U.S. Falls Out of Top 20 Happiest Countries for the First Time Ever
Solcyré Burga – March 19, 2024
Credit – Illustration by TIME; Getty Images (2)
For the first time in the World Happiness Report’s dozen-year history, the U.S. did not rank in the top 20 of the world’s happiest countries.
Out of the more than 140 nations surveyed, the U.S. landed in 23rd place, compared to 15th place in 2023. While the U.S. is still in the top 10 happiest countries for those 60 years old and above, its overall ranking fell due to a significant decline in the reported well-being of Americans under 30.
Finland ranked at the top of the list for the seventh year in a row. Lithuania is the happiest country in the world if you only look at those under the age of 30, while Denmark is the happiest country for people who are 60 and older.
This was the first year the report, released March 20 to mark the UN’s International Day of Happiness, analyzed rates of happiness by age group. “We found some pretty striking results,” said John F. Helliwell, professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and founding editor of the World Happiness Report. “There is a great variety among countries in the relative happiness of the younger, older, and in-between populations. Hence the global happiness rankings are quite different for the young and the old, to an extent that has changed a lot over the last dozen years.”
The findings were developed through a partnership between Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the World Happiness Report’s editorial board, and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Countries are ranked based on a “three-year average of each population’s average assessment of their quality of life,” the press release said.
The most recent report relies on data that was collected after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with survey respondents answering questions from 2021-2023.
According to the report, people born before 1965 are, on average, happier than people born after 1980. Millennials report drops in their life satisfaction with every year they grow older, while boomers’ happiness increases the older they get.
Globally, people between the ages of 15 and 24 typically report greater life satisfaction than older adults. But the 2024 report finds that the gap is shrinking in Europe, and has reversed in North America. The data contrasts with reports of life satisfaction between 2006 and 2010, when the younger generation in North America were just as happy as older folks.
“Social connections could be one factor explaining the generational happiness differences,” says Ilana Ron Levey, Gallup Managing Director. “Different generations have different levels of social connections and we know social support and loneliness affect happiness. The quality of interpersonal relationships may affect the young and the old differently.”
In Central and Eastern Europe, Ron Levey notes, younger people tended to report higher levels of happiness than older people, in part because of social connection. But the data differs elsewhere in the world, including in the U.S. Last May, the U.S. Surgeon General brought attention to the public health crisis of loneliness and isolation, calling it an epidemic. A previous report by the American Psychological Association found that Gen Z adults reported higher stress levels than older generations, with health and finances cited as top concerns.
Across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, the wellbeing of 15-to-24-year-olds has also fallen since 2019.
“Piecing together the available data on the wellbeing of children and adolescents around the world, we documented disconcerting drops especially in North America and Western Europe,” said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre and an editor of the report. “To think that, in some parts of the world, children are already experiencing the equivalent of a mid-life crisis demands immediate policy action.”
The world’s 100 worst polluted cities are in Asia — and 83 of them are in just one country
By Helen Regan, CNN – March 19, 2024
Morning walkers seen during a cold and hazy morning at Kartavya Path near India Gate on December 9, 2023 in New Delhi, India. Arvind Yadav/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
All but one of the 100 cities with the world’s worst air pollution last year were in Asia, according to a new report, with the climate crisis playing a pivotal role in bad air quality that is risking the health of billions of people worldwide.
The study looked specifically at fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which is the tiniest pollutant but also the most dangerous. Only 9% of more than 7,800 cities analyzed globally recorded air quality that met WHO’s standard, which says average annual levels of PM2.5 should not exceed 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
“We see that in every part of our lives that air pollution has an impact,” said IQAir Global CEO Frank Hammes. “And it typically, in some of the most polluted countries, is likely shaving off anywhere between three to six years of people’s lives. And then before that will lead to many years of suffering that are entirely preventable if there’s better air quality.”
When inhaled, PM2.5 travels deep into lung tissue where it can enter the bloodstream. It comes from sources like the combustion of fossil fuels, dust storms and wildfires, and has been linked to asthma, heart and lung disease, cancer, and other respiratory illnesses, as well as cognitive impairment in children.
Begusarai, a city of half a million people in northern India’s Bihar state, was the world’s most polluted city last year with an average annual PM2.5 concentration of 118.9 — 23 times the WHO guidelines. It was followed in the IQAir rankings by the Indian cities of Guwahati, Assam; Delhi; and Mullanpur, Punjab.
Asian countries top air pollution ranking for 2023
In 2023, the average air quality in Bangladesh exceeded the World Health Organization’s (WHO) safety guidelines by nearly 16 times, making it the country with the worst air quality globally. Pakistan and India followed closely behind, with India occupying nine of the top 10 spots for the most polluted cities.
Countries where avg. PM2.5 concentration (micrograms per cubic meter) exceeded WHO guideline seven to 10 times in 2023
A bar chart showing 15 most polluted countries on average in 2023, with Bangladesh at the top. Bangladesh 79.9 – Pakistan 73.7 – India 54.4- Tajikistan 49 – Burkina Faso 46.6 – Iraq 43.8 – United Arab Emirates 43 -Nepal 42.4 – Egypt 42.4 – DR Congo 48.8 – Kuwait 39.9 – Bahrain 39.2 -Qatar 37.6 – Indonesia 37.1 – Rwanda 36.8
Note: The concentration of small air particles called PM2.5 is used to compare air quality as they are responsible for most air pollution today.
Source: IQAirGraphic: Rosa de Acosta and Krystina Shveda, CNN
Across India, 1.3 billion people, or 96% of the population, live with air quality seven times higher than WHO guidelines, according to the report.
Central and South Asia were the worst performing regions globally, home to all four of the most polluted countries last year: Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan.
South Asia is of particular concern, with 29 of the 30 most polluted cities in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. The report ranked the major population centers of Lahore in 5th, New Delhi in 6th and Dhaka in 24th place.
Hammes said no significant improvement in pollution levels in the region is likely without “major changes in terms of the energy infrastructure and agricultural practices.”
“What’s also worrisome in many parts of the world is that the things that are causing outdoor air pollution are also sometimes the things that are causing indoor air pollution,” he added. “So cooking with dirty fuel will create indoor exposures that could be many times what you’re seeing outdoors.”
Video Ad Feedback. This is what happens to your body when you breathe polluted air03:08 – Source: CNN
A global problem
IQAir found that 92.5% of the 7,812 locations in 134 countries, regions, and territories where it analyzed average air quality last year exceeded WHO’s PM2.5 guidelines.
Only 10 countries and territories had “healthy” air quality: Finland, Estonia, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius and French Polynesia.
Millions of people die each year from air pollution-related health issues. Air pollution from fossil fuels is killing 5.1 million people worldwide every year, according to a study published in the BMJ in November. Meanwhile, WHO says 6.7 million people die annually from the combined effects of ambient and household air pollution.
The human-caused climate crisis, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, plays a “pivotal” role in influencing air pollution levels, the IQAir report said.
The climate crisis is altering weather patterns, leading to changes in wind and rainfall, which affects the dispersion of pollutants. Climate change will only make pollution worse as extreme heat becomes more severe and frequent, it said.
The climate crisis is also leading to more severe wildfires in many regions and longer and more intense pollen seasons, both of which exacerbate health issues linked to air pollution.
“We have such a strong overlap of what’s causing our climate crisis and what’s causing air pollution,” Hammes said. “Anything that we can do to reduce air pollution will be tremendously impactful in the long term also for improving our climate gas emissions, and vice versa.”
Regional rankings
North America was badly affected by wildfires that raged in Canada from May to October last year. In May, the monthly average of air pollution in Alberta was nine times greater than the same month in 2022, the report found.
And for the first time, Canada surpassed the United States in the regional pollution rankings.
The wildfires also affected US cities such as Minneapolis and Detroit, where annual pollution averages rose by 30% to 50% compared to the previous year. The most polluted major US city in 2023 was Columbus, Ohio for the second year running. But major cities like Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles experienced significant drops in annual average pollution levels, the report said.
In Asia, however, pollution levels rebounded across much of the region.
China reversed a five-year trend of declining levels of pollution, the report found. Chinese cities used to dominate global rankings of the world’s worst air quality but a raft of clean air policies over the past decade has transformed things for the better.
A study last year had found the campaign meant the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan is now 2.2 years longer. But thick smog returned to Beijing last year, where citizens experienced a 14% increase in the annual average PM2.5 concentration, according to the IQAir report. China’s most polluted city, Hotan, was listed at 14 in the IQAir ranking.
In Southeast Asia, only the Philippines saw a drop in annual pollution levels compared to the previous year, the report found.
Indonesia was the most polluted country in the region, with a 20% increase compared to 2022. Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand all had cities that exceeded WHO PM2.5 guidelines by more than 10 times, according to the report.
Last month, Thai authorities ordered government employees to work from home due to unhealthy levels of pollution in the capital Bangkok and surrounding areas, according to Reuters. On Friday, tourism hot spot Chiang Mai was the world’s most polluted city as toxic smog brought by seasonal agricultural burning blanketed the northern city.
Inequality… and one bright spot
The report also highlighted a worrying inequality: the lack of monitoring stations in countries in Africa, South America and the Middle East, which results in a dearth of air quality data in those regions.
Although Africa saw an improvement in the number of countries included in this year’s report compared with previous years the continent largely remains the most underrepresented. According to IQAir, only 24 of 54 African countries had sufficient data available from their monitoring stations.
Seven African countries were among the new locations included in the 2023 rankings, including Burkina Faso, the world’s fifth most polluted country, and Rwanda, in 15th.
Several countries that ranked high on the most polluted list last year were not included for 2023 due to a lack of available data. They include Chad, which was the most polluted country in 2022.
“There is so much hidden air pollution still on the planet,” said Hammes.
One bright spot is increasing pressure and civic engagement from communities, NGOs, companies, and scientists to monitor air quality.
“Ultimately that’s great because it really shows governments that people do care,” Hammes said.
15 promises Donald Trump has made so far in his campaign for a second term
Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Abby Turner – March 6, 2024
Former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican nominee, has made a number of promises on the campaign trail, including rolling back car pollution rules, building 10 new cities and appointing a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden and his family.
While some of Trump’s plans are lacking in detail, here are some of the policies he says he would enact if elected for a second term.
Immigration
Trump has made immigration and the border a central campaign issue, successfully pressuring Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal last month and making a trip to the southern border on February 29, where he touted his previous hard-line immigration policies.
In a Des Moines Register op-ed published roughly a week before winning the Iowa caucuses in January, Trump vowed to use the “Alien Enemies Act to remove known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States.”
“We will shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement — including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS,” he wrote.
In a video posted on Truth Social in late February before his border visit, Trump also promised to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
After the Israel-Hamas war began last October, Trump also promised to terminate the visas of “Hamas’ sympathizers.”
“We’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country, if that’s OK with you,” he added.
