Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds
NY Times – about 2 hours ago
Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China. …
Among the countries patronizing Mr. Trump’s properties, China made the largest total payment — $5.5 million — to his business interests, the report found. …
Saudi Arabia was the second-largest spender, shelling out more than $615,000 at the Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel.
Massachusetts Switches On Its First Large Offshore Wind Farm
NY Times – Jan 4
Vineyard Wind is the country’s second large-scale offshore project to start producing electricity and comes at a turbulent time for the industry.
The first large offshore wind farm in New England has started producing electricity, a milestone for an industry that has struggled to get off the ground over the past year.
The power started flowing late on Tuesday. For now, the Vineyard Wind project, located off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., can send only five megawatts of power to the grid from a single towering wind turbine. But the companies behind the project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, plan to install a total of 62 turbines with 800 megawatts of capacity, or roughly enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, by the end of this year. …
Vineyard Wind is the nation’s second utility-scale offshore wind farm to start generating electricity. Another large project off the coast of New York, South Fork Wind, began producing power in December. Once completed, South Fork will be capable of producing 132 megawatts of electricity. …
With a flip of the switch, offshore wind energy enters New England’s grid
Boston Globe – Jan 3
Wind power from south of Martha’s Vineyard was delivered to the New England grid late Tuesday night — a step Governor Maura Healey hailed as “a historic moment for the American offshore wind industry.”
It’s a development nearly 20 years in the making, ever since the ill-fated Cape Wind project was first proposed.
The breakthrough from the Vineyard Wind project happened at 11:52 p.m. on Tuesday evening, according to Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the developers of the project, when roughly five megawatts of power from one turbine was sent to the grid via a connection point in Barnstable. …
The two projects are coming online at a turbulent time for the nascent offshore wind industry. To fight climate change, many Eastern states are hoping to install dozens of large wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean that can generate electricity without emitting any planet-warming greenhouse gases. But lately, developers of those projects have struggled with soaring costs, high interest rates, supply chain delays and bursts of local opposition.
Developers have already terminated contracts for several large, planned wind farms in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, saying that the deals were signed before rising inflation and interest rates upended the profitability of those projects. As a result, analysts at BloombergNEF say they expect that just 15,000 megawatts of offshore wind will be installed in the United States by 2030, about one-third less than they had expected as recently as June. …
… Power from the project interconnects to the New England grid in Barnstable, transmitted by underground cables that connect to a substation further inland on Cape Cod. Once completed, the project will consist of 62 wind turbines generating 806 Megawatts, enough to power more than 400,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts….
… An 806-megawatt project located 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Vineyard Wind will generate electricity for more than 400,000 homes and businesses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, create 3,600 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) job years, save customers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation, and is expected to reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million metric tons per year, the equivalent of taking 325,000 cars off the road annually.
Good news for the new year. NASA says a ‘lost’ asteroid the size of the Shard won’t hit us on October 5 – although we still technically don’t know where it is. The 54 million ton asteroid 2007 FT3 was spotted for less than a day and a half in 2007 before disappearing from view, becoming too faint for telescopes to spot.
Standing 309.6 metres (1,016 feet) high, The Shard is the tallest building in the United Kingdom, and the seventh-tallest building in Europe. … (Wikipedia)
New Mapping Finds the Oceans Are Filled With “Dark Vessels”
Futurism – Jan 5
Researchers have exposed an enormous quantity of previously untracked human activity at sea using a combination of satellite imagery, vessel GPS data, and AI.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature by Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit backed by Google, researchers found that a whopping 72 to 76 percent of the world’s industrial fishing vessels aren’t being publicly tracked, with almost a third of “transport and energy vessel activity” found “missing from public tracking systems.” …
African Migration to the US Soars as Europe Cracks Down
NY Times – about 6 hours ago
Thousands of people from African nations are flying to Central America and then traveling over land to Mexico and on to the southern border.
… While migrants from African nations still represent a small share of the people crossing the southern border, their numbers have been surging, as smuggling networks in the Americas open new markets and capitalize on intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment in some corners of Europe.
Historically, the number of migrants from Africa’s 54 countries has been so low that U.S. authorities classified them as “other,” a category that has grown exponentially, driven recently, officials say, by fast-rising numbers from the continent.
According to government data obtained by The Times, the number of Africans apprehended at the southern border jumped to 58,462 in the fiscal year 2023 from 13,406 in 2022. The top African countries in 2023 were Mauritania, at 15,263; Senegal, at 13,526; and Angola and Guinea, which each had more than 4,000. …
Fact-Checking Candidates’ Sparring Over Social Security and Medicare
NY Times – just in
The top presidential candidates are vowing to protect the entitlement programs for current seniors, though some have floated changes for younger generations. But they’ve muddied each other’s current positions.
Top contenders for the 2024 presidential election in recent weeks have accused each other of jeopardizing Social Security and Medicare, key entitlement programs for seniors.
