White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

IRENA Panel Urges Youth To Move from Anger to Action on Energy Transition

At the IRENA Youth Forum, young people in conference room listen to speakers.

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ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change canary, didn’t participate in the 13th assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), held in Abu Dhabi on Jan. 14 to 15. Perhaps it was because she was otherwise engaged in protesting against the razing of the German village of Lützerath for the expansion of a coal mine.

No matter. The urgency always in Thunberg’s voice on climate change was heard all over the assembly, from COP28 President-designate Sultan al-Jaber of the United Arab Emirates saying in a session, “Over the next seven years, we will need to more than triple renewable generating capacity worldwide. The world must move much faster than ever before,” to U.S. climate envoy John Kerry insisting in another session that not enough money was being “put on the table” to achieve net-zero targets.

“We’re either not trying to do it or we’re trying to do it on the cheap, and the result is that we’re not doing it,” Kerry said. “The system is broken in terms of how we’re trying to fix this, and we need to respond more effectively.”

Among the 1,500 or so high-flier participants at the assembly, convened to identify energy transition priorities in preparation for the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, were hundreds of fledglings — youths from all over the world, ranging from high schoolers to ministers of parliaments under the age of 45 — all eager to get into the energy transition formation.

Ernest Mkhonta, managing director of Eswatini Electric Company, told me, “Actually, I think youth should be leading the formation.”

For the fourth time at its assembly, Abu Dhabi-based IRENA, a lead intergovernmental agency for energy transformation, whose membership comprises 167 states and the European Union, has held a youth forum. At this one, young people heard from a diverse panel on how to move from demonstrating to decision-making in an equitable energy transition.

Passy Amayo Ogolla, a program manager leading implementation of the Sustainable Energy Futures for Eastern Africa Program at the Society for International Development, echoing some of Thunberg’s angry statements on the world dawdling on pathway to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), said bluntly at the forum, “Friends, we’re running out of time.”

Ogolla, who serves as vice chair of IRENA Global Council on Enabling Youth Action for SDG7 (ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all is the seventh of the sustainable development goals established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015), noted that today, there are 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 years, accounting for 16 percent of the global population. By 2030 — the target date for the SDGs that make up the UN 2030 agenda — the number of youth is projected to have grown by 7 percent, to nearly 1.3 billion.

“We must run faster and hold world leaders accountable in the energy transition. We need to create the change that we need for an equitable energy future for all,” she said.

Hans Olav Ibrekk, Norway’s special envoy for climate and security, who called himself an “old-timer” but wanted to be addressed by his first name, said it was great to see young people from 15o countries in the room and “willing to take on the mess that my generation has created. You definitely have your work cut out for you.”

Ibrekk commended IRENA for creating the youth forum, saying,  “We need a new dialog between youth and decision-makers in order to accelerate the energy transition.”

After COP27, he said, the message is that the world needs action and radical solutions: “We need all hands on deck, and we need agents of change. … You represent untapped youth potential for the energy transition.”

Political institutions, for their part, need to make sure that all voices are heard, Ibrekk said. “We can hear you, but we don’t really listen to you.” He urged young people to be responsible and engage in the political process, particularly by voting.

Attracting young talent is one of the major challenges of the energy transition. “We don’t have enough [technically] trained people to do what we have to do,” Ibrekk said. He encouraged young people in the room to pursue “careers of relevance in the energy sector.”

Digitization in the energy sector, he said for example, “offers a huge potential for young people to play an active role in the transition. “We old-timers are not really used to this,” he admitted, “You should use your comparative advantage in this area.” He added that as older energy sector workers retire, “there will be plenty of empty seats in offices” to fill.

The theme of the youth forum was “Empowering Youth To Lead an Equitable and Sustainable Energy Future.” Ditte Juul Jorgensen, European Commission director general for energy, said renewables can be “local and global at the same time.”An example: rooftop solar. “There is a huge potential in renewables to benefit everyone,” she said.

A European Union concern is that in order for renewables to be accessed universally — a key policy point — countries need more access to power generation, including wind turbines, Jorgensen said.

Sahar Albazar, a member of Egypt’s parliament, said the Inter-Parliamentary Union Forum of Young Parliamentarians, for which she serves as president, advocates with governments to “put youth in the driver’s seat” in the energy transition.

She noted that the group of 24,000 MPs under the age of 45 is focusing on the need for wind, solar, carbon capture, and new technologies that help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Having young MPs versed in renewable energy means “we can work with our tools and power to allocate the budgets for things we want to focus on, both locally and nationally, and to put in more incentives for private and world investments,” she said.

Asked how those who haven’t flown up to being MPs can have a place at the decision-making table, Albazar replied, “Can I have a show of hands of those who know the term ‘entrepreneur’?” Hands flew up all over the room.

“So you know the energy that entrepreneurs bring to business and innovation. We need political entrepreneurs, innovators,” she said.

Albazar said her group of young MPs is urging parliaments to use some of its six tools empower young people. The first, she cited, is to get young people into leadership positions. “We want the age to run for office to be equal to the age to vote,” she said, noting that in some countries, 18 is the voting age, but  the candidacy age is 24 or 25.

She said her group is also working to get parliaments to mentor young MPs and to create youth caucuses or committees. “We have your back,” she said.

The final speaker, Felicity Tan, director of global partnerships at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, said her group is working on access to energy.

“Whether it is health, education, empowerment, or whatever you are working on, without energy, it isn’t possible,” she said. “At the same time, by our estimates, about half of the planet doesn’t have access … 3.85 billion people. And that is the North-South access divide right there.”

The alliance is working with IRENA, which is among 19 global partners (governmental, financial, investors), on three specific areas for youth empowerment in the energy transition: education, training and technical skills, and advocacy — “not just giving youth a voice, but giving them agency.”

The first Global Stocktake will be held at the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (COP28), taking place in Abu Dhabi from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12.

Postcards from Edinburgh

Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.

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Eerie Edinburgh

I play a silly game of characterizing cities as things. Here’s how it goes: If London were a holiday, which one would it be? My answer — no doubt influenced by Charles Dickens — is Christmas. Paris is New Year’s, because I’ve spent a few memorable ones there, feasting, drinking bubbly, and giving cheek kisses.

Halloween? New Orleans, with its haunted French Quarter houses, voodoo and vampire lore, is my pick. But Edinburgh can give The Big Easy a run for its money.

In fact, Edinburgh has just been named one of the top three creepiest cities in the United Kingdom by Skiddle, an events discovery platform, based on the combined number of reported hauntings and Halloween-themed events. According to Skiddle, bookings of ghost tours are way up in London and Brighton, which take the top two places in its survey, and Edinburgh.

A terror tour favorite in Edinburgh, Greyfriars Kirkyard, a church cemetery established in the mid-16th century, is a one-stop shop of horrors, replete with ghosts, ghouls, and bodysnatching.

I would’ve thought that the British tourists would’ve been spooked enough by the economic ghosts of 1979 — a stagnant economy, surging inflation, and waves of industrial unrest, trounced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-market policies in the following years.

Prime Minister Liz Truss, who resigned amid the all the Tory turmoil, was no ghostbuster.

Yes! We Have No Newspapers

There is a newsagent on Princes Street, near the Apex Waterloo Place Hotel. Above the door, hangs a sign for The Scotsman,” the Edinburgh daily, flanked by two smaller signs for other city newspapers: The Evening News, and the Daily Record and Sunday Mail.

My husband and I stopped in to buy some newspapers, keen to read the coverage of the Scottish National Party Conference. But we found none there.

Yes, they had Fyffes bananas, and the shelves were stacked nearly to the ceiling with boxes of “sweet biscuits” and shortbread, especially the shiny red tartan boxes of Walkers Shortbread, advertised on the shelf as “Walkers Pure Butter Luxury Shortbread Top Quality All Size Box 3.99 p.”

I walked up to the cashier, a young man of South Asian origin, and asked if he sold newspapers. He said he gave up selling them because he didn’t want to deal with the “all the paperwork and returns for a few pence on a sale.”

Anyway, he adamantly said, “Nobody ever needs to read newspapers. They have nothing in them, only opinions.”

Surely, I said, there’s a newsagent in the vicinity that sells newspapers. Somewhat grudgingly, he told me to go to the WHSmith shop in the train station.

I left the no-news newsagent and walked to the station. I bought 15 pounds worth of newspapers at the WHSmith because I’m a big-spending nobody.

Sir Jim, ‘The Bonnie Baker’

In read in The Herald that Walkers Shortbread’s profits had more than doubled to 62 million pounds sterling this year, boosted by strong demand in key markets.

In the late 1980s, when I was the editor of a global food industry paper, I interviewed Jim Walker, head of the family-owned baking company, which was founded by Joseph Walker in 1898. In my story about Walkers, I dubbed him “The Bonnie Baker.” He is now Sir Jim, having received his knighthood in the late Queen’s Birthday Honors earlier this year.

Walker told The Herald that it had been “a very, very difficult couple of years” due to COVID and supply problems. “Butter has virtually doubled, and the price of flour has gone up as well,” he said.

Butter was a problem for Walkers in the late 1980s, but for quite a different reason.

In the U.S. cookies market, where Walkers wanted more penetration, it was a bad time for butter. Spurred by food activists, like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, consumers were demanding that cookie manufacturers eliminate highly-saturated fats, from butter to palm oil, in their products.

On a visit to the company’s headquarters in Abelour, in the Highlands, during that saturated fat-cutting time, I offered Walker this advice: Find a healthy butter substitute.

“No, we can’t,” he said firmly. “Butter is one of four shortbread ingredients.”

I offered him another pat of advice: Extend the brand’s product line with chocolate chip shortbread.

This was probably already in the works, but I’d like to think that I was responsible for Walkers adding another ingredient — and going on to become the largest British exporter of shortbread and cookies to the U.S. market.

Buchanan Fish Fight

The Buchanan clan has its first new chief in over 340 years.

“The last Buchanan chief, John Buchanan, died in 1681 without a male heir. Identifying the new chief required decades of genealogical research conducted by renowned genealogist, the late Hugh Peskett,” according to History Scotland, a Scottish heritage website.

John Michael Ballie-Hamilton Buchanan was inaugurated Oct. 8 in a ceremony in Cambusmore, Callander, the modern seat of Clan Buchanan and the chief’s ancestral home. International representatives of the clan’s diaspora – from North America (count conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan) to New Zealand — celebrated alongside the chiefs and other representatives of 10 ancient Scottish clans, History Scotland reported.

“Speaking before the inauguration, Lady Buchanan, said they expected many neighboring clans to attend – despite, in some cases, a long history of rancor,” The Daily Telegraph’s Olivia Rudgard wrote.

“ ‘Spats’ involving the Buchanan clan include a 15th century feud with Clan MacLaren, apparently started at a fair when a Buchanan man slapped a member of the MacLaren clan with a salmon and knocked his hat off his head.

“It ended in a bloody skirmish which killed, among others, one of the sons of the MacLaren chief,” she wrote.

With apologies to Robert Burns, a Scot’s a Scot, for a’ that — and Scotland is a bonnie place to visit.

 

 

O Pioneering Millennials, There Are Cities with Cheap Houses

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Millennials are supercharging the U.S. housing market. They have lots of cash, and they’re making a dash for cities like Boise, Idaho, Raleigh, N.C., Tampa, Fla., and Austin, Texas.

As home mortgage rates rise and inventory shrinks in those and other A-list cities, millennials, particularly those who can work remotely, might want to consider C-list — C for cheap — cities.

Hey, millennial. Don’t be bummed about being outbid for that pricey “adorable vintage house within walking distance to entertainment” in Austin (actually, a teardown with a honky-tonk a few yards from the back porch). Be cheered that Wall Street 24/7, a news and financial site, has just released a special report entitled “The Cheapest City to Buy a Home in Every State.”

If you’re a pioneering millennial, here are a few cities in the report:

Gary, Indiana could be “your home sweet home” — just like the line from the song in “The Music Man,” which was a hit on stage and screen long before you were born. The median home value is $66,000. Cheap homes abound in this not-so-cheerful city.

Flint, Michigan. The fact that you can’t drink the water is no problem for you because you’ve only ever drunk bottled water. The median home value is $29,000. If you decide to buy a home there, keep buying bottled water from fresh municipal springs — in other states.

Camden, New Jersey. There is great news for home buyers. Trenton has taken the “Murder Capital of New Jersey” title away from Camden, a perennial titleholder. The median home value in Camden is a bargain $84,000 versus $335,600 for New Jersey. Camden is downriver from Trenton, so mind the floating corpse risk.

Minot, North Dakota. It’s a hot market: The median home value is $208,700 versus $193,900 for the state. As for temperature, it’s not. A school friend from Minot told me the saying there was, “Why not Minot? Because freezing is the reason.” Look at those months of frigid temperatures as being the reason to get more wear out of your chichi Canada Goose Expedition Parka.

East St. Louis, Missouri. One resident, in a review on the Niche site, wrote, “I didn’t like all of the abandoned homes and buildings. It looked like the area isn’t livable and then two houses down, it is livable.” The Niche reviewers give the city bad marks for violence, but great ones for the high school football team and the diners. The median house value is $54,000.

The city that really caught my eye in the report was Danville, Virginia – a state where I lived for most of my life.

For years, because I’m interested in architecture, I’ve pored through listings on historic house sites. Recently on one site, there were many dilapidated Victorian houses listed in Danville’s Old West End, priced from $15,000 to $55,000.

For much of its history, Danville was a D-list city – D for disreputable. This tobacco-processing and textile-manufacturing city’s reputation rolled downhill for a century, from the Civil War (where it was major center of Confederate activity; and was the “Last Capital of the Confederacy” from April 3-7, 1865) to “Bloody Monday,” the name given to a series of arrests and brutal attacks that took place during a nonviolent protest by Blacks against segregation laws and racial inequality on June 10, 1963. Of the protests, leading up to the March on Washington on Aug. 28, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, “As long as the Negro is not free in Danville, Virginia, the Negro is not free anywhere in the United States of America.”

Danville’s work in recent decades to create a new identity is paying off. The median home value is $90,500. The city is attracting high-tech companies and millennial workers – new residents who will continue its transformation from disreputable to desirable.

Face Masks: What’s Good for Us Isn’t Good for the Geese

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When I lived in Manhattan, I pursued an unusual pastime. I started it to avoid eye contact with Unification Church members who peddled flowers and their faith on many street corners in the 197os. If a Moonie (as a church member was known derisively) were to approach me, I’d cast my eyes down to the sidewalk, where I’d see things that would set my mind wandering.

In the winter months, I’d see lone gloves and mittens. On the curb in front of La Cote Basque on East 55th Street, the luxe French restaurant where Truman Capote dined with the doyennes of New York’s social scene and dished on them in his unfinished novel, “Answered Prayers,” I saw a black leather glove with a gold metal “F” sewn on the cuff. I coveted such a Fendi pair, eyeing them at the glove counter at Bergdorf Goodman, but not buying them – they cost about a third of my Greenwich Village studio apartment rent in the late 1970s. On the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, in front of an FAO Schwartz window, I saw a child’s mitten, expertly knit in a red-and-white Norwegian pattern that I never had the patience to follow. I wondered whether the child dropped the mitten after removing it to point excitedly to a toy in the window.

In the summer months, I’d see pairs of sunglasses and single sneakers on the sidewalks, things that had fallen out of stuffed weekenders. It wasn’t unusual for me to see pantyhose. Working women in Manhattan, in my time there, could wear a short-sleeved wrap dress – the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg was the working woman’s boilersuit — in the summer, but they’d better have put on pantyhose, or packed a pair in their pocketbooks or tote bags. The pantyhose would fall out of them and roll like tumbleweed along the avenues.

One summer morning on Perry Street, near where I lived, I saw a long, black zipper. It looked like a black snake had slithered out of a drain grate on the street and was warming itself on the asphalt, its white belly gleaming in the sun.

Now when I walk on a city sidewalk, I still look down, not to pursue my pastime but to preserve myself from tripping and falling on them. I sometimes see interesting litter, but mostly I see single-use and reusable face masks.

This fall, as I walked on the waterfront promenade along the Rondout Creek in Kingston, New York, I saw a single-use mask swirling in the wind with the fallen leaves. I grabbed the mask and deposited it in a trash can, worried that it would fall into the creek, ensnarling the waterfowl and the fish.

Mask of Doom: A face mask imperiling ducks on the Rondout Creek in Kingston, N.Y. Photo: Linda Gasparello

In the Covid-19 crisis, masks have been lifesavers. But masks, especially single-use, polypropylene surgical masks, have been killing marine wildlife and devastating ecosystems.

Billions of masks have been entering our oceans and washing onto our beaches when they are littered, when waste management systems are inadequate or nonexistent, or when these systems become overwhelmed due to increased volumes of waste.

A new report from OceansAsia, a Hong Kong-based marine conservation organization, estimates that 1.56 billion masks will have entered the oceans in 2020. This will result in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tonnes of marine plastic pollution, says the report, entitled “Masks on the Beach: The impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.”

Single-use masks are made from a variety of meltdown plastics and are difficult to recycle, due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection, the report points out. These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down, slowly turning into microplastics ingested by wildlife.

“Marine plastic pollution is devastating our oceans. Plastic pollution kills an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, over a million seabirds, and even greater numbers of fish, invertebrates, and other animals each year. It also negatively impacts fisheries and the tourism industry and costs the global economy an estimated $13 billion per year,” according to Gary Stokes, operations director of OceansAsia.

The report recommends that people wear reusable masks, and to dispose of all masks properly.

I hope everyone will wear them for the sake of their own and others’ health, and that I won’t see them lying on sidewalks on my strolls, or on beaches, where they are a sorry sight.

How Tortoise Rides Led to Hope for COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s

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A little boy was taken to the Staten Island (N.Y.) Zoo where he was enthralled to ride Jalopy, a Galapagos tortoise.

Jalopy became a favorite. But then one day the giant tortoise wasn’t there, and the little boy learned she had cancer and had been taken to Arizona for radiation treatment.

“I had never heard of radiation,” said Dr. James S. Welsh, professor of radiation oncology at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois. But his love of that tortoise was enough for him to devote his life to radiation therapy.

Now Welsh is in the vanguard of doctors who hope to save lives by using radiation as a therapy for patients with COVID-19 — and possibly as a therapy for Alzheimer’s, arthritis and other diseases where inflammation plays a role.

Inflammation is present when the body’s immune system mobilizes to fight disease or injury. The problems come when the immune system, according to Welsh and other doctors I have interviewed, goes “haywire.”

Radiation can’t cure COVID-19, Welsh explained, but it can be used to reduce the acute inflammation, known as cytokine storm. This causes a flooding of the lungs and is what kills most COVID-19 patients.

Using very low doses of radiation to fight respiratory inflammation isn’t new: It was how viral pneumonia was treated more than 75 years ago, before the perfecting of a battery of drugs that took over.

Radiation was highly effective against viral pneumonia, with success rates recorded at 80 percent or better. Antibiotic drugs combined with growing public antipathy to radiation in all forms took it off the pneumonia therapy list.

But now it appears to be back-to-the-future time for radiation.

Welsh says that a patient about to enter acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which kills many COVID-19 patients, can be treated with low-dose radiation to clear the lungs. Afterward, the patient can return to the ward to get treatment with antiviral drugs. No ICU, no ventilator, no long-term scarring of the lungs.

“Radiation could be used with a drug like remdesivir or another drug, like steroids. But it is my opinion that radiation will prove superior to dexamethasone or other steroid medicines,” Welsh said in an interview with me on “White House Chronicle,” the PBS television program.

A few clinical trials of low-dose radiation therapy for COVID-19 have begun in the United States and six other countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom.

“Although peer-reviewed results have yet to be published, preliminary data seem very encouraging, and certainly justify the siting of a proposed clinical trial here,” said Welsh, referring to the Hines VA Hospital in Chicago, where he is the chief of radiation therapy. He hopes to launch a clinical trial there in weeks.

The radiation doses for COVID-19 treatment are extremely low. Welsh is planning to use 0.5 gray in his trial, but others use more, 1 gray or even 1.5 grays. Those are above X-ray doses, but well below cancer doses. Brain cancer and lung cancer patients get doses of 60 grays, with up to 80 grays for prostate cancer, Welsh said.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t opposition.

Much of the concern over radiation is associated with the linear, no-threshold (LNT) model that posits that all radiation will have detrimental health effects even at minuscule levels, like normal background. This theory has been contested violently for decades by nuclear scientists, but it remains an undermining orthodoxy.

“Most people and physicians are not familiar with the potential application as an anti-inflammatory in infectious disease,” Welsh said.

Nonetheless, he believes the future beckons. When I asked him about the use of radiation in other diseases where inflammation was a factor, particularly Alzheimer’s and arthritis, he responded, “A definitive ‘yes.’ ”

The beauty of radiation therapy, according Welsh and others, is that about half the hospitals in the country have radiology departments and staff. Treatments for COVID-19 patients could begin almost immediately.

As to Jalopy, she died in 1983 at the age of 77. She was so popular over the 46 years she lived at the zoo that a bronze sculpture of a Galapagos tortoise was erected as a memorial.

And you might say, her memory radiates hope for the future.

We’re All Screaming, and Some Are Cussing, for Ice Cream

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You’ve heard of an ice cream social — an event in a home or elsewhere, using ice cream as its central theme, dating back to the 18th century in America.

Thomas Jefferson became the first president to serve ice cream at the White House in 1802. An epicure, Jefferson had his own personal recipe for vanilla ice cream.

Now, in the time of COVID-19 and President Trump, there are ice cream anti-socials.

These events feature meltdowns by customers in ice cream shops over having to wear face masks, having to stand six feet apart waiting in line — or even having fewer flavor choices on the menu. No Peanut Butter Caramel Cookie Dough? What’s America coming to? As Trump might tweet, “So terrible!”

The latest reported ice cream anti-socials in New England happened at Brickley’s, an ice cream shop with locations in Narragansett and Wakefield, R.I. In early May, one at Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour in Mashpee, Mass., described by its owner as “insane,” made national news.

The Brickley’s events mirrored the one in Cape Cod in the rude, crude and socially unacceptable behavior of some customers.

Steve Brophy, who owns and operates Brickley’s with his wife, said in a June 22 Facebook post, “Over the last two weeks at both our locations, we have experienced on multiple occasions customers who will not wear their mask (asking us to show them the law) or are angry they can’t get exactly what they want due to the reduced menu. I, personally, had one man yell at me, ‘What’s your f—ing problem?’ because I had told him he needed to move his car which was blocking traffic. A few more expletives hurled toward me and I (for the first time in 26 years) told him to take his business elsewhere.

“Some of these customers are being verbally abusive to our young staff. That is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. I cannot ask our high school and college (age) staff to police the behavior of some who choose to ignore our rules.”

As if what these boors said wasn’t enough, Brophy also said in the post: “Another customer, who could not get exactly what he wanted, told our staff member, ‘You are babies. Are you going to let Gina hold your hand all summer?’ and ‘I hope you go out of f—ing business.’ ”

By “Gina,” the customer was referring to Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, who issued an order on May 8 requiring all residents over the age of two to wear face coverings or masks while in public settings, whether indoors or outdoors. It’s the law.

The simple pleasure of going out for an ice cream, an all-American summer activity, is being taken away from adults and children, who’ve been holed up during the pandemic, by foul-mouthed people, partisan or not.

If they want to signal their vileness, maybe an enterprising one of their lot should open an ice cream shop: no masks, flavors like COVID-19 Cookies and Cream, and all abuse-spewing patrons welcome.

These ice cream anti-social events are likely to happen all over the country, especially as the summer and the 2020 presidential campaigns heat up.

July is National Ice Cream Month. I propose, a chilling out, a time for Americans to reflect on the nice tradition of ice cream socials and going out for an ice cream.

Don’t be a jerk. Stop hurling expletives and politics at shop owners and staff: high school and college students who are trying to make a buck by scooping your ice cream, making your life a little sweeter.

Slim Pickings in Northern Supermarkets? Try Southern Recipes

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As I surveyed what remained on the shelves at the supermarket I frequent in Rhode Island, I was reminded of the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Hurricane or coronavirus pandemic, Rhode Islanders — as befits their mostly Italian heritage and food preference — had cleared the shelves and frozen food cases of pasta (except that made with chickpeas), canned and jarred tomato sauce, and frozen pizza.

Expectedly all the standard frozen and canned foods (except the dreaded whole and sliced beets), milk, butter, eggs, tuna, soup, bread, cookies and snack food had been cleared out, too.

What to buy? I viewed the rejected food not as Italian-American Rhode Islander, but rather as a Virginia transplant to the state. And I found heaps to buy.

Many of the ingredients for classic Southern dishes were still on the shelves and the frozen food cases. Here are some ingredients I saw and some ideas for what to do with them:

— Shrimp and grits: Buy frozen wild or farmed shrimp and grits (look on the bottom shelves in the breakfast cereal aisle). Yo, Italian-Americans up North! If you like polenta, you’ll love grits. “I ga-ron-tee!” as the late Cajun chef and humorist Justin Wilson used to say.

— Okra: If you live in the North, it will be the only vegetable left in your supermarket’s frozen food case. Dip it in buttermilk, dredge it in a seasoned cornmeal-flour mixture and fry it until it reaches that beautiful golden brown. Okra tastes like eggplant: In fact, you can make parmigiana with it.

— Jarred pimentos: When life gives you pimentos, make pimento cheese. Southerners call it “pate du Sud” (Southern pate). It’s a dip, a spread, but mostly it’s chopped pimentos mixed with mayonnaise and cheddar cheese. As Jeremy, the bigger and funnier of the two Jeremys who used to fix things around our house in Virginia, said of pimento cheese, “Put that on top of your head and your tongue would beat your brains out trying to get to it.”

— Stone-ground cornmeal: Cornbread. Nuff said.

— Instant pistachio pudding: You could make Shut the Gate Salad, also known as Watergate Salad. I first ate this salad in college in Washington in the mid-1970s. This salad was never served at the Watergate Hotel, site of the June 17, 1972, break-in of Democratic Party headquarters during the Nixon Administration, and the origin of its name remains obscure.

“But the particular mix of ingredients that became the standard Watergate Salad likely originated with the Jell-O brand, which introduced a line of pistachio pudding mix in 1976. This was two years after President Richard Nixon resigned, and the Watergate scandal was still fresh in Americans’ minds. (A spokesperson for Kraft, which now owns Jell-O, once said pistachio mix was introduced in 1975),” NPR said in a “Weekend Edition Sunday” broadcast.

Salad in the South is often devoid of leafy green vegetables. The green food coloring in the pudding legitimizes eating this pudding, Cool Whip, crushed pineapple, toasted pecan and mini marshmallow concoction as a vegetable serving. (Sound of incredulous gasping in the North.)

The supermarket checkout lines were long, so I only picked a few items off the shelves, including the despised and rejected canned beets and chickpea pasta. And, yes, I was tempted to grab the makings for Watergate Salad: A little Southern comfort food in the time of COVID-19.

My husband says we should try barbecue sauce on the chickpea pasta.

The 1953 Iranian Coup that Keeps on Giving

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“Thinking well is wise; planning well, wiser; doing well is the wisest and best of all,” says an Iranian proverb. For decades the United States and Iran largely haven’t thought, planned or done well by each other.

One deed in 1953 left a scarring legacy that has brought the two countries to the brink of war today: the coup d’état, orchestrated by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh (also spelled Mosaddeq) and restored power to the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The reformist premier had nationalized the British oil industry in Iran, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, created by Winston Churchill to fuel the British fleet when it switched from coal to oil. The shah had tried and failed to dismiss Mosaddegh and, after riots broke out, he fled the country.

The Churchill government enlisted the Eisenhower administration’s support for Mosaddegh’s ouster. Britain was motivated by its desire to regain control over the oil industry in Iran. Arguably, the United States was motivated more by the fear that Mosaddegh wouldn’t be able to stop the spread of communism in Iran than it was by the U.S. share of Iranian oil production after the coup.

“For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated the duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhanded methods to overthrow a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests,” the Agence-France Presse reported.

The United States supported the shah — who many considered to be an imposed ruler — for a quarter of a century then abandoned him. His government was known for its autocracy, its focus on modernization and Westernization, and for its disregard for religious and democratic measures in Iran’s constitution.

On my first trip to Tehran, in December 1976, it was apparent that many Iranians — from liberal students to unskilled laborers — had reached a breaking point with the political corruption and the political oppression by the secret police (SAVAK) — preceded by the shah’s security forces, trained in 1953 by Maj. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., the father of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who commanded coalition forces during the Gulf War.

The oil boom of the 1970s — from which the shah’s family was the foremost beneficiary — had produced accelerating inflation and an expanding gap between the rich and the poor. The government’s attempts to rein in inflation disproportionately affected the thousands of poor and unskilled men who flocked to Tehran and other cities to work in construction. Culturally and religiously conservative, many went on to form the core of the revolution’s demonstrators and “martyrs.”

In Tehran, on my first trip, I saw a few cars stuck in the open drains along street edges known as jubes. A friend there told me the cars belonged to “foreign workers who are unpopular, and get pushed into the jubes, too.”

Just a year later, Jimmy Carter, who visited Iran on New Year’s Eve, toasted the shah, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”

Iranians wouldn’t swallow Carter’s toast, which was so out of touch with what was going on in the country. Within days, they began the demonstrations that would end the shah’s rule.

James Schlesinger, who served as energy secretary in the Carter administration, told my husband Llewellyn King and me that he had strongly advised the president to tell the shah that if he wanted to hold on to his country, he should pay his army, not his air force. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah piloted his “Shah’s Falcon” Boeing 727 jetliner from Tehran to Egypt for an extended “vacation,” setting the stage for his country’s Islamic Revolution a month later.

“When the Shah finally fell in 1979, memories of the U.S. intervention in 1953, which made possible the monarch’s subsequent, and increasingly unpopular, 25-year reign, intensified the anti-American character of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians,” Mark Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne wrote in their authoritative book “Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.”

The 1953 coup’s legacy bore on later events, including the 1979-81 hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran; the United States designating Iran a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, unleashing severe sanctions; to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s speech in 2000, acknowledging the U.S. role in the Mosaddegh’s overthrow and “shortsighted” foreign policy in the region; and Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Whether President Donald Trump knows about the coup or not, it was involved in the airstrike that he ordered in Iraq on Jan. 3, killing Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, a specialized unit in the Revolutionary Guards.

Uzbekistan Transforming Old Silk Road Cities to Smart Cities

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Photo: Tashkent City designs.

Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is undergoing a transformation at a pace and scale almost comparable to Samarkand in 1370, when the Turco-Mongol ruler Timur, or, Tamerlane, as he is known in the West, made it his capital.

On the one hand, Tamerlane was a brutal conqueror who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. The empire he founded in 1370 and ruled until his death in 1405 (probably of a mid-winter cold, caught while on his way to change the Ming regime in China) stretched from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia.

But on the other hand, Tamerlane was a brilliant constructor. One of his signature achievements was Samarkand, which he strove to make the most splendid city in Asia.

“It’s not hard to see why the author of the ‘1001 Nights’ had Scheherazade spin her tales from a palace in Samarkand: the city was on the Silk Road, alive with people from different lands; it was a wonderland of Islamic architecture, and a great center of learning,” Srinath Perur wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

The Registan in Samarkand

But no place in Samarkand represents all three aspects as well as the Registan, the main square, three sides of which stand a blur-of-blue-tiled madrasas (Islamic colleges). In 1888 George Curzon, world traveler and future viceroy of India, called it “the noblest public square in the world.”

While most of the edifices seen around the square were built after Tamerlane’s death, they couldn’t have been built without his sacking Islamic brother cities (including Baghdad, Damascus and Khiva) and his sparing their artisans and craftsmen, who he brought back to Samarkand.

In 1399, just a year after reducing Delhi to rubble because he thought the Muslim sultan was too tolerant of his Hindu subjects, Tamerlane was back to building his sumptuous capital. A caravan of 90 captured elephants was employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a great mosque, according to Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, an envoy the Spanish kingdom of Castile dispatched to Samarkand. The Europeans rather liked Tamerlane because roughed up their neighborhood bully, the Ottoman Turks.

Tamerlane returned from his military conquests — estimated to have wiped out five percent of the world’s population — with architectural inspiration and plunder that could finance his appetite for building in Samarkand and other cities.

One of his monuments bears the proverb, “If you want to know about us, examine our cities.”

That proverb could be driving Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who succeeded Islam Karimov as president in 2016. His smart city projects in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, so it seems, are aimed at rebranding Uzbekistan as a country interested in political reform, economic investment and good relations with the rest of the world.

Javlon Vakhabov, Uzbekistan’s youthful new ambassador in Washington, discussed one smart city project, Tashkent City, in some depth at a summit on smart cities and communities organized by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.

Construction of Tashkent City, a $1.7-billion international business and financial hub in the heart of the capital, started in 2018. The design includes an industrial park, eight business centers, a shopping mall, restaurants and a cultural center, as well as residential apartments on a 173-acre site.

“The aim of this project,” according to the government, “is to create an architectural complex in the center of Tashkent, implemented by embedding the latest trends in world architecture and the application of environmentally-friendly and energy-saving, smart technologies.”

Vakhabov enthused that Tashkent City projects have already received millions of dollars in loans from the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.

But he added, “Uzbekistan is a 3,000-year-old country. We have four UNESCO World Heritage cities. We have 4,000 sites that are highly protected by UNESCO. We need to be sensitive to these historical sites and adapt them to smart cities.”

“A mass movement of people from the countryside to the cities has created stresses on the environment and infrastructure,” he said. Ultimately smart cities can alleviate those stresses, using information and communication technology to improve efficiency, sustainability and citizen welfare.

Meantime, smart city projects have been stressing out people. There have been news reports about protests and court cases in Tashkent over traditional housing demolitions and evictions.

“As for the resettlement of people living in houses built by their forefathers, we need to create more favorable conditions for people persuaded to move to other communities,” Vakhabov said reassuringly.

 

Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com.

When You Think You Have Seen It All, Try Fantastic Kazakhstan

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NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan — There is the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But there is also a grand one, the Charyn Canyon, in Kazakhstan, the vast Central Asian country with curious and wondrous sights that await intrepid tourists.

Sayasat Nurbek, who serves as a National Geographic goodwill ambassador in Kazakhstan, lists the Charyn Canyon, which stretches 56 miles along the Charyn River in the mountainous Southeast, as one of the country’s top sights.

Located near Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, Nurbek describes the canyon as “very futuristic.”

For 12 million years, nature’s sculptors — wind, water and sand — have carved the canyon’s red sandstone to create formations of various shapes and sizes. These have been given names for the fantastic things that they resemble: castles, devils and ghosts.

Nurbek recommends that tourists start their travels in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan with a population of 1.7 million. It is not only the country’s cultural and trading hub, but also the gateway to the region’s natural wonders, including a national park in the Trans-Ile Alatau mountains, which has 300 species of wildlife, including the snow leopard.

Medeu skating rink

Not far from Ile-Alatau National Park, in the Malaya Almatinka Valley, winter tourists can skate on the world’s largest outdoor ice-skating rink, Medeu, and schuss down slopes in Shymbulak, Central Asia’s top skiing resort.

At the Altyn-Emel National Park, also near Almaty, tourists can see the Terekty Petroglyphs and listen to the “singing dunes” — a low, vibrating sound made when the wind moves the sand.

“Almaty is a city where in 15 to 20 minutes, you can get to pristine mountains and lakes —- not like the Swiss or French Alps, where you must travel far from the cities to get to them,” says Nurbek, who has a master’s degree in geopolitics from the Sapienza University of Rome.

Shymkent, the third-largest city in Kazakhstan and an important place along the Great Silk Road, is well worth a stopover, Nurbek says.

“It’s a Southern city with a rich cultural and historical heritage. There is great food there, especially kebabs,” he says. You might even wash down your kebabs with kumis — a beverage made with fermented mare’s milk, popular across Central Asia.

In the Kazakh desert, about 93 miles northwest of Shymkent, lies an ancient center of the caravan trade: Turkestan. “It’s a spiritual capital,” says Nurbek.

The city, previously called Yasi, is known for the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, the Sufi philosopher and poet, which was built at the time of Timur (Tamerlane), from 1389 to 1405. The imposing, turquoise-domed mausoleum is partly unfinished, but its Persian master builders experimented with architectural and structural solutions later used in the construction of Samarkand, the capital of the Timurid Empire. UNESCO designated the exquisite mausoleum as a World Heritage Site in 2003.

The medieval mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi in Turkistan, Kazakhstan. Photo: Dmitry Chulov / Shutterstock.com

After touring the South, Nurbek suggests going West to the Caspian, which is the largest lake in the world. Aktau, on the shores of the Caspian, is an inviting beach town.

“There is no other lake in the world that has seals or the strange fish that you will find in the Caspian. You can even collect sharks’ teeth on the beaches because it was once part of a larger sea,” he says.

Nurbek, an avowed “environmental enthusiast,” wants oil and gas exploration in the Caspian to be replaced with “massive caviar production. We would have the same revenues from caviar as from oil.”

There has been an increase in the number of oil fields and, consequently, spills. But, Nurbek says, “they are not catastrophic.” And the Caspian’s prized sturgeon population is growing due to more university-conducted research on the diseases affecting them, he claims.

As for the nascent environmental movement and green party in Kazakhstan, he wishes there were “more people pushing for the environment, more politicians too.”

From the Caspian, Nurbek says tourists should head to the capital city of Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, in the north-central steppe. The capital was renamed in March to honor President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who abruptly resigned on March 19 after three decades in power.

Nazarbayev moved the capital from Almaty to Astana in 1997. He transformed it from a provincial town to the playground for the world’s leading architects, including Japan’s Kisho Kurokawa, who drew up the master plan for Astana, and Britain’s Norman Foster, who designed the glimmering glass Khan Shatyr shopping mall — the largest tent in the world — which has an indoor beach.

Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country and its ninth-largest country, about the size of Western Europe. Nurbek recommends that tourists take the country’s trains — a tradition from Soviet times.

“If you are out to experience the vastness of the country — the steppes, the mountains, the lakes — then take the train from Nur-Sultan,” he says, “You can make friends on it, share food, share stories, stop at the stations. You can make memories that will last forever.