Tag: Burns

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Politics

Biden to faucet Nicholas Burns ambassador to China, Rahm Emanuel to Japan

Biden to tap Nicholas Burns ambassador to China, Rahm Emanuel to Japan

Nicholas Burns

Scott Mlyn | CNBC

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden announced on Friday his intention to appoint a career diplomat and former US ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, as his ambassador to China.

The president also announced that Rahm Emanuel, the former two-term mayor of Chicago, will be nominated as his ambassador to Japan.

Both announcements have been eagerly awaited, and once officially nominated, both Burns and Emanuel are expected to be ratified by the Senate.

Burns is one of America’s most skilled and respected diplomats, serving both Republicans and Democrats for more than 25 years. He was ambassador to Greece in the Clinton administration, ambassador to NATO in the George W. Bush administration and from 2005 to 2008 undersecretary of state for political affairs.

With the Biden administration making economic and geopolitical competition with China the cornerstone of its broader foreign policy, Burns would be the spearhead as ambassador.

He would likely undertake the double duty of implementing policies deeply unpopular with his Chinese hosts while maintaining a warm working relationship.

The White House has signaled that it will seek a relationship with Beijing that, in some ways, reflects Washington’s strategy towards the Kremlin.

While Russia and the United States are adversaries on almost all fronts, senior diplomats in both countries maintain specific areas of cooperation on issues where cooperation is in their mutual interest, such as nuclear arms control.

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Such a model could be applied to US-China relations, with collaboration on issues such as North Korea and climate change.

In contrast to Burns, Emanuel is neither a professional diplomat nor a Japan expert.

As former White House Chief of Staff to then President Barack Obama and previously an Illinois Congressman, Emanuel has close ties with several of the top figures in the Biden White House, including current White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.

However, within the broader Democratic Party, Emanuel is a polarizing figure.

As a centrist on issues such as immigration and health care, Emanuel has drawn the wrath of progressives in Congress since the early days of the Obama administration.

But it was his time as Mayor of Chicago that nearly ruined any chance Emanuel had to join the Biden administration.

As mayor, Emanuel has been heavily criticized for refusing to post police dashcam footage for more than a year after the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a police officer who alleged , McDonald pounced on him.

The footage of that shooting showed that McDonald was actually turned away by the policeman when the policeman shot him. McDonald collapsed on the first shot, but the officer didn’t stop; he fired another 15 shots at McDonald while the teenager was on the ground.

Emanuel claimed he never saw the video, which clearly showed the Chicago police’s version of the events was a lie.

Emails later revealed that Emanuel’s closest mayor’s aide knew early on that the police story did not match the footage.

Emanuel’s nomination as Biden’s ambassador to Japan is a blow to the progressives who fought against him.

But as with any ambassador, it is Emanuel’s personal friendship with Biden and other senior White House officials that is most important to the Japanese government.

In this regard, Tokyo is no different from any other foreign capital: a US ambassador is only as good as the time it takes to get the president on the phone.

Categories
World News

As Haitian Chief’s Funeral Nears, Anger Burns within the Streets

As Haitian Leader’s Funeral Nears, Anger Burns in the Streets

CAP-HAÏTIEN, Haiti – Hours before mourners were due to pay tribute to assassinated President Jovenel Moïse at a state funeral on Friday – a moment many hoped would help heal a broken nation – the northern city of Cap-Haïtien burned with anger and frustration exposing the deep divisions in Haiti.

Black smoke from burning tires billowed across the streets on Thursday, a common form of protest in a country divided on geography, wealth and power. Large crowds of demonstrators ran through the narrow colonial streets and shouted: “You killed Jovenel and the police were there.”

Mistrustful of the elite who had come out of the capital, angry men tried to prevent the arrival of mourners from outside the city by throwing a cinder block at the leading car of a motorcade that had navigated through the fire and later over a concrete telephone pole A street.

“We sent someone alive, they sent him back a body,” shouted Frantz Atole, a 42-year-old mechanic, promising violence. “This country will not be silent.”

The state funeral planned for the Moïse family homestead, less than half an hour from downtown Cap-Haïtien, was to attract diplomats from around the world and officials from across the country. But the uproar before the ceremony raised questions about safety and whether everyone who wanted to pay tribute to Mr. Moïse would actually come to the funeral.

Two weeks after Mr Moïse was riddled with bullets in his own bedroom in the capital, Port-au-Prince – killed by a group of Colombian mercenaries, authorities say – the country is still circling the country with unanswered questions and seething with rage. Several members of Mr Moïse’s own security department were also questioned and taken into custody.

A new government was installed in the capital this week, with leaders vowing to get to the bottom of the horrific murders and to reach consensus between the country’s warring political factions and its angry civil society groups. But the unrest Thursday threatened to turn hopes for consensus into a naive, unrealized dream.

“The Port-au-Prince bourgeoisie is responsible. You are the reason for all of this, ”said Emmanuella Joseph, a 20-year-old high school student who cried into a washcloth by the roadside at the end of an ongoing protest. “All I ask is to close all roads so they don’t come.”

She added lamentably that the president’s killers were outsiders who had long interfered in the fate of the country. “What kind of nation comes and kills a president?”

Others shouted that the police and the Presidential Guard, whose members were not injured in the attack on the President’s home, were involved in the murder.

Cap-Haïtien was dressed in mourning on Thursday. It was once the capital of the French colony of St. Domingue, which claimed one of the world’s most brutal slave plantation economies and was later overwhelmed by the world’s most successful slave rebellion. Banners hung over the streets reading “Justice for President Jovenel” and “Thank you, President Jovenel. You gave your life for the struggle of the people and it will go on. “

In the immediate vicinity of the city’s main stone square, where rebel leaders were executed more than two centuries ago, mourners queued to sign books of condolence and light candles before a large photo of the president was taken in a government building.

“We live in such a fragile time,” said Maxil Mompremier in front of the Notre Dame de L’Assomption cathedral from colonial times, where Moïse’s supporters had previously gathered for a service. “Nobody understands what happened. Lots of people are scared. “

The assassination of the President of Haiti

Mr Moïse comes from the north of the country and was not known in the country’s center of power, Port-au-Prince, when he was elected as a candidate for the 2015 elections by the ruling party. Born in the nearby town of Trou-du-Nord, he later began his entrepreneurial career in Port-de-Paix, where he became President of the Chamber of Commerce.

The fact that he was killed far away in Port-au-Prince sparked old divisions between the less developed north and the capital and economic center of the country and deepened the rifts between the country’s small elite and its destitute majority.

“It occurs incessantly in the entire history of Haiti,” said Emile Eyma Jr., a historian from Cap-Haïtien, speaking of the resentments of the northerners. “It is dangerous that both the question of color and the question of regionalism are used as weapons for purely political reasons.”

The president’s wife, Martine Moïse, who was injured in the attack, has announced that her family will pay for the funeral. Planes arrived at the usually sleepy airport all day, with more to arrive on Friday.

But anger burned in the streets of this city.

“We’ll protest all night,” Mr. Atole vowed as the tires burned on a bridge behind him. “We’ll make it difficult for them in town.”

Harold Isaac contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Health

How Weight Coaching Burns Fats

How Weight Training Burns Fat

Before and after that process, the researchers drew blood, biopsied tissues, centrifuged fluids and microscopically searched for vesicles and other molecular changes in the tissues.

They noted plenty. Before their improvised weight training, the rodents’ leg muscles had teemed with a particular snippet of genetic material, known as miR-1, that modulates muscle growth. In normal, untrained muscles, miR-1, one of a group of tiny strands of genetic material known as microRNA, keeps a brake on muscle building.

After the rodents’ resistance exercise, which consisted of walking around, though, the animals’ leg muscles appeared depleted of miR-1. At the same time, the vesicles in their bloodstream now thronged with the stuff, as did nearby fat tissue. It seems, the scientists concluded, that the animals’ muscle cells somehow packed those bits of microRNA that retard hypertrophy into vesicles and posted them to neighboring fat cells, which then allowed the muscles immediately to grow.

But what was the miR-1 doing to the fat once it arrived, the scientist wondered? To find out, they marked vesicles from weight-trained mice with a fluorescent dye, injected them into untrained animals, and tracked the glowing bubbles’ paths. The vesicles homed in on fat, the scientists saw, then dissolved and deposited their miR-1 cargo there.

Soon after, some of the genes in the fat cells went into overdrive. These genes help direct the breakdown of fat into fatty acids, which other cells then can use as fuel, reducing fat stores. In effect, weight training was shrinking fat in mice by creating vesicles in muscles that, through genetic signals, told the fat it was time to break itself apart.

“The process was just remarkable,” said John J. McCarthy, a professor of physiology at the University of Kentucky, who was an author of the study with his then graduate student Ivan J. Vechetti Jr. and other colleagues.

Mice are not people, though. So, as a final facet of the study, the scientists gathered blood and tissue from healthy men and women who had performed a single, fatiguing lower-body weight workout and confirmed that, as in mice, miR-1 levels in the volunteers’ muscles dropped after their lifting, while the quantity of miR-1-containing vesicles in their bloodstreams soared.

Of course, the study mostly involved mice and was not designed to tell us how often or intensely we should lift to maximize vesicle output and fat burn. But, even so, the results serve as a bracing reminder that “muscle mass is vitally important for metabolic health,” Dr. McCarthy said, and that we start building that mass and getting our tissues talking every time we hoist a weight.