1518: Q-Yoga

This pressure is set to rise as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is digested. For a sense of the quickening drumbeat, we turn to a recent article in The New Yorker authored by Bill McKibben, a man so revered by the climate consortium that he has been bestowed with no less than 20 honorary degrees from various institutions of higher learning (emphasis added throughout):

“There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. That’s what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or oil, and parked in their garages and driveways or on nearby streets are some two hundred and ninety million vehicles, an estimated ninety-nine per cent of which, as of August, run on gasoline. It took centuries to build all those homes from wood and brick and steel and concrete, but, if we’re to seriously address the climate crisis, we have only a few years to remake them.”

Within minutes of the heart attack Pharma used MedTwitter to flood the zone with a lie — that the heart attack was definitely a result of “commotio cordis” — an extremely rare sports injury whereby a kid struck in the chest (usually by a baseball) can experience cardiac arrest.

There are all sorts of reasons why this is false. Unlike baseball players, football players wear hard plastic chest protectors. The tackle was not unusual and if anything Hamlin shifted his body to the side in ways that deflected the collision. And commotio cordis usually only happens in kids under 15 years old — by the time one is an adult the body is more fully developed to protect the heart from such a blow. But that did not stop every vaccine injury denialist on Twitter from shouting from the rooftops that the tackle, and not the deadly vaccine, was the culprit.

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How about a boots on the ground report?

My full time gig is a firefighter/paramedic in Central Ohio and...shit is weird. These are a few things I haven't seen a lot about that needs explanation and is something for everyone to look out for with loved ones who have taken these shots:

We transported a cancer patient who had a serious reaction to her first chemo treatment. I didn't think it was anything too out of the ordinary until the nurse who administered the treatment stated "I've been giving this chemo drug for 16 years and never had anyone have a bad reaction to this drug. But, ever since these covid shots came out I've sent tons of people to the ED after they had bad reactions post treatment." And lo and behold, I look into it and our department alone had transported several patients from this clinic to the ED because of bad reactions to this routine chemo drug .

We hosted a cardiologist for a training meeting a few months ago. We flat out asked "are you seeing younger people coming in for cardiac issues because of the vax?" He replied "I cant' say it's because of the vax or not, but yes. A lot more younger people are coming in with heart issues and pulmonary embolisms" (a blood clot in the lung vasculature, like a heart attack for the lungs).

A guy on my shift told me his wife went to get a routine mammogram and had an odd interaction with the technician who did the scan- the technician asked "did you get your covid shots in your left arm?" My shiftmate's wife confirmed that was the case and the technician stated she can see a white haze/spots on whatever side breast people have been getting covid shots on.

We had a continuing education course on Pediatric Stroke recognition. Attached is a pic showing the training points. Either kids have always had strokes and we just never looked for them, or all of a sudden medical providers should be looking for strokes in kids...

Bottom line for everyone- eliminate age as a factor for suspecting heart attacks and strokes. Learn the signs and symptoms of both and assume anyone of any age showing any of them could be having a major medical issue. This also goes for chemo treatments- watch family members for delayed allergic reactions after their first few chemo sessions or if they change chemo treatments. Learn CPR, learn how to use and locate AED's, and maintain a close on on loved ones who've been vaxxed. Be ready.

They claimed that the visibility of the case and the defendant had already posed a risk to Bankman-Fried’s parents, and that the guarantors should not be subject to the same scrutiny. Kaplan approved the motion in court.

From January 2018 through July 2021, Nano sold at least $200,000 worth of products and warranties to approximately 800 Vermont consumers. The investigation initiated by the Attorney General’s Office revealed numerous unfair business practices and misleading statements allegedly made by Nano, including:

misrepresenting the character of their hearing products;

offering a “hearing test” on its website which is misleadingly described as an “accurate hearing test” in less than ten minutes that “works as free audiologist consultation;”

implying that professional audiologists review each consumer’s “hearing test” results;

directing sales staff to identify themselves to consumers as “hearing specialists” despite having no related specialized medical training or advanced degrees;

directing sales staff to persuade dissatisfied consumers into keeping their devices past the point of when returns are possible under Nano’s 45-day money-back guarantee;

perpetually listing their products as being on sale;

claiming products are designed in the U.S. when they are designed in China;

unlawfully promoting its products for children; and

implying its products are approved by the FDA when they are not.

The lawsuit seeks to protect consumers by requiring Nano to refund money to consumers, to give up any profits resulting from violations of the law, and to pay penalties for its conduct.

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“There seems to be a concerted effort to weaken Germany out of a fear of Germany and Russia becoming closer allies. This originates from the United States and the United Kingdom,” Scott Bennett, a veteran of the 11th Psychological Operations Battalion of the US Army, and former State Department counterterrorism analyst, explained.

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Archived Version

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 18:18

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This article, the second in a series on global migration caused by climate change, is a result of a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state's electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth '-- 130 degrees in Death Valley '-- and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.

Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state's 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.

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But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?

I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet '-- changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions '-- the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.

So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I'd been asking others: Was it time to move?

Firefighter Zach Leisure working to contain the Ranch 2 Fire near Azusa last month. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms '-- all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat '-- 20 more days than the previous record.

For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.

I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so '-- if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing '-- was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and ProPublica mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America's shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)

Read More New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States According to new data analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures, rising seas and changing rainfall will profoundly reshape the way people have lived in North America for centuries.

What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people '-- nearly 1 in 2 '-- will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation's federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.

Residents of Azusa watching the Ranch 2 Fire. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.

There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and 3 out of 4 now describe climate change as either ''a crisis'' or ''a major problem.'' This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities found that even Republicans' views are shifting: 1 in 3 now thinks climate change should be declared a national emergency.

Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what's next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save '-- often at exorbitant costs '-- and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California's suburbs are no longer safe.

It has already begun.

Pedro Delgado harvesting a cob of blue corn that grew without kernels at Ramona Farms in Pinal County, Arizona, last month. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Let's start with some basics. Across the country, it's going to get hot. Buffalo, New York, may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Arizona, does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer '-- which supplies nearly a third of the nation's irrigation groundwater '-- could be gone by the end of the century.

It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans '-- largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin '-- will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.

The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme projections of 8 to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move 3 miles closer to my house, as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school, a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first, but research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread: Nearly 1 in 3 people here in Marin County will leave, part of the roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.

From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of the nation's 20 largest metropolitan areas '-- Miami, New York and Boston among them '-- will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.

In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move '-- though difficult to predict precisely '-- could easily be tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The Great Migration '-- of 6 million Black Americans out of the South from 1916 to 1970 '-- transformed almost everything we know about America, from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many people moved? What might change?

Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient. Even a subtle environmental change '-- a dry well, say '-- can mean life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is often simply a question of survival.

By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money. So even as the average flow of the Colorado River '-- the water supply for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation's vegetable and cattle farming '-- has declined for most of the last 33 years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992 '-- and even as that state has become a global example of the threat of sea-level rise '-- more than 5 million people have moved to Florida's shorelines, driving a historic boom in building and real estate.

Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.

Homes being rebuilt near Coffey Park, the California community that was ravaged during the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa. Smoke filled the air as a construction crew worked and wildfires raged nearby. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies '-- and government subsidies '-- to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.

Perhaps no market force has proved more influential '-- and more misguided '-- than the nation's property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people's long-term decision-making.

Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. The regulations '-- called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements '-- are justified by developers and local politicians alike as economic lifeboats ''of last resort'' in regions where climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able to buy insurance.

At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and wildfires.

In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.

That's what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn't exist.

As a result, Florida's taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion '-- more than seven times the state's total budget '-- as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.

On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University's School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to '-- suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I'd spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where these migrants would be driven from.

Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all looking for his read on the state's future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It's an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. ''And once this flips,'' he added, ''it's likely to flip very quickly.''

Cassidy Plaisance surveying what was left of her friend's home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, after Hurricane Laura. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)In fact, the correction '-- a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans' appetite for reckless development '-- had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules.

On Oct. 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, virtually in my own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.

The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn't have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as ''basically zero risk,'' according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate '-- and price '-- the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other ''impossible'' fires. After a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm consumed Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said, ''alarm bells started going off'' for the insurance industry.

What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe 50% of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90% had been leveled. ''The destruction was complete,'' he told me. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California's autumn winds weren't getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. ''It's hard to forecast something you've never seen before,'' he said.

For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with California's rolling power blackouts last fall '-- an effort to preemptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire '-- which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing. Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the ''new abnormal.''

It was no surprise, then, that California's property insurers '-- having watched 26 years' worth of profits dissolve over 24 months '-- began dropping policies, or that California's insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February, the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the words of one consumer advocacy group, ''follow the lead of Florida'' by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California's FAIR plan for catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180% since 2015, and in Santa Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.

It's only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt '-- and devaluation '-- from door to door. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis.

Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk ''bluelining,'' and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.

Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here, were testament to Keenan's belief that the bluelining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy, starting in the nation's largest state.

Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt '-- climate-distressed mortgage loans '-- might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.

Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it's easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.

Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans' irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise '-- and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on '-- the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.

And that's when the real migration might begin.

As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians' exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, ''Should I be selling my house and getting '-- ''

He cut me off: ''Yes.''

Senior citizens at a cooling center in Phoenix last month during Arizona's record-setting heat wave. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers '-- ''Okies'' not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri '-- unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.

The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.

A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation's wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, ''abandonment is one option.''

Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America's cropland '-- plus the steady baking and burning and flooding '-- suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States '-- mostly across the South and the Southwest '-- will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.

That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65% of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10% will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities '-- not the places that empty out '-- that wind up bearing the brunt of America's reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.

A woman lost consciousness in a parking lot in Lake Charles after Hurricane Laura left her without electricity or air conditioning for several days. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)So what will happen to Atlanta '-- a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta '-- where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state's C+ infrastructure grade last year '-- already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.

Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn't ''fully grappled with'' such challenges now, said Na'Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, ''the city might be pushed to what's manageable.''

So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.

Erika Gonzlez and her son, Kevin, evacuating their home in Sonoma County, California, as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire approached in August. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest '-- from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California '-- decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.

In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people '-- the nation's opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20% more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10%, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.

Read More Where Will Everyone Go? ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. This is what we found.

The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10%, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang's research forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit; Rochester, New York; Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put to good use. One day, it's possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho's up-and-coming wine country and the country's new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.

Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. The facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles '-- a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving '-- that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.

Al Shaw contributed reporting.

Clarification, Sept. 16, 2020: This article was updated to clarify that the mapping of danger zones was done by ProPublica staff.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 17:57

Guest Essay

Credit... Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; images by Man_Half-tube, via Getty Images Send any friend a story

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

By Mara Altman

Ms. Altman is a writer and the author of ''Gross Anatomy.''

From where I stand '-- at five feet even '-- being tall is a widely held fantasy of superiority that long ago should have been retired.

It made sense to fawn over height when it facilitated survival. Ages ago, when the necessity of defending oneself cropped up daily, if not hourly, tall people could more easily protect their families and bring home some woolly rhino flank. Today, those who have the stamina to sit in an office chair all day bring home the plastic-wrapped meats.

There is an ongoing debate about the stature of a population and what it means for the prosperity and fairness of a nation, but I'm interested in shortness on an individual level. Our success as individuals does not depend on beating up other people or animals. Even if it did, in an era of guns and drones, being tall now just makes you a bigger target.

In ''Size Matters,'' the journalist Stephen S. Hall wrote that in the 18th century Frederick William of Prussia paid exorbitant sums to recruit ''giant'' soldiers from around the globe, institutionalizing ''the desirability of height for the first time in a large, postmedieval society'' and attaching tangible value to inches that would reverberate into modern times.

The echoes of these early human desires and biases have stuck in our minds like a particularly catchy marketing jingle, so much so that we vote for tall candidates assuming that they are better leaders and often choose tall people as partners with no definitive data that they make better spouses. John Kenneth Galbraith, the 6-foot-8-inch economist and diplomat, suggested that favoring the tall was ''one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society.'' Others go to extremes in pursuit of a few extra inches '-- more and more people are spending as much as $150,000 to get excruciating limb-lengthening surgeries, and parents give their healthy children growth hormone treatments with unknown side effects.

I know this because I was one of those children. As a preteen I injected Humatrope into my thighs for three and a half years, at the behest of my parents, who feared I'd be alienated for being short. I understand why they felt that way, given how short people are treated in our society '-- a song with the lyric ''Short people got no reason to live'' was No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 just a few years before I was born.

Now I have twins who are among the smallest in their kindergarten class, but instead of preparing to medicate them because of an antiquated societal bias, I'm going to let them be as they are: tiny. Because short is better, and it is the future.

We only talk about short stature in a positive light once every four years, when Simone Biles dazzles us in a leotard. That has left the many advantages enjoyed by short people underappreciated. On average, short people live longer and have a lower incidence of cancer. One theory suggests this is the case because with fewer cells there is less likelihood that one goes wrong. I'd take that over dunking a basketball any day.

The short are also inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion. Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).

''I don't want tall people to feel bad about themselves,'' Samaras said, sincerely, ''but the time is right to be short.''

Parents boast about how their kids ''eat them out of house and home'' and grow out of shoes the very week a new pair is bought as if it's a badge of honor. My children eat like gerbils '-- it's fine, they are healthy '-- and because of their low percentiles we save money and food, and they fit into the same pair of shoes for a year. Growing like a weed? No, thanks. I'll take growing like a cactus.

Short people don't just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth's growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked). Yuval Noah Harari, in his book ''Sapiens,'' wrote about a population of early humans who inhabited an island called Flores. Because of a rise in sea level, the island was cut off from other land masses.

''Big people, who need a lot of food, died first,'' Mr. Harari wrote.

After generations, the people on the island evolved to reach only three and a half feet tall. They could do everything bigger humans could '-- make tools, hunt '-- but they could also stay alive when times got tough.

When you mate with shorter people, you're potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

Nancy Blaker, a Netherlands-based researcher who at one time studied social status, said that short men, counter to prevailing stereotypes, may ''compensate'' for being short by developing positive attributes. ''It's not about being aggressive and mean,'' she said; ''short men behave in smart strategic ways and that can also mean being prosocial.''

My husband, who is 5-foot-6, said it would have been easier to be tall than to have had to put effort into developing his wit, but I know we wouldn't be married if he didn't make my cheeks hurt from smiling so hard on our first date.

The problem is we are still under the illusion, as a general principle, that more always adds value. It was my former endocrinologist from Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, Alberto Hayek, who laid it out for me. When I tracked down the doctor, who is now retired, I asked why parents whose children have no underlying medical conditions sought growth hormone treatment for them. He said the pursuit of height made sense in a capitalistic society. ''Everything is big,'' he said, ''the buildings, the businesses,'' and went on to explain that parents reflect the mind-set that bigger is better when envisioning their offspring.

Another endocrinologist, Adda Grimberg, the scientific director of the Growth Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said that though heightism exists, concerned parents wrongly think height is the key to success and belonging. ''There are some short people who thrive and do phenomenally well and lead fantastic lives, and there are some tall people who are miserable,'' Dr. Grimberg said. ''It's not the height in and of itself that determines the outcome.''

I agree. As a short person, I've found the only thing I can't do is grab things off high shelves. But that works out fine at the grocery store because tall people love to reach for things '-- it makes them feel like their excessive limbs still have purpose.

In some corners of the world, a celebration of short stature is actually happening. Arne Hendriks, a 6-foot-4-inch lecturer and artist, uses performance and exhibitions to encourage people to embrace fewer inches. He's even restricted dairy from his sons' diets and only allows them minimal sugar in an attempt to limit their growth, saving them from the ills of height. ''It's time for tall people to get off our high horses,'' Mr. Hendriks said. ''Don't be overly confident when you are tall because you are probably going to die younger, have more health problems and you are polluting more.''

The future I envision is different: I want my children's children to know the value of short. I want them to call themselves ''short drinks of water'' with ''legs for minutes.'' While one yells, ''I'm the shortest,'' I hope the other will bend his knees to gain an advantage, shouting, ''No, I'm the shortest!''

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:58

I. The heart attack

We said it would happen and it happened. A vaccinated NFL player's heart stopped during the first quarter of Monday Night Football.

It's not complicated. If you repeatedly inject billions of people with a shot known to cause blood clots you're going to see lots of heart attacks '-- everywhere '-- at school, at the gym, during a live newscast, at the mall, on the highway, and during sporting events.

Players, coaches, staff, and fans will also have heart attacks in the NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball in the coming years.

The outcome of the NCAA basketball final last year was influenced by the fact that a star player for North Carolina, ''fully vaccinated'' of course, had to leave the game with myocarditis. But we're not allowed to talk about that and so it keeps happening.

II. The movement blinks

Within minutes of the heart attack Pharma used MedTwitter to flood the zone with a lie '-- that the heart attack was definitely a result of ''commotio cordis'' '-- an extremely rare sports injury whereby a kid struck in the chest (usually by a baseball) can experience cardiac arrest.

There are all sorts of reasons why this is false. Unlike baseball players, football players wear hard plastic chest protectors. The tackle was not unusual and if anything Hamlin shifted his body to the side in ways that deflected the collision. And commotio cordis usually only happens in kids under 15 years old '-- by the time one is an adult the body is more fully developed to protect the heart from such a blow. But that did not stop every vaccine injury denialist on Twitter from shouting from the rooftops that the tackle, and not the deadly vaccine, was the culprit.

At the same time MedTwitter told us '-- vaccine skeptics '-- to STFU and that any speculation on our part was dishonoring Damar Hamlin and his family.

So first they lied and then they tried to silence us.

I'm disappointed by the fact that some of the big name newbies in our movement immediately fell for the ''commotio cordis'' psyop. I imagine that they fell for it because they are scared of the enormity of the truth '-- that is: we are living in the midst of a genocide.

I'm grateful for everyone who has joined our movement but you need to know that mainstream society is never going to let you rejoin them. So you may as well stand and fight instead of taking a dive anytime Pharma gives you the opportunity to distance yourself from those damn dirty anti-vaxxers.

I should also add that I didn't see any of the big players in the movement (who have been doing this for a long time) step up either. At a time when the movement could have used some leadership, the bigs went silent as well. Please correct me if I'm wrong, perhaps their accounts are just so suppressed by the algorithm that it's impossible to get the message out? And I hope in the coming days that they will come out with statements that reflect the enormity of the crime that we just witnessed.

There's not really any point in being unbanned on Twitter if we don't use our voice when the moment comes.

III. The art of shaping the narrative

When a big event like this happens '-- you have anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes to shape the narrative. That's it. A narrative is like wet concrete '-- it's really important to have structures in place to guide it and you only have a short window of time to shape it before it hardens. Once the narrative is set, it's rock solid, new facts will bounce off of it. Pharma understands this which is why they flooded the zone with the ''commotio cordis'' lie as quickly as possible and tried to keep us out of the conversation.

Meanwhile many people on our team were twiddling their thumbs waiting for more evidence. But here's the thing '-- no more evidence is coming . The hospital will never release info that implicates the vaccine and if he dies, there will never be a proper autopsy. So there is no later reckoning '-- you either take the info that you have right now and go with it '-- before the narrative is set '-- or Pharma wins the narrative war and the teachable moment disappears.

The right thing to do on Monday night was to drop everything, watch the clip repeatedly, think through the possibilities from a number of angles, check to see if someone else has a smart take, and then rush to the barricades to fight like hell to shape the narrative. Again, you only have 5 to 45 minutes to shape the debate so don't piss it away with bothsidesism.

Mark Crispin Miller understood the assignment. He walked through the facts, connected the dots, and published a Substack article within minutes of the game being suspended. The article was subtle but the subheadline said everything you need to know:

With ''Monday Night Football'' taking a traumatic turn, it's now impossible to keep denying what the architects of this unprecedented global horror have done to all of us.

That was the correct take.

I grabbed Mark's article and immediately posted it (from my burner account) in the replies to the Twitter accounts of Rochelle Walensky , Ashish Jha , and Robert Califf '-- with the comment, ''This is on you.''

Then I grabbed The Highwire clip that shows hundreds of other athletes collapsing in a similar fashion and posted it in reply to anyone trying to argue for the Pharma psyops narrative. Lots of warrior moms and dads and people injured by the Covid shots were in the trenches fighting to shape the narrative as well.

By the end of the night, most of the people on our side who had fallen for the psyop had backed off and acknowledged that this was a heart attack likely caused by the Covid shots.

IV. Pharma's flex

As Frantz Fanon taught us 60 years ago in The Wretched of the Earth , one of the biggest challenges any revolutionary movement faces is that most colonization is internal '-- oppressed people tend to see the world through the mindset of their oppressors.

Furthermore in Power a Radical View , Steven Lukes demonstrates that actual power shapes the aspirations and ideation of oppressed groups.

And so it is with the current iatrogenocide '-- many victims embrace the narrative supplied by their oppressors.

What Pfizer did to Damar Hamlin is the same thing that Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd '-- 9 minutes without breath.

But there will be no statement from the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, Southern Poverty Law Center, the Democratic Party, nor the NFL Player's Association about the shots that stopped Damar Hamlin's heart. Such a possibility does not even cross their minds. It's unthinkable.

The internal mental colonization is so great that most Americans will reach for any excuse, no matter how preposterous, to exonerate the shots.

Pfizer literally killed a Black man (stopped his heart for 9 minutes) on live TV and then told all Americans to shut up if they know what's good for them. That's the sort of power that Julius Caesar, Stalin, and Mao possessed '-- and now that raw murderous totalitarian power is in the hands of the most ruthless corporation on earth. And the establishment has made it clear that we will be banished from polite society if we talk about the actual cause.

So that's the world we live in. Pharma has killed several hundred thousand Americans and millions more around the world with the clot shot. Then they killed a guy in the first quarter of Monday Night Football and there will be no investigation and we're all just supposed to nod our heads and blame it on coincidence.

Like everyone, I am grateful that paramedics were eventually able to restart Damar Hamlin's heart. I hope and pray that he makes a miraculous recovery and returns to playing the game that he loves. In the meantime, I'm going to work to overthrow the Pharma state that caused his heart attack. And I encourage all of us to be prepared for the next heart attack on live TV and the next and the next, because they are coming.

Blessings to the warriors. ðŸŒ

Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. ðŸ

Huzzah for everyone working to build the parallel economy our hearts know is possible. ''Š

In the comments, please let me know what's on your mind.

As always, I welcome any corrections.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:52

Files reveal how the specter of Moscow's supposed underhand ways was used to subjugate the platform to the US Democratic Party

In a pair of blockbuster #TwitterFiles threads, this week, journalist Matt Taibbi has blown open, even wider, the media giant's concerning collusion with the US national security state. The former Rolling Stone writer exposed how political pressure from the US Democratic Party very effectively forced the company to endorse the lie that its platform was extensively weaponized by Russia, with hugely significant consequences.

Find the "Russian trace" at any costThe first, boldly titled 'How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In', documents how in August 2017, despite dubious allegations that Russian bots and trolls were responsible for the election of Donald Trump in the mainstream media reaching fever pitch, Twitter's hierarchy knew its platform wasn't riddled with malign Kremlin-directed actors.

In internal emails, the company's senior executives and communications professionals almost mocked the idea that it was overrun with Russian bots. They could neither detect ''a big correlation'' in account activity related to the November 2016 election, nor any ''larger patterns'' at all. They forecast potentially taking action against less than 25 users. As such, it was decided to simply ignore approaches from the media on the issue.

The next month, Twitter informed the Senate it had suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with ''possible links'' to those accounts. Senator Mark Warner, a ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, immediately held a high-profile press conference to denounce the social network's response as ''frankly inadequate on every level.''

Such pressure, combined with bitter, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declaring, ''It's time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare,'' forced the social network to set up a dedicated ''Russia task force'' to investigate the issue. It did '' and found nothing. ''No evidence of a coordinated approach'' between accounts flagged as potentially Kremlin-run was identified, despite an ''exhaustive'' internal investigation.

In all, after manually scouring through the posts of thousands of accounts flagged as ''suspicious'' by external actors, they found that just 32 were questionable, 17 of which were connected with Russia, and only two had spent any money on advertising '' one being RT, which was specifically given favorable marketing offers by Twitter before the election.

Again, senior Democratic party officials were enraged by these results. What followed was a flurry of unhinged, sensationalist news stories, claiming Twitter was either covering up the Kremlin's dirty work for sinister reasons, either by lying about the issue, or actively deleting reams of incriminating data to cover its own tracks.

''Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB '... they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,'' professor Thomas Rid, an adviser to the Intelligence Committee, remarked to Politico at the time.

Surrender to politicsNone of this was true. But it provided the Democrats with ammunition to threaten regulations on Twitter's political advertising, which could've been extremely costly to the company's revenue. This sent senior staffers into a panic, which was only intensified by the timely leak of a database of thousands of alleged Russian bots and trolls to major media outlets by the Intelligence Committee. This resulted in a flood of aggressive queries from journalists.

Realizing the pressure would only keep mounting '' as media outlets and politicians had decided this absolutely was a major scandal, irrespective of the available evidence, and were going to keep pushing until they got what they wanted '' Twitter kowtowed, and publicly declared bots and trolls were in fact a massive issue on its platform, and it would be proactive in rooting out such activity in future.

Internally, Twitter executives settled on an informal, secret policy for dealing with rogue actors on the network. Publicly, they would stick to the line content was removed and users were banned ''at our sole discretion,'' while privately they would ''off-board'' anything and everything ''identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations,'' without argument.

Twitter had actively invited US spies to run its moderation process, without anyone knowing, and on the explicit internal understanding they would not be leaving. That sinister penetration widened substantially when Covid-19 arrived in the US, and again the bogeyman of Kremlin ''disinformation'' was the battering ram.

In February 2020, US State Department intelligence wing the Global Engagement Center published a report, ''Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.'' It claimed that a vast network of bots and trolls controlled by Moscow and amplified by China and Iran was pumping endless propaganda ''describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon.''

The report's criteria for determining if an account was a bot or troll was, unbelievably, whether the user followed ''two or more'' Chinese diplomats. The 250,000-strong network included Western government officials, and media outlets, including CNN. Such a weak evidentiary foundation did not deter mainstream journalists publishing countless stories endorsing the report's findings.

Twitter staff, likely due to past experience at this point, could see what the Center was up to '' namely, attempting to ''insert themselves'' into the ''content moderation club'' through which Google, Twitter and Facebook were controlled by the FBI, DHS, and other US government agencies. Executives at these tech giants were unanimously opposed to the Center's inclusion, not least due to its ''mandate for offensive'' information operations to ''promote American interests.''

Hell under the heelAfter years of bending over backwards to placate the Democratic establishment, Twitter attempted to push back. Over a series of internal emails, various executives spelled out deep concerns about allowing the Center any influence over the platform, and initially rejected an FBI request for the organization to be included in the moderation club's regular 'industry call'. It was felt the Center's involvement would pose ''major risks '... especially as the election heats up.''

Eventually, the FBI offered a compromise '' the CIA, NSA, and Global Engagement Center would be able to simply listen to the industry calls, but wouldn't be active participants. Twitter relented, a decision its higher-ups seem to have quickly come to regret. Before long, the social network was being bombarded with requests to censor content and ban users from every US government body under the sun.

This extended to US government officials asking for users to be banned because they didn't personally like an individual in question. Notorious House Intelligence Committee chief Adam Schiff, a Democrat, once asked Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry, due to his critical reporting on the Committee's work. After initially refusing, Sperry was later suspended.

Almost every other request was granted immediately, even those from the Global Engagement Center. This included demands to ban independent media outlets falsely claimed to be ''GRU-controlled'' and linked ''to the Russian government.'' In one email, a former CIA staffer remarked that Twitter would soon be unable to deny a single request. ''Our window on that is closing,'' they said.

In the weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, Twitter was flooded with demands from so many officials, departments and agencies, they were confused and overworked. If action wasn't taken promptly, followup emails quickly appeared, asking if action had yet been taken, and if not, why, and when it would be.

In one request, an FBI official even apologized ''in advance for your workload.'' Once, a no doubt exhausted senior attorney at the social network complained internally, ''my inbox is really f***ed up at this point.''

Previous #TwitterFiles threads exposed how the FBI paid the social network $3 million to process its requests. Based on the most recent disclosures, it's clear the company and its staff were significantly underpaid for their efforts. Future releases promise yet further bombshell revelations, but the long-hidden truths divulged so far should prompt every Twitter user to reflect how the site for many years in secret operated as an effective wing of the US intelligence '' and may well still do so.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:42

Before COVID-19, many countries were already heading towards a completely cashless future. But, the increase in contactless payments and online shopping triggered by the pandemic saw a huge shift from cash to cashless payments globally'--but just not at the same speed. Even in Europe, payment preferences still vary wildly. But, there's a handful of countries that are leading the cashless revolution. Here are the top 5 European countries closest to a cashless future.

The 5 most cashless countries in Europe

Within Europe, there's a huge divergence of preference when it comes to paying with cash. In 2019, Austrians withdrew a staggering '‚¬140 a week from ATMs, with Norwegians taking out just '‚¬35. While in 2020, 96% of the Icelandic population used online banking, compared to only 9% in Romania.

However, working out exactly which European countries are the closest to a cashless future is tricky for two reasons:

Physical cash is untrackableThere isn't a Europe-wide uniform method for tracking cashless paymentsThat being said, there's still a wealth of reliable data out there that gives us a solid understanding of exactly which European countries are leading the race to a cashless future. Read on to discover what we found out.

Sweden

The first European country to issue banknotes, Sweden looks set to be one of the first European countries to get rid of them. With less than 32 ATMs per 100k people, over 98% of citizens owning a debit card, and one of the top countries for contactless mobile payments, physical cash is fast becoming a relic of the past in Sweden.

The move to a cashless Swedish society is even encouraged by law. In Sweden, it's fully legal for a merchant to refuse cash payments. This essentially forces consumers to purchase their goods via a cashless payment method. This combined with the fact that most Swedish banks don't handle cash transactions in-branch and ATMs are a scarce commodity, it's little wonder that according to the Swedish Central Bank, Sweden will be a fully cashless country by 2023!

Norway

Norway is the European country closest to a cashless future, according to data from the World Bank. Nearly all Norwegians (98%) own a debit card and Norway's central bank says that only 3''5% of all point of sale transactions were carried out with physical cash'--with three out of every four card transactions being contactless. What's more, over 95% of the population use mobile payment apps'--and as of 2020, apps were the most popular way of transferring money peer-to-peer, accounting for nearly 80% of all transfers.

However, Norway's shift to becoming a fully cashless society has concerned some senior government officials. In 2021, the Finance Ministry requested that Oslo's Financial Supervisory Authority establish a plan that guarantees banks will still offer physical cash to customers. This comes as a backlash to many Norwegian banks denying that it's their responsibility to offer cash services, as has been the case in Sweden.

An interesting by-product of heading towards a cashless future is an increased focus on digital currencies. In April 2021, Norway's central bank publicly announced that it was researching digital currency options to help support the switch to a cash-free society.

The Netherlands

According to GlobalData, the Netherlands card payments market is projected to grow by 7.7% by the end of 2021. Already well-established as a country where it's easy to be cash-free, 91% of the Dutch use banking apps'--with 90.5% of all card payments made with debit cards in 2020. However, there's a hesitancy towards using credit cards due to a cultural unease regarding debt.

Interestingly, the Netherlands is the leading European country for cashless smartwatch payments, which account for over 33% of total smartwatch transactions in Europe. This could be, in large part, due to the fact that two of the Netherlands' biggest banks are compatible with both FitBit and Garmin smartwatches.

Finland

The Bank of Finland has predicted that it will be an entirely cashless country by the end of 2029'--and there's a lot of data to back up this claim. With 98% of all Finns owning a debit card and 63% owning a credit card, nearly the entire population can pay without using cash. Finland's cashless transactions reached a staggering '‚¬50bn in 2018 and are projected to reach highs of nearly '‚¬60bn by 2022.

80% of Finns prefer paying by debit card when in a brick-and-mortar store. This number is only increasing, with a forecasted 0.8% decrease in cash payments projected for 2022. However, not all Finns are convinced that a cashless future is the way to go. 61% don't believe in the concept of a cashless future, 13% are unsure about it, and only 26% believe that going completely cashless would be beneficial for Finnish society.

The United Kingdom

The UK was an early adopter of digital payment methods'--and today, contactless payments are one of the most popular ways to make a payment. As of 2020, 27% of all payments were contactless, which amounted to a sizable 9.6 billion payments!

This marks a significant change in behavior from just a decade ago. In 2011, cashless payments accounted for 50% of all transactions, whereas today five out of six British payments are cashless. COVID-19 also played a role in the British shift toward going cash-free. A study by UK Finance reported a 35% decrease in cash payments in 2020, largely due to the pandemic. The paper also revealed that 79% of adults use online banking and 54% use mobile banking apps proving that the UK is well on its way to becoming cashless.

Why are Nordic countries among the most cashless in the world?

With Sweden, Norway, and Finland all included in this list, it's clear that the Nordic countries are leading the way when it comes to going cashless'--but why is that? Well, it might have something to do with trust. Culturally, the Nordic countries tend to have more trust in their governments and large institutions such as banks. Thus, they believe that their money is just as safe, if not safer, in the hands of a digital bank than it is in their own.

Combine that with a high level of computer literacy even amongst older generations, and banks that proactively restructured to accommodate for advancing digital technologies, and you have a recipe for a fully cashless Nordic region in the not-too-distant future!

Your money at N26

Want to be part of the cashless revolution? As a fully digital bank, N26 let's you manage your finances 100% online. Plus, every single account, including the N26 Standard account comes with a virtual Mastercard, so you can make payments with just a tap of your smartphone. Secure, simple, and hassle-free, open your N26 account in a matter of minutes.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:16

A dangerous storm system is slamming California, with meteorologists at the National Weather Service warning of imminent ''widespread flooding, impassible roads, mudslides/landslides [and] rapid rises in rivers/creeks.'' The system, which prompted the Weather Service to take the unusual step of urging residents to have ''go bags'' at the ready and prepare insurance documentation in advance, is set to unleash its harshest conditions Wednesday night into early Thursday.

Virtually the entirety of Northern and Central California is under flood watches and high-wind warnings, with damaging gusts to 60 mph possible. Strong to severe thunderstorms could be in the offing as well, in addition to 2 to 4 inches of rain in the lowlands and more in the mountains. In the highest terrain, the heavy rain will transition to up to 2 to 4 feet of heavy snow. Along the coast, beaches will be battered by large waves and areas of coastal flooding.

Southern California will see heavy rain, strong winds, hazardous surf along the coast and the potential for flooding, too, especially from Los Angeles northward Wednesday night into Thursday.

The disruptive storm comes on the heels of a barrage of other atmospheric rivers, which dropped 11.6 inches of rain on San Francisco in December. The already saturated soils will make renewed flooding occur more quickly, and make it easier for trees to be uprooted.

''Damaging winds will blow down trees and power lines,'' the Weather Service warned. ''Widespread power outages are expected.''

Ahead of the storm, a mandatory evacuation was ordered for the city of Watsonville, in the Monterey Bay area of California's Central Coast, because it is prone to flooding.

On Wednesday afternoon, the threatening storm system resembled a potent comma-shaped swirl on satellite imagery as it lurked ominously off the West Coast. It was both meteorologically striking and foreboding '-- even the Weather Service office in the Bay Area tweeted: ''As we prepare for the incoming weather, let's take a moment to pause and look at the visible imagery and marvel at what Mother Nature is sending our way.''

That parent low-pressure system is a ''bomb cyclone,'' a term describing the storm's rapid intensification since early in the week. Its minimum air pressure plummeted by about 3 percent in 24 hours, signifying a vacuum-like ingestion of air that is resulting in strong inward winds.

Ahead of the storm's core, warm, somewhat humid air is streaming north, leading to moderate rainfall across Central and Southern California. Rainfall rates of 0.1 inches per hour were common Wednesday morning. This ''appetizer'' rainfall was associated with the warm front.

Then a break will come, followed by a more potent batch of rainfall along the actual cold front. That second band is the one that will pack the punch, and include the threat of damaging winds, thunderstorms and coastal flooding.

On Wednesday afternoon, the front was just starting to come ashore along the coast of far Northern California. Weather radar showed heavy rain starting to affect Crescent City, Eureka and Fort Bragg. Winds were gusting to 40 to 60 mph along the coast and over 80 mph on the ridgetops of coastal mountains. More than 20,000 customers were already without power.

Even around the Bay Area, winds were gusting over 40 mph ahead of the front Wednesday afternoon.

Conditions to worsen Wednesday night

The cold front should arrive in the Bay Area by the start of the evening commute and will feature torrential downpours, rainfall rates of 0.25 to 0.5 inches an hour, possible thunder and lightning, and the strongest winds. Immediately ahead of the front, southerly wind gusts of 35 to 55 mph will be common, followed by an abrupt switch to southwesterly winds behind the front. That's when winds will increase, with gusts of over 60 mph possible at the shoreline, and 45 mph or greater likely inland.

'š ¸Damaging winds will increase quickly this morning, lasting through tomorrow. Strongest winds will be this afternoon - early tomorrow morning. Here is a look at the forecast timing of the winds. Widespread damage of downed trees & powerlines are expected. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/uH8e3NyzyU

'-- NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) January 4, 2023The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center declared a Level 1 out of 5 risk for severe thunderstorms along the Central California coastline, suggesting the potential for storms with lightning, hail and winds gusting to 60 mph. These storms would accompany the cold front itself.

As the front passes and the winds switch, the onshore flow could result in water being piled against the coastline. Large breaking waves of 22 to 27 feet are expected, along with minor coastal flooding. That could affect western San Francisco during the Thursday morning into early afternoon high-tide cycle. High-surf advisories and coastal flood advisories are in effect.

Around Sacramento and California's Central Valley, the brunt of the storm is predicted Wednesday night into early Thursday, when the Weather Service expects flooding in creeks, streams and small rivers. ''Some of the recent burn scars will also be at elevated risk of mud and debris flow,'' wrote the Weather Service office serving the region.

Toward Southern California, the worst conditions are anticipated late Wednesday night into Thursday. Up to 4 to 8 inches of heavy rain on south-facing mountains in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties ''could cause significant flash flooding or debris flows across the region in and outside of recent burn scars,'' wrote the Weather Service office serving the region.

Two to 4 inches of rain is predicted in Los Angeles, which is under a flood watch.

Parade of storms means drought improvement, escalating flood risk

With a prolonged wet pattern in the forecast, the concern is that a series of closely spaced, stronger storms could continue to bombard the state next week.

''There will be some flooding, the question is just how problematic it becomes, and that's going to depend mainly on the exact storm sequencing next week,'' Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said in a video update Tuesday.

ðŸ'ª Check out that super-charged Pacific jet stream, extending over 6,000 miles from China to California!Jet-level winds are forecast to exceed 200 mph in some sections, driving several impactful storm systems into the U.S. West Coast over the next 1-2 weeks... pic.twitter.com/wwXZxTTKfE

'-- Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) December 30, 2022The onslaught of atmospheric rivers has drawn comparisons to a California ''megastorm'' scenario that could impact the state in the coming decades, in which relentless storms drop 60 to 100 inches of precipitation on the Sierra Nevada, causing widespread catastrophic flooding.

''We're nowhere near that yet and we're probably not headed there, but this is definitely one of the higher-impact wet periods we've seen in recent years,'' Swain said. ''Right now, it looks like it could be comparable to what we saw in the 2016-17 winter, which was an exceptionally wet year with some significant flood-related impacts in Northern California.''

A 'megaflood' in California could drop 100 inches of rain, scientists warn

Despite the flood concerns, the prolific wet pattern has been good news for the state's drought. Most of California is now expected to see drought improvement during January.

Swain said that he expects significant, short-term drought relief for Northern and Central California, although the January storms will have little effect on the Colorado River crisis.

''The drought situation is going to look a lot better when we see the next major drought update in either two or four weeks,'' he said.

Snowpack off to one of best starts in four decades

A very wet December racked up big snow totals in the Sierra Nevada, and statewide snowpack remains well above average for this time of year. On Tuesday, the California Department of Water Resources conducted its first snow survey of the season at Phillips Station, about 15 miles south of Lake Tahoe. Snow water content measured 177 percent of average at the site, which is comparable to the current statewide average of 174 percent. Cold storms this week will only add to those numbers.

''Our snowpack is actually off to one of its best starts in the past 40 years,'' Sean de Guzman, manager of the department's snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit, said during the survey. ''However, that doesn't mean that we're out of the woods quite yet, and we must continue to remain vigilant and continue to conserve water.''

If February and March turn dry, the picture could look drastically different by April 1, a key date for measuring the water supply expected from mountain snowpack.

''The significant Sierra snowpack is good news but unfortunately these same storms are bringing flooding to parts of California,'' Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth said in a statement. ''This is a prime example of the threat of extreme flooding during a prolonged drought as California experiences more swings between wet and dry periods brought on by our changing climate.''

The storm Wednesday and Thursday is forecast to produce up to 2 to 4 additional feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada, prompting winter storm warnings. The heaviest snow is forecast above 7,000 feet; snow levels are predicted to be between 4,000 and 5,000 feet as the storm begins, rise to 6,500 to 7,500 feet Wednesday night and then lower to around 5,000 feet toward the storm's conclusion Thursday.

There is no shortage of wet weather systems that will continue to supply the west, especially California with huge amounts of liquid and frozen. This loop is just till mid January!! Rivers and burn scars will be tested and Lake Oroville will continue to fill. @weatherbell pic.twitter.com/QIn71wRlSm

'-- Jim Cantore (@JimCantore) January 4, 2023This is far from the last atmospheric river that will plague the Golden State in the weeks ahead. While 80 percent of the state is facing a severe or worse drought per the U.S. Drought Monitor, too much water in a short period can easily overwhelm soils and cause destructive flooding.

At least three additional atmospheric rivers are expected to drench the state in the next week or so '-- one over the weekend, one Monday into Tuesday, and another late next week. A ''zonal,'' or west-to-east jet stream pattern, is largely to blame. Often, during La Ni±a winters like the present one, weather systems bombard the Pacific Northwest. But at least for the moment, weather systems are instead surfing the jet stream directly into California.

''This is not a 'one and done' storm,'' the Weather Service office serving the Bay Area wrote Wednesday. ''Of course, timing and details of subsequent systems will be subject to change. Be sure to stay tuned to the latest information in the coming days.''

Jason Samenow contributed to this report.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:15

The generational immunity treatment aims to counter the deadly American Foulbrood disease

The US Department of Agriculture has granted a conditional license to the first-ever vaccine for bees, Dalan Animal Health announced on Wednesday. The Athens, Georgia-based company has developed an oral prophylactic they hope will be effective against a highly destructive spore-transmitted bacterial infection.

''Our vaccine is a breakthrough in protecting honeybees,'' Dalan CEO Dr. Annette Kleiser said in a statement, suggesting it might ''change how we care for insects, impacting food production on a global scale.''

American Foulbrood is a bacterial infection transmitted to bee larvae by spores. While antibiotic treatment can mitigate the impact to adult bees, US regulations adopted almost a century ago require the burning of an infected colony.

Dalan's technology ''uses a transgenerational immune priming approach,'' using the queen to pass the immunity onto larvae before they hatch. In practice, the vaccine containing ''killed whole-cell Paenibacillus larvae bacteria'' is passed along by worker bees to the queen via the royal jelly, and ends up in her ovaries. The company claims that efficacy studies have indicated this ''may reduce larval death'' associated with the Foulbrood infections.

The USDA has given the treatment conditional approval for two years, the company said. While it was developed by Dalan, the vaccine will be manufactured by Diamond Animal Health, an Iowa subsidiary of Heska, a Canadian company specializing in blood diagnostic solutions. Dalan will be in charge of limited distribution to interested commercial beekeepers.

If the approach proves successful, Dalan intends to apply it to ''other honeybee diseases and underserved industries, such as shrimp, mealworms, and insects used in agriculture.''

The company's statement quotes Trevor Tauzer, board member of the California State Beekeepers Association, who called the vaccine ''an exciting step,'' noting that until now the only countermeasures available were costly and time-consuming antibiotic treatments that had limited effectiveness.

California accounts for almost half of all the US honeybee colonies, due to the high demand of the almond industry. Almond plantations in the state's central valley provide an estimated 80% of the world's supply, and require up to 30,000 colonies to be shipped there by truck every year during pollination season. The concentration has a downside, as bees can get poisoned by pesticides or catch infections from other swarms, requiring apiaries to destroy millions of insects rather than sending them back.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:34

UK food price rises soared to a record rate in December, figures show, as retail industry bosses warned that high inflation would continue in 2023 amid the fallout from surging energy bills.

Annual food inflation jumped to 13.3% in December, up from 12.4% in November, according to the latest monthly report from trade body the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and the data firm Nielsen. The BRC said this was the highest monthly rate since it began collecting data in 2005.

Highlighting the pressure on households during the festive shopping season, the industry snapshot showed the price of many essential foods rose sharply as the reverberations from Russia's war in Ukraine continued to drive up energy costs.

The BRC said high prices for animal feed, fertiliser and energy fed into higher food prices on supermarket shelves, while warning that consumers would probably face further increases in 2023.

''It was a challenging Christmas for many households across the UK,'' said the BRC's chief executive, Helen Dickinson. ''2023 will be another difficult year for consumers and businesses as inflation shows no immediate signs of waning.''

The figures came as concerns grew about the strength of the British economy, with the headline inflation rate at its highest level since the early 1980s, driven by soaring gas and electricity bills. Manufacturers suffered a further downturn in activity in December, with production, new orders and employment all in decline.

The S&P Global/Cips UK manufacturing purchasing managers' Index fell to a 31-month low of 45.3 in December, down from 46.5 in November, indicating a fifth successive month of contraction in UK factory output.

Domestic and overseas demand remained lacklustre as the industry suffered a weak end to 2022, with companies facing rising costs, increasing market volatility and problems related to Brexit for firms with EU-based customers.

John Glen, the chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, said: ''New orders dropped at one of the fastest rates in over a decade as overseas customers were put off by Brexit customs requirements pushing up costs and delays and domestic orders were affected by the general pressure from rising prices.''

As the soaring costs fed through to consumers, households sharply cut back on spending in recent months. Figures from Barclaycard show retail sales fell overall in 2022, while high street footfall slumped last week at a time when consumers would usually be hitting the shops for the Boxing Day sales.

According to the BRC figures for December, when households usually stock up on Christmas food and drink, the inflation rate for fresh produce accelerated to a new record of 15% in December, up from 14.3% a month earlier.

However, retailers offering steep discounts on non-food products helped to bring December's overall shop price inflation figure down a little, to 7.3% from 7.4% the month before, as high street stores and online retailers looked to shed excess stock built up during periods of disruption to supply chains earlier in 2022.

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Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Aldi said it had experienced record Christmas sales as more shoppers turned to the discount chain amid the cost of living crisis. The retailer said sales jumped by 26% in December to top £1.4bn in the UK and Ireland for the first time.

The discounter highlighted strong sales of fresh meat products, with poultry and pork up 28% for the month. Chilled dessert sales rose by 30%, while sales of cheese increased by about 50%. Snacks such as crisps and nuts were up more than 40% as the World Cup coincided with the Christmas period for the first time.

Dickinson said businesses struggling with soaring energy costs urgently required support from the government. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, confirmed in the run-up to Christmas that he was preparing an extension in financial support for businesses with high energy bills, which would be announced ''early in the new year''.

''Without the scheme, retailers could see their energy bills rise by £7.5bn,'' Dickinson said. ''The government must urgently provide clarity on what future support might look like, or else consumers might pay the price.''

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:33

A NHS chief has warned people not to take part in specific activities to reduce pressure on emergency services The Chief Medical Officer for Wales has warned people to avoid specific activities in an attempt to bring down the risk of having to call the emergency services.

Those activities include going on long runs.

Sir Frank Atherton is urging people to avoid putting excessive demands on medical services as ambulances face long queues to admit patients to hospital.

Figures from NHS England show that last month, around 37,837 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E for a decision to be admitted to a hospital department.

NHS: Emergency departments are facing pressure with long queues for A&EVictoria Jones

Several NHS Trusts have also declared critical incidents in recent days.

The Chief Medical Officer for Wales said: ''The health and care system is under such pressure '' it's the busiest I've ever seen it.

''We are asking people to behave sensibly, don't put themselves at risk, don't put others at risk, look after each other when you're out and about, don't drink too much and don't get into trouble.

''This is not the time to be putting yourself at risk with dangerous activities, anything that increases the risk to you in person, given the fact we do have delays to ambulance services, and they really can only meet the needs of the most seriously ill.''

He added that there are specific activities people should avoid.

''Now is not the time to be going out and starting to do a huge long run. We want people to get fit and active in the new year, of course we do, but do it sensibly, think about pacing yourself, about not taking on too much all at once,'' he said.

Pressures on the NHS are set to get worse if nurses and ambulance workers carry out further strikes this month following threats of industrial action over a pay dispute.

More strikes by nurses and ambulance workers could put more pressure on the NHSJames Manning

Sir Frank told the BBC: ''Watch out for your loved ones, make sure that people are kept safe, particularly the elderly at this time of year, that they are well hydrated at home, because people can get dehydrated very quickly and we know that elderly people who get dehydrated then run into problems with frailty, they have falls, they need to be brought to hospital.

''So we can look after each other and look after ourselves and keep the NHS capacity for those who really need it.''

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:33

Ministers were today begged not to reintroduce any Covid-era restrictions amid claims face mask and work from home guidance could be adopted to stop the NHS from meltdown.

Hospitals are buckling under winter demand, soaring rates of flu, staff shortages and bed-blockers. Covid's resurgence and the emergence of the XBB.1.5 'Kraken' variant could cause even more chaos.

Health chiefs and scientists have already advised adults and pupils to stay at home if they are unwell and to wear masks if they must venture outside when sick. They also called for the booster rollout to be widened in a bid to protect the NHS.

Now ministers are understood to have last-resort plans to advise Britons to wear masks on public transport, WFH and socially distance if the health service 'is at risk of collapse'.

Critics have, however, hit out at the response, warning the NHS's annual winter crisis can't be used as an 'excuse to reintroduce Covid-era restrictions'. Others said such measures could leave Britons 'more vulnerable' to the virus and flu.

People wear face masks on the London Underground today after new advice has been given to curb rising infections as flu and Covid number increase

A commuter wears a face mask on the London Underground today

Two mask-wearers on Nottingham high street today

More mask-wearers on Nottingham high street today

London shoppers wearing face masks in shops on Oxford Street yesterday

Pictured: London shoppers wearing face masks in shops on Oxford Street on January 3

Official sources have suggested that the Government could issue fresh advice for the public to wear face masks on public transport and work from home, if the NHS situation gets worse.

A 'well-placed' source told the i that there is a 'list of potential measures' under consideration.

However, lockdowns and school closures are not among them and no advice is expected to be mandatory or legally enforceable.

They said: 'Softer, less intrusive measures could soon be introduced if the NHS is at risk of collapse.

'While the guidance is for people who are ill to wear face masks if they leave their homes already, it may well be that the wearing of a mask could again be the guidance for all those using public transport.'

A separate government source told the newspaper: 'We're not there yet, but guidance for everyone, ill or not, to wear face masks on public transport is not really going to inconvenience people.

'It would also make perfect sense to ask people who can work from home to do so if the NHS need us all to support them through this busy period of the year.'

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: 'It is inaccurate to say we are considering implementing any such measures. We are working hard with the NHS to tackle the pressures faced this winter.'

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) this week issued fresh calls for Britons who are unwell to stay at home and wear face coverings if they must venture outdoors.

It also said children who are unwell and have a fever '-- classed as 38C or more '-- should stay at home until they feel better.

The advice was backed by Transport Secretary Mark Harper, who previously advocated against Covid restrictions. He said yesterday that it would be 'very sensible' for people who have Covid or flu to wear a mask.

However, some Tory MPs have called the advice 'madness' and said face coverings make 'no difference at all to the transmission of a virus'.

And some experts have warned that a Covid-esque response can't be brought back every winter.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show 1.2million had the virus on any given day in the week up to December 9 in England

UK Covid infection data shows 97 people per million tested positive in the week to December 27. For comparison, 2,699 Covid cases per million were confirmed during the peak last winter

Latest Covid daily admission data shows nearly 1,300 people infected with the virus were hospitalised on December 19. The figure is up by a third week-on-week

The number of people infected with Covid taking up beds in wards across England soared above 8,600 on December 21, data shows. The figure has jumped 29 per cent in a week

NHS England data today showed that an average of 63,000 staff were off work every day in the week to Christmas (red line). Around 8,000 of the absences were due to Covid (blue line)

The flu-nami has swept across the NHS in England, the latest round of health service data shows, with over 3,800 admissions for the virus on December 23. Graph shows the number of beds on wards taken up by those with flu (red) and the number of beds occupied due to the virus in critical care (blue)

Ambulance handover delays peaked on December 19 with more than 3,000 patients forced to wait over an hour in the back of an emergency vehicle, unable to be offloaded to a hospital bed

Ambulances parked outside the Royal London hospital in east London today

Emergency vehicles outside the Royal London hospital in east London today

Ambulances wait outside Portsmouth Hospital yesterday due to shortages of rooms

The UK Health Security Agency this week issued fresh calls for Britons who are unwell to stay at home and wear face coverings if they must venture outdoors. They also said children who are unwell and have a fever '-- classed as 38C or more '-- to stay at home until they feel better

Professor David Livermore, a microbiologist at the University of East Anglia, told MailOnline that the public is more vulnerable to viruses due to prior Covid restrictions and it is a 'period we have to pass through'.

'Hiding away again will only delay our immune recovery and make it harder,' he said.

Professor Livermore said: 'There is absolutely no good reason to demand the return of masks. They have failed epically.

'Worse, they cause harm. They impede communication. They impede childhood learning. They create a scurf of poorly degradable street litter.

'Nor is there good reason to reinstate other restrictions, such as social distancing and WFH.

'A large part of our present problems is that, through two years of restrictions, we lost our natural equilibrium '-- of repeated asymptomatic infection and re-boosted immunity '-- with other pathogens, such as flu, RSV and even Strep A.'

Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, told MailOnline that staying at home when ill and infectious is 'always good advice'.

He said: 'But we mustn't allow the NHS's annual winter crisis to be used as an excuse to reintroduce Covid-era restrictions.

'There is no evidence that the latest sub-variant of Omicron is more dangerous and the Chicken Littles warning of disaster have been wrong again and again for 18 months.

'Rather than demanding behavioural change of the whole population, we should ask why it is only the UK, of the all major economies, that has a healthcare system that collapses every winter and barely functions the rest of the year.

'The NHS is not the envy of the world. It is a national embarrassment, burning our money and incapable of reform.'

However, some scientists are already urging Britons to follow restrictions similar to those brought in during the pandemic in a bid to lower pressure on the over-stretched health service, warning that the UK has 'sleepwalked into another avoidable crisis'.

Professor Sam Wilson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow, said 'taking familiar Covid precautions' will help limit the spread of Covid.

He told The Guardian: 'Regardless of the impact of a new variant, the NHS is already under tremendous pressure from a cocktail of different viruses this winter.

'Where it is possible, taking voluntary steps to reduce transmission '-- reducing contacts, wearing high-quality masks in crowded indoor spaces, and isolating if you have symptoms '-- will help reduce the pressure on the NHS.'

Dr Stephen Griffin, an infectious disease expert at the University of Leeds, told MailOnline that he 'fully endorses' limiting contacts.

He said: 'I would advise people to limit contacts wherever possible, working from home if possible, and not mixing at all if feeling unwell.

'Naturally, not everyone can afford to due a lack of support for isolation at present.

'Testing is ideal if you can access them, which is more and more difficult nowadays as well.

'In areas that are poorly ventilated, including most public transport, a well fitted filtering mask is the best protection for you, and for others.'

Dr Griffin said that Omicron variant XBB.1.5, which is fuelling a surge in cases in the US and was behind at least one in 25 UK Covid cases in the week before Christmas, is 'both highly antibody evasive and more highly transmissible'.

He added: 'It is growing quickly as a result, but we already have high prevalence from existing viruses which, combined with resurgent influenza, is putting incredible strain on the NHS.

'These pressures are exposing the brittleness of the NHS infrastructure caused by 12 years of under resourcing.

'We have yet again sleepwalked into another avoidable crisis.

'It pains me that the Government are able to accept this, or even pretend that this constitutes "living with" Covid, or any other disease.'

Professor Martin McKee, president at the British Medical Association and public health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told MailOnline: 'When the NHS is facing unprecedented pressure from respiratory infections, anything we can do to reduce them makes even more sense than normal.'

Professor Karl Friston, scientific director at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, told MailOnline that it is 'sensible' to self-isolate and wear masks when unwell or if there is a high risk of transmission.

He noted that the number of contacts people have per day is still 15 per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels. 'As a population, we are more aware of the dangers of unmitigated viral spread '-- and how to respond sensibly,' Professor Friston added.

The NHS crisis has seen patients face record delays in A&E this winter, with some reporting waits of up to four days for a bed, while others are treated in cupboards, corridors, meeting rooms and even outside hospitals.

Doctors have described 'Dickensian overcrowding' in emergency departments, with some staff being forced to ask seriously ill patients to monitor their own vital signs.

Last week, one in five ambulance patients in England waited more than an hour to be handed over to A&E teams.

In a bid to boost 'atrocious' response times, London Ambulance Service yesterday ordered its teams to leave 999 patients in chairs or trolleys, raising patient safety fears among some medics.

Some hospitals have cancelled all appointments and operations deemed 'non-urgent', with leaders warning more will follow suit, and others have reported that they are running out of oxygen.

Some are considering using 'field hospitals' with tents to cope with the 'unprecedented' influx in patients.

Experts have called for the reopening of Nightingale hospitals, which are staffed by the Army and built during the pandemic but saw little use, to prop up the ailing health service.

Figures from the Sanger Institute, one of the UK's largest Covid surveillance centres, shows 4 per cent of cases in the week to December 17 were caused by XBB.1.5 (shown in purple, bottom right corner)

December 17 marked the first time XBB.1.5 was listed on the institute's virus dashboard, which is updated weekly

Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said up to 500 patients could be dying each week due to delays in emergency care.

NHS chiefs have warned the crisis could continue until Easter.

The health service has blamed ongoing pressures in part on workforce shortages, with 130,000 vacancies across its entire workforce. On top of this, staff absences are on the rise.

It is also battling a 'twindemic' of flu and Covid, with an average of 3,746 flu patients in hospital each day last week '-- up seven-fold in one month. Around 8,600 Covid patients were taking up beds on December 21, up 84 per cent on last month. Health chiefs warned today that flu and virus cases are expected to keep rising throughout January.

Further adding to the crisis is the fact that 12,000 hospital beds were taken up by 'bed-blockers' in the last week.

Demand for A&E has also skyrocketed because of difficulties accessing GPs. One in five patients unable to get an in-person appointment in December turned up at hospitals instead, according to polling by the Liberal Democrats.

On top of these pressures, experts have warned that the Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.5 is set to pile further demand on the health service.

The strain has gained mutations which helps it to bypass Covid-fighting antibodies generated in response to vaccination or previous infection.

Figures from the Sanger Institute, one of the country's largest Covid surveillance centres, suggests at least 4 per cent of cases in England in the week to December 17 were caused by XBB.1.5.

The situation saw Labour MP Rachael Maskell yesterday call for compulsory isolation for those infected with Covid, saying 'we need' those with the virus to stay at home.

Ms Maskell also called for arrivals from China, which is battling its biggest outbreak since the pandemic began, to isolate in the UK if they are infected.

As it stands, those travelling to England must show proof of a negative test taken up to two days before flying.

Some passengers will also be asked to take a voluntary test on arrival at Heathrow to monitor for new variants. But those who test positive will not have to isolate.

Ms Maskell told MailOnline that as well as obliging arrivals from China to quarantine if they test positive, there needed to be a 'discussion' about bringing back more widespread isolation.

Isolation for those infected with Covid was ditched under the Government's 'Living with Covid' plan, which sets out actions people can take to reduce the risk of catching the virus and spreading it to others.

But the guidance still advises people who have symptoms of a respiratory infection and a fever to 'try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people'.

The plan also urges people to get vaccinated and keep up-to-date with the booster doses they are eligible for, as well as ventilate rooms, such as by opening windows and vents.

Britons should also wear masks when in close contact with someone at-risk from Covid and in crowded public spaces with infections are high, the guidance states.

In other health news...

'I'm in charge of curing the NHS now': Rishi Sunak unveils blueprint to help tackle the crisis in UK hospitals '' in the first major speech of his premiership

Pharmacists 'to treat more illnesses' as the government considers handing them greater powers to ease the pressure on waiting times for GPs and A&E

Man suffering from acute appendicitis had to sleep in his CAR outside Scarborough hospital because there were no beds to treat him in

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Britain has to say no to mandatory masks

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:29

Real answer from OpenAI's ChatGPT. Credit: Shane Burke Microsoft could soon get a return on its $1 billion investment in OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, which gives humanlike text answers to questions.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries rather than just showing a list of links, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Microsoft hopes the new feature, which could launch before the end of March, will help it outflank Google, its much bigger search rival.

The Briefing microsoft enterprise

Meta's Targeted Ads Are Dealt Yet Another Regulatory Blow

By Martin Peers &middot Jan. 4, 2023 5:01 PM PST

When it comes to the fines European regulators are imposing on big tech companies, it's easy to lose track. Take today's decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission, imposing fines totaling more than $400 million against Meta Platforms for breaching European rules with targeted advertising. This is on top of several other cases against Meta at the Irish regulator, which is taking the lead...

Federal Authorities Seizing FTX Assets, Including Robinhood Shares

By Akash Pasricha &middot Jan. 4, 2023

Twitter Hack Reportedly Leaks Over 200 Million Email Addresses

By Erin Woo &middot Jan. 4, 2023

Amazon Plans to Lay Off More Than 18,000 Workers, Mostly in Retail and HR

By Theo Wayt &middot Jan. 4, 2023

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:26

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) '-- Officials in California ordered evacuations in a high-risk coastal area where mudslides killed 23 people in 2018 as a huge storm barreled into the state Wednesday, bringing high winds and rain that threatened widespread flooding and knocked out power to more than 100,000 people.

The storm was expected to dump up to 6 inches (152.4 millimeters) of rain in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area where most of the region would remain under flood warnings into late Thursday night. In Southern California, the storm was expected to peak in intensity overnight into early Thursday morning with Santa Barbara and Ventura counties likely to see the most rain, forecasters said.

''We anticipate that this may be one of the most challenging and impactful series of storms to touch down in California in the last five years,'' said Nancy Ward, the new director of the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at a news conference that the city was ''preparing for a war.'' Crews cleared clogged storm drains, tried to move homeless people into shelters and passed out emergency supplies and ponchos to those who refused to go.

