The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard? – By Somini Sengupta – The New York Times

By Somini Sengupta

Nov. 24, 2018,   1055

“HANOI, Vietnam — Coal, the fuel that powered the industrial age, has led the planet to the brink of catastrophic climate change.

Scientists have repeatedly warned of its looming dangers, most recently on Friday, when a major scientific report issued by 13 United States government agencies warned that the damage from climate change could knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end if significant steps aren’t taken to rein in warming.

An October report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on global warming found that avoiding the worst devastation would require a radical transformation of the world economy in just a few years.

Central to that transformation: Getting out of coal, and fast.

And yet, three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised action, coal shows no sign of disappearing. While coal use looks certain to eventually wane worldwide, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency, it is not on track to happen anywhere fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate change. Last year, in fact, global production and consumption increased after two years of decline.”

Source: The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard? – The New York Times

How Xi Jinping Made His Power Grab: With Stealth, Speed and Guile – by Chris Buckley – NYT

“BEIJING — Some 200 senior Communist Party officials gathered behind closed doors in January to take up a momentous political decision: whether to abolish presidential term limits and enable Xi Jinping to lead China for a generation.

In a two-day session in Beijing, they bowed to Mr. Xi’s wish to hold onto power indefinitely. But a bland communiqué issued afterward made no mention of the weighty decision, which the authorities then kept under wraps for more than five weeks.

That meeting of the party’s Central Committee was the culmination of months of secretive discussions that are only now coming to light — and show how Mr. Xi maneuvered with stealth, swiftness and guile to rewrite China’s Constitution.

The decision was abruptly announced only last week, days before the annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. The delay was apparently an effort to prevent opposition from coalescing before formal approval of the change by the legislature’s nearly 3,000 members.”

Source: How Xi Jinping Made His Power Grab: With Stealth, Speed and Guile – The New York Times

 

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT Pending Approval at the NYT comments.

Will this be good of bad for Vietnam? My gut tells me it will be bad. As China moves away from becoming more democratic, and moves towards becoming more fascist, it will perhaps become more dependent, or willing, to take on outside foreign wars, to distract its people. No one has more to lose in such a development, than the Vietnamese, who have had to repel Chinese invasions and occupations, at least seven times by 1789, when Nguyen Hue and his 200,000 troops deffeated a Qing army of about 300.000. I am pleased that the Trump administration has sent one of its aircraft carriers to visit Vietnam this month, at the deep port of Danang. This is an important message, that we in the United States agree with the Vietnamese, that the South China Sea, or the East Sea in Vietnam, does not belong to China, but should be shared by all the nations that live around it, or send their ships through it.

 David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam,” and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com

Hanoi publicises 500 firms with prolonged insurance debts – VietNam Breaking News

“Hanoi (VNA) – The Hanoi Social Insurance has decided to publicise 500 local enterprises which failed to pay social premiums for their employees for three months upwards. Hanoi now has the highest debts of social, health and unemployment insurance, standing at 3,378 billion VND (148.8 million USD) owed by 23,955 enterprises, affecting the legitimate rights of 334,694 labourers.”

Source: Hanoi publicises 500 firms with prolonged insurance debts – VietNam Breaking News

The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People – By George Black – The New Yorker

Munitions-clearing operations in Vietnam in 2005. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, more than forty thousand Vietnamese have been killed by unexploded ordnance.Photograph by Patrick Zachmann / Magnum

“On Saturday, President Obama will set out on a trip to Vietnam, for a visit that’s being billed as looking forward to the future rather than back at the bitter history of the past. On the same day, a funeral will be held in Quang Tri province for a man named Ngo Thien Khiet.

Khiet, who died at the age of forty-five, and who leaves behind a wife and two sons, was an expert on the unexploded ordnance, or U.X.O., left over from the Vietnam War. He was particularly skilled at locating, removing, and safely destroying cluster bombs found in the farm fields of Quang Tri, an impoverished agricultural province that straddles the old Demilitarized Zone, or D.M.Z., which once divided North and South Vietnam.

Quang Tri is a place of great natural beauty, a narrow strip of land that stretches from the curving beaches and breakers of the South China Sea, in the east, to the misty, forested mountains along the border with Laos, in the west. Perhaps no other part of the country suffered more grievously during the Vietnam War. More ordnance was dropped on Quang Tri than was dropped on all of Germany during the Second World War. The province was also sprayed with more than seven hundred thousand gallons of herbicide, mainly Agent Orange. The names of battlefields like Cam Lo, Con Thien, Mutter’s Ridge, and the Rockpile still give American veterans nightmares. The seventy-seven-day siege of the Marine base of Khe Sanh, in Quang Tri, so obsessed Lyndon Johnson that he kept a scale model of the base in the White House, and demanded daily updates on the course of the battle.”

Source: The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People – The New Yorker

The Workers Who Regret Trump’s Scrapping of a Trade Deal – by Neil Gough – NYT

“HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Do Thi Minh Hanh, a labor activist, had grown accustomed to being beaten, hospitalized and jailed for her work in a country where independent trade unions are banned.

So it gave her hope for a reprieve when Vietnam reached a trade deal with the United States and other countries that called for its members to bolster workers’ rights and protect independent unions.

That hope fizzled in late January, when President Trump pulled the United States out of the trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with the stroke of a pen.“

The Vietnamese government will use this as an excuse to suppress the labor movement,” Ms. Hanh said. “They never wanted to have independent unions in Vietnam.” “

What Is TPP? Behind the Trade Deal That Died – The New York Times

“Today, the United States and most developed countries have few tariffs, but some remain. The United States, for example, protects the domestic sugar market from lower-priced global suppliers and imposes tariffs on imported shoes, while Japan has steep surcharges on agricultural products including rice, beef and dairy. The pact was an effort to create a Pacific Rim free-trade zone.

Environmental, Labor and Intellectual Property Standards

United States negotiators stressed that the Pacific agreement sought to level the playing field by imposing rigorous labor and environmental standards on trading partners, and supervision of intellectual property rights.”

 

Ministry cracks down on antibiotics use in aquaculture – Society – Vietnam News

“…….Several companies said they only used antimicrobial material in food for sea animals, although in reality they sold them to veterinary units, which would eventually sell them to marine animal farms, Dũng said.

During a product examination, a company purchasing shrimps in southern Cà Mau Province found antibiotic residue in up to 15 per cent of the total quantity of shrimps, according to the ministry’s Specialised Inspection Division.

“The ministry’s inspectors will continue highlighting the issue in a key inspection programme next year to put an end to the use of antibiotics in aquaculture.Such programmes needs close collaboration with the health sector to be effective, Dũng said. — VNS”

Source: Ministry cracks down on antibiotics use in aquaculture – Society – Vietnam News | Politics, Business, Economy, Society, Life, Sports – VietNam News

Editorial: Vietnam locks her up – Washington Post in New Haven Register

“On Oct. 10, police in the south-central province of Khanh Hoa arrested a popular blogger, Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, 37, who writes under the pen name Mother Mushroom. She is co-founder of a network of independent bloggers who often find themselves in the crosshairs of a regime that strictly controls the news media and does not tolerate dissent. Radio Free Asia quoted the network as protesting that Quynh is an “activist who has advocated for human rights, improved living conditions for people, and sovereignty for many years.”

Most recently, Quynh had been blogging extensively about a chemical spill in April that devastated marine life and left fishermen and tourism industry workers jobless in four provinces. In June, a Taiwanese-owned company acknowledged it was responsible for the pollution and pledged to clean it up, but the spill has provoked protests by Vietnamese who criticize the government for remaining silent about the cause of the spill at the outset and then failing to provide information about health and environmental dangers. Many of the protests were mobilized on Facebook.”

Source: Editorial: Vietnam locks her up

Vietnam Arrests Mother Mushroom, a Top Blogger, for Criticizing Government – The New York Times

“HONG KONG — The authorities in Vietnam said on Tuesday that they had arrested a popular blogger who has criticized the country’s one-party government over politically delicate topics, including a dump of toxic chemicals that devastated fishing communities and set off protests.The blogger, Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, 37, was detained on Monday in Khanh Hoa, a south-central province. She was accused on Tuesday of distorting the truth and spreading propaganda against the state, according to the Vietnamese news media. The charges carry a maximum prison term of 12 years. No trial date was given.

Ms. Quynh, who writes under the pen name Mother Mushroom, is a co-founder of the Network of Vietnamese Bloggers, one of the few independent writers’ associations in Vietnam. The country’s news media and publishing industry are heavily controlled by the governing Communist Party, and writers who stray outside the system and challenge the party are frequently imprisoned under vague national security laws.Pham Doan Trang, a dissident writer in Hanoi and a member of the Network of Vietnamese Bloggers, said that the authorities might have arrested Ms. Quynh to intimidate younger bloggers who have been inspired by her online crusades — via Facebook and independent blogs — against corruption, social injustice and police brutality. But Ms. Trang predicted that the tactic would fail.“She has a lot of supporters,” Ms. Trang said of Ms. Quynh in an interview via Facebook Messenger on Tuesday. “Many of them will replace her or follow in her path.” ”

Source: Vietnam Arrests Mother Mushroom, a Top Blogger, for Criticizing Government – The New York Times

Bob Kerrey and the ‘American Tragedy’ of Vietnam – The New York Times

“Los Angeles — EVEN today, Americans argue over the Vietnam War: what was done, what mistakes were made, and what were the lasting effects on American power.This sad history returns because of Bob Kerrey’s appointment as chairman of the American-sponsored Fulbright University Vietnam, the country’s first private university. That appointment has also prompted the Vietnamese to debate how former enemies can forgive and reconcile.What is not in dispute is that in 1969 a team of Navy SEALs, under a young Lieutenant Kerrey’s command, killed 20 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, in the village of Thanh Phong. Mr. Kerrey, who later became a senator, a governor, a presidential candidate and a university president, acknowledged his role in the atrocity in his 2002 memoir, “When I Was a Young Man.”Those in the United States and Vietnam who favor Mr. Kerrey’s appointment see it as an act of reconciliation: He has confessed, he deserves to be forgiven because of his efforts to aid Vietnam, and his unique and terrible history makes him a potent symbol for how both countries need to move on from their common war.I disagree. He is the wrong man for the job and regarding him as a symbol of peace is a failure of moral imagination.”

Source: Bob Kerrey and the ‘American Tragedy’ of Vietnam – The New York Times

I have not made up my own mind on this yet. I am still collecting information, and processing it.

Here is a comment thought, one of many from the NYT comments which I think is helpful and significant:

Ted Hanoi

Vietnam 7 hours ago

“As I long time Vietnam resident (23 years) I cannot agree with Bob Kerrey’s appointment to the Fulbright University. It is a divisive issue here and I am at a loss to understand the lack of sensitivity in this appointment.
I understand Mr. Kerrey has been supporting fundraising for this project for a number of years. A role he can continue to undertake, but not full-time in Vietnam.
I can understand that Mr. Kerrey is trying to atone for past deeds, but his past actions will always be in the background during his tenure at Fulbright which will make his task more difficult and perhaps less effective.
I see the major benefit of the Fulbright as not just delivering “free-market values” to Vietnam but also being an open education model that will slowly force the State higher education institutions to reform and adopt teaching methods that will produce graduates with enhanced innovative thinking capabilities.
I do not agree with Mr. Nguyen regarding a memorial to the Thanh Phong victims at the Fulbright as this idea is directly related to Mr. Kerrey’s appointment. In my opinion, and if there is to be a memorial, the Fulbright should consider erecting a “generalized” memorial to all atrocity victims from this period so that the Fulbright stands as a symbol of reconciliation.
Similarly, Mr. Nguyen’s scholarship proposal should not just focus on Thanh Phong, it should assist as many disadvantaged students as possible from all over the country.”

• 73 Recommended

 

I think that young men of both sides committed atrocities, and they all deserve to be forgiven, if they show regret and remorse and become agents of positive growth. In the end, it for the Vietnamese, not the Americans, to decide if they can permit Bob Kerry to continue his noble acts of repentance inside of Vietnam, as a university president.