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Grace Gannon

Nato jets 'intercept Russian plane' - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-29736481

Nato jets Russia plane international relations culture

shared by Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14
     
    Nato jets have intercepted a Russian spy plane that was flying over the Baltic Sea. Russia has recently been accused of several recent border violations in the region and has also been accused of sending submarines into Swedish waters, crossing borders once again.
maddieireland334

Arab League agrees to create joint Arab military force - 0 views

diigo.com/07h3jd

crisis Arab League military

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15
     
    The leaders of countries in the 22-nation Arab League agreed to the principle of creating a joint Arab military force at a summit in Egypt on Sunday. The decision was announced in the closing session of a two-day meeting in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Javier E

Exxon Mobil and the G.O.P.: Fossil Fools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fossil-fools.html

global warming oil industry disinformation GOP

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • It’s not surprising, given its army of first-rate scientists and engineers, that Exxon was aware as far back as the 1970s that carbon dioxide from oil and gas burning could have dire effects on the earth. Nor is it surprising that Exxon would later try to cast doubt on what its experts knew to be true, to inject informational pollution into the river of knowledge about climate change.
  • But what is startling is how a deliberate campaign of misinformation — now disavowed by even Exxon Mobil itself — has found its way into the minds of the leading Republican presidential candidates.
  • Exxon’s board of directors was fully briefed by its own scientists, decades ago, on the emerging consensus that burning oil and gas may cause sea levels to rise, glacial ice to melt and a host of other “generally negative consequences.” Their reaction was to fund the kind of counter-information campaigns that Soviet-era propagandists would be proud of.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • even as one in-house memo stated that “fossil fuels contribute most of the CO2” that was turning the earth into an overheated greenhouse, another memo showed that the company would seek to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.”
Javier E

The Decay of Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...412867

culture oral social media twitter

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Why is Instagram (or Vine, or Pinterest) so much more fun than Twitter?
  • To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong.  
  • Ong was an English professor and a historian of religion at Saint Louis University. He served as president of the Modern Language Association for a year. He was Marshall McLuhan’s student. And from age 23 to his death in 2003 at 91, he was or was training to be a Jesuit priest.
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  • Ong’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media
  • orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.”
  • In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic.
  • To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century.
  • we chat, we type, we text. One of the key attributes of orality is its instantaneousness: There’s no delay between utterances
  • How do you describe this odd mix of registers: literate culture that has all the ephemerality of oral culture? During his life, Ong suggested a new term, secondary literacy. I’ve also seen it referred to as a hybrid literacy
  • on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”
  • Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to.
  • It’s not quite context collapse, because what’s collapsing aren’t audiences so much as expectations. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations. It’s a consequence of the oral-literate hybrid that flourishes online. It’s conversation smoosh.
  • This tension also explains, to me, why the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi, but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.
  • At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.
aqconces

The Origins of the Sykes-Picot Agreement | History | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...ykes-picot-agreement-180957217

WW1 origins agreement France Britain

shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • How Great Britain and France secretly negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement
  • before the final outcome of the Great War has been determined, Great Britain, France, and Russia secretly discussed how they would carve up the Middle East into "spheres of influence" once World War I had ended.
  •  The Ottoman Empire had been in decline for centuries prior to the war, so the Allied Powers already had given some thought to how they would divide up the considerable spoils in the likely event they defeated the Turks
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Britain and France already had some significant interests in the region between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf, but a victory offered a great deal more. Russia as well hungered for a piece.
  • From November 1915 to March 1916, representatives of Britain and France negotiated an agreement, with Russia offering its assent. The secret treaty, known as the Sykes–Picot Agreement, was named after its lead negotiators, the aristocrats Sir Mark Sykes of England and François Georges-Picot of France.
  • Its terms were set out in a letter from British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey to Paul Cambon, France's ambassador to Great Britain, on May 16, 1916.
  • Russia's change of status, brought on by the revolution and the nation's withdrawal from the war, removed it from inclusion. But when marauding Bolsheviks uncovered documents about the plans in government archives in 1917, the contents of the secret treaty were publicly revealed.
  • After the war ended as planned, the terms were affirmed by the San Remo Conference of 1920 and ratified by the League of Nations in 1922. Although Sykes-Picot was intended to draw new borders according to sectarian lines, its simple straight lines also failed to take into account the actual tribal and ethnic configurations in a deeply divided region. Sykes-Picot has affected Arab-Western relations to this day.
mcginnisca

Greek islanders on frontline of migrant crisis - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

greece refugee crisis hospitality politics

shared by mcginnisca on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • For the thousands of migrants who make the treacherous sea crossing to Greece, Lesbos is often the first stop
  • nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, and a petition to recognize the efforts of the Greek islanders with a nomination has garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures.Read More
  • When the refugees started coming, she did what she could to help them
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  • Don't they have human feelings? Don't they have hearts?"
  • t's now a part of his life and an extension of the culture of hospitality on the island. It's not a choice to help or not, he says; it's about being human.
lenaurick

Migrant crisis: 10,000 children may be missing, agency says - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis children politics syria europe

shared by lenaurick on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • About 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children who traveled to Europe may be unaccounted for
  • Europol said the names of some suspected migrant smugglers are also appearing in the agency's human trafficking database -- indicating some of those missing might be vulnerable to exploitation.
  • That is another tragic twist in the latest story of migration to Europe and the need to protect vulnerable young people who find themselves at loose without friends in Europe and therefore vulnerable without proper mentoring and leadership."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • More than 1 million migrants entered Europe last year.
  • At least 3,695 either drowned or disappeared last year as they attempted to cross the sea on unseaworthy boats, according to International Organization for Migration figures. That's a rate of about 10 deaths or disappearances a day.
  • Denmark, for example, recently adopted a controversial law to seize asylum-seekers' valuables to help cover their expenses.
lenaurick

Children now account for a third of all refugees: U.N. - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...europe-migrants-children-women

crisis politics syria europe children refugees

shared by lenaurick on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • More than one third of migrants making the treacherous sea crossing to Greece from Turkey are now children, according to UNICEF.
  • six months ago, the U.N. agency said, when 73% of the migration flow was male, and only one in 10 migrants was an accompanied child. Now most are women and children.
  • Last month, one in every five people who drowned while trying to sail from Turkey to Greece was a child,
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  • Last year, the IOM said 3,811 people had drowned in the attempt.
  • . And in the first 28 days of this year alone, the agency estimates that more than 55,000 migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean to enter Europe. So far, 366 of these have been reported dead or missing.
sarahbalick

Turkey's Erdogan denounces US support for Syrian Kurds - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-35541003

turkey support

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Turkey's Erdogan denounces US support for Syrian Kurds
  • Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at the US over its support for Syria's main Kurdish group.
  • sea of blood", he said.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The refugees have fled an offensive by Syrian government forces and Iranian-backed militias, supported by Russian air strikes, on rebel-held areas around the divided northern city of Aleppo.
  • More than 500 people, including dozens of civilians, have been killed since the assault began 10 days ago, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group.
  • Turkey has already taken in more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees over the past five years and says it will continue to do so in a "controlled fashion".
  • "Is there a difference between the PKK and the PYD? Is there a difference with the YPG?" he added."We have written proof! We tell the Americans: 'It's a terror group.' But the Americans stand up and say: 'No, we don't see them as terror groups.'"
  • "turned into a pool of blood".
redavistinnell

North Korea makes nuclear threat | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...orea-makes-nuclear-threat.html

north korea threat

shared by redavistinnell on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • North Korea makes nuclear threat
  •  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his military on standby for nuclear strikes at any time, state media reported Friday, an escalation in rhetoric targeting rivals Seoul and Washington that may not yet reflect the country's actual nuclear capacity.
  • "The only way for defending the sovereignty of our nation and its right to existence under the present extreme situation is to bolster up nuclear force both in quality and quantity," a dispatch from the North's official Korean Central News Agency said, paraphrasing Kim. It said Kim stressed "the need to get the nuclear warheads deployed for national defense always on standby so as to be fired any moment."
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  • Pyongyang is thought to have a handful of likely crude atomic bombs, but there is considerable outside debate about the state of its arsenal.
  • Kim made the most recent warning while guiding the test-firing of a new large-caliber multiple launch rocket system, the report said.
  • at a North Korean launch site where the country fired a long-range rocket on Feb. 6, according to an analysis by the North Korea-focused 38 North website.
  • The U.N. sanctions include mandatory inspections of cargo leaving and entering North Korea by land, sea or air; a ban on all sales or transfers of small arms and light weapons to the North; and the expulsion of North Korean diplomats who engage in "illicit activities."
  • North Korean state media earlier warned that the imposition of new sanctions would be a "grave provocation" that shows "extreme" U.S. hostility against the country. It said the sanctions would not result in the country's collapse or prevent it from launching more rocket
  • South Korea's Defense Ministry said the North Korean projectiles, fired from the eastern coastal town of Wonsan, flew about 60 to 90 miles. Ministry officials said they couldn't confirm whether the projectiles were those fired by the weapons system KCNA referred to.
  • The deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, is opposed by North Korea, China and Russia. Opponents say the system could help U.S. radar spot missiles in other countries.
  • In January, North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. Last month, it put a satellite into orbit with a long-range rocket that the United Nations and others saw as a cover for a test of banned ballistic missile technology.
sarahbalick

South Korea and US set for 'largest ever' war games - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-35739110

south largest korea war games

shared by sarahbalick on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • South Korea and US set for 'largest ever' war games
  • South Korean defence minister Han Min-koo has said the exercises will be twice the size of last year.
  • The North responded to the sanctions by saying it was readying nuclear weapons for 'pre-emptive' use, and firing short-range missiles into the sea.Military analysts doubt the country has the ability to put nuclear warheads on its missiles.
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  • Beijing says the Thaad anti-missile system compromises its security and would undermine its nuclear deterrent.
  • Uses hit-to-kill technology - where kinetic energy destroys the incoming warhead Has a range of 200km and can reach an altitude of 150km
  • The enemy launches a missile2. The Thaad radar system detects the launch, which is relayed to command and control3. Thaad command and control instructs the launch of an interceptor missile4. The interceptor missile is fired at the enemy projectile5. The enemy projectile is destroyed in the terminal phase of flightThe launcher trucks can hold up to eight interceptor missiles.
qkirkpatrick

General: Conflict with North Korea would be akin to WWII - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...north-korea-wmd

North Korea China wwii US politics war

shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The commander of American forces in South Korea warned Wednesday that a conflict with North Korea could resemble the scale of World War II.
  • Describing what the confrontation might look like, Gen. Curtis Scaparrrotti said that, "Given the size of the forces and the the weaponry involved, this would be more akin to the Korean War and World War II -- very complex, probably high casualty."
  • The U.S. military suffered 405,399 fatalities in World War II and 36,574 during the Korean War of 1950-1953. Korean casualties were in the millions.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The U.S. maintains nearly 30,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula. These troops operate in alliance with the 655,000-strong South Korean armed forces, while North Korea fields a military of 1.19 million service members, according to a tabulation by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
  • North Korea's recent nuclear and long-range missile tests have prompted formal discussions on the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system, which can target short, medium and intermediate ballistic missiles in flight.
  • He added, "China is clearly militarizing the South China Sea, and you'd have to believe in the flat Earth to think otherwise."
sarahbalick

France tests world's largest cruise ship - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35781787

france tests world largest cruise ship titanic

shared by sarahbalick on 11 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • France tests world's largest cruise ship
  • Thousands of people gathered to watch in the port of Saint-Nazaire as the 70m (230ft) high vessel was guided out to sea by six tugs on Thursday.
  • The 120,000-tonne
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  • vessel is expected to be delivered to the US-based firm in two months.
  • 50m longer than the Eiffel Tower is high.
  • 6,000 passengers.
  • About 2,000 crew members will cater for their needs.
sarahbalick

COP21: Obama praises Paris climate change agreement - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

obama paris climate change

shared by sarahbalick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • , the agreement would set an ambitious goal of halting average warming at no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures -- and of striving for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.
  • "This didn't save the planet," Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said of the agreement. "But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet."
  • If this [the Paris Agreement] is adopted as this currently stands then countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis."
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  • Scientists and policy experts say that would require the world to move off fossil fuels between about 2050 and the end of the century. To reach the more ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius goal, some researchers say the world will need to reach zero net carbon emissions sometime between about 2030 and 2050.
  • That level of warming is measured as the average temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution.
  • Failure to set a cap could result in superdroughts, deadlier heat waves, mass extinctions of plants and animals, megafloods and rising seas that could wipe some island countries off the map. The only way to reach the goal, scientists say, is to eliminate fossil fuels.
  • The entire agreement enters into force once 55 countries (who must account for 55% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions) have ratified it.
  • The agreement calls for developed countries to raise at least $100 billion annually in order to assist developing countries.
  • China and the United States, respectively, account for about 24% and 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions
  • The agreement doesn't mandate exactly how much each country must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Rather, it sets up a bottom-up system in which each country sets its own goal -- which the agreement calls a "nationally determined contribution" -- and then must explain how it plans to reach that objective. Those pledges must be increased over time, and starting in 2018 each country will have to submit new plans every five years.
  • Many countries actually submitted their new plans before COP21 started last month -- but those pledges aren't enough to keep warming below the 2 degrees target
  • Another issue, according to observers, was whether there would be reparations paid to countries that will see irreparable damage from climate change but have done almost nothing to cause it.
  • That means if the world's biggest polluters don't sign off on the agreement, enacting it could prove challenging.
  • resident Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved Saturday in Paris, saying it could be "a turning point for the world."
  • "The Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis,"
  • "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • "I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world," Obama said, calling the agreement "the best chance we have to save the one planet that we've got."
  • The accord achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures and strives for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) if possible.
redavistinnell

No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ism-sinai-air-crash-egypt-says

evidence terrorism sinai plane crash egypt

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says
  • The civil aviation ministry in Cairo said a preliminary report into the Metrojet crash that killed 224 people on 31 October had been completed on Sunday. Nearly all the victims were Russian holidaymakers returning from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
  • Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said the search for wreckage had extended more than 10 miles (16km) from the main crash site. He said investigators had analysed the plane’s computers and were currently checking the technical details and repairs carried out on the Airbus A321 since it was built in 1997
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Last month, the federal security service’s director, Alexander Bortnikov, said an improvised bomb with the force of up to 1kg of TNT blew up onboard the plane, and traces of explosives had been found in the plane debris.
  • The country’s tourism industry has been badly hit over the years by the fallout from terror attacks. Holiday flights from Russia and Britain to its top winter sun resort will not resume until 2016, leaving it virtually empty for what should be peak season, and overall tourist revenues are expected to fall by at least 10% this year.
redavistinnell

Russian warship fires warning shots at Turkish fishing boat - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35087050

russian warship fires warning shots turkish fishing boat

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Russia says one of its warships fired warning shots at a Turkish fishing boat in the Aegean Sea to avoid a collision.
  • The captain of the Turkish boat said he was unaware that his vessel had been shot at.
  • Relations remain tense between the two countries since Turkey's shooting down of a Russian warplane.
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  • "We are not in favour of tension," Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying after the incident."We have always been in favour of overcoming tensions through dialogue rather than conflict."
  • "We were not aware that they had fired shots at us," Muzaffer Gecici said. "We have video footage and we have handed this to the coastguard. We didn't even know it was a Russian ship."
  • And last week, Turkey complained over what it said was a sailor on a Russian naval ship brandishing a missile launcher as the vessel passed through Istanbul. R
  • ussia rejected the criticism, saying the crew had a "legal right" to protect the ship.
  • President Vladimir Putin described as a "stab in the back" Turkey's downing of the Russian bomber and has imposed economic sanctions.
  • With Turkey refusing to apologise over the incident, Russia announces a package of economic sanctions against Turkey, including restrictions on imports and travel.
  • Turkey condemns Russian "provocation" after Turkish media publish an image showing a Russian serviceman holding a rocket launcher aboard a warship passing through the Bosphorus.
  • A Russian warship fires "warning shots" at a Turkish fishing vess
  • "Despite numerous attempts by the crew of the Smetlivy, the crew of the Turkish fishing boat did not make radio contact and did not respond to visual signals by semaphore or warning flares,"
  • A Turkish F-16 fighter jet shoots down a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft, allegedly because it violated Turkish airspace
  • Russian warship fires warning shots at Turkish fishing boat
katyshannon

Climate Deal Analysis: The Good, the Bad, the Still Unknown - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...good-bad-still-unknown-n479056

climate deal analysis unknown nbc news history Policy

shared by katyshannon on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • First, the good news: On Saturday afternoon, world leaders ratified a universal pact to slow global warming, ending a decades-long political stalemate and, according to the best possible science, lowering the risk of ecological collapse.
  • The decisive moment arrived inside a high-security airplane hangar on the outskirts of Paris, where delegates from nearly 200 nations fought over the deal line-by-line for two weeks. Finally, the French foreign minister called an all-hands meeting, and asked if there were any objections to the final 31-page agreement.
  • Seeing and hearing none, he banged a tiny green gavel, sealing the deal into international law. The room erupted in a man-on-the-moon-like moment of rapturous applause. The online world followed.
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  • President Barack Obama praised the deal as "the most ambitious climate change agreement in history." "Beautiful," added French president Francois Hollande. "I used to say we must," commented Christiana Figueres, the United Nation's climate chief. "Today, we can say we did!"
  • The agreement commits the world to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." That's an ambitious goal here in 2015, which is expected to be the hottest year on record, amid the three hottest decades on record.
  • Finally, the agreement pledges a minimum of $100 billion a year for developing countries to adapt to the ravages of our already overheated climate. That's an acknowledgement of the vast inequities of climate change: The fact that the richest, most powerful countries have done the most to cause climate change, yet suffer the least as a result. advertisement
  • But there's a whole lot of bad news in this agreement as well: It's vague. It's aspirational. And critics say it's several orders of magnitude away from being enough to avert a crisis in the decades ahead.
  • "The Paris Climate Agreement is not a fair, just or science-based deal," said Erich Pica, president of the eco-watchdog group Friends of the Earth. "The result is in an agreement that could see low-lying islands and coastlines swallowed up by the sea, and many African lands ravaged by drought."
rachelramirez

Six Children Drown off Turkey | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...six-children-drown.html

Turkey politics crisis Policy

shared by rachelramirez on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Six children die off Turkey coast trying to reach Europe
  • adding that the migrants on the boat were Afghans
  • The migrants were apparently hoping to make it to the island of Chios from the resort of Cesme
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 500,000 people have crossed into Greece this year
  • As many as 600 people have drowned this year in the Aegean Sea, including dozens of children
  • Human right organization Amnesty International criticized last week's detentions, calling them "alarming."
katyshannon

Christmas Delivery: First U.S. Space Station Shipment in Months - US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...ace-station-shipment-in-months

christmas delivery u s space station shipment news six months history us

shared by katyshannon on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station accepted its first U.S. shipment in more than half a year early Wednesday, receiving Christmas presents and much-needed groceries for the resident astronauts.
  • "There's much rejoicing on the ground," Mission Control radioed.
  • NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren (CHELL LEND-grin) used the space station's big robot arm to grab the capsule and its 3 ½ tons of cargo. The operation went smoothly, thanks to all the practice Lindgren put in. He operated the crane via joy sticks, joking earlier this week, "I knew those hours playing video games would come in handy!"
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  • The capture occurred as the spacecraft soared 250 miles above the Arabian sea, skirting the coast of Oman. Three hours later, the capsule was bolted into place. The door was to remain shut until Thursday, though, given the crew's busy schedule.
  • The supply ship, dubbed Cygnus after the swan constellation, rocketed into orbit Sunday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA's commercial shipper, Orbital ATK, used another company's rocket for the launch. Orbital supply runs had been on hold ever since a launch explosion last year. The other U.S. supplier, SpaceX, meanwhile, has not made a delivery since April because of a launch accident.
  • Orbital flight controllers, based at company headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, applauded and shook hands once the Cygnus made contact with the space station Wednesday morning. They wore retro-style white shirts, black slacks and skinny black ties in honor of the Mercury astronaut for whom the capsule had been named, Deke Slayton, a commercial space pioneer before his death in 1993.
  • The previous Cygnus also bore Slayton's name, but ended up being destroyed seconds after liftoff in October 2014. Orbital christened this capsule the S.S. Deke Slayton II.
  • NASA is paying billions of dollars to Orbital and SpaceX to stock the space station. The pantry got a little too empty for NASA's taste over the past year; besides the two lost commercial shipments, Russia also endured a failed supply run. The Russian Space Agency didn't take long, however, to resume flights; another shipment is scheduled for just before Christmas.
  • Two of the six-man crew — space station commander Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko — are three-quarters of the way through a one-year mission. They're especially eager to see the Cygnus contents, since they won't be back on the planet until March.
  • The Cygnus will remain at the space station for a month, before being filled with trash and cut loose for a fiery re-entry.
katyshannon

Fossil fuels kill more people every year than wars, murders, and traffic accidents comb... - 0 views

qz.com/...and-traffic-accidents-combined

fossil fuels people wars traffic accidents kill combined quartz history crisis environment future

shared by katyshannon on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Something unique makes humans the top species of the planet. It’s not our exceptional brain size, but our ability to imagine the future. This skill trains us to think unlike other animals and ultimately triumph over them. And, yet, a limitation of this unique ability might also spell our doom.
  • At a meeting in Paris, world leaders are scratching their heads about how we can deal with the imminent threat posed by global warming. Our energy-thirsty civilization is guzzling fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate and we are soon to run out our carbon budget. If we don’t act now, disastrous consequences are predicted: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, easy-to-spread infections and so on.
  • But, as Arnold Schwarzenegger makes it clear, despite our ability to dream up dystopia, “Stuff that happens in the future does not mean anything to people.” It’s a limitation that could seriously hinder a successful outcome in Paris.
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  • One way out may be to reframe the debate. Global warming will affect billions of lives in the future. But, by one estimate, our love for fossil fuels may already be responsible for more deaths than those caused by wars, murders, and traffic accidents combined.
  • These figures come from the 2012 Climate Vulnerability Monitor. In 2010, some 4.5 million deaths could be attributed to air pollution, because of the production of carbon particles and nitrogen oxides. Another 500,000 deaths that year could be attributed to changes in climate, which lead to extreme weather events, flare ups in infectious diseases, and other disastrous phenomena.
  • Of course, things are only going to get worse. But few people will understand what “worse” will look like in the future.
  • Better to think about how our fossil fuel use is already affecting the planet and its inhabitants, and act now.
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