The city distributed so many sandbags to residents that supplies temporarily ran out.

Powerful winds gusting to 85 mph (136 kmh) or more forced the cancellation of more than 70 flights at San Francisco International Airport and downed trees and power lines. Firefighters rescued a family after a tree fell onto their car. The fire department reported ''large pieces of glass'' fell off the Fox Plaza tower near the Civic Center, although no injuries were reported. It was ''highly possible'' the damage to the skyscraper was wind-related, the department tweeted.

The new storm left more than 100,000 customers in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Coast without power.

The storm is one of three so-called atmospheric river storms in the last week to reach the drought-stricken state. California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to allow for a quick response and to aid in cleanup from another powerful storm that hit just days earlier.

In Southern California, evacuations were ordered for those living in areas burned by three recent wildfires in Santa Barbara County, where heavy rain forecast for overnight could cause widespread flooding and unleash debris flows.

County officials did not have a firm number for how many people were under evacuation orders, but Susan Klein-Rothschild, a spokesperson in the county's emergency operations center, said sheriff's deputies went door-to-door and contacted at least 480 people.

Among the towns ordered to evacuate was Montecito, where five years ago huge boulders, mud and debris swept down mountains through the town to the shoreline, killing 23 people and destroying more than 100 homes. The town is home to many celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.

''What we're talking about here is a lot of water coming off the top of the hills, coming down into the creeks and streams and as it comes down, it gains momentum and that's what the initial danger is,'' Montecito Fire Department Chief Kevin Taylor said.

Elsewhere, a 45-mile (72-kilometer) stretch of the coastal Highway 1 running through Big Sur was closed Wednesday evening in anticipation of flooding and rock falls. Further north, a 25-mile (40-kilometer) stretch of Highway 101 was closed due to several downed trees.

Drivers were urged to stay off the roads unless absolutely necessary, especially with heavy snow expected in the mountains.

The storm came days after a New Year's Eve downpour led to the evacuations of people in rural Northern California communities and the rescue of several motorists from flooded roads. A few levees south of Sacramento were damaged.

On Wednesday, authorities in south Sacramento County found a body in a submerged car '-- one of at least four victims of flooding from that storm.

Evacuation orders were in place in Santa Cruz County's Paradise Park along the swiftly moving San Lorenzo River, as well as in areas along the Pajaro River. Residents who fled wildfires in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2020 were packing their bags as the towns of Boulder Creek, Ben Lomond and Felton were all warned they should be prepared to evacuate.

Sonoma County authorities issued an evacuation warning for a string of towns along the Russian River, which was expected to reach flood stage on Thursday.

The storms won't be enough to officially end the state's ongoing drought, now entering its fourth year. The U.S. Drought Monitor showed that most of California is in severe to extreme drought. Since the state's major reservoirs are low, they have plenty of room to fill with more water from the storm, officials said.

Trees already stressed from years of limited rain are more likely to fall now that the ground is suddenly saturated and winds are heavy. That could cause widespread power outages or create flood hazards, said Karla Nemeth, director of the state's Department of Water Resources.

''We are in the middle of a flood emergency and also in the middle of a drought emergency,'' she said during an emergency briefing.

Storms also took a toll elsewhere in the U.S. In the Midwest, ice and heavy snow this week closed schools in Minnesota and western Wisconsin and caused a jet to go off an icy taxiway after landing in a snowstorm in Minneapolis. No passengers were injured, Delta airlines said.

In the South, a possible tornado damaged homes, downed trees and flipped a vehicle on its side in Montgomery, Alabama, early Wednesday.

In Illinois, staff from the National Weather Service's Chicago office planned to survey storm damage on Wednesday following at least six tornadoes, the largest number of rare January tornadoes recorded in the state since 1989.

___

Associated Press writers Janie Har in San Francisco, Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis and Rick Callahan in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:07

Amazon is set to make around 18,000 job cuts, with tech teams among those bearing the brunt of the losses.

The move followed CRM giant Salesforce's decision to slash about 10 percent of its 73,000 workforce while taking a financial hit of $1.4 billion to $2.1 billion, announced yesterday.

The global online retailer and cloud company is set to slash around 5 percent of its workforce '-- largely in the areas of devices and books, technology services and stores '-- which is considerably higher than the 10,000 estimated in November.

In a blog published last night, CEO Andy Jassy, who founded AWS, said the pace of recent hiring combined with current economic uncertainty forced it to make the cuts.

"Between the reductions we made in November and the ones we're sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles. Several teams are impacted; however, the majority of role eliminations are in our Amazon Stores and People Experience and Technology organizations," he said.

He said the company was working to support those who will lose their jobs. Packages include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.

Jassy added that Amazon would be "inventive, resourceful, and scrappy in this time when we're not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles." Venturing into a ponderous tone, the CEO pointed out that the leadership principle "Invent and Simplify" applied to "finding a way to do more for customers at a lower cost" as well as tech innovation.

Amazon has been hit by the return of in-store shopping after Covid-related restrictions were lifted across the globe. Online sales fell during the first half of 2022 but grew 7 percent in the third quarter compared to the prior year. The company has also been hit by increasing fuel prices, inflation and supply chain difficulties.

The era of cloud colonialism has begunPrime suspect: Amazon to loosen logistics and delivery from EU retailSalesforce to chop 10% of workforce in $1.4 billion restructuring blueprintMicron plans staff decimation as demand dips to Great Recession levelsAmazon unfreezes some hiring to expand its datacenter footprintAmazon this week agreed an $8 billion unsecured loan from several unnamed lenders, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing [PDF] on Tuesday. The brown box shifter later told Reuters "the uncertain macroeconomic environment" meant it was using "different financing options to support capital expenditures, debt repayments, acquisitions, and working capital needs."

In November last year, reports claimed Amazon's Worldwide Digital unit, where Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology are nested, hit an operating loss of over $3 billion. It was claimed the vast majority of the losses were tied to Amazon's Alexa and other devices. Amazon responded that it was as committed as ever to Echo and Alexa would "continue to invest heavily in them." ®

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:05

Bank sold assets at a loss to cover withdrawals and cut 40% of its staff but remains committed to crypto

The collapse of crypto exchange FTX sparked a run on Silvergate Capital Corp., forcing the bank to sell assets at a steep loss to cover some $8.1 billion in withdrawals.

Crypto-related deposits plunged 68% in the fourth quarter, the bank said in an early release of some quarterly results. To satisfy the withdrawals, Silvergate liquidated debt it was holding on its balance sheet. The $718 million it lost selling the debt far exceeds the bank's total profits since at least 2013.

The...

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The collapse of crypto exchange FTX sparked a run on Silvergate Capital Corp., forcing the bank to sell assets at a steep loss to cover some $8.1 billion in withdrawals.

Crypto-related deposits plunged 68% in the fourth quarter, the bank said in an early release of some quarterly results. To satisfy the withdrawals, Silvergate liquidated debt it was holding on its balance sheet. The $718 million it lost selling the debt far exceeds the bank's total profits since at least 2013.

The bank has laid off 40% of its staff, or about 200 employees, and said it would pare back its businesses. It shelved a plan to launch its own digital currency, writing off $196 million it spent buying the technology that Facebook had built in its failed attempt to start a crypto-based payments network.

Silvergate caters to companies in the crypto business, taking their deposits and operating a network that links investors to crypto exchanges. FTX and other companies controlled by its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, accounted for about $1 billion of the bank's deposits.

Their November collapse rattled the crypto market and sent Silvergate's stock down sharply.

Silvergate was able to survive such a steep decline in deposits because it isn't structured like most banks. It sold off much of its traditional banking operations and branches to focus on providing bank accounts to crypto exchanges and investors. Crypto-related deposits account for some 90% of the bank's total, and it keeps almost all of its deposits in cash or easy-to-sell securities.

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The bank said it remains committed to crypto and has the funding to handle a ''sustained period of transformation.''

At the end of the fourth quarter, Silvergate said it had more cash on hand, $4.6 billion, than its $3.8 billion in remaining deposits. And it held another $5.6 billion in debt securities like U.S. Treasurys that could be sold quickly. Daily average volume on Silvergate's network rose in the fourth quarter, the bank said.

''While Silvergate is taking decisive action to navigate the current environment, its mission has not changed,'' the bank said in a statement. ''Silvergate believes in the digital asset industry.''

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Silvergate has faced intense scrutiny over its relationship with Mr. Bankman-Fried's companies, and the crypto market's implosion has raised questions about the viability of the bank's business model. A group of federal regulators earlier this week warned banks against being too exposed to the crypto market.

Silvergate's stock is down more than 70% in the last three months, and its shares are heavily shorted. The trade has been a profitable one, with shorts up more than $400 million in the last year, according to S3 Partners.

The stock had rallied on Wednesday, rising 27%, its best percentage gain since 2020.

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The bank said the withdrawals were the result of a crypto crisis of confidence. Deposits dropped to as low as $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter, before rising again to end the quarter at $3.8 billion.

Silvergate plans to report full fourth-quarter results later this month.

Write to David Benoit at David.Benoit@wsj.com

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Thu, 05 Jan 2023 02:18

I turned 60 in July. Even typing that out makes me feel old. When my parents were 60, they were the definition of geriatric. Settled into life, sitting on the couch watching endless TV and not thinking about being healthy. This is definitely not me or where I wanted to be. I entered my sixth decade of life fighting. Fighting to stay and feel young. I didn't feel 60 and I didn't want to be 60. So, I decided to really push myself.

75 days of hell and triumph

On September 4th, I embarked on the 75 Hard program. Designed by Andy Frisella, it's 75 days of mental and physical toughness, or hell, depending on how you view it. You are challenged to see how much chutzpah you have. Many people fail within the first week because they didn't realize what they signed up for. Not me.

For 75 days, you have to complete two 45-minute workouts, one inside, one outside. Drink one gallon of water daily, read 10 pages of a nonfiction book '' and you have to finish it even though you hate the book. Eat a healthy diet, your choice, but no sugar, alcohol or cheat days. And you have to take a daily photo to either horrify you or watch the incremental changes that happen over nearly 12 weeks.

My competitive side knew I would see this program to the end. There was no way I was going to fail. To hold myself accountable, I announced I was doing 75 Hard on Instagram and my podcast, Curry & The Keeper . And I invited people to join me. Misery loves company, right? To my delight, 15 people joined me on this 75-day journey. A few dropped off but many of us stayed on course.

During those 75 days, new friendships were formed. Ideas, miseries, recipes and just plain life were shared. We cheered each other on and even provided emotional support to a friend who was bit by a dog on her daily run. We were in the trenches together, and together, we helped each other succeed.

Tricks to complete 75 Hard

Our group found tricks to get us to the finish line. And they worked. Should you wish to embark on this journey, here they are.

To understand the rules, listen to Andy Frisella's podcast, #208, where he outlines the entire program. You'll have to excuse his extreme profanity but he's passionate! Consider buying his book as you'll refer to it often. Disclaimer: there are many typos in his book. Drove me crazy. Also, download the app. The app has a task checklist and many of us liked checking them off each day. Each completed day was one day closer to being done.

Set yourself up for success by pre-gaming. Start doing some of the tasks before you actually begin the program because going from 0 to 100 on day one leads to failure.

About two weeks before you begin, slowly increase your water intake. Drinking a gallon of water on the first day is shocking '' and you'll be alarmed at the number of bathroom trips. Develop some tricks to help get the water down. One group member drank half a gallon of water before noon. I started drinking water as soon as I woke up and finished around 6 PM so I didn't endure late night bathroom trips. Get some cool water bottles since they'll be your best friends for 75 days.

Begin doing one workout each day about 10 days before your actual start date. You'll get one workout down and the second one won't be difficult to add once the program begins. Set up a schedule. One group member got up early and completed both workouts by noon. Be creative. You'll get bored doing the same workout repeatedly. Care for your body. Do not go hard seven days a week. Incorporate yoga and stretching. And simply walk for your outside workout. Put on your headphones and listen to a podcast. It's amazing how much you'll learn while you're checking off the days.

When presented with busy weekends or going out of town, figure out ahead of time how you're going to get your tasks done. You'll have more success when you plan. There were many late-night workouts but everyone got it done. And if you're traveling in the car for a while, make sure you map out bathroom stops.

Find a diet that works for you '' actually a sustainable way of eating so it's the least of your worries. A little bit of meal planning goes a long way.

Research your books thoroughly because you have to read every day. Audio books are not allowed and once you start a book, you have to finish it. I read five books: 75 Hard (preparation!), Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (a snoozer), John 3:16 by Max Lucado, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson (I realized at 60 I was already there). The intent is to read self-empowerment books. You know, to keep yourself motivated.

Lastly and most importantly, find yourself a posse. They'll keep you accountable and motivated. Keep in touch via an app. We used Geneva but a Facebook Group or Clubhouse works. We posted every day to share an idea or to say we completed a workout. We celebrated each other with words of wisdom and lots of emojis. Your group will be there the whole time, even on Day 76 to celebrate with a Zoom wine toast! Most of all, you'll have wonderful friendships where you're forever bonded.

Lost and gained

On November 17th, I successfully completed the 75 Hard Program. Seventy-five gallons of water, 150 workouts, 75 daily photos, five books, no sugar, alcohol or cheat days. Mere words can't convey how proud I am of myself and our group. Although many days felt the same, my will '' and our group '' kept me motivated to the finish line. My body became stronger, leaner and more agile. I lost 10.5 inches and 12 pounds and I now fit back into my clothes. However, more valuable than the weight loss, I gained the confidence and mental toughness to know I can accomplish anything. And I know my age is no excuse.

Here we go again

It's been over a month since our group completed the program. We keep in touch almost every day and still complete many of the 75 Hard tasks '' although not as rigorous. And good thing because many of us are starting the next 75 Hard phase on January 1. Yes, we're doing it again. It's only 30 days this time around and since we've mastered the mental toughness, know what's needed to be successful and understand the importance of supporting each other, we got this.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:12

(Note: This feature at GoLongTD.com ran in July 2021. Thank you for reading. All prayers are with Hamlin and his entire family.)

GETZVILLE, N.Y. '-- The man wants the full Western New York experience so that's what he gets this night.

One month prior, Damar Hamlin asked everyone for their top 5 wing spots in town, a tweet that generated 194 replies. Fans didn't steer the newest Buffalo Bill the wrong direction, either. The two true wing meccas were mentioned over 'n over again.

So, since Hamlin had already taken his family to one of those spots '-- Bar Bill in East Aurora, awarding their wings a ''10/10'' '-- it was only right for this conversation to be held at the other holy grail.

At the one spot everyone absolutely must move to the No. 1 slot on their Wings Power Rankings: Elmo's.

Hamlin drives north, walks through the doors and, first, relives his raw emotions from draft weekend.

When the Bills drafted him, the first thought that crossed his mind was Thank God . The wait to the 212nd overall selection took a toll on this safety out of the University of Pittsburgh. The wait was so stressful that Hamlin actually lost a few pounds. His second thought? There would be no need to adjust to the cold. He's lived it his whole life in Pittsburgh and is hopeful that the front-wheel drive on his Challenger will suffice this winter.

Time will tell. He's told the lake effect is different here. Those whiteouts are no joke.

Now, all he's doing is studying like crazy. This playbook feels like a new language to Hamlin. Not that he has any questions about his ability. At Pitt, the 6-foot-1, 200-pounder was a human highlight film.

''I'm a fierce competitor,'' Hamlin says, ''and somebody who wants to win. I play to win. I'm not scared to compete. I'm aggressive. I can do anything you ask me. Any task. I can do it all. That's something to not be taken lightly.''

Many players say this. Few can back it up. Hamlin knows this.

So, first, Hamlin eases into why he is different.

It starts right where he's from, right in his borough of Pittsburgh '-- McKees Rocks.

''You face uncomfortable situations early,'' Hamlin says, ''which push you into that sink-or-swim mentality. Whenever you're faced with competition in football, it's just another bump in the road.''

With that, Hamlin gets up to head to the bathroom. He walks past the youth sports team celebrating a win with their parents across the bar. On the speakers, ''Whoomp! There It Is'' blends to ''Beat it.'' There's a Sixers/Hawks game on a TV in one corner, the NHL Playoffs live up front and Buffalo sports paraphernalia decorates all walls. No doubt, one Super Bowl triumph would forever change every wing establishment in Western New York.

The hope is real here.

This is a team that went 13-3 and advanced to the AFC Championship last season. Damn right, the expectation in 2021 should be to win the Super Bowl. And that mission only gets tougher here on out, too. Now that the Bills believe they've finally found their long-lost franchise quarterback, they'll be paying that quarterback anywhere from $40 million to $45 million per year soon'... which means it'll only become more difficult to build a winner. GM Brandon Beane won't be able to spend so liberally in free agency. He and head coach Sean McDermott must find starters in the mid-to-late rounds of the draft for the Bills to win long term.

This is the one danger in handing over a blank check to one player and they're not alone. Cleveland and Baltimore will likely be forking over massive contracts to their QBs, too.

It's on the team to scout and scout and scout and find hidden gems who'll shatter the odds.

Hamlin could be that player because Hamlin has beaten the odds.

Hamlin knows he is 100 percent ready '-- for anything.

Once he returns to his seat, the wings arrive. He gets the full Elmo's experience, too. Scattered across the table is a smorgasbord of 10 BBQ milds, 10 Cajun Honey Mustards, 10 Cajun milds, 10 regular milds and, for good measure, a side of Cajun fries. Hamlin gnaws on Wing No. 1 and lets his mind wander back to everything he's been through. Particularly, all of the friends he's lost.

Hamlin estimates more than half of the kids he grew up with are dead.

After a while, you simply lose track.

''It makes you numb to it,'' Hamlin says, ''which is not good. I take reality for what it is and that's a product of me having to grow up so early. It's part of life, losing people.''

Life in McKees Rocks certainly molded him. Specifically, one period of life when he lost his Dad. Football became his escape. His ''getaway.'' His ticket to virtually any college he wanted. And then? Football was taken from him. Onto Pitt, a mystery injury should've ruined Hamlin.

He got through that, too.

He found his way to Buffalo, to a state of reflection over wings.

Now, Hamlin is the player this Super Bowl contender needs.

The sentencing came out of nowhere. That dark day, in 2010, a 12-year-old Hamlin was not expecting to lose his father.

But, he did. The image is seared in his memory.

What he and his family believed was a procedural hearing turned dark. This felt like something straight out of a movie. When guards entered the courtroom, Hamlin was overwhelmed with fear.

''You start to sense something,'' Hamlin says. ''And they said they were going to keep him. It broke my Mom. My Mom was crushed.''

Mario Hamlin was sentenced to 10 years in prison for intent to sell drugs. As Mom's eyes welled with tears while taking her husband's jewelry, so did Damar's eyes.

Just like that, Dad was whisked away. He'd end up serving 3 ½ years of that sentence, 3 ½ precious years of his son's development.

Hamlin's mother, Nina, did everything she possibly could to shield Damar from the same trappings ensnaring his peers in middle school. McKees Rocks is rough today but it was even rougher back then, Hamlin assures. At an early age, Nina was determined to pull her son out of his home school district (Sto-Rox) and get him into a private school. Financial aid helped. But to make this work, she worked nonstop. She ran a daycare and the family also had a cleaning business. With Dad gone, Hamlin's day became regimented.

School. Practice. Cleaning business. That's it.

Many nights, he'd be cleaning until midnight.

Seeing Dad taken away like this ''stripped the imagination of a kid.''

''That's when my outlook on life changed,'' Hamlin says. ''I had to take reality for reality and couldn't be a kid anymore. It was just me and my Mom now trying to survive. I had to grow up really fast. It instilled a toughness in me. That mental toughness. It built that work ethic in me. Just that time with not having my Dad around. I had to be a man.

''It changed my life.''

Some nights, the heat in their home broke. Never easy those Pittsburgh winters. He could talk to his Dad but, as son says, there's a huge difference between getting life advice on the phone and getting it every day in-person. Many days, Hamlin didn't have money to buy lunch at school. Whenever that happened, he'd swallow his pride and ask a close friend for a few bites of their meal.

And even as he enrolled into Pittsburgh Central Catholic, Hamlin was still living in McKees Rocks. Still around the violence.

This is where losing a father at such an impressionable age really posed a threat.

McKees Rocks is a ''crab-in-a-barrel type of place,'' Hamlin says, where ''everybody knows everybody.''

When we all think of Pittsburgh, we may picture yellow bridges and winding rivers and Primanti Bros. and waving Terrible Towels. Yes, there is a lovable yinzer side to the city, Hamlin explains. But then there's the inner city where '-- like so many American cities today '-- life can become borderline untenable. Opportunities are limited. Fathers, often, are not present. Other than music or sports, here, Hamlin says kids don't see ways to escape. The statistics are ugly, too. McKees Rocks (pop. 5,919) has one of the highest crime rates in America '-- one in 16 people here are the victim of a crime.

Right when his Dad went away, Hamlin started losing his friends.

That year alone, three under the age of 18 died.

In fact, that's how Hamlin and fellow Pitt-to-NFL defensive back Paris Ford became so close. One of these three kids was a mutual friend.

''I've got so many friends who didn't even make it to 21,'' Hamlin says. ''It's crazy. When you think about that '-- all the friends that you have '-- just imagine if half of them didn't make it to 21.''

He does the math in his head for a moment, pauses, and corrects himself.

Actually, it's '' more than half.''

Everyone in McKees Rocks starts to get nervous in the summertime, he explains. When the weather gets hotter, you just know there's a good chance that someone you love will die. People start ''moving around'' as the heat cranks up. Drugs and gangs are a thing around here, sure, but Hamlin says many deaths aren't related to either. Simply, a fight can break out over something minor and instead of settling the dispute with fists, a gun is drawn, a trigger is pulled, a life is taken far too soon.

He can't shake the feeling that there's a reason he's still alive, a reason he's sitting right here.

Friend to friend, he relives tragedy to tragedy.

One of his best friends as a kid, Jeremiah Jones, was shot to death on the other side of Pittsburgh on July 2, 2017. They grew up with the same NFL dreams on the same little league team with Jones even blossoming into a star quarterback at nearby Woodland Hills High School. Then, at the age of 19, Jones was shot multiple times in Wilkins Township.

When an Uber driver found Jones lying in the middle of a remote part Lougeay Road, he was hanging on for life. The driver called 911 and tried CPR but it was too late. Jones was pronounced dead at 3:30 a.m.

Then, there was rapper Jimmy Wopo.

He was gunned down on June 18, 2018 at approximately 4:22 p.m. (EST) right in Pittsburgh. Hamlin was close to him, too. Very close. All of the horror that day comes back to him like it was yesterday. Hamlin was attending summer school at Pitt, a campus situated smack dab in the inner-city. And while squeezing in a quick power nap before class, Hamlin woke up to loud sirens. He went to class. He got word that Wopo was shot. He hightailed it to the hospital.

And right there in the lobby of the emergency room, a doctor emerged to tell everyone that Wopo didn't make it.

There was crying. There was screaming. Nothing but utter devastation.

One report, after the fact , tied Wopo to a gang responsible for prior murders. Still, Hamlin insists his friend was a source of hope for kids throughout the city and, one year prior, Wopo sure sounded determined to create a new life for himself. The rapper grew up in city's Hill District '-- about five miles from McKees Rocks '-- and rose to fame in 2016 with a song about his own neighborhood, titled ''Elm Street.'' Hamlin always pictured a world in which he, Ford and Wopo provided all kids in all rough corners of Pittsburgh a new ''image'' to aspire to.

One drive-by shooting ended Wopo's life.

''That was,'' Hamlin says, ''a life-changing experience for me.''

And then, there was Naekwon Wright. ''KB,'' as friends knew him. He actually rapped on one of Wopo's tracks, ''This & That.'' Before every game last season, KB would text both Hamlin and Ford in a group chat. He couldn't attend games because of Covid but tried to stay as connected as possible. Every Saturday convo ended with the same message from KB, too: ''Good luck. Love y'all.''

Wright died on Oct. 6, 2020.

Wright suffered several gunshot wounds just before midnight.

Who killed all three? Nobody knows, to Hamlin's knowledge.

Not that it's abnormal. Typically, you don't get answers.

''The way I grew up,'' Hamlin says, ''teaches you to cherish everybody in your life because you never know who you'll lose. You could lose anybody. Everybody I talk to, I say 'I love you.' And that's neighborhood tradition.''

Miraculously, Hamlin was able to sidestep danger himself. There were a few close calls. When he was young, he remembers shots ringing out a handful of times in the streets. Whenever a ricochet of bullets filled the air, he'd sprint into the house. But he was never tempted to join any gang, any bad crowd. Attending Central Catholic opened his eyes up to a new world.

One of his closest friend's was Lynn Swann's son. Seeing their house helped Hamlin realize this sport could lead to a new life.

Getty ImagesBy the time he was a sophomore in high school, Dad was back. The two were able to pick up where they left off, but Hamlin admits the lack of a father those 3 ½ years affected him. Deeply. Part of him absolutely understood why Dad sold drugs. As Damar says, he ''was just trying to make a way for us'' and that's a sad, raw reality for many families here.

Mom was 16 and Dad was 17 when they had him. He knows he's lucky to have a Dad at all. Other kids are left stranded for much longer than 3 ½ years.

And, today, Mario Hamlin's life is on track. He has his own trucking company and he and Nina gave birth to a second child, too. Their second son is six years old and playing football for the first time this summer. Mario is his coach and actually calls Damar this night at Elmo's to fill him in on the latest'... he had to make his little bro run laps at practice because all he wanted to do was talk and talk and talk.

Hamlin smiles.

''He's a natural-born leader,'' Hamlin says, ''and just wants to be in control of everything.''

Without question, this little brother is the No. 1 reason Hamlin chose Pitt.

He had 48 scholarship offers. He could've gone just about anywhere, whittling his top five down to Ohio State, Penn State, Notre Dame, Clemson and Pitt.

The chance to affect this one life overrode the prestige of more storied programs.

''I wanted to give him that image growing up,'' Hamlin says, ''that he can look back on and be able to model himself after. That's something I never had. I had a bunch of examples of what not to do. I want to give him a different example. Me growing up, I always questioned if I was doing the right things. Just because I didn't have anybody to look to, to say like, 'This is the right thing to be doing.' '... I didn't have anybody I could look to or lean on. That's why I stayed home at Pitt. I chose Pitt over everybody . Just for that one reason '-- for my brother.''

Of course, on the football field, Hamlin faced a totally new challenge.

He wasn't himself.

His brain would tell him one thing.

Break on the ball here. Close on the running back there.

Yet, his body could not deliver.

That's what was most frustrating. One of the top recruits in the nation suddenly felt completely powerless. Like somebody else. His first year at Pitt was filled with nothing but total frustration. Damar Hamlin had two surgeries done to repair a sports hernia and the surgeries seemed to accomplish nothing.

Every practice was agonizing. He was told the problem was fixed when it most certainly was not.

''Knowing what you're capable of in your head,'' he explains, ''but you can't do it because something in you is not right. Your body is not right. There's something in you that is not solved. '... You want to keep trying but there was just pain. So much pain. That's what the problem was '-- pain . Your brain is saying you want to but your body can't. Something's wrong.''

He was the No. 1-ranked defensive prospect in the entire state. He was destined for stardom, destined to be that beacon of inspiration for everyone in McKees Rocks. And now this? If Hamlin knew precisely what was wrong, fine, he could've mentally handled that. But not this cruel mystery.

The problem was that the school's doctor used surgical ''mesh.'' He says this doctor '-- Brian Zuckerbraun '-- treated his ailment like a regular hernia and not a true sports hernia, the layman's term for a core muscle injury . Which is much different. Which is when the muscle tears off of the bone and must be reattached, not patched together with mesh. Thus, the surgeries didn't solve anything.

''I questioned myself '-- 'Is this for me?''' Hamlin recalls. ''I didn't think I was going to get through it. I went through a lot. But it makes it even worse because it was out of my control. It wasn't my body or anything. They were just doing the wrong shit. So that was tough to go through.''

To get by, to ''stay afloat,'' Hamlin started his own business. He turned a slogan he had used throughout his life '-- ''Chasing Millions'' '-- into a clothing brand . Coming from ''a family of bosses,'' he felt the urge to file for his own LLC. This helped clear his mind, a bit, but Hamlin was still losing his mind on the field. Going through a tough breakup with a girlfriend certainly didn't help matters, either.

Getty ImagesHamlin very rarely shows his emotions, but the one person who did see exactly what he endured then was his roommate, teammate and best friend, Bricen Garner.

Garner remembers Hamlin telling him during games that he was hurting '-- bad '-- but that he wasn't sure what to do. Do I tell the coaches? Do I suck it up? Since Hamlin didn't want to appear weak, he pressed on. Pitt's secondary coach, Archie Collins, remembers Hamlin insisting he needed to grit through the pain, too. (''Him being a tough kid," Collins says, ''he wanted to play through all of that stuff.'') So, through it all, Garner tried to help Hamlin stay sane. Not that it was easy. They shared many long talks at night and this was right when Hamlin got into the Bible.

He'd read a scripture every day and constantly send passages to Garner to read.

''It was a grind,'' Garner says. ''He was pushing himself mentally and physically due to injury. The injury took a toll.''

Football, forever, was Hamlin's escape from reality in McKees Rocks.

Then, football was taken from him.

''I'll never forget that feeling of trying to go out there,'' Hamlin says, ''and practice those two years and not being OK. Shit was stressful as hell. It was shit I can't even describe to you. Football is supposed to be your getaway from everything. That's really what it is for me. Football has been my getaway from my reality '-- losing all my friends and dealing with all that trouble. Coming from where I come from, football's always been my getaway. So, during that time when my getaway isn't my getaway? That was tough.''

When Hamlin was on crutches, Garner carried his books to class for him. All along, he reminded him what the end goal was: ''To show everybody who the real Damar Hamlin is.''

Adds Hamlin: ''Bricen got me through it. He was there through everything.''

Finally, enough was enough. Pitt's medical staff sent him to see the best of the best. On his birthday '-- March 24, 2017 '-- Hamlin underwent a third surgery to fix the core muscle injury. The most renowned core doctor in country, Dr. William Meyers of the Vincera Institute in Philadelphia, finally fixed Hamlin for good. In fact, right on the Vincera website is a ''Why we don't use mesh'' section explaining how a hernia and a sports hernia are different. Clearly, Hamlin isn't the only athlete to live this hell.

After a six-month recovery, Hamlin was himself again.

His seek-and-destroy playing style was a direct reflection of life in McKees Rocks, too.

He'd go on to lead the Panthers in tackles in 2018, rank second in 2019, then first again in 2020.

A fearless hitter, Hamlin finished his collegiate career with six interceptions, 27 pass breakups and 10 tackles for loss. Part of Collins wanted to tone him down'... but he'd usually let him go.

He knew this physicality was rare and, no doubt, a byproduct of his past.

''His mentality is Pittsburgh-tough,'' Collins says. ''He's been playing like that his whole career. Any time you're growing up that way, you have things you remember. You always have experiences that you go through, and a lot of that stuff comes out through football. So, that's how he plays.''

Both Collins and Garner believe Hamlin's football IQ is what'll forever separate him. Just by watching film and seeing how a receiver lines up '-- a foot this way, a foot that way '-- Hamlin seemed to always know which routes were coming.

''His ability to break down the opposing team is crazy,'' says Garner, who's now playing at Western Michigan. ''It's like he's an extra coach in the room.''

Getty ImagesGranted, Hamlin notes that Zuckerbraun never apologized.

Go Long reached out to Zuckerbraun this week but did not hear back.

''It was to a point where I could've filed a malpractice,'' Hamlin says. ''But since I was still playing, I really couldn't. Because since I'm still out here functioning, it's not like it's stopping me.''

As his agent Ira Turner points out, many collegiate athletes don't even know they can request a second opinion when they suffer an injury.

They're trusting what they're told. They go along with it.

Thankfully, Hamlin was able to get clarity through an outside party.

And yet, Hamlin isn't living with any regrets. He knows he wouldn't be the man he is today without all of these experiences. Every tragic death. Every torturous practice. It all molded his perspective on life today, all gave him a real appreciation for life. Hamlin isn't sure he'd be as community-driven as he is today without so much heartbreak.

His purpose in the world is clear: To spread love, to change lives.

''It's all natural. It's all genuine from the heart,'' Hamlin says. ''It's not even stuff I have planned out. It'll be things that just pop up in my head and I'm going to make sure it happens. I feel like that's God talking to me. I really feel like that's what my purpose is. That's why he put me here. That's why he made me make it to the NFL besides everybody that I lost. Everyone. That's why I'm the one. He knows my heart. He knows my intentions. It's all pure. That's really what I stand on.''

So, it's simple: Damar Hamlin must make a difference.

That's what drives him today more than anything '-- the opportunity to inspire anyone he can in McKees Rocks and beyond. Just last week, Hamlin teamed up with fellow Pittsburgh natives in the NFL Miles Sanders, Kenny Robinson, Khaleke Hudson and Ford to host a youth football camp in Pittsburgh, ''PGH2ThePros.'' He knows there are kids buried in poverty back in his neighborhood that need to meet someone like him.

He's been in their shoes.

He's walked their streets.

''I try to be a big voice for them,'' Hamlin says, ''because I know what they've been going through. I know how hard it is. So I'm trying to push them, keep it positive and let them see me. Let them see it's possible '-- 'I come right from where y'all are from.' '... It's a lack of opportunities You're in survival mode. That's what it is '-- it's survival mode. Survival mode turns everybody against each other at the end of the day. That's what I meant by 'sink or swim.'''

More kids will ''swim'' in life if they have a role model. That's why Hamlin aims to one day start a program for kids with incarcerated parents that'll insert a mentor right into their lives. Even with a Dad in prison, Hamlin was able to stay in his own ''bubble.'' Hamlin credits his Mom for making sure he didn't stray '-- changing schools certainly helped. Drugs. Gangs. Guns. None of that was ever too appealing to him.

He always believed he had a ''higher purpose.'' Turner promises this belief is authentic, too.

''With him, it's 100 percent genuine,'' says Turner, of Agency 1 Sports. ''He is passionate about giving back. Seeing those kids and how excited they were about NFL players coming back to really show them, 'Hey, it can be more than what it is right now,' that's something he was missing growing up. In reality, a lot of guys don't make it out where he's from.

''I wasn't familiar with the crime of that area but it's incredible to see someone make it out and want to do something positive.''

Whenever Hamlin is back home, his parents tell him that his presence alone changes the energy in the house. And Garner knows all of those friends who died are on Hamlin's mind all year long. Any time the anniversary for one friend's death comes around, he's seen Hamlin call that friend's family just to chat. Garner believes alllll of the pain Hamlin has endured has only pushed him to be great.

Hamlin doesn't view pain as a bad thing, he adds.

He uses it. Always.

And the best way for Hamlin to bring real change to his neighborhood now, of course, is by busting out in the pros.

Getty Images To sustain success, the Bills absolutely will need a young wave of talent to emerge. Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer form one of the best safety tandems in the NFL right now but '-- like everything around a rich quarterback '-- all good things will come to an end. You absolutely need the Hamlins of the world to break out. It's a matter of when, not if , the Bills give Josh Allen a historic contract. After all, this is a franchise that toiled in quarterback purgatory for two decades.

Right now, the importance of every draft selection magnifies tenfold.

This front office has been dicey so far in the draft, too.

Worst-case scenario? Bad picks compound and you doom your quarterback. Best-case scenario? You hit on sixth-rounders. You find unique players with unique backgrounds like Hamlin and bring the Lombardi Trophy home.

Hamlin is well-aware who the Bills face in Week 1: the Pittsburgh Steelers.

What an opportunity that'll be to inspire. All football-loving kids with TV sets back in McKees Rocks will be tuning in. Further, one of Hamlin's friends from Pittsburgh who is still alive is now a teammate. Cornerback Dane Jackson grew up on a different side of town but Hamlin is positive that Jackson experienced his own struggles.

''That's just how life was,'' Hamlin says. ''Anybody you see from Pittsburgh that's really from the city, to make it out? From the inner city? They're going to have some stories.''

His new city is dying for a championship. Hamlin can feel it already.

He's trying to learn everything that he can about Buffalo, too. An avid bowler, Hamlin has already heard about Strikers Lanes in Orchard Park. He's shocked to hear there are actually beaches in Western New York, too. He'll work Woodlawn Beach into his schedule at some point.

And when this season begins, Hamlin knows the Bills will need him.

With a game on the line. Maybe a season on the line.

At some point, his number will be called.

''I don't know when,'' he says, ''but I will be ready. I will be ready.''

With most all wings in front of him polished off '-- and those fries ancient history '-- Hamlin then heads off into the night determined to change McKees Rocks right here in Buffalo.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:41

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

A New York Times op-ed suggests that everyone should ''mate with shorter people'' in order to save the planet.

Yes, really.

Author Mara Altman, claims that ''When you mate with shorter people, you're potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations.''

''Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet,'' she adds in the piece.

"He's even restricted dairy from his sons' diets and only allows them minimal sugar in an attempt to limit their growth, saving them from the ills of height."Anyone else think things are getting pretty weird around here?https://t.co/mb45hs58E0

'-- Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) January 2, 2023Altman argues that shorter people are ''inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion,'' adding that ''if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).''

Altman continues, ''Short people don't just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth's growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked).''

''Our success as individuals does not depend on beating up other people or animals. Even if it did, in an era of guns and drones, being tall now just makes you a bigger target,'' Altman adds, concluding ''I want my children's children to know the value of short.''

Twitter wasted no time in ceaselessly mocking the piece:

Reporting the @nytimes for this disgusting tallphobia

'-- Dan Andros (@DanAndros) January 2, 2023Short grooming is where we have to draw the line.

'-- BRANDON HARTSELL''Π(@brandonhartsell) January 2, 2023Liberals think making their kids shorter is a win? Um, ok.

'-- Diana D (@Diana53999) January 3, 2023Sing to me, o muse: ''short is better, and it is the future.'' https://t.co/EC8A2dUUbE

'-- John Schwartz (@jswatz) January 2, 2023If one were to look on the bright side, at least Altman's future allows for continued 'mating'.

It's a step down from ''voluntary human extinction'', an idea previously amplified by the Times, so perhaps this is progress.

* * *

Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor '' Turbo Force '' a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:37

Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in New York federal court Tuesday to eight charges related to the collapse of his former crypto exchange FTX and hedge fund Alameda Research.

The onetime crypto billionaire was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud, individual charges of securities fraud and wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to avoid campaign finance regulations.

The trial will begin on Oct. 2.

Bankman-Fried arrived outside the courthouse in a black SUV and was swarmed with cameras from the moment his vehicle arrived. The scrum grew so thick that Bankman-Fried's mother was unable to exit the vehicle, falling onto the wet pavement as cameras scrambled to catch a glimpse of her son.

Former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried (C) arrives to enter a plea before US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in the Manhattan federal court, New York, January 3, 2023.

Ed Jones | AFP | Getty Images

Bankman-Fried was hauled by security through the throng and into the courthouse in a matter of moments, with photographers scrambling to get out of the way.

Earlier in the day, attorneys for Bankman-Fried filed a motion to seal the names of two individuals who had guaranteed Bankman-Fried release on bail with a bond. They claimed that the visibility of the case and the defendant had already posed a risk to Bankman-Fried's parents, and that the guarantors should not be subject to the same scrutiny. Kaplan approved the motion in court.

Federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon told the court that Bankman-Fried had worked with foreign regulators to transfer assets that FTX's U.S. management had been attempting to recover through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process.

Regulators in the Bahamas and FTX's U.S. lawyers have been fighting for weeks in Delaware bankruptcy court over hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. FTX's attorneys insist that Bahamian regulators have illicitly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars, and that Bankman-Fried assisted them.

Bahamian regulators say that local laws give them jurisdiction over those assets, and dispute the validity of the U.S. Chapter 11 proceedings.

Federal prosecutors appear to agree with FTX's U.S. attorneys. Sassoon asked Kaplan to impose a new restriction barring Bankman-Fried from transferring or accessing FTX customer assets. The judge approved that motion as well.

Bankman-Fried returned to the U.S. from the Bahamas on Dec. 21, and the next day was released on a $250 million recognizance bond, secured by his family home in California.

Federal prosecutors also announced the launch of a new task force to recover victim assets as part of an ongoing investigation into Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX.

"The Southern District of New York is working around the clock to respond to the implosion of FTX," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement Tuesday.

The U.S. attorney's office for the SDNY had argued that Bankman-Fried used $8 billion worth of customer assets for extravagant real estate purchases and vanity projects, including stadium naming rights and millions in political donations.

Federal prosecutors built the indictment against Bankman-Fried with unusual speed, packaging together the criminal charges against the 30-year-old in a matter of weeks. The federal charges came alongside complaints from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

They were assisted by two of Bankman-Fried's closest allies, Caroline Ellison, former CEO of his hedge fund Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, who co-founded FTX with Bankman-Fried.

Ellison, 28, and Wang, 29, pleaded guilty on Dec. 21. Their plea deals with prosecutors came after rampant speculation that Ellison, Bankman-Fried's onetime romantic partner, was cooperating with federal probes.

Another former FTX executive, Ryan Salame, apparently first alerted regulators to alleged wrongdoing inside FTX. Salame, a former co-CEO at FTX, flagged "possible mishandling of clients' assets" to Bahamian regulators two days before the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy protection, according to a filing from the Securities Commission of the Bahamas.

Bankman-Fried was accused by federal law enforcement and financial regulators of perpetrating what the SEC called one of the largest and most "brazen" frauds in recent memory. His stunning fall was precipitated by reporting that raised questions on the nature of his hedge fund's balance sheet.

In the weeks since FTX's Nov. 11 Delaware bankruptcy filing, the extent of Bankman-Fried's alleged malfeasance has been exposed. Replacement CEO John J. Ray said there was a "complete failure of corporate control."

