60 dead, 145 injured in Moscow concert hall attack; Daesh claims responsibility

OBILIC: For 30 years, Shemsi Gara operated a giant digger in a Kosovo coal mine, churning up toxic dust that covered his face and got into his airways. Home life wasn’t much better: the power plants that the mine supplies constantly spew fumes over his village.
Gara died on Sunday aged 55 after three years of treatment failed to contain his lung cancer. In his final days, unable to walk, he lay on a couch at home, gaunt and in pain, as a machine pumped oxygen into his dying body.
“I kept telling him I wanted to help, but I couldn’t,” said his wife Xhejlane, who mourned in her living room with friends on Wednesday. “He would say ‘Only God knows the pain I have’.”
As much of the world moves to reduce the use of fossil fuels, pollution in Western Balkan countries remains stubbornly high due to household heating, outdated coal plants, old cars, and a lack of money to tackle the problem.
Relatively small cities such as Serbia’s capital Belgrade and Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo have frequently topped daily global pollution charts, according to websites that track air quality worldwide.
This has costly health impacts, and could also jeopardize such countries’ prospects of joining the European Union, which has stricter emissions standards.
“There are no resources in the region for the reduction of air pollution,” said Mirko Popovic, a director with the Renewables and Environmental Regulatory Institute think-tank in Belgrade.
In the EU, net greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by about 40 percent since 1990, driven by the embrace of renewable energy, a European Commission report said in November.
Western Balkan nations have pledged to reduce carbon emissions but economic hardship has slowed progress.
Kosovo, one of Europe’s poorest countries, generates more than 90 percent of its power from coal. The World Bank estimates that a transition to a coal-free economy will cost 4.5 billion euros.

SMOG
The impact of pollution is clear across the region, especially in winter.
Smog has cloaked Belgrade this week, while Sarajevo sits in a valley that acts as a pollution trap. The Bosnian capital’s air quality was classed as “hazardous” on Tuesday, the worst in the world, according to IQAir, which tracks pollution levels.
In North Macedonia’s capital Skopje, mask-wearing locals often lose sight of nearby snow-capped mountains for days.
The rate of deaths attributable to ambient pollution is relatively high — 114 per 100,000 people in Bosnia and around 100 in Serbia and Montenegro, World Health Organization data show, compared with just 45 in Germany and 29 in France.
Gara was buried on Monday in a cemetery in Obilic, outside Kosovo’s capital Pristina. From the graveside, mourners could hear the chug of a nearby conveyor belt transporting coal from the mine to the power plants.
Gara’s doctor, Haki Jashari, blamed Gara’s cancer on his years at the coal mine, and on the polluting power plants.
Cancer rates more than doubled in Obilic over the last two years, Jashari said — the result, he added, of a generation of exposure to pollutants. He expects it will get worse.
Kosovo’s energy ministry told Reuters it was committed to reducing emissions and was investing in renewable energy projects and upgrading existing plants.
Jashari only wishes more could have been done sooner.
“They would have shut the plants down if we were part of the EU. It is unacceptable.”

WASHINGTON: For years, as disputes over names on the map riled up nationalist passions in several parts of the world, US policymakers have watched warily, trying to stay out or to quietly encourage peace.
Suddenly, the United States has gone from a reluctant arbiter to a nomenclature belligerent, as President Donald Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico will henceforth be called the “Gulf of America.”
In an executive order signed hours after he returned to the White House, Trump called the water body an “indelible part of America” critical to US oil production and fishing and “a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities.”
The term Gulf of America was soon used by the US Coast Guard in a press release on enforcing Trump’s new crackdown on migrants, as well as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, when discussing a winter storm.
Deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler said Trump’s declaration was “very silly” and would likely be ignored by maritime professionals.
A president has the authority to rename sites within the United States — as Trump also did.
“The Gulf of Mexico, however, is a body of water that borders several countries and includes pockets of high seas,” said Thaler, founder of Blackbeard Biologic Science and Environmental Advisers.
“There really isn’t any precedent for a US president renaming international geologic and oceanographic features. Any attempt to rename the entire Gulf of Mexico would be entirely symbolic,” he said.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has cheekily suggested calling the United States “Mexican America,” pointing to a map from well before Washington seized one-third of her country in 1848.
“For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said Tuesday.
The International Hydrographic Organization, set up a century ago, works to survey the world’s seas and oceans and is the closest to an authority on harmonizing names for international waters.
The United Nations also has an expert group on geographical names, which opens its next meeting on April 28.
Martin H. Levinson, president emeritus of the Institute of General Semantics, said it was unknown how much political capital Trump would invest in seeking name recognition by other countries.
“Does he really want to strong-arm them for something as minor as this?” Levinson asked.
“I think the political benefit is to the domestic audience that he’s playing to — saying we’re patriotic, this is our country, we’re not going to let the name be subsumed by other countries,” he said.
He doubted that other countries would change the name but said it was possible Google Earth — a more ready reference to laypeople — could list an alternative name, as it has in other disputes.

Among the most heated disputes, South Korea has long resented calling the body of water to its east the Sea of Japan and has advocated for it to be called the East Sea.
The United States, an ally of both countries, has kept Sea of Japan but Korean-Americans have pushed at the local level for school textbooks to say East Sea.
In the Middle East, Trump in his last term angered Iranians by publicly using the term Arabian Gulf for the oil-rich water body historically known as the Arabian Gulf but which Arab nationalists have sought to rename.
The United States has also advocated maintaining a 2018 deal where Greece agreed for its northern neighbor to change its name to North Macedonia from Macedonia, but Athens ulitmately rejected due to historical associations with Alexander the Great.
Gerry Kearns, a professor of geography at Maynooth University in Ireland, said that Trump’s move was part of the “geopolitics of spectacle” but also showed his ideological bent.
With Trump also threatening to take the Panama Canal and Greenland, Trump is seeking to project a new type of Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration by the United States that it would dominate the Western Hemisphere, Kearns said.
“Names work because they are shared; we know we are talking about the same thing,” he wrote in an essay.
“In claiming the right to force others to use the name of his choosing, Trump is asserting a sort of sovereignty over an international body of water.”