spring winds,
toss ancient lawn chairs-
old man reads Neruda’s ‘Residencia en la tierra’
2 Tibetans Set Selves On Fire Outside Lhasa Temple
BEIJING (AP) — Two men engulfed themselves in a burst of flames outside a Buddhist temple popular with tourists and pilgrims in Lhasa, marking the first time a recent wave of self-immolations to protest Chinese rule has reached the tightly guarded Tibetan capital.
One man died and the other was hospitalized after they set themselves on fire Sunday outside the Jokhang Temple, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The report quoted a local Communist Party official as blaming separatist forces, an accusation it often makes against Tibetan exiles who support the Dalai Lama.
Xinhua said the two men were taken away by authorities within two minutes of setting themselves on fire.
Protests have become rare in remote Tibet and Lhasa in particular because of tight police security that has blanketed the area since anti-government riots erupted in Lhasa in 2008.
There have been at least 34 immolations since March of last year to draw attention to China’s restrictions on Buddhism and to call for the return from exile of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Most have taken place in heavily Tibetan areas of China, but only one had occurred in Tibet itself and none in the capital.
Chinese authorities have confirmed some of the self-immolations over the past year but not all.
The twin immolations in the heart of the Tibetan capital are certain to embarrass the region’s communist leadership, who have pledged to prioritize social stability and ethnic unity. That mandate is especially pressing this year as China prepares for a once-a-decade leadership transition in the fall and doesn’t want the occasion undermined.
The immolations are also likely to prompt tough, new restrictions on Tibetan social gatherings and religious activities in Lhasa, as they have elsewhere
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‘Stumbling Stones’ Evoke Strong Emotions
The names of Jeffrey Katz’s family members are depicted on “stumbling stones” in Lembeck, Germany. His relatives owned a home on the property near the stones, before they were evicted in 1942.
(NPR’s Eric Westervelt reported from Germany on Morning Edition about the effort to remember Holocaust victims by engraving their names on bricks, or “stumbling stones,” placed on sidewalks throughout Germany. Some of those stones bear the names of Jeffrey Katz‘s relatives. Jeffrey, NPR’s deputy managing editor for digital news, went to see those stones last year in Lembeck, Germany.)
My roots are so deeply engrained in Germany that I have family trees that stretch back more than 300 years on my mother’s side and almost as far on my father’s side. None of it helped during the Holocaust — they were German Jews. The lucky few left just in time or escaped; most perished.
One of the few remaining hallmarks of their lives are theStolperstein, or “stumbling stones,” made by artist Guenther Demnig.
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BANNED IN IDAHO, ‘FIVE WIVES VODKA’
Bottles of Ogden’s Own Distillery Five Wives Vodka at a state liquor store in Salt Lake City.
They’re “five wives who just like to get together and have a cocktail.”
They’re not meant to be a direct reference to polygamy and those kittens they’re holding in their laps are … just part of a photograph that’s reflective of the 1890s to early 1900s.
For all anyone knows, they might be lesbians.
Those are some of the things that Five Wives Vodka director of marketing Steve Conlin had to say this afternoon to All Things Considered co-host Robert Siegel about the news that the company’s product has been banned in Idaho because its label and its name might offend Mormons and women.
Ironically, Five Wives Vodka is made — and sold — in Utah, home to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
As The Salt Lake Tribune reported this week, “Idaho regulators have decided not to carry an Ogden distillery’s Five Wives Vodka because of its label, while Utah booze cops have deemed acceptable the bottle’s depiction of 19th century women in petticoats holding kittens near their lady parts.”
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How About A Big-Box House? Much too Upscale for Tim Lane’s taste….
The architecture firm HyBrid, which specializes in designing buildings from recycled shipping containers, created this solar-powered house for Sunset Magazine.
When it comes to architecture, sustainability and affordability can mean many things: Salvaged wood becomes new flooring, old newspapers are shredded into insulation.
But a few architects are taking green building one step further: creating entire homes and businesses out of discarded shipping containers — an approach some have dubbed “cargotecture.”
Approximately a quarter-million shipping containers pass through Oregon’s Port of Portland each year. These are big boxes — 40 feet long and weighing thousands of pounds.
“As you look across the container terminal here, they look like giant, multicolored Legos stacked up out there,” says port spokesman Josh Thomas. Each one is full of cargo moving in or out of the Portland region.
Shipping containers are ubiquitous on trucks, trains and ships today; about 20 million pass through American ports each year. But as critical as they are to modern life, the containers date back fewer than 60 years.
“We started to see containerization,” the freight shipping system based on the boxy containers, in the 1950s, Thomas says. “And since then, increasingly, just about anything that can be shipped inside of a container is.”
But traveling so many miles takes its toll, and eventually the containers are retired. Some are melted down, and some sit around old lots.
And some become buildings — like taquerias. Or “A Primary Dwelling” like casa de Tim’s place below……
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Doc Watson Dies at 89
Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson in the 1960s.
A mountain-born treasure of American folk music, Doc Watson, died Tuesday in North Carolina at age 89.
His manager said in a statement that Watson died at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, after abdominal surgery last week.
Watson was born in Deep Gap, N.C., in the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a three-room house he shared with eight brothers and sisters. He revolutionized not just how people play guitar but the way people around the world think about mountain music.
Watson went blind when he was only about a year old, from an untreated eye infection. He told WHYY’s Fresh Air that he was only 11 when his father made him a banjo using the skin of an old dead cat.
“He brought it to me and put it in my hands, and said, ‘Son, I want you to learn to play this thing real well. One of these days we’ll get you a better one,’ he said. ‘Might help you get through the world,’ ” Watson recalled.
His parents made sure young Arthel Lane Watson had the tools he needed to face life without sight or money. His father traded a week’s worth of pay at the sawmill for a hand-cranked phonograph that came with 50 records, including country, blues and jazz. Watson incorporated those sounds into the Appalachian music surrounding him.
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Peru Forced to Confront Deep Scars of Civil War
IMA, Peru — During a scorched earth military campaign that threatened to topple the government here, the Maoist guerrilla group known as the Shining Path terrorized Peru with assassinations, bombings, beheadings and massacres. So Peruvians were rattled last year when a group of former guerrillas began collecting signatures to create a political party to participate in the democratic process they had once sought to destroy.
Among their goals was an amnesty for crimes committed during the war, which lasted from the early 1980s to 2000; it would allow the release of jailed Shining Path leaders, including the group’s reviled founder, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso.
More than a decade after the struggle largely ceased, the rebels’ attempt to move into politics has stirred emotions that are still raw and reopened a searing national debate on what the war meant and how to move on.
“We are at this moment in a fight over what to remember and how to remember,” said José Pablo Baraybar, executive director of the Peruvian Team for Forensic Anthropology, which has exhumed bodies from several mass graves from the war years.
What alarmed many Peruvians about the Shining Path’s effort to reinvent itself was that many of the hundreds of thousands of signatures the former guerrillas collected came from college students too young to recall the turmoil of the war. Driving home the point, a television station broadcast interviews with young people who were unable to identify a photograph of Mr. Guzmán, whose bearded face was once as recognizable as that of the president.
“It showed that many young people don’t know anything about what happened,” said Fernando Carvallo, national director of the Place of Memory, a three-story museum being built in Lima to commemorate the conflict. In a sign of how deep the wounds remain, even a project intended to be as evenhanded as this one was initially opposed by the previous president, Alan García, and has depended on foreign financing, mainly from Germany and the European Union.
In January, election officials rejected the effort to create a new Shining Path-linked party, ruling that the group adhered to anti-democratic principles and had failed to meet some technical requirements of the election law.
Peru has seen impressive, although uneven, economic growth in recent years, but many of the inequities that helped set off the guerrilla conflict remain, including crushing poverty in urban slums and villages and marginalization of indigenous populations.
At least one faction of the Shining Path remains active in a remote jungle in central Peru, where its activities are focused on drug trafficking. It recently shot down a military helicopter and killed several soldiers, giving Peruvians an uneasy feeling that the awful past was not so distant.
The Beats Hit the Road Again on Screen
From left, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund in “On the Road.”
FOR filmmakers trying to capture the spirit of the Beats, there has always been the pressure — stated or not — of their work living up to the legends. Survivors of the movement, and the scholars who chronicled their every move, are certain to cast an unforgiving eye.
It has been no different for Walter Salles, the first director to finally wrestle Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to the big screen more than five decades after its publication caused a literary sensation and launched a thousand road trips, not to mention innumerable road movies.
Mr. Salles’s answer was to endear himself to virtually every living Beat poet, artist and philosopher with a stake in the book’s legacy while literally retracing Kerouac’s crisscrossing of the country with a Super 8 camera. In other words, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Among the Kerouac contemporaries Mr. Salles interviewed were the poets Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka, as well as the Kerouac biographers Gerald Nicosia and Barry Gifford, who served as consultants on the film. The process consumed five of the eight years that the director has been toiling on the project, which had its premiere this month at the Cannes Film Festival and is expected to reach theaters in the fall.
In Rarefied Sport, a View of the Romneys’ World
A TRUSTED ASSOCIATE Jan Ebeling with Mitt and Ann Romney. Mr. Ebeling, a top-ranked dressage rider, tutors Mrs. Romney.
As Ann Romney immersed herself in the elite world of riding over the last dozen years, she relied on Jan Ebeling as a trusted tutor and horse scout. In her, he found a deep-pocketed patron.
A taskmaster, Mr. Ebeling pushed Mrs. Romney to excel in high-level amateur shows. He escorted her on horse-buying expeditions to Europe. She shares ownership of the Oldenburg mare he dreams of riding in the Olympic Games this summer. Mrs. Romney and her husband, Mitt, even floated a loan — $250,000 to $500,000, according to financial records — to Mr. Ebeling and his wife for the horse farm they run in California, where the Romneys use a Mediterranean-style guesthouse as a getaway.
The relationship has given the Romneys “the ability to enjoy the horses in a very safe and private haven, along with enjoying the people who provide them the service,” said Robert Dover, who knows the Romneys and Mr. Ebeling and his wife, Amy. “That friendship has stood the test of time.” It also offers a glimpse into the Romneys’ way of life, which they have generally shielded from view.
Protective of their privacy, they may also have been wary of the kind of fallout that came after Mr. Romney’s mention of the “couple of Cadillacs” his wife owned and the disclosure of plans for a car elevator in the family’s $9 million beach house in California, which prompted criticism that Mr. Romney was out of touch with average Americans.
Cult Film Maker, John Waters Tries Some Desperate Living on a Cross-Country Hitchhiking Odysse
John Waters traveling with members of the band Here We Go Magic as he hitchhiked from Baltimore to San Francisco.
An advisory to readers who may be driving on this Memorial Day weekend: If, as you travel the nation’s highways, you spot a hitchhiker with a wiry build, a pencil mustache and a mischievous look in his eyes, you may not wish to pick up this person. Unless, of course, you are certain it is the cult filmmaker John Waters, thumbing his way across the country in search of material for a new book.
This is not as improbable as it might sound. In recent days, an indie rock band from Brooklyn, a married couple from Illinois and a young lawmaker from Maryland have all reported unexpected road encounters with Mr. Waters, the 66-year-old writer and director of such willfully trashy movies as “Desperate Living,” “Polyester” and “Hairspray.”
On a trip that Mr. Waters said took him eight days and about 15 hitchhiked rides to get him from one end of the country to the other, he has accumulated numerous anecdotes for a book he has tentatively titled “Carsick” and which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
But more crucially, he said this journey has taught him that it can sometimes be thrilling to not know where life is taking you.
‘Route 66′: A Road Story On TV, In The Early 60′s
George Maharis (left) played Buz Murdock alongside Martin Milner as Tod Stiles in Route 66, two men driving across America in search of home.
When you’ve seen a lot of movies where Toronto plays the part of New York, you come to appreciate location shooting. And on today’s All Things Considered, you’ll hear from the star of one of television’s more ambitious series when it comes to location shooting: Route 66, which followed two guys around the country in a cool Corvette as they looked for a place to settle.
The show, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, has just been released in its entirety as a DVD box set, which presents the entire run on 24 discs. George Maharis, who starred on Route 66 with Martin Milner, talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about all that travel.
“We never saw the schedule,” Maharis says. “It was week-to-week. We didn’t know where we were going and sometimes we wouldn’t know what the script was until two days before shooting.” In fact, sometimes, it might take a little longer than that to actually get the scripts, since they were sometimes in a city where they wanted to shoot more than one episode, but not all the scripts were done yet. “I remember we were in Cleveland doing the one with Nehemiah Persoff about the Russian Hill, and we were standing on the bridge, and we had no pages — we didn’t know where to go yet. Luckily, they had to raise and lower the bridge, and in the meantime, the plane landed in Cleveland, and a car took the script and brought it to us, because we didn’t know what clothes we were supposed to be in.”
New and Frozen Frontier Awaits Offshore Oil Drilling
Edward Itta, the former mayor of North Slope Borough and an Inupiat Eskimo, campaigned as a whaler opposed to offshore drilling.
WASHINGTON — Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2010, the leaders of the commission President Obama had appointed to investigate the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sat down in the Oval Office to brief him.
After listening to their findings about the BP accident and the safety of deepwater drilling, the president abruptly changed the subject.
“Where are you coming out on the offshore Arctic?” he asked.
William K. Reilly, a former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and a commission co-chairman, was startled, as was Carol M. Browner, the president’s top adviser at the time on energy and climate change. Although a proposal by Shell to drill in the Arctic had been a source of dissension, it was not a major focus of the panel’s work.
“It’s not deep water, right?” the president said, noting that Shell’s proposal involved low-pressure wells in 150 feet of water, nothing like BP’s 5,000-foot high-pressure well that blew out in the gulf.
“What that told me,” Mr. Reilly later recounted, “was that the president had already gotten deeply into this issue and was prepared to go forward.”
The president’s preoccupation with the Arctic proposal, even as the nation was still reeling from the BP spill, was the first hint that Shell’s audacious plan to drill in waters previously considered untouchable had gone from improbable to inevitable.
Barring a successful last-minute legal challenge by environmental groups, Shell will begin drilling test wells off the coast of northern Alaska in July, opening a new frontier in domestic oil exploration and accelerating a global rush to tap the untold resources beneath the frozen ocean.
It is a moment of major promise and considerable danger.
Industry experts and national security officials view the Alaskan Arctic as the last great domestic oil prospect, one that over time could bring the country a giant step closer to cutting its dependence on foreign oil.
But many Alaska Natives and environmental advocates say drilling threatens wildlife and pristine shorelines, and perpetuates the nation’s reliance on dirty fossil fuels.
In blessing Shell’s move into the Arctic, Mr. Obama continues his efforts to balance business and environmental interests, seemingly project by project. He pleased environmentalists by delaying the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and by adopting tough air standards for power plants, yet he has also delighted business concerns by rejecting an ozone standard deemed too costly to the economy.
Old Ways Disappearing In The New Mongolia
Mongolia, the land of Genghis Khan and nomadic herders, is in the midst of a remarkable transition. Rich in coal, gold and copper, this country of fewer than 3 million people in Central Asia is riding a mineral boom that is expected to more than double its GDP within a decade. The rapid changes simultaneously excite and unnerve many Mongolians, who hope mining can help pull many out of poverty, but worry it will ravage the environment and further erode the nation’s distinctive, nomadic identity.
Last of four parts
Mongolia is a country of tremendous contrasts. Consider this: Two out of every five Mongolians make their living herding goats, sheep and camels.
But last year — according to World Bank estimates — Mongolia’s economy grew faster than any other on the planet, driven by a mining boom.
The Central Asian nation seems to be racing from a nomadic culture to an industrial one practically overnight. To appreciate how this transition — and its inevitable tensions — play out in the lives of ordinary Mongolians, spend a few hours with Bat-Erdene Badam and his family.
Bat-Erdene, 47, is a lifelong herder who lives in a ger, or a yurt, in the middle of the Gobi. He spends each spring combing cashmere from his goats. On a recent day, a goat lies stretched out on its side in a ger, its horns tethered to the ground. A fellow herder rakes off tufts of white cashmere with what looks like a gardening tool as the goat yelps in fear.
Bat-Erdene sells the cashmere for about $20 a pound. Combings from his 300 goats should bring in more than $6,000 this year.
That’s decent money in the middle of the Gobi, a mix of moonscape, mountain and increasingly arid grassland in southern Mongolia. But Bat-Erdene’s three children have no interest in the family business.
“Young people stopped herding animals,” says Bat-Erdene, leaning against the wooden gate of a corral filled with goats. “There are lots of employment opportunities for them in the mining business. Therefore, I could probably say that the generation of herders is ending with me.” …………………READ OR LISTEN TO THE STORY……………..
Mongolia’s Dilemma: Who Gets The Water?
Mongolia, the land of Genghis Khan and nomadic herders, is in the midst of a remarkable transition. Rich in coal, gold and copper, this country of fewer than 3 million people in Central Asia is riding a mineral boom that is expected to more than double its GDP within a decade. The rapid changes simultaneously excite and unnerve many Mongolians, who hope mining can help pull many out of poverty, but worry it will ravage the environment and further erode the nation’s distinctive, nomadic identity.
Second of four parts
The Central Asian nation of Mongolia has untold riches in copper, coal and gold, which could help many of its nearly 3 million people — more than one-third of whom live in poverty.
But mining is also reshaping Mongolia’s landscape and nomadic culture. Camel and goat herders worry that new mega-mines will siphon off precious water in an area that’s already suffering from the effects of climate change.
Mijiddorj Ayur, whose livestock graze near the Oyu Tolgoi mine, tends camels in a stretch of Mongolia’s South Gobi province that’s a moonscape of sand and gravel. He relies on the animals for meat, wool and milk, and they rely on hand-pumped well water to survive.
“When we come to the well, we can see the level of the well water is 8 inches lower than it used to be,” says Mijiddorj, 76, who wears a golden, double-breasted robe called a deel and a brimmed felt hat.
Mijiddorj — Mongolians typically go by one name — says the well water has dropped in the last several years because of lower rainfall, while the grasslands are shrinking because of rising temperatures from climate change.
Now, he sees another potential threat: Oyu Tolgoi, a giant mine that will need huge amounts of water to process copper ore. The company has already drilled test wells near where Mijiddorj’s camels drink.
“My greatest fear is we won’t have water,” he says. “I don’t care about the gold or the copper, I’m just afraid there won’t be water.”
‘Road To Freedom’: Moral Debate For Free Enterprise
Analysts expect this fall’s election to turn on the economy. President of the American Enterprise Institute Arthur C. Brooks wants to deepen the debate on the economy by discussing which economic policies are morally right. Brooks talks to Steve Inskeep about his book, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise.
May solar eclipse
filtered light-
moon’s portrait on shoji screen
acid dreams
distort-
old plaster wall
The ‘Ring Of Fire’: A Spectacular Solar Eclipse on Sunday………..
An annular solar eclipse is seen over Myanmar on Jan. 15, 2010 as the moon crossed the sun’s path, blocking everything but a narrow, blazing rim of light.
You lucky West Coast folks! A stunning solar eclipse will occur late Sunday afternoon, and people in the western U.S. will get the best views. Live on the East Coast? It’s already going to be dark, so the only way we’ll get to experience this is via webcam.
The event starts about 5:30 PM Pacific time and the maximum effect will occur about 6:30 PM, according to NASA.
This is an annular solar eclipse, not the total blackout we imagine when the moon passes in front of the sun. NASA says as the moon travels, there will be an ‘annulus of sunlight’ that peeps all around the moon’s shape – that’s the ring of fire effect. The sun, hidden behind the moon, will look like it’s a big black hole.
This bears repeating: during the eclipse, don’t look at the sun. And don’t use your home telescope to peer directly at the eclipse; you should have special solar filters fitted for it. Here’s NASA webpage on eye safety during eclipses.
In the U.S., the eclipse’s shadow will travel from the Pacific Coast in Oregon and cut toward the southeast. The shadow will move over northern California, swing directly over Reno, Nevada, cover quite a bit of Utah, edge northern Arizona and slide directly over most of New Mexico. The Texas panhandle will see it, too. (Tokyo will also have a great view.) NASA says the ring effect may last up to four and a half minutes.
If you can’t bear to miss it, check out Panasonic’s website. The Japanese electronics company is sending a video team up Mt. Fuji to capture the event, notes AFP. There’s a cool map that will mark the team’s ascent to the top and a link to the eclipse video stream. If you’d rather see the eclipse in person, check out Reno. The Las Vegas Sun reports the city’s hotels are offering discounts for the event and the local planetarium is staging a festival.
How To Watch The Solar Eclipse
‘Never Fall Down’: Surviving The Killing Fields
Prize-winning author Patricia McCormick is known for tackling challenging — even harrowing — themes in her young adult novels. Her book Sold, a National Book Award finalist, took on child trafficking. In her new book, Never Fall Down, she describes the atrocities of the Cambodian genocide, drawing upon the experiences of Arn Chorn-Pond, a real-life survivor, who joined her and NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss the novel and the lingering impact of his ordeal.
Interview Highlights
On meeting Arn
Patricia McCormick: “Arn was introduced to me by a neighbor in my apartment building in New York City. I could see that Arn had a lot of charisma and a fire to tell his story. The idea of creating a book, which is a lasting record of that story, was something I felt that Arn needed to get that story out more widely.”
On telling the story as a young adult novel
Patricia McCormick: “I think young adults get a bad rap for being self-absorbed and self-centered. My experience going around the United States and speaking in schools is that teenagers here are very interested in the fate of their peers around the world. They are deeply compassionate. I think it allows them to see that their lives are endurable, and it gives them inspiration and courage when they see kids like themselves under extraordinarily circumstances surviving.”
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The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret–An inside look at how killing by remote control has changed the way we fight.
An MQ-1 Predator drone goes through post-flight maintenance in Iraq.
One day in late November, an unmanned aerial vehicle lifted off from Shindand Air Base in western Afghanistan, heading 75 miles toward the border with Iran. The drone’s mission: to spy on Tehran’s nuclear program, as well as any insurgent activities the Iranians might be supporting in Afghanistan. With an estimated price tag of $6 million, the drone was the product of more than 15 years of research and development, starting with a shadowy project called DarkStar overseen by Lockheed Martin. The first test flight for DarkStar took place in 1996, but after a crash and other mishaps, Lockheed announced that the program had been canceled. According to military experts, that was just a convenient excuse for “going dark,” meaning that DarkStar’s further development would take place under a veil of secrecy.
The drone that was headed toward Iran, the RQ-170 Sentinel, looks like a miniature version of the famous stealth fighter, the F-117 Nighthawk: sleek and sand-colored and vaguely ominous, with a single domed eye in place of a cockpit. With a wingspan of 65 feet, it has the ability to fly undetected by radar. Rather than blurting out its location with a constant stream of radio signals – the electronic equivalent of a trail of jet exhaust – it communicates intermittently with its home base, making it virtually impossible to detect. Once it reached its destination, 140 miles into Iranian airspace, it could hover silently in a wide radius for hours, at an altitude of up to 50,000 feet, providing an uninterrupted flow of detailed reconnaissance photos – a feat that no human pilot would be capable of pulling off.
Not long after takeoff – a maneuver handled by human drone operators in Afghanistan – the RQ-170 switched into a semiautonomous mode, following a preprogrammed route under the guidance of drone pilots sitting at computer screens some 7,500 miles away, at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. But before the mission could be completed, something went wrong. One of the drone’s three data streams failed, and began sending inaccurate information back to the base. Then the signal vanished, and Creech lost all contact with the drone.
Today, even after a 10-week investigation by U.S. officials, it’s unclear exactly what happened. Had the Iranians, as they would later claim, hacked the drone and taken it down? Did the Chinese help them? If so, had they pulled off a sophisticated attack – breaking open the drone’s encrypted brain and remotely piloting it to the ground – or a cruder assault that jammed the drone’s signal, causing it to crash? Or did the drone operators back at Creech simply make a mistake, sparking a glitch that triggered the aircraft to land? “After a technical fuck-up, people panic and start trying to fix it, doing things they shouldn’t have done,” says Ty Rogoway, a drone expert who runs an industry website called Aviation Intel. “It was fishy from Day One.”
What we do know is that the government lied about who was responsible for the drone. Shortly after the crash on November 29th, the U.S.-led military command in Kabul put out a press release saying it had lost an “unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan.” But the drone wasn’t under the command of the military – it was operated by the CIA, as the spy agency itself was later forced to admit.
Ten days after the crash, the missing drone turned up in a large gymnasium in Tehran. The Iranian military displayed the captured aircraft as a trophy; an American flag hung beneath the drone, its stars replaced with skulls. The drone looked nearly unscathed, as if it had landed on a runway. The Iranians declared that such surveillance flights represented an “act of war,” and threatened to retaliate by attacking U.S. military bases. President Obama demanded that Iran return the drone, but the damage was done. “It was like when someone from Apple left a prototype of the next iPhone at a bar,” says Peter Singer, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institute and the author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. “It was a propaganda win for Iran.”
The incident also underscored the increasingly central role that drones now play in American foreign policy. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.
The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit. “It’s democratized information on the battlefield,” says Daniel Goure, a national security expert who served in the Defense Department during both Bush administrations. “It’s like a reconnaissance version of Twitter.” Drones have also radically altered the CIA, turning a civilian intelligence-gathering agency into a full-fledged paramilitary operation – one that routinely racks up nearly as many scalps as any branch of the military.
But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.
“Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,” says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. “What I don’t think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we’re trying to attack it?’ A great deal about the drone strikes is still shrouded in secrecy. It’s very difficult to evaluate from the outside how serious of a threat the targeted people pose.”
The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the U.S. military rigged a kite with a camera, producing the first aerial reconnaissance photos. When airplanes were introduced to warfare in the First World War, they charted the same pattern later followed by drones – technology deployed first as a means of surveillance, then as a means to kill the enemy.
During World War II, Nazi scientists experimented with radio-controlled missiles for their bombardment of England – creating, in essence, the first kamikaze drones. But it wasn’t until the end of the 1950s, when America and Russia were competing to conquer space, that scientists figured out how to fly things without a human onboard: launching satellites, for instance, or remotely controlling the path of rockets and missiles. There were also significant technological shifts that began to make drones feasible. “We were building smaller engines and guidance systems, and we were upgrading our communication and computing abilities,” says Goure
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Fracking’s Methane Trail: A Detective Story
A natural gas drilling rig’s lights shimmer in the evening light near Silt, Colo.
There are a lot of cheerleaders for the nation’s natural gas boom — in part because they believe it’s a lot cleaner than dirty coal. It’s pretty well-known that power plants that burn coal pump out far more greenhouse gases than power plants that run on natural gas.
But there’s a hitch: We don’t really know how much air pollution is created when companies drill for natural gas.
‘Not So Many Measurements’
Well heads, storage tanks and pipelines all leak methane in sprawling gas fields.
“We need to know a lot about methane itself, which is natural gas, if we’re worried about climate change,” says energy consultant Sue Tierney, “so that we don’t automatically think that gas is so much cleaner than coal.”
Science And The Fracking Boom: Missing Answers
Explore key components of the natural gas production process — and the questions scientists are asking.
Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It’s very effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
“Fifty years from now, are we really going to be wondering if we really screwed up because we went on this big gas boom? You really wouldn’t want to be messing that up,” Tierney says.
She says that’s why it’s so important to study air pollution from natural gas production now.
Tierney was on an Energy Department advisory panel that recommended that gas companies start measuring and reporting their air emissions.
The way it is now, the government doesn’t really know how much methane comes from gas production.
“What the official estimates are based on generally are not so many measurements, but rather estimates,” says Greg Frost, an air pollution expert for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They really are based on maybe a measurement here or there, but then they’re largely based on extrapolation.”
To really find out how much methane is being leaked, many scientists say you need to take lots of direct measurements: How much methane is coming off a well, or a pipeline, or a whole gas field?
Finding The Methane Source
Tiny Hand Over Hand
Ashima Shiraishi at Hueco Tanks in Texas on a climb known as Greasy Kids Stuff. In March, Shiraishi won the youth bouldering national championship.
HUECO TANKS STATE PARK AND HISTORIC SITE, Tex. — With a concentrated squint, Ashima Shiraishi silently sized up her first rock of the day, a menacing slab of jagged beige boulder 20 feet high, scuffed by white chalk left behind from bigger, older, more experienced climbers.
A black crash pad as thick as a mattress was placed on the ground, and without a rope or harness for protection, Ashima shrugged off her purple jacket, hoisted herself onto the boulder and began to scramble up, her calf muscles bulging gently as she grabbed one nearly invisible ledge of rock after another. With a final stretch, she reached the top, her glossy black ponytail disappearing first, then one limb at a time, until she was out of sight.
A tiny voice floated over the top of the boulder. “How do you get down?” she said.
Ashima had just begun a two-week climbing expedition this spring at Hueco Tanks, a state park that is a mecca for bouldering enthusiasts, 860 acres of rock masses surrounded by endless desert and sky 30 miles northeast of El Paso.
Three days after she arrived, she stunned the bouldering world by climbing Crown of Aragorn, an exceedingly difficult route that requires climbers to contort their bodies and hang practically upside down by their fingers as they navigate a rock that juts out from the ground at a 45-degree angle.
On the scale of V0 to V16 that governs bouldering, Crown of Aragorn is a V13, a level that only a few female climbers had reached.
None were 10 years old, as she was.
Ashima, a petite girl with pale skin, a toothy smile and a thick fringe of bangs cut in a perfect line across her forehead, is not only the best climber her age in the United States, or maybe anywhere, but her accomplishments have already placed her among the elite in the sport.
In 2008, when she was only 7, she began sending problems — bouldering lingo for ascending routes — that some adult climbers could not handle.
On a trip to Hueco in 2010, she climbed a V10 called Power of Silence. The next year, she ascended a V11/12 called Chablanke.
At the American Bouldering Series Youth National Championship in Colorado Springs in March, she easily came in first place, all 4 feet 5 inches and 63 pounds of her.
Before finishing fifth grade, Ashima, who recently turned 11, is redefining what physical tools are required to be an elite climber and showing how a child can hold her own against professional climbers who are adults.
This summer, she will accompany a group of American climbers for an expedition in South Africa, where she will be the only child climber in the bunch.
Jerry Roberts
