US president-elect Barack Obama is expected to select Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu(朱棣文) to be his energy secretary, US media reported on Thursday.
Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. He has since focused on climate change for several years, saying last year that the best scientist have realized that the world is facing a “crisis situation.”
Chu has been head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California since 2004, which specializes in alternative and renewable energy, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.
In other key appointments, Obama plans to name Carol Browner to a new White House post, coordinating policy related to energy, the environment and climate across various departments, the Washington Post reported.
Browner was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for eight years during the administration of former president Bill Clinton. She is currently at the Albright Group, an investment advisory firm that focuses on emerging markets.
Obama was also to pick Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to lead the EPA.
At a private meeting Tuesday with former vice president Al Gore, Obama said delaying action on climate change was no longer an option. He has pledged an aggressive effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the US — including forcing dirty companies to pay for pollution permits — and re-engaging in international climate talks.
The president-elect has also made investments in clean energy a cornerstone of his economic recovery plan as he tries to pull the US out of a year-long recession.
Obama is also expected to put a former leader of the Senate in charge of coordinating efforts to overhaul the US health care system.
The appointment of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle as the Health and Human Services secretary and as chief of a new White House Office of Health Reform will be announced Thursday in Chicago, said a Democratic official familiar with the plan.
“He will be the White House’s voice on this critical issue” of health care, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the development.
The US is one of the few Western countries without universal health care.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema