TDB Top 5 International Stories: Tuesday 18th April 2017

5: How Trump’s Inaction on Climate Change Could Lead to Impeachment

The “prediction professor,” who has correctly called the last nine presidential elections, thinks that Trump is headed for a fall.

Since 1984, a history professor named Allan Lichtman has used a set of “keys” to predict presidential elections—a set of 13 true-false statements like, “The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.” This rudimentarily system hasn’t been wrong in three decades, and it was even correct in 2016 when so many pundits and polls misfired. That track record makes it hard to dismiss his latest project out of hand, even though it sounds crazy as hell: It’s a book titled The Case for Impeachment that lays out a case for how and why Donald Trump will get removed from office, which Lichtman sees as an inevitability.

The beginning of the book is like CliffsNotes on the history of presidential impeachment––very helpful for someone like me, a byproduct of Florida public schools. A quick civics lesson for the similarly uninformed: Any member of the House can draft what’s known as an article of impeachment, and if a majority of the House votes for those articles, the president is impeached. After that, the Senate puts the president on trial, and if a majority of senators vote guilty, the president is thrown out. There have been three impeachments or near-impeachments in American history, none of which directly resulted in the president being removed. Andrew Johnson’s downfall was being headstrong (he was acquitted and remained in office), Richard Nixon’s was his paranoia and the need for total control (he resigned before he could be impeached), and Bill Clinton’s was the inability to tell the truth on the stand (Clinton, like Johnson, was acquitted by the Senate). Anyone who’s been following the news since January can see that Trump displays all three characteristics, often all at once. But will any of the scandals or upsets of the young administration lead to Trump losing the White House?

Vice News

4: Is Turkey Becoming a Dictatorship?: Erdogan Claims Victory in Vote to Give President Sweeping Powers

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed victory in Sunday’s referendum over whether to give sweeping powers to the president, but Turkey’s main opposition party is calling for the the referendum results to be tossed out, citing irregularities. According to unofficial results, just 51 percent of voters approved the sweeping change. Turkey’s three largest cities—Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir—all voted against the referendum. The opposition says they’ve received thousands of reports of voter fraud, including some alleged instances caught on camera. Critics say the constitutional changes will allow Erdogan to rule until at least 2029, if not longer, and could turn Turkey into a dictatorship. Earlier today, Turkey announced it would extend its state of emergency put in place after an attempted coup last year.

Democracy Now

3: North Korea on ‘maximum alert’ after US threats

North Korea has warned its army is on “maximum alert” after the US vice president visited the heavily militarised border between the two Koreas and reiterated Washington’s position that “all options are on the table” in dealing with Pyongyang.

Sin Hong-chol, North Korea’s deputy foreign minister, told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview on Monday that Donald Trump’s administration “should look at the world with open eyes”.

“The time of dictating orders by brandishing the US military might has gone. If those businessmen in power in the US thought of intimidating us by any military or sanction threats – as the [Barack] Obama administration used to do and failed – they will soon find out such threats are useless,” Sin said.

“If we notice any sign of assault on our sovereignty, our army will launch merciless military strikes against the US aggressors, wherever they may exist, from the remote US lands to the American military bases on the Korean peninsula, such as those of Japan and elsewhere.”

Aljazeera

2: Receding glacier causes immense Canadian river to vanish in four days

An immense river that flowed from one of Canada’s largest glaciers vanished over the course of four days last year, scientists have reported, in an unsettling illustration of how global warming dramatically changes the world’s geography.

The abrupt and unexpected disappearance of the Slims river, which spanned up to 150 metres at its widest points, is the first observed case of “river piracy”, in which the flow of one river is suddenly diverted into another.

For hundreds of years, the Slims carried meltwater northwards from the vast Kaskawulsh glacier in Canada’s Yukon territory into the Kluane river, then into the Yukon river towards the Bering Sea. But in spring 2016, a period of intense melting of the glacier meant the drainage gradient was tipped in favour of a second river, redirecting the meltwater to the Gulf of Alaska, thousands of miles from its original destination.

The continental-scale rearrangement was documented by a team of scientists who had been monitoring the incremental retreat of the glacier for years. But on a 2016 fieldwork expedition they were confronted with a landscape that had been radically transformed.

The Guardian 

1: Devastation and a war that rages on: visiting the valley hit by the Moab attack

The Afghan commando knew when the big bomb would hit, so he turned on his phone camera to capture the impact.

When the blast came at 7.32pm – as the Americans had said it would – a giant white flash lit up the evening sky over the Spin Ghar mountains. But the explosion was not as loud as he had expected, the commando said. In the moment, it felt more like an earthquake.

The 11-ton GBU-43/B, or Moab (“mother of all bombs”), dropped by a US cargo plane on an Islamic State stronghold in eastern Afghanistan on 13 April, was the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat.

Residents in nearby villages felt the strike differently, depending on their location. Some spoke of ringing ears and crying children, others of houses shaking and walls cracking.

The bomb was the culmination of an offensive launched in early April to push Isis back. About a kilometre from the blast site, on a hill above Shadel Bazar, which derives its name from a history as an opium market, Afghan special forces have now set up base in a shady grove named Asadkhel.

American special forces “advisers”, resting 50 metres away, ordered their Afghan colleagues – unsuccessfully – not to talk to reporters.

The Guardian