Drug cartels
The former president has also made waging “war” on drug cartels a priority for his second term. If elected, Trump said in his November 2022 campaign announcement that he would ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and human traffickers can receive the death penalty for their “heinous acts.”
Trump also vowed to “take down” drug cartels by imposing naval embargos on cartels, cutting off cartels’ access to global financial systems and using special forces within the Department of Defense to damage the cartels’ leadership.
Education
Trump announced plans in a September 2023campaign video to close the Department of Education and send “all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
“We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it,” he added.
The former president has also promised to “put parents back in charge and give them the final say” in education. In a January 2023 campaign video, the former president said he would give funding preferences and “favorable treatment” to schools that allow parents to elect principals, abolish teacher tenure for K-12 teachers, use merit pay to incentivize quality teaching and cut the number of school administrators, such as those overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump also said in that campaign video that he would cut funding for schools that teach critical race theory and gender ideology. In a later speech, Trump said he would bring back the 1776 Commission, which was launched in his previous administration to “teach our values and promote our history and our traditions to our children.”
The former president said he would charge the Department of Justice and the Department of Education with investigating civil rights violations of race-based discrimination in schools while also removing “Marxists” from the Department of Education. A second Trump administration would pursue violations in schools of both the Constitution’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, which prohibit the government establishment of religion and protect a citizen’s right to practice their own religion, he said.
Health care
Last November, Trump promised to replace the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, in a series of posts on Truth Social. A Trump-backed effort to repeal andreplace Obamacare failed in 2017 after three Republicans senators joined with Democrats to vote against the bill.
“Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration,” he said.
“It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!,” he continued. He also doubled down on his vow during a speech in early January.
Trump also vowed in a June 2023 campaign video to reinstate his previous executive order so that the US government would pay the same price for pharmaceuticals as other developed countries. Some of the former president’s pharmaceutical policies were overturned by Biden.
Gender care
“I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” Trump said at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference last March.
Trump added in a campaign video that he would issue an executive order instructing federal agencies to cut programs that promote gender transitions, as well as asking Congress to stop the use of federal dollars to promote and pay for gender-affirming procedures. The former president added that his administration would not allow hospitals and health care providers to meet the federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare if they provide chemical or physical gender-affirming care to youth.
Justice system
Trump has promised to use the Department of Justice to attack critics and former allies. In several videos and speeches, the former president also laid out plans to gut the current justice system by firing “radical Marxist prosecutors that are destroying America.”
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said in June 2023 remarks. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”
Trump said in a campaign video last year that he would reinstate a 2020 executive order to remove “rogue” bureaucrats and propose a constitutional amendment for term limits on members of Congress.
To address what he labeled the “disturbing” relationship between technology platforms and the government, the former president said in a January 2023 video that he would enact a seven-year cooling off period before employees at agencies such as the FBI or CIA can work for platforms that oversee mass user data.
Trump added in multiple campaignreleases that he would task the Justice Department with investigating online censorship, ban federal agencies from “colluding” to censor citizens and suspend federal money to universities participating in “censorship-supporting activities.”
In a September 2023 speech at the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, DC, Trump also touted plans to continue appointing conservative judges.
“I will once again appoint rock-solid conservative judges to do what they have to do in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia; Samuel Alito, a great gentleman; and another great gentleman, Clarence Thomas,” he said.
Trump has also pledged to “appoint U.S. Attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros District Attorneys and others that are being appointed throughout the United States.”
In a September 2023 speech in Washington, DC, Trump also announced that he would appoint a task force to review the cases of people he claimed had been “unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.” Trump noted that he wanted to “study the situation very quickly, and sign their pardons or commutations on day one.”
It’s a move that could lead to potential pardons of many rioters from the January 6, 2021, insurrection – which he suggested he would do at a CNN town hall in May 2023.
Crime
Trump said in two February 2023 campaignvideos that if “Marxist” prosecutors refuse to charge crimes and surrender “our cities to violent criminals,” he “will not hesitate to send in federal law enforcement to restore peace and public safety.”
Trump added that he would instruct the Department of Justice to open civil rights investigations into “radical left” prosecutors’ offices that engaged in racial enforcement of the law, encourage Congress to use their legal authority over Washington, DC, to restore “law and order” and overhaul federal standards of disciplining minors to address rising crimes like carjackings.
Addressing policies made in what Trump calls the “Democrats’ war on police,” the former president vowed in a campaign video that he would pass a “record investment” to hire and retrain police, strengthen protections like qualified immunity, increase penalties for assaulting law enforcement officers and deploy the National Guard when local law enforcement “refuses to act.”
The former president added that he would require law enforcement agencies that receive money from his funding investment or the Department of Justice to use “proven common sense” measures such as stop-and-frisk.
Foreign policy
Trump has continued his attacks against member countries of NATO, a European and North American defense alliance. At a South Carolina rally last month,Trump said he would not abide by the alliance’s collective-defense clause and would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” if a member country didn’t meet spending guidelines.
“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
The former president has also previously pledged to end the war in Ukraine, though he’s offered no details on how he would do so.“Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump said at a New Hampshire campaign event last year, adding in another speech that it would take him “no longer than one day” to settle the war if elected.
Trump further addressed his strategy of stopping the “never-ending wars” by vowing to remove “warmongers,” “frauds” and “failures in the senior ranks of our government,” and replace them with national security officials who would defend America’s interests. The former president added in a campaign video that he would stop lobbyists and government contractors from pushing senior military officials toward war.
Trump said in multiple campaignvideos that he would spearhead an effort to build so-called “Freedom Cities” to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”
In his plan, the federal government would charter 10 new cities on federal land, awarding them to areas with the best development proposals. The former president said in a campaign video that the Freedom Cities would bring the return of US manufacturing, economic opportunity, new industries and affordable living.
In the March 2023 video, Trump added that the US under a second Trump administration would lead in efforts to “develop vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals,” not letting China lead “this revolution in air mobility.” The former president said these airborne vehicles would change commerce and bring wealth into rural communities.
Electric vehicles
Trump has promised to roll back new car pollution rules at the Environmental Protection Agency that could require electric vehicles to account for up to two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032. Biden’s electrical vehicle-related policies, Trump claimed at a Michigan rally last September, “spell the death of the US auto industry.”
“On day one, I will terminate Joe Biden’s electrical vehicle mandate, and I will cancel every job-killing regulation that is crushing American autoworkers,” Trump added.
Energy
Trump has promised to reduce energy prices by increasing domestic production. In several campaign appearances, he has laid out plans to end delays in federal drilling permits and leases.
“We’re going to ‘drill, baby, drill’ right away,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, during a victory speech after winning the state’s Republican caucusesin January.
At a South Carolina rally in February, he pledged to remove limits on American natural gas exports.
Trade
At the same rally in South Carolina,Trump pledged to impose “stiff penalties on China and other trade abusers.”
“It’s called you screw us, and we screw you,” Trump said.
Under his proposed “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act,” the former president said if other countries impose tariffs on the US, the country would impose “a reciprocal, identical” tariff right back.
It was the same pledge Trump made in a campaign video in 2023: to impose the same tariffs that other countries may impose on the US on those countries. The goal, the former president said then, is to get other countries to drop their tariffs.
As part of a larger strategy to bring jobs back into the US, Trump also said he would implement his so-called “America First” trade agenda if elected. By setting universal baseline tariffs on a majority of foreign goods, the former president said Americans would see taxes decrease as tariffs increase. His proposal also includes a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, as well as stopping China from buying up America and stopping the investment of US companies in China.
The former president has particularly focused on China, vowing in a January 2023 campaign video to restrict Chinese ownership of US infrastructure such as energy, technology, telecommunications and natural resources. Trump also said he would force the Chinese to sell current holdings that may put national security at risk. “Economic security is national security,” he said.
Economy
Trump has promised to extend the cuts from his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, notably the TCJA’s individual income tax breaks. The former president has also talked about reducing the corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 15%.
“I will make the Trump tax cuts the largest tax cut in history,” the former president said last month at the Black Conservative Federation’s Honors Gala in South Carolina. “We’ll make it permanent and give you a new economic boom.”
Trump has also pledged to repeal Biden’s tax hikes, “immediately tackle” inflation and end what he called Biden’s “war” on American energy production.
Second Amendment
“I will take Biden’s executive order directing the federal government to target the firearms industry, and I will rip it up and throw it out on day one,” Trump said at the 2023 National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action leadership forum last April.
The former president also promised in the speech that the government would not infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights and that he would push Congress to pass a concealed carry reciprocity.
Equity
“I will create a special team to rapidly review every action taken by federal agencies under Biden’s ‘equity’ agenda that will need to be reversed. We will reverse almost all of them,” Trump said in a campaign video.
Trump added in multiple campaignvideos that he would revoke Biden’s equity executive order that required federal agencies to deliver equitable outcomes in policy and conduct equity training. If elected, Trump said he would also fire staffers hired to implement Biden’s policy, and then reinstate his 2020 executive order banning racial and sexual stereotyping in the federal government.
CNN’s Tami Luhby, Kate Sullivan and Kristin Holmes contributed to this report.
What continued drone strikes on Russian oil refineries could mean for war with Ukraine
CBC – February 18, 2024
Bryansk Gov. Alexander Bogomaz shared a photo of oil tanks burning on Telegram on Feb. 19 after a reported drone attack on a facility in Klintsy, Russia. Analysts say the attacks show Ukraine may have an increased ability to strike targets deeper inside Russia. (Bryansk Gov. Alexander Bogomaz/Telegram/The Associated Press – image credit)
Hostile drones have been winding their way across the Russian landscape this winter, striking refineries and related oil and gas infrastructure all the way from the Baltic Sea in the northwest to the Black Sea in the southwest.
Though Ukraine does not typically confirm its actions outside its borders and Russia has not officially acknowledged drones were the cause of these incidents, media reports have identified Kyiv’s hand in the attacks occurring with regularity as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine nears the two-year mark.
Analysts say the drone attacks are demonstrating that oil and gas targets of economic significance are not out of reach, even far from the front lines of the war.
Bryansk Gov. Alexander Bogomaz/Telegram/The Associated Press
“This is where strikes are intended to hurt,” said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He sees a distinction between these types of targets versus strikes that have drawn attention but had less strategic impact.
He says Ukraine has gradually been able to send drones “further and further inside Russia,” and in doing so, may be aiming to make Russia think twice about its actions on the other side of the border.
Russia, oil and revenues
Late U.S. Senator John McCain once derisively described Russia as being “a gas station masquerading as a country” — a jibe underlining the critical importance of oil and gas products to Moscow.
Dmitri Lovetsky/The Associated Press
Indeed, Russia draws heavily on its resource reserves to support the state. The International Energy Agency says Russia’s oil and gas export revenues accounted for 45 per cent of its federal budget in 2021.
As Radchenko points out, these exports contribute “significantly” to Russia’s earnings, allowing it to use those funds to import goods and support the war effort.
A January attack on a Novatek facility in Ust-Luga halted gas processing operations there for several weeks. The plant processes gas condensate into various fuel products that are exported to customers in Turkey and Asia, according to Reuters.
Sergey Vakulenko, a former strategy executive at Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of the larger Russian energy firm, believes the Ust-Luga episode may illustrate a bigger problem for Russia than a temporary disruption to production at a single facility.
In a recent analysis published online, Vakulenko reasoned that if small drones can get all the way to Ust-Luga, which is hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, there are some 18 Russian refineries at risk of being targeted, and they account for more than half the country’s refinery production. He’s not the only analyst noticing this concern for Russia’s refineries.
And while the drones being used in these attacks may be small, they can still cause problems.
“With a bit of luck, they can damage not just pipelines, but also compressors, valves, control units, and other pieces of equipment that are tricky to replace because of sanctions,” Vakulenko wrote in the analysis.
The Russian government has taken steps to deal with the problem.
Maxim Starchak, an independent expert on the Russian defence and nuclear industry, says regulations have been put in place to restrict drones from flying close to “the most significant fuel and energy sector facilities” and operators are using electronic warfare systems to defend against drone threats.
But Starchak said Russian energy firms must foot the bill for expenses related to defence of their facilities.
“Moscow will not specifically help,” he said, noting Russian authorities may hold firms accountable for not putting measures in place to protect their facilities.
A familiar threat for Ukraine
On the other side of the border, Ukraine has seen the deadly impact drone strikes can have — including in Kharkiv last weekend.
Sergey Bobok/AFP/Getty Images
Regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said at least 10 incoming drones were involved in the assault, with eight of the devices shot down — but one hit an oil depot, which then caused a fuel leak. The ensuing fire burned down 15 homes and killed at least seven people.
As Ukraine continues to fight to repel Russian forces from its lands, its military leaders have signalled drones and related technology will be needed to win the war that seems to have no end in sight.
“Only changes and constant improvement of the means and methods of warfare will make it possible to achieve success on this path,” said Col.-Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the newly minted Ukrainian army chief, in a recent Telegram post.
Until a few days ago, I was feeling fairly sanguine about America’s prospects. Economically, we’ve had a year of strong growth and plunging inflation — and aside from committed Republicans, who see no good, hear no good and speak no good when a Democrat is president, Americans appear to be recognizing this progress. It has seemed increasingly likely that the nation’s good sense would prevail and democracy would survive.
But watching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.
And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election. It reminds me, as it reminds everyone I know, of the 2016 furor over Hillary Clinton’s email server, which was a minor issue that may well have wound up swinging the election to Donald Trump.
As most people know by now, Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed to look into allegations of wrongdoing on Biden’s part, concluded that the president shouldn’t be charged. But his report included an uncalled-for and completely unprofessional swipe at Biden’s mental acuity, apparently based on the president’s difficulty in remembering specific dates — difficulty that, as I wrote on Friday, everyone confronts at whatever age. Hur’s gratuitous treatment of Biden echoed James Comey’s gratuitous treatment of Clinton — Hur and Comey both seemed to want to take political stands when that was not their duty.
Yes, it’s true that Biden is old, and will be even older if he wins re-election and serves out a second term. I wish that Democrats had been able to settle on a consensus successor a year or two ago and that Biden had been able to step aside in that successor’s favor without setting off an intraparty free-for-all. But speculating about whether that could have happened is beside the point now. It didn’t happen, and Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee.
It’s also true that many voters think the president’s age is an issue. But there’s perception and there’s reality: As anyone who has recently spent time with Biden (and I have) can tell you, he is in full possession of his faculties — completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail. Of course, most voters don’t get to see him up close, and it’s on Biden’s team to address that. And yes, he speaks quietly and a bit slowly, although this is in part because of his lifetime struggle with stuttering. He also, by the way, has a sense of humor, which I think is important.
Most important is that Biden has been a remarkably effective president. Trump spent four years claiming that a major infrastructure initiative was just around the corner, to the point that “It’s infrastructure week!” became a running joke; Biden actually got legislation passed. Trump promised to revive American manufacturing, but didn’t. Biden’s technology and climate policies — the latter passed against heavy odds — have produced a surge in manufacturing investment. His enhancement of Obamacare has brought health insurance coverage to millions.
If you ask me, these achievements say a lot more about Biden’s capacity than his occasional verbal slips.
And what about his opponent, who is only four years younger? Maybe some people are impressed by the fact that Trump talks loud and mean. But what about what he’s actually saying in his speeches? They’re frequently rambling word salads, full of bizarre claims like his assertion on Friday that if he loses in November, “they’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania.”
Not to mention confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and mistaking E. Jean Carroll for one of his ex-wives.
As I also wrote last week, Trump’s speeches make me remember my father’s awful last year, when he suffered from sundowning — bouts of incoherence and belligerence after dark. And we’re supposed to be worried about Biden’s mental state?
Over the past few days, while the national discussion has been dominated by talk about Biden’s age, Trump declared that he wouldn’t intervene to help “delinquent” NATO members if Russia were to attack them, even suggesting that he might encourage such an attack. He seems to regard NATO as nothing more than a protection racket and after all this time still has no idea how the alliance works. By the way, Lithuania, the NATO member that Trump singled out, has spent a larger percentage of its G.D.P. on aid to Ukraine than any other nation.
Again, I wish this election weren’t a contest between two elderly men and worry in general about American gerontocracy. But like it or not, this is going to be a race between Biden and Trump — and somehow the lucid, well-informed candidate is getting more heat over his age than his ranting, factually challenged opponent.
As I said, until just the other day I was feeling somewhat optimistic. But now I’m deeply troubled about our nation’s future.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography.
Has the planet warmed more than we thought? Ocean sponges might be telling us something
By Seth Borenstein – February 5, 2024
This undated image provided by Amos Winter shows a sponge from the Caribbean. This sponge, a simple animal that filters water, and a handful of other centuries-old sponges are causing some scientists to think human-caused climate change began sooner and has heated the world more than they thought. Many sponge species live long, and as they grow they record the conditions of the environment around them in their skeletons. (Courtesy of Amos Winter via AP)
This undated image provided by Amos Winter shows a sponge from the Caribbean that has been cut. This sponge, a simple animal that filters water, and a handful of other centuries-old sponges are causing some scientists to think human-caused climate change began sooner and has heated the world more than they thought. Many sponge species live long, and as they grow they record the conditions of the environment around them in their skeletons. (Courtesy of Amos Winter via AP)
A man walks past an abandoned canoe at the Sau reservoir amid a drought in Vilanova de Sau, north of Barcelona, Spain, Jan. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti File)
A pedestrian uses an umbrella to shield against the sun while passing through Times Square as temperatures rise, July 27, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
A boy rests under a tree while watching the sun set as triple-digit heat indexes continue in the Midwest, Aug. 20, 2023, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
Beachgoers flock to Ipanema beach to beat the extreme heat in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sept. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado, File)
A handful of centuries-old sponges from deep in the Caribbean are causing some scientists to think human-caused climate change began sooner and has heated the world more than they thought.
They calculate that the world has already gone past the internationally approved target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, hitting 1.7 degrees (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) as of 2020. They analyzed six of the long-lived sponges — simple animals that filter water — for growth records that document changes in water temperature, acidity and carbon dioxide levels in the air, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change.
Other scientists were skeptical of the study’s claim that the world has warmed that much more than thought. But if the sponge calculations are right, there are big repercussions, the study authors said.
“The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate changes is being brought forward by at least a decade,” study lead author Malcolm McCulloch, a marine geochemist at the University of Western Australia. “Basically, time’s running out.”
“We have a decade less than we thought,” McCulloch told The Associated Press. “It’s really a diary of — what’s the word? — impending disaster.”
In the past several years, scientists have noted more extreme and harmful weather — floods, storms, droughts and heat waves — than they had expected for the current level of warming. One explanation for that would be if there was more warming than scientists had initially calculated, said study co-author Amos Winter, a paleo oceanographer at Indiana State University. He said this study also supports the theory that climate change is accelerating, proposed last year by former NASA top scientist James Hansen.
“This is not good news for global climate change as it implies more warming,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who was not part of the study.
Many sponge species live long, and as they grow they record the conditions of the environment around them in their skeletons. Scientists have long used sponges along with other proxies — tree rings, ice cores and coral — that naturally show the record of changes in the environment over centuries. Doing so helps fill in data from before the 20th century.
Sponges — unlike coral, tree rings and ice cores — get water flowing from all over through them so they can record a larger area of ecological change, Winter and McCulloch said.
They used measurements from a rare species of small and hard-shelled sponges to create a temperature record for the 1800s that differs greatly from the scientifically accepted versions used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The study finds that the mid-1800s were about half a degree Celsius cooler than previously thought, with warming from heat-trapping gases kicking in about 80 years earlier than the measurements the IPCC uses. IPCC figures show warming kicking in just after 1900.
It makes sense that the warming started earlier than the IPCC says because by the mid-1800s the Industrial Revolution had begun and carbon dioxide was being spewed into the air, said McCulloch and Winter. Carbon dioxide and other gases from the burning of fossil fuels are what causes climate change, scientists have established.
Winter and McCulloch said these rusty orange long-lived sponges — one of them was more than 320 years old when it was collected — are special in a way that makes them an ideal measuring tool, better than what scientists used in the mid- to late 1800s.
“They are cathedrals of history, of human history, recording carbon dioxide in the the atmosphere, temperature of the water and pH of the water,” Winter said.
“They’re beautiful,” he said. “They’re not easy to find. You need a special team of divers to find them.”
That’s because they live 100 to 300 feet deep (33 meters to 98 meters) in the dark, Winter said.
The IPCC and most scientists use temperature data for the mid-1800s that came from ships whose crews would take temperature readings by lowering wooden buckets to dip up water. Some of those measurements could be skewed depending on how the collection was done — for example, if the water was collected near a warm steamship engine. But the sponges are more accurate because scientists can track regular tiny deposits of calcium and strontium on the critters’ skeleton. Warmer water would lead to more strontium compared to calcium, and and cooler water would lead to higher proportions of calcium compared to strontium, Winter said.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the study, has long disagreed with the IPCC’s baseline and thinks warming started earlier. But he was still skeptical of the study’s findings.
“In my view it begs credulity to claim that the instrumental record is wrong based on paleo-sponges from one region of the world. It honestly doesn’t make any sense to me,” Mann said.
In a news briefing, Winter and McCulloch repeatedly defended the use of sponges as an accurate proxy for world temperature changes. They said except for the 1800s, their temperature reconstruction based on sponges matches global records from instruments and other proxies like coral, ice cores and tree rings.
And even though these sponges are only in the Caribbean, McCulloch and Winter said they are a good representation for the rest of the world because they’re at a depth that doesn’t get too affected by warm and cold cycles of El Nino and La Nina, and the water matches well with global ocean temperatures, McCulloch and Winter said.
Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who also wasn’t part of the sponge study, said even if the McCulloch team is right about a cooler baseline in the 1800s that shouldn’t really change the danger levels that scientists set in their reports. That’s because the danger levels “were not tied to the absolute value of preindustrial temperatures” but more about how much temperatures changed from that time, he said.
Although the study stopped at 2020 with 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) in warming since pre-industrial times, a record hot 2023 pushes that up to 1.8 degrees (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), McCulloch said.
“The rate of change is much faster than we thought,” McCulloch said. “We’re heading into very dangerous high-risk scenarios for the future. And the only way to stop this is to reduce emissions. Urgently. Most urgently.”
Teresa de Miguel contributed to this report from Mexico City.
‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show
Oliver Milman – January 30, 2024
Composite: The Guardian/Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego/Lyndon B Johnson Library
The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.
A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO2 alongside a related effort to research the smog that regularly blighted Los Angeles at the time. This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil companies.
In the research proposal for the money – uncovered by Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate website DeSmog – Keeling’s research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that could identify “changes in the atmosphere” caused by the burning of coal and petroleum.
“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.
“They contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth’s climate on a scale significant to human civilization,” said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in historic climate disinformation at the University of Miami.
“These findings are a startling confirmation that big oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years – for twice my lifetime – and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry’s denial of basic climate science decades later.”
Previous investigations of public and private records have found that major oil companies spent decades conducting their own research into the consequences of burning their product, often to an uncannily accurate degree – a study last year found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s.
The newly discovered documents now show the industry knew of CO2’s potential climate impact as early as 1954 via, strikingly, the work of Keeling, then a 26-year-old Caltech researcher conducting formative work measuring CO2 levels across California and the waters of the Pacific ocean. There is no suggestion that oil and gas funding distorted his research in any way.
The findings of this work would lead the US scientist to further experiments upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that were to provide a continual status report of the world’s dangerously-rising carbon dioxide composition.
Keeling died in 2005 but his seminal work lives on. Currently, the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 level is 422 parts per million, which is nearly a third higher than the first reading taken in 1958, and a 50% jump on pre-industrial levels.
A total of 18 automotive companies, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, gave money to the foundation. Other entities, including banks and retailers, also contributed funding.
Separately, a 1959 memo identifies the American Petroleum Institute (API), the US’s leading oil and gas lobbying body, and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now known as the Western States Petroleum Association, as “major contributors to the funds of the Air Pollution Foundation”. It’s not clear exactly when API started funding the foundation but it had a representative on a research committee from mid-1955 onwards.
A policy statement of the Air Pollution Foundation from 1955 calls the problem of air pollution, which is caused by the emissions of cars, trucks and industrial facilities, “one of the most serious confronting urban areas in California and elsewhere” and that the issue will be addressed via “diligent and honest fact finding, by wise and effective action”.
The unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s, and represent what may be the first instance of the fossil fuel industry being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its business model.
The oil and gas industry was initially concerned with research related to smog and other direct air pollutants before branching out into related climate change impacts, according to Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law.
“You just come back to the oil and gas industry again and again, they were omnipresent in this space,” he said. “The industry was not just on notice but deeply aware of the potential climate implications of its products for going on 70 years.”
Muffett said the documents add further impetus to efforts in various jurisdictions to hold oil and gas firms legally liable for the damages caused by the climate crisis.
“These documents talk about CO2 emissions having planetary implications, meaning this industry understood extraordinarily early on that fossil fuel combustion was profound on a planetary scale,” he said.
“There is overwhelming evidence the oil and gas industry has been misleading the public and regulators around the climate risks of their product for 70 years. Trusting them to be part of the solutions is foolhardy. We’ve now moved into an era of accountability.”
API and Ralph Keeling, Charles’s son who is also a scientist, were contacted for comment about the documents but did not respond.
Iconic lake once known for its crystal-clear waters is on the verge of extinction: ‘The damage done … cannot be compensated’
Jeremiah Budin – January 30, 2024
Anchar Lake, located in the Kashmir region, is on the verge of disappearing entirely, despite calls for action from environmentalists that have been going unheeded for more than a decade.
What is happening?
Once a major tourist destination, Anchar Lake has fallen victim to the same forces that have negatively impacted so many bodies of water and parts of nature throughout the world — pollution, overdevelopment, and governments that prioritize protecting profits over the environment.
“The lake was once a beautiful tourist attraction, but over the past many years, it has turned into a polluted wasteland,” one nearby resident told Rising Kashmir.
Why is this concerning?
A century ago, the lake encompassed 7.5 square miles. Today, it has been reduced to 2.6 square miles, with more than half of that area comprised of marshland. Contributing factors include unregulated development around the area that has pushed silt and sediment into the lake.
Improper sewage and drainage systems have filtered waste into the lake, making its waters toxic and inhospitable to the bird and fish species that once thrived there.
“The lake is under tremendous anthropogenic pressures, which have resulted in deterioration of its water quality. The entire liquid and solid wastes generated on the peripheral areas situated at higher contours where people live find its way into the lake. Even the agricultural waste of the above area is disposed of in it,” Ajaz Rasool, an environmentalist and hydraulic engineer, told Greater Kashmir.
What is being done about it?
Greater Kashmir laid out several steps that need to be taken to ensure that Anchar Lake does not become extinct, which would be devastating for local wildlife that has already seen its habitat harmed dramatically.
These steps include officially making the conservation of the lake the responsibility of the Lake Conservation and Management Authority, erecting fences around the area to prevent further development and encroachment, plugging drains that filter waste into the lake, and rebuilding the sewage system.
“It is the responsibility of the Government and people to join hands to restore the glory of Anchar, as both are responsible for its deterioration. Damage done to the environment is irreparable and cannot be compensated in any form,” the piece concluded.
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New satellite images catch world’s worst polluters red-handed: ‘Now we really know exactly where it’s coming from’
Leslie Sattler – January 26, 2024
The world’s 1,300 largest methane-polluting sites have been identified from space, thanks to an endeavor by environmental intelligence company Kayrros.
The identification of these methane leaks is an urgent call to action but also a great opportunity.
Thanks to Kayrros’ satellite surveillance, the exact sources of potent planet-warming pollution are finally exposed. “Previously, we could measure the amount of methane in the atmosphere, but now we really know exactly where it’s coming from,” Antoine Rostand, co-founder of Kayrros, told Sky News.
Pursuing the where, what, and why of these polluting leaks has led Kayrros to gas wells, pipelines, coal mines, and waste sites in countries like Turkmenistan (home to the single largest oil and gas source), India, Russia, Australia, and the United States, as Sky News has reported.
With the “who” and “where” made clear, targeted reduction is finally possible.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, meaning its presence in the atmosphere can alter Earth’s temperature, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Methane only lingers in the atmosphere for about a decade, but it has an intense effect during that time (per NASA), so fixing methane leaks is immediately impactful.
Simultaneously, plugged leaks can significantly slow near-term temperature rises while improving air quality and public health.
Researchers at universities like MIT are also hard at work developing ways to capture escaped methane from the atmosphere.
The U.S. recently implemented national methane monitoring and repair policies, which are expected to eliminate 58 million tons of toxic gas over 15 years — a decisive climate victory.
Additionally, over 150 world governments have joined the Global Methane Pledge to cut methane output by 30% by 2030. If realized, the Pledge could quickly curb rising temperatures and prevent over 250,000 heat-related deaths annually (as projected by the World Health Organization).
With exact methane leak sources now in plain view from space, the path to a cooler future is illuminated.
In the meantime, Kayrros plans to continue its monitoring — and to share its findings with the world.
“Open-access climate data has a huge role to play in the climate crisis by holding governments and businesses to account,” Rostand said, as reported by InsideEcology.
“We intend to increase access to climate data and increase the basic knowledge and understanding of the harm methane does and of the failure of many governments and organizations to report their emissions of it accurately.”
Many parts of the world are experiencing a rapid depletion in the subterranean reserves of water that billions of people rely on for drinking, irrigation and other uses, according to new research that analyzed millions of groundwater level measurements from 170,000 wells in more than 40 countries.
It’s the first study to piece together what’s happening to groundwater levels at a global scale, according to the researchers involved, and will help scientists better understand what impact humans are having on this valuable underground resource, either through overuse or indirectly by changes in rainfall linked to climate change.
Groundwater, contained within cracks and pores in permeable bodies of rock known as aquifers, is a lifeline for people especially in parts of the world where rainfall and surface water are scarce, such as northwest India and the southwest United States.
Reductions in groundwater can make it harder for people to access freshwater to drink or to irrigate crops and can result in land subsidence.
“This study was driven by curiosity. We wanted to better understand the state of global groundwater by wrangling millions of groundwater level measurements,” said co-lead author Debra Perrone, an associate professor in University of California’s Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program, in a news release on the study that published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
The authors found that groundwater levels declined between 2000 and 2022 in 71% of the 1,693 aquifer systems included in the research, with groundwater levels declining more than 0.1 meter a year in 36%, or 617, of them.
The Ascoy-Soplamo Aquifer in Spain had the fastest rate of decline in the data they compiled — a median decline of 2.95 meters per year, said study coauthor Scott Jasechko, an associate professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at University of California Santa Barbara.
Several aquifer systems in Iran were among those with the fastest rate of groundwater decline, he added.
The team wasn’t able to gather data from much of Africa, South America and southeast Asia because of a lack of monitoring, but Jasechko said the study included the countries where most global groundwater pumping takes place.
Declines not universal
The study also highlighted some success stories in Bangkok, Arizona and New Mexico, where groundwater has begun to recover after interventions to better regulate water use or redirect water to replenish depleted aquifers.
“I was impressed by the clever strategies that have been put into action to address groundwater depletion in several places, though these ‘good news’ stories are very rare,” Jasechko said via email.
To understand whether the declines seen in the 21st century were accelerating, the team also accessed data for groundwater levels for 1980 to 2000 for 542 of the aquifers in the study.
They found that declines in groundwater levels sped up in the first two decades of the 21st century for 30% of those aquifers, outpacing the declines recorded between 1980 and 2000.
“These cases of accelerating groundwater-level declines are more than twice as prevalent as one would expect from random fluctuations in the absence of any systematic trends in either time period,” the study noted.
Donald John MacAllister, a hydrologist at the British Geological Survey who wasn’t involved in the research, said it was a really “impressive” set of data, despite some gaps.
“I think it’s fair to say this global compilation of groundwater data hasn’t been done, certainly on this scale, at least to my knowledge before,” he said.
“Groundwater is an incredibly important resource but one of the challenges is… because we can’t see it, it’s out of mind for most people. Our challenge is to constantly bang the drum for policymakers — that we have this resource that we have to look after, and that we can use to build resilience and adapt to climate change.”
