In terms of this new cartography of terror, it is not Europe that is most vulnerable, however. Rather, it is the more remote regions that are most insecure, exacerbated by repressive authoritarian regimes offering more of an opportunity for entrenched insurgency to take root.
Although the low-intensity nature of these latent insurgencies have continued to impede Russian attempts to pacify and placate local grievances, the past several years have been marked by a fairly fragile, yet manageable period of control.
And the most vivid example is the Caucasus. Despite the apparent "stabilisation" of Chechnya and other earlier rounds of war in the North Caucasus, the lingering and restive insurgencies have festered for some time.
Although the low-intensity nature of these latent insurgencies have continued to impede Russian attempts to pacify and placate local grievances, the past several years have been marked by a fairly fragile, yet manageable period of control.
Yet, the recent events in Paris suggest a change, and will likely trigger a renewed cycle of violence and terrorism in the Caucasus.
Ukraine’s ambition to wean itself off gas supplies from a hostile Russia has never seemed so distant.
Foreign explorers that are key to Ukraine’s future energy independence are fleeing the nation as a war against pro-Moscow insurgents in eastern regions sends the economy into freefall. Even government measures aimed at shrinking consumption of Russian gas have helped drive some international companies away.
JKX Oil & Gas Plc (JKX) halted investment last week, citing a 55 percent tax imposed on gas production and a government decision to secure supplies for households by imposing restrictions on sales to industrial customers. The company joined Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Eni SpA, which quit Ukraine or froze projects in the past year. Others are set to follow, according to Bloomberg Industries.
“JKX’s decision to suspend its planned natural gas field development investments in Ukraine may be followed by peers also active in the country,” Philipp Chladek, an analyst at the London-based researcher, said on Jan. 7. With the state’s curb on sales to industry and gas production tax, “economic parameters appear insufficient to justify further drilling.”
The Parliament, sworn in six weeks ago, has passed a draconian budget to unlock the next tranche of a $17 billion International Monetary Fund-led bailout and prevent a default. At the same time, Ukraine is trying to reduce dependence on gas from Russia’s OAO Gazprom, which until last year supplied more than half of demand. A 48 percent slump in Ukraine’s currency against the dollar in 2014 also cut its ability to fund imports.
Canada is trying to stop NAFTA's environmental watchdog from taking a closer look at the environmental effects of the huge tailings ponds produced by Alberta's oilsands, and it appears Mexico and the U.S. will go along with efforts to stop a formal investigation.
If that happens, it would be the third time in a year Canada has stopped North American Free Trade Agreement scrutiny of its environmental record.
The tailings ponds are a touchy political issue for both the Alberta and Canadian governments. They've become a symbol of the environmental footprint of oilsands production. The ponds cover more than 176 square kilometres and contain a toxic mixture of water, clay and chemicals, what's left over when the oil is removed.
[. . .]
Two environmental groups and three private citizens from Alberta, Saskatchewan and the N.W.T. want the Commission on Environmental Co-operation to find out whether Canada is breaking its own Federal Fisheries Act by failing to prevent tailings from leaking into the Athabasca River and nearby creeks in northern Alberta.
[. . .]
The Commission on Environmental Co-operation was in set up in 1994 as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement to resolve environmental disputes and to provide the public an outlet for environmental concerns.
Commission staff investigate public complaints in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. and can recommend an in-depth investigation, called a factual record, if they find there are grounds. But it has no power to compel the countries to do anything.
Several farmers’ groups in the Patharpratima administrative block of the South 24-Parganas district told IPS that every family has one or more migrant members, on whose remittances they are increasingly dependent.
Other families, like Sukomal and his wife Alpana Mandal, are turning towards integrated farming methods.
“An integrated farming system virtually replicates nature,” explained Debabrata Guchhait, a trainer with the Indraprastha Srijan Welfare Society (ISWS), which works for community food security.
The technique “brings the farm and household together” so that waste from one area of life becomes an input for another. Staple crops are mixed with other plant and vegetable varieties, while cattle, ducks and hens all form part of the self-sustaining cycle.
The process “reduces farm costs and risks by going organic and by diversifying yield and income sources, while ensuring nutrition,” Guchhait told IPS.
The hens feed on leafy greens, broken grains and maize while their litter is collected and used as organic manure with dung from Mandal’s three cows and two goats. The remaining hen waste drains into the pond, becoming fish feed.
Digging a small pond to help harvest water during the annual monsoon, which typically brings 1,700 mm of rainfall, helped his fortunes immensely.
Several years ago, the FBI announced it was looking for 10 acres in or near downtown Detroit to build a regional headquarters. The project fell through when the FBI could not find suitable space. Some people lamented the loss, but from an urban planning stance, Detroit dodged a bullet.
Security requirements for government buildings today have grown so severe that they produce bunker-like buildings surrounded by high fences and razor wire. Such security measures may be necessary in today's age of terrorism. But bunkers off-limits to the public do little or nothing to create the lively walkable places that are today's norm for urban revitalization.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's regional center on Warren east of I-75 in Detroit, which opened a decade ago, is one example. When ground was broken back in 2004, city leaders hailed the project as a gem, and architecturally, the building is quite fine. Designed by Detroit-based SmithGroupJJR, it features spacious interiors and a rich array of stone, metal and glass surfaces. But the building is set far back from the road behind security fences that it would take a tank to smash through.
Such projects violate the basic tenet of what planners today call place-making — an elusive quality of walkable urbanism achieved through densely populated streets alive with shops, restaurants, offices, housing and public spaces. Both downtown and Midtown Detroit are transforming with place-making principles in mind. Witness the array of new eateries and attractions in Midtown and the lively mix of street-level attractions in and around Campus Martius.
An essential piece of place-making is that there be as few gaps as possible in the streetscape. Huge off-limits government projects create enormous gaps in the flow of visual interest that encourages pedestrian traffic. Granted, projects like the Federal Reserve center on Warren are not open to the public, but placing such projects in the midst of a redeveloping district hurts, rather than helps, the revitalization effort.
Another friend who is a newspaper editor recently described the problem of speaking, from the perch of experience gleaned in decades before this one, at a journalism school today: “It’s either you stand up and lie, or just depress the hell out of all the students.”
Because copy editors have become an extreme luxury at many news outlets, and fact checkers a distant memory, and there are barely any free weeklies any more, certainly none that can get you your own apartment while still in university, and most outlets have no travel budgets for cultural reporting anymore, and most editors are so overburdened that a writer is lucky to get a one-word email (“thanks!”) in return for a commissioned article, be it a blurb or something slaved over for months.
The writer should be happy they are getting paid at all. The thousands of kids graduating from the print streams of North American journalism schools now are destined for years of unpaid internships at organizations currently hemorrhaging money, or an unmoored existence, fuelled by bright hope and nearly impossible expectations, in the twittering universe of blogs, Tumblr, non-paying online magazines and postings on social media. They will be convinced to write for free over and over again, because it is “good exposure.” It comes to the point where a thousand retweets — or Facebook likes or Instagram thumbs-up — feels like actual career headway, rather than the fleeting pleasant distraction that it is, the scent of bread and circuses in the wind (albeit much more circus than bread).
Last year I did visit my former editor’s feature-writing class. For my talk, I chose the lying route. I had just written a cover story for an American magazine that represented a quarter of my income that year, a story I had worked on for six months. I talked about the multiple trips the piece required, about the all-nighter with the cawfee-tawking fact checker, about the library of 23 books I read in preparation for writing, about the month of interview transcription, about the four versions the story went through before publication.
I stood there lying not because any of the above was untrue for me, last year. I was lucky enough to be born in 1973, to have gained all my experience and connections in the last decades when the long-form style of feature print journalism I was describing was not just a viable route for many writers, but a profitable one.
But it will frankly will be an impossible career niche for nearly every single person in the graduating classes of 2015, who are coming into journalism in a time of great transition and mystery as to how the industry, never mind its art, will continue. I certainly have no crystal ball on the matter.
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