More than half a billion, 500 million, honey bees dropped dead in Brazil within 3 months — and environmentalists are worried
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-than-half-a-billion-bees-dropped-dead-in-brazil-within-3-months-and-environmentalists-are-worried/
EPA sued for allowing use of pesticide harmful to bees
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/458094-epa-sued-for-allowing-use-of-pesticide-harmful-to-bees
Russia Tells Nuclear Watchdog: Radiation From Blast Is ‘None of Your Business’
https://www.thedailybeast.com/four-russian-nuclear-monitoring-stations-now-offline-as-putin-denies-any-radiation-threat
Amazon under fire for new packaging that cannot be recycled - Use of plastic envelopes branded a ‘major step backwards’ in fight against pollution
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/20/amazon-under-fire-for-new-packaging-that-cant-be-recycled
EU officials reject Boris Johnson's new Brexit demands before he even sits down with European leaders
https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-new-brexit-plan-rejected-by-eu-officials-2019-8
Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests | The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression. "Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system," Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May. As The Intercept's Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks "has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in... Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/20/leaked-audio-shows-oil-lobbyist-bragging-about-success-criminalizing-pipeline
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/19/oil-lobby-pipeline-protests/
Feds Arrest Neo-Nazi Trump Fan for Threatening to "Exterminate" Miami Hispanics
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/neo-nazi-eric-lin-threatened-to-exterminate-miami-hispanics-fbi-says-11247579
A truck driver has been arrested after saying he would commit a mass shooting at a church in Memphis, Tennessee, authorities say in newly filed court records. Thomas Matthew McVicker was apprehended in Indianapolis before the plan could be carried out, according to court papers filed Monday. It's the most recent case in a string of men being arrested around the country for threatening to carry out shootings. | His mother told the FBI he owned a Ruger P90 handgun and sometimes uses cocaine and methamphetamine. She also said her son is being treated for schizophrenia. McVicker told his Alabama friend "evil entities entered his body and are torturing him," the affidavit states.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/truck-driver-threatened-mass-shooting-memphis-church-fbi-says-n1044291
A Florida man who sent text messages that he was planning a mass shooting and that “a good 100 kills would be nice” was arrested Friday, authorities said. Tristan Scott Wix of Daytona Beach was charged with making a threat to commit a mass shooting after the Volusia County Sheriff were informed of text messages the 25-year-old sent about his plans to kill as many people as possible.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-man-arrested-after-texting-mass-shooting-plans-n1043836
Since 2017, Missouri has dropped 100,000 children from Medicaid
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-for-poor-families-dropped-medicaid-coverage-in-missouri-burdens/article_34479ff8-4b91-522d-b9db-856401c2a569.html
United States Steel Corporation has laid off dozens at a facility in Michigan and outlined plans to temporarily remove up to 200 workers in the coming weeks, according to a state filing. In a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice filed with the State of Michigan this month, the steel giant said the layoffs were the result of idled operations and other adjustments at the Great Lakes Works facility. "These additional adjustments in operations at Great Lakes Works are related to ongoing challenging market conditions," said US Steel spokesperson Meghan Cox, adding that the notice included positions in nearly every area of the facility. According to the August 5 filing, US Steel anticipated that further layoffs at the facility in Ecorse, Michigan would likely begin on September 30 and may continue "periodically thereafter based on market conditions." The company said it did not know when normal production levels would resume at the facility.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-steel-layoffs-even-after-trump-tariffs-designed-to-help-2019-8-1028460211
Government Delays First Big U.S. Offshore Wind Farm. Is a Double Standard at Play? It ordered an expanded review for Vineyard Wind at the same time Trump is weakening environmental rules for fossil fuel projects that contribute to climate change.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19082019/vineyard-wind-offshore-renewable-energy-delay-boem-environmental-cumulative-review-nepa-massachusetts
RSF is deeply concerned at the White House’s recent decision to suspend correspondent @BrianKarem's press pass. This is the second time that a journalist’s press pass was suspended by the Trump administration in clear violation of the First Amendment.