Bankman-Fried was indicted in New York federal court on Dec. 9, and was arrested by Bahamas law enforcement at the request of U.S. prosecutors on Dec. 12. Following his indictment, Bankman-Fried's legal team in the Bahamas flip-flopped on whether or not their client would consent to extradition.

WATCH: Sam Bankman-Fried arrives in court

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Archived Version

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:26

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's '-- Congressman-elect Robert Garcia.

One of the newest arrivals in Washington will swear to ''bear true faith and allegiance'' to the US Constitution '-- on one of the rarest and most valuable comic books in the world.

The California Democrat will hold the rare ''Superman'' comic along with a copy of the founding document, a photo of his late parents and his citizenship certificate as he takes the House of Representatives oath, his office told The Post on Tuesday.

''Congressman Robert Garcia will be sworn in on the Constitution,'' Sara Guerrero, a spokeswoman for Garcia, said in a statement. ''With him he will be bringing a photo of his parents who he lost to COVID, his citizenship certificate, and an original Superman No. 1.

''Congressman Garcia learned to read and write in English by reading Superman comics so it's especially exciting he was able to borrow this rare copy from the kind folks at the Library of Congress,'' Guerrero added.

Rep.-elect Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) will hold items he holds dearest to him as he takes the congressional oath. Instagram/robertgarcialbThe pristine comic, published in the summer of 1939, was spotted Tuesday along with other sacred texts that lawmakers will use to pledge allegiance to truth, justice and the American way.

The Library of Congress typically provides historic volumes '-- such as Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Quran or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Bible '-- that lawmakers use during their swearing-in ceremony.

The very first comic featuring Clark Kent as the Man of Steel is considered to be the holy grail for comic book collectors. In April, a copy of Superman No. 1 sold at auction for a record-breaking $5.3 million.

Garcia will hold the rare graphic novel, a copy of the founding document, a photo of his late parents and his citizenship certificate. Twitter/RobertGarciaIn November, Garcia, the former mayor of Long Beach, Calif., tweeted out a photo of the same Superman comic spotted on Tuesday alongside a Spider-Man No. 1 with the caption: ''I'm going to have a hard time deciding which one to check out first.''

The incoming congressman, 45, could barely contain his enthusiasm after his November election victory when he realized his new job would allow him access to the largest comic collection in America.

''Ok y'all I'm freaking out. This is the Congressional members reading room in the Library of Congress. I can pull any comic book from what is the largest public comic collection in the country and read them here. Let's go!''

Garcia learned to read and write from the Superman comic book. Instagram/robertgarcialb Ok y'all I'm freaking out. This is the Congressional members reading room in the Library of Congress. I can pull any comic book from what is the largest public comic collection in the country and read them here. Let's go! pic.twitter.com/SyIrCvHkfT

'-- Robert Garcia (@RobertGarcia) November 14, 2022The California Democrat, who is the first openly gay immigrant in Congress, has called comics both ''an essential part of American fiction'' and ''serious s'--.''

''For all of you upset that I still read comics and suggesting that I need to do more serious reading'.....um'...'....anyone who understands comics knows that comics are an essential part of American fiction. And the lessons learned are invaluable. It's serious s'--,'' he tweeted in November.

Garcia's swearing-in will have to wait another day as the House adjourned Tuesday without selecting a new speaker, which it must do before inaugurating new members or conducting any other business. Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy failed to attain the required 218 votes to become House speaker on the first three ballots cast.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:24

Google is paying $27485 to $29658 consistently for taking a shot at the web from home. I joined this action 2 months back and I have earned $31547 in my first month from this action. I can say my life has improved completely! Take a gander at what I do'.....https://lmy.de/JBXGe

Vote Up -3 Vote Down Reply

Hey ass wipe you claimed Google is hiring, are you a late bloomer and know that Google and other major platforms are infected with FBI, CIA and Department of Justice agents? So you are out advertising for Google in controlled by X government agents? Spare me you circle jerk piece of s***

A delusional national threat.

I am disgusted daily by the corruption lying manipulation of all that surrounds us for the sole purpose of one groups power.. and the despicable thing is that group seems grow larger in membership daily'.....masks pulled and exposures made'... I trust nothing tat is said written or announced.. this is what they have wrought.

How is this not a textbook example of an abuse of power warranting an indictment?

How can Adam be banned from everything?

Life sentence at Guantanamo or'...

Okay, tiny insignificant red diaper baby

Vote Up 11 Vote Down Reply

Schiffhead is a lying manipulator to his core. Bug eyes are prolly from the internal pressure of holding back so much Bull.

Lost all credibility, with hardly any effort at all.

While Republican congressman fart around playing House Speaker tit-for-tat Marxist Democrat scoundrels like Adam Schiff still have a voice while Pelosi slave Cheryl'' you don't have to call me'' Johnson rules the house proceedings!!

Personally, I think Schiff looks better with a mustache.

Vote Up 10 Vote Down Reply

Screw Adam Schifhead.I hope he and PelosI took ALL their covid shots and boosters'...

The worst consequences Adam Schiff will see is being elected to the Senate.

yup'...they are all untouchable members of ruling class'....it's why they are so brazen about their abuses of power'...they know they will never be held accountable

Vote Center Camera Malfunction Generator Team Lead

I hope he sneezes and his eyeballs pop out. What a POS!

Vote Up 11 Vote Down Reply

Vote Center Camera Malfunction Generator Team Lead

ðŸ‘ðŸ'¥ðŸ

Hey, we probably met . Our team was covering windows in the counting rooms to help us conceal the cheat. We have come so far since we figured out the opposition takes the same kinda money we do. Joining the two parties was good for business. See you at the union bbq.

Personally I enjoyed every minute of J6.Didn't end well but it was wonderful to seem them invade their temple of evil like heros.

Paul Sperry was suspended from Twitter. Was that caused by Shiff?

Yet another person, who if died today, the world would be a better place.

Vote Up 13 Vote Down Reply

Shiff or Sperry?

Vote Up -2 Vote Down Reply

Adam Schiff is the real threat to democracy..He should be in jail for treason and corruption for the rest of his horrible life..

Vote Up 32 Vote Down Reply

A government of, by and for the people should not be able to seal their corruption for 50 years!! If the Jan6 committee had important stuff on Trump wouldn't they want everyone to see it?

Vote Up 10 Vote Down Reply

Anyone requesting someone else to be banned..should forfeit their right to write'...ðŸ¤--

Vote Up 16 Vote Down Reply

Last time i checked, government isn't supposed to oppress it's citizens speech. He needs to be punished.

Vote Up 26 Vote Down Reply

Schiff is scum. He's what you wipe off your shoe after stepping in dog poop.

Vote Up 28 Vote Down Reply

Now and again I forget that vengeance is the Lord's and I wish someone would step in and squash that little lying worm schitt

Vote Up 17 Vote Down Reply

Shut Up, Schiff For Brains!

Vote Up 14 Vote Down Reply

Elon should put up a poll about a perma-ban on shifty.

Vote Up 17 Vote Down Reply

Well it works both ways. The republicans should be asking Twitter to ban democrats they don't like too. Nobody gets in trouble for requesting someone get banned on social media. There are no penalties.

We can join Twitter and personally tell him to ESAD

Even for a demoncrap pencil neck seems like an extraordinary fascist POS.

Vote Up 13 Vote Down Reply

I'd be okay with censoring Schiff and denying him membership on any House Committee. He is unworthy of his office.

We should eject and ban him from the House. All the lies he voiced should not have been tolerated. Nancy, Him, Nadler, Schumer and the like have done a lot of damage to this country and its people. Wish the elections could have got them out of there.

Vote Up 33 Vote Down Reply

God, what a piece of shit.

Vote Up 30 Vote Down Reply

LolWould Speaker McCarthy even do anything about it? Prolly a censure'...maybe just go on FNC and have a phony fit and think that was good enough. And he'd be right.

Vote Up 10 Vote Down Reply

Apparently the country's biggest threat are a bunch of peaceful J6 protesters allowed in the front door of Capitol who just walked around inside for about an hour. The biggest facilitator of the entry into the Capitol Ray Epps as seen on video remains at large while the rest rot in a DC gulag.

Vote Up 19 Vote Down Reply

They are and were a threat to the looters in congress.

FILTHY LIBERAL Liddle Adam Schitt should be arrested for violating the 1st amendment rights of American Citizens.

Vote Up 39 Vote Down Reply

Be ready for nobody to care. Nobody has ever faced consequences for anything that could be considered anti-Donald Trump.It's like there are no rules when someone is opposing Trump.

Vote Up 22 Vote Down Reply

The fact this lying piece of garbage still has his job says all we need to know about our useless government. He intentionally misled the American people for over 3 years knowing the Russia allegations against Trump were a lie.

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Ha I've asked the DOJ to put Schiff in prison

Vote Up 17 Vote Down Reply

They know where you live, now retract your request.

So is this the end of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights or is this an end to corruption? I sure wish I knew.

Vote Up 11 Vote Down Reply

Now, now I'm sure we will soon see there were duly considered requests to ban the likes of leftist hack journalists like Maggie Habberman or scumbag muckrakers like David Brock.Any day now I'm sure.

Vote Up 10 Vote Down Reply

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:17

[1/2] Tesla's China chief Tom Zhu speaks at a delivery ceremony for China-made Tesla Model 3 vehicles in the Shanghai Gigafactory of the U.S. electric car maker in Shanghai, China December 30, 2019. REUTERS/Yilei Sun/File Photo

Move makes Zhu effective deputy to MuskInvestors have called for deeper executive team, Musk focusChina-born Zhu holds New Zealand passportZhu joined Tesla in 2014Jan 3 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc's (TSLA.O) China chief Tom Zhu has been promoted to take direct oversight of the electric carmaker's U.S. assembly plants as well as sales operations in North America and Europe, according to an internal posting of reporting lines reviewed by Reuters.

The Tesla posting showed that Zhu's title of vice president for Greater China had not changed and that he also retained his responsibilities as Tesla's most senior executive for sales in the rest of Asia as of Tuesday.

The move makes Zhu the highest-profile executive at Tesla after Chief Executive Elon Musk, with direct oversight for deliveries in all of its major markets and operations of its key production hubs.

The reporting lines for Zhu would keep Tesla's vehicle design and development - both areas where Musk has been heavily involved - separate while creating an apparent deputy to Musk on the more near-term challenges of managing global sales and output.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Reuters reviewed the organizational chart that had been posted internally by Tesla and confirmed the change with two people who had seen it. They asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Zhu and a team of his reports were brought in by Tesla late last year to troubleshoot production issues in the United States, driving an expectation among his colleagues then that he was being groomed for a bigger role.

Zhu's appointment to a global role comes at a time when Musk has been distracted by his acquisition of Twitter and Tesla analysts and investors have urged action that would deepen the senior executive bench and allow him to focus on Tesla.

Under Zhu, Tesla's Shanghai plant rebounded strongly from COVID lockdowns in China.

Tesla said on Monday that it had delivered 405,278 vehicles in the fourth quarter, short of Wall Street estimates, according to data compiled by Refinitiv.

The company had delivered 308,600 vehicles in the same period a year earlier.

The Tesla managers reporting to Zhu include: Jason Shawhan, director of manufacturing at the Gigafactory in Texas; Hrushikesh Sagar, senior director of manufacturing at Tesla's Fremont factory; Joe Ward, vice president in charge of Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Troy Jones, vice president of North America sales and service, according to the Tesla notice on reporting lines reviewed by Reuters.

Tesla country managers in China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand continued to report to Zhu, the notice showed.

Zhu does not have a direct report at Tesla's still-ramping Berlin plant, but a person with knowledge of the matter said responsibility for that operation would come with the reporting line for Amsterdam-based Ward. Ward could not be immediately reached for comment.

Zhu, who was born in China but now holds a New Zealand passport, joined Tesla in 2014. Before that he was a project manager at a company established by his MBA classmates at Duke University, advising Chinese contractors working on infrastructure projects in Africa.

During Shanghai's two-month COVID lockdown, Zhu was among the first batch of employees sleeping in the factory as they sought to keep it running, people who work with him have said.

Zhu, a no-fuss manager who sports a buzz cut, favors Tesla-branded fleece jackets and has lived in a government-subsidized apartment that is a 10-minute drive from the Shanghai Gigafactory. It was not immediately clear whether he would move after his promotion.

He takes charge of Tesla's main production hubs at a time when the company is readying the launch of Cybertruck and a revamped version of its Model 3 sedan. Tesla has also said it is developing a cheaper electric vehicle but has not provided details on that plan.

When Tesla posted a picture on Twitter last month to celebrate its Austin, Texas, plant hitting a production milestone for its Model Y, Zhu was among hundreds of workers smiling on the factory floor.

Allan Wang, who was promoted to vice president in charge of sales in China in July, was listed as the legal representative for the operation in registration papers filed with Chinese regulators in a change by the company last month.

Tesla board member James Murdoch said in November the company had recently identified a potential successor to Musk without naming the person. Murdoch did not respond to a request for comment.

Elecktrek previously reported that Zhu would take responsibility for U.S. sales, delivery and service.

Reporting by Zhang Yan in Shanghai and Hyunjoo Jin in Seoul; Writing by Kevin Krolicki; Editing by Stephen Coates

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:15

Italians are notoriously '' and understandably '' protective of their cuisine, as regular arguments about the correct toppings for pizza or the appropriate pasta to use with a Bolognese ragu will attest.

So it was hardly surprising that, when a Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist weighed in with advice about how to cook pasta perfectly which seemed to upend everything the countries' cooks had been doing in the kitchen for centuries, it caused an almighty row.

Professor Giorgio Parisi '' who won the 2021 physics Nobel for ''the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales'' '' suggested that turning off the heat midway through cooking pasta, then covering with a lid and waiting for the residual heat in the water to finish the job, can help reduce the cost of cooking pasta.

In response, Michelin-starred chef Antonello Colonna claimed this method makes the pasta rubbery, and that it could never be served in a high-quality restaurant such as his own. The controversy quickly spilled over into the media, with several food and science heavyweights contributing.

But for those of us at home trying to save our pennies while cooking pasta, is Parisi's method really cost effective? And does it really taste that bad? Inspired by the thought of saving some money, students Mia and Ross at Nottingham Trent University took to the kitchen to cook pasta in different ways, helping to pick apart the tangled strands of this question.

What happens when you cook pasta?The first thing to ask is what actually happens when we cook pasta. In the case of dried pasta, there are actually two processes which typically take place in parallel. Firstly, water penetrates the pasta, rehydrating and softening it within ten minutes in boiling water. Secondly, the pasta heats up, causing the proteins to expand and become edible.

The standard cooking method plunges 100g pasta into 1 litre of boiling water for ten to 12 minutes, depending on its thickness. The breakdown of energy use is depicted in the graphic below, which can be converted into a total cost using information on the price of energy and the efficiency of the stove.

At today's prices, the cost of cooking dried pasta on a ceramic hob comes in at 12.7p per serving, an induction hob at 10.6p, and a gas hob at 7p. So given the UK's love of pasta, with on average everyone eating one portion per week, we are spending £4,690,000 a week on cooking pasta.

Cooking pasta: the energy lowdown. David Fairhurst, Mia London and Ross Broadhurst/Nottingham Tent University , Author provided It is clear from the graphic that around 60% of the energy is used to keep the water boiling. So anything that can be done to reduce the cooking time would have a significant impact on the overall cost. Parisi's method of turning off the hob midway and allowing the pasta to cook in the residual heat will halve the cooking cost, a saving of around 3p. This method will be even more effective on ceramic hobs as unlike gas and induction, they are slow to cool down.

However, by separating the processes of rehydration and heating, it is possible to reduce the cost even further. Dried pasta can be fully rehydrated by pre-soaking it in cold water for two hours. This is a process that requires no energy at all and saves an additional 3p.

The pasta then needs to be dropped into boiling water to heat it through '' and there are further savings to be made here too. Chefs, bloggers and scientists report that the quality of the cooked pasta is unaffected by significantly reducing the amount of water. We found that halving the water resulted in perfect pasta, but reducing to one-third was unsatisfactory. Starch is released during cooking and if there is insufficient water the concentration builds up, leaving clumps of unevenly cooked pasta '' although regular stirring of the pot may well improve matters.

The graphic shows that the second-largest energy requirement is from bringing the water to the boil. Again, there is another saving to be made here.

It turns out that the granules of protein in pasta dissolve above 80ºC, so there is no need to bring the pan to a ''rolling boil'' at 100ºC, as is often advised. Gentle simmering is sufficient to cook the pasta completely, providing an additional saving of around 0.5p.

We also investigated using a microwave to heat the pre-soaked pasta. Microwaves are very efficient at heating water, but in our experiments this produced the worst pasta of all. Definitely not one to try at home.

How to do it '' and save moneyThe prize for the most efficient method of cooking dried pasta is to pre-soak it in cold water before adding it to a pan of simmering water or sauce for one to two minutes. Keeping a lid on the pan is another simple thing you can do. Adding salt, while making minimal difference to the boiling point, does significantly improve the taste.

We aren't all Michelin-starred chefs or Nobel Prize-winning physicists, but we can all make a difference in the way we cook to reduce energy bills while still producing great-tasting food. Now it's up to you to experiment with these methods until you find a combination that makes your cooking more economical while also saving your pennes.

The author would like to thanks his students Mia London and Ross Broadhurst for their assistance in compiling this research.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:43

When the president of thepoorest,most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invokedin the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we've reached Peak Zelensky.

It's a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media's shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, "Methinks the media doth hype too much."

Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.

Let's remember that before ascending to his country's presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky's greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I'm not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I'm not joking.

Now, he's Europe's George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.

Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn't want you to know.

The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen,recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine's electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.'s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don't. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, "Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo."

Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

That's more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn't even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going to last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.' imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

France's Macron and Germany's Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

Macron suggestedin a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. "We need to prepare what we are ready to do'...to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table."

Scholz was even more specific. In anarticle in Foreign Affairs he declared, "We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe."

This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.'s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia's security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In aWall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, "Our focus is'...to take back territory that's been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th."

Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.' earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken's opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It's the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: "The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis." Ding. "Contestant #3?" "Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?"

A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn't have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin's highest priority and what he asked for--and was denied--in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland'--some of the best in the world'--for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they've constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed'--and, let's be honest, often abused--since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:35

Redactie binnenland 3 januari 2023 18:01 Gewijzigd: 3 januari 2023 18:14

De Erasmusbrug op oudejaarsavond. beeld ANP, TOBIAS KLEUVER Binnenland | oud en nieuwHet openbaar ministerie (OM) zegt dat de teksten die tijdens de jaarwisseling zijn geprojecteerd op de Erasmusbrug in Rotterdam strafbaar zijn. De politie is daarom onder leiding van het OM een strafrechtelijk onderzoek gestart.

Heeft u een fout gezien of wilt u een opmerking maken over dit artikel? Mail naar

redactie@rd.nl.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:31

De bevolking van Amsterdam groeide in 2022 gestaag. Die groei kwam vooral door buitenlandse migranten en de fusie met Weesp, zo blijkt uit cijfers van het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS).

Jesper Roele 4 januari 2023 , 00:01 Amsterdam telde ongeveer 921.000 inwoners richting het eind van 2022. Een jaar eerder waren dat er nog bijna 883.000, maar toen werden de ongeveer 20.000 inwoners van Weesp nog niet meegeteld.

De Amsterdammers die vertrekken, lijken uit te wijken naar gemeenten buiten de Randstad. Ook Almere is in trek: die stad behoort tot de snelle groeiers in Nederland, hoofdzakelijk door binnenlandse verhuizingen en geboorten. Flevoland is ook de provincie met de sterkste bevolkingsgroei.

Amsterdam groeit vooral door migranten die naar de stad komen. Er migreerden ongeveer 28.500 mensen naar de stad, van wie 5000 Oekra¯ners die er tijdelijk onderdak vonden. Daartegenover staat het vertrek van bijna 15.000 inwoners.

In bijna alle Nederlandse gemeenten groeide de bevolking, onder andere door de komst van Oekra¯ners. In ongeveer de helft van de Nederlandse gemeenten wonen meer dan vijf Oekra¯ense migranten per duizend inwoners, in Amsterdam staat de teller op 5,8.

Verwachting Het CBS en het Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL) spraken in juli al de verwachting uit dat Amsterdam waarschijnlijk in 2030 de grens van (C)(C)n miljoen inwoners zal passeren. Eerder verwachtten de instanties nog dat dat pas in 2035 zou gebeuren. Dat Weesp met ruim 20.000 inwoners met Amsterdam zou fuseren, werd toen niet in die cijfers meegenomen.

De verwachtingen zijn wel met enige onzekerheid omgeven. Economische omstandigheden, klimaatverandering en gewijzigde woonwensen kunnen nog tot veranderingen leiden, al is het wel 'vrij zeker' dat Amsterdam de komende decennia zal blijven groeien.

Lees ook

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:16

¬'...¯¸ Left Arrow*¯¸Æ'£ Asterisk­ StarOption SlidersÅ''°¯¸ MailExit Via BFI / YouTube Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, now in their seventies, are taking the studio to court for alleged abuse they experienced while making the 1968 film Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were just teenagers (15 and 16 respectively) when they starred in an acclaimed adaptation of Romeo and Juliet released in 1968 . While the film was nominated for four Academy Awards and performed well commercially, it drew criticism at the time for a bedroom scene in which the two actors performed while partially nude. Now in their seventies, the pair have filed a lawsuit against Paramount, accusing the studio of sexually exploiting them and distributing nude images of children.

According to their claim, the actors were assured prior to filming that there would be no nudity in the film and that they would be wearing flesh-coloured underwear during the bedroom scene. But during the shoot, director Franco Zeffirelli '' who died in 2019 '' allegedly changed his mind and pressured them into acting nude, saying that if they refused then ''the picture would fail''. Even after this point, the actors allege that they were falsely assured that no nude footage would be used in the film, and misled as to where the camera would be positioned.

According to the complaint, the actors have suffered years of mental anguish as a result of this deception, as well as losing out on career opportunities following the release of the film. They are reportedly seeking damages of up to $500 million. Their attorney, Solomon Gresen, said, ''Nude images of minors are unlawful and shouldn't be exhibited. These were very young naive children in the 60s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them. All of a sudden they were famous at a level they never expected, and in addition they were violated in a way they didn't know how to deal with.''

The suit came about in part because the state of California suspended the statute of limitations (the period of time for which a crime can be prosecuted) for older claims of child sexual abuse, which led to a flurry of claims against the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts of America, and a number of other institutions.

One of the depressing aspects of this case is that it appears to show that some things in Hollywood never changed. While norms and laws around publishing nude images of minors may have gotten stricter, it's too common to hear young actors, such as several members of the cast of Euphoria, report feeling exploited on set and pressured into doing things they didn't feel comfortable with. The entertainment industry still has a long way to go, but addressing this historical wrong might be another small step in the right direction.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:11

https://sputniknews.com/20230104/polands-wwii-reparations-demands-of-germany-constitute-extortion-at-uss-behest-analyst-suggests-1106036031.html

Poland's WWII Reparations Demands of Germany Constitute 'Extortion' at US's Behest, Analyst Suggests

Poland's WWII Reparations Demands of Germany Constitute 'Extortion' at US's Behest, Analyst Suggests

The German Foreign Ministry delivered a note to its Polish counterparts on Tuesday reiterating that as far as Berlin is concerned, the issue of World War II reparations ''remains closed''. Warsaw wants $1.3 trillion.

2023-01-04T12:42+0000

2023-01-04T12:42+0000

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Poland was almost certainly egged on by its overseas allies in Washington and London to start a diplomatic storm in a teacup with its German neighbor by demanding new World War II reparations, a former US Army psychological warfare operations officer-turned whistleblower has told Sputnik.''There seems to be a concerted effort to weaken Germany out of a fear of Germany and Russia becoming closer allies. This originates from the United States and the United Kingdom,'' Scott Bennett, a veteran of the 11th Psychological Operations Battalion of the US Army, and former State Department counterterrorism analyst, explained.Part of this effort included the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which Warsaw may have had a hand in, according to the observer. In that sense, he suggested, the push for reparations ''could be a smokescreen to try and keep Germany from exposing Poland's role.''Citing the long-term US objective of ''enslaving Europe'' politically and economically, Bennett said it remains to be seen whether Berlin will ''allow itself to be enslaved'' or rediscover its national pride and ''reject the slavery the US is attempting to burden them with, and become their own masters of their own destiny in the future.''Reparations SpatPolish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk slammed Germany over its alleged imperialism on Tuesday after Berlin formally rejected any new negotiations on the WWII reparations issue.''[Germany's] response is disrespectful toward the Polish state and the Polish people. Poland's losses [in WWII] were unimaginable, the Germans received our report on this matter,'' Mularczyk said, speaking to Polish media. The diplomat suggested that Berlin's ''one sentence'' note on the inadmissibility of reparations talks was not legally argued, and expressed annoyance over Germany shutting down the talks while paying Namibia for the colonial legacy and even discussing returning ancient museum artefacts to Egypt.''Germany is not pursuing a friendly policy toward Poland. They want to build their sphere of influence here and treat Poland as a vassal,'' Mularczyk said. ''We will continue our activities in the matter of compensation consistently and intensively.'' The official added that Poland would be taking its case to the United Nations to try to force the creation of a ''platform for dialog.''In September, on the 83rd anniversary of the 1939 Nazi German invasion of Poland, Warsaw officially announced plans to demand 6.2 trillion zlotys (about $1.3 trillion) from Germany for damage to the country done during WWII. A formal diplomatic note was delivered to Berlin in October, but balked at by German authorities, who pointed out that Poland waived the right to further reparations in a diplomatic agreement signed in 1953.Poland's ruling Law and Justice authorities dismissed the terms of the 1953 waiver, claiming the country's post-war communist government was pressured into abandoning the reparations demands by Moscow. The government left out the part about Moscow's role in assuring Poland's current western borders, which include over 100,000 square km of former eastern German lands, including the coal mines of Silesia, agricultural lands a Baltic Sea coast.German Chancellor Olaf Scholz indirectly waded into the WWII legacy debate with Poland in September, saying he ''would not like to see some people rummage through history books to introduce revisionist border changes.'' Polish officials and media interpreted the comments as a threat, with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki blasting Scholz as a ''devil [who] has dressed himself in vestments and is ringing for Mass.''Warsaw has also threatened to demand WWII reparations from Russia. Moscow dismissed the idea as an ''immoral'' ''political fantasy,'' pointing out that Poland as a state and the Polish people would not exist were it not for the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in WWII, and the 600,000+ Red Army soldiers and tens of thousands of Polish People's Army troops who died kicking the Germans out of Poland.Over 5.8 million Poles, including up to three million Polish Jews, died during World War II, with the country's losses constituting some of highest globally after China and the Soviet Union. In percentage terms, Poland's losses of 17 percent were the second heaviest after Belarus, which lost 25 percent of its population.

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poland, germany, world war ii, second world war, reparations, money, demands

poland, germany, world war ii, second world war, reparations, money, demands

The German Foreign Ministry delivered a note to its Polish counterparts on Tuesday reiterating that as far as Berlin is concerned, the issue of World War II reparations ''remains closed''. Warsaw slapped Germany with a $1.3 trillion WWII reparations bill in September, and has threatened to demand money from Russia, one of its liberators, as well.

Poland was almost certainly egged on by its overseas allies in Washington and London to start a diplomatic storm in a teacup with its German neighbor by demanding new World War II reparations, a former US Army psychological warfare operations

officer-turned whistleblower has told Sputnik.

''There seems to be a concerted effort to weaken Germany out of a fear of Germany and Russia becoming closer allies. This originates from the United States and the United Kingdom,'' Scott Bennett, a veteran of the 11th Psychological Operations Battalion of the US Army, and former State Department counterterrorism analyst, explained.

''The United States and the United Kingdom represent the Atlanticist mindset while Germany is a continental power which is always neutral or potentially 'in play'. The United States and the United Kingdom traditionally fear Germany moving closer to Russia and therefore actively engage in subterfuge, sabotage, coercion and other blackmail operations to control the German political leadership and indeed force them to betray the German people,'' Bennett said.

Part of this effort included the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which Warsaw may have had a hand in, according to the observer. In that sense, he suggested, the push for reparations ''could be a smokescreen to try and keep Germany from exposing Poland's role.''

In addition, part of the US strategy to weaken Germany economically ''is being applied through Poland by exerting political, diplomatic and economic extortion operations against Germany. No doubt Poland is receiving orders from the United States to make these demands of Germany in order to then offer a compromise or backroom deal of appeasement. Such a secret deal might be that Poland will drop these reparation demands in exchange for Germany following further US dictates toward Russia and Ukraine. This is part of the long-term US psychological and diplomatic warfare strategy,'' Bennett said.

Citing the long-term US objective of ''enslaving Europe'' politically and economically, Bennett said it remains to be seen whether Berlin will ''allow itself to be enslaved'' or rediscover its national pride and ''reject the slavery the US is attempting to burden them with, and become their own masters of their own destiny in the future.''

28 November 2022, 16:47 GMT

Reparations Spat

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk

slammed Germany over its alleged imperialism on Tuesday after Berlin formally rejected any new negotiations on the WWII reparations issue.

''[Germany's] response is disrespectful toward the Polish state and the Polish people. Poland's losses [in WWII] were unimaginable, the Germans received our report on this matter,'' Mularczyk

said, speaking to Polish media. The diplomat suggested that Berlin's ''one sentence'' note on the inadmissibility of reparations talks was not legally argued, and expressed annoyance over Germany shutting down the talks while paying Namibia for the colonial legacy and even discussing returning ancient museum artefacts to Egypt.

''Germany is not pursuing a friendly policy toward Poland. They want to build their sphere of influence here and treat Poland as a vassal,'' Mularczyk

said. ''We will continue our activities in the matter of compensation consistently and intensively.'' The official added that Poland would be taking its case to the United Nations to try to force the creation of a ''platform for dialog.''

In September, on the 83rd anniversary of the 1939 Nazi German invasion of Poland, Warsaw

officially announced plans to demand 6.2 trillion zlotys (about $1.3 trillion) from Germany for damage to the country done during WWII. A formal diplomatic note was delivered to Berlin in October, but

balked at by German authorities, who pointed out that Poland waived the right to further reparations in a diplomatic agreement signed in 1953.

Poland's ruling Law and Justice authorities dismissed the terms of the 1953 waiver, claiming the country's post-war communist government was pressured into abandoning the reparations demands by Moscow. The government left out the part about Moscow's role in assuring Poland's current western borders, which include over 100,000 square km of former eastern German lands, including the coal mines of Silesia, agricultural lands a Baltic Sea coast.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz indirectly waded into the WWII legacy debate with Poland in September, saying he ''would not like to see some people rummage through history books to introduce revisionist border changes.'' Polish officials and media interpreted the comments as a threat, with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki blasting Scholz as a ''devil [who] has dressed himself in vestments and is ringing for Mass.''

16 September 2022, 12:55 GMT

Warsaw has also threatened to demand WWII reparations from Russia. Moscow dismissed the idea as an

''immoral'' ''political fantasy,'' pointing out that Poland as a state and the Polish people would not exist were it not for the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in WWII, and the 600,000+ Red Army soldiers and tens of thousands of Polish People's Army troops who died kicking the Germans out of Poland.

Over 5.8 million Poles, including up to three million Polish Jews, died during World War II, with the country's losses constituting some of highest globally after China and the Soviet Union. In percentage terms, Poland's losses of 17 percent were the second heaviest after Belarus, which lost 25 percent of its population.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:11

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Info at: www.armypsyop.wix.com/shellgame

Scott Bennett is a U.S. Army Special Operations Officer (11th Psychological Operations Battalion, Civil Affairs-Psychological Operations Command), and a global psychological warfare-counterterrorism analyst, formerly with defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He received a Direct Commission as an Officer, held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) security clearance, and worked in the highest levels of international counterterrorism in Washington DC and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. He has developed and managed psychological warfare theories, products, and operations for U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Central Command, the State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and other government agencies.

He served in the G.W. Bush Administration from 2003 to 2008, and was a Social Science Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His writings and lectures seek to enhance global awareness and understanding of modern psychological warfare, the international military-intelligence community, and global surveillance operations being artificially generated under the spectre of ''National Security''. He has written extensively on the intelligence community's surveillance activities addressed by Edward Snowden's National Security Agency-Central Intelligence Agency materials; and since 2010 has filed numerous military-government whistle-blowing reports with Congressional Committees, including: the Intelligence, the Armed Services, the Government Oversight and Reform, the Homeland Security, the Judiciary, the Foreign Affairs, the Banking, and the Terrorism Committees. He has communicated with over a hundred Federal Representatives, Senators, senior military officers and Pentagon officials, and journalists about the scandalous abuses of power and deception being employed against the American people by its own military-intelligence community; and filed legal action against Booz Allen Hamilton and the Department of Defense for their involvement in secret Swiss Bank Terrorist Finance Operations, which he uncovered with the help of Union Bank of Switzerland whistleblower, Brad Birkenfeld.

His educational background includes a Bachelor of Science in Advertising and Spanish Minor from San Jose State University in California, a Master of Arts in International Business and Public Policy from George Mason University in Virginia, and a Ph.D. (ABD) in Political Theory from the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. He currently resides in California.

NOTE: For any military-CIA assassins (foreign and domestic) contemplating their assignment to murder me, as was done to journalist Michael Hastings after he and Michael Isikoff (NBC News) began investigating my reports and materials in relation to the Edward Snowden and Brad Birkenfeld connections (CIA-NSA-Swiss Banks-Booz Allen Hamilton-Terrorist Finance), first consider this, as it will determine your eternal destiny:

I, Scott Bennett, have worn the United States military uniform proudly to defend my family, friends, and neighbors; and my country's sacred honor and Constitution of liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness....I have fought on your behalf, written whistleblowing reports to Congress to save the lives of my military brethren. I am a staunch patriot. I am also a man of deep faith, and fearlessly believe, "No weapon formed against you shall prosper", saith the Lord.

I am also a sharpshooter , explosives expert, and excellent hand-to-hand combat and knifefighter.

WARNING: In the event of my untimely death, additional documents and materials will be immediately released which expose all previously undisclosed persons, networks, operations, and financial accounts relating to illegal foreign and domestic terrorism activities. All materials have been safely uploaded to legal counsel. Congress and Military authorities have been notified of this.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:04

Jamie Lee Curtis has joined the chorus of celebrities who are weighing in on the so-called ''nepo baby'' debate.

Curtis, the daughter of actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, made her professional acting debut at age 19 in a 1977 episode of the TV series Quincy, M.E.

Earlier this week, New York magazine published a feature titled ''The Year of the Nepo Baby'' that detailed the lineages of numerous members of young Hollywood who have famous parents and/or other relatives working in the entertainment industry. The story's various charts '-- including this one, which featured Curtis and other celebrities '-- explored how nepotism has given them some industry advantage or played a part in each of their successes.

Curtis on Friday weighed in with a post on Instagram, noting that she's been acting since age 19 (she's now 64), starting with that episode of Quincy, so that makes her an ''OG Nepo Baby.''

''I've never understood, nor will I, what qualities got me hired that day, but since my first two lines on Quincy as a contract player at Universal Studios to this last spectacular creative year some 44 years later, there's not a day in my professional life that goes by without my being reminded that I am the daughter of movie stars,'' she wrote. ''The current conversation about nepo babies is just designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt.''

In her post, which featured a photo of her as a toddler along with her family, the Halloween actress also noted that she doesn't try to ''pretend there aren't any'' advantages to having had A-list parents but challenged the generalization that she or others born into famous families don't necessarily have talent.

''For the record I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don't pretend there aren't any, that try to tell me that I have no value on my own,'' she wrote. ''It's curious how we immediately make assumptions and snide remarks that someone related to someone else who is famous in their field for their art, would somehow have no talent whatsoever. I have come to learn that is simply not true. I have suited up and shown up for all different kinds of work with thousands of thousands of people and every day I've tried to bring integrity and professionalism and love and community and art to my work. I am not alone. There are many of us. Dedicated to our craft. Proud of our lineage. Strong in our belief in our right to exist.''

She ended her post by quoting from the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once, an awards contender in which she stars opposite Michelle Yeoh.

''So, in these difficult days of so much rage in the world can we just try to find that quiet voice that the brilliant movie, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE reminds us '...

''NOTE TO SELF:

''BE KIND,

''BE KIND;

''BE KIND:''

Curtis is the latest to weigh in after the New York article went viral. Others include O'Shea Jackson Jr., the son of rapper, actor and filmmaker Ice Cube; Lily Allen, daughter of actor Keith Allen and movie producer Alison Owen; and Lottie Moss, half-sister of Kate Moss.

See Curtis' full post below.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:02

One of Nielsen's critical measurement projects, Nielsen One Ads, officially has a launch date.

The company says that the cross-platform measurement product will hit the market on Jan. 11, well ahead of the 2023 upfront negotiations, and fresh off the launch of new streaming tiers from Netflix and Disney+.

Nielsen One Ads has been anticipated by marketers and media buyers, promising deduplicated measurement across linear TV, connected TV devices (i.e. Roku), mobile devices (like smartphones), and desktop computers.

Importantly, it will also offer measurement of content and ads at the second-by-second level, as opposed to the minute-by-minute level of the current systems. ''This will provide the industry with greater comparably across television and digital platforms,'' Nielsen says.

''Ultimately, Nielsen One will allow advertisers and publishers to plan and transact using a single metric across linear and digital that is reliable, independent and standardized across the industry,'' the company added.

The product will have an ''always on'' digital dashboard, rather than forcing clients to wait for a data drop, though at launch it will only be available in the U.S. The company says that later this year it will add advanced audience data (think consumers that just bought a house, or are in the market for a car) and outcome measurement (i.e. if. consumer sees an ad and makes a purchase).

The launch is a long time coming, with both publishers like TV networks and streaming services and media buyers and advertisers clamoring for a more advanced measurement system to eventually replace the outdated Nielsen currency that currently underpins the TV advertising market.

By now every major media company has struck deals with other measurement firms (like VideoAmp, EDO, Comscore, and iSpot) to supplement Nielsen's data, and that is unlikely to change even with Nielsen's new suite of products, as companies grapple with a rapidly-changing ad and consumer environment.

''Audiences today control what they watch, when they watch, and how they watch it. As the media landscape becomes more varied and complicated, Nielsen is committed to working with the industry to bring clarity and simplicity to media buying and selling through Nielsen One,'' said Karthik Rao, CEO of audience measurement for Nielsen. ''By combining the scale of big data and granular insights from our people-based panel, Nielsen ONE provides comprehensive, representative measurement of ads and content for our clients to transact with confidence.''

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Archived Version

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 04:26

The claim: The 'Star of Bethlehem' will shine for the first time since 1226 on Dec. 21 In Christian tradition, the "Star of Bethlehem" guided wise men to the site of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem more than two millennia ago. Now, viral social media posts are claiming stargazers can see the same formation in 2022 for the first time in nearly 800 years.

''Mark your calendar for December 21st for 45 minutes after sunset," reads the Dec. 11 Facebook post (direct link, archived link) that was shared more than 6,000 times in less than one week. "The Star of Bethlehem will shine for the first time since 1226.''

Other versions of the claim garnered thousands of additional shares on the social media platform.

Follow us on Facebook!Like our page to get updates throughout the day on our latest debunks

But the post is off by two years. It was 2020 when Jupiter and Saturn aligned to form what some referred to as the "Star of Bethlehem," and it won't happen again until 2040. Experts told USA TODAY Mars, Jupiter and Venus '' another lineup that's been suggested as the "Star of Bethlehem" '' will not be in conjunction on Dec. 21.

USA TODAY reached out to users who shared the claim for comment.

'Nothing out of the ordinary' expected in sky on Dec. 21 There isn't a scientific consensus on what the "Star of Bethlehem" was, but experts told USA TODAY under no definition would it be making an appearance in 2022.

Thomas Fleming, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said some astronomers believe the "Star of Bethlehem" was a conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Venus. Conjunctions describe two or more astronomical objects that appear to be close to each other in the sky.

The planets will be visible on Dec. 21, but Fleming said they'll be ''nowhere near'' each other so as to create a festive formation. He said the bright light some stargazers may see is Venus, which recently re-emerged in the evening sky.

It will make for a scenic view, but not a rare one.

''What you will see Wednesday night after sunset is the same thing you'll see Tuesday night after sunset, it's the same thing you'll see tonight,'' Fleming said. ''There's nothing out of the ordinary about this.''

The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn has also been suggested as a possible explanation for the "Star of Bethlehem", according to Johns Hopkins University professor Kevin Lewis.

More: Closest known black hole to Earth, sitting 1,600 light-years away, found by astronomers

Such an event happens roughly every 20 years and last occurred with an "unusually close alignment" in 2020, he said. At the time, Astronomy Magazine reported it was the closest observable conjunction of the planets since 1226.

Lewis said the next conjunction of the planets won't be until 2040, and Forbes reported Jupiter and Saturn won't get as close as they were in 2020 until 2080.

Our rating: FalseBased on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that the ''Star of Bethlehem'' will shine for the first time since 1226 on Dec. 21. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 2020 marked the closest observable alignment of the planets since 1226, but the formation won't happen again until 2040. Mars, Jupiter and Venus, another suggested theory for the "Star of Bethlehem," will not be in conjunction on Dec. 21, according to experts.

Our fact-check sources:Kevin Lewis, Dec. 16, Email to USA TODAY Thomas Fleming, Dec. 12, Phone call with USA TODAY Astronomy, Dec. 18, 2020, The Star of Bethlehem: Can science explain what it really was?Astronomy, Dec. 7, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will form rare "Christmas Star" on winter solsticeForbes, Nov. 20, 2020, A Spectacularly Rare 'Christmas Star' Is Coming In December As Two Worlds Align After SunsetThank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:42

via insights.braiins.comLast week we discussed how the arctic blast was materially affecting bitcoin's hashrate as on-grid miners engaged in demand response programs powered down their ASICs so that electricity could be delivered to residential consumers as demand rose significantly in a short period of time. Well, a week has come and gone, temperatures across the US rose back to normal levels, miners turned back on, and the difficulty adjusted downwards by 3.6%.

As you can see from the chart above, at the peak of the arctic blast so much hashrate came off the network that the difficulty adjustment that occurred yesterday was estimated to be -11.6%. Today marks the 14th anniversary of the network's genesis block and it seems fitting that we've been gifted an opportunity to highlight how dynamic the bitcoin network truly is. The fact that yesterday's difficulty adjustment wound up being -3.6% is a testament to the creativity of Satoshi's design of the bitcoin network, particularly Proof of Work conensus with a difficulty adjustment.

When miners began shutting off en masse over the Christmas weekend hashrate temporarily fell as low as ~165 EH/s. For context, the average hashrate over the last 30 days is ~250 EH/s. The only effect this decline in hashrate had on the network is that blocks came in a bit slower than the 10-minute target hardcoded into the protocol. Users were still able to conduct transactions in a peer-to-peer fashion, they just had to wait a little bit longer for those transactions to be confirmed in a block. There was no central authority dictating the slow down of block production. The network was just reacting dynamically to raw inputs on the fly.

As temparatures rose, demand for electricity fell, and the demand response services of miners across the US was no longer needed they turned their ASICs back on and block production began coming in closer to the ten-minute target. When difficulty epoch 381 reached its 2,016th block the overall effect demand response proved to have on block production was relatively minimal. If the arctic blast lasted longer and miners were forced to remain turned off because of sustained high demand from the grid, the difficulty would have had a more pronounced downward adjustment and the network would continue to operate withtout any problems. This process is truly awe inspiring.

Another interesting thing to note is that bitcoin is uniquely suited for this type of on-grid demand response. Since bitcoin is a distributed network, miners are free to join or leave the network whenever they see fit, and the protocol was designed with this freedom of movement in mind temporary hashrate increases or declines do not materially affect the network. Other types of "data centers" aren't able to participate in these demand response programs because if they were forced to turn down their servers it would completely disrupt their business operations. Think Amazon, Google or Microsoft server farms. Each server facilitates a particular process for their customers. If they were forced to shut down specific servers connected to a particular grid so that electricity could be delivered to residential consumers it would mean the websites, applications, or monitoring systems their customers are running on those servers would go down. This is an untenable proposition for those cloud providers. They need 100% uptime.

Since the bitcoin network is a distributed system and hashrate is distributed geographically across the world it can provide grids with what is known as "interruptible load". Miners can turn off and on without causing the bitcoin network to go down or preventing particular users from accessing the network. I don't know if Satoshi understood the impact his design would have on energy systems, but what he launched has provided humanity with an incredible mechanism to build more stable and robust grid systems. Most of the world doesn't understand this yet but overtime the benefit will be undeniable.

With that being said, there is a right and wrong way to build bitcoin-enhanced grids. As we mentioned last week, bitcoin miners acting as interruptible load providers works best when grids have reliable base loads supported by reliable energy sources like nuclear, coal, and natural gas. In an ideal world, grid capacity is built out to a point that grid customers never have to worry about losing electricity when extreme weather events happen. The capacity will far exceed what will ever be needed, bitcoin miners will consume the excess capacity profitably, and in the event of an extreme weather event miners will shut down to ensure residential demand is met and make some money for doing so.

Bitcoin is beautiful.

Clip of the day...

Sjors Provoost explains why Senator Warren's proposed Digital Asset bill is nonsensical. Subscribe to the TFTC Clips channel to get high-signal-bite-sized pieces of content.

Final thought...

Day two of writing in front of the fire. I will own a house with multiple wood fireplaces by 2025.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:01

Damar Hamlin may have suffered a one-in-200million heart injury that shut off blood to his brain and triggered a cardiac arrest, doctors say.

The Buffalo Bills safety - a position described as the 'last line of defense' - collapsed during Monday night's game against the Cincinnati Bengals and was administered CPR on the field.

This morning, the Bills revealed Hamlin, 24, had suffered a cardiac arrest and that his heartbeat was restored on the field. He has been taken to hospital, where he remains in a critical condition.

Doctors believe the blow to the star's chest threw his heart's pumping mechanism out of rhythm, disrupting blood flow around his body and shutting off his brain.

But to make matters worse, experts speculate this may have happened during a very vulnerable moment in the heart's electrical cycle, triggering a condition called 'commotio cordis'.

The rare injury occurs when something makes contact with the chest wall precisely when the heart's lower chambers start to refill with blood. The impact then causes a rapid and disorganized contraction of the heart's lower chambers, preventing the heart from getting blood to the rest of the body. The window for this to happen is just 20 milliseconds, making commotio cordis incredibly rare. Just 30 people a year suffer the injury worldwide and only around 200 cases have been reported among Americans. It has previously been noted in young baseball or hockey players who receive a blow from a baseball or hockey puck to the center of their chests

Hamlin collapses, falling backwards and laying motionless on the floor

This occurs when something makes contact with the chest wall precisely when the heart's lower chambers start to refill with blood. The impact then causes a rapid and disorganized contraction of the heart's lower chambers, preventing the heart from getting blood to the rest of the body.

The window for this to happen is just 20 milliseconds, making commotio cordis incredibly rare. Just 30 people a year suffer the injury worldwide and only around 200 cases have been reported among Americans. It has previously been noted in young baseball or hockey players who receive a blow from a baseball or hockey puck to the center of their chests.

The critical question, doctors say, is how long Hamlin's brain went without the oxygen carried to organs by blood flow.

Brain tissue dies rapidly when deprived of oxygen, which could leave permanent injuries. But there is hope for Hamlin because he was given treatment so quickly.

About nine in 10 people who have cardiac arrest outside the hospital die, but rapid CPR can improve those odds, doubling or even tripling a person's chance of survival if it is performed in the first few minutes of cardiac arrest.

Medics say that survival rates drop to three percent when resuscitation is delayed beyond three minutes.

Dr Deepak Bhatt, a top cardiologist at Mount Sinai Heart in New York City, told DailyMail.com that Hamlin had likely suffered from heart condition commotio cordis at the game last night

Dr Deepak Bhatt, a top cardiologist at Mount Sinai Heart in New York City, told DailyMail.com that Damar Hamlin had likely suffered commotio cordis.

'The first thought that occurred to me was that it was something called commotio cordis,' he said.

'It really refers to the classic situation of injury to the chest.

'This is usually in baseball when someone hits a line into the pitcher's chest and that sudden impact can trigger abnormal heart rhythms.

'The only way to come out of that is to deliver an electric shock and perform CPR.'

Asked why the player was able to stand up moments afterwards, he said: 'It could be the case that for a couple of seconds there was enough blood getting to the brain.

'When the heart stops beating we lose consciousness within a matter of seconds. Those may have been the few seconds before the brain stopped getting enough blood.'

Dr Bhatt said it would be 24 to 48 hours before doctors would be able to give an accurate prognosis.

'People may be out cold for that long, and the heart and brain function can take a good 24 to 48 hours to recover,' he said.

In the best-case scenario, he said that patients may be in the hospital for at least a week to ten days. In worse cases, it could be longer.

Asked whether the player could ever return to football, Dr Bhatt did not rule it out but said this was a 'much, much more complex question'.

'Assuming minimal damage to the player, [doctors] would want to do a lot of testing,' he said.

Dr Bernard Ashby (left), a vascular cardiologist, and Dr Chris Haddock, a primary care physician in Georgia, both agreed with the diagnosis

Dr Anthony Cordillo, an emergency medicine expert in Los Angeles, California, said that the player may have suffered a ventricular arrthymia

WHAT IS COMMOTIO CORDIS?Commotio cordis is when a sudden blunt impact to the chest causes sudden death without damage to the ribs, sternum or heart and without underlying cardiac problems.

More than 224 cases have been reported to the US Commotio Cordis Registry since 1995, and the survival rate is 24 per cent.

Commotio Cordis is a primary arrhythmic event that occurs when the energy generated by a blow is confined to a small area of the heart -called the precordium - generally over the left ventricle.

It profoundly alters the electrical stability of the myocardium, the muscular wall of the heart, which contracts and relaxes in the process of pumping blood.

This results in ventricular fibrillation, the most serious cardiac rhythm disturbance whereby the heart quivers instead of beats, disrupting the functioning of blood pumping.

Sometimes triggered by a heart attack, ventricular fibrillation causes blood pressure to drop, cutting off blood supply to the vital organs such as the brain.

Commotio cordis events have most happened in sports, and so the phenomenon has become more well known to the sports communities and physicians.

Commotio cordis primarily affects young men, with the mean age of 15 years.

It is thought that the stiffening of the chest wall contributes to the decrease in incidence in older individuals, and possibly because not many older people play ball related sports.

'This would include some sort of a stress test on a treadmill, with exercise under monitoring circumstances to make sure the same thing does not happen again.

'It would not be unexpected to also do a stress test pushing them to the limits and just making sure nothing bad happens.'

Other doctors also suggested that the player had suffered from commotio cordis, including Dr Bernard Ashby, a vascular cardiologist in Florida, and Dr Chris Haddock, a primary care physician in Georgia.

But doctors cannot yet rule out an undetected heart condition. The collision may also have caused a bulge in a blood vessel '-- known as an aneurysm '-- to burst.

Young males, aged between four and 18 years, are more vulnerable to commotio cordis because their chest walls are more flexible and offer less protection to the heart, doctors say.

This risk drops, however, as people get older as the chest wall hardens and adults take part in sports less often.

Commotio cordis may not cause direct damage to the heart because its tissue has not been torn.

But the disruption in blood supply to organs such as the brain can lead to lasting damage because they have been deprived of oxygen.

Medics treating Hamlin are yet to give a formal diagnosis of his condition.

Hamlin's collapse has echoes of the injury suffered by Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen at the Euro 2020 competition.

The player suddenly collapsed on the pitch when he went to kick the football and was rushed to hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a cardiac arrest.

This is when the heart stops beating altogether due to problem with the organ's electrical signals, which prevents blood from pumping around the body.

It is still unclear exactly what happened to Eriksen, but the player was fitted with an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) device '-- which can reset the heart after a cardiac arrest.

He eventually had to leave his team Inter Milan, but was able to return to the pitch eight months after the injury '-- playing first for Brentford and then Manchester United.

Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen collapsed on the pitch last year. Doctors later diagnosed him with a cardiac arrest

Medics emphasized to DailyMail.com that commotio cordis is an extremely rare condition.

Dr Larry Phillips, a cardiologist at NYU Langone, told DailyMail.com 'there is no good registry that keeps track of all the cases,' which makes it difficult to work out exactly how many people are affected.

Dr Ashby, an Associate Professor at Florida International University, said on Twitter: 'The video of Damar Hamlin from a cardiologist's perspective resembled commotio cordis '-- a phenomenon that occurs when a sudden blunt impact to the chest causes cardiac arrest.

'Timely defibrillation is life saving and prevents anoxic brain injury. I pray an AED was near.'

Dr Haddock, who runs a family practice in Ringgold, Georgia, added: 'As a physician I believe Damar Hamlin was likely suffering from commotio cordis where a blow to the chest at a precise moment in the electrical cycle stops the heart.'

He also said: 'Those trying to tie this to vaccine status to project their unscientific beliefs are terrible, horrible people.'

Dr Anthony Cordillo, an emergency medicine expert in Los Angeles, California, suggested to ABC7 that the player had suffered a ventricular arrhythmia.

He told the broadcaster: 'This is a phenomenon that as the heart is going between its beats, as that heart is depolarizing and then repolarizing, if you have traumatic trauma to the chest at a very specific moment as that heart is repolarizing itself, then you can go into a lethal ventricular arrhythmia.

'And that looks like what happened because he was able to stand up and at that point his heart started what we call fibrillating, that's that cardiac arrest where he collapsed back down.

'And they would have recognized at that point the odd pulse.'

He ruled out an injury where the aorta '-- a major blood vessel '-- was severed, because people suffering that type of injury do not get back up.

Other doctors have suggested that the violent contact may have caused a bulge in a blood vessel '-- medically termed an aneurysm '-- to burst.

It may have combined with a previously undetected heart defect to trigger a life-threatening event, among other possibilities, they added.

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:29

More than 300 million people travel on long-distance flights (generally more than four hours) each year.1 Blood clots, also called deep vein thrombosis (DVT), can be a serious risk for some long-distance travelers. Most information about blood clots and long-distance travel comes from information that has been gathered about air travel. However, anyone traveling more than four hours, whether by air, car, bus, or train, can be at risk for blood clots.

Blood Clots and Travel: What You Should KnowThis podcast is designed to help people reduce their risk of blood clots during long-distance travel of four hours or more.

Blood clots can form in the deep veins (veins below the surface that are not visible through the skin) of your legs during travel because you are sitting still in a confined space for long periods of time. The longer you are immobile, the greater is your risk of developing a blood clot. Many times the blood clot will dissolve on its own. However, a serious health problem can occur when a part of the blood clot breaks off and travels to the lungs causing a blockage. This is called a pulmonary embolism, and it may be fatal. The good news is there are things you can do to protect your health and reduce your risk of blood clots during a long-distance trip.

Understand What Can Increase Your Risk for Blood ClotsEven if you travel a long distance, the risk of developing a blood clot is generally very small. Your level of risk depends on the duration of travel as well as whether you have any other risks for blood clots. Most people who develop travel-associated blood clots have one or more other risks for blood clots, such as:

Older age (risk increases after age 40)Obesity (body mass index [BMI] greater than 30kg/m2)Recent surgery or injury (within 3 months)Use of estrogen-containing contraceptives (for example, birth control pills, rings,patches)Hormone replacement therapy (medical treatment in which hormones are given to reduce the effects of menopause)Pregnancy and the postpartum period (up to 3 months after childbirth)Previous blood clot or a family history of blood clotsActive cancer or recent cancer treatmentLimited mobility (for example, a leg cast)Catheter placed in a large veinVaricose veinsThe combination of long-distance travel with one or more of these risks may increase the likelihood of developing a blood clot. The more risks you have, the greater your chances of experiencing a blood clot. If you plan on traveling soon, talk with your doctor to learn more about what you can do to protect your health. The most important thing you can do is to learn and recognize the symptoms of blood clots.

My name is Amaris White and I want to share my personal experience with blood clots. My hope is that by sharing this information, you will learn the signs and symptoms of this potentially fatal condition and know how to protect yourself and others.

Recognize the SymptomsDeep Vein Thrombosis (DVT)About half of people with DVT have no symptoms at all. The following are the most common symptoms of DVT that occur in the affected part of the body (usually the leg or arm):

Swelling of your leg or armPain or tenderness that you can't explainSkin that is warm to the touchRedness of the skinIf you have any of these symptoms, contact your doctor as soon as possible.

Pulmonary Embolism (PE)You can have a PE without any symptoms of a DVT. Symptoms of a PE can include:

Difficulty breathingFaster than normal or irregular heartbeatChest pain or discomfort, which usually worsens with a deep breath or coughingAnxietyCoughing up bloodLightheadedness, or faintingIf you have any of these symptoms, seek medical help immediately.

For more information on blood clots

Blood Clots and Long Distance Travel: Advising Patients

View this video to learn more about how healthcare providers can advise their patients on long-distance travel and blood clots.

Protect Yourself and Reduce Your Risk of Blood Clots During TravelKnow what to look for. Be alert to the signs and symptoms of blood clots.Talk with your doctor if you think you may be at risk for blood clots. If you have had a previous blood clot, or if a family member has a history of blood clots or an inherited clotting disorder, talk with your doctor to learn more about your individual risks.Move your legs frequently when on long trips and exercise your calf muscles to improve the flow of blood. If you've been sitting for a long time, take a break to stretch your legs. Extend your legs straight out and flex your ankles (pulling your toes toward you). Some airlines suggest pulling each knee up toward the chest and holding it there with your hands on your lower leg for 15 seconds, and repeat up to 10 times. These types of activities help to improve the flow of blood in your legs.If you are at risk, talk with your doctor to learn more about how to prevent blood clots. For example, some people may benefit by wearing graduated compression stockings.If you are on blood thinners, also known as anticoagulants, be sure to follow your doctor's recommendations on medication use. Reference1Gavish I, Brenner B. Air travel and the risk of thromboembolism. Intern Emerg Med 2011 Apr;6(2):113-6.

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:17

How much money I have made with my Lego YouTube channel? Let's go through the YouTube Analytics. Whether you're a colleague or an aspiring Youtuber, you may find this information valuable.

I started Brick Experiment Channel in December 2017 and got accepted to YouTube Partner Program in June 2018. Now, October 2022, the total earnings are 664 thousand USD. That is 12500 USD per month. This is the money Google sends to my bank account, from which I pay taxes.

Brick Experiment Channel total: subscribers: 2.9 million video views: 705 million uploads: 65 total earnings: 664 000 USD avg earnings per month: 12 500 USD RPM: 0.94 Playback-based CPM: 3.20

A screenshot from YouTube Analytics.An average video: view count: 10.8 million video length: 8 minutes audience retention: 39% impressions click-through rate: 5.9% rating: 96.9% likes: 138000 comments: 4400 shares: 20400 ad revenue: 10200 USD

Key numbers for my 20 most popular videos.All YouTube earnings are from YouTube ads (and a small portion from YouTube Premium). I have never used Super Chat donations or any other monetization features. All ad types are enabled in video settings.

Outside YouTube, my revenue sources are small. I receive little amounts (less than 5% of total earnings) from Beyond The Brick, because they post my videos on Facebook. Another minuscule revenue stream is starting to come from BuildaMOC, because they sell a Lego kit I designed. I have never done sponsorship, affiliate links, received donations, or anything else.

Total expenses are 30400 USD (5% of earnings). That includes Lego parts (7600 USD) and other stuff like film equipment (22800 USD). Such a low expense comes from having a lean video production. I do everything myself: design Lego builds, film, edit, buy parts, do the accounting. No salary is paid to external people. I don't belong to an MCN.

Total work time is roughly 6500 hours (100 hours per video). That makes my hourly rate 90 USD/hour.

How much ''successful'' Lego channels earn?I analyzed over 100 Lego channels with more than 10k subs. I consider those creators successful. On average, they are 9 years old channels, they have 470k subs, 504 uploads, and 208 million views. They release one video per week that gets 410k views. If they have the same RPM as my channel, they earn 1800 USD of ad revenue per month for their efforts. Not bad, in my opinion.

Red marker is my channel.But don't think filming Lego will guarantee you high earnings. There are many, many creators who release Lego videos continuously and have no subs and get no views. Too many. Hundreds, maybe thousands of such creators. It is kind of heartbreaking to see people put so much time and effort for (supposedly) nothing.

My audienceMy viewership consists of mostly middle-aged males. Top countries are United States, India and Russia.

How viewers find my videosMost of the views (> 90%) come from YouTube homepage (browse features) and video suggestions.

Externally comes very little amount of traffic (0.5%). Mostly from Google search and Reddit /r/Videos.

Popular search terms leading to my content are Lego related.

Video suggestions come mostly from my own videos.

Little traffic (1.0%) from playlists also.

RPMRPM is 0.94 on average. It has stayed about the same for the last 5 years.

CPM (and RPM) vary a lot between countries. When I see my RPM drop suddenly, it is usually because my videos are being watched a lot in India.

My most popular videoMaking Lego Car CLIMB Obstacles is my most popular video with 81 million views. Audience retention is 70% at 30 second mark.

Observations from Excel graphsI pulled data out of YouTube Analytics and crunched it in Excel. The sample size is small, only 65 videos in 5 years, so the data is noisy.

RPM seasonality. As you see, more ad revenue comes at the end of the year, close to Christmas. When the year changes, the rate drops suddenly.

Longer videos usually earn more money per view.

The lifetime of my videos is surprisingly long. Many are still watched a year after release.

Many key figures drop after release. I think the reason is that my fans watch new videos first, then later comes other random people.

Popular videos get disliked more.

People subscribe more likely if they watch video for a long time.

You would expect high click-through rate to lead to high view count. But correlation looks to be non-existing or slightly to the opposite. I think the reason is with causality going the other direction. When a video is shown to a large audience (high view count), those viewers are not Lego fans or technology enthusiasts, so they won't click the thumbnail so often.

Download excel documents that include all raw data:link or backup link

Any comments, questions?

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:12

Picture: Graeme RobertsonThe Guardian is continuing to be severely impacted by a suspected ransomware attack which hit the publisher's global IT systems on 20 December.

Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson sent a note on Monday, 2 January, saying that all staff must continue to work from home. Staff have been told to work remotely since the incident began.

Bateson said: ''This is a further update on the serious disruption to our network and IT systems that began before Christmas. As a result of the steps we took to secure our network, a number of key systems have been taken offline and remain unavailable.

''To reduce strain on our networks and help the enterprise tech, ESD and other involved teams focus on the most essential fixes, everyone must work from home until at least Monