Latest news with #SameerAl-Doumy
Epoch Times
7 days ago
- Business
- Epoch Times
EU Approves $170 Billion Defense Fund as Europe Moves to Take Charge of Own Security
The European Union (EU) has formally adopted a landmark $170 billion defense financing program aimed at rearming the continent, bolstering its defense industry, and reducing reliance on the United States as the war in Ukraine rages on and questions swirl about America's future engagement in Europe's security amid increasing risks in the Pacific posed by communist China. The new instrument, known as the Security Action for Europe (SAFE), was finalized under Poland's rotating presidency of the Council of the EU and 'This is an unprecedented instrument which will boost our defence capabilities and support our defence industry,' Adam Szlapka, Polish minister for the EU, said in a statement. 'The more we invest in our security and defence, the better we deter those who wish us harm.' The new initiative—which will enter into force on May 29—will also allow the EU to strengthen its military support for Ukraine by including the country in the program from the start. This means Ukraine's defense industry can take part in joint purchases with EU countries and other partners, helping Kyiv get much-needed weapons and build closer ties with Europe's defense sector as it continues to counter Russian aggression. In addition to Ukraine, SAFE allows for participation from countries with existing security agreements with the EU, such as the United Kingdom. However, full participation in the program by these third countries will require additional agreements with conditions like capping non-EU content in defense contracts. SAFE is the first part of the EU's larger ReArm Europe Related Stories 5/27/2025 5/27/2025 'We are in an era of rearmament, and Europe is ready to massively increase its defense spending, both to respond to the short-term urgency to act and to support Ukraine, but also to invest in the long term, to take on more responsibility for our own European security,' Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in March when announcing the plan, adding that the time has come for Europe to 'step up.' Together with recent bilateral treaties—such as the new Franco-Polish defense French soldiers take part in joint military exercises with the British army near Reims, France, on April 22, 2025. Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP/Getty Images A soldier takes cover next to a British armoured vehicle as part of urban combat exercise during joint military maneuvers between the French and British army at the Sissonne camp, near Reims, France, on April 22, 2025. Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP/Getty Images Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has pushed Europe to boost its defense spending and take more responsibility for its own security after decades of depending on U.S. protection. The urgency behind SAFE also reflects growing alarm over Russia's latest actions. Over the weekend, Moscow Trump, who has positioned himself as a mediator in the conflict, criticized the escalation, Some U.S. lawmakers—including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)—have 'Without truly strong pressure on the Russian leadership, this brutality cannot be stopped,' Zelenskyy said in a recent post on social media. Russia maintains it's open to a cease-fire and diplomatic settlement to the long-running conflict but insists that the 'root causes' of the war must be addressed, which Ukraine sees as code for capitulation.
DW
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- DW
France: Power outage hits Cannes region during film fest – DW – 05/24/2025
As the Cannes Film Festival is set to end, a power outage hit the glitzy resort town on the French Riviera. Police assume it was caused by a deliberate fire. A major power outage hit the area around the French Riviera resort of Cannes on Saturday, the final day of the Cannes Film Festival. The power cut began just after 10:00 a.m. local time (8:00 a.m. GMT) due to a fire in a substation in the nearby village of Tanneron. Police assume the cause was probably an arson attack. However, the police spokeswoman was unable to say whether there was a connection between the incident and the film festival. A blackout caused the timetable screens at Cannes train station to go offline Image: Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP The French media reported that a pylon also fell onto a high-voltage power line in the morning. It is not yet clear whether the incident had a criminal background. According to grid operator RTE, the power outage affected 160,000 homes in Cannes and the surrounding area. The glitzy holiday destination has been hit by a power outage, causing traffic lights to fail and leading to traffic jams. The shops were closed on one of the main streets. Teams from RTE and supplier Enedis are working to restore the network. It is still unclear when the power will be back on, French media reported, citing RTE. Cannes Film Festival 2025 kicks off To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Festival is not affected by outage The Cannes Film Festival organizers said the closing ceremony would not be affected by the power outage. The festival announced it had "switched to an alternative electricity power supply, which enables us to maintain the events and screenings planned for today in normal conditions, including the closing ceremony." However, morning screenings at the festival's cinemas were briefly interrupted while the supply switched to generators. At the closing ceremony, scheduled to start at 16:40 GMT, French actress Juliette Binoche and her jury will announce the winners of the festival's top prizes. Twenty-two films are competing for the Palme d'Or this year. Edited by: Wesley Dockery
New Statesman
30-04-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Britain's small boats obsession
Photo by Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP via Getty Images Shortly before dawn on 23 April 2024, on the shores of a resort town perched on the northernmost corner of France, unexpected chaos broke out. From behind the sand dunes that run along the beach, a mass of people emerged running towards the water. Amid the rush, a group of young men dragged an inflatable dinghy alongside the growing swell of people, pulling the boat into the English Channel before it could be intercepted by the French policemen heading their way. Others in the group attempted to hold the authorities back, throwing fireworks at them and brandishing sticks to ward them off. Once the boat was in the water, the people immediately began to scramble aboard, desperate to make the perilous 32km crossing to the UK. Within minutes, it was clear that the boat was over capacity. These dinghies – which typically measure around 11m long – are only designed to carry a maximum of 15 people. Sometimes the number of people attempting to board them to make the Channel crossing can be has high as 60, but on this particular morning, the number had surpassed 100. Even more besides had been pushed into the water and were clinging on to the side of the boat. The French authorities stood on the shore watching the dinghy float out to sea. They are not allowed to follow those attempting to cross the Channel into the water and so were forced to stay put as this dangerous vessel drifted further away from the shore. Close by, watching this scene unfold, were members of the BBC's Home Affairs team, who had captured the scene on camera. It later emerged that five people onboard the vessel had died; two had drowned making the crossing, while three others were crushed in the turmoil. Among the dead was a seven-year-old girl. Just hours earlier, the UK's controversial Rwanda Bill had finally become law, having made its way through the House of Commons. The new policy, which the former Conservative government had spent two long and turbulent years trying to implement, aimed to relocate illegal immigrants and asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda for processing. It was dreamt up during Boris Johnson's administration, though neither he nor Liz Truss had successfully pushed the new policy through. But on 22 April, after the bill had finally passed, a triumphant Rishi Sunak declared 'nothing will stand in our way' when getting flights off the ground. Back in northern France, the BBC spoke to migrants in the precarious camps which surround Calais who had already heard about the fatal incident that morning. When asked whether the Rwanda scheme would deter him from risking a small boat crossing, one Sudanese man said: 'Nothing can stop me.' On the day that the Rwanda scheme was first announced, 14 April 2022, the journalist Nicola Kelly happened to be on the Kent coast with her husband and young son. Her professional instinct kicked in as she rushed to the beach at Folkestone to speak to arrivals. Kelly spoke to more than 40 people who had made the Channel crossing that day, arriving from Iran, Syria, Sudan, Eritrea and Iraqi Kurdistan. She found similar attitudes to those that would be heard by the BBC two years later. All of those Kelly spoke to had heard the news of the imminent deal between the UK and Rwanda; each one had braved the crossing anyway. This and many other stories, gathered over five years of scrupulous reporting, have been distilled into Kelly's debut book, Anywhere But Here: How Britain's Asylum System Fails Us All. A former civil servant and diplomat, Kelly joined the Home Office as a press officer in 2014, just as it was rolling out the notorious hostile environment policy. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The policy was announced by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, in 2012 (who only ten years previously had criticised her own party for making 'political capital out of minorities') and came to define the UK's attitudes towards immigration during the 2010s. Its main aim was to discourage people from seeking to remain in the UK illegally by making it more difficult for them to access basic necessities. As Kelly points out, the policy 'created an atmosphere of inherent suspicion and disbelief in which private landlords, NHS staff, teachers, DVLA administrators – anyone in a position of authority – was turned into a de facto border guard'. Some of those targeted (most famously, the Windrush generation, who were disproportionately affected) had been in the UK for years, having established families and careers. It was a clear turning point in the UK's approach to immigration, and for Kelly's career in the civil service. After months waking up every day 'with a sense of dread' caused by the direction of travel in the department, she handed in her Home Office lanyard and switched to the side of the journalists, reporting on immigration and asylum for the Guardian and elsewhere. Many of Kelly's former colleagues became her sources, and her reporting is clearly enriched by her insider knowledge of how the Home Office operates. The dysfunction and antagonism of Britain's immigration and asylum system has its roots in the hostile environment, but it is expressed through the UK's enduring political obsession with small boats. Since 2018, roughly 150,000 people have entered the UK via these dangerous, rudimentary means – the boats themselves have become totemic of Britain's conversations around immigration. Sunak's pledge to 'stop the boats' dictated the final days of his premiership as he fought to do something (anything!) to reduce the number of people reaching UK shores via these means. And who can forget Suella Braverman's haunting photo op on a press trip to Rwanda in November 2023 (to which only right-leaning newspapers were invited), in which she looks gleeful, head thrown back in apparent laughter, excited by the prospect of delivering her government's fateful policy. Since Labour's victory at last year's general election, this has evolved to become Yvette Cooper's new mission to 'smash the gangs' – but the focus on small-boat crossings remains. Anywhere But Here takes small boats as its focus, and throughout Kelly is deftly and equitably critical of the government's fixation with them at the expense of sensible and comprehensive immigration policies. But her writing expands further than Whitehall to tell the stories of those most affected by the government's rhetoric and its decision-making. One story, told in snippets throughout the book, is of Parwen, an Iraqi-Kurdish mother of two who Kelly first met at a camp in Dunkirk in 2023. The pair swapped numbers, and Parwen kept Kelly abreast of her family's journey from Iraq via WhatsApp. It was treacherous: Parwen watched her mother drown attempting to make an earlier small-boat crossing from Turkey to Greece (a terrible reminder that these crossings are not limited to the English Channel), and once they reached northern France a canister of tear gas was released near her four-year-old son to deter them from setting up camp. Parwen's story is one of many sensitively relayed via Kelly's humane reporting. Another is that of Barin, a Kurdish asylum seeker in his early twenties who, on 14 June 2022, was forced on to a plane destined for Rwanda. Unsure of where the officers who had picked him up from Brook House immigration removal centre were taking him, and with little understanding of English, Barin communicated with them via Google Translate. A high court order at the 11th hour stopped the plane from taking off. Through these stories, Kelly sensitively illustrates the end-point of policies devised in Whitehall. Nicola Kelly writes early on: 'This book is not about policy, politics or politicking; it's about people.' But when confronted by the human consequences of initiatives designed to win votes in Westminster, it is hard not to read this without feeling a certain degree of rage that such inhumane actions are being taken in the name of the British taxpayer. Yet Kelly remains poised, articulate and informed by exhaustive knowledge. Above all, to read Anywhere But Here is to follow her in the search for justice. Anywhere But Here: How Britain's Asylum System Fails Us All Nicola Kelly Elliott & Thompson, 320pp, £20 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: The sounds that shape us] Related
Vox
23-04-2025
- Science
- Vox
Let's not panic about AI's energy use just yet
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. AI is driving demand for data centers that in turn are creating demand for more energy. Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip. Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. 'Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,' said Timothy Sherwood, a computer science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'When you do any computation, what's happening inside the microprocessor is that there's some one that transitions to a zero, or a zero that transitions to one. Every time that happens, a little bit of energy is used.' This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. When you add that up — across the billions of transistors on chips and then the billions of these chips in computers and server farms — they form a significant and growing share of humanity's energy appetite. According to the International Energy Agency, computing and storing data accounts for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of global electricity demand at the moment. With the growth of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies that rely on industrial-scale data centers, that share is poised to grow. For instance, a typical Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours while a ChatGPT query consumes 2.9 watt-hours. In 2024, the amount of data center capacity under construction in the US jumped 70 percent compared to 2023. Some of the tech companies leaning into AI have seen their greenhouse gas emissions surge and are finding it harder to meet their own environmental goals. How much more electricity will this computation need in the years ahead, and will it put our climate change goals out of reach? AI is injecting chaos into energy demand forecasts But some of these companies aren't picky about where their power is coming from. 'What we need from you,' former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier this month, is 'energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.' Already, energy demand from data centers is extending a lifeline to old coal power plants and is creating a market for new natural gas plants. The IEA estimates that over the next five years, renewables will meet half of the additional electricity demand from data centers, followed by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power. However, a lot of these energy demand forecasts are projections based on current trends, and well, a lot of things are changing very quickly. 'The first thing I'll say is that there's just a lot of uncertainty about how data center energy demand will grow,' said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the tech sector and energy. Here is some context to keep in mind: Remember that data centers are less than 2 percent of overall electricity demand now and even doubling, tripling, or quintupling would still keep their share in the single digits. A larger portion of global electricity demand growth is poised to come from developing countries industrializing and climbing up the income ladder. Energy use is also linked to the economy; in a recession, for example, power demand tends to fall. Climate change could play a role as well. One of the biggest drivers of electricity demand last year was simply that it was so hot out, leading more people to switch on air conditioners. So while AI is an important, growing energy user, it's not the only thing altering the future of energy demand. We're also in the Cambrian explosion era of crypto and AI companies, meaning there are a lot of different firms trying out a variety of approaches. All of this experimentation is spiking energy use in the near term, but not all of these approaches are going to make it. As these sectors mature and their players consolidate, that could drive down energy demand too. How to do more with less The good news is that computers are getting more efficient. AI and crypto harness graphical processing units, chips optimized for the kinds of calculations behind these technologies. GPUs have made massive performance leaps, particularly when it comes to the ability of AI to take in new information and generate conclusions. 'In the past 10 years, our platform has become 100,000 times more energy efficient for the exact same inference workload,' said Joshua Parker, who leads corporate sustainability efforts at Nvidia, one of the largest GPU producers in the world. 'In the past two years — one generation of our product — we've become 25 times more energy efficient.' Nvidia has now established a commanding lead in the AI race, making it one of the most valuable companies in history. However, as computer processors get more efficient, they cost less to run, which can lead people to use them more, offsetting some of the energy savings. 'It's easier to make the business case to deploy AI, which means that the footprint is growing, so it's a real paradox,' Parker said. 'Ultimately, that kind of exponential growth only continues if you actually reach zero incremental costs. There's still costs to the energy and there's still cost to the computation. As much as we're driving towards efficiency, there will be a balance in the end because it's not free.' Another factor to consider is that AI tools can have their own environmental benefits. Using AI to perform simulations can avoid some of the need for expensive, slow, energy-intensive real-world testing when designing aircraft, for example. Grid operators are using AI to optimize electricity distribution to integrate renewables, increase reliability, and reduce waste. AI has already helped design better batteries and better solar cells. Amid all this uncertainty about the future, there are still paths that could keep AI's expansion aligned with efforts to limit climate change. Tech companies need to continue pulling on the efficiency lever. These sectors also have big opportunities to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chains for these devices, and in the infrastructure for data centers. Deploying vastly more clean energy is essential. We've already seen a number of countries grow their economies while cutting greenhouse gases. While AI is slowing some of that progress right now, it doesn't have to worsen climate change over the long term, and it could accelerate efforts to keep it in check. But it won't happen by chance, and will require deliberate action to get on track. 'It's easy to write the headline that says AI is going to break the grid, it's going to lead to more emissions,' Parker said. 'I'm personally very optimistic — I think this is credible optimism — that AI over time will be the best tool for sustainability the world has ever seen.'
