HSFC_2017_01_11

(Jacob Rumans) #1

XXXXX SFChronicle.com | Wednesday,January 11, 2017|A


SILWAD, West Bank —
Maryam Abdel-Kareem
gazed longingly onto the
plot ofWest Bank land
she inherited from her
father. Once planted with
tomatoes, cucumbers and
okra, the wind-swept
hilltop now hosts the
whit e trailer homes of an
Israeli settlement outpost
that took root more than
20 years ago.
Now, Abdel-Kareem
and otherPalestinian
landowners are set to
reclaim the property they
watchedstripped from
them, hoping to finally
put to rest a bitter,years-
long legal saga onFeb. 8
—the latest court-or-
dered dead line for the
evacuation of the Amona
outpost.
“I’ve never lost hope,”
said Abdel-Kareem, 82,
peering outacross a rocky
valley toward Amona.
“It’s as ifyou ha ve this
child andyou hug him
and love him, andyou
don’t want to let himgo.
The land is like this to me,
more precious than a
child.”
Amona is one ofabout
100 outpostsacross the
West Bank that Israel
considers illegal but toler-
ates and often allows to
flourish.It was estab-
lished in the mid-1990s,
when a small group of
settlers,quietly beckoned
by government-funded
infrastructure, erected
caravans on therugged
knoll.
Amona now houses a
synagogue, a basketball
court andabout 300 resi-
dents. It became asymbol
of settlerdefiancewhen
Israeldemolished nine of
its structures in 2006,
sparking violentclashes

between settlers and
Israeli security forces.
In 2008, thePalestinian
landowners, represented
by lawyers from the Is-
raeli legal rights group
Yesh Din, petitioned the
Supreme Court to have
the outpost removed.
The state agreed to
peacefullydemolish the
outpostby the end of 2012
but the move was repeat-
edly delayed. What
seemed like a finalruling
in 2014,decl aring the land
private Palestinian prop-
erty, gave Israel until Dec.
25, 2016, to carry out the
evacuation.But under
fierce pressure from set-
tlers and theirsupporters
in parliament, thegovern-
ment secured a 45-day
extension until early
February. There isstill no
alternate housing solu-
tion for the 40families
living in Amona.
The landowners
watched with frustration
as their landswere taken.
Yesh Din says reports
about land theft filed with
Israeli police in the late
1990s went unaddressed,
and Palestinianattempts
to drawawareness to the
issuewere th warted.
The outpost hasdom-
inated headlines in Israel,
and the settlers’fate has
posed a serious risk to
PrimeMinister Benjamin
Netanyahu ’s coalition,
after the pro-settlerJew-
ish Home party threat-
ened towalk outover it.
In ad dition to the unau-
thorized outposts, there
are about 120Jewish set-
tlements Israel considers
legal. Both settlements
and outposts are opposed
by the international com-
munity aswell as the
Palestinians.

Tia Goldenberg and
Mohammed Daraghmeh are
Associated Press writers.

ISRAEL


Palestinians


await outpost


evacuation


By Tia Goldenberg
and Mohammed
Dara ghmeh

BEIJING — President-
elect DonaldTrump has
calledclimatechange a
hoax createdby China
and said hewould cancel
an internationalaccord
to curb greenhouse gas
emissions.But lea ders of
other nations, including
China, are rollingup
theirsleeves for the hard
work of putting thatdeal
into practice.
The accord, an ambi-
tiousglob al effort signed
in 2015 and known as the
Paris agreement, rests on
a foundation of transpar-
ency andgood faith:
Countries aresupposed
to report andsubmit for
verification their carbon
emissions data.Without
accurate and timely re-
porting, there is noway
to monitor progress and
adjust policies.
China, theworld’s
biggest polluter, has
refused toaccept in-
ternational monitoring of
its emissions and says it
will provide data to out-
side observers. In the
past, conflicting data


about the country’s ener-
gy use has raisedques-
tionsabout accuracy.
To take on a leader-
ship role to promote the
Paris agreement, as Chi-
na has indicatedit wants
to do, Beijing will have to
be more transparent on
emissions.Whatexactly
would it have to do?
The work of creating
an international “trans-
parency regime” has
already begun.At a sum-
mit meeting inMarra-
kesh, Morocco, inNo-
vember, officials dis-
cussed a plan to establish
standards and mecha-
nisms for reporting.
Over the next twoyears,
negotiators will engage
in “the most technically
complex and politically
contentious issues,” said
Li Shuo, a Beijing-based
climate policy analyst at
GreenpeaceEast Asia.
But China, he said,
“still has a longway to
improve its transparency
system.”
International negotia-
tors are expected to draw
up standards that will
apply to bothdeveloped
and developing coun-

tries, unlike the bifurcat-
ed reporting require-
ments of olderclimate
deals. This means that
China andIndia will be
compelled to provide the
same kinds of informa-
tion that, say, France and
Japan do.
A country’s green-
house-gas output isde-
terminedby extrapolat-
ing dataabout energy
use rather than directly
measuringit. Accurate
annual coal consumption
statistics are critical for
these calculations be-
cause industrial coal
burning is the biggest
source of greenhouse-gas
pollution.
But China’s coalstatis-
tics aresubject to official
corrections andchanges,
and updates are released
just onceevery five
years, when the country
conducts an economic
census.
The last census re-
vealed that China’s coal-
derived energy use was
12 to 14 percent higher
than previous estimates
for every year since 2005.
Furthermore, there are
persistent differences

between coal consump-
tion statistics reported
on the provincial and
national levels.
“Over time,it would
be desirable if the report-
ing systems are im-
proved,” saidGlen Pe-
ters, a scientistat the
Center forInternational
Climate and Environ-
mentalResearch-Oslo.
“The fact that the census
leads to 10 percent revi-
sions insuchan impor-
tant commodity is a little
worrying.”
“The U.S., for exam-
ple, also has revisions,
but generally less than 1
percent in the firstyear
and maybe 0.1 percent in
followingyears,” he said.
Another problem is
that China has been
reluctant to releaseits
own calculations of emis-
sions, so other nations
rely on calculations
made byforeign scien-
tists.
There is“no good
reason” China is drag-
ging its feet, said Li, the
Greenpeace analyst.

EdwardWong is a New
York Times writer.

CHINA


Kevin Frayer / GettyImages 2016

A Chinesewoman wears a mask asshe walks down astreeton a polluted day inBeijing last month.


Beijing’s policies stifle bid


to lead climate movement


By Edward Wong


HONGKONG — Clare
Hollingworth, a British
war correspondentwho
was the first to report the
Nazi in vasion ofPoland
that marked the begin-
ning ofWorld War II,
died inHong Kong on
Tuesday. She was 105.
The Foreign Corre-
spondents’ Club of Hong
Kong announced her
death, calling her a be-
loved member with a
remarkable career in-
cluding “the scoop of the
century.”
Adetermined journal-
ist who defied gender
barriers and narrowly
escapeddeath se veral
times, Ms.Hollingworth
spentmuchof her career
on the front lines of major
conflicts, including in the
Middle East, North Africa
and Vietnam,working for
British newspapers.She
lived her final fourde-
cades in Hong Kong after
being one of the fewWest-
ern journalistsstationed
in China in the1970s.
She won major British
journalismawards in-
cluding a “WhatThe
Papers Say” lifetime
achievementaward and
was ma de an Officer of
the Order of the British
Empireby Queen Eliza-


beth II.Former British
PrimeMinisterEdward
Heat h and formerHong
Kong Gov. ChrisPatten
were fans of Ms.Holling-
worth.
The scoop that
launched her career came
in lateAugust 1939, when
she was a 27-year-old
rookie reporter in south-
ern Poland, barely aweek
into her job with Britain’s
DailyTelegraph.
The borderwas closed
to all but diplomaticvehi-
cles, soshe borrowed a
British consulate official’s
car to drive into German-
occupied territory. She
saw tanks, armored cars
and artillery massing.
She recounted in her
autobiography that bur-

lap screens beside the
road,“constructed to hide
the militaryvehicles, blew
in the wind, thus I saw the
battledeployment.”
“I guessed that the
German Commandwas
preparing tostrike to the
north ofKatowice andits
fortified lines and this, in
fact, was exactly how they
launched their invasion in
the south.”
Returning toPoland,
she filed herstory, but her
namewas not on the
byline — a common prac-
tice for newspapers in
those days.
She scored another
scoopwhen theNazis
launched their invasion
three days later on Sept. 1.
Her first callwas to the

British Embassy inWar-
saw, but the officialshe
talked to didn’t believe
her.
“‘Listen!’ I held the
telephone outmy bed-
room window. The grow-
ing roar of tanks encir-
cling Katowicewas clear-
ly audible,”she recounted
in herautobiography.
“‘Can’t you hearit?’ ”
She then called the
Telegraph’s Warsaw
correspondent,who dic-
tated herstory toLondon.
As the Nazis adva nced,
Ms. Hollingworth scram-
bled toget out ofPoland,
eventually making her
way to Romania.
After thePolish in-
vasion, Ms.Hollingworth
covered hostilities in
North Africa.When Al-
lied forces capturedTrip-
oli, Libya,in 1943, British
Field Marshall Bernard
Montgomery ordered her
back to Cairo because he
didn’t wa nt women
around. Soshe insteadgot
herselfaccredited with
U.S. forces in Algeria.
Ms. Hollingworth
wrote articles for the
InternationalHerald
Tribune andAsian Wall
Street Journalwell into
her oldage.

Kelvin Chan is an
Associated Press writer.

CLARE HOLLINGWORTH1911-


Journalist broke news of WW II


Kin Cheung /Associated Press 2016
ClareHollingworth celebrated her 105th birthdayat
the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in October.

By Kelvin Chan


WORLD

Free download pdf