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peterconnelly

Linda Fagan: Biden celebrates first female commandant of the US Coast Guard - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • (CNN)President Joe Biden on Wednesday commemorated the "historic first" time that a woman will lead a branch of the armed forces, as Adm. Linda Fagan became the first female commandant of the US Coast Guard.
  • "connection to the earliest days of our nation" as well as a "new milestone."
  • She most recently served as the commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area and also served on the icebreaker USCGC POLAR STAR.
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  • "There's no one more qualified to lead the proud women and men of the Coast Guard and she will also be the first woman to serve as commandant of the Coast Guard, the first woman to lead any branch in the United States Armed Forces. And it's about time," the President said.
  • Admiral Fagan shows that young people, young people entering the service, we mean it when we say: There are no doors, no doors closed to women
  • He noted -- to applause -- that 40% of the US Coast Guard is now comprised of women, as he called for continued efforts to improve diversity within the US armed forces.
Maria Delzi

BBC News - UK storms: Fresh flood fears for coming days - 0 views

  • People are being warned to brace themselves for floods on England's coasts and rivers, with further severe weather forecast.
  • More than 90 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected, are in place in England and Wales, with 10 in Scotland.
  • The search for a teenager in Devon who has been missing since Thursday has been called off for a second night.
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  • The Environment Agency said parts of England's north-east coast could see flooding while parts of the south coast - including Portsmouth and Newhaven - were also at risk over the weekend.
  • Spokesman Jonathan Day added: "The risk of flooding to the coast will continue over the next few days, especially on the south and west coast and along the Severn estuary."
  • A man was rescued by police in Newquay after going into the sea in the early hours of Saturday morning
  • Part of a cliff has collapsed into the sea on the East Sussex coast after being undermined by rough seas
  • In Scotland, flooding was less severe than expected after warnings of a tidal surge on the east coast
  • There are currently no severe flood warnings - indicating danger to life - in place across the UK.
  • However, more than 240 flood alerts - meaning flooding is possible, be prepared - are in place in England and Wales, in addition to more than 90 flood warnings.
  • Prime Minister David Cameron praised the agencies involved in dealing with the storm threat.
  • He tweeted: "Great work by emergency services & @EnvAgency helping people flooded. 200,000 properties have been protected by flood defences in last 36hrs."
  • Forecasters have warned of heavy rain in southern England, south-east Wales, Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.
  • There is an increased risk of flooding risk to Weybridge and Guildford on Sunday and into Monday and people living along the non-tidal Thames, including Oxford and Osney, could be at risk from Sunday, the EA said.
peterconnelly

While China makes Pacific islands tour, US Coast Guard is already on patrol - CNN - 0 views

  • As China's foreign minister began a Pacific islands tour to promote economic and security cooperation with Beijing, the smallest of the US government's armed services was already on the scene, reinforcing Washington's longstanding commitment to the region.
  • The US cutter "helped to fill the operational presence needed by conducting maritime surveillance to deter illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the northern Solomon Islands," a Coast Guard press release said.
  • China had proposed a sweeping regional security and economic agreement with a number of Pacific Island nations
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  • "We will expand US Coast Guard presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia and the Pacific Islands, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity-building," the strategy's action plan says.
  • "Don't be too anxious and don't be too nervous, because the common development and prosperity of China and all the other developing countries would only mean great harmony, greater justice and greater progress of the whole world," he said.
  • The pact, if accepted, would have marked a significant advance in Beijing's connection to the region, which holds geo-strategic importance in the Indo-Pacific.
  • The relationships the US Coast Guard has forged in the Pacific islands have deep roots, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
  • With fish as the main food source and key economic driver of the island nations, the Coast Guard says the emphasis of Operation Blue Pacific is to deter illegal and unregulated fishing.
  • "You cannot understate the Coast Guard's importance to ... relationships in the Central and Western Pacific," he said.
  • "It's difficult to imagine China having sufficient political capital to push for something analogous to what the US is currently doing," Koh said.
ethanmoser

The Latest: 7 bodies of migrants found near Spain, off coast | Fox News - 0 views

  • The Latest: 7 bodies of migrants found near Spain, off coast
  • Spain's maritime rescue service says the bodies of seven African migrants have been found dead along the Strait of Gibraltar since Friday.
  • More than 181,000 people, most so-called "economic migrants" with little chance of being allowed to stay in Europe, attempted to cross the central Mediterranean last year from Libya, Africa's nearest stretch of coast to Italy. About 4,500 died or disappeared.
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  • Some European leaders are warning of a fresh migration crisis when sea waters warm again and more people choose to put their lives in the hands of smugglers.
  • Pope Francis is demanding that "every possible measure" be taken to protect young refugees as he marks the church's World Day of Migrants a day after the latest Mediterranean migrant shipwreck.
  • Italy's coast guard says only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship off Libya's coast on Saturday. An estimated 100 people were aboard and only eight bodies have been recovered.
katyshannon

Here's What's Up With The East Coast's Absurdly Warm Weather - 0 views

  • The weather's been positively toasty across much of the east coast over the past several days, especially for a December. In New York, Sunday temperatures shattered a 30-year-old record, hitting 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And the month has been chock-full of 60-plus days.
  • So what's going on? Is this a climate change thing, or a welcome boon from the ongoing El Nino tropical weather event? The answer actually lies with a buzzword from 2014's equally extreme temperatures: the polar vortex.
  • Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, said last week the band of cold air surrounding the arctic -- called the "Arctic Oscillation" -- is particularly tight right now. During the polar vortex, pressure changes in that band of air caused it to slow and slip down towards America, bringing with it a wave of Arctic air that led to well below zero temperatures.
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  • This time around, all of that frigidity is being kept north, causing the far more pleasant temperatures experienced around the east coast.
  • Meanwhile on the West Coast, a series of storm systems is expected to bring more rain and cover the Northwest and Rockies with snow this week.
  • Some meteorologists have warned the Arctic Oscillation could slip as winter carries on, leading to a sudden downturn in temperatures.
abbykleman

Coast Guard suspends practice of shooting, stabbing and dismembering animals in trauma ... - 0 views

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    The U.S. Coast Guard said it has suspended a longtime practice in which it used live animals during trauma training. The suspension will last at least six months, giving the Coast Guard time to examine non-animal alternatives, such as using dummies during what the military has called "live tissue training," Coast Guard spokeswoman Alana Miller said.
izzerios

Russian bombers spotted off Alaskan coast twice in 24 hours - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

shared by izzerios on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Russian TU-95 Bear bombers were spotted flying about 41 miles off the coast of Alaska on Tuesday
  • It is unclear if these were the same planes that were intercepted by the F-22s on Monday, but defense officials told CNN that it was a separate violation.
  • The closest the bombers came was 36 nautical miles off the mainland Alaskan coast
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  • US military officials downplayed Monday's midair interaction as "nothing out of the ordinary" and "not dissimilar from what we've seen in the past with respect to Russian long-range aviation."
  • Russians were "trying to show their teeth" by flying so close to the US coastline
  • "This was a show of force by the Russians to show us that they are still here,"
  • "an attempt to come up as close as they could to our international borders to see what our reaction would be."
rerobinson03

A Brief History of the Age of Exploration - 0 views

  • The era known as the Age of Exploration, sometimes called the Age of Discovery, officially began in the early 15th century and lasted through the 17th century.
  • The period is characterized as a time when Europeans began exploring the world by sea in search of new trading routes, wealth, and knowledge. The impact of the Age of Exploration would permanently alter the world and transform geography into the
  • modern science it is today.
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  • Explorers learned more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and brought that knowledge back to Europe.Massive wealth accrued to European colonizers due to trade in goods, spices, and precious metals.Methods of navigation and mapping improved, switching from traditional portolan charts to the world's first nautical maps.New food, plants, and animals were exchanged between the colonies and Europe.Indigenous people were decimated by Europeans, from a combined impact of disease, overwork, and massacres.The workforce needed to support the massive plantations in the New World, led to the trade of enslaved people, which lasted for 300 years and had an enormous impact on Africa.
  • When the Ottoman Empire took control of Constantinople in 1453, it blocked European access to the area, severely limiting trade. In addition, it also blocked access to North Africa and the Red Sea, two very important trade routes to the Far East.
  • Portuguese explorers discovered the Madeira Islands in 1419 and the Azores in 1427. Over the coming decades, they would push farther south along the African coast, reaching the coast of present-day Senegal by the 1440s and the Cape of Good Hope by 1490. Less than a decade later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama would follow this route all the way to India.
  • Christopher Columbus, an Italian working for the Spanish monarchy, made his first journey in 1492. Instead of reaching India, Columbus found the island of San Salvador in what is known today as the Bahamas.
  • Columbus would lead three more voyages to the Caribbean, exploring parts of Cuba and the Central American coast.
  • Great Britain and France also began seeking new trade routes and lands across the ocean. In 1497, John Cabot, an Italian explorer working for the English, reached what is believed to be the coast of Newfoundland. A number of French and English explorers followed, including Giovanni da Verrazano, who discovered the entrance to the Hudson River in 1524, and Henry Hudson, who mapped the island of Manhattan first in 1609.
  • Over the next decades, the French, Dutch, and British would all vie for dominance. England established the first permanent colony in North America at Jamestown, Va., in 1607.
  • Other important voyages of exploration during this era included Ferdinand Magellan's attempted circumnavigation of the globe, the search for a trade route to Asia through the Northwest Passage, and Captain James Cook's voyages that allowed him to map various areas and travel as far as Alaska.
  • The Age of Exploration ended in the early 17th century after technological advancements and increased knowledge of the world allowed Europeans to travel easily across the globe by sea. The creation of permanent settlements and colonies created a network of communication and trade, therefore ending the need to search for new routes.
  • The Age of Exploration had a significant impact on geography. By traveling to different regions around the globe, explorers were able to learn more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and bring that knowledge back to Europe.
  • As technology advanced and known territory expanded, maps and mapmaking became more and more sophisticated.
  • The Age of Exploration served as a stepping stone for geographic knowledge. It allowed more people to see and study various areas around the world, which increased geographic study, giving us the basis for much of the knowledge we have today
anonymous

Post-Election Violence: Cities And Businesses Prepare For Unrest : NPR - 0 views

  • Across the country, there are growing concerns that the bitterness and animosity over the presidential election will not end when the polls close Tuesday night. From coast to coast, cities are preparing for possible protests, civil unrest and violence, regardless of the election's outcome.
  • While the nation's capital city is certain to be a focal point of post-election demonstrations, other cities are bracing for possible chaos too.
  • The National Retail Federation has held training webinars for members on crisis prevention and de-escalating conflict and hired security consultants to help store owners prepare.
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  • but also the mom & pop shops on the South and the West sides of Chicago who he says "are hanging on by a thread right now because of the pandemic."
  • "They cannot afford to be looted. They cannot afford destruction, because if that happens, they very well may close and not reopen,"
  • Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says the city has been planning and preparing for potential election-related protests and civil unrest for months.
  • Chicago has been running tabletop exercises and gaming out how, when and where violence might erupt.
  • the city will flood certain areas with a highly visible police presence to deter violence. The city will also be using snow plows, dump trucks and other heavy vehicles to block certain streets and expressway exit ramps to keep demonstrators away.
  • Chicago police will respect people's rights to peacefully protest and will work first and foremost to de-escalate any confrontations, but he hastens to add that his officers will take swift action against anyone intent on spreading chaos.
  • Groups on all sides of the political spectrum are planning election night demonstrations and the very real possibility that the results might not be known for days or weeks after Election Day could escalate tensions.
  • mass organized political violence is not a part of the American psyche.
  • but in terms of actual massive violence, this is not something we have done before."
  • 2020 is already a year of political tension and unrest unlike anything seen in the country since the 1960s
  • Phil Brach spent the weekend putting huge sheets of plywood up over the massive glass windows of the store where he works, Rodman's Food and Drug in Washington, D.C., in preparation for Election Day.
  • Across the country, there are growing concerns that the bitterness and animosity over the presidential election will not end when the polls close Tuesday night. From coast to coast, cities are preparing for possible protests, civil unrest and violence, regardless of the election's outcome.
  • Nolan says he went to the store the night of the looting along with a police officer who advised him to leave.
  • "We put some film on these windows so that they're not easily broken, if they're smashed, they'll stay in place. And we're hoping that no one can break into the store, at least not easily," Roy says. Nolan adds, "The film makes the glass shatterproof so it doesn't just explode upon contact."
  • While the nation's capital city is certain to be a focal point of post-election demonstrations, other cities are bracing for possible chaos too.
  • Workers were busy boarding up store windows while supporters of President Trump held a "freedom rally" that was briefly disrupted by counter protesters.
  • "Coming off of the summer, seeing the looting that occurred, there's a lot of anxiety," says Elliott Richardson who heads the Small Business Advocacy Council in Chicago.
  • Superintendent David Brown says Chicago police will respect people's rights to peacefully protest and will work first and foremost to de-escalate any confrontations, but he hastens to add that his officers will take swift action against anyone intent on spreading chaos.
  • In Beverly Hills, Calif. tensions felt high already this weekend.
  • The National Retail Federation has held training webinars for members on crisis prevention and de-escalating conflict and hired security consultants to help store owners prepare.
  • Groups on all sides of the political spectrum are planning election night demonstrations and the very real possibility that the results might not be known for days or weeks after Election Day could escalate tensions.
Javier E

The right shuts down free speech, too - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • In a disturbing series of events, conservative organizations have been claiming the mantle of free speech in service of suppressing campus speech they dislike, too.
  • The most recent case involves professor Olga Perez Stable Cox at Orange Coast College in California. An anonymous student in her human sexuality class secretly recorded Cox discussing her political views. She referred to Donald Trump as a “white supremacist,” his running mate Mike Pence “as one of the most anti-gay humans in this country” and their election as an “act of terrorism.”
  • Meanwhile, the Orange Coast College Republicans — the group that disseminated the gotcha video — is campaigning for her firing. The group’s president said that expunging commentary such as hers from campus is necessary to ensure the college’s commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusivity.”
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  • conservative pundits convinced that U.S. colleges are leftist indoctrination camps have taken up the Republican students’ cause. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly referred to the professor’s words as an “assault” on her students — conflating words with physical violence in the same way liberals so often do.
  • In a similar vein, the conservative group Turning Point USA recently published a “Professor Watchlist,” a catalogue of what it thinks are dangerous and “anti-American” professors who deserve public shaming for allegedly trying to “advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.” (Among those “radical agenda” items: advocating gun control, calling Ted Cruz’s infamous “New York values” statement anti-Semitic.)
jongardner04

Ivory Coast holds first post-war presidential poll - BBC News - 0 views

  • Ivory Coast is holding a bitterly contested presidential election, the first since the civil war ended in 2011.
  • After refusing to admit defeat in November 2010, Mr Gbagbo was eventually arrested by a combination of French, UN and pro-Ouattara forces in April 2011.
  • President Alassane Ouattara is running for a second term in the world's largest cocoa producer.
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  • Since taking power, Mr Ouattara has overseen an economic boom but been accused of ignoring atrocities allegedly committed by his supporters, while prosecuting his rivals.
cdavistinnell

Hurricane Irma: Massive storm bears down on Florida - BBC News - 0 views

  • The category four storm with sustained winds up to 130mph (209km/h) moved away from the Florida Keys and should make landfall on the west coast in hours
  • "very concerned" about the west coast
  • Extreme winds and storm surges continued in the Lower Florida Keys area, which includes Key West.
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  • One official had warned staying on the islands would be "almost like suicide".
  • Irma is the most powerful Atlantic storm in a decade, and has already caused widespread destruction on several Caribbean islands
  • Another storm, Jose, further out in the Atlantic behind Irma, is a category four hurricane, with winds of up to 130mph.
  • Hurricane Katia, in the Gulf of Mexico, a category one storm with winds of up to 75mph, made landfall on the Mexican Gulf coast in the state of Veracruz late on Friday before weakening to a tropical depression.
anonymous

Oregon coast earthquakes: No tsunami warnings after two 5.9 magnitude earthquakes - CNN - 0 views

  • Two 5.9 magnitude earthquakes struck the Pacific Ocean off Oregon's coast early Friday morning,
  • The tremors occurred about 89 miles and 98 miles west of the coastal town of Gold Beach, Oregon, after 1 a.m. (PT)
  • At least five earthquakes ranging in magnitudes from 3.2 to 5.9 have occurred in the area in the last few hours, according to USGS.
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  • No tsunami warnings, advisories, watches, or threats were issued following the earthquakes, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Tsunami Warning System.
Javier E

The Origins of Trump's Slapdash, Last-Second '1776 Report' - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • he 1776 Report can be understood as the other side of the coin to Anton’s rage. It’s the positive vision that justifies Trumpian cruelty. By conjuring an idealized and imaginary past, West Coast Straussians—and too many on the right—transform current conflicts into a satanic fall from an American Eden.
  • The American past is rich, complicated, beautiful, and powerful, but also wicked and painful. It needs to be reckoned with. The 1776 Report is the Trumpian and West Coast Straussian response to a prominent recent attempt to reckon with part of that history, the New York Times’s hotly debated 1619 Project.
  • Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a prominent critic of the 1619 Project, dismissed the 1776 Report as “the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a slavocracy, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history. It’s basically a political document, not history.”
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  • In the 1980s, an East Coast Straussian, Thomas Pangle, criticized Jaffa and his allies of espousing a “new mythic Americanism” that blurred the line between scholarship and poetry. To Pangle, Jaffa’s sacred vision of America hurt authentic patriotism by failing to engage with a real country and its real past.
Javier E

Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
  • This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
  • “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
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  • Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.
  • The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
  • “It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects
  • But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
  • Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.
  • The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
  • Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
  • Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
  • it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
  • “Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
  • Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
  • “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”
  • Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life
  • how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.
  • It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change
  • The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
  • Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
  • For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”
  • “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
  • “we’re all in this together.”
  • First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
  • every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
  • It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels
  • Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
  • “Seriously, it is not reversible.”
  • Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
  • If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.
  • Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.
  • If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.
  • If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
  • The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.
  • “In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt
  • “But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”
  • So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.
  • “The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”
  • “I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”
  • adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one
  • Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.
  • “Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”
  • It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”
  • And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.
  • Cascading Disasters
  • Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.
  • Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.
  • Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”
  • as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.
  • Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.
  • One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves
  • A Lifetime of Clues
  • For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.
  • As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,
  • “I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”
  • ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.
  • “There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”
  • “What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”
Javier E

DNA Confirms Oral History of Swahili People - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.
  • A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.
  • long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.
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  • The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north
  • In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.
  • Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths 0c 0c and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber 0c 0c went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)
  • A unique cosmopolitan society emerged that blended African customs and beliefs with those of the foreign traders, some of whom stuck around and assimilated.
  • Islam, for example, arrived from the Middle East and became an integral part of the Swahili social fabric, but with coral-stone mosques built and decorated in a local, East African style
  • Or consider the Kiswahili language, which is Bantu in origin but borrows heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern tongues
  • The arrival of Europeans, beginning around 1500, followed by Omani sailors some 200 years later, changed the character of the region
  • over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.
  • That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though
  • They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.
  • “It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England
  • “This oral tradition was always maligned,”
  • “Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”
  • The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.
  • To figure out where these people came from, the researchers compared genetic signatures from the dug-up bones with cheek swabs or saliva samples taken from modern-day individuals living in Africa, the Middle East and around the world.
  • The burial-site DNA traced back to two primary sources: Africans and present-day Iranians. Smaller contributions came from South Asians and Arabs as well, with foreign DNA representing about half of the skeletons’ genealogy
  • “It’s surprising that the genetic signature is so strong
  • Gene sequences from tiny power factories inside the cell, known as mitochondria, were overwhelmingly African in origin. Since children inherit these bits of DNA only from their mothers, the researchers inferred that the maternal forbearers of the Swahili people were mostly of African descent.
  • By comparison, the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, was chock-full of Asian DNA that the researchers found was common in modern-day Iran. So, a large fraction of Swahili ancestry presumably came from Persian men
  • Dr. Reich initially assumed that conquering men settled the region by force, displacing the local males in the process. “My hypothesis was that this was a genetic signature of inequality and exploitation,”
  • hat turned out to be a “naïve expectation,” Dr. Reich said, because “it didn’t take into account the cultural context in this particular case.”
  • In East Africa, Persian customs never came to dominate. Instead, most foreign influences — language, architecture, fashion, arts — were incorporated into a way of life that remained predominantly African in character, with social strictures, kinship systems and agricultural practices that reflected Indigenous traditions.
  • “Swahili was an absorbing society,” said Adria LaViolette, an archaeologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the East African coast for over 35 years. Even as the Persians who arrived influenced the culture, “they became Swahili,”
  • One major caveat to the study: Nearly all the bones and teeth came from ornamental tombs that were located near grand mosques, sites where only the upper class would have been laid to rest.
  • the results might not be representative of the general populace.
  • Protocols for disinterring, sampling and reburying human remains were established in consultation with local religious leaders and community stakeholders. Under Islamic law, exhumations are permitted if they serve a public interest, including that of determining ancestry,
rachelramirez

One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
  • One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.
  • “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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  • As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
  • The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On.
  • The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
  • He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
  • HIV first started infecting humans somewhere in West Africa, having jumped into us from chimpanzees.
  • He also concluded that the virus must have arrived in the U.S. around 12 years before AIDS was formally recognized in 1981.
  • They reveal that HIV had spread from Africa to the Caribbean by around 1967, and had jumped into the U.S. by around 1971. It landed in New York City and began diversifying rapidly
  • By the time anyone noticed the first sign of AIDS in 1981, the virus had already hopped from coast to coast, and become genetically diverse.
  • This means that not only did Dugas not bring AIDS to America, but he didn’t spread it west either. He was a totally mundane part of a very unusual epidemic.
  • In 2010, evolutionary biologists used gene trees to prove that a man named Anthony Eugene Whitfield had knowingly infected many women with HIV. More recently, biologists used a pocket-sized DNA sequencer to track the evolution of Ebola in real-time, providing details about routes of transmission that helped to curtail the recent west African outbreak.
anonymous

'The Worst We Have Ever Seen': Fewer Migrants, More Death - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The harrowing journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe has become increasingly deadly for asylum seekers desperate to find a better life.
  • many migrants have died at sea this year
  • “This is by far the worst we have ever seen,”
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  • Here are some of the reasons the Mediterranean crossing has become increasingly dangerous.
  • Most migrants are heading to Italy,
  • So far this year, 327,800 people have crossed the Mediterranean, about half the number who crossed in the same period last year.
  • The sharp rise in fatalities — 3,740 people died through this week — can be attributed in part to the changing tactics used by smugglers. They are loading thousands of people at a time and using less seaworthy boats, including inflatable rubber rafts that do not last the crossing.
  • The Italian Navy and Coast Guard rescued more than 6,000 migrants in a single day early this month and on Monday pulled 2,200 more to safety in the course of 21 rescue operations.
  • The Libyan Coast Guard has denied any involvement in the incident, but Sea-Watch, a rescue organization that retrieved four bodies and rescued around 120 people in the incident,
Javier E

Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The presidential election of 1968 was a milestone in partisan realignment — the breakup of the mid-20th-century Democrats and Republicans and the reshuffling of voter blocs among the two parties
  • In 2016, this half-century process of partisan realignment is all but complete. What we are seeing instead of partisan realignment is policy realignment — the adjustment of what each party stands for to its existing voter base.
  • For a while, the strength of the religious right allowed elite Republicans to trade tax cuts for the rich for support for banning abortion and gay marriage. But as religious conservatism declines, a kind of European-style national populism is rising, for which protectionism and immigration restriction are central issues, not peripheral concerns.
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  • Although he benefited from the support of working-class whites who resented affirmative action, busing, mass immigration, sexual liberation and cultural liberalism, Reagan himself was animated by an optimistic individualism that had more in common with Chamber of Commerce boosterism than it did with the defensive and combative communitarianism of conservative populism.
  • in the midterm election of 1994, when the Republican party captured both houses of Congress, many centrist and conservative Democrats, particularly in the South and West, were replaced by Republicans. The Democrats who survived the slaughter were concentrated in New England and the West Coast, big cities and college towns, and majority black or majority Latino districts. The midterm elections of 2010 wiped out much of the remnant of centrist-to-conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House.
  • Today’s Democratic base is, to simplify somewhat, an alliance of Northern, Midwestern and West Coast whites from the old Rockefeller Republican tradition with blacks and Latinos.
  • For their part, the Republicans of 2016 rely for their votes on the Southern white and Northern white working-class constituencies that were once the mainstays of the other party. With this partisan realignment over, the policy realignment has begun — the closing of the gap between the inherited program of a political party and the values and interests of its present-day voters.
  • In the Republican Party, the inherited program shared by much of the conservative movement and the party’s donors, with its emphasis on free trade and large-scale immigration, and cuts in entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, is a relic of the late 20th century, when the country-club wing of the party was much more important than the country-and-western wing.
  • We are accustomed to thinking of the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as the beginning of a new era. But from the vantage point of 2016, both Reagan and Bill Clinton look more like transitional figures. During this period, the migration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party of socially conservative, economically populist Democrats, like the supporters of the segregationist Democrat George Wallace’s independent presidential campaign in 1968, was not yet complete. Neither was the flow of moderate Rockefeller Republicans in the opposite direction.
  • Long before Mr. Trump threw his hat into the ring in 2015, the economic libertarians who are overrepresented in the donor class and Republican think tanks and magazines were losing to the populists. Opposition to illegal immigration went from being a fringe issue associated with Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s to a central test of whether one was a “true conservative” or a Republican in Name Only.
  • Mr. Trump exposed the gap between what orthodox conservative Republicans offer and what today’s dominant Republican voters actually want — middle-class entitlements plus crackdowns on illegal immigrants, Muslims, foreign trade rivals and free-riding allies
  • notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the young for Bernie Sanders, the major tension is not between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton. It is between Hillary Clinton and the legacy of Bill Clinton.
  • the success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more. Many Democrats hope that the long-term growth of the Obama coalition, caused chiefly by the growth of the Latino share of the electorate, will create an all but inevitable Democratic majority in the executive branch
  • The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.
  • on the social and racial issues that are important to today’s Democratic base, it is Mr. Sanders, not Mrs. Clinton, who has had to modify his message. At the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Sanders the democratic socialist focused in the manner of a single issue candidate almost exclusively on themes of class, inequality and political corruption. But because he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he has had to put greater emphasis on other issues, including racial disparity in policing and sentencing and the environment and immigration.
  • For all of these reasons, it is likely that the future of the Democrats will be Clintonism — Hillary Clintonism, that is, a slightly more progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism.
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