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redavistinnell

North Korea makes nuclear threat | Fox News - 0 views

  • 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.
  • 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 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
  • 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 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.
katyshannon

India Temple Fire: Kerala Disaster Leaves Over 100 Dead, 200 Injured - NBC News - 0 views

  • A massive fire broke out during a fireworks display in a Hindu temple in south India early Sunday, killing more than 100 people and injuring at least 200 others, officials said.
  • The fire started when a spark from the unauthorized fireworks show ignited a separate batch of fireworks that were being stored at the Puttingal temple complex in Paravoor village, a few hours north of Kerala's state capital of Thiruvananthapuram, said Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, the state's top elected official.
  • Thousands had been packed into the temple complex when a big explosion erupted around 3 a.m., officials said. The blaze then spread quickly through the temple, trapping devotees within.
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  • Most of the 102 people died when the building where the fireworks were stored collapsed, Chandy told reporters at the temple complex.
  • Local TV channels broadcast images of huge clouds of white smoke billowing from the temple, as fireworks were still going off in the night sky. Successive explosions from the building storing the fireworks sent huge chunks of concrete flying as far as a half mile, according to resident Jayashree Harikrishnan.
  • The temple holds a competitive fireworks display every year, with different groups putting on successive light shows for thousands of devotees gathered for the last day of a seven-day festival honoring the goddess Bhadrakali, a southern Indian incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.
  • This year, district authorities denied permission for the fireworks display, Chief Minister Chandy said. advertisement The state's High Court had earlier mandated that fireworks must be stored more than 100 yards from temples — orders that were flouted at the Paravoor temple, said Loknath Behera, a top police official.
Javier E

Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs And Other Fantastic Fables From The GOP Voter Fraud Mythology - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • Numerous studies have found that voter fraud is far from a major issue in the U.S., and in-person fraud of the sort Trump and Kobach like to talk about — things like non-citizens showing up to vote or people returning to vote multiple times under different names — is vanishingly rare. A 2007 study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice memorably found that an individual American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.
  • as of last summer, 68 percent of Republicans thought millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016, and almost three quarters said voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often.” The same survey found that nearly half of Republicans believed Trump had won the popular vote.
  • The idea that Nixon gracefully and expeditiously chose not to fight the outcome is a myth, the historian David Greenberg demonstrated back in 2000. Nixon did, however, eventually give in — but in the process, he turned the notion that the Democrats had stolen the election into an article of faith among Republicans, especially conservative ones.
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  • or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.
  • the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.
  • Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution
  • Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.
  • One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”
  • Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.
  • The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.
  • As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.
  • At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote
  • Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.
  • “I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”
  • The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.
  • The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.
  • Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.
  • So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”
  • Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”
  • Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”
  • In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
  • Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”
  • Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.
  • voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.
  • Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”
  • As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.
  • But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes
  • Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.
  • for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.
  • Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”
  • In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.
  • Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.
  • One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee
  • Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.
  • Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.
  • This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.
Javier E

How Early Humans Handled Aggression - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Richard Wrangham, who has come up with some of the boldest and best new ideas about human evolution
  • he enters a debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans.
  • Why are we so much less violent day-to-day within our communities (in pretty much all cultures) than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs? At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?
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  • Wrangham’s 2009 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, pursued a very different hypothesis. Based on archaeological evidence, he made the case that our ancestors mastered fire much earlier than most of us had believed—perhaps closer to 2 million rather than 800,000 years ago—which changed everything for them
  • In his 1996 book, Demonic Males, co-authored with Dale Peterson, Wrangham recapped this and other evidence to draw a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy. Here was vivid support for a Hobbesian view of human nature, rooted in genetics.
  • his two previous books, which explore the opposing poles of behavior. Renowned for his meticulous fieldwork, especially with chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, Wrangham showed just how common chimp brutality is.
  • He also applies his evolutionary logic to studies of a wider array of animals. He dwells in particular on some marvelous experiments that explore the taming of wild foxes, minks, and other species by human-directed artificial selection over many generations.
  • fire extended the day into the night. Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire are to human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions
  • evidence has steadily accumulated that humans, from early on in their development, are the most cooperative species in the primate world
  • classic work on chimps has been complemented by new studies of bonobos, our other close relative. No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species. Some of our nonhuman kin, such fieldwork has revealed, can live and evolve almost without violence.
  • he pursues yet another ambitious hypothesis: “Reduced reactive aggression must feature alongside intelligence, cooperation, and social learning as a key contributor to the emergence and success of our species.”
  • “I walked around Auschwitz. I could feel the chimera at its best and worst.” Violence and virtue, he recognizes, are not opposites but powerful, not always reliable allies. “So much cooperation,” he notes of the smoothly operating human machinery of mass murder—“it can be for good or bad.”
  • cooking made possible a much more diverse diet
  • Enter the bonobos, to whom Wrangham turns as he considers how diminished aggression may have been selected for in the evolution of humans
  • they separated from chimps 1 to 2 million years ago, and were isolated south of a bend in the Congo River. Female bonobos form strong coalitions—partly based on sex with each other—that keep a lid on male violence. The “trust hormone” oxytocin is released during female sex: You could say that the partners are high, in both senses of the word, on trust. Because females run things, males don’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence is extremely limited. Bonobos also display the other traits common to the domestication syndrome, which suggests—as in the case of the foxes—a broad genetic dynamic at work.
  • He has learned that over many generations, ecological realities create species-specific behavior. In the case of bonobos, he suggests, a lush habitat in which they were protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression
  • Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication
  • our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages
  • They serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.
  • My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (
  • Wrangham has nonetheless highlighted a puzzle at the core of human evolution, and delivered a reminder of the double-edged nature of our virtues and vices.
  • Such breeding efforts, Wrangham notes, have produced “the domestication syndrome”: a change in a suite of traits, not just the low reactive aggression that breeders have deliberately singled out
  • Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past
  • As data pile up, so do surprises
  • In 1965 a remarkable book—Irven DeVore’s collection Primate Behavior (which led me to study with DeVore)—made what then seemed a radical claim: We will never understand our origins without intensive study of the wild world of our nonhuman relatives. A handful of scientists, including Jane Goodall, set up tents in distant jungles and savannas. Following monkeys, apes, and other creatures in their habitats, these scientists turned their notes and observations into voluminous, quantitative data.
oliviaodon

Fire and Fury Is Actually a Coup for Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The explosive tell-all about President Trump, Fire and Fury, has been available for purchase for less than a week, but many of its readers are ready to render a verdict on its impact.
  • For the president’s detractors, the bestseller offers bona fide proof that Trump is unfit for office; for his supporters, it is nothing more than tabloid fiction written by an author with a questionable reputation.
  • The book’s international popularity mirrored its U.S.-based reception. In Singapore, some bookstores ran out of copies less than 24 hours after it was released.
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  • While the Trump administration tried to undermine the book’s release, even seeking to block its publication, these efforts only appeared to draw more attention to it. It’s not often a publisher is called on to cease and desist publication of a book, and it’s even rarer for such a demand to come from one of the most powerful leaders in the world.
  • “Given how central the story of Trump’s administration has been to the political conversation—certainly in the West and definitely beyond that as well—I think it’s fair to say that this book is getting a wide hearing ,” Jacob Parakilas, the deputy head of the U.S. and Americas project at the London-based Chatham House, told me. “The commentary in American publications about it, the way it has sort of driven the media narrative, is apparent to audiences far beyond Washington.”
  • This is especially true when it comes to the president’s foreign policy decisions, to which Fire and Fury dedicates ample space.
  • Bannon proposed quashing the two-state solution—once considered to be a cornerstone of American diplomacy in the Middle East—by splitting up the Palestinian territories between Jordan (which would retake control of the West Bank) and Egypt (which would assume control over Gaza).
  • While the book has earned Trump a fair bit of international bad press since its release
  • it probably won’t lower Trump’s standing in foreign countries by any significant margin.
  • “The effect of the book, rightly or wrongly, is to reinforce this narrative of the White House as this center of intrigue and competing fiefdoms and aggressive competition between different ideological and personality-based groupings surrounding the president and the sort of concomitant narrative of Trump’s own mental state, his fitness for office, his level of attention to the job,”
Javier E

The House Is On Fire - Accepting the Truth of the Trump Revolution - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • Of course, he’s a racist. But that doesn’t tell us enough. Lots of people dislike blacks or Jews, don’t want to live near them, etc. But many, likely most with racist attitudes, do not embrace a politics driven by racial grievance. Trump’s politics are about racial grievance. It’s not latent or peripheral but rather central. That’s different and it’s worse.
  • We can infer what stands behind a person’s public statements if we’ve seen them enough, under different pressures and in different contexts. Trump’s repeated expressions of sympathy for racist activists, refusals to denounce racist activists, coddling and appointments of racist activists can only really mean one thing: that he instinctively sympathizes with them and indeed is one. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 80 million times, I need to seriously consider what the fuck is wrong with me.
  • The simpler explanation that accounts for all the available facts is not always right. But as Occam noted, it is always to be preferred. What we need is a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Trumpism, or at least some of us need it. The breakthrough for Copernicus was in positing the unimaginable, indeed the terrifying possibility that the Earth is not the center of the universe but rather a peripheral, secondary celestial body. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.
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  • With Trump, he has a revanchist racist politics because he is a revanchist racist. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.
  • What we have in this Times article is the more direct evidence, a confirmation of what we should already know. His advisors know this is what he thinks. They apparently hear it frequently. They were shocked to here him say in public “opinions that the president had long expressed in private.”
  • What we’ve seen over the last five days is sickening and awful. The house is on fire. But it was on fire a week ago. It’s been on fire since November. The truth is indeed unimaginable and terrifying. But we need to accept the full truth of it if we are going to be able to save our country.
honordearlove

Will Trump Direct FEMA to Fund Churches Hit by Harvey? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • According to the stated policy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, houses of worship cannot receive funding from the agency’s public-assistance program, which provides money for emergency fire and rescue services, medical care, urgent debris removal, and critical utility repairs in the wake of disasters.
  • Faith-based organizations, including churches, synagogues, and mosques, provide an extraordinary amount of support during natural disasters. Greg Forrester—the president and CEO of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, an association of relief groups—told USA Today that non-profits are responsible for 80 percent of recovery efforts, and most of those are faith-based.
  • . “Our faith is what drives us to help others. Faith certainly doesn’t keep us from helping others, and we’re not sure why it keeps FEMA from helping us.”
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  • The timeline for FEMA funding is tight. The president has to declare an emergency or national disaster, and affected organizations generally have to request public assistance within 30 days. In their lawsuit, the three Texas churches requested expedited relief, arguing that they only have until that 30-day deadline—September 26—to win protection “against FEMA’s discrimination.”
  • ut the problem is that “this seems to be policy that is made disaster by disaster.” Even if the president directs FEMA to do something, the agency could later face lawsuits for doing so. In this case, critics could argue that such funding violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
  • Constitutionally speaking, “the real question comes down to whether this is framed as a public-safety, emergency-relief action or whether it’s framed as helping a church get a new building,” said Richard Garnett, a professor of law and political science at the University of Notre Dame. “Nobody thinks it’s unconstitutional for a fire truck to put out a fire at a church, and clearly there aren’t different Establishment Clause rules for fires and floods. But are there different rules for putting out fires and repairing a building after it burns?”
  • As the churches say in their lawsuit: “Mold will not wait for litigation process to spread through the churches’ buildings; storm and flood debris will not stop rotting while the government processes their claims.”
rerobinson03

California Looks at Curbing Construction in Wild Fire-Prone Areas - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The proposals, many of which would require approval by the State Legislature, could remake the real estate market in parts of California and are the latest sign of how climate change is beginning to wreak havoc with parts of the American economy.
  • The building industry quickly pushed back against the recommendations. Dan Dunmoyer, president of the California Building Industry Association, said it wasn’t necessary to limit development because building standards are already strong enough to protect homes in high-risk areas.
  • In response, insurers have begun pulling out of fire-prone areas, threatening people’s ability to buy and sell homes, which depends on access to affordable insurance. That’s because banks generally require insurance as a condition of issuing a mortgage.The state has taken a series of increasingly aggressive steps, including temporarily banning companies from dropping some customers after wildfires. But those steps were meant to be a stopgap as state officials searched for more lasting changes that would allow the insurance industry to keep doing business in high-hazard areas.
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  • But other proposed changes reflect the growing consensus among experts that accelerating climate risk is fast becoming uninsurable — and if governments want insurance to remain affordable, it will mean finding new ways to limit people’s exposure to that risk.In California, like most other states, local officials have significant control over where homes are built. Those officials face powerful incentives to permit the construction in fire-prone areas: New houses mean more jobs and more residences, which translate into more tax revenue.
  • And if local officials insist on building in places exposed to wildfires, the recommendations call for preventing those homes from getting insurance through the state’s FAIR Plan.
  • State Senator Bill Dodd, a Democrat whose district includes Napa, Sonoma and other areas hit hard by recent wildfires, said he was open to many of the recommendations, including stopping access to the FAIR Plan for new homes in high-risk areas, halting infrastructure spending and expanding building codes. “We’ve got to rethink how we are developing” in those places, he said.
katherineharron

This California city has a history of police using deadly force. Its first Black police chief looks toward reform - CNN - 0 views

  • When Shawny Williams joined the Vallejo, California, police department in the fall of 2019, he was taking the reins of a police force known for its use of deadly force.
  • McMahon was one of six officers who opened fire on Willie McCoy, the 20-year-old who'd appeared to fall asleep in a fast food drive-through.
  • "Vallejo is like a distillation of the problems that a lot of places, I think, are facing,"
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  • "There was a 2016 research survey by Pew of something like 7,800 law enforcement personnel all over the country," King continued. "They found that 73% of law enforcement officers have never fired their weapon, ever. Forty percent of the Vallejo police department had been in at least one shooting [according to Open Vallejo research], and about a third of those had been in two or more."
  • That includes now-fired Vallejo officer Ryan McMahon, who was involved in two fatal shootings, CNN affiliate KGO reports
  • McMahon shot 33-year-old Ronell Foster during a confrontation over a missing headlamp on Foster's bike
  • Vallejo officers had fatally shot 18 people in less than a decade, according to KTVU. Between 2005 and 2017, the Bay Area community of 122,000 people had the third-highest rate of police killings per capita in the state,
  • The string of fatal shootings by Vallejo officers, including the killing of 21-year-old Angel Ramos in 2017, led to protests as families of the deceased demanded answers and accountability
  • Williams, who is the city's first Black police chief, seemed to acknowledge this history at his swearing-in as he pledged to rebuild trust with a skeptical community, according to KGO. "Today," Williams said, "we chart a new direction."
  • On June 2, amid nationwide protests in response to George Floyd's death at the hands of police, 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed by a Vallejo officer in a Walgreens parking lot. Police, who were investigating reports of looting, said a hammer in Monterrosa's pocket was mistaken for a gun.
  • In July, the troubling news continued: a report from Open Vallejo alleged that some Vallejo officers were bending the tips of their police badges to mark fatal shootings while on the job.
  • "It's important to me that we approach these community concerns with empathy and compassion," he continued. "Change takes time. I can't change the past, but I can impact the future -- and that's what we're focused on."
kaylynfreeman

Israel-Hamas Conflict: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the barrage of rocket fire by Hamas into Israel eased overnight on Thursday as senior officials on both sides privately expressed optimism that a cease-fire agreement could come by the weekend, according to a senior Israeli official familiar with the negotiations.
  • President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday, telling the Israeli leader that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a cease-fire,” administration officials said.
  • Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, met with Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday to press for peace.
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  • Hamas has launched more than 4,000 rockets at southern Israel — the vast majority shot down by Israeli defenses, falling short of their targets or landing in unpopulated areas. That steady onslaught appeared to slow overnight, with Israeli military officials recording 70 rockets between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.
  • Israel has targeted around 1,000 sites in Gaza that it claims hold significant military value, according to Israeli military officials. However, the campaign has also caused widespread destruction of homes and critical infrastructure, displacing tens of thousands from their homes and causing dire shortages of water and medical supplies.
  • While fighting continued for an 11th day, it appeared to ease as the two sides indicated that they could soon reach an agreement.
  • Since the start of the conflict 11 days ago, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 200 Palestinians, including over 60 children, according to the Gaza health ministry. The Israeli military said that more than 130 of those killed were combatants. Hamas rocket attacks have killed more than a dozen people in Israel, including two children, according to the Israeli authorities.
  • The shape of a possible cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel started to come into clearer focus on Thursday, even as diplomats and Middle East experts cautioned that the last moments before any agreement are fraught with risk and uncertainty.
  • Under growing international pressure, Israel and Hamas are said to be edging toward a cease-fire that could end their deadliest conflict since a 2014 war. But the history of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities is littered with agreements that have failed to resolve the underlying disputes.
Javier E

California's NIMBY-Wildfire Nexus - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Wildfires and lack of affordable housing—these are two of the most visible and urgent crises facing California, raising the question of whether the country’s dreamiest, most optimistic state is fast becoming unlivable
  • in some ways, the two crises are one: The housing crunch in urban centers has pushed construction to cheaper, more peripheral areas, where wildfire risk is greater.
  • California’s housing crisis and its fire crisis often collide in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where trailer parks and exurban culs-de-sac and cabins have sprung up amid the state’s scrublands and pine forests and grassy ridges
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  • Roughly half of the housing units built in California between 1990 and 2010 are in the WUI, which has expanded by roughly 1,000 square miles.
  • As a result, 2 million homes, or one in seven in the state, are at high or extreme risk for wildfire, according to one estimate from the Center for Insurance Policy and Research. That’s three times as many as in any other state.
  • human behavior is primarily to blame for the destruction. People start more than nine in 10 fires, according to reliable estimates.
  • built structures—houses, cars, hospitals, utility poles, barns—act as the most potent fuel, researchers have found. A house burns a lot hotter than a bush does; a propane tank is far more combustible than a patch of grass.
  • If building in the WUI is so dangerous, why do it? In part because building new housing is so very difficult in many urban regions in California, due to opposition from existing homeowners and strict building codes.
  • So housing sprawls into the periphery. And each time major fires happen—in the WUI, as well as in unpopulated regions and urban areas—the state’s housing crisis gets a little worse.
  • In the meantime, California isn’t doing enough to discourage building in fire-prone areas. “I cannot recall any development project that was denied, or where the density was substantially reduced, because of known wildfire hazards,
brookegoodman

Rain may help battle Australia fires - but could cause other problems - 0 views

  • Rain has started pouring down on Australia — bringing some much-needed relief to areas of the country ravaged by bushfires and drought
  • The rains will not put out all the fires but will bring relief for firefighters battling the blazes, The Washington Post reported.
  • A second weather system will form, triggering supercell storms over the states of Victoria, South Australia and western New South Wales, further benefiting the country’s east coast.
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  • the New South Wales government is working on addressing new challenges the rain will bring — including damaging gusts of wind, flash flooding and ash and debris in water supplies
  • Rescuers have worked to save wildlife by dropping carrots as celebrities pledge large donations to help with fire relief efforts.
katherineharron

Iowa poll: Likely Democratic caucusgoers are fired up by the election but also exhausted by politics - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Majorities of likely Democratic caucusgoers say they're optimistic, fired up, feminists and ... exhausted by politics. A new poll from CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom finds fewer soon-to-be caucus attendees consider themselves socialists than capitalists, and almost a quarter are regular Twitter users.
  • Three-in-five likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers say they're fired up, especially those who are very liberal (76%), extremely enthusiastic about their first choice candidate (76%), and have locked in who they'll caucus for (71%). Likely caucus attendees who say they'll "definitely attend" rather than "probably attend" the caucus are more likely to describe themselves as "fired up" (66%).
  • Almost a quarter of likely Democratic caucusgoers identify as regular Twitter users. Caucusgoers under the age of 35 are the most likely to be active on the site (37%), followed by those who are caucusing for the first time in 2020 (36%), and those who identify as very liberal (36%). Likely caucusgoers who plan to caucus for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are more likely than other candidates supporters to be active Twitter users (34%).
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  • Some likely Iowa caucusgoers also consider themselves woke (39%), centrists (34%) or capitalists (33%). Centrist is on par with 2016 (at 32%) while the number who identify with capitalism has dropped since then (from 38%). Those who live in the suburbs (49%) and those who report an income of $100K or more a year (48%) are more likely to identify as "capitalist."
  • A little more than a quarter of likely Iowa caucusgoers (28%) identify as "angry at big tech companies" and 24% consider themselves cynical. But through all the complicated feelings surrounding the caucuses, a huge majority of likely Democratic attendees consider themselves optimistic (78%). Even though that's down 10 percentage points from the 2016 survey, majorities across all groups say they're an optimist.
aidenborst

At late-night rally, Trump suggests he may fire Fauci 'after the election.' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Trump suggested at a rally early Monday morning that he might fire Dr. Anthony S. Fauci after Election Day, further escalating the tension between his administration and the nation’s top infectious disease expert as the number of new coronavirus cases in the United States reaches record highs.
  • His grousing led the crowd of his supporters to begin chanting, “Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!” Mr. Trump listened in silence for a few moments before remarking: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election. I appreciate the advice.”
  • On Friday, more than 99,000 coronavirus infections were reported across the country, a single-day record. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has maintained without citing evidence that the United States has “turned the corner” in fighting the virus, a point he reiterated at the rally early Monday.
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  • Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, has said repeatedly that if he were to win the presidency, he is hopeful Dr. Fauci would remain in his role and serve in his administration.
  • Mr. Trump has adopted Florida as his home turf, and it is a swing state that he desperately needs to win to open paths to another four-year term. Although he narrowly prevailed there in 2016, polls, including one released Sunday by The New York Times and Siena College, have shown him trailing Mr. Biden in a tight race.
  • Roughly 8.7 million Floridians had already voted as of Sunday, according to the U.S. Elections Project, almost two-thirds of all registered voters in the state. But at least as of Sunday night, turnout among Black and Hispanic voters, both key groups for Democrats, has been lagging in Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in the state.
  • “We win Florida,” Mr. Trump said at the rally, “we win the whole thing.”
zarinastone

Australia fires: 'Apocalypse' comes to Kangaroo Island - BBC News - 0 views

  • Kangaroo Island in South Australia has been likened to a Noah's Ark for its unique ecology. But after fierce bushfires tore through the island this week, there are fears it may never fully recover.
  • The fires on Kangaroo Island have been shocking for their speed and extreme behaviour.
  • Driving through the fire trail in Kangaroo Island, there are rows upon rows of blackened trees, some still burning from inside.
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  • It's an ecological disaster so big, the army have been called in.
  • But scientists are now worried about many endangered species - including the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-like marsupial, and the glossy black-cockatoo.
  • "We're struggling to look for remnants of intact vegetation where some species may still be present," says Caroline, tearfully.
  • Kangaroo Island is one of Australia's most important wildlife sanctuaries, renowned for its biodiversity. Now it's feared that half of the island (more than 215,000 hectares) has been scorched.
  • "A lot of the flora and fauna there are distinctive because a lot of the island's habitats remained fairly pristine. It's like stepping back in time when you cross to Kangaroo Island.
  • "They are likely to have perished in the flames and for those who've survived, their habitats are gone," says Prof Dickman.
  • "We have no way of knowing exactly what has been lost. [But] if you don't have habitat, you don't have species."
  • It's estimated that half of the Kangaroo Island's 50,000 koalas have perished in the fires - a huge loss for a population that was thriving here.
  • A section of the outside grounds has been turned into a makeshift clinic. Volunteers race to treat as many animals as possible.
  • And, says Sam, the worst may not be over.
anonymous

As Trump Again Rejects Science, Biden Calls Him a 'Climate Arsonist' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Climate Arso
  • nist’
  • poor forest management
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  • I don’t think science knows
  • Trump a “climate arsonist” while the president said that “I don’t think science knows” what is actually happening.
  • incumbent president who has long scorned climate change as a hoax and rolled back environmental regulations and a challenger who has called for an aggressive campaign to curb the greenhouse gases blamed for increasingly extreme weather.
  • poor forest management, not climate chang
  • looding in the Midwest and hurricanes along the Gulf Coast.
  • danger to the nation’s suburbs,
  • why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?
  • ath toll of 10 along with 22 othe
  • issing,
  • m
  • rs
  • Without question, our state has been pushed to its limits,” Ms. Brown said.
  • progress containing fires.
  • Thursday could also include lightning, raising the danger of new fires.
  • 363,000 acres.
  • was poor forest management
  • hen you have dried leaves on the ground, it’s just fuel for the fires.
  • a Democrat,
  • clearly was a factor.
  • the science is in a
  • Absolutely,”
  • But please respect
  • more bluntly
  • we’re not going to succeed
  • It’ll start getting cooler,
  • Well, I don’t think science knows, actuall
  • tense grin.
  • Showing up matters,” he
  • But more important is what you actually do
  • floors is really inane.
  • some backing from hundreds of supporters who gathered outside the airpor
  • ey should have been cutting
  • 500,000 electric vehicle charging s
  • liminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035
  • Delaware
  • vulnerable by denying the science of climate change
  • Donald Trump is out of touch with reality.
aidenborst

As Trump Again Rejects Science, Biden Calls Him a 'Climate Arsonist' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called President Trump a “climate arsonist” while the president said that “I don’t think science knows” what is actually happening.
  • Mr. Trump flew to California after weeks of public silence about the flames that have forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, wiped out communities and forests, burned millions of acres, shrouded the region in smoke and left at least 26 people dead.
  • Mr. Grafe said the rains that may now come on Wednesday or Thursday could also include lightning, raising the danger of new fires.
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  • In Oregon, with a confirmed death toll of 10 along with 22 others missing
  • At his subsequent briefing, however, Gov. Gavin Newsom and his top environmental adviser pushed the president to acknowledge the role of climate change. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, made a point of doing so exceedingly politely, reaffirming his working relationship with the president, thanking him for federal help and agreeing that forest management needed to be improved.
  • “Something’s happening to the plumbing of the world, and we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this.”
  • Mr. Biden, on the other hand, has proposed spending $2 trillion over four years to escalate the use of clean energy and ultimately phase out the burning of oil, gas and coal. He has pledged to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, build 1.5 million new energy-efficient homes and eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035.
  • Mr. Trump rejected the premise. “It’ll start getting cooler,” he insisted. “You just watch.”
  • “Well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” Mr. Trump retorted, maintaining a tense grin.
  • Some environmental specialists said that Mr. Trump had a point about forest management but that it should not be an excuse to deny climate science and refuse to take action.
  • Experts say climate change, the management of public lands and decisions over where to site housing all contribute to wildfires. Mr. Trump has exclusively blamed poor forest management and last year issued an executive order directing agencies to cut down more trees, arguing that expanding timber harvesting would reduce forest fires.
  • Not far away, one of the biggest fires, now largely contained, recently burned more than 363,000 acres.
  • former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called President Trump a “climate arsonist” while the president said that “I don’t think science knows” what is actually happening.
  • the Democratic presidential nominee sought to paint a second Trump term as a danger to the nation’s suburbs, flipping an attack on him by the president.
  • Mr. Newsom noted that only 3 percent of land in California is under state control while 57 percent is federal forest land, meaning under the president’s management as governed by federal law.
  • “And so I think there’s an area of at least commonality on vegetation, forest management. But please respect — and I know you do — the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue on the issue of climate change.”
lmunch

Trump Administration Rejects California's Request for Wildfire Relief - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Trump administration has rejected California’s request for disaster relief aid for six recent fires that have scorched more than 1.8 million acres in land
  • Lizzie Litzow, a press secretary for FEMA, said on Friday that the damage assessments completed with state and local partners “determined that the early September fires were not of such severity and magnitude to exceed the combined capabilities of the state, affected local governments, voluntary agencies and other responding federal agencies.
  • President Trump visited California after a period of silence on its wildfires and blamed poor forest management, not climate change, for the crisis.
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  • Infrastructure damage estimates from the fires had exceeded $229 million
  • The state this year has suffered four of its five largest wildfires in modern history.
  • California went from a projected $5.6 billion budget surplus to a $54.3 billion projected deficit. “California’s economy is suffering in a way we have not seen since the 2009 Great Recession,” he said.
  • Over the past 50 years, excluding the last four, wildfires averaged about the same in direct damages: a billion dollars per year, adjusted for inflation.
sarahbalick

Texas lawyer in Nazi uniform opens fire at strip mall, 9 injured - NY Daily News - 0 views

  • Houston lawyer wearing Nazi uniform opens fire at strip mall; nine injured, suspect shot dead by police
  • A Houston lawyer wearing a Nazi uniform — who neighbors claimed had recently been acting paranoid — opened fire near a strip mall, wounding nine people before he was shot dead by police, authorities said.
  • Shots rang out around 6:30 a.m. Monday in southwest Houston near an intersection with a grocery store, Walgreens and Chuck E. Cheese.
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  • sed a tree near his car for cover as he exchanged gunfire with several officers in a nearby neighborhood before he was killed, officials said at an afternoon press conference.
maxwellokolo

Death toll at Oakland warehouse fire rises to 24 - 0 views

  •  
    The death toll from the fire that raced through an Oakland warehouse during a music concert rose to 24 as searchers continued sift through the ruin of one of the deadliest fires in modern California history. It could take another two days for the search for victims to end, frustrating frantic family and friends awaiting word about the fate of their loved ones.
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