A vast new investment plan aimed at modernizing America's infrastructure overcame a key legislative hurdle in the US Senate on Sunday, with legislation described as "historic" by President Joe Biden now almost certain to become law.

The bill, months in the making, calls for $550 billion in new federal spending on the nation's aging infrastructure, including funds to slow the effects of climate change.

The total $1.2 trillion price tag -- equal to the annual economic output of Spain -- includes some funds previously approved but not yet spent.

Sunday evening saw the bill largely overcome several procedural votes in the Senate, with the slim Democratic majority bolstered by support from over a third of Republicans.

It now goes to a final vote, with lawmakers primed to approve it as early as Monday if an agreement can be reached.

But while there is now little doubt that the Senate will approve the almost 2700-page text, its future is less certain in the House of Representatives, where left-wing and centrist factions have clashed over the size of the spending.

Biden, a 36-year veteran of Senate maneuvering, has followed the bill's progress closely, and White House officials have said he would not hesitate to phone wavering senators if needed.

Making a last-minute plea for passage, Biden tweeted Saturday that the bill represented a "historic, once-in-a-generation investment in our nation's infrastructure."

"We can't afford not to do it," he added.

A rare alliance between Democratic and Republican supporters of the law has helped speed up the passage of the bill in the Senate, where legislative work has for years been stymied by bipartisan obstruction.

But their efforts were stalled by opposition from Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, a former ambassador to Japan under the administration of ex-President Donald Trump, who over the weekend warned GOP lawmakers they could face primary challenges if they support the legislation.

This did not stop eighteen of them -- including influential top Republican Mitch McConnell -- from agreeing Sunday to send the text to a final vote.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the plan will add $256 billion to the deficit between 2021 and 2031, figures that have stoked Republican opposition to the law.

The bill's defenders stress that the CBO cannot formally factor in all additional savings and revenues the bill will bring in, which will cover the cost of these measures.

UN set to unveil landmark report as climate impacts multiply
Paris (AFP) Aug 9, 2021 - As heart-stopping images of fires and floods dominate news cycles worldwide, the UN's climate science panel will unveil on Monday its much-anticipated projections for temperature and sea-level rises less than three months before a crucial climate summit in Scotland.

After two weeks of virtual negotiations, 195 nations approved the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) comprehensive assessment of past and future warming on Friday in the form of a "summary for policymakers".

The text -- vetted and approved line by line, word by word -- is likely to paint a grim picture of accelerating climate change and dire threats on the horizon.

On the heels of deadly floods in India, China and northern Europe as well as asphalt-melting heatwaves in North America and southern Europe, the IPCC's report is the first so-called assessment report since 2014.

Both the world and the science have changed a lot since then.

With increasingly sophisticated technology allowing scientists to measure climate change and predict its future path, the report will project global temperature changes until the end of the century under different emissions scenarios.

Based almost entirely on published research, it could forecast -- even under optimistic scenarios -- a temporary "overshoot" of the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement, and revise upwards its estimates for long-term sea-level rise.

It is also expected to reflect huge progress in so-called attribution science, which allows experts to link individual extreme weather events directly to man-made climate change.

While the underlying IPCC report is purely scientific, the summary for policymakers is negotiated by national representatives, and therefore subject to competing priorities.

Belgian climate physicist and former IPCC co-chair Jean-Pascal Ypersele, who was party to the negotiations, said the talks were guided by the underlying science.

"I can testify that the authors of the #ClimateReport had the last word on every sentence in the SPM, which really was a Summary FOR (and not BY) policymakers," he said on Twitter.

The report comes less than three months before the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, which are seen as vital for humanity's chance of limiting the worst impacts of global warming.

"This is going to be the starkest warning yet that human behaviour is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why COP26 has to be the moment we get this right," COP26 President Alok Sharma said over the weekend.

"We can't afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years -- this is the moment," he told a British newspaper.

French climatologist Corinne Le Quere congratulated the delegates on Friday for finalising "the text of what I think will be one of the most important scientific reports ever published".

There will be two further parts to the IPCC's latest round of climate assessments, known as AR6.

A working group report on climate impacts, a draft of which was exclusively obtained by AFP, is set for release in February 2022.

Another report focusing on solutions for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change will be out the following month.

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A year after the mushroom cloud, Lebanon still bleeds
Beirut (AFP) Aug 1, 2021
On August 4, 2020, a fire at the Beirut port ignited one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. It disfigured the city, took more than 200 lives and shattered Lebanon's psyche. The blast was felt as far away as Cyprus, and the destruction is hard to fathom. But if one thing can outweigh what happened to Lebanon that day, it is what hasn't happened since. Not one culprit has been put on trial, jailed or even identified. Families of the victims have received no visit, apology or explana ... read more