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ARAB TIMES, FRIDAY-SATURDAY, APRIL 7-8, 2017
INTERNATIONAL
18
World News Roundup
Debris sits atop bracing that had been holding a five-foot wide concrete wall as the cutter heads of a massive tunneling machine are fully visible as it completes boring for the State Route 99 highway on April 4, under Seattle.
After tunneling more than 9,000 feet and building an outer tunnel wall as it moved forward, the boring machine finished digging what will be a two-mile, double-decker traffic tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way viaduct, damaged
in an earthquake in 2001. (Inset): A worker claps his hands as he sits between the cutting blades of the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine. (AP)
Tunnel
Climate
Seattle project ‘milestone’
Trump boosts coal as China cuts emissions
Tunnel machine ends
long, troubled journey
Top polluters take divergent paths
SEATTLE, April 6 (AP): The world’s largest tunnelboring machine broke through a concrete wall beneath
Seattle on Tuesday to reach the end of its long, troubled
journey, a milestone in a multibillion-dollar project to
replace an aging highway hugging the city’s waterfront.
Critics of the effort to build an underground roadway called it an overpriced endeavor that would collapse under the weight of its
ambition and mounting costs.
For a while, they looked to be
right as the machine, known as
Bertha, broke down soon after
it started drilling in 2013 and
didn’t crank up again until last
year.
Bertha has finally capped its
1.75-mile (3-kilometer) journey, which the state Transportation Department and some
Murray
media live-streamed online.
Social media users posted memes about the time it
took to reach this moment, when the giant machine cut
through the final pieces of concrete in a 5-foot wall,
filling the air with dust.
“Today is a major construction milestone in our
plan to reclaim Seattle’s waterfront,” Mayor Ed Murray said. “We will build a waterfront for pedestrians,
transit and sensible car trips without a freeway wall
casting a shadow over our vision of a well-connected
21st century city.”
Crews will break down Bertha as others prepare the
inside of the tunnel to handle double-decker lanes of
a $3.1 billion underground highway project that will
replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was damaged in a 2001 earthquake. The tunnel is set to open in
2019, three years behind schedule.
Proponents say the viaduct will no longer wall off
Puget Sound. Some conservative lawmakers slammed
the project as an expensive vanity project, and environmentalists objected to building another highway in
Seattle.
Reflect
“This is a historic moment in our state’s transportation history,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee,
adding that it was a time “to reflect on the incredible
level of innovation and skill needed to get to this
point.”
Republican state Sen. Michael Baumgartner of
Spokane, a member of the Transportation Committee,
called the project “a tragedy of errors.”
“Only in bonkers, leftist Seattle would an absurdly
stupid project that’s massively behind schedule and
over cost, would finishing be considered a success,”
he told The Associated Press.
Bertha had only drilled about 1,000 feet (305 meters) of its 9,270-foot (2,826-meter) trek when it hit
a steel pipe and ground to halt in December 2013.
Crews dug a pit to reach the machine so it could be
pulled out and repaired. Exactly what caused Bertha
to stop drilling will be the subject of litigation between
the state and the contractor.
The removal of water near the pit sparked concerns
about the ground in the area settling and posing a
danger to pipes, buildings and roadways. Some businesses reported cracked walls, and monitors detected
ground movement near the pit.
Officials ultimately decided the movement stemmed
from activity in the pit and natural causes. After being
shut down for more than two years for repairs, Bertha
began digging again in 2015.
Officials also expressed concern when a barge carrying excavated soil began to tip and dropped material into the water. The spill posed a hazard to tunnel
workers and the public.
The courts will decide who will pay for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cost overruns and delays.
Seattle Tunnel Partners and its insurance companies
sued in 2015, claiming the state was at fault for Bertha’s breakdown. The Department of Transportation
responded with its own lawsuit, seeking unspecified
damages because of the delays caused by the breakdown.
In this Jan 25, 2012 file photo, former
astronaut and Sen John Glenn poses
for a photo during an interview at his
office in Columbus, Ohio. Glenn died
on Dec 8, 2016 at age 95. (AP)
Whitson
Kelly
Discovery
Final goodbye for Glenn: Final funeral
rites for astronaut John Glenn took place
Thursday at Arlington National Cemetery.
His family and invited guests, including
astronauts and dignitaries, said goodbye to
the first American to orbit Earth at a small
private service at the Old Post Chapel.
In Glenn’s honor, President Donald
Trump has ordered flags at federal entities
and institutions flown at half-staff Thursday,
his press secretary tweeted, and Ohio Gov
John Kasich has done the same at public
grounds and buildings across Glenn’s home
state.
There was a public outpouring of admiration for the former fighter pilot, historymaking astronaut and longtime Democratic
US senator from small-town Ohio after he
died on Dec 8 at age 95.
Thousands of mourners visited his flagdraped casket as it lay in repose at the Ohio
Statehouse for a longer period than assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and others
in history. (AP)
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3 extra months in orbit: The world’s
oldest and most experienced spacewoman is
getting three extra months in orbit.
NASA announced Wednesday that
astronaut Peggy Whitson will remain on
the International Space Station until September. The 57-year-old astronaut arrived
last November and was supposed to return
to Earth in June. But under an agreement
between NASA and the Russian Space
Agency, she’ll stay another three months
and take advantage of an empty seat on a
Soyuz capsule in the fall.
This mission — her third — will now last
close to 10 months. Scientists are eager to
monitor any changes to her body, to add to
the knowledge gained from retired astronaut
Scott Kelly’s recent one-year flight.
The two men she flew up with in November — France’s Thomas Pesquet and
Russia’s Oleg Novitskiy — will return in
June without her.
Whitson has already spent more time in
space than any other woman, counting all
her missions, and just last week set a record
for the most spacewalks by a woman, with
eight. (AP)
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WASHINGTON, April 6, (Agencies):
For years, cutting carbon emissions to
stave off the worst impacts of climate
change was routinely near the top of the
agenda at talks between the leaders of
the United States and China.
Not anymore.
As President Donald Trump hosts
President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago
resort in Florida this week, the world’s
two largest economies and carbon polluters are taking dramatically divergent
paths on climate policy.
The Chinese government recently
canceled construction of more than 100
new coal-fired power plants and plans
to invest at least $360 billion in green
energy projects by 2020. It is a building
boom expected to create an estimated
13 million jobs. China already leads the
world in total installed solar and wind
capacity.
Trump, who has said global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to hurt the US economy, signed
an executive order last week that aims
to roll back Obama-era policies regulating carbon emissions. He has pledged to
reverse decades of decline in coal mining, which now accounts for fewer than
75,000 US jobs.
“Clean energy is the next, largest
global market,” said Barbara Finamore,
Asia director at the Natural Resources
Defense Council, a US-based environmental group. “The US risks losing
out.”
With Trump threatening to pull out of
the Paris climate accord negotiated by
the Obama administration, Xi is poised
to become the world’s foremost leader
on climate change. Signed by nearly
200 nations, the 2014 agreement calls
for holding global temperature increases
to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit) in hopes of prevent-
Europe’s 1st cave fish found: A German man who goes diving underground for
a hobby has discovered what scientists say is
Europe’s first known cave fish.
Spelunker Joachim Kreiselmaier chanced
upon the fish in August 2015 while exploring
the Danube-Aach cave system in southern
Germany. It resembled stone loaches found
in nearby rivers, but with smaller eyes,
longer whisker-like barbels, larger nostrils
ing devastating droughts, storms and sea
level rise.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January,
Xi called the Paris accord a “hard-won
achievement” and urged signatories to
“stick to it.”
The White House declined to comment Wednesday on whether climate
change will even be mentioned at Mara-Lago. US officials are instead expected to focus on enlisting China’s cooperation on curbing the North Korean
nuclear threat.
While China eclipsed the United
States as the world’s top carbon polluter
more than a decade ago, it is also now
outpacing the US in transitioning to a
cleaner energy portfolio. China is currently generating about 20 percent of
its electricity from renewable sources,
compared to about 13 percent in the US.
China still burns more coal than any
other nation, but its consumption of the
dirtiest fossil fuel fell in 2016 for a third
consecutive year. An analysis by Greenpeace of data from the Chinese National Energy Administration showed
an expected corresponding decrease in
China’s carbon dioxide emissions of 1
percent in 2017, in what would be the
fourth straight year of zero growth or a
decline.
That puts China on track to meet its
2030 target under the Paris accord as
much as one decade early.
“Given the absolute lack of leadership from the Trump administration,
China is seeing a stronger role both in
its self-interest as a country threatened
by the impacts of climate change, and
also as a diplomatic opportunity in the
vacuum left by Trump’s retrograde position,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior
coal campaigner for Greenpeace in Beijing.
and almost no color on its body.
In an article published Monday in the
journal Current Biology, scientists from the
University of Constance who studied the
fish concluded that it is a genetically distinct
species. (AP)
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Icebergs drifts into ship lanes: More
than 400 icebergs have drifted into the North
In this March 15, 2017 photo, a cave fish swims in an aquarium at the University
of Constance, Germany. A German man who goes underground diving for a
hobby has discovered what scientists say is Europe’s first known cave fish. (AP)
In China’s capital, Trump’s public
statements doubting that human activity
is the primary cause of global warming
are greeted with a mixture of bemusement and worry.
Also:
WASHINGTON: A coalition of 17 US
states filed a legal challenge on Wednesday against efforts by President Donald
Trump’s administration to roll back
climate change regulations, deepening
a political rift over his emerging energy
policies.
Led by New York state, the coalition said the administration has a legal
duty to regulate emissions of the gases
scientists believe cause global climate
change.
“The law is clear: the EPA must limit
carbon pollution from power plants,”
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement announcing the challenge.
Trump signed an executive order last
week targeting climate change regulations ushered in by former president
Barack Obama, saying they hinder US
energy production and jobs without
providing meaningful environmental
benefits. The order’s main target was
Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a law that
would require states to slash carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, but
which was never implemented because
it was challenged in court by 26 Republican-led states.
Trump’s order directed the Environmental Protection Agency to review the
regulation to decide whether to “suspend, rescind, or revise it.” Shortly after, EPA filed a legal motion asking the
US Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit to delay ongoing court
proceedings on the regulation to allow
for the review.
Atlantic shipping lanes over the past week in
an unusually large swarm for this early in the
season, forcing vessels to slow to a crawl or
take detours of hundreds of miles.
Experts are attributing it to uncommonly strong counter-clockwise winds
that are drawing the icebergs south, and
perhaps also global warming, which is
accelerating the process by which chunks
of the Greenland ice sheet break off and
float away.
As of Monday, there were about 450
icebergs near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, up from 37 a week earlier, according to
the US Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol
in New London, Connecticut. Those kinds of
numbers are usually not seen until late May
or early June. The average for this time of
year is about 80.
In the waters close to where the Titanic
went down in 1912, the icebergs are forcing
ships to take precautions.
Instead of cutting straight across the
ocean, trans-Atlantic vessels are taking
detours that can add around 400 miles to the
trip. That’s a day and a half of added travel
time for many large cargo ships.
Close to the Newfoundland coast, cargo
ships owned by Oceanex are throttling way
back to 3 or 4 knots as they make their way
to their homeport in St John’s, which can add
up to a day to the trip, said executive chairman, Capt Sid Hynes.
One ship was pulled out of service for
repairs after hitting a chunk of ice, he said.
“It makes everything more expensive,”
Hynes said Wednesday. “You’re burning
more fuel, it’s taking a longer time, and it’s
hard on the equipment.” He called it a “very
unusual year. (AP)