https://twitter.com/RSF_en/status/1163858709531037698
The US won't provide flu vaccines to migrant families at border detention camps | At least three children held in detention centers at the Mexican border have died, in part, from the flu, a group of doctors say.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/the-us-wont-vaccinate-migrant-children-against-the-flu-at-border-camps.html
Trump and his aides are projecting confidence in the economy. But Trump has called for the Fed to cut its benchmark rate by a level typically considered only when the economy is struggling—and the White House is exploring proposals to bolster the economy. | The White House is examining proposals to bolster the economy amid warning signs of a slowdown, even as President Trump and top officials project confidence that a recession isn’t on the horizon.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-officials-try-to-bolster-economy-even-as-they-praise-it-11566321939
Smoke plunges Sao Paulo into sudden darkness, baffling the Western Hemisphere’s largest city | “The smoke didn’t come from fires in the state of Sao Paulo, but from very dense and wide fires that have been happening for several days in [the state of] Rondonia and Bolivia,” Josélia Pegorim, a meteorologist with Climatempo, said in an interview with Globo. “The cold front changed direction and its winds transported the smoke to Sao Paulo.”
The news highlighted the number of forest fires in Brazil, which rose by more than 80 percent this year, according to data released this week by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
“This central Brazil and south of the Amazon Rainforest region has been undergoing a prolonged drought,” Alberto Setzer, a researcher at INPE, said in an interview with local media outlets. “And there are some places where there has not fallen a drop of rain for three months.” Most of the Amazon was once considered fireproof, but as climate change and deforestation remake the world, wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, recent research has shown. “Wildfires in the Amazon are not natural events, but are instead caused by a combination of droughts and human activities. Both anthropogenic climate change and regional deforestation are linked to increases in the intensity and frequency of droughts over Amazonia,” British researchers wrote this year in the Conversation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/20/sudden-darkness-befalls-sao-paulo-western-hemispheres-largest-city-baffling-thousands/
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/s41467-017-02771-y
https://theconversation.com/amazon-rainforests-that-were-once-fire-proof-have-become-flammable-91775
Russia has resumed sharing data from radiation monitoring stations in Siberia after some were taken offline following a deadly explosion at a missile range, an nuclear weapons watchdog said Tuesday, while an American expert said the fact that more than one Russian site went offline at the same time suggests it was not the work of Mother Nature. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CNTBTO) said earlier this week that several Russian radiation monitoring stations went silent shortly after the Aug. 8 explosion at the Russian navy’s testing range in northwestern Russia. Lassina Zebro, the organization’s executive secretary, said Tuesday on Twitter that the two Russian stations reported to be offline are back in operation and are now backfilling the data. He lauded Moscow for its “excellent cooperation.” William Tobey, a former deputy administrator at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, said it was “at least an odd coincidence” that the Russian sensors stopped transmitting data about the same time as the explosion occurred. Although the explanation could be innocuous “the fact that it was from more than one site seems to make that less likely,” said Tobey, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Power outages, other failures, can knock down a particular place, but if more than one site is out, it would seem that that is a less likely explanation,” he added. Russian authorities have offered changing and contradictory information about the explosion at the testing range in Nyonoksa on the White Sea, fueling speculation about what really happened and what type of weapon was involved.
https://apnews.com/4ef91f50d5814ebbbc087da307b41982
South Korea to ban Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche cars in emissions scandal
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190820000719
Trump has spent nearly a third of his presidency visiting his business properties at taxpayer expense
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-spent-one-third-presidency-visiting-business-properties-report-1455319
Ways and Means chairman cites ‘credible allegations’ of misconduct in presidential tax audit | The House Ways and Means Committee said it had received “credible allegations” from a federal employee of potentially “inappropriate efforts to influence” the IRS’ mandatory audit of presidential tax returns. References to the unexplained allegations were in a letter included in a Tuesday filing by the committee in its federal lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. The filing consisted of arguments in support of the committee’s motion for the court to grant it summary judgment in its lawsuit seeking six years of tax returns from President Trump and from eight of his businesses. In an Aug. 8 letter to Mnuchin, Ways and Means Chairman Richard E. Neal said the committee had received an “unsolicited communication” July 29 from a federal employee claiming “evidence of possible misconduct” regarding the presidential audit program. While not required to do so by law, the IRS adopted the practice during President Richard Nixon’s term of annually auditing the president’s tax returns. Neal’s letter provides no details of the allegations and doesn’t specify that the allegations regarding the audit program related to Trump’s returns. But in his letter, Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, characterized the allegations as “a grave charge that appreciably heightens the Committee's concerns about the absence of appropriate safeguards as part of the mandatory audit program and whether statutory codification of such program or other remedial, legislative measures are warranted.”
https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/ways-means-chairman-cites-credible-allegations-misconduct-presidential-tax-audit
Cherokee Nation to assert treaty right to appoint nonvoting member of Congress
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/government-and-politics/cherokee-nation-to-assert-treaty-right-to-appoint-nonvoting-member/article_33d9762c-9081-50f1-be4d-09c5f808235c.html
It's raining plastic: microscopic fibers fall from the sky in Rocky Mountains | Discovery raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth | More than 90% of plastic waste is not recycled, and as it slowly degrades it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. “Plastic fibers also break off your clothes every time you wash them,” Mason said, and plastic particles are byproducts of a variety of industrial processes. It’s impossible to trace the tiny pieces back to their sources, Mason said, but almost anything that’s made of plastic could be shedding particles into the atmosphere. “And then those particles get incorporated into water droplets when it rains,” she added, then wash into rivers, lakes, bays and oceans and filter into groundwater sources. | Animals and humans consume microplastics via water and food, and we likely breathe in micro- and nanoplastic particles in the air, though scientists have yet to understand the health effects. Microplastics can also attract and attach to heavy metals like mercury and other hazardous chemicals, as well as toxic bacteria. “Plastic particles from furniture and carpets could contain flame retardants that are toxic to humans,” Krause said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/12/raining-plastic-colorado-usgs-microplastics
Trump called NRA chief Wayne LaPierre this afternoon to tell him universal background checks are off the table
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/trump-background-checks-nra/596413/
#PrayforAmazonia trends as Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro blasted for inaction over 3-week-long forest fires ravaging the "lungs of our planet" | One large fire, which started in late July, burnt around 1,000 hectares of an environmental reserve in the Brazilian state of Rondônia—located on the border with Bolivia. This blaze, along with others in the region, created dense plumes of smoke that spread far across the state, endangering the health of people living in the area and the lives of animals, Painel Politico reported. Two weeks ago, the state of Amazonas in the northwest of the country declared a state of emergency in response to an increase in the number of fires there, Euronews reported. Various fires have also been burning in the state of Mato Grosso, according to satellite imagery. The scale of the recent fires in the Amazon region was highlighted by NASA researcher Santiago Gassó who said August 13 that they had created a smoke layer covering an area of approximately 1.2 million square miles. | Fire is used in the Amazon as a technique to clear land for agricultural use. It is also one of the main methods of illegal deforestation, Euronews reported. At this time of year, the practice is banned as there is a high risk of spreading due to drier conditions. "The population has to be aware that today any burning is a crime, not to mention that our fauna and flora suffers directly from this situation, besides children and the elderly. People have to be aware, " Marcos Silva, a firefighter in the state of Rondônia, told Painel Politico. According to NASA, the Amazon rainforest has been relatively fire-resistant throughout its history due to its moist and humid conditions. But an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts—a phenomenon that's linked to anthropogenic climate change—in combination with human activities in the forest has led to a spike in the number of fires. In fact, the number of fire outbreaks in Brazil grew by 70 percent this year in comparison to the same period of 2018, reaching the highest rate since 2013—the first year in which such data was reported for the same period—according to the country's National Institute for Space Research (INPE.) Of these fires, 51.9 percent of incidents occurred in the Amazon biome, the data indicates. | As trees are lost, researchers say there is a risk that large swathes of the forest could transition to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall via evaporation and transpiration from plants. This could have significant implications for global warming, given that the rainforest—often described as the "lungs of the planet," absorbs vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Some studies have estimated this to be around 20-25 percent of total tree cover, when other factors such as climate change and fires are taken into account, Mongabay reported.
https://www.newsweek.com/pray-amazonia-brazil-jair-bolsonaro-forest-fires-lungs-planet-1455189
Map below shows extension of fires currently happening in the state of Rondônia in Brazil (which is under a thick smoke and where people have been dying), and in Bolivia, both in the Amazon region. Fires are intentional, started by farmers to open up land. https://twitter.com/ClimaInfoNews/status/1163168078370357254
https://twitter.com/danimadu/status/1163244330200555521
Brazil’s president is doing nothing to stop what is happening with the Amazon Rainforest. My heritage is from Brazil and it is so sad to see what is happening, it looks like a movie, but it is now. Y’all pray for Brazil! #PrayforAmazonia Brazil is destroying Brasil 😪
https://twitter.com/BarrosThereza/status/1163656180163649536
Katharine Gorka steps down as Customs and Border Protection press secretary after two months
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/20/politics/katharine-gorka-leaving-cbp-press-secretary-two-months/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment