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In upholding green groups efforts to end the E.P.A.s 90-day stay over parts of the regulation, the appeals court ruled that the agencys decision was unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious. The agency, it said, did not have authority under the Clean Air Act to block the rule.

Americans overwhelmingly believe that global warming is happening, and that carbon emissions should be scaled back. But fewer are sure that it will harm them personally.

E.P.A.s stay, in other words, is essentially an order delaying the rules effective date, and this court has held that such orders are tantamount to amending or revoking a rule, Judges David Tatel and Robert Wilkins wrote. The third member of the three-judge panel, Janice Rogers Brown, dissented. The judges said the agency would have to undertake a new rule-making process to undo the regulation.

The methane rule was part of a broad suite of climate regulations enacted by former President Barack Obama. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Oil and gas companies have argued that the rule requiring them to report and fix any methane leaks in their equipment is an unnecessary burden because many oil-producing states already have their own regulations. The E.P.A. announced on June 5 that it was suspending enforcement of the rule, arguing that the industry had not had enough opportunity to comment. The court rejected that argument.

The courts decision ends the continued pollution by the oil and gas industry thats been illegally allowed by Pruitt, said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Reid Porter, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said that standards set in 2012 are already reducing methane emissions. A stay is needed to allow for regulatory certainty as E.P.A. continues the formal process to review the rule making, he said in a statement.

An E.P.A. spokeswoman said the agency was reviewing the opinion and would weigh its options.

Mondays decision does not mean the methane rule cannot be reversed. But to do so, the E.P.A. will have to write a new rule to unwind it and must comply with the Obama-era regulation in the meantime.

Originally posted here:
Court Blocks EPA Effort to Suspend Obama-Era Methane Rule - New York Times

"The Paris agreement, even with the temporary absence of US leadership, will still be a critical factor in helping our children solve the enormous challenge in civilization," Obama said at a Seoul conference organized by South Korea's Chosun Ilbo media group.

In his speech, Obama highlighted the role China plays in allowing North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un's regime to continue.

"China is the one country North Korea does depend on to some extent and the elites depend on to access foreign currency, basic supplies that are important to the regime," the former president said.

Obama also noted that Kim governs a bit differently than his father who preceded him, but is still a threat due to his hunger for power.

"Pyongyang doesn't always listen to China," the former president said. "Unlike the father, the son often times has engaged in fairly significant diplomatic insults of Beijing in a way we haven't seen before and in a way that surprised China."

"You have a young man who is only interested in maintaining power and is willing to do anything to sustain that," Obama added.

Trump spoke alongside South Korean President Moon Jae-in Friday in the US, expressing his frustration with the North Korean government.

After the speech in Seoul Monday, Obama and Moon met and discussed the future relationship between the US and Asia.

Read the original:
Obama touts Paris accord despite 'temporary absence of US leadership' - CNN International

The Trump administration took aim late last week at an Obama-era rule designed to crack down on for-profit colleges.

The Department of Education announced Friday that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will press pause on the gainful employment regulations developed by the Obama administration. The rules require that career training programs, many of which are at for-profit colleges, graduate students whose loan payments dont exceed 20% of their discretionary income or 8% of their total earnings. Rather than providing students with a degree in a broad field, these programs, which are typically less than four years, prepare students directly for work in a given occupation, such as health care support, cosmetology or mechanics. Programs that dont meet those criteria for multiple years could lose access to federal financial aid.

Initially, career-training programs would be required to disclose the data associated with the requirement to students by July 1 of this year. On Friday, DeVos announced that she would give the schools until July 1, 2018 to comply with this requirement. In addition, the Department is extending the deadline for schools to file any appeals challenging the way the Department calculated their debt-to-earnings ratio.

We need to get this right for our students, and we need to get this right for our institutions of higher education, DeVos said in a statement announcing the delay. Once fully implemented, the current rules would unfairly and arbitrarily limit students ability to pursue certain types of higher education and career training programs.

The announcement marks the latest attempt by the Trump administration to challenge Obama-era regulations targeting for-profit colleges. Last month, officials announced they would revisit both the gainful employment rule and a regulation known as defense to repayment that allows borrowers who believe theyve been defrauded by their schools to have their federal student loans wiped away.

This is also the second time Trump administration officials pushed back deadlines for schools to comply with the gainful employment requirements.

It is very clear this administration is looking for any possible tool it can find to weaken or delay the gainful employment regulation, while they are re-regulating it out of existence, said Ben Miller, the senior director of postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Borrower advocates have argued for years that many for-profit colleges use unseemly tactics to recruit vulnerable students and saddle them with debt in exchange for a degree thats not worth much in the labor market. The collapse of Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institutes two major for-profit college chains in the last two years, amid scrutiny from regulators, highlighted those concerns. Thousands of borrowers were left in the lurch after the two schools filed for bankruptcy.

Dont miss: What to expect on student debt from Betsy DeVos

Amid those concerns, the Obama administration moved to regulate for-profit colleges and faced intense opposition from the industry. The gainful employment rule was challenged several times in court over the past several years before finally becoming law.

Even after it was implemented, the gainful employment rule faced a court challenge from the American Association of Cosmetology Schools, which argued that its member schools were at a disadvantage in proving their students earned enough to meet the regulations standards because the Departments methodology for calculating a debt-to-earnings ratio doesnt properly account for cash tips, a hefty share of cosmetology graduates income. The judge in the case ordered the Department to give these schools more time to appeal their debt-to-earnings ratios.

In their announcement, Department officials cited the court order as a factor in their decision to extend the deadline for schools to appeal their debt-to-earnings ratio as calculated by the Department. In January, the Obama-era Department announced that about 800 programs were failing to meet the rules requirements.

Miller said he found it concerning that the Department was using a narrow court order that applies only to certain types of schools to delay implementation of the regulation as it applies to all programs. This is not a good faith interpretation of what the judge said, Miller said.

Advocates for for-profit colleges have argued that the Obama administrations approach to regulating them unfairly targeted the sector, focusing more on the tax status of a school than its outcomes. Theyve said that theyre serving a population of students that wouldnt have anywhere else to turn for higher education without these schools.

It appears DeVoss Department of Education has embraced this point of view. In their announcement, Department officials described the gainful employment regulations as overly burdensome. In her statement, DeVos also said, we need to expand, not limit, paths to higher education for students.

The for-profit college industry praised DeVoss approach. Steve Gunderson, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, a trade group representing for-profit colleges, said in a statement that his association applauded the delay of the gainful employment regulation.

The rule is clearly flawed, the statement reads. Recent studies and court rulings prove this rule needs to be revisited.

Originally posted here:
Another Obama legacy Trump wants to undo: Cracking down on for-profit colleges - MarketWatch

President Trump has decided that it is important that he keep tweeting from his personal Twitter account because it allows him to speak directly to the American people outside of the filter of the mainstream media, by which he means the medias pesky insistence on fact-checking his comments and including unflattering news in analysis of his presidency. Over the weekend, Trumptook this defense of his social-media use to a new place: Not only is his tweeting perfectly fine for a president, but it is defining what it means to be presidential.

In a sense, this is probably true, for better or worse.

But Trumps defense of his tweeting depends largely on the idea that hes unusually skilled at social media, playing the strings of Twitter like the first-chair violinist at the New York Philharmonic.

What if, instead, Trumps not that great at Twitter? What if Barack Obama is better?

Allow us to present that case.

Overall, Trumps two accounts his personal account, @realDonaldTrump, and his presidential one, @POTUS get more retweets in a month than Obamas (@BarackObama and @POTUS44, respectively). (Were using retweets as a metric here for two reasons. First, its accessible data. Second, it captures one aspect of the point of social media: social interaction.) Trumphas used @POTUS only since January, since that was when he was inaugurated. Obama hasused only @BarackObama since then, retaking the account from the advocacy organization Organizing for Action, which had been renting the account during his two terms in office. (The @POTUS44 account is an archive of Obamas official White House tweets while in office.)

The exception came in January, when Obamas farewell tweets got a ton of attention.

Thats simply a raw count of retweets, the total for each tweet added to the others for that month. So we have to note: Trump also tweets far more than does Obama.

If we look at the number of retweets per tweet how much engagement each tweet gets on average we see that Obama actually fares much better than does Trump.

Trumps totals are actually hurt by how much he tweets. The more he tweets in a week, the lower his number of retweets per tweet (over the past month).

The dichotomy in where each president is successful poses an interesting question. Which of these demonstrates a more effective use of Twitter: tweeting a lot to rack up retweets, or getting more retweets on each tweet? I posed this question on Twitter, in an unscientific poll, without mentioning the point I was investigating.

More than two-thirds of respondents figured that more retweets per tweet was the preferable metric. Meaning that Obama is using Twitter more effectively.

Theres a case to be made that more total retweets in a month means that more people are seeing each tweet. That may be true. But it may also mean that the user who tweets more is getting the same, smaller group of people to retweet his tweets over and over meaning that the overall audience for each tweet is smaller.

If we look at the most-retweeted tweets from each account (extending back a year or for the period that each president controlled the account), the top 10 tweets from Obamas presidential account racked up far more retweets than any from Trump. That, objectively, is a bigger audience on a per-tweet basis.

That includes this tweet, which is the most retweeted from Obamas time in office.

Obamas top seven tweets from his time as president all earned more retweets than the top 10 tweets from either of Trumps two accounts.

Some may argue that Trump, unlike Obama, actually tweets his own tweets, with Obamas being crafted by committee. Its not clear whether thats still true for Obama, but, even assuming that it is, this ignores the role that Trumps social-media director, Dan Scavino, plays in his use of Twitter. The early morning TV-watching tweets are probably Trump, but many arent.

Obamas most-retweeted tweet overall came during the 2012 campaign. Until Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a selfie at the Oscars in 2014, it held the title for most-retweeted in history. The person who formulated that tweet, Obamas 2012 social-media director,Laura Olin, told The Washington Post over Twitter (of course) that she would have preferred more cumulative retweets than a higher per-tweet average.

Its always nice when a given post pops because of a certain moment, she said, but ongoing high levels of engagement indicate that people care about the meat-and-potatoes governing stuff, too, not just the cute Happy birthday Michelle messages which are wonderful but dont necessarily serve to convey shared values or further an agenda to make peoples lives better.

In that sense, Trump is outperforming his predecessor.

Whats more, the numbers above exclude the awareness brought to Trumps tweets when they are provocative enough to earn him attention from the mainstream media.

Thats the sort of coverage that Trump never complains about.

See original here:
Resolved: Barack Obama is better at Twitter than Donald Trump - Washington Post

By Margie Mason By Margie Mason July 1

JAKARTA, Indonesia Following another week of dust-ups between the media and President Trump, his predecessor shared a bit of wisdom Saturday from the other side of the world about tolerance and taking the daily news cycle in stride.

I wasnt worried about what was in the newspapers today, former president Barack Obama said during a nostalgic visit to Indonesias capital, his childhood home. What I was worried about was, What are they going to write about me 20 years from now when I look back?

Obama was greeted by a crowd of thousands, including leaders, students and businesspeople, in Jakarta, where he opened the Fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora.

He reminisced about moving to Jakarta in 1967 when he was just 6 years old, shouting, Indonesia bagian dari diri saya! or Indonesia is part of me!

Obama lived in the country with his mother, an anthropologist, and his Indonesian stepfather. The couple split up after his half sister was born, and Obama moved back to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his grandparents.

My time here made me cherish respect for peoples differences, he said, noting how he and his family had just visited two of the most treasured ancient temples Borobudur, a Buddhist complex, and the Hindu compound of Prambanan in the worlds most populous Muslim country.

Obamas speech came on the final leg of his 10-day vacation in Indonesia. In addition to visiting the temples in the city of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, he and his wife, Michelle, and daughters Sasha and Malia, also went rafting and toured the resort island of Bali. On Friday, he met Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the grand Bogor Palace in West Java, just outside Jakarta.

Obama largely stayed away from U.S. politics and the Trump administration, but he did tout one of his accomplishments while in office.

In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history about climate change, an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership, can still give our children a fighting chance, he said.

Trump shocked many countries last month by announcing he was pulling out of the accord. He has also had a difficult relationship with members of the news media and was recently condemned by Democrats and Republicans for a tweet that attacked a female MSNBC host.

Obama stressed the importance of stepping away from news sites where only like-minded views are shared, and he warned about social media giving rise to resentment of minorities and bad treatment of people.

He urged the country to be a light of democracy and to never stop embracing differences. Indonesia has faced a rise in Islamist radicalism and anti-gay attacks and was recently condemned by rights groups for jailing Jakartas former governor, an ethnic Chinese Christian, for blasphemy.

The spirit of this country has to be one of tolerance. Its enshrined in Indonesias constitution, its symbolized by mosques and temples and churches beside each other, Obama said. That spirit is one of the defining things about Indonesia. It is one of the most important characteristics to set as an example for other Muslim countries around the world.

Associated Press

Excerpt from:
Obama pushes tolerance, respect in childhood home Jakarta - Washington Post