Friday, April 22, 2022

News: Ukraine: April 22

मोदीले भने - हाम्रो संसदमा रुस र युक्रेनबारे विस्तृत छलफल भयो
कलाकारले युक्रेन हाँकेको छ, हामीलाई कम आँकलन नगर्दा हुन्छ नेताहरूले राम्रो गरेको भए कलाकार किन राजनीतिमा आउनुपर्थ्यो?
राजपाक्षे परिवारको स्वार्थले डुबेको श्रीलंका

Vertical Farms Expand as Demand for Year-Round Produce Grows The industry is expected to grow to $9.7 billion worldwide by 2026, but it faces challenges, including high energy costs, technological limitations and the ability to scale. ....... Plenty Unlimited, an agricultural start-up, is using the site for an indoor vertical farm ....... What made moving indoors possible was a drop in price in LED lights, which plunged as much as 94 percent in 2015 from 2008. .......... Vertical farming is expected to grow to $9.7 billion worldwide by 2026, from $3.1 billion in 2021 ........ Upward Farms, a start-up based in Brooklyn that blends vertical farming with aquaponics and uses fish waste as fertilizer, is building a 250,000-square-foot warehouse on six acres in Luzerne County, Pa., about 100 miles from Manhattan. ....... But some scientists have doubts about the industry’s ability to scale and diversify given the limitations of current technology. Tomatoes take 60 percent more electricity to grow than lettuce, and strawberries take twice that amount ....... “LED lights are about 70 percent, close to their theoretical maximum” of efficiency, he said. The consumer is paying for the energy costs. ....... “LED’s are not going to go down much more” in cost, he said. “Where investors are going against physics, they are going to have a hard time.” .

The Home Cooks (and Start-Ups) Betting on Prepared Meals Tens of billions of dollars are being spent on what, where and how consumers will eat in the coming years. Laws and regulations aren’t always keeping up........ The companies paint themselves as part of the new gig economy, a way for the people making the food to earn a little or a lot of money, working whatever days and hours best fit their schedules. ...... Selling meals online presents an opportunity for women who have struggled to work outside the home because of limited child care options or for refugees and recent immigrants ...... From her kitchen in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, María Bído uses WoodSpoon to sell classic Puerto Rican dishes like mofongo, bacalaitos and sancocho, using recipes she learned from her grandmother. ....... “My whole life, people told me, ‘You need to do something with your food’ .

‘There Is No Reasonable Way for This to End’: Bill Browder on How to Stop the War Mr. Browder, once a major investor in Russia, discusses what influences Vladimir Putin and whether punishing the oligarchs around him could help end his aggression in Ukraine. ........ Mr. Browder, once a major investor in Russia, has become one of the Kremlin’s biggest enemies. Russia has tried several times to get Interpol to issue arrest orders against him. And he is such a thorn in Mr. Putin’s side that the Russian president singled him out by name during his first official summit with President Donald J. Trump. ......... What did he do to attract such ire? Mr. Browder ran one of the largest hedge funds in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But his public battles against corporate corruption eventually prompted his expulsion from Russia in 2005 as a “threat to national security.” ......... Putin is a dictator. One of the great benefits of dictatorship is that he can steal as much money as he chooses. And he chooses to steal a lot. ......... The purpose of these wars is that he was afraid of being overthrown. And so the best way to do that is to get everyone to rally around the leader. And so when you’re talking about an endgame, there is no endgame. This is just him staying in power. .......... The world that he lives in is like a prison yard. This is a world where everybody is sort of eyeing each other up aggressively, and everybody has to show strength to each other. You know, the most powerful person in a yard has to be the most vicious person in order to keep their power. .......... his misjudgment in how effectively the Ukrainians are fighting back has made him look stupid. ....... The Ukrainians have shown him huge disrespect by successfully fighting back. And so, for example, the war crimes that have been committed are not by accident. .......... It’s either he ends up taking over Ukraine and then moving his way toward the Baltic countries to challenge us at NATO — or for him to be defeated by Ukraine and then having the Russian people overthrow him because he was the weak guy who couldn’t beat Ukraine. ........ when you see an oligarch worth $20 billion, $10 billion of that is Putin’s. He can’t hold any money in his own name. ........ continuing to do business in Russia after this invasion is the equivalent of continuing to do business in Nazi Germany when Hitler started persecuting the Jews. It’s the same thing. ......... the U.S. is probably going to be less likely to sanction China before consumers themselves sanction China. ...... The way Russia works is that I don’t think he’s spending a lot of time on me, but he gave an order 10 years ago to his government to go after Bill Browder in every way possible. Until the order is rescinded, there are people whose job it is to go after me, no matter what’s going on in the world. And they continue to go after me. .

Koch Industries’ Bet on Batteries The company is plugging $30 million into a start-up co-founded by one of Silicon Valley’s favorite scientists. .

World War II, Ukraine and the Future of Conflict Richard Overy’s prodigious “Blood and Ruins” is a sweeping history of World War II packed with lessons for the future. .

With India on the fence over Ukraine, Biden meets with Modi. India has long been reliant on Russia for military hardware, an important factor in the deep historic ties between the two countries. And so despite global condemnations of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Mr. Modi’s administration has tried to remain neutral — refraining from criticizing Russia, while calling for negotiations and engaging Ukraine with humanitarian assistance. ...... India imports only about one percent of its oil needs from Russia. Many Indian officials have spoken of a double standard, with Europe continuing to import oil from Russia while India’s imports come under increased scrutiny. ......... “Our talks today are taking place at a time when the situation in Ukraine is very worrying,” Mr. Modi said. “During this entire process I spoke several times to the presidents of both Ukraine and Russia. I not only appealed for peace, but also suggested there be direct talks between President Putin and the president of Ukraine.” .



‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’ Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk. ........ Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, “is not a country.” ........ Obama’s handling of Putin did not always strike her as judicious. When Chuck Todd of NBC asked Obama at a news conference in 2013 about his working relationship with Putin, Obama replied, “He’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.” Hill told me that she “winced” when she heard his remark, and when Obama responded to Putin’s invasion and annexation of the Ukrainian region Crimea a year later by referring to Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” she winced again. “We said openly, ‘Don’t dis the guy — he’s thin-skinned and quick to take insults,’” Hill said of this counsel to Obama about Putin. “He either didn’t understand the man or willfully ignored the advice.” ........ “living in his own bubble”; “a germaphobe”; “a shoot-the-messenger kind of person” ........ an insider’s look at a chaotic, reckless and at times antidemocratic chief executive. ...... Trump said of Hill: “She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing.” ....... “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.” ...... Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. “His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,” she said. “It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.” .

No comments: