Europe Struggles to Find Leopard 2 Tanks for Ukraine – The New York Times

By Erika Solomon, Steven Erlanger and Christopher F. Schuetze

Feb. 28, 2023Updated 6:18 a.m. ET

7 MIN READ

“BERLIN — Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow seems more like a trickle.

Some nations have discovered that the tanks in their armory don’t actually work or lack spare parts. Political leaders have encountered unanticipated resistance within their own coalitions, and even from their defense ministries. And some armies had to pull trainers out of retirement to teach Ukrainian soldiers how to use old-model tanks.

The struggle to provide Leopard tanks to an embattled Ukraine is just the most glaring manifestation of a reality Europe has long ignored: Believing that large-scale land war was a thing of the past and basking in the thaw of the Cold War, nations chronically underfunded their militaries. When Russia launched the largest land war on the continent since World War II, they were woefully unprepared.”

Fact checking ‘The Crown’: Queen Elizabeth’s close relationship with preacher Billy Graham – The Washington Post

“One of the running themes throughout the Netflix show “The Crown” is the devout Christian faith of Queen Elizabeth, who is shown kneeling for prayer by her bedside as her husband jokingly teases her to offer one for him. The queen, after all, serves not just as head of state but head of the Church of England, the mother church of Anglicanism worldwide.

“Monarchy is God’s sacred mission to grace and dignify the Earth,” her elderly grandmother, Queen Mary, tells Elizabeth early in the show.

The second season of the series portrays the queen as someone who, feeling betrayed by a family member, wrestled deeply with questions of faith and forgiveness. The show also depicts her budding relationship with famous American evangelist Billy Graham, who drew millions of people to his “crusades” across the globe and was a friend to many U.S. presidents.”

Source: Fact checking ‘The Crown’: Queen Elizabeth’s close relationship with preacher Billy Graham – The Washington Post

David Wallace-Wells | Britain’s Cautionary Tale of Self-Destruction – The New York Times

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

“In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.

Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished “state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in decades, its “zero Covid” reversal a sign of both political weakness and political overreach, depending on whom you ask.

But the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one.”

David Lindsay: Impressive columne, but why. Here the top comments, helps move the analysis along.

Minneapolis Mom

Mpls MNJan. 25

Its interesting how Britain’s decline in real wages coincides closely with the dramatic drop in their corporate tax rates – from 30% in 2008 to 19% today. Conservatives follow the same recipe everywhere – fund tax reductions on corporations and the wealthy by cutting government programs. Motivate voters with xenophobic fear-of-the-other tropes. Rinse and repeat.

15 Replies974 Recommended

What One Importer’s Legal Fight Says About the – The New YorkPower of Cargo Giants Times

By Peter S. Goodman

Peter Goodman reported this article from Los Angeles, New York and Washington.

• Nov. 14, 2022Updated 8:13 a.m. ET

“Like the rest of the e-commerce world, Jacob Weiss was contending with excruciating difficulties in getting his goods — mostly furniture — across the Pacific from factories in China.

It was April 2021, and the global supply chain was rife with dysfunction because of the pandemic. At ports in China, Mr. Weiss’s usual ocean carrier, Hamburg Süd, was refusing to accept some of his shipping containers at his contracted rates, saying it had no room on its vessels.

These sorts of complaints had become commonplace, given shortages of containers and crippling traffic jams at ports. Most importers avoided conflict, fearing reprisals from the carriers. But Mr. Weiss had his lawyer fire off a menacing letter, demanding that Hamburg Süd “immediately honor” his contract while threatening to file a complaint with the Federal Maritime Commission.

Here was a minnow picking a fight with a whale. Mr. Weiss’s company, OJ Commerce, is modest in size. Hamburg Süd is a subsidiary of Maersk, a publicly traded Danish conglomerate that is the second-largest container shipping company on earth, with annual revenues exceeding $61 billion.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT2h ago

Great reporting, thank you Peter Goodman. Now I’d like a serious discussion or rounddtable about what can be done about this problem. It seems like many big problems return to, in part, a US Justice system that favors the rich over the poor, but then there is the fact that this was also an anomoly of the pandemic. How do we make the playing field more level. I wonder if the US government could use a part of the Justice Dept or some other agency to fast tract a decsion, and if they find the small American business has a claim, to fund its legal challenge against the giant corporation. David blogs at InconvenientNews.net.

Reply6 Recommended

Tanya Gold | Britain’s Liz Truss Is Finished – The New York Times

By Tanya Gold

Ms. Gold is a journalist who writes about Britain’s politics, culture and everyday life.

“PENZANCE, England — For 40 days, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain has ridden a roller coaster of ridicule.

Her “mini budget,” on which she hung her free-market credentials, was a disaster: Bond yields rocketed, the pound tanked, and the markets, far from gratified, were distinctly upset. To mitigate the damage, she reversed a tax cut for high earners — and was rewarded with more mockery. At the Conservative Party conference, protesters played loud clown music, and the police refused to intervene, as sure a sign of a failing administration in Britain as the storming of the Winter Palace in Russia.

Embattled, Ms. Truss raged against the “anti-growth” coalition, opponents of her supposed revitalization of the British economy through tax cuts. It is a remarkably capacious coalition, with room for King Charles III (who last week greeted her with the chilling words “Back again. Dear, oh, dear”), the BBC and most of the Conservative Party. To judge from the polls, which put Labour 33 points ahead of the Conservatives and Ms. Truss’s approval rating at minus 47, the country is in that camp, too.

On Friday, things got worse still. Ms. Truss fired Kwasi Kwarteng, her chancellor and friend, and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt, a Tory moderate who has torn up the rest of her economic platform with the performative solemnity of a disappointed teacher. The dreaded letters of no confidence are flooding in, and Conservative lawmakers are talking about changing the leadership rules — she is supposed to have a year’s grace — to dethrone her. Ms. Truss may limp on, but she is without power. For all intents and purposes, her prime ministership is finished.”

David Lindsay:  Excellent essay and comments. Here is one of my favorite comments:’

Jack Sonville

Florida  8h ago

For almost 40 years, since the days of Thatcher and Reagan, tax cuts have been the Tory/Republican cure-all for every ill. All of this in spite of the fact that data has shown they do not drive the massive growth promised. How about a new economic idea from that side of the aisle? The only new other idea out of the Tories over the past few decades has been Brexit. How’s that working out? Where’s the massive growth that was supposed to generate? But at least that is some semblance of an idea with a theory behind it (however flawed). Over the past few years, in the absence of any coherent policy on virtually any topic, Republicans here have pretty much only touted three proposals other than tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations: Repealing the ACA to, in effect, cancel heath care subsidies for tens of millions; eliminating a woman’s right to privacy over her own body; and the notion that every election they don’t win must have been fraudulently rigged. despite no evidence, simply because they say so. It’s hard to be optimistic right now, for either country.

3 Replies141 Recommended

With Leaps and Bounds, Parkour Athletes Turn Off the Lights in Paris – The New York Times

By Constant Méheut

Oct. 13, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET

“PARIS — After taking a few steps back to get a running start, Hadj Benhalima dashed toward the building, pushed against its wall with his foot, propelled himself upward and stretched out his arm.

At the peak of his leap, he flipped off a light switch, more than 10 feet off the ground. A click sound rang out, and the bright lights of a nearby barbershop went off instantly.

“Oooh,” his friends cheered, as Mr. Benhalima, a thin 21-year-old dressed all in black, landed back on the sidewalk. It was the second store sign he had turned off on a recent nighttime tour across Paris’s upscale neighborhoods. Many more would follow as he soared up and dropped back down across the city.”

Germany Needs Coal to Replace Gas, So a Village Has to Go – The New York Times

By Christopher F. Schuetze and Erika Solomon

• Oct. 13, 2022

“LÜTZERATH, Germany — For months, die-hard environmental activists have camped in the fields and occupied the trees in this tiny farming village in western Germany, hoping that like-minded people from across the country would arrive and help stop the expansion of a nearby open-pit coal mine that threatened to swallow the village and its farms.

They had reason to be optimistic. Mass protests led the German government to step in and save an old-growth forest from coal expansion just two years ago. And the Green party notched its best showing ever in elections last year, a sign of how fighting climate change had become a winning political issue in Europe’s largest economy.

“If there were 50,000 on the street, politicians would have to do something,” said Eckardt Heukamp, 58, the last farmer remaining in Lützerath, who put up some of the protesters in apartments on his property. Others built tree houses, pitched tents or moved into abandoned houses in the village.

But the hoped-for surge in protesters never materialized. And last week, the government effectively sealed Lützerath’s fate by announcing that RWE, Germany’s largest energy company, needed the coal under the village — to make up for gas that had stopped flowing in from Russia.”

Paul Krugman | Liz Truss’s Tax Cuts Won’t Help Britain’s Economy – The New York Times

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

“Britain is in a very difficult economic position. The British economy, like the U.S. economy, seems to be seriously overheated, with substantial amounts of inflation driven by high domestic demand. Unlike America, it is also facing the full force of Europe’s energy crisis, driven by the efforts of President Vladimir Putin of Russia to use a shut off of natural gas to bully the West into abandoning Ukraine.

So many of us expected Britain’s economy to go through a rough patch in the months, or maybe even years, ahead. What few foresaw, as far as I can tell, was a policy zombie apocalypse.”

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Thomas L. Friedman | Putin Will Make People Choose Between Heating or Eating This Winter – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

“While some Russian soldiers in Ukraine are voting with their feet against Vladimir Putin’s shameful war, their hasty retreat doesn’t mean that Putin is surrendering. Last week, in fact, he opened a whole new front — on energy. Putin thinks he’s found a cold war that he can win. He’s going to try to literally freeze the European Union this winter by choking off supplies of Russian gas and oil to pressure the E.U. into abandoning Ukraine.

Putin’s Kremlin predecessors used frigid winters to defeat Napoleon and Hitler, and Putin clearly thinks it’s his ace in the hole to defeat Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who told his people last week, “Russia is doing everything in 90 days of this winter to break the resistance of Ukraine, the resistance of Europe and the resistance of the world.”

I wish I could say for certain that Putin will fail — that the Americans will outproduce him. And I wish I could write that Putin will regret his tactics, because they will eventually transform Russia from the energy czar of Europe to an energy colony of China — where Putin is now selling a lot of his oil at a deep discount to overcome his loss of Western markets.

Yes, I wish I could write all of those things. But I can’t — not unless the U.S. and its Western allies stop living in a green fantasy world that says we can go from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy by just flipping a switch.”

“. . . .  But the most important factor for quickly expanding our exploitation of oil, gas, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro or nuclear energy is giving the companies that pursue them (and the banks that fund them) the regulatory certainty that if they invest billions, the government will help them to quickly build the transmission lines and pipelines to get their energy to market.

Greens love solar panels but hate transmission lines. Good luck saving the planet with that approach.”

David Lindsay: Yes and amen. Here is one of several good comments:

Bruce Rozenblit

Kansas City, MOSept. 13

Electrical engineer checking in. Mr Friedman is 100% correct on this one. The most fundamental component to a green energy future will be a massive buildout of our transmission system. No matter what the source of power, it is useless without a means to transmit it across the nation. Now I’m not talking about making our grid smart. I’m talking massive towers with 345 KV and even 500 KV lines. Lots of steel, aluminum and concrete arrayed all across the land. And no, we can’t put these things underground at such high voltages. This is a matter of national security. We built the interstate highway system as a matter of national security. We needed a way to transport weapons and material all over the place. We used eminent domain to acquire the land for the highways. We should do the same for these new transmission lines. A few ranchers cannot be allowed to block our energy security. Pay them a fair price for the land and build away. Most people underestimate how difficult an undertaking this is. Not only will it take years to build out, it will take years to design. Plans have to be drawn up and contracts let. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars in contracts for thousands of miles of transmission lines. And then there will be all the substations and control equipment to hook it all together and make it work. We have to spend the money to do this and the federal government should fund it, just like they did with the highways.

8 Replies436 Recommended

Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for dirty Energy – for wood chips – The New York Times

“. . . . . . burning wood was never supposed to be the cornerstone of the European Union’s green energy strategy.

When the bloc began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power.

Those subsidies gave rise to a booming market, to the point that wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source, far ahead of wind and solar.

European governments count wood power toward their clean-energy targets. But research shows it can be dirtier than coal.

But today, as demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power. And evidence is mounting that Europe’s bet on wood to address climate change has not paid off.

Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitters. In Hungary, the government waived conservation rules last month to allow increased logging in old-growth forests.

And while European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels.: