Only Germans Think They Are Helping to Fix Global Warming - TIME

http://time.com/3028723/germany-climate-change-coal-poll/

• Denver Nicks @DenverNicks
 

July 24, 2014

    

Wind turbines stand behind a solar power park on October 30, 2013 near Werder, Germany.Sean Gallup—Getty Images

Germans have a pretty high opinion of themselves when it comes to environmental stewardship, according to a recent TIME poll, but their pride might be a little premature.

From among six large countries surveyed in a recent TIME poll, only Germany sees itself as more a part of the solution to global warming (60%) than part of the problem (40%). Only in Germany did the majority of poll respondents report that their country has a “mostly” or “somewhat positive” role in combating global warming.

The TIME poll surveyed 3,505 online respondents between May 10 and May 22 from the Germany, the United States, Brazil, Turkey, India and South Korea, with an equal number of respondents in each country. The margin of error in the survey is 1.8%.

Despite their environmentalist pride, Germans are not optimistic about the ability of the world as a whole to change its polluting ways—just 19% of Germans think the planet can reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, compared to 37% of respondents overall.

The Germans’ pride likely stems from Energiewende, or “energy transition,” Germany’s closely-followed effort to ramp up energy production from renewable sources. The country has indeed significantly increased solar and wind power, and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy in April found Germany to be the most energy-efficient major economy on earth. Germany hit a new record around noon on a day in May this year, producing 74% of its electricity needs from renewable sources.

The problem is that, while solar power plants may be super-effective power producers at noon on a sunny day, without scalable energy-storage technologies they aren’t so effective producing power for other times—when it’s dark, for example. Because Energiewende has been accompanied by a rapid move away from nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster Germany has had to make up its energy deficit by increasing its reliance on coal for the first time in years. German CO2 emissions have actually been rising over past three years.

The country is continuing to perfect and expand its renewable energy portfolio and may one day succeed in cutting back again on its coal habit. For the time being though German perceptions aren’t quite in line with the reality.

A Small World Concept - in Science of Networking

A Small World

The Small World Concept is derived from the notion that in this vast and complicated world there are bound to be some common threads that link people and things together through some underlying connections which may not be obvious at first glance. These subtle links will reveal themselves if we observe the system from the right perspectives and the Science of Networks will provide us with the tools to carry out such observations and analysis.
In 1967, a US social psychologist called Stanley Milgram conducted a strange experiment. He sent a number of letters to various unrelated persons in the Mid- West . He explained in his letters that each letter was, in fact, intended for one of his sharebroker friends who lived in the Boston area whose address he had mislaid. The recipients of his letters were asked to try their best to assist him in forwarding the letter to this friend of his with just the details of his friend's name and profession. As if by divine intervention, most of his letters reached the hands of his sharebroker friend in Boston in something like six steps. This was the birth of the now famous phrase - “ Six Degrees of Separation “ after which a movie was made. As unlikely as it may sound, it is claimed that all people on earth are connected to every other person only by a personal link of no more than six people. This is the origin of the Small World Concept. We are actually more closely connected than we would at first realize.
To understand this idea better, we must first know some basic facts about networks in general. There are three main kinds of networks for expressing the relationships between different variables. The first kind is a random network, the second one is the fragmented network and the third is the small world network. The first kind, as lts name implies, does not have any connections or feed-back loops among its constituent parts while the second kind contains connections among each local module but not as a whole. The third kind is the most interesting and useful one. Such a configuration means that there are shortcuts in the access routes between different parts of the small world network that can be exploited to increase the effeciency in communications among these divided regions of the network. These are the subtle connections, so to speak.

It is easy to visualize how the small world effect can come about in just a few examples. Let us look at some of these in turn. Suppose you are an accountant and your circle of friends are mostly accountants. Then, suppose your wife is a doctor and most of her circle of friends are in the medical profession. Normally, accountants and doctors have no frequent and necessary contact with one another but because of the relationship between you and your wife these two seemingly separate groups of people are subtly linked and may very well develop social and professional contact through you and your wife. Due to the multiple capacities each person must necessarily assume, each person's social and professional networks of friends may cover vast and complicated groups of seemingly unconnected people. If you add the blood relationships and in-law relationships of each person to his or her lists of possible groups of people they will interact, you can easily build up an extensive and colourful social network for each person. You may not realize the potential connections but they are there and can be very useful for you when you need them. For social networks, the significance of understanding such connections will be advantageous in terms of potentials in friendships, business development, personal assistance, job opportunities and exchange of important information when you need it.

 However, if the small world effect is applied to other phenomena such as epidemics, its proper understanding can save precious lives.The most vital and rewarding characteristic of the small world effect that scientists have discovered is that subtle or informal connections may be even more important and decisive in the functioning of any particular network in which the effect is present. The following example will illustrate this point. The formal communication network in a big corporation is, of course, the local area network of computers but before any policy is finalized and approved by the management it has to be discussed. Therefore, any hints of a forthcoming administrative policy will not come from the formal information system. 

In fact, management scientists have conclusively discovered that the most sensitive information system for capturing intelligence on upcoming company policy decisions exists in the informal circle of the secretaries of the various department heads during their coffee break gossips. This finding is the absolute truth and not a joke ! The chatting and gossiping of a group of secretaries is actually the medium for the propagation of the small world effect in any big corporation. The subtle link in the present example shows how the various parts of a big corporation can be connected by an informal sub-system and that remarkable shortcuts can be found in the corporate network's information system outside the mainframe computer. This, once again, is the same lesson taught us by the Science of Networks as in other theories to be meticulous in our observations and not simply following our instinct of paying attention only to the conspicuous facts. In many cases, it is the inconspicuous details that make the vital difference. 

Think Your Flight Delays Are Bad? Try China, Where the Military Hogs Most of the Skies - TIME

http://time.com/3022331/china-flight-delays-aviation-shanghai/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Hannah Beech @hkbeech
 

July 23, 2014

    

Air China aircraft stand parked at Shanghai Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China, on Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013.Bloomberg—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Even in this era of jam-packed commercial air travel, the armed forces still control most of China’s airspace

Last week, I flew in and out of Shanghai over two days. Both flights idled on the tarmac for more than one hour. I felt rather lucky.

Airport delays are such a constant in China that a mere one-hour wait is practically a gift from the aviation gods. International flight monitors put Chinese cities at the bottom of a list of on-time takeoffs at major airports worldwide. On July 21, nearly 200 flights leaving from Shanghai’s two airports, Pudong and Hongqiao, were cancelled. Around 120 more planes were delayed from takeoff by two or more hours.

The same day, a notice attributed by state media to the Civil Aviation Administration of China warned that a dozen airports in eastern Chinese metropolises would suffer even more serious delays through August 15. The reason? An unnamed “other user” would be hogging the skies. That aerial monopolist is thought to be the Chinese military, which even in this era of jam-packed commercial air travel still controls most of China’s airspace. On July 23, the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, tweeted a picture of dejected looking passengers camped out on the floor of the airport in Dalian, a port city in northeastern China. The cause, according to the paper, was mass cancellations stemming from “planned military activity.”

On Monday, Jiao Xuening, a resident from the southern city of Shenzhen, described on his Chinese social-media account how he had been stranded at a Shanghai airport for almost six hours. “At first I was disgruntled,” he wrote. But then he listened to a stream of flight cancellations over the loudspeaker. “I was told my flight was merely four hours delayed and was not cancelled, so I became happy again.”

On July 22, the Shanghai Daily, the state-controlled newspaper in China’s most populous city noted that Pudong airport’s outbound on-time rate had nosedived to 26% the day before. “Shanghai’s air traffic control authority has refused to explain” the Shanghai Dailycomplained of the delays. “With the authority remaining tight-lipped about the reasons behind this, speculation has been rife on the Internet.”

Such conjecture, though, can be dangerous. Earlier this month, some people had speculated online that a dragnet around a “high-ranking official” had perhaps prompted the grounding of planes in Shanghai. The Chinese authorities didn’t take kindly to such gossip; nearly 40 “rumor-mongers” were detained or “held” for wondering online about the flight cancellations, according to the Shanghai Daily.

The chronic flight delays are a huge hassle. But the opacity surrounding their circumstances also speaks to the inefficiencies of doing business in China. In the first half of 2014, non-financial foreign direct investment in China dipped, compared to the same period the year before. Government paranoia about social instability is such that Facebook, Google and Twitter are inaccessible within mainland China. Major foreign news websites are also blocked by censors. Basic things overseas businessmen expect to do can’t be done.

Then there’s the suffocating air pollution, which has dissuaded some expatriates from traveling to China, much less living here. Now, with the routine airport delays, it’s no longer practical to, say, fly from Hong Kong to Shanghai in the morning, attend a few meetings and then return to Hong Kong by the evening. A Beijing-Shanghai-Beijing run makes more sense by the punctual high-speed train service. But that still means committing around 10 hours to traveling the rails.

In the meantime, customer-service representatives for Chinese airlines are trying to cope as best they can. Political sensitivities are such that the carriers cannot complain about the Chinese air force’s monopoly of the skies. Employees for Air China and China Southern said they were only informed about the continuing air congestion the day after the latest round of delays began on July 21. Air China says it will send text messages to passengers’ cellphones to update them on the latest scheduling. “Most of our customers understand the situation,” said an Air China customer-service staffer in a somewhat beleaguered tone. To cope with the long waits in airports notorious for meager services, the statement attributed to the Civil Aviation Administration of China dispensed further advice: “Flight passengers please bring with you food and water.”

—with reporting by Gu Yongqiang/Beijing

Will MH17 air crash damage Russia's Putin? - BBC NEWS

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28421196

By Dmitri TreninDirector, Carnegie Moscow Centre, Moscow

Russia has been accused of providing military help to the rebels to shoot down the Malaysia Airlines plane

Right up until the downing of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July, President Vladimir Putin's handling of the Ukraine crisis was seen in Russia as fairly successful, both strategically and tactically.

Russia was obviously supporting the militants in the Donbass region, while still pursuing a policy of plausible deniability. At the same time, it had joined Germany and France in a diplomatic effort to promote a political settlement within Ukraine that would also take Russia's interests into account.

The European Union was balking at further sanctions against the Russian government, with a number of countries resolved to protect their important economic relations. The Obama Administration's attempts to rally the Europeans around the sanctions agenda appeared largely ineffectual.

Russia and China signed a landmark gas deal in May 2014, boosting relations between the two countries

Mr Putin was, by contrast, expanding Russia's relations with China, gaining a measure of moral support from the other Brics countries (Brazil, India, China and South Africa), and rekindling old and striking new friendships in Latin America.

The MH17 tragedy abruptly changed all that.

The United States and several of its closest allies have immediately accused Russia of aiding and abetting, if not actually perpetrating, a heinous crime.

Mainstream Western media are already calling for Russia to be treated as a pariah state. As a majority of the victims were from the Netherlands, relations with Europe are particularly likely to suffer.

UK PM David Cameron sees the crash as a "defining moment" for Russia

The gap between the US and EU approaches to sanctions on Russia is about to become narrower, destroying Moscow's hopes of a serious divergence within the West.

In Asia, where Russia is now "pivoting" to, the shooting down of the Malaysian passenger plane may also give rise to anti-Russian sentiment. Mr Putin recently signed a 30-year gas deal with China.

Elsewhere in the non-Western world, which still relies to a significant degree on the Western media for covering world developments, the reputations of both Russia and President Putin will take a big hit.

President Putin publicly backs an international inquiry into the MH17 disaster

Some in Russia may see the dramatic worsening of relations with the West over Ukraine as being driven by an undeclared US policy of containing Russia, but few welcome it.

While most Russians sympathise with the plight of the people of eastern Ukraine, around two-thirds are against a military invasion of Ukraine.

With Mr Putin's popularity still topping 80%, he has been widely credited so far with pursuing the right course: protecting Russia's interests, while avoiding unacceptable risks.

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The MH17 air disaster, however, raises questions.

Russians, by and large, have long assumed that Moscow is giving the self-declared people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk more than moral and political support.

At the same time, they hear from their own leaders that Russia does not control those whom it publicly backs. For a while, they may have accepted this apparent incoherence as a diplomatic ruse.

If the international investigation, however, establishes that Russia has indeed given the Donbass militants powerful weapons which they used to shoot down - by mistake - a passenger plane, part of the Russian public, not necessarily pro-Western or liberal, will see the Kremlin's approach as irresponsible brinkmanship.

Sensing this danger, Vladimir Putin is pushing back hard against the US-backed version of the crash.

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The stakes are very high.

If the investigators' verdict does eventually fall against Russia it is not so much Vladimir Putin's integrity that will suffer, as respect for his strategic skill. He has, after all, never said that the rebels had nothing to do with the disaster; instead he blamed Ukraine for attacking them.

Mr Putin will survive politically, but will have to work hard to restore faith in him, and his good fortune.

Russia may, however, avoid the blame. And if it does, then the onus for the crime, and the responsibility, will be on others. And Vladimir Putin will have dodged that bullet, too.

Malaysia, the World’s Unluckiest Airline, Will Now Struggle to Survive - TIME

http://time.com/3011201/malaysia-airlines-ukraine-crash-survival-business-mh370-mh17/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Michael Schuman @MichaelSchuman
 

July 21, 2014

    

Malaysia’s national carrier was already in a weak financial position. Now its future is highly uncertain

Only four months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished somewhere in the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers on board, Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, causing the loss of another 298 souls — an unprecedented blow to a major international airline. Even a robust operator would have trouble overcoming twin disasters like that. But the fact is that Malaysia’s flag carrier is in no financial shape to absorb these catastrophes. In fact, analysts wonder if it will ever be able to recover.

“The outlook is very dire,” says Mohshin Aziz, an aviation analyst at Kuala Lumpur–based Maybank. The airline, he fears, “won’t be able to survive beyond the year in its current form.”

The next months could prove humbling for an airline that had grand ambitions. The Malaysian government had high hopes that its national carrier would compete with the region’s best, and invested much money and emotion into building it. But Malaysia Airlines got badly squeezed in the fiercely contested Asian airline industry. Its cost base is too high to compete with lean and mean budget carrier AirAsia, also based in Kuala Lumpur. At the same time, it lacks the prestigious brand image to raise its ticket prices and take on East Asia’s more premier airlines, such as Singapore Airlines and Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific. As a result, the company has been bleeding for years. The airline’s Kuala Lumpur–listed parent, Malaysian Airline System, has racked up losses of more than $1.4 billion since 2011. Management has tried cutting costs and improving service to turn around the airline’s fortunes, but such efforts were making only minimal progress.

Now whatever hope remained may get dashed by the two crushing tragedies. Analysts are concerned that the fallout will scare passengers away from flying on the airline, or force management to discount tickets to convince them to book — reducing revenue either way. That could push the airline’s fragile finances to the breaking point, causing “the ticking time bomb to explode,” says Daniel Tsang, founder of consultancy Aspire Aviation in Hong Kong. That reality will likely force Malaysia Airlines to take more drastic measures to stay afloat. Even before the latest crash over Ukraine, CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya told shareholders in June that the MH370 incident “sadly now added an entirely unexpected dimension, damaging our brand and our business reputation, and accelerating the urgency for radical change.”

There are options, but all are equally unsavory. Mohshin believes that Malaysia Airlines will have to greatly shrink its business, perhaps eradicating most of the international routes it flies, to focus on the more profitable parts of the operations. “It will never get back to the large size it was before,” he says. “The sooner they accept that fact, the better off they will be.” Tsang says that bankruptcy proceeding would be a “pretty good option” for Malaysia Airlines. That process would make it easier to strip out more of the legacy costs and make the airline more competitive.

What happens next ultimately depends on the Malaysian government. A state-controlled investment fund owns a majority of the shares in the carrier’s parent company, and that makes the future of Malaysia Airlines a political issue. The airline’s powerful union has been able to fight off previous efforts at radically overhauling the carrier and analysts say that rescuing Malaysia Airlines this time will require a high degree of political commitment. Still, if Malaysia Airlines manages to streamline its operations, it may live to fly another day.

“The restructuring will be painful for a lot of people,” Tsang says. “But a phoenix can rise from ashes.”

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Is Worth It If You Read This Many Books - TIME

http://time.com/3006110/amazon-kindle-unlimited-value/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Victor Luckerson @VLuck
 

July 18, 2014

    

The logo of the Penguin publishing house, part of Pearson Plc, is seen on a Kindle Fire HD e-reader at a bookstore in London, U.K., on 

Amazon on Friday announced Kindle Unlimited, a new all-you-can read e-book service allows customers to read as many titles as they want for $9.99 per month. Kindle Unlimited has a library of over 600,000 books, including well-known titles like Harry Potter and Life of Pi. If you’re a voracious reader, the Unlimited program could be a good way to save money while feeding your reading habit. Let’s break down the math to see whether you plow through enough books regularly to justify the cost.

At $9.99 per month, Kindle Unlimited costs about $120 per year. E-books on Amazon can vary wildly in price, from $0.99 to hundreds of dollars. During 2013, e-books on the Digital Book World best-sellers’ list mostly sold for between $7 and $8 on average (the price in the most recent recorded week in 2014 was $7.52). If we say that the typical e-book best-seller costs $7.50, a customer would need to read more than 16 books per year to derive a greater value from Kindle Unlimited than buying the books individually.

This doesn’t necessarily mean avid readers should dive head-first into Kindle Unlimited. Customers lose access to Unlimited’s library of books if they end their subscription, whereas readers can typically hold on to purchased books forever. Also, books from major publishers such as Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette so far don’t appear to be part of the service.

Think of Kindle Unlimited more like Netflix, which has a spotty selection of movies for its streaming library (especially during its early days) rather than Spotify, which typically gets new album releases the same day they go on sale in physical stores. Either way, Amazon is offering a 30-day free trial of Kindle Unlimited, so you can test your binge-reading capabilities before committing to pay for the service.

With Jet Strike, War in Ukraine Is Felt Globally - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/europe/with-jets-fall-war-in-ukraine-is-felt-globally.html?emc=edit_th_20140720&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=56381892&_r=0

By PETER BAKERJULY 19, 2014

Emergency workers on Saturday carried a body from the site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash in the Donetsk region. For many, the disaster brought home a struggle that had seemed distant. CreditMaxim Zmeyev/Reuters

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

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WASHINGTON — From the start, the telephone call did not go well. Dispensing with pleasantries, President Vladimir V. Putinlaunched into an edgy and long-winded complaint about the new American sanctions imposed on Russia the day before.

President Obama, on the phone from the Oval Office on Thursday morning, responded that Russia was arming rebels in Ukraine — citing among other things the antiaircraft weapons that the United States believed they had been sent. “This is not something we’re making up,” Mr. Obama said, according to an American official.

Then, more than halfway through the tense, hourlong call, Mr. Putin noted, almost in passing, that he had received a report of an aircraft going down in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin was vague about the details, and the conversation moved on. But in that instant, the monthslong proxy war between East and West took a devastating turn, one that would shift the ground geopolitically amid the charred wreckage and broken bodies in a Ukrainian wheat field.

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The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 rippled across multiple continents — from Amsterdam, where friends and family had just seen off their loved ones, to the distant shores of Asia and Australia that had been waiting for 298 passengers and crew who would never show up. The tragedy reached as far as a college campus in Bloomington, Ind., shocked to find one of its doctoral students among the dead.

It was a day of confusion and anger, of grief and disbelief, of charges and countercharges, of politics and war. It was a day that brought home in vivid relief the consequences of a struggle in a torn society that had seemed far removed for many. And it was a day that was a long time in the making.

Cor Schilder had been looking forward to his vacation with his girlfriend. Two months ago, he posted pictures of an Indonesian resort on his Facebook page. “We will stay with a private pool with rose petals floating in it,” he wrote in Dutch on May 17. “We won’t leave before all those petals have withered away.”

A florist and amateur musician who played drums in a band called Vast Countenance, Mr. Schilder, 33, and his girlfriend, Neeltje Tol, 30, closed up their Amsterdam flower shop on Wednesday, leaving a sign saying that they would reopen on Aug. 4. As they passed through customs at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport the next day, Mr. Schilder kept updating his Facebook page.

“Mind your step, mind your step,” he wrote two hours before the flight, echoing the automated warning message of the airport’s moving-walkway system.

Before boarding, he posted a picture of the plane, exactly the same model owned by the same airline as one that vanished mysteriously in March en route to China. “In case it goes missing,” he wrote wryly, “this is what it looks like.”

That may have been less amusing for a couple who were also passengers, Maree Rizk and her husband, Albert, who lost relatives aboard the never-found Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Ms. Rizk’s stepmother’s brother and his wife were among those lost in March. The couple was returning home to Australia after a four-week vacation in Europe. “We thought it was unusual they would fly Malaysia because that earlier flight had gone down,” said Phil Lithgow, a friend.

Photo

Flowers were laid amid the wreckage on Saturday at the site of the crashed Malaysian passenger plane, shot down by a missile.CreditAlexander Khudoteply/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Continue reading the main story

The flight took off from Amsterdam and headed east along a flight plan filed before departure. As it crossed over Ukraine, it cruised at an altitude of 33,000 feet, making sure to stay above a new minimum of 32,000 feet set just three days earlier so as to avoid any fighting on the ground or in the air. Some airlines had stopped traversing Ukraine altogether because of its violent insurgency in the east, but most had not.

Until that week, pro-Russian separatists fighting in the east had been known to possess shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles known as Manpads, weapons that can typically fire to a maximum altitude of roughly 12,000 feet. But in the days before the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight, combatants had made clear they now had access to a weapon of a different magnitude, a radar-guided SA-11 that can deliver warheads at three times the speed of sound to a target as high as 70,000 feet.

On Monday, such a missile had brought down a Ukrainian Antonov-26 military transport plane flying at 21,000 feet, a feat requiring expertise and training that only a military could provide. American intelligence agencies believe the missile came from the Russian side of the border, which Moscow denied. Separatists said they brought the plane down themselves.

Either way, Ukraine that same day set the 32,000-foot minimum for civilian airliners. Russia followed suit two days later. But no one banned passenger jets from the area, despite the obvious change in the threat.

Dramatic Shift in Battle

The missile strike that brought down the Malaysia flight was in many respects a result of a dramatic change in the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. After declaring unilateral cease-fires that failed to lead to meaningful negotiations, Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, let the latest cease-fire lapse and ordered his military to resume efforts to crush the insurrection by force.

After the military plane was shot down on Monday, fighting escalated. On Tuesday, a blast destroyed a residential building in Snizhne, a town 12 miles from the Russian border controlled by rebels. Ukraine said a Russian plane had carried out the attack; the rebels blamed the Ukrainian military. Whoever was responsible, a new air war was clearly underway. On Wednesday evening, Ukraine said Russia had sent a MIG-29 fighter jet across the border to engage with Ukrainian Su-25s. In the ensuing dogfight, one Su-25 was shot down, while another was damaged but escaped

A Ukrainian security official was complaining about the Russian incursion at a briefing on Thursday around the same time Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was taking off from Amsterdam.

In eastern Ukraine several hours later, residents noticed what they presumed was a missile climbing into the sky. American intelligence analysts later traced the launch to an area around Snizhne and the nearby town of Torez. The plane exploded in midair and plummeted down into a series of large fields of wheat, grass and sunflowers, its fuselage and landing gear twisted into a mountain of metal, wires, engines and seats.

Bodies lying in the field struck strange, unnatural shapes in the tall grasses, many naked but for their shoes. Some were nestled together among piles of open suitcases, including a man in a mint-colored T-shirt lying near a woman in torn jeans whose right arm was thrown up over her head as if she were trying to protect herself. Others lay alone, like the tiny girl, probably no older than 3, dressed in a red T-shirt without pants.

The sight was overwhelming, even to rebels, who stood in stunned groups trying to comprehend. “I have four children,” said a miner named Sergei who said he had found many bodies of children. “I’m in shock.”

New Shock in Malaysia

The shock was felt nearly as powerfully in Kuala Lumpur, where the Malaysian government and its people remain deeply traumatized from the March episode. Prime Minister Najib Razak was at his personal residence when he was notified that Flight 17 had apparently gone down. He rushed to the Malaysia Airlines emergency response center at Kuala Lumpur’s airport and ordered his defense minister, foreign minister, aviation director and airline executives to meet him there.

“People were incredulous, but people weren’t emotional,” said a Malaysian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the government’s response. “You looked at the faces around the room, and everyone had been battle-scarred from MH-370.”

Photo

A candlelight vigil was held on Saturday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the air-crash victims.

After bruising international criticism of the response to that catastrophe, Mr. Najib was determined to handle this one more smoothly. The last time, he waited a week to make a public statement. This time, he appeared before cameras within hours. Last time, it took Malaysia Airlines six weeks to release a cargo manifest. This time, it would take 36 hours.

In Moscow, the first news reports appeared in early evening as RIA Novosti, a state-run agency, said that the separatists — Russia’s news media often refers to them as “volunteers” — had downed another Ukrainian Antonov-26 military transport plane.

Mr. Putin was also in the air above Eastern Europe that afternoon, as he was returning from a six-day tour of Latin America aboard his presidential Airbus, referred to as Aircraft No. 1 by the media. The Russian jet apparently passed near the doomed Malaysian plane, both flying in roughly the same airspace over Warsaw at 33,000 feet some 37 minutes apart, according to an Interfax report. He got on the telephone with Mr. Obama shortly after landing.

As soon as it became clear that the downed plane was not a military craft but a civilian passenger plane, Russian news media shifted their narrative from a separatist attack to a variety of other explanations, including the possibility that Ukraine’s military had shot it down. The coincidental proximity of Mr. Putin’s plane even led to conspiracy theories that whoever destroyed the Malaysia jet was actually trying to target the Russian president. Rossiya 24, the state-run cable network, played past clips of Ukrainian public figures saying they wished Mr. Putin dead and then interviewed supposed experts about how the two planes might have been confused.

Mr. Putin released a statement 40 minutes after midnight, blaming Ukraine. “Certainly,” he said, “the government over whose territory it occurred is responsible for this terrible tragedy.”

Obama and the Disaster

After hanging up with Mr. Putin, Mr. Obama boarded his Marine Onehelicopter to fly to Andrews Air Force Base. During the flight, news broke that Ukraine was blaming a Russian-made missile. Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser, received an email and told Mr. Obama about the allegation.

Once he boarded Air Force One, which was scheduled to take him to Delaware and New York for a policy speech and political fund-raisers, Mr. Obama was briefed by his national security aide, Brian McKeon. By the time the president landed outside Wilmington, Del., it was clear he would need to address the disaster. Speechwriters at the White House emailed a statement to the plane.

Josh Earnest, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, gave him a copy and explained that a line about concern for Americans stemmed from reports that as many as 23 were on board.

Mr. Earnest told the president that the number came from Ukrainian officials and seemed dubious. But even as Mr. Obama went before cameras and made his brief comments, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. got on the phone with Mr. Poroshenko, who told him the Ukrainians had intercepted conversations indicating the separatists had shot down the plane.

Mr. Obama was briefed by telephone after his speech by Antony J. Blinken, his deputy national security adviser, who told him about the Poroshenko call, and the president decided to call the Ukrainian leader as well as Mr. Najib from Air Force One. The flight to New York was so short, however, that the pilots had to fly a long, looping route to give the president enough time to talk with the leaders.

Once in New York, he headed to his first fund-raiser at an upscale apartment. In a den, where a secure telephone line had been set up, Mr. Obama convened a conference call with his staff for an update. He was told most of the dead were from the Netherlands and so arranged to call the Dutch prime minister.

The next morning, back at the White House, he was told that one American had been on board, as well as AIDS researchers and activists heading to a conference that he himself had addressed two years earlier. He recognized that he had probably met some of them. “That seemed to kind of rattle him,” an aide said.

As a cloudy morning dawned on Ukraine on Friday, the horror of the crash site was on full display. Small white pieces of cloth dotted the grassy farmland, marking the locations of bodies. The smell of burned flesh hung heavily near a broken hulk of metal on the road. A foot with part of a leg lay nearby.

The scene was strangely empty. There was no yellow tape, no investigators poring over the giant metal carcass. Four local rebels wearing fatigues and carrying hunting rifles wandered through the ruins, poking around the debris more out of curiosity. On the grass were photographs of a family vacation, a baby announcement postcard and a boarding pass.

One of the men, who had never seen a boarding pass, asked what it was. Another picked up an English-language tour book and flipped through it before throwing it back in the heap. “I can’t read it anyway,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; C.J. Chivers and David Montgomery from the United States; Nicola Clark from Paris; Thomas Erdbrink from Amsterdam; David M. Herszenhorn from Kiev, Ukraine; Michelle Innis from Sydney, Australia; Neil MacFarquhar from Moscow; Michael S. Schmidt from Washington; and Sabrina Tavernise from Grabovo, Ukraine.

Jetliner Explodes Over Ukraine; Struck by Missile, Officials Say - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/malaysian-airlines-plane-ukraine.html?emc=edit_th_20140718&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=56381892

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, ERIC SCHMITT and RICK GLADSTONEJULY 17, 2014

GRABOVO, Ukraine — A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people aboard exploded, crashed and burned on a flowered wheat field Thursday in a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, blown out of the sky at 33,000 feet by what Ukrainian and American officials described as a Russian-made antiaircraft missile.

Ukraine accused the separatists of carrying out what it called a terrorist attack. American intelligence and military officials said the plane had been destroyed by a Russian SA-series missile, based on surveillance satellite data that showed the final trajectory and impact of the missile but not its point of origin.

There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, blamed Ukraine’s government for creating what he called conditions for insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where separatists have bragged about shooting down at least three Ukrainian military aircraft. But Mr. Putin did not specifically deny that a Russian-made weapon had felled the Malaysian jetliner.

Flight Was Headed Toward Closed Routes

PUBLISHED JULY 18

The Malaysian plane was flying on an active route used by commercial airlines every day. Hours before the crash, Russia closed four airways near the Ukrainian border, including one that was a continuation of Flight 17’s route.Related Maps and Multimedia »

Sources: Eurocontrol; Federal Aviation Administration

Whatever the cause, the news of the crashed plane, with a passenger manifest that spanned at least nine countries, elevated the insurgency into a new international crisis. The day before, the United States had slapped new sanctions on Russia for its support of the pro-Kremlin insurgency, which has brought East-West relations to their lowest point in many years.

Making the crash even more of a shock, it was the second time within months that Malaysia Airlines had suffered a mass-casualty flight disaster with international intrigue — and with the same model plane, a Boeing 777-200ER.

The government of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, is still reeling from the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370 over the Indian Ocean in March. Mr. Najib said he was stupefied at the news of Flight 17, which had been bound for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, from Amsterdam with 283 passengers, including three infants, and 15 crew members. Aviation officials said the plane had been traveling an approved and heavily trafficked route over eastern Ukraine, about 20 miles from the Russia border, when it vanished from radar screens with no distress signal.

“This is a tragic day in what has already been a tragic year for Malaysia,” Mr. Najib told reporters in a televised statement from Kuala Lumpur. “If it transpires that the plane was indeed shot down, we insist that the perpetrators must swiftly be brought to justice.”

Mr. Najib said he had spoken with the leaders of Ukraine and the Netherlands, who promised their cooperation. He also said that he had spoken with President Obama, and that “he and I both agreed that the investigation must not be hindered in any way.” The remark seemed to point to concerns about evidence tampering at the crash site, which is in an area controlled by pro-Russia insurgents.

Continue reading the main storyVideo

Ukraine released what it said was audio of phone calls between rebels and Russian officers. In one call, a rebel is heard saying, “We have just shot down a plane.”

 Publish DateJuly 18, 2014.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin also spoke about the disaster and the broader Ukraine crisis, White House officials said, and Mr. Putin expressed his condolences. But in a statement quoted by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, Mr. Putin said, “This tragedy would not have happened if there was peace in the country, if military operations had not resumed in the southeast of Ukraine.”

Continue reading the main story

The United Nations Security Council scheduled a meeting on the Ukraine crisis for Friday morning.

Adding to Ukrainian and Western suspicions that pro-Russia separatists were culpable, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the State Security Service, known as the S.B.U., released audio from what it said were intercepted phone calls between separatist rebels and Russian military intelligence officers on Thursday. In the audio, the separatists appeared to acknowledge shooting down a civilian plane.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent reporters a link to the edited audio of the calls, with English subtitles, posted on YouTube by the S.B.U.

According to a translation of the Russian audio by the English-language Kyiv Post, the recording begins with a separatist commander, identified as Igor Bezler, telling a Russian military intelligence official, “We have just shot down a plane.”

Photo

Separatists at the site of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, near the settlement of Grabovo. The region has been roiled by fighting between pro-Russian militants and the Ukrainian government, and at least one military aircraft has been shot down. CreditMaxim Zmeyev/Reuters

In another call, a man who seems to be at the scene of the crash says that a group of Cossack militiamen shot down the plane. He adds that it was a passenger jet and that the debris contains no sign of military equipment. Asked if there are any weapons, he says: “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medical equipment, towels, toilet paper.”

Asked if there are any documents among the debris, the man says, “Yes, of one Indonesian student.”

Myroslava Petsa, a Ukrainian journalist in Kiev, said that the people in the audio sounded shocked by what they had found in the wreckage.

By Thursday night, American intelligence analysts were increasingly focused on a theory that rebels had used a Russian-made SA-11 surface-to-air missile system to shoot down the aircraft and operated on their own fire-control radar, outside the checks and balances of the national Ukrainian air-defense network.

“Everything we have, and it is not much, says separatists,” a senior Pentagon official said. “That said, there’s still a lot of conjecture.”

Photo

The crash site of a Malaysia Airlines 777 carrying 298 people in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.CreditDmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press

Russian troops, who have been deployed along the border with eastern Ukraine, have similar SA-11 systems, as well as larger weapons known as SA-20s, Pentagon officials said.

Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, said he had called the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, to express his condolences and to invite Dutch experts to assist in the investigation. “I would like to note that we are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act,” Mr. Poroshenko said.

Reporters arriving at the scene near the town of Grabovo described dozens of lifeless bodies strewn about, many intact, in a field dotted with purple flowers, and remnants of the plane scattered across a road lined with fire engines and emergency vehicles. “It fell down in pieces,” one rescue worker said as tents were set up to gather the dead. The carcass of the plane was still smoldering, and rescue workers moved through the dark field with flashlights.

For months, eastern Ukraine has been the scene of a violent pro-Russia separatist uprising. Rebels have claimed responsibility for attacking a Ukrainian military jet as it landed in the city of Luhansk on June 14, and for felling an AN-26 transport plane on Monday and an SU-25 fighter jet on Wednesday. But this would be the first commercial airline disaster to result from the hostilities.

Despite the turmoil, the commercial airspace over eastern Ukraine is heavily trafficked and has remained open. Questions are likely to be raised in the coming days about why the traffic line, which is controlled by Ukraine and Russia, was not closed earlier.

Continue reading the main storyVideo

PLAY VIDEO|1:02

Amateur Video of Malaysia Airlines Crash

Amateur Video of Malaysia Airlines Crash

After a Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in Ukraine on Thursday, several amateur videos were posted online.

 Publish DateJuly 17, 2014.

With the news of the crash on Thursday, Ukraine declared the eastern part of the country a no-fly zone. American and European carriers rerouted their flights, and Aeroflot, Russia’s national carrier, announced that it had suspended all flights to Ukraine for at least three days. The conspicuous exception was Aeroflot flights to Crimea, the southern peninsula that Russiaannexed in March, a pivotal point in the Ukraine crisis.

It was unclear late Thursday whether any Americans had been aboard the flight. Russia’s Interfax news agency said there had been no Russians aboard.

In Amsterdam, a Malaysia Airlines official, Huib Gorter, said the plane had carried 154 Dutch passengers; 45 Malaysians, including the crew; and 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Belgians, four Germans, three Filipinos and one Canadian. The rest of the passengers had not been identified.

Prof. David Cooper, director of the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said that a prominent AIDS researcher traveling to the 20th International AIDS conference in Melbourne was among those on the flight.

Professor Cooper, who was heading to the conference from Sydney, said he was unaware how many other passengers were also on their way to the conference, which is scheduled to start on Sunday.

Andrei Purgin, deputy prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an insurgent group in eastern Ukraine, denied in a telephone interview that the rebels had anything to do with the crash. He said that they had shot down Ukrainian planes before but that their antiaircraft weapons could reach only to around 4,000 meters, far below the cruising level of passenger jets.

“We don’t have the technical ability to hit a plane at that height,” Mr. Purgin said.

Mr. Purgin did not rule out the possibility that Ukrainian forces themselves had shot down the plane. “Remember the Black Sea plane disaster,” he said, referring to the 2001 crash of a Siberia Airlines passenger jet, bound for Novosibirsk from Tel Aviv, that the Ukrainians shot down by accident during a military training exercise.

In comments broadcast on Ukrainian television, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, said the crash illustrated the threat to peace in Europe posed by the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “This is not just a local conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, but a full-scale war in the center of Europe,” he said. “I’m certain the international community this time will pay attention and understand.”

Correction: July 17, 2014 

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Ukraine’s president. He is Petro O. Poroshenko, not Poroschenko. An earlier version also misstated the title of Najib Razak. He is the prime minister, not president, of Malaysia. The article had also misstated the direction a Siberian Airlines passenger jet was flying before it was shot down by Ukraine in 2001. It was flying from Israel, not to it.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Grabovo, Ukraine, Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar, David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow; Noah Sneider from Grabovo; Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker from Washington; Thomas Erdbrink from Amsterdam; C. J. Chivers from the United States; Michelle Innis from Sydney, Australia; and Masha Goncharova and Robert Mackey from New York.

Rupert Murdoch Made $80 Billion Offer for Time Warner - TIME

http://time.com/2991384/murdoch-time-warner-bid/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Sam Frizell @Sam_Frizell
 

July 16, 2014

    

Rupert Murdoch, Executive Chairman of News Corp. and Chairman and CEO of 21st Century Fox, attends the Allen & Co. 32nd annual Media and Technology Conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho, July 10, 2014.Gary He—Insider Images/Polaris

Time Warner rejected an offer that could have reshaped the media landscape, the New York Times reports

Updated 9:20am ET

Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate Twenty-First Century Fox admitted Wednesday to making an unsuccessful $80 billion offer in recent weeks to take over Time Warner.

The New York Times reported that Chase Carey, the president of Fox and longtime top deputy to Rupert Murdoch, met with Time Warner’s chief executive Jeff Bewkes in early June.

After the private meeting, Fox reportedly made a formal takeover proposal worth $85 in stock and cash for each Time Warner share, amounting to about a 25 percent premium to Time Warner’s stock price at the time. Time Warner’s board sent Fox a brief letter after discussing the proposal, saying that the company would remain independent.

Fox made a statement Wednesday after the Times reported the proposal: “21st Century Fox can confirm that we made a formal proposal to Time Warner last month to combine the two companies. The Time Warner Board of Directors declined to pursue our proposal. We are not currently in any discussions with Time Warner.”

Time Warner said early Wednesday that there were considerable “strategic, operational, and regulatory risks” to being acquired by Twenty-First Century Fox, adding that rejecting the proposal was in the best interests of its shareholders.

The deal would have effectively put Murdoch at the head of a portfolio of major household media brands, including TNT, TBS, HBO, Warner Brothers, Fox News and others, as well as assets controlled through his company News Corp., like the Wall StreetJournal and HarperCollins.

CNN, a subsidiary of Time Warner, would reportedly have been spun off as part of a deal because of possible antitrust concerns, as it competes with Murdoch’s Fox News.

Murdoch has built a global media empire over nearly fifty years that includes television channels, newspapers and studios, often by making deals that were at first rejected.

TIME.com is owned by Time Inc, which was spun off from Time Warner earlier this year.

China’s Economy Continues to Defy Gravity. That May Not Be a Good Thing - TIME

http://time.com/2990640/chinas-economy-continues-to-defy-gravity-that-may-not-be-a-good-thing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Michael Schuman @MichaelSchuman
 

4:26 AM ET

    

A container truck drives past the container area at the Yangshan Deep Water Port, part of the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone, on Sept. 26, 2013Carlos Barria—Reuters

China announced better-than-expected growth over the second quarter. Despite optimistic official figures, there's plenty to worry about in the world's second largest economy

China announced its GDP figures for the second quarter on Wednesday and — surprise, surprise — they were better than expected. Growth clocked in at 7.5% — which just so happens to be the government’s official target. The statistics will likely give a boost to sentiment globally. Investors have been worried that a slowing China would hit the entire world economy. More buoyant Chinese growth will probably calm those jitters.

Yet China is also something of a puzzle. Somehow the economy continues to power through all sorts of issues that should be slowing it down. The all-important property sector, which accounts for some 16% of its GDP, is undergoing a major downturn. For most of the year, the government has tried to control dangerous levels of debt in the economy and clamp down on “shadow banking,” which encompasses alternative financial networks and lending practices. Tighter credit should translate into slower growth. Beijing is also supposedly on a mission to streamline bloated industries like steel by eliminating excess capacity, which, though healthy for the future prospects of the economy, should also act as a drag on short-term growth. So should President Xi Jinping’s ongoing anticorruptioncampaign, which in theory should be disrupting policymaking and creating uncertainty.

So how is China defying gravity once again? There is always the perennial suspicion that the numbers are inflated. Capital Economics looks at statistics that aren’t as easily manipulated as GDP, such as freight shipments and electricity output, to gauge the economy’s performance, and figures GDP has probably been expanding more like 6% in recent quarters. But economists are crediting the latest growth rate to government stimulus, carefully targeted at infrastructure and public housing, both investments the economy still needs.

This is a smart move. The Chinese government has ample ability to keep growth humming while it attempts to implement more substantial reforms. However, the reliance on stimulus also raises doubts about what might be ahead. Some economists see growth “bottoming out” and a revival continuing through the rest of the year. Others believe continued headwinds, especially the struggles of the property sector, are too strong for the government to counter — without even greater largesse. That might be on its way. New loans made in June were the highest in five years, according to research from Barclays, which suggests that the government is loosening up credit once again.

That begs the most important question facing China’s economy right now: Will Beijing sacrifice reform for growth? So far, China’s leaders have controlled their usual urge to pump up growth rates, an indication they realize the dangers lurking in the economy. Since the 2008 financial crisis, debt in China has risen to dizzying heights. A recent report from Standard & Poor’s calculated that China’s corporate sector has more debt outstanding than any other in the world. Combined with tremendous excess capacity, a risky increase in shadow banking and signs of a property bubble, the Chinese economy is rampant with problems that threaten its future. Some economists believe Beijing needs to address these ills and resist efforts to use credit and other stimulus to rev up growth — or else face a possible financial crisis.

Yet the reforms necessary to fix these problems are coming very slowly. Beijing has pledged to undertake a bold slate of measures — to liberalize interest rates and other prices, improve the performance of bloated state-owned enterprises, open protected markets to competition, strengthen the financial sector and allow private enterprise greater sway in the economy. All of these steps, if implemented, would make the Chinese economy healthier and more advanced. But so far, only the most minor of experiments have started, such as the approval of a handful of small private banks and the opening of a free-trade zone in Shanghai to tinker with more open capital flows. Even more, once the greater reforms fall into place (if they ever do), it could take years before they have an impact on the economy.

There are two ways of looking at what’s going on. One is that China’s policymakers are wisely going slow on potentially painful reforms while the economy works out some of its messiest problems in an environment of relatively stable growth. The other, less optimistic, view is that the problems rotting away at the Chinese economy are so complex and entrenched that policymakers are prioritizing continuing growth over tough reforms. In that scenario, China’s broken-down growth model will be kept alive with debt and government spending, while the fundamental change necessary to take China to the next level stalls.

I continue to be afraid of the latter. And with China the world’s second largest economy, we all should be too.