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December 2016

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Gave $10,000 to West Bank Settlement in 2003, Report Says U.S. presidents from both parties have criticized West Bank settlements, saying they are an obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians By Damian Paletta

By on December 19th, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump donated $10,000 to a prominent Jewish West Bank settlement in 2003, according to the Jerusalem Post, taking a position that many Republican and Democratic presidents have refused to endorse.

The Jerusalem Post cites Trump Foundation records to show that Mr. Trump gave the sum to American Friends of Beit El. Beit El is an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, territory Palestinians seek for the establishment of their own state.

Mr. Trump said last week he would nominate his friend and lawyer David Friedman to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Mr. Friedman has served as president of American Friends of Beit El for the past several years.

Beit El was founded in 1977 as a small settlement but has expanded since then. Yaakov Katz, one of the original settlers, told Galei Israel Radio Sunday that the donation was made in Mr. Friedman’s honor.

U.S. presidents from both parties have criticized the West Bank settlements, saying they are an obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Mr. Friedman has supported the development of Jewish settlements there, and he has also expressed skepticism that a two-state solution agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians can be achieved. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jewish Settlers Agree to Leave Amona Outpost in West Bank The deal comes a week before a Dec. 25 deadline set by Israel’s high court to evacuate the land By Rory Jones see note please

By on December 19th, 2016

This is an appalling concession. The people in Amona came to build in and live in peace . ……rsk

TEL AVIV—Israel’s government on Sunday forged a last-ditch deal to relocate Jewish settlers from homes built on Palestinian land to another part of the West Bank, avoiding a potentially violent confrontation but underscoring state support for controversial settlements.

After weeks of talks with 40 families of Jewish settlers that had constructed an outpost of trailer homes in the Palestinian territories north of Ramallah, Israel’s conservative government agreed to move most of the settlers to nearby plots, a spokesman for the families said.

Israel’s Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that the outpost, called Amona, was built illegally after claims were lodged by Palestinians over the land. The court ordered the site be evacuated by Dec. 25.

The ruling pitted the judiciary and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against members of his conservative ruling government coalition who supported Amona and have since put forward new legislation to legalize other outposts in the West Bank.

In recent days, hundreds of supporters of the settlers had camped out at Amona ahead of plans by the police and military to forcibly remove the families. Earlier Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu urged the settlers to take the deal offered by the government and evacuate peacefully. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Rust Belt Is Right to Blame Obama The risk that regulators pose to business is up 79% from 2010—a burden that falls heavy on industry. By Clark S. Judge

By on December 19th, 2016

Donald Trump hasn’t wasted time moving to revive America’s economic growth, with an emphasis on manufacturing. Critics may say the recent Carrier deal, which will save 800 American jobs, is small potatoes, but Mr. Trump’s pledge to reduce regulation is decidedly not. A new analysis confirms that the average industry’s regulatory risk has increased nearly 80% from 2010—and that this burden particularly hurts manufacturing and heavy industry.

The analysis was developed by a small group of quantitative hotshots under the guidance of Alex Vogel, an old Washington hand, and Jeff Hood, a 30-year finance veteran. Instead of considering the question of regulatory risk like D.C. think tankers, they approached it like Wall Street analysts.

Their most inventive technique involved natural-language processing, an essential tool of the big-data era that has been used to analyze Shakespeare and fight spam email. Messrs. Vogel and Hood used the technology to analyze the language in the 10K reports that companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Every 10K report includes a formal assessment of the company’s vulnerabilities. Messrs. Vogel and Hood flagged any words and phrases that signaled regulatory exposure. They included general terms like “regulation” and “Congress” as well as specific ones like “fraud,” “inversions” and “Dodd-Frank.” They did something similar with the Federal Register to capture economically significant rule-making.

Then, firing up a suite of algorithms and formulas, they generated a regulatory-risk score for every company in the Fortune 500. Hedge funds are using the findings to gauge how potential investments could be affected by new regulations, court filings and other breaking events.

But the news here is in the next steps. The Vogel and Hood team analyzed corporate lobbying and turned out company-by-company ratings of its effectiveness. They put into the calculations the amounts that firms spend on government relations, the size of government-relations staffs, the expertise of the outside lobbyists hired, and the number of lobbying registration reports filed. Each company can then be ranked in the hierarchy of Washington influence.

Messrs. Vogel and Hood say their method is like a capital asset pricing model with one exception: In place of the standard measure for market risk, they substituted their metrics for regulatory risk and corporate response. What were the results?

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The EPA’s Science Deniers The agency changes its view on fracking and water without evidence.

By on December 19th, 2016

Speaking of fake news, the political scientists at the EPA have rewritten the conclusion of a report in order to cast doubt on the safety of hydraulic fracturing. Consider this EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s parting gift to Donald Trump.

Last week the EPA issued the final version of a five-year study evaluating the impact of hydraulic fracturing, the oil and gas drilling method known as fracking, on groundwater contamination. The draft report released last year for public comment concluded that fracking has not “led to widespread, systemic impact on drinking water resources in the United States.” The EPA’s findings haven’t changed, but its conclusion has.

After being barraged by plaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities, the EPA in its final report substituted its determination of no “widespread, systemic impact” with the hypothetical that fracking “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances” and that “impacts can range in frequency and severity” depending on the circumstances.

Any technology has the potential to inflict some damage—self-driving cars can be hacked to go haywire—and the EPA explains that drinking-water contamination could occur if wastewater is incorrectly disposed or wells are poorly sealed. In Pavillion, Wyo., the EPA’s faulty construction of a monitoring well caused contamination.

Yet after reviewing more than 1,000 studies, the EPA couldn’t find more than limited evidence—mostly alleged by plaintiff attorneys—of operational failures causing contamination. That the EPA uncovered only a few instances of contamination among a million some wells reinforces its prior conclusion that fracking doesn’t threaten the drinking-water supply.

The EPA now asserts that “significant data gaps and uncertainties” prevent it from “calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts.” For instance, water-quality data was not collected everywhere prior to the introduction of fracking, which has allowed plaintiff attorneys to ascribe any contamination to oil and gas companies.

Methane can leak into groundwater naturally, and the EPA even notes that “site-specific cases of alleged impacts” are “particularly challenging to understand” because “the subsurface environment is complex.” Scientists have documented methane in the shallow subsurface of Susquehanna County, Pa.—one area of alleged fracking contamination—dating back more than 200 years.

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