Deadliest Ebola Outbreak on Record Is Over, W.H.O. Says
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After Ebola: the darkest days of terror are over | Bintu Sannoh - 0 views
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"Ebola has now moved on from Kenema and the east. For two months, we have hardly had any cases. People say they are winding up some of the Ebola clinics around. For us here, we hope those dark, darkest days of terror, confusion and pain are past. Ebola is still big in Sierra Leone, though, especially in Freetown. I feel so sad for those people."
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Deadliest Ebola Outbreak on Record Is Over, W.H.O. Says - The New York Times - 0 views
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DAKAR, Senegal — The World Health Organization declared on Thursday the end to the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, which killed and sickened tens of thousands of people in West Africa, even as it cautioned that more flare-ups of the disease were likely.
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recent chain of cases in Liberia was snuffed out, marking the first time since the start of the epidemic two years ago that Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone
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Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, hailed the “monumental achievement” in curbing the outbreak
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United Nations said, killed more than 11,300 people and infected more than 28,500. At the height of the outbreak
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The risk, although significant, was low, he said. The new cases had occurred on average 27 days apart, but there have been none since mid-November
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The three West African countries now have the world’s biggest pool of expertise in handling Ebola and greater professionalism, confidence and resources for dealing with it, he said.
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Sierra Leone was declared free of Ebola transmission in November and Guinea at the end of December; Liberia was declared Ebola-free in May but then reported a few new cases.
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Beating back Ebola is among the few tangible achievements that senior United Nations officials cite as an example of global cooperation
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“Relative to its significance to global humanity, there is no issue that gets less attention,” said Lawrenc
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“Frankly, this has not been on the A-list of global problems in the way that nuclear proliferation, or terrorism, or global climate change has been,
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Investing roughly $4.5 billion a year to improve health systems, advance research, and strengthen the abilities of the World Health Organization and other bodies could avoid $60 billion in losses in the event of a pandemic, the commission concluded.
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Ebola virus: New case emerges in Sierra Leone - BBC News - 0 views
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Sierra Leone officials have confirmed a death from Ebola, hours after the World Health Organization declared the latest West Africa outbreak over.
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he country was declared free of the virus on 7 November, and the region as a whole was cleared when Liberia was pronounced Ebola-free on Thursday.
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Tests on a person who died in northern Sierra Leone proved positive, an Ebola test centre spokesman told the BBC.
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A Single Fire Killed At Least 10% Of The World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says : NPR - 0 views
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At least a tenth of the world's mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service.
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Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world's mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.
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The consequences of losing large numbers of giant sequoias could be felt for decades, forest managers said. Redwood and sequoia forests are among the world's most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The groves also provide critical habitat for native wildlife and help protect the watershed that supplies farms and communities on the San Joaquin Valley floor.
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Brigham, the study's lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed.
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"I have a vain hope that once we get out on the ground the situation won't be as bad, but that's hope — that's not science," she said.
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The newspaper said the extent of the damage to one of the world's most treasured trees is noteworthy because the sequoias themselves are incredibly well adapted to fire. The old-growth trees — some of which are more than 2,000 years old and 250 feet (76 meters) tall — require fire to burst their pine cones and reproduce.
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"One-hundred years of fire suppression, combined with climate change-driven hotter droughts, have changed how fires burn in the southern Sierra and that change has been very bad for sequoia," Brigham said.
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Sequoia and Kings Canyon have conducted controlled burns since the 1960s, about a thousand acres a year on average. Brigham estimates that the park will need to burn around 30 times that number to get the forest back to a healthy state.
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What Is Middle Class in Manhattan? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“When we got here, I didn’t feel so out of place, I didn’t have this awareness of being middle class,” she said. But in the last 5 or 10 years an array of high-rises brought “uberwealthy” neighbors, she said, the kind of people who discuss winter trips to St. Barts at the dog run, and buy $700 Moncler ski jackets for their children.
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Even the local restaurants give Ms. Azeez the sense that she is now living as an economic minority in her own neighborhood. “There’s McDonald’s, Mexican and Nobu,” she said, and nothing in between.
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“My niece just bought a home in Atlanta for $85,000,” she said. “I almost spend that on rent and utilities in a year.
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“Housing has always been one of the ways the middle class has defined itself, by the ability to own your own home. But in New York, you didn’t have to own.” There is no stigma, he said, to renting a place you can afford only because it is rent-regulated; such a situation is even considered enviable.
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“It’s overwhelmingly housing — that’s the big distortion relative to other places,” said Frank Braconi, the chief economist in the New York City comptroller’s office. “Virtually everything costs more, but not to the degree that housing does.”
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The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000.
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New Yorkers also live in a notably unequal place. Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone — the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites make 40 times more than the lowest fifth, according to 2010 census data.
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There is no single, formal definition of class status in this country. Statisticians and demographers all use slightly different methods to divvy up the great American whole into quintiles and median ranges. Complicating things, most people like to think of themselves as middle class. It feels good, after all, and more egalitarian than proclaiming yourself to be rich or poor. A $70,000 annual income is middle class for a family of four, according to the median response in a recent Pew Research Center survey, and yet people at a wide range of income levels, including those making less than $30,000 and more than $100,000 a year, said they, too, belonged to the middle.
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“You could still go into a bar in Manhattan and virtually everyone will tell you they’re middle class,” said Daniel J. Walkowitz, an urban historian at New York University.
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The price tag for life’s basic necessities — everything from milk to haircuts to Lipitor to electricity, and especially housing — is more than twice the national average.
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If the money you live on is coming from any kind of investment or dividend, you are probably not middle class, according to Mr. Braconi.
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Without the clear badge of middle-class membership — a home mortgage — it is hard to say where a person fits on the class continuum. So let’s consider the definition of “middle class” through five different lenses.
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If you live in Manhattan and you are making more than $790,000 a year, then congratulations, you are the 1 percent.
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“Understanding who is middle class, in New York, but especially Manhattan, is all about when you got into the real estate market,” he said. “If you bought an apartment prior to 2000, or have long been in a rent-stabilized apartment, you could probably be a teacher in Manhattan and be solidly middle class. But if you bought or started renting in a market-rate apartment over the last 5 or 10 years, you could probably be a management consultant and barely have any savings.”
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By the same formula — measuring by who sits in the middle of the income spectrum — Manhattan’s middle class exists somewhere between $45,000 and $134,000.
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But if you are defining middle class by lifestyle, to accommodate the cost of living in Manhattan, that salary would have to fall between $80,000 and $235,000. This means someone making $70,000 a year in other parts of the country would need to make $166,000 in Manhattan to enjoy the same purchasing power.
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Using the rule of thumb that buyers should expect to spend two and a half times their annual salary on a home purchase, the properties in Manhattan that could be said to be middle class would run between $200,000 and $588,000.
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On the low end, the pickings are slim. The least expensive properties are mostly uptown, in neighborhoods like Yorkville, Washington Heights and Inwood. The most pleasing options in this range, however, are one-bedroom apartments not designed for children or families.
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“There’s no room for the earlier version of the middle class,” Mr. Walkowitz said. Firefighter, police officer, teacher and manufacturing worker all used to be professions that could lift a family into its ranks. But those kinds of jobs have long left people unable to keep up with soaring real estate prices.
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Positions that would nudge a family into the upper class elsewhere — say, vice president or director of strategy — and professions like psychologist are solidly middle class in Manhattan.
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The same holds true for jobs in higher education, a growth sector for the city. The average tenured university professor at New York University or Columbia makes more than $180,000 a year, according to a 2012 survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Sweetening the deal for those looking to buy, N.Y.U. has offered mortgage assistance and discounted loans, while qualified Columbia faculty are eligible for a subsidy of up to $40,000 a year. Some faculty members benefit from university housing that rents well below the market rate, in prime locations on the Upper West Side and in Greenwich Village.
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Because her building is owned by Columbia, her rent, about $1,800 a month, is manageable on an associate professor’s salary, which averages about $125,000. A similar market-rate apartment on the Upper West Side costs about $6,000 a month,
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One way to stay in Manhattan as a member of the middle class is to be in a relationship. Couples can split the cost of a one-bedroom apartment, along with utilities and takeout meals. But adding small roommates, especially the kind that do not contribute to rent, creates perhaps the single greatest obstacle to staying in the city.
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Only 17 percent of Manhattan households have children, according to census data. That is almost half the national average, making little ones the ultimate deal-breaker for otherwise die-hard middle-class Manhattanites.
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By one measure, in cities like Houston or Phoenix — places considered by statisticians to be more typical of average United States incomes than New York — a solidly middle-class life can be had for wages that fall between $33,000 and $100,000 a year.
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“The only artists I know now who are still in Manhattan,” she said, “either made it big and bought, or are still in the rent-controlled studios they landed in 1976, and will leave in a coffin.”
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People define class as much by association and culture as they do by raw numbers — a sense, more than anything, of baseline financial security garnished by an occasional luxury like a vacation, and a belief that things can get better through hard work and determination.
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In the last decade, the percentage of people who are paying “unaffordable rents” (defined as more than 30 percent of their income) has increased significantly, according to a report issued in September by the city’s comptroller.
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The only young people she sees moving in around her are often buoyed by parental support, given an apartment at graduation the way she was given a Seiko watch. As her own friends and neighbors age or die out, she wonders, “who is going to take our place?”
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Philippines and China in Dispute Over Reef - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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China accused the Philippines on Monday of illegally occupying Chinese territory after a Philippine vessel outmaneuvered the Chinese Coast Guard and resupplied a ship that has been stranded for 15 years on the Second Thomas Shoal, a tiny reef in the South China Sea.
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Chinese ships prevented the Philippines from resupplying the boat and its eight-man military crew in early March, but on Saturday a Philippine vessel manned by troops managed to keep the Chinese at bay by going into shallow waters and lifting food onto the stranded ship.“This is a political provocation,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Hong Lei, said at a regular briefing on Monday, adding that the Philippines was “hyping” its “illegal occupation” by filing a case on Sunday with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
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The cat-and-mouse maneuvers between the Philippines, an American ally with little naval capacity, and China, which has a fast-expanding navy, have captured attention for what they might foretell about future rivalries in the South China Sea.China claims about 80 percent of the South China Sea, a vital waterway for world trade.
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Philippines invited reporters on board the government vessel that was sent to resupply the Sierra Madre, a rusted warship that has been grounded on the reef since 1999.
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The Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper with nationalist views, said in an editorial on Monday that the “small and weak” Philippines had become the vanguard force of “provoking China.” It warned that China had the ability to force Filipino soldiers off the reef at any time, “like taking thieves away.”
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Bombed by Nazi pilots, before WWII - LA Times - 0 views
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Berg, who lived in Columbia, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was the last known survivor of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as the several units of American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War came to be called
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One of the last, killed a year and a half later, was James Lardner, a 24-year-old from a famous literary family, who traveled to Spain as a New York Herald Tribune correspondent and then decided to fight.
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World War II has largely pushed that conflict out of our collective memory, but it was momentous for the people of Spain, and for the 40,000 volunteers from more than 50 countries, 2,800 of them American, who fought in it. Eighty years ago this July, a large group of right-wing army officers staged a coup against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic.
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Foreign volunteers eager to help the Republic began arriving in late 1936. In January 1937 an American battalion was formed and hastily thrown into combat the next month. Americans fought in most of the major battles that followed. About 750 of them died and a majority of the remainder were wounded, including Delmer Berg, who carried shrapnel in his liver for the rest of his life.
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Roughly three-quarters of the American volunteers were members of the Communist Party or its affiliated groups. In their illusions about the Soviet Union they were of course profoundly naive. But they were not fighting for the Soviet Union, they were fighting for Spain
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And almost all of these men and women (about 75 American women went to Spain, mostly as nurses) felt that the conflict might be the opening battle of another world war.
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The Spanish Civil War was bewilderingly complicated. Within the republic were tensions between the Communists and the mainstream parties on one hand and, on the other, the Spanish anarchists and their allies
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How Badly Will US Exports of Crude Oil Hurt the Environment? | VICE | United States - 0 views
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Over the holidays, when most Americans were busy buying stuff and trying to stay cool in the December heat, one of the most significant environmental policies of the last several decades was quietly enacted.
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The reversal of the oil export ban, along with the expected first shipment of liquefied natural gas to a foreign country ever (expected later this month), is great news for oil and gas producers who've been hit hard by lower and lower prices for their goods in recent years.
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"It's a huge deal," Jean Su, a lawyer with the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told VICE over the phone. "It's less than a week after the Paris agreement was signed and Obama said the US was committed, then we go and sign a thing that regresses on everything that happened in Paris. It's horrendous."
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Oil prices dropped from over $100 a barrel in 2014 to just about $35 a barrel today. That's about the same amount it costs to produce a barrel, meaning right now oil producers are making nothing. Natural gas prices are down to their lowest levels in 16 years.
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Thanks to new technologies, mostly fracking, which allows producers to extract gas and oil from rocks thousands of feet below the surface of the earth with a mix of high-pressured water and chemicals, production of oil skyrocketed from about 5,000 barrels a day in 2008 to 8,700 in 2014.
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On New Year's Eve a Bahamian tanker called the "Theo T" cruised out of Corpus Christi, Texas with the first batch of crude oil to leave US shores in four decades, thanks to the budget bill that enabled it.
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The short answer: politics. Without throwing a bone to oil-backed Congresspeople, the budget bill last month would have likely been blocked.
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The other problem is leakage: Natural gas has been touted by Obama as a "bridge fuel" to get the world off of coal and other dirtier fuels. But it's only better than coal if the vast majority of it doesn't leak into the atmosphere before being burned.
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But it's slightly more clear what oil exports will do: one analysis found exports will allow for 3.3 million more barrels a day of oil to be produced in the US between 2015 and 2035.
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"We're already on the frontlines of oil and gas production," Raleigh Hoke, an activist with the Gulf Restoration Network, which works with communities affected by oil and gas in Louisiana, told VICE over the phone. "There are already 28 export facilities being constructed along the coast, so that means countless new pipelines through people's backyards, new trains carrying oil which are dangerous, and it hinders our efforts to restore our wetlands."
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"Frankly we just have to wait until November," Athan Manuel, an organizer at the Sierra Club, told VICE. "And then hope we have an anti-fossil fuel Senate and an anti-fossil fuel President."
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AOC's Green New Deal: A New Millennial Climate Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Al Gore made a prediction.When Americans understood what climate change would mean for their children and grandchildren, the former vice president warned, “they will demand that whoever is running for office, whoever is elected to serve, will have to respond.”
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“Millennials have been hearing for 20 years” that climate change would be an issue for their generation to deal with, he told me. “And I would say, thanks, we’re here now. This is us taking over the issue that, decades ago, people said would be ours to deal with. This is what the next generation of the issue looks like.”
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it has become the biggest idea in U.S. climate policy, and four Democratic presidential contenders have spoken in support of it (if tepidly). In practical terms, today’s plan matters most for the 2020 election. It shows that the broad left is on board with a policy; activist groups can now send detailed questionnaires to candidates and prepare report cards on the depth of their Green New Deal support.
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Even in its vague and broad language, it remains the most detailed guide to a Green New Deal yet. It is the first such plan endorsed by environmental organizations across the left, from the old-guard Sierra Club to the upstart Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activism corps that brought national notoriety to the Green New Deal plan last November.
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“This is an investment,” she said. “For every dollar we spend on infrastructure, we get more than a dollar back for that investment. For every dollar we collect in taxes, we get less than a dollar back.”
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Many progressives would consider themselves lucky if they ever get to talk seriously about carbon-capture policy. For now, they have the same goal: making its mix of climate and labor policy as much a part of the mainstream Democratic agenda as health care is.
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Charles III of Spain: an Enlightened Despot, Part II | History Today - 0 views
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With him in charge of the government, Charles was able to get into his stride as an enlightened despot: schools were founded to fill the void left by the expulsion of the Jesuits; the currency was reformed; a census was taken; and Madrid became, for the first time, a city worthy of Europe
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He did not like it, but he believed that the Spaniards wanted it, and the events of 1766 had taught him the danger of offending national prejudices
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During Aranda’s administration, an ambitious project was adopted for colonizing a depopulated area in the South of Spain, the Sierra Morena, with colonists from abroad, mostly from Germany
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Charles certainly tried to reduce the authority and privilege of the Church, but he was pious and his intervention was moderate.
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it is an absolute principle always to do what has been done the day before and to do it in absolutely the same way
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Charles issued a decree declaring officially that the trades of tanner, blacksmith, tailor and shoemaker did not degrade the person exercising them, or his family. To carry the point further, he worked from time to time with his hands in his own factories, and he was proud of having made the boots and main items of a soldier’s equipment
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It is difficult to exaggerate the darkness of the intellectual climate in which Charles and the men of the enlightenment had to work
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It is impossible to understand Charles’ reign or the achievement of the men of the enlightenment in Spain without keeping constantly in mind how widespread and entrenched were the forces of conservatism, intolerance and privilege, and how few were the men who believed that the only hope for the country lay in the introduction of new ideas—in the acceptance of reason rather than tradition as the lode-star of human activity
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There was a revulsion against war and a condemnation of militarism. ‘This peninsula,’ wrote Cadalso, ‘has not enjoyed anything that can be called peace for nearly 2,000 years. It is a marvel that there is any grass in the fields or water in the fountains
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Along with the embourgeoisement of the Spanish central government went a fresh broom in local affairs that swept away many of the old hereditary offices, opened them up to anyone who was qualified regardless of birth, and even introduced elections for certain posts
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He established royal factories for clocks and porcelain; infant industries were protected, and some of the restrictive practices of the enormously powerful guilds were curtailed
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The first national bank of Spain was founded, and economic societies were established in many parts of the country to spread technical knowledge
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Charles was also a considerable patron of the arts and sciences. He founded an astronomical observatory and an immense hospital.
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From all over France and Spain spectators flocked to see the 7,000 British defenders under General George Elliot defeated by the 40,000 men under the command of the renowned Spanish general
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The 1733 family Compact between the Kings of France and Spain contained an article committing His Most Christian Majesty to do everything, if necessary using force, to compel the British to restore Gibraltar to Spain
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the main source of five Anglo-Spanish wars in seventy-five years and was the prime objective for which Spain joined France in the War of American Independence
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Spain’s participation in the war led at first to a joint French-Spanish plan to invade England, but this soon had to be abandoned and, after the failure of secret peace talks, Spanish activity came to be concentrated more and more upon the capture of the Rock
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But Charles’s struggle for internal reform was partly stultified by his failure to spare the country the cost of further war. In 1775 an expedition was undertaken against Algiers which failed ignominiously
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But George III was in favour of giving it up since he was convinced that ‘this proud fortress’, to use his own words, would be ‘the source at least of a constant lurking enmity between England and Spain’
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The French Minister did not want to make the sacrifice of territory necessary to accomplish the exchange; nor did he wish to weaken the ties that bound the Bourbon powers by removing the greatest single obstacle to a reconciliation between Spain and England
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In the light of history, it looks as if a golden opportunity was missed for resolving the problem. Spain recovered Minorca and acquired the whole of Florida. But the source of enmity continued to lurk
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The war had brought serious consequences for Spain’s internal economy. But it had also not been without its effect on the problems of the Spanish-American colonies which now had a Republic on their doorstep
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the movement for separation. The development of trade led to more prosperity among many of the creoles and, hence, to in-dependent-mindedness
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He insisted on every detail of every new idea being thrashed out in one or other of the various councils of state
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There could be no attenuation of his absolute authority. It was government for the people, certainly, but without the people
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If the hopes were not entirely fulfilled and if Spain before long slipped backwards again into the darkness from which Charles had tried to lift her, the causes were hardly his responsibility.
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The French Revolution spread such fears amongst the reforming rulers of Spain that they panicked and suspended all progress
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Charles simply did not reign long enough to establish for all time the climate of change he had introduced
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Scientists find evidence of 'ghost population' of ancient humans | Science | The Guardian - 0 views
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Arun Durvasula and Sankararaman obtained 405 genomes from four west African populations and used statistical techniques to work out whether an influx of genes from interbreeding was likely to have happened in the distant past. The analysis suggested that it had in every case.
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The scientists went on to scour the African genomes for chunks of DNA that looked different to modern human genes. This allowed them to pull out sequences that most probably came from an ancient relative. By comparing these with genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans, they concluded that the DNA had to come from an unknown group of archaic humans.
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“They seem to have made a pretty substantial impact on the genomes of the present day individuals we studied,” Sankararaman said. “They account for 2% to 19% of their genetic ancestry.” The four populations studied came from three countries: two from Nigeria, and one each from Sierra Leone and the Gambia.
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Will Florida be lost forever to the climate crisis? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views
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Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than south Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat.
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Below are some of the biggest threats posed by the climate crisis to south Florida today, along with solutions under consideration. Some of these solutions will have a lasting impact on the fight. Others, in many cases, are only delaying the inevitable. But in every situation, doing something is preferable to doing nothing at all.
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Sea level rise The threat: By any estimation, Florida is drowning. In some scenarios, sea levels will rise up to 31in by 2060, a devastating prediction for a region that already deals regularly with tidal flooding and where an estimated 120,000 properties on or near the water are at risk. The pace of the rise is also hastening, scientists say – it took 31 years for the waters around Miami to rise by six inches, while the next six inches will take only 15 more.
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The cost: The participating counties and municipalities are contributing to a $4bn statewide spend, including Miami Beach’s $400m Forever Bond, a $1bn stormwater plan and $250m of improvements to Broward county’s sewage systems to protect against flooding and seawater seepage. In the Keys, many consider the estimated $60m a mile cost of raising roads too expensive.
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The threat: Saltwater from sea level rise is seeping further inland through Florida’s porous limestone bedrock and contaminating underground freshwater supplies, notably in the Biscayne aquifer, the 4,000-sq mile shallow limestone basin that provides drinking water to millions in southern Florida. Years of over-pumping and toxic runoff from farming and the sugar industry in central Florida and the Everglades have worsened the situation. The Florida department of environmental protection warned in March that “existing sources of water will not adequately meet the reasonable beneficial needs for the next 20 years”. A rising water table, meanwhile, has exacerbated problems with south Florida’s ageing sewage systems. Since December, millions of gallons of toxic, raw sewage have spilled on to Fort Lauderdale’s streets from a series of pipe failures.
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The cost: The Everglades restoration plan was originally priced at $7.8bn, rose to $10.5bn, and has since ballooned to $16.4bn. Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget includes $250m for Everglades restoration. The estimated $1.8bn cost of the reservoir will be split between federal and state budgets.
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The cost: With homeowners and businesses largely bearing their own costs, the specific amount spent on “hurricane-proofing” in Florida is impossible to know. A 2018 Pew research study documented $1.3bn in hazard mitigation grants from federal and state funding in 2017, along with a further $8bn in post-disaster grants. Florida is spending another $633m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on resiliency planning.
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Wildlife and habitat loss The threat: Florida’s native flora and fauna are being devastated by climate change, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory warning that a quarter of the 1,200 species it tracks is set to lose more than half their existing habitat, and the state’s beloved manatees and Key deer are at risk of extinction. Warmer and more acidic seas reduce other species’ food stocks and exacerbate the deadly red-tide algal blooms that have killed incalculable numbers of fish, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Bleaching and stony coral tissue disease linked to the climate crisis threaten to hasten the demise of the Great Florida Reef, the only living coral reef in the continental US. Encroaching saltwater has turned Big Pine Key, a crucial deer habitat, into a ghost forest.
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As for the Key deer, of which fewer than 1,000 remain, volunteers leave clean drinking water to replace salt-contaminated watering holes as herds retreat to higher ground. A longer-term debate is under way on the merits and ethics of relocating the species to other areas of Florida or the US.
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Coastal erosion The threat: Tourist brochures showcase miles of golden, sandy beaches in South Florida, but the reality is somewhat different. The Florida department of environmental protection deems the entire coastline from Miami to Cape Canaveral “critically eroded”, the result of sea level rise, historically high tides and especially storm surges from a succession of powerful hurricanes. In south-eastern Florida’s Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, authorities are waging a continuous war on sand loss, eager to maintain their picture-perfect image and protect two of their biggest sources of income, tourism dollars and lucrative property taxes from waterfront homes and businesses.
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In the devastating hurricane season just one year before, major storms named Harvey, Maria and Irma combined to cause damage estimated at $265bn. Scientists have evidence the climate crisis is causing cyclones to be more powerful, and intensify more quickly, and Florida’s position at the end of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley” makes it twice as vulnerable as any other state.
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With the other option abandoning beaches to the elements, city and county commissions have little choice but costly replenishment projects with sand replacement and jetty construction. Federal law prohibits the importation of cheaper foreign sand, so the municipalities must source a more expensive alternative from US markets, often creating friction with residents who don’t want to part with their sand. Supplementary to sand replenishment, the Nature Conservancy is a partner in a number of nature-based coastal defense projects from West Palm Beach to Miami.
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benefited from 61,000 cubic yards of new sand this year at a cost of $16m. Statewide, Florida spends an average $50m annually on beach erosion.
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The threat: “Climate gentrification” is a buzzword around south Florida, a region barely 6ft above sea level where land has become increasingly valuable in elevated areas. Speculators and developers are eyeing historically black, working-class and poorer areas, pushing out long-term residents and replacing affordable housing with upscale developments and luxury accommodations that only the wealthy can afford.
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No study has yet calculated the overall cost of affordable housing lost to the climate crisis. Private developers will bear the expense of mitigating the impact on the neighborhood – $31m in Magic City’s case over 15 years to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust, largely for new “green” affordable housing. The University of Miami’s housing solutions lab has a $300,000 grant from JPMorgan to report on the impact of rising seas to South Florida’s affordable housing stocks and recommend modifications to prevent it from flooding and other climate events. A collaboration of not-for-profit groups is chasing $75m in corporate funding for affordable housing along the 70-mile south Florida rail trail from Miami to West Palm Beach, with the first stage, a $5m project under way to identify, build and renovate 300 units.
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Florida has long been plagued by political leadership more in thrall to the interests of big industry than the environment. As governor from 2011 to 2019, Rick Scott, now a US senator, slashed $700m from Florida’s water management budget, rolled back environmental regulations and enforcement, gave a free ride to polluters, and flip-flopped over expanding offshore oil drilling. The politician who came to be known as “Red Tide Rick”, for his perceived inaction over 2018’s toxic algae bloom outbreaks, reportedly banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from state documents.
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Last month, state legislators approved the first dedicated climate bill. It appears a promising start for a new administration, but activists say more needs to be done. In January, the Sierra Club awarded DeSantis failing grades in an environmental report card, saying he failed to protect Florida’s springs and rivers and approved new roads that threatened protected wildlife.
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The cost: Florida’s spending on the environment is increasing. The state budget passed last month included $650m for Everglades restoration and water management projects (an instalment of DeSantis’s $2.5bn four-year pledge) and $100m for Florida Forever. A $100m bridge project jointly funded by the state and federal governments will allow the free flow of water under the Tamiami Trail for the first time in decades.
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Florida has woken up to the threat of climate change but it is not yet clear how effective the response will be. The challenges are innumerable, the costs immense and the political will to fix or minimize the issues remains questionable, despite recent progress. At stake is the very future of one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, in terms of both its population and its environment. Action taken now will determine its survival.
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Pruitt: Scientists receiving federal grants will be cut from EPA advising roles - CNNPo... - 0 views
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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt says scientists who sit on EPA advisory boards and committees who have also received federal grants for studies could be cut from their roles as soon as next week, citing a lack of objectivity in their research.
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Pruitt said having individuals on EPA advisory boards who have received grants from the agency raises red flags.
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Jennifer Sass, the Natural Resources Defense Council's health program senior scientist, said Pruitt's goal was to "get rid of scientists who tell us the facts about threats to our environment and health."
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During his speech at the Heritage Foundation, Pruitt also confirmed that he's looking at a red team-blue team approach into questions about climate change.
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"Of course Scott Pruitt doesn't want to support science, because science makes clear that Pruitt's policies are disastrous for the health of our kids and our communities," Bruce said. "For Pruitt, anything that helps corporate polluters make money is good and science and facts are just roadblocks he wants to tear down."
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'Potentially historic': dangerous winds expected as fires burn across California | US n... - 0 views
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Californians braced for power cuts and a “potentially historic” wind event on Saturday as a growing wildfire prompted fresh evacuations for 50,000 people in the northern Bay Area.
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The tumultuous Kincade fire spread to 25,455 acres in the wine-growing region of Sonoma county, with meteorologists warning of severe, windy conditions beginning Saturday night that could see gusts of up to 80mph. The entire communities of Healdsburg and Windsor were ordered to evacuate.
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The Sonoma county sheriff’s office said it is expected to be the biggest evacuation in the county in more than 25 years.
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The National Weather Service described the conditions as “the strongest since the 2017 wine country fires and potentially a historic event given the strength and duration of the winds”.
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Meanwhile, millions across the state will have their power cut again as California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), said it would shut off electricity for the third time in as many weeks. PG&E said it would begin blackouts in the afternoon for about 940,000 homes and businesses in 36 counties for 48 hours or longer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, wine country and Sierra foothills. An estimated 2.35 million people are due to be affected, thousands more than previously predicted.
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Another blaze that forced evacuations of 50,000 residents in suburbs north of Los Angeles grew to 4,615 acres overnight. The Tick fire, which started on Thursday, has destroyed nine homes and businesses while threatening 10,000 more, according to firefighters.
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California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared a local emergency to assist with battling the blazes, and thousands of firefighters have been deployed to both locations.
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The power shutoff in Geyserville created a dangerous challenge when it came time to evacuate residents as the blaze crept nearer. Typically during evacuations, local authorities deploy reverse 911 calls to alert individual residents. With the power out, evacuees reported being awakened in the early hours by frantic knocks on their front doors.
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Though nine wildfires are currently burning throughout the state, none have reached the level of death and destruction witnessed in the past few years. Nevertheless fears remain, especially among those who lived through the devastation of the previous fires. The Kincade fire was starting to skirt along the path of the 2015 Valley fire, which killed four people and burned through more than 76,000 acres.
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The harsh fire weather conditions have spread beyond the state, kicking up flames in parts of Baja California, just across the border from San Diego in Mexico.
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Is the "Resource Curse" a Myth? | JSTOR Daily - 0 views
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As the media struggles to make sense of President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland, some say that his motives are transparent: Greenland possesses vast untapped natural resources.
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Of course, resource wealth does not always lead to well-being. In fact, in some cases the opposite seems to be true. The idea of a “resource curse” gained momentum in the early 2000s. It proposes a correlation between resource endowment, particularly oil, and the propensity for armed conflict, corruption, and poor development outcomes.
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resources provide financial incentives for rebels to continue conflict, and governments to engage in misrule, with little of a country’s resource wealth translating into public welfare. Civil wars in resource-rich African countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the post-Cold War period are examples of this dynamic.
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Holding resource wealth responsible for these complex situations is simplistic, as the roots of conflicts in some countries predate the discovery of oil. Conflicts fueled by the so-called “resource curse” are also fueled by deep-seated inequality. For example, Nigeria is resource-rich but possesses low wealth per capita.
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Similarly, Norway and Canada have either escaped the resource curse or actively try to mitigate its negative fallouts. Both are democratic welfare states.
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How San Francisco broke America's heart - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth. It is a place that people disparage constantly, especially residents.
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Real estate is the nation’s costliest. Listings read like typos, a median $1.6 million for a single-family home and $3,700 monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment.
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“This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok. There are no guardrails,” says Salesforce founder and chairman Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who in a TV interview branded his city “a train wreck.”
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Tech isn't what everyone talks about in San Francisco. It's money. Real estate, income inequality, $20 salads, the homeless, adult children unable to move out, non-tech workers unable to move in.
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Julie Levak-Madding, who manages the VanishingSF page on Facebook, documenting the “hyper-gentrifiction” of her city. “It’s so devastating to a huge amount of the population.”
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Everyone has a story about what isn’t here anymore. The inability to find a hardware store, a shoe repair, a lesbian bar, a drag-queen bar, an independent music club
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San Francisco has less of what makes a city dynamic. It has the lowest percentage of children, 13.4 percent, of any major American city, and is home to about as many dogs as humans under the age of 18.
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To take a midday tour downtown is to be enveloped by a jeaned and athleisured army of young workers, mostly white and Asian, and predominantly male. The presence of a boomer or toddler is akin to spotting an endangered species
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“I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who is making a full-time living as an artist,” says Victor Krummenacher of the band Camper Van Beethoven, who left the city in April after 30 years, moving an hour east of Los Angeles. “Part of being an artist is being an observer of what is going on. In the Bay Area, you’re so mired in the congestion and costs.
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San Francisco has also become less welcoming of altruistic professions, as teachers and social workers are priced out of housing.
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The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, decamped to Oakland three years ago after its annual rent was projected to increase by almost $1.5 million. “Nonprofits are fleeing San Francisco. They can no longer afford it, ”
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“You’re constantly trying to justify why you stay. There’s this blanket of anxiety and frustration that lives on top of everything,” says Talbot, a white fifth-generation San Franciscan. “You’re heartbroken because it’s changed so much and so quickly. This nostalgia is baked into everything, of missing what was here.
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and now the gayborhoods are going away.” A resident of the Castro, the city’s famed gayborhood that’s been transformed by record prosperity, he bemoans the loss of cultural vitality and lack of caring for the less fortunate. “I don’t hear people talking about poetry. I still love my town. I still love my neighborhood, but it is changing very rapidly. It’s quite harsh and quite brutal and it frightens me.”
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Benioff, the city’s largest employer, says residents are at “the beginning of our journey in San Francisco of understanding who we’ve become and where we’re going,” he says. Yet, he acknowledges, “there are a lot of people who are not willing to do the work. They’re here to make money. They’re not here for the long haul.”
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“This is a place none of us would have moved to. It’s Monaco,” Levak-Madding says. “It’s urban blight by excess.”
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Barrett speaks in first Supreme Court oral arguments since joining court | Fox News - 1 views
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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked her first questions during oral arguments on Monday, in a remote hearing on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case.
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The first case Barrett and the rest of the justices heard Monday morning was U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services v. Sierra Club.
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Barrett on Monday is also hearing arguments -- along with the rest of the court -- in another low-profile case, Salinas v. Railroad Retirement Board.
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Things will heat up Wednesday and into next week, however, as the court gets into cases on more hot-button issues.
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Opinion | America and the Coronavirus: 'A Colossal Failure of Leadership' - The New Yor... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-united-states.html
us failure pandemic response leadership trump history policy
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One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found
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“We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”
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“I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”
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There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.
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As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan
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The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.
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“It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”
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in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.
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the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.
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It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.
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The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.
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Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.
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Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”
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When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.
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If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.
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In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.
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That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.
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the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.
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It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.
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t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.
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In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.
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Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.
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Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.
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Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.
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The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.
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A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach
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Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”
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A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.
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A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.
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Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics
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It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.
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Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.
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This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.
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Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.
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More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found
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So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.
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An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.
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During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization
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Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks
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Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
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It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives
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And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.
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“It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.