The future of the programs has been fodder for endless political debate — and distortions — because of the long-term financial challenges they face.
Social Security’s main trust fund is currently projected to be depleted in 2033, meaning the program would then be able to pay only about three-quarters of total scheduled benefits. Medicare, for its part, is at risk of not having enough money to fully pay hospitals by 2031.
President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are among the candidates zeroing in on those vulnerabilities, often by referring to one another’s previous positions.
Upbeat economic news buoys Biden and the Democrats as election year begins
Boston Globe – Jan 5
President Biden has many worries: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, migrants surging across the southern border, a looming government shutdown, and, as he addressed Friday, the fate of American democracy.
The US economy might no longer be near the top of the list.
Defying predictions a year ago that the nation would be in a recession right now, the economy enters 2024 on a roll. An unexpectedly strong jobs report Friday is the latest development fueling optimism among Democrats on an issue that polls show is the most important to voters — yet one on which Biden continues to have a dismal approval rating.
“You’d be hard pressed to have come up with a better economic story than the one that we’re witnessing right now coming out of a pandemic,” said Representative Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Inflation has come down significantly from a four-decade high, wages are rising, gas prices are falling, consumer confidence is up, mortgage rates are down, and the stock market has been booming. …
“The economy’s performing well; 2023 was a really good year,” said Mark Zandi chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
The economy is expected to continue performing well in 2024, although not quite to the level of last year. Overall growth and job gains are expected to slow, not to recession levels, but enough that the Federal Reserve recently indicated it could cut interest rates in the coming months. While consumers are feeling better about the economy, confidence is still well below pre-pandemic levels. …
(The Dobbs Index was up 6% last year, after being down 22% in 2022. Down slightly so far this year.)
(Hey! Maybe we are in the middle of a ‘Seldon Crisis’.)
Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?
NY Times – Ross Douthat – this morning
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, a “psychohistorian” (Hari Seldon) in a far-flung galactic empire figures out a way to predict the future so exactly that he can anticipate both the empire’s fall and the way that civilization can be painstakingly rebuilt. This enables him to plan a project — the “foundation” of the title — that will long outlast his death, complete with periodic messages to his heirs that always show foreknowledge of their challenges and crises.
Until one day the foreknowledge fails, because an inherently unpredictable figure has come upon the scene — the Mule, a Napoleon of galactic politics, whose advent was hard for even a psychohistorian to see coming because he’s literally a mutant, graced by some genetic twist with the power of telepathy.
Donald Trump is not a mutant telepath. (Or so I assume — fact checkers are still at work.) But the debates about how to deal with his challenge to the American political system turn, in part, on how much you think that he resembles Asimov’s Mule.
Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off? …
Images from the Webb telescope suggest that newborn galaxies look weirder than expected.Exactly how screwy was physics at the dawn of time?
What does a newborn galaxy look like?
For the longest time, many astrophysicists and cosmologists have assumed that newborn galaxies would look like the orbs and spidery discs familiar in the modern universe.
But according to an analysis of new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, baby galaxies were neither eggs nor discs. They were bananas. Or pickles, or cigars, or surfboards — choose your own metaphor. That is the tentative conclusion of a team of astronomers who re-examined images of some 4,000 newborn galaxies observed by Webb at the dawn of time.
“This is both a surprising and unexpected result, though there were already hints of it with Hubble,” said Viraj Pandya, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, referring to the Hubble Space Telescope. He is the lead author of a paper soon to be published in the Astrophysical Journal under the provocative title “Galaxies Going Bananas.” Dr. Pandya is scheduled to give a talk about his work on Wednesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. …
With Shutdown Looming, House and Senate Leaders Agree on Spending Levels
NY Times – just in
Despite the deal, time is short to assemble and pass legislation putting the agreement in force before a Jan. 19 deadline.
Senate and House leaders announced on Sunday that they had struck an overarching agreement on 2024 government funding, but it was not clear whether they would be able to cement the deal and pass it into law in time to avert a partial government shutdown in less than two weeks.
After weeks of negotiations and on the eve of Congress returning from its holiday break, top Senate and House members said they had agreed to set the total amount of spending at nearly $1.66 trillion, bringing funding in line with the deal struck last year between President Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy that met with vehement conservative opposition.
The agreement includes an increase in Pentagon spending to $886.3 billion and holds nondefense funding essentially flat at $772.7 billion, including $69 billion of added money agreed to through a handshake deal between Mr. McCarthy and the White House. That additional spending is offset by speeding up $10 billion in cuts to I.R.S. enforcement and clawing back $6 billion in unspent Covid dollars and other emergency funds. Officials said the agreement did not include an additional $14 billion sought by the Republican and Democratic appropriators in the Senate to beef up both domestic and military spending. …
Congress faces its initial deadline for passing four spending bills on Jan. 19, and getting an overall deal on total funding is just the first step in avoiding a shutdown. A second deadline for finishing the remaining eight appropriations bills, including the one covering the Pentagon, looms on Feb. 2. Finishing the job could prove a daunting task. Lawmakers returning to Washington also face big decisions on the emergency spending package for Ukraine and Israel, which Republicans have refused to consider without strict new immigration policies to stem the flow of migrants into the United States. …
Far Right Balks as Congress Begins Push to Enact Spending Deal
NY Times – just in
With little time to spare before a shutdown deadline, Speaker Mike Johnson will have to navigate the same political currents that did in his predecessor.
Congress on Monday began an uphill push to pass a new bipartisan spending agreement into law in time to avoid a partial government shutdown next week, with Speaker Mike Johnson encountering stiff resistance from his far-right flank to the deal he struck with Democrats.
Ultraconservative House Republicans have panned the $1.66 trillion agreement Mr. Johnson made with Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, saying it is unacceptable.
The agreement essentially hews to the bargain that Congress passed last year to suspend the debt ceiling, which the hard right opposed at the time and had hoped to scale back. It also includes $69 billion in spending that was added as a side deal, money that conservatives sought to block altogether.
“This is a total failure,” the far-right House Freedom Caucus, a group of Republicans who have proved a thorn in the side of a series of G.O.P. speakers, wrote on social media. …
The backlash from the extreme right underscored anew that Mr. Johnson will most likely have to rely on substantial Democratic support to pass the spending bills underlying the agreement. It also raised questions about the viability of his plan to try to attract Republican backing to spending measures by inserting conservative policy dictates aimed at restricting abortion rights and what Republicans see as “woke” administration policies.
Democrats say they will fight the addition of such policy riders. If a large bloc of Republicans opposes the spending bills, the speaker will either need to drop the policy provisions to secure Democratic backing or face a shutdown.
“Democrats will not accept any Republican poison pill policy changes,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, declared in a statement.
The result is that Mr. Johnson finds himself in a predicament similar to the one that led to the ouster of Kevin McCarthy last fall — overseeing a minuscule majority while facing a potential government shutdown and having to cut a deal with Democrats in the Senate and the White House that is certain to draw opposition and an outcry from the far right. …
Trump Received Millions From Foreign Governments as President, Report Finds
NY Times – about 2 hours ago
(So, the remaining 18 guv’mints kicked in about $94K each.)
There are many reasons not to vote for the Former President. This is perhaps one of the least of them, but it is still a reason.
Massachusetts Switches On Its First Large Offshore Wind Farm
NY Times – Jan 4
Vineyard Wind is the country’s second large-scale offshore project to start producing electricity and comes at a turbulent time for the industry.
With a flip of the switch, offshore wind energy enters New England’s grid
Boston Globe – Jan 3
NY Times –
power from the Vineyard Wind project was delivered to the New England grid for the first time
Sometime in 2009 I was hanging out in Logan waiting to board a plane to a test we were running out “west”.
Next to me was one of our engineers, I had read an article on off shore wind farms…. the Vineyard project has been discussed since those rosy days.
His response was how much will it cost to keep those things running and what is the maintenance plan?
Recent experiences in wind suggest his concerns are significant.
It is interesting to say the 62 turbines can generate XXX mw, but how much of the time is that XXX mw “available” and at what recurring cost?
Darned engineers!
Yeah, well maintenance is always going to be a problem with off-shore windfarms, maybe.
African Migration to the US Soars as Europe Cracks Down
NY Times – about 6 hours ago
Thousands of people from African nations are flying to Central America and then traveling over land to Mexico and on to the southern border.
Fact-Checking Candidates’ Sparring Over Social Security and Medicare
NY Times – just in
The top presidential candidates are vowing to protect the entitlement programs for current seniors, though some have floated changes for younger generations. But they’ve muddied each other’s current positions.
Upbeat economic news buoys Biden and the Democrats as election year begins
Boston Globe – Jan 5
(The Dobbs Index was up 6% last year, after being down 22% in 2022. Down slightly so far this year.)
(Hey! Maybe we are in the middle of a ‘Seldon Crisis’.)
Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?
NY Times – Ross Douthat – this morning
Hari Seldon – Wikipedia
The Early Universe Was Bananas
NY Times – just in
Images from the Webb telescope suggest that newborn galaxies look weirder than expected. Exactly how screwy was physics at the dawn of time?
With Shutdown Looming, House and Senate Leaders Agree on Spending Levels
NY Times – just in
Despite the deal, time is short to assemble and pass legislation putting the agreement in force before a Jan. 19 deadline.
So much for that news…
Far Right Balks as Congress Begins Push to Enact Spending Deal
NY Times – just in
With little time to spare before a shutdown deadline, Speaker Mike Johnson will have to navigate the same political currents that did in his predecessor.