1
U.S.
President Said to Be Planning to Use Executive Authority on Carbon Rule
President Obama’s proposed regulation to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants by up to 20 percent would be the strongest action taken by an American president to tackle climate change.
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3
World
U.S. Alleged to Join in Plot in Venezuela
Caracas charged that the United States ambassador to Colombia was involved in a plot to kill President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, but offered no convincing proof.
4
Automobiles
Tests Show Improvements in Crash-Avoidance Systems
Automakers are improving systems that aim to keep drivers from colliding with vehicles ahead, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
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Business Day
Jimmy Iovine, a Master of Beats, Lends Apple a Skilled Ear
Apple is betting that Mr. Iovine’s four decades in the recording industry, his knack for trend-spotting and his credibility with artists will help rejuvenate its music business.
7
Magazine
Life in the Valley of Death
In Srebrenica, the remains of those killed in the genocide keep turning up, unsettling the reconciliation between Muslims and Serbs.BOSNIA ASKING U.N. FOR PEACE FORCES
By CHUCK SUDETIC,
Published: March 29, 1992
Leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina appealed to the
United Nations today to deploy peacekeeping forces in the republic as
fighting raged for a third day in the town of Bosanski Brod.
"The situation in the republic is seriously
deteriorating," Ejup Ganic, a member of the republic's collective
presidency, wrote in a letter to Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
of the United Nations. "Military observers should urgently come to this
republic."
About 30 people have been killed in fighting between
Serbs and combined forces of Muslim Slavs and Croats in and around
Bosanski Brod, near the border with Croatia, local reports say.
Other Fighting Near Croatia
Fresh fighting was also reported today near the
Adriatic town of Neum, also close to Croatia, involving the Yugoslav
Army and Croatian forces. But the major battlefronts in Croatia were
said to be quiet.
Three members of Bosnia and Herzegovina's presidency
flew by helicopter to Bosanski Brod today to investigate reports that
Croatian and Muslim Slav forces had killed a dozen Serbian civilians in
fighting on Thursday night in the nearby village of Sijekovac.
Sarajevo television said tonight that witnesses who
were in the village today reported seeing dozens of burned houses and
several charred bodies.
Violence in Bosanski Brod began four weeks ago when
Serbian guerrillas, armed by the pro-Serbian Yugoslav Army, attempted to
capture a key bridge over the Sava River leading to Croatian territory.
Sarajevo radio and spokesmen at Bosanski Brod's
Croatian and Muslim Slav crisis center reported that Yugoslav Army jets
had circled over Bosanski Brod early today.
The Yugoslav Army denied the reports of the flights
and emphasized that it had taken no part in the fighting in the town.
But it released a statement tonight saying an army jet fighter had
crashed near the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, a major army stronghold.
The United Nations is preparing to deploy the bulk
of a 14,000-member peacekeeping force in the war-torn regions of Croatia
beginning next week. The peacekeeping operation's headquarters is in
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital, but the deployment plan does
not foresee actual peacekeeping operations inside this republic's
borders.
The Muslim Slavs and Croats, who account for about
60 percent of the population, are pressing for the republic to become
independent of Yugoslavia.
Serbian leaders in Sarajevo today approved a
constitution for a "Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina," which they
say will be a state in a reconstituted Yugoslavia including Serbia,
Montenegro and Serbian-populated parts of Croatia. The republics of
Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina have declared
independence from the old Yugoslavia.
Photo: A scheduled exchange of Croatian and Serbian
prisoners of war failed to take place in Sarvas, Yugoslavia, when the
Croation side insisted on a ratio of nine Croats for one Serb, instead
of a previously agreed six-to-one ratio. Croatian prisoners ducked down
to avoid being photographed. (Associated Press)
8
Sports
Video: Snowboarders’ Downtime Leads to Pranks
Professional snowboarders may pass hundreds of hours waiting for ideal weather. These hours can serve as a catalyst for pranks — and sometimes these pranks go farther than expected.
9
N.Y. / Region
With New Slant on Subway Elevators, Expect Delays
The No. 7 line’s new terminus in Manhattan was supposed to open in 2013, but a diagonal elevator, built in Italy, failed its factory test.
10
Sports
Matthew Saad Muhammad, Boxing Champion, Is Dead
Saad Muhammad was a fighter known for his bruising style who was abandoned as a child and later escaped homelessness.
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U.S.
Detroit Urged to Tear Down 40,000 Buildings
A task force recommended that the bankrupt city spend nearly $2 billion to stem the spread of blight.
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N.Y. / Region
Jury Awards $172 Million in Verdict Against New York City
A girl who suffered brain damage while waiting for an ambulance won a $172 million judgment on Wednesday, one of the largest awards of its kind in cityhistory.
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U.S.
Oklahoma: Abortion Curbs Become Law
Gov. Mary Fallin on Wednesday signed a bill that requires abortion clinics to have a physician with admitting privileges at a nearby hospital present when an abortion is performed.
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The Upshot
With G.D.P., It’s Important to Distinguish Signal From Noise
Quarterly output is a prime example of an economic indicator that is important, yet notoriously subject to a lot of later revision.
"Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming.
Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are
already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them.
Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in
greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy.
Just ask the United States Chamber of Commerce.
O.K., that’s not the message the Chamber of Commerce was trying to deliver in the report it put out Wednesday.
It clearly meant to convey the impression that the E.P.A.’s new rules
would wreak havoc. But if you focus on the report’s content rather than
its rhetoric, you discover that despite the chamber’s best efforts to
spin things — as I’ll explain later, the report almost surely overstates
the real cost of climate protection — the numbers are remarkably small.
Specifically,
the report considers a carbon-reduction program that’s probably
considerably more ambitious than we’re actually going to see, and it
concludes that between now and 2030 the program would cost $50.2 billion
in constant dollars per year. That’s supposed to sound like a big deal.
Instead, if you know anything about the U.S. economy, it sounds like
Dr. Evil intoning “one million dollars.” These days, it’s just not a lot
of money.
Remember, we have a $17 trillion economy right now,
and it’s going to grow over time. So what the Chamber of Commerce is
actually saying is that we can take dramatic steps on climate — steps
that would transform international negotiations, setting the stage for
global action — while reducing our incomes by only one-fifth of 1 percent. That’s cheap!
Alternatively,
consider the chamber’s estimate of costs per household: $200 per year.
Since the average American household has an income of more than $70,000 a
year, and that’s going to rise over time, we’re again looking at costs
that amount to no more than a small fraction of 1 percent.
One
more useful comparison: The Pentagon has warned that global warming and
its consequences pose a significant threat to national security.
(Republicans in the House responded with a legislative amendment that would forbid the military from even thinking about the issue.) Currently, we’re spending $600 billion a year on defense. Is it really extravagant to spend another 8 percent of that budget to reduce a serious threat?
And
all of this is based on anti-environmentalists’ own numbers. The real
costs would almost surely be smaller, for three reasons.
First,
the Chamber of Commerce study assumes that economic growth, and the
associated growth in emissions, will be at its historic norm of 2.5
percent a year. But we should expect slower growth in the future as baby
boomers retire, making emissions targets easier to hit.
Second,
in the chamber’s analysis, the bulk of the reduction in emissions comes
from replacing coal with natural gas. This neglects the dramatic
technological progress taking place in renewables, especially solar power, which should make cutting back on carbon even easier.
Third,
the U.S. economy is still depressed — and in a depressed economy many
of the supposed costs of compliance with energy regulations aren’t costs
at all. In particular, building new, low-emission power plants would
employ both workers and capital that would otherwise be sitting idle,
and would, if anything, give the U.S. economy a boost.You
might ask why the Chamber of Commerce is so fiercely opposed to action
against global warming, if the cost of action is so small. The answer,
of course, is that the chamber is serving special interests, notably the
coal industry — what’s good for America isn’t good for the Koch
brothers, and vice versa — and also catering to the ever more powerful
anti-science sentiments of the Republican Party.
Finally,
let me take on the anti-environmentalists’ last line of defense — the
claim that whatever we do won’t matter, because other countries, China
in particular, will just keep on burning ever more coal. This gets
things exactly wrong. Yes, we need an international agreement to reduce
emissions, including sanctions on countries that don’t sign on. But U.S.
unwillingness to act has been the biggest obstacle to such an
agreement. If we start taking serious steps against global warming, the
stage will be set for Europe and Japan to follow suit, and for concerted
pressure on the rest of the world as well.
Now,
we haven’t yet seen the details of the new climate action proposal, and
a full analysis — both economic and environmental — will have to wait.
We can be reasonably sure, however, that the economic costs of the
proposal will be small, because that’s what the research — even research
paid for by anti-environmentalists, who clearly wanted to find the
opposite — tells us. Saving the planet would be remarkably cheap."
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Business Day
E.C.B. Plots Strategy for Staving Off Deflation
As the bank’s president, Mario Draghi, acknowledged to a group of experts that the euro zone might slide into deflation, good options are scarce.Secular Stagnation in the Euro Area
Most discussion about the possibility of
secular stagnation has focused on US data, partly because most of the
new secular stagnationists are American, partly because the data are
easier to work with. But as Izabella Kaminska and James Mackintosh
point out, the euro area seems closer to Japanification than the US. So
are there structural changes in Europe that arguably will lead to
persistently lower demand unless offset by policy?
Indeed there are. Start with demography: a
falling rate of growth in the working-age population leads, other things
equal, to lower investment as a share of GDP, because there is less
need to equip workers with new factories, office buildings, houses, etc.
And if we look at working-age population for the US, the euro area
(EA), and Japan we see that Europe is now where Japan was around 1998,
when I and other Japan worriers started talking in earnest about
liquidity traps:
Add to this the end of ever-increasing
leverage. In the US we focus on how ever-growing household debt was a
major source of demand before 2008, which won’t come back; in Europe
much the same was going on, but it also makes sense to focus on a
different measure, large capital flows to peripheral countries, which
won’t come back even if the woes of austerity abate. And these flows
were a big part of overall European demand before the crisis:
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Business Day
F.D.A. Approves Heart Device That Transmits Data to Doctors
The device uses an implanted sensor in the peripheral artery to measure blood pressure and heart rate.
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Opinion
Brazil Is Tired of Being Scolded
There is a growing feeling that FIFA and the Olympic committee are taking the parent act a bit too far.
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Business Day
A Revision Shows the Economy Shrank Last Quarter
The economy contracted at an annual rate of 1 percent earlier this year, the first quarterly decline in three years.
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Business Day
May Brings a Loss of Viewership for Cable News Channels
In a typically slow month for television news channels, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all showed declines among the viewers that matter most toJust bad editing.
The news has been fascinating.
The fires and murders have been slow.
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N.Y. / Region
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