Artikler fra avisen The Guardian. Publisering gjort mulig via avisens Open Platform.
The German people are angry at the perceived opaqueness of politics, but don’t see nationalism as a solution
This article titled “Germany will remain the euro’s defender – however reluctantly” was written by Alan Posener, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 29th September 2011 14.15 UTC
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Journalisten og forfatteren Misha Glenny dekket Balkan-krigene på 1990-tallet for BBC. Han har skrevet to bøker om emnet. Her er hans kommentar til arrestasjonen av Ratko Mladic.
Greece and Ireland may have to be allowed to default gracefully. Demand grows for independent audit to separate public from private debt.
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Nederland har ennå ingen ny regjering, over to måneder etter valget. Guardian forklarer hvorfor i denne saken.
The Dutch government has launched a damage-limitation campaign to try to counter what it fears is the disastrous international impact of the Islam-bashing populist Geert Wilders.
Wilders, whose success in June’s general election catapulted him into the role of kingmaker in attempts to form a new coalition government, is to travel to New York to take part in protests on 11 September against the proposed Muslim community centre near Ground Zero.
Maxime Verhagen, the acting foreign minister and Christian Democrats’ leader, has voiced fears that Wilders’s speech in New York will tarnish Dutch reputations. He has also taken the unusual step of circulating confidential orders to Dutch diplomats around the world on how to answer questions about Wilders’s influence in a new government and on the fallout for Muslims in the Netherlands.
With characteristic robustness, Wilders has told Verhagen to mind his own business. He clearly intends to grab attention with a tub-thumping exercise in Islamophobia in New York.
“Good feeling. Important speech. No one will stop me. No mosque at Ground Zero,” he tweeted after booking a flight to New York. “Stop Islam, defend freedom” is his rallying cry.
The tensions over 9/11 and New York come as Wilders savours his growing clout at home. His Freedom party is running at 31% in the most recent opinion poll, ahead of all other contenders, and he has spent most of this week at a secret location with Verhagen and Mark Rutte, the liberals’ leader, haggling over the terms for a new coalition government.
Wilders, whose party almost tripled its seats, from nine to 24, in the June election, is not joining the new cabinet. Instead, he will prop up a rightwing coalition of liberals and Christian Democrats in return for pledges of a tough new crackdown on immigration and other policy concessions. If the talks succeed, Wilders will be in the enviable position of wielding power while abjuring responsibility.
The negotiations have been going on for a fortnight and are supposed to be concluded next week. But they are said to be going badly.
A coalition backed by Wilders would command the slimmest of majorities – 76 seats in the 150-seat second chamber or lower house. The Trouw newspaper yesterday reported at least one dissident Christian Democrat MP would not support it, making it unviable.
Verhagen is in a difficult position. While negotiating with Wilders, he is also telling his diplomats how to undermine the rightwing maverick. Verhagen faces mounting resistance within his own party to collaborating, even if only tacitly, with Wilders.
Last week German Christian Democrats joined Dutch party dissidents in calling for a boycott of Wilders.
The latest opinion polls show Wilders soaring ahead of Rutte’s liberal VVD party. Rutte, who is expected to be the new prime minister, supports an immigration crackdown and other anti-EU and hardline policies demanded by Wilders. But the two rightwingers are split over the main issue – austerity and budget cuts. Rutte is committed to slashing public spending by €18bn to halve the budget deficit from almost 7%. He is demanding health service, education, welfare and social security cuts.
Wilders, who is being prosecuted in Amsterdam on charges of inciting hatred and discrimination, is portraying himself as the protector of Dutch welfare, while calling for a tax on Islamic headscarves, a ban on the Qur’an, closure of Islamic schools, deportation of immigrants and proscribing mosque-building.
Verhagen has told his ambassadors how to cope with foreigners’ questions such as “What will that mean for the treatment of Muslims?” if Wilders props up a new government.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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The world’s leading climate scientists will gather this week in the United States to hammer out plans to set up an early warning system that would predict future meteorological disasters caused by global warming.
The meeting, in Boulder, Colorado, has been arranged at diplomatic level amid fears that storms, hurricanes, droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events now threaten to trigger widespread devastation in coming decades. A series of meteorological catastrophes have dominated headlines in recent weeks, while scientists have warned that figures so far for this year suggest 2010 will be the hottest on record.
Recent events include a record-breaking heatwave that has seen Moscow blanketed with smog from burning peatlands, the splintering of a giant island of ice from the Greenland ice cap, and floods in Pakistan that have claimed the lives of at least 1,600 people and left 20 million homeless.
Scientists say events like these will become more severe and more frequent over the rest of the century as rising greenhouse gas emissions trap the sun’s heat in the lower atmosphere and bring change to Earth’s climate and weather systems. However, their ability to pinpoint exactly where and when the worst devastation will occur is still limited. The aim of the Colorado meeting is to develop more precise predictive techniques to help pinpoint the location and severity of droughts, floods, and heatwaves before they happen and so save thousands of lives.
“The events in Moscow and Pakistan are going to focus our minds very carefully when we meet in Colorado,” said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office. “On both sides of the Atlantic we have been monitoring what has been going on with the aim of understanding their precise causes so that we can provide better warnings of future disasters.”
The meeting in Boulder will be the first full session of Ace, the Attribution of Climate-related Events, which has been set up by scientists from the world’s three leading meteorological organisations: the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the UK Met Office and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The aim, said Stott, would be to develop a modelling package that would allow scientists to forecast the kind of events that the world has been witnessing over the past few weeks – before they struck. The fact that the Foreign Office has been closely involved in setting up Ace reveals how seriously the issue is taken by politicians.
Meteorologists have developed remarkably effective techniques for predicting global climate changes caused by greenhouse gases. One paper, by Stott and Myles Allen of Oxford University, predicted in 1999, using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, that by 2010 global temperatures would rise by 0.8C from their second world war level. This is precisely what has happened.
But although meteorologists have developed powerful techniques for forecasting general climatic trends – which indicate that weather patterns will be warmer and wetter in many areas – their ability to predict specific outcomes remains limited. It is this problem that will be tackled, as a matter of urgency, at the Ace meeting in Boulder.
An example of the complexity that faces meteorologists is provided by the weather system that scorched Moscow, said Stott. “Moscow has a stable high pressure system over it, much like the one that brought a heatwave to Europe in 2003. However, for a while the land around the city acted as a natural air conditioner, keeping the air cool through evaporation of moisture from the ground. But the land eventually dried out and there was no more cooling. Hence the soaring temperatures.”
To forecast an event like that, scientists need to be able to quantify all the variables involved and also develop a very precise model of the land surface, added Stott.
“These are the sorts of things we need to understand. We need to be able to forecast events weeks or months ahead of their occurrence so people can mitigate their worst impacts. We also need to consider the longer-term context and see if we need to build better sea defences at a particular location and assess how high dykes or walls need to be. Certainly, one thing is clear: there is no time to waste. The effects of global warming are already upon us.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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