Hasta La Gadget!

* Leaders see Republican reluctance to embrace key reforms

* Plurality of minorities may help shape future races

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

BALTIMORE, Nov 18 (Reuters) – Latinos, African-Americans and other minorities who helped President Barack Obama win a second term are skeptical about enhanced Republican outreach to their communities, but also say the future of the coalition that shaped the 2012 election may be fragile.

Top Republicans rushed to do damage control last week after Mitt Romney blamed his election loss on what he called an Obama strategy of giving “gifts” to blacks, Latinos and young voters – groups instrumental to the president’s re-election victory.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and other Republicans warned that the party could not broaden its appeal unless it stopped insulting the very voters its was trying to reach.

“We have to really question their motives and how they’re tokenizing these faces of color,” Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, told activists and organizers at a conference on racial issues in Baltimore this weekend.

She said Latino voters and other minority groups remained on guard given the Republicans’ reluctance to embrace immigration reform and other substantive issues. She said it had not escaped notice that most delegates at Republican convention were white despite the inclusion of Latino speakers.

Michael Omi, a leading scholar on U.S. racial politics at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Republican party faced a crisis in how to adapt to changing demographics, which show blacks, Latinos, Asians and others will eclipse whites as a majority of the U.S. population in three decades, without moving away from its core constituency of white males.

“All of that amounts to a pretty thin veneer,” Omi told over 1,400 teachers, doctors, artists and others at the “Facing Race” conference hosted by the non-profit Applied Research Center.

He said it was still unclear if Asian-Americans and Latinos would be increasingly accepted as “honorary whites,” which could align them more closely with the Republican party while perpetuating a black-white divide, or if the country would move toward a new, more multi-faceted view of race.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Junot Diaz, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic when he was a child and now teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the 2012 presidential election clearly reflected growing unease with what he called the Republican party’s “angry white male machine.”

“People of color have for the first time in the history of the United States attained a strategic plurality that, when coordinated, allowed us to decisively alter the outcome of the presidential campaign in Obama’s favor,” said Diaz, author of the best-selling novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

IMAGES OF WHITE SUPREMACY

But maintaining the new alliances could be tough, given long-standing tensions among various groups, deeply internalized images of white supremacy among minorities and vast economic disparities still in place 50 years after the civil rights movement, Diaz said. “Who knows if the coalition will hold, splinter, collapse or mutate,” he added.

Rinku Sen, executive director of the center that hosted the conference, said she saw growing interest in racial justice issues, including hundreds of grass-roots initiatives focused on immigrant rights, underperforming schools, healthcare, working conditions, human trafficking and mass incarceration.

Over the past four years, she said, many of those groups began working more closely together, partnering across racial, ethnic and gender lines to support each other.

In Minnesota, for instance, organizers brought together Native Americans, Somali immigrants and others to oppose a voter-identification amendment. In Maryland, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rallied its members to support an amendment legalizing same-sex marriage.

Sen said there was also far more attention to racial issues during the 2012 election, but the Republican party faced an uphill battle with non-white voters after remarks like those made by Romney, especially since the Republican policy agenda did not address the needs of large numbers of people of color.

Republicans in recent years have taken a hard line against the estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, most of whom are Hispanic. During the campaign, Romney called for “self-deportation” of such immigrants.

“Unless they figure out how to adapt their policy platforms to address those needs, I think they’re going to continue to have trouble,” Sen told Reuters during the conference.

At the same time, Sen said a record number of deportations and other issues had left many immigrants and others ambivalent about the Democratic Party as well.

Diaz told reporters the Republican political machine remained strong and well-funded and could still fragment the fledgling coalition whose success in 2012 had surprised many of its own members.

“Just because people have the numbers does not mean they’re not going to be captured,” he said. “Historically there’s been very efficient ways to neutralize numerical advantages.” (Editing by Philip Barbara)

Read More…
More on Republicans

While I love the convenience of credit cards, the interest fees and late charges can really throw you for a loop if you don’t pay them off every month. But I might just have to add one more card to my wallet just so I can have the Darth Vader Visa Card.

This awesome Star Wars credit card appears to be available only in Japan, so I’m betting they won’t approve my application – especially since I can’t even fill it out.

It’s probably for the best, anyhow. I can only imagine what would happen if I ever was one minute late with my payment on this card. The Dark Lord himself would probably force choke me (and my wife… and my cat… and my dog) until I paid up – double. Or maybe he’d send an army of clones to my front doorstep to threaten me with their blasters.

You saw what they did to Uncle Owen and Aunt Baru, right? That’s because they were 30 days past-due.

OAKLAND, Calif. — After fighting their way back from an 0-4 start to a .500 record, the New Orleans Saints now face a tough task if they want to make it back to the playoffs.

Drew Brees threw three touchdown passes and Malcolm Jenkins returned an interception for another score to get the Saints back to even with a 38-17 victory over the Oakland Raiders on Sunday.

Read More…
More on New Orleans Saints

The mobile phone, or cell phone, or smartphone as we now tend to call it, has come a long way since its invention. To celebrate its 20th anniversary Japanese communications company NTT DoCoMo put together an actual display, illustrating the the evolution of its phone line. More »

* Poorest regions hit hardest

* World Bank focuses on climate change under new chief

* Must balance climate change with energy needs of poor

By Anna Yukhananov

WASHINGTON, Nov 18 (Reuters) – All nations will suffer the effects of a warmer world, but it is the world’s poorest countries that will be hit hardest by food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought, the World Bank said in a report on climate change.

Under new World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, the global development lender has launched a more aggressive stance to integrate climate change into development.

“We will never end poverty if we don’t tackle climate change. It is one of the single biggest challenges to social justice today,” Kim told reporters on a conference call on Friday.

The report, called “Turn Down the Heat,” highlights the devastating impact of a world hotter by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, a likely scenario under current policies, according to the report.

Climate change is already having an effect: Arctic sea ice reached a record minimum in September, and extreme heat waves and drought in the last decade have hit places like the United States and Russia more often than would be expected from historical records, the report said.

Such extreme weather is likely to become the “new normal” if the temperature rises by 4 degrees, according to the World Bank report. This is likely to happen if not all countries comply with pledges they have made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even assuming full compliance, the world will warm by more than 3 degrees by 2100.

In this hotter climate, the level of the sea would rise by up to 3 feet, flooding cities in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh. Water scarcity and falling crop yields would exacerbate hunger and poverty.

Extreme heat waves would devastate broad swaths of the earth’s land, from the Middle East to the United States, the report says. The warmest July in the Mediterranean could be 9 degrees hotter than it is today — akin to temperatures seen in the Libyan desert.

The combined effect of all these changes could be even worse, with unpredictable effects that people may not be able to adapt to, said John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which along with Climate Analytics prepared the report for the World Bank.

“If you look at all these things together, like organs cooperating in a human body, you can think about acceleration of this dilemma,” said Schellnhuber, who studied chaos theory as a physicist. “The picture reads that this is not where we want the world to go.”

SHOCKED INTO ACTION

As the first scientist to head the World Bank, Kim has pointed to “unequivocal” scientific evidence for man-made climate change to urge countries to do more.

Kim said 97 percent of scientists agree on the reality of climate change.

“It is my hope that this report shocks us into action,” Kim, writes in the report.

Scientists are convinced that global warming in the past century is caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases produced by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. These findings by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were recognized by the national science academies of all major industrialized nations in a joint statement in 2010.

Kim said the World Bank plans to further meld climate change with development in its programs.

Last year, the Bank doubled its funding for countries seeking to adapt to climate change, and now operates $7.2 billion in climate investment funds in 48 countries.

The World Bank study comes as almost 200 nations will meet in Doha, Qatar, from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7 to try to extend the Kyoto Protocol, the existing plan for curbing greenhouse gas emissions by developed nations that runs to the end of the year.

They have been trying off and on since Kyoto was agreed in 1997 to widen limits on emissions but have been unable to find a formula acceptable to both rich and poor nations.

Emerging countries like China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, have said the main responsibility to cut emissions lies with developed nations, which had a headstart in sparking global warming.

Combating climate change also poses a challenge for the poverty-fighting World Bank: how to balance global warming with immediate energy needs in poor countries.

In 2010, the World Bank approved a $3.75 billion loan to develop a coal-fired power plant in South Africa despite lack of support from the United States, Netherlands and Britain due to environmental concerns.

“There really is no alternative to urgent action given the devastating consequences of climate change,” global development group Oxfam said in a statement. “Now the question for the World Bank is how it will ensure that all of its investments respond to the imperatives of the report.”

Kim said the World Bank tries to avoid investing in coal unless there are no other options.

“But at the same time, we are the group of last resort in finding needed energy in countries that are desperately in search of it,” he said.

Read More…
More on Climate Change