the world’s largest planted forests, doubling its forest coverage rate from 12 percent in the early 1980s to 24.02 percent in 2022. Based on NASA satellites date [data] at least 25 percent of global foliage expansion since the early 2000s came from China,” the spokesperson said.

When asked about China’s tree planting efforts, Charlie Hammans, an investigator on the Global Witness report, acknowledged China, which is the world’s largest carbon emitter, had seen some successes at home.

“China has made significant strides in decarbonizing its economy in the last few years and has set a net zero goal by 2060. However, this report makes clear that the behavior of companies in forest-rich countries such as CKBFD undermines the efforts of the country at home,” he said.

But Global Witness said there’s a loophole in China’s forest law, as it is not clear if it applies to imported timber.

“A clear strategy to address this imbalance should be to bring in strong laws to ensure products linked to deforestation cannot be imported into China, and Chinese banks who finance forestry and agribusiness beyond their borders should be required to carry out extensive due diligence to ensure they are not bankrolling bad actors linked to deforestation,” Hammans said.

Антисемитские беспорядки в Махачкале не угрожают режиму Путина, отражая настроения элиты в РФ, считает журналист Манфреда Квиринг, долго работавший в Москве и на Северном Кавказе.

Министерство разведки Израиля подготовило план урегулирования палестино-израильского конфликта с минимальным числом жертв среди мирного населения. Он подразумевает переселение 2,3 млн жителей Газы в Египет. При этом о возвращении беженцев после окончания войны речи не идет. Каир с планом не согласился и предложил разместить беженцев в пустыне. Как на Ближнем Востоке решают судьбу переселенцев – в материале “Газеты.Ru”.

Португальский нападающий оставил под роликом с критикой в адрес аргентинского футболиста смеющиеся смайлики.

Цена за килограмм колеблется от 60 до 70 рублей.

Daily ship crossings on the Panama Canal, one of the world’s main maritime trade routes, will be further reduced over the coming months due to a severe drought, the authorities managing the canal said late on Monday.

Booking slots will be cut to 25 per day between November 3 to November 6, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) said in a shipping advisory, and will be gradually reduced further over the coming months to 18 per day beginning February 1, 2024.

In recent months, the ACP has imposed various passage restrictions to conserve water, including cutting vessel draft and daily passage authorizations.

The latest announcement comes after ship crossings were most recently reduced on Sep. 30 to 31 from 32, effective Nov 1.

Книга обогнала по популярности автобиографию певицы Бритни Спирс.

Temptation has been around since the beginning of time. I think everybody at one time has come face to face with the perils of temptation. Being tempted by forbidden fruit is just part of the human experience. It can, on occasion, however, lead to calamitous results.

That’s what I see in the distance for Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s narcissism is on fire right now. He is struggling — and failing in that struggle.

Since Judge Chutkan reinstated Trump’s gag order, he’s been in a state of fury. Nobody hates like a narcissist hates. Nobody gives into temptation like the narcissist. The gag order was reinstated Sunday evening. Hours later, Trump lashed out in a fit of rage.

He threatened to prosecute President Biden. He accused people of political interference. It was the same old same old with Trump as his diatribe continued into Monday morning, with streams of angry ranting on Truth social posts.

There is a difference now, though. The gag order is in place. Yes, at some point, trump will be hauled off to prison. He is ensuring that. Trump’s temptation dances in front of him, a forbidden and mischievous apple, waiting for him to take more bites, mockingly beckoning him to violate the gag order in so many different ways.

And he will. He has to because narcissists and criminals like Trump know no limits and no self-control. They never think of the ramifications of their actions. They think only of NOW — of satisfying whatever itch they want to scratch in the present.

Yes, temptation — that silken, deceptive vice that has driven many to insanity has existed since the beginning of time. But most people can ward off the forbidden fruit that sings to them, asking them to take a bite from the tempting but deadly low-hanging fruit.

Most people have limits and inner logic and reason. So they resist. Donald Trump has no such limits. He has no impulse control. He cannot win in a battle with forbidden fruit, with temptation. For temptation, it is like taking candy from a baby. That is how easy the tempting of Donald Trump is.

This is one battle Trump cannot win, but later, be it next week or next month when he’s starting at the bars in his new home, perhaps — only perhaps — he might realize that temptation has tempted him all right — right into the trap, right into the ruination of all that he once held dear.

The post Like taking candy from a baby appeared first on Palmer Report.

In the weeks since Israel suffered the deadliest attack in its history, U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged his unfettered support to the country and its people. “President Biden loves Israel, loves the Israeli people, and has our back,” Amir Tibon, an Israeli journalist who survived Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, said following a meeting with the president earlier this month.

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Not everyone feels the same. Back in the U.S., Palestinian and Arab Americans have expressed outrage over Biden’s response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 8,000 people, more than a quarter of them children. The first national poll of Arab Americans since the war in Gaza began shows how deep that sense of betrayal goes, with only 17% of Arab American voters saying they will vote for Biden in 2024—a staggering drop from 59% in 2020. 

“This is the most dramatic shift over the shortest period of time that I’ve ever seen,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, which released the poll on Tuesday, tells TIME. 

The damage isn’t limited to Biden: Just 23% of Arab Americans identify with the Democratic Party, marking the first time a majority did not claim to prefer the Democrats since the institute began tracking party identification in 1996. Those identifying as Independents rose to 31%, the highest it’s ever been.

The poll results are likely to increase concerns among Democrats about Biden’s standing with Arab Americans heading into 2024, particularly in Michigan, where roughly 277,000 Arab Americans call home, and Biden won in 2020 by 155,000 votes. But the smaller Arab American populations in Pennsylvania and Georgia were also larger than Biden’s margins of victory there. All three states are ones Biden flipped after Trump won them in 2016.

Although the roughly 3 million Arab Americans residing in the U.S. today are hardly a monolith, more than half of them voted for Biden in 2020. In places such as Dearborn, Michigan, which boasts one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, the overwhelming majority did so. Arab American community leaders and activists tell TIME that this wasn’t because they had any illusions about Biden’s pro-Israel stance. Rather, it was because they believed that he would be better than Trump, whose xenophobic and Islamophoblic policies disproportionately affected the Arab American community.

Even though 2024 appears likely to present a rematch between Biden and Trump, Arab Americans insist Biden cannot take their support for granted. None of those who spoke with TIME say that their lack of confidence in Biden means that they’ll be inclined to vote for Trump. But some remain conflicted about whether the situation would be any worse under the former president either. “Look, we’re not silly—we know what Trump has done to our communities,” says Amer Zahr, the president of the Dearborn-based New Generation for Palestine. But when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he continues, “The policies are basically the same. Except when Trump does it, you get some pushback from the Democratic Party.”

Zahr, who was a national surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020, eventually supported Biden to keep Trump from winning another term.

“If Trump were president and all of this was going on right now, we would probably get a lot more Democratic politicians at our rallies,” Zahr says. “But Biden doing it means that we don’t.”

As others see it, though, the question of whether Trump would be better or worse right now is immaterial. “Joe Biden is president right now and the genocide is happening right now—every other hypothetical is of no concern to me,” says Maysoon Zayid, a Palestinian-American comedian, disability advocate, and longtime Democratic Party activist who campaigned for Biden in 2020. When asked whether there was anything Biden could do to win back her support, she was unwavering. “There’s absolutely nothing that man could do. I mean, my God, what could ever bring back those kids? Nothing.”

Zogby, a decades-long member of the Democratic National Committee, notes that the shift away from the Democratic Party among Arab Americans can be seen across the board: among the old and the young, the naturalized citizens and the native-born Americans, as well as among Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims. “The community is feeling a certain sense of cohesion, and Joe Biden and Israel brought them together,” he says.

The reality, of course, is that Arab Americans base their vote on more issues than just the Middle East. The economy, education, and climate change are likely to be among their concerns next November. But the duration of the war, and the extent to which Biden is seen to enable it, could lead to that issue carrying more weight than it has with many voters in previous elections.

“It’s never a bad bet to bet that foreign policy issues don’t dominate in an election,” says Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former chief foreign policy advisor to Sen. Sanders. “But I do think we do see evidence here and there that for certain voters, it does matter. And ultimately, we’re talking about a few hundred thousand voters in a few key states. That’s what this election is going to come down to.”

Efforts by the White House to repair the relationship through meetings with Arab and Muslim American leaders appear to have borne little fruit thus far, according to The Washington Post, with one such meeting being described by one of its attendees as “a sh*t show.”

According to the Arab American Institute poll, 68% of Arab Americans support an immediate ceasefire. Biden has proposed only a “humanitarian pause” in the bombardment in order to allow for the flow of aid into Gaza and the exit of American and other foreign nationals from the Strip. Arab Americans also want him to take the issue of rising Islamophobia and anti-Arab discrimination more seriously and do more to make substantial and meaningful progress towards a permanent peace deal. “Just changing his tone—that’s not enough,” says Sami Khaldi, the president of Dearborn Democratic Club and a former 2020 Biden delegate. “Every president comes here and says the best solution for the Middle East crisis is to have a two-state solution, but you don’t see anyone have the courage to do it. We need him to do that.”

Read More: The American Public’s Views on Israel Are Undergoing a Profound Shift. Washington Hasn’t Caught Up

Restarting the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the space of a year is a tall order, not least because Biden has spent much of his first term disregarding the issue. Of the litany of challenges that would need to be overcome—among them the accelerated expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli government’s hardline stance against Palestinian statehood, and Palestinians’ own growing dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority—would be Biden himself. “This is an issue on which Joe Biden’s views have not evolved,” says Duss, who supported Sanders in 2020. After Sanders ended his bid, Duss recalls helping draft the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform and facing pushback from Biden’s foreign policy team over using the term “occupation” to describe the Israeli military’s control over the Palestinian territories that began in 1967. “That was too far for them,” Duss adds. “If you’re not going to even say the word occupation, in my view, this is like an oncologist who won’t say the word cancer.”

Zahr and others warn that while the appeal to save America from Trump may have compelled them to support Biden in 2022, that argument won’t have the same effect after Gaza. While those such as Duss may disagree with the idea that Trump is worth that risk, he says that those opposed to Israel’s invasion deserve to have that view better represented in the next election.

“Arab Americans should not be put in this position by President Biden,” he says. “And I think if [Democrats] now turn and say, ‘Well, you got no choice—it’s us or Trump,’ if that’s the best argument they have, well, that’s a verdict on this administration too. I don’t find that to be a very inspiring bumper sticker.”

Many sleep experts take a dim view of using the snooze button in the morning. Setting serial alarms beginning earlier than you need to get up, rather than sleeping straight through until a single alarm, may prematurely pull you out of deep, restorative sleep, the thinking goes. And if you’re snoozing beyond the time you actually meant to get out of bed, that may be a signal that you’re not getting enough rest at night, says Philip Cheng, a sleep expert at Henry Ford Health.

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But when Stephen Mattingly—a serial snoozer who completed his Ph.D. in cognition at the University of Notre Dame and then became a postdoctoral researcher at the university—turned to the scientific literature to see if the data backed up those warnings, he couldn’t find much.

Previous studies had found that fragmented sleep at night is worse than short but uninterrupted sleep, and, more positively, that napping may reverse some of the damage associated with sleep deprivation (and potentially also improve heart health). But neither nighttime slumber nor daytime napping is exactly the same as snoozing first thing in the morning.

Some of the only snoozing-specific research Mattingly could find linked snooze-button use to increased chances of lucid dreaming, but he was more interested in the day-to-day health effects of the habit. So he designed a study using both survey and wearable-device data to assess the science of snoozing.

The results, published in the journal Sleep in 2022, suggested that snoozers didn’t sleep less overall or report feeling more fatigued throughout the day than people who got up after one alarm. Snoozers did, however, tend to experience lighter sleep, especially in the hour before waking, and had elevated resting heart rates relative to non-snoozers—results that suggest their stress responses kicked into gear before waking.

That may sound like a bad thing, but the body has a stress system for a reason, Mattingly says. In this context, he says, it may help shake off “sleep inertia,” or the grogginess many people feel after waking, and promote alertness and cognitive function.

The study’s results suggest that snoozing has been “unfairly villainized,” says co-author Aaron Striegel, a professor of computer science at Notre Dame. “That was our big takeaway: it’s probably not as bad as what they’re telling you.”

A 2023 study published in the Journal of Sleep Research bears that out. The researchers found that, shortly after waking, people who had snoozed for 30 minutes performed better on arithmetic equations and memory exercises than people who got up after only one alarm—perhaps because they experienced less sleep inertia. There also weren’t dramatic differences in the cognition, mood, or sleepiness of snoozers and non-snoozers as the day went on.

However, the study was small. Only 30 people participated in the cognitive tests, and all of them—even those who were assigned to the group that woke after a single alarm—were snoozers in their day-to-day lives. Their cognition may have been worse since they altered their normal routines for the study, the authors write, so the results should be interpreted with caution.

Without a ton of data, Cheng says it’s hard to say for sure whether snoozing is beneficial for easing sleep inertia. But his gut feeling is that “it’s more functional for you to be out of bed and up and moving around” than it is to stay in bed, dozing. “You’re just delaying the time that you’re awake, as opposed to making an actual transition.” One 2022 study backs him up: it found that, although snoozers and non-snoozers don’t experience drastically different overall sleep quality, those who lean on the snooze button may have prolonged sleep inertia.

Kathryn Roecklein, who researches sleep at the University of Pittsburgh, agrees that snoozing likely isn’t the best way to reduce morning grogginess. Instead, she suggests turning on the lights as soon as your alarm goes off, which can make you feel more alert.

You can also buy alarm clocks with light features, some of which gradually brighten your room to mimic the sun’s rise. While there’s not a ton of research on specific products, the thinking behind them makes sense, since morning light exposure helps regulate circadian rhythms involved in sleep-wake cycles.

Snoozing may be particularly problematic for people who struggle to fall asleep at night, Roecklein says. For people in that camp, going to bed and rising at the same time every day can help sync circadian rhythms, she explains. Prolonged snoozing may throw off that process and make it harder to drift off at night.

But what about people who sleep fine at night, don’t feel overly tired during the day, and still like to snooze? Cheng says there’s probably not too much reason to worry. “It could just be behavioral,” he says. “There definitely is a possibility that it’s just part of normal daily life” for some people, perhaps because their schedules force them to get up earlier than is ideal for their biological clocks and hitting the snooze button helps them compensate.

Despite the popular perception that snoozers are lazy or harming their health, Mattingly says he’s not convinced that’s the case. Personally, he says, he kicked his snoozing habit for a reason that has nothing to do with rest: he had kids.