reblog

“For all their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power to make change on the scale we need in the time that we have,” said Mr. McKibben, who is 62, chatting early Tuesday before an anti-big bank climate rally in Washington’s Franklin Park. “We all vote, we ended up with most of the resources in our society. If we’re going to make Washington and Wall Street change, it’ll take a few people with hairlines like mine.”

The protests came on the heels of the latest dire report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecast that within the next decade, average global temperatures are likely to increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to preindustrial levels and making catastrophic weather events harder for human and other life-forms to bear. To ward off the worst, nations must cut greenhouse gasses by half by 2030, the report said, and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the early 2050s.

Yet in 2022, carbon emissions hit record highs and the top oil producers reaped a record-breaking $220 billion in profits.

And though major oil-funding banks are also investing in renewable energy sources, several protesters dismissed such efforts as greenwashing. “They’re running ads on TV, a lot of the big oil companies, about how they’re doing all these environmentally friendly things, but they’re doing record oil exploration,” said Fred Solowey, 71. “And then these phony offsets that they use a lot, to pretend that they’re going to be carbon neutral. It’s hogwash.”

For the rockers, the goal was to urge people to pull their money out of the oil-funding banks, and to goose the consciences of bank executives.

“I think anybody is complicit that is not trying to do anything,” said Pam Murphy, 64, as she sat outside the Chase branch early Tuesday, in front of a sign that read “This bank funds climate chaos.” One rocking chair over sat Susan Flashman, 68, a retired electrician who lives in Mount Rainier, Md. “We’re the activists, we’re the boomers,” Ms. Flashman said. “People our age, we’re just incensed that no nobody’s doing anything. So here we are.”

Most of the rocking chair activists were from the Washington metropolitan area, and sat in three-hour blocks throughout Monday night, though Ellen Barfield, 66, opted to sit multiple shifts from Monday evening until 5 a.m. Tuesday. She was a night owl anyhow, she said, and still up for the occasional all-nighter. “It’s better than a camp chair,” she said, of the seating arrangement, “And it’s poetic.”

“I mean, our climate is getting worse and worse,” Ms. Barfield continued. “We are far from doing what we need to do about it. And these banks are a big part of why, because they keep pouring money into this horrendous industry. And that has got to change, right?”

Most of the rocking chairs (there were about 50 in all) had been gathered by Lisa Finn, 57, and her husband, who live outside of Alexandria, Va., and hosted a rocking chair painting party before driving the chairs up in a U-Haul.

Along with the rally at Franklin Park (speakers included Ebony Twilley Martin, the co-executive director of Greenpeace USA; and Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club) there were marches featuring banners, outsize puppets and at least one shofar, and the blockading, with even more rocking chairs, of Wells Fargo and Chase. One protester was arrested after using paint on the street, organizers said.

Before addressing the rally, Mr. Jealous said pressure from older activists ought to make the banks take notice.

“For the banks, this is a very worrisome signal,” he said. “They can write off young people, they don’t see them as having a whole lot of money right now. They know these folks do.”

For his part, Mr. McKibben conceded that closing personal accounts in oil-funding banks was not likely to impose enough financial harm to force change, but said that merely underscored the urgent need to do more.

“We can put serious pressure on their reputations, their images, their brands, and their sense of themselves,” he said. “Right now, the most powerful people in the world are deeply complicit in the gravest crisis that the world has ever experienced. So part of today is an attempt to rouse these guys to some kind of sense of their place in history.”

NHfLmU
xyBdbz
ZJqSXe
phxBtm
TYAEbm
faewQP
HYnvCc

Ukraine has said that video released on Saturday shows how its forces had successfully targeted Russian tanks overnight.

The clip tweeted by Ukraine's security service the SBU shows a bird's eye view of military vehicles exploding after being hit from above.

"Nine or ten? TEN! That's how many Russian tanks were destroyed by special forces of the SBU "White Wolves" in just one night!," the SBU said on Telegram next to the clip, which as of Saturday afternoon had received more than 47,000 views.

The SBU said that an armored personnel carrier was also hit the in the strikes in the direction of Russian-occupied Donetsk. The video has not been independently verified and the exact location of the purported strikes was not mentioned. Newsweek has emailed Russia's defense ministry for comment.

It comes after another video went viral allegedly showing Ukrainian forces striking one of Russia's T-90 tanks, which are considered to be among the invaders' most advanced equipment.

Ukrainian internal affairs advisor Anton Gerashchenko tweeted how his country's National Guards brigade was among Ukraine's forces which had "tracked down and destroyed the pride of Russian defense industry—the T90 Proryv tank."

On Saturday, Kyiv held discussions with American officials about upcoming U.S. military assistance, including weapons and ammunition, the Ukrainian presidential chief-of-staff Andriy Yermak wrote on Telegram.

They discussed "the current situation at the front, combat operations in the most difficult directions, as well as about the urgent needs of the Ukrainian army," Yermak wrote according to a translation.

On the call was U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who said on Thursday that Ukraine "doesn't have any time to waste" ahead of an anticipated spring offensive.

Austin had said said that the U.S. had to deliver "swiftly and fully" on what it had promised Kyiv. That included getting armored capabilities to the battlefield and making sure Ukrainian troops get "the training, spare parts, and maintenance support they need," Politico reported.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Russian media reported how Vladimir Putin had visited the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula nine years after proclaiming its occupation. He visited an arts school in the Black Sea port city of Sevastopol accompanied by local governor Mikhail Razvozhayev, according to images broadcast on TV.

The Russian president's visit to the peninsula Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 came a day after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against him for his role in the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children.

W0iTm JHN5u AGB6y WQVB7 LKMy6 DVGgt HNBSr JMNHe AGBSw MNJIq

Fox News host Tucker Carlson's attempt to take down Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen with a video clip badly backfired on Thursday.

The latest edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight featured the conservative pundit lashing out at Yellen for telling the Senate Finance Committee that "our banking system remains sound" despite a recent string of U.S. bank failures.

Carlson also took issue with Yellen's failure to agree with Republican Senator Ron Johnson's suggestion that government spending played a key role in current high inflation rates, insisting that she was "wrong" and "lying about it."

The Fox News host argued that it was "not the first time she's been wrong." He then introduced a clip by saying, "here she was in 2007, one year before the Great Recession."

As the clip played, the year "2017" was clearly displayed on screen.

The footage showed Yellen saying that it would be "going too far" to predict there would "never be another financial crisis" but that the country's economy was "much safer" and she did not think a crisis would come "in our lifetimes."

"Our mistake," a somber-sounding Carlson said after the clip played. "That was 2017. Clearly, she didn't see this crisis coming."

Tucker Carlson Janet Yellen Fox News Treasury
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is pictured on the left during an event in Hollywood, Florida, on November 17, 2022, while Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is shown on the right Thursday during a Senate Finance Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. Carlson on Thursday was forced to quickly correct himself after attempting to take down Yellen with a clip from 2017 that he initially claimed showed her failing to predict the Great Recession in 2007. Jason Koerner; Chip Somodevilla
The recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the second- and third- largest bank failures in U.S. history, have inspired fears of an impending financial crisis in the U.S. and abroad.

While Yellen said that the domestic banking system was "sound" during her Senate testimony, she admitted that "work needs to be done" on bringing down still-high levels of inflation.

The treasury secretary's positive assessment of the banking system appears to have restored some confidence among investors on Thursday, with surging prices among multiple U.S. bank stocks following her testimony.

Credit Suisse share prices also rebounded on Thursday, hours after the struggling giant announced a $54 billion loan deal with the Swiss central bank.

On the same day that the banking stocks were rebounding, Goldman Sachs economists warned that the chances of a U.S. recession happening in the next 12 months was 35 percent, up from 25 percent last month.

Yellen, the first woman to serve as treasury secretary, has had a long history of advising the government on economic issues. In 2007, the year that Carlson initially attributed to the video clip on Thursday, she was serving as president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Yellen later served as the vice chair and eventually the chair of the Federal Reserve under former President Barack Obama, becoming the first woman to chair the Fed. She also held positions at the Fed and the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the administration of former President Bill Clinton.

gfbt
ebdf
webf
absg
tlkd
iuob
vgtd

The Last of Us has come to an end, bringing Joel and Ellie's epic journey across America to a close with a dramatic, bloody finale.

The HBO show has delighted fans for weeks and has particularly delighted those who are familiar with Naughty Dog's critically acclaimed game, which the show adapts with stunning accuracy.

In a press conference held ahead of the finale's release, showrunner Craig Mazin and game co-creator Neil Druckmann spoke about the finale and why they never considered changing the game's ending despite how divisive it might be.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us finale.

'The Last of Us' Showrunner Refused to Change Game's Ending

The Last of Us has followed Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey) as they traveled across the dangerous landscape of post-apocalypse America after the globe was torn apart by the Cordyceps Brain Infection two decades earlier.

Joel and Ellie were on a mission to find the rebel group, the Fireflies, where they hoped to meet doctors who would be able to create a cure using Ellie's blood as she is immune to the infection.

However, the finale ends with a veritable bloodbath when Joel learns that Firefly leader Marlene (Merle Dandridge) and the doctors are only able to make a cure for humanity if they kill Ellie, and Joel decides he can't lose another loved one.

Rather than sacrifice Ellie for the greater good, Joel kills everyone in the hospital and takes the teen, unconscious from the operation, back. He later lies to her about the events. Rather than be honest, Joel tells Ellie that there were others who were immune like her and the doctors were unable to find a cure so she was not needed anymore.

The ending matches that of the game, and even Ramsey warned fans that it would be "massively" divisive, but Druckmann and Mazin were firm as they said they had never considered changing it.

Druckmann, who also co-created the show, said: "No, not with this production. I think Craig was already in love with it, we had like little things that we considered like changing certain shots or just beats or blinds, what I would consider superficial things, but no major deviation."

Mazin then added: "I don't think [Neil] was ever the guy who said 'no we have to do it the way it was in the game,' I was that guy.

"I am a fan, right, and Neil, in the smartest, most generous and flexible ways, was always open to the process of adaptation, he understood what adaptation meant.

"And it wasn't like he was suggesting, 'oh, we should not do the giraffe scene, or we should do it differently' or something like that, it wasn't that. It was just me saying, 'by the way, we're doing that exactly the way it is. I don't care. We're doing it as close as we can, as close as we can [to the game.]'

"But you know the ending was never a question, that was the ending... as a player, I got to the end, why would I ever want to change that? It's awesome," he added.

Druckmann concurred with Mazin, and added: "I think there's a good opportunity to talk about process, like had Craig come and said, 'hey, I've been thinking about this other ending' I'm sure at first I would tense up a little bit and hear the pitch.

"But our process would be like, 'OK, let's talk it through. Let's talk about what that [would be].' We would go back through the whole season and say have we worked up towards this other ending potentially?

"And often we would like have these pitches, like 'what if we did this drastic change?' and we'd play it through the whole story and often the answer would be like, 'yeah, it doesn't quite work or it changes too many things.'"

Mazin explained that, as a team, they "weren't afraid" to make changes to the game's story along the way, and he referenced episodes 3, 5 and 6 when he added: "Obviously we did change a lot of things and my phrase I would use with Neil was a 'radical suggestion,' and sometimes it was 'what if Sam were deaf?' 'Hey, what if Bill and Frank actually had a great relationship?'

"Other times we would play around with stuff because it's important to give things their chance. If you don't give it a chance then you can start to feel a little choked off, you know?"

JHN5T
AGBT4
WQVB7
LKM8I
DVG1J
XNH5G
UNH8I
RTB7Y
NGB6Y

Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday to act immediately in order to prevent a run on the country's banking system amid the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Established in 1983, SVB became a go-to financial institution for technology and health startup businesses in the United States, particularly for those in California's Silicon Valley tech corridor. Taking in an influx of business during the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank reported over $200 billion in assets by the end of last year.

On Friday, however, the once trusted bank of venture capital investors was shut down by regulators as customers began a run on their deposits. This is credited due to rising interest rates that devalued the bank's security, putting it on the verge of collapse.

In a letter written by Gottheimer on Sunday, the Democratic congressman asked Yellen to "take immediate steps using all necessary regulatory tools." Gottheimer suggested that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) prioritize finding a buyer for SVB to "provide a seamless transition for the bank's depositors and borrowers with the hope of making the depositors whole."

In addition, Gottheimer asked the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to encourage banks of all sizes that have relationships with SVB's depositors to extend temporary lines of credit to the bank's depositors to "assist with essential costs" like payroll. Lastly, the congressman asked that the Fed continue to offer liquidity through repurchase agreements in order to prevent contagion and assure depositors that their banks are healthy.

"If Americans can't trust that their basic deposits are safe, we could suddenly face runs at banks of all sizes across the country," Gottheimer wrote in his letter.

"Right now, we are concerned about the depositors at SVB, and at banks across the country, suddenly unnerved by SVB's catastrophic failure that unfolded in just forty-eight hours, accelerated, in part, by social media and pack mentality withdrawals," he added.

Meanwhile, Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who represents the district including Silicon Valley, is also pushing the Biden administration for "more clarity" amid the bank's collapse.

In an interview with CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, Khanna was asked about his thoughts about Yellen's remarks, in which she said the U.S. government will not "bail out" SVB.

"I have great respect for Secretary Yellen, but I think we need to have more clarity and greater strength in what the Treasury is saying," Khanna said.

"First, the principle needs to be all depositors will be protected and have full access to their accounts Monday morning. Here's what I'm hearing from people in my constituency, they are getting notes to pull out of regional banks, and all of this will be consolidated in the top four banks. We don't want that as a nation," he said.

Political analyst Craig Agranoff told Newsweek on Sunday that "to try and prevent a [bank] run, the Federal Reserve and other regulatory authorities will likely take steps to reassure depositors about the safety of their deposits in other banks."

HNBF5
ARBF7
HN3GA
WMN4Y
LKM6U
ASC4E

Agranoff said the Fed may also provide additional liquidity to the banking system in order to meet demands of depositors. He also pointed out that runs on banks are "rare events in the modern banking system, which is generally well-regulated and well-capitalized."

However, the political analyst also suggested that Monday could "be a tumultuous day for the banking sector," as SVB's collapse could potentially lead to a run on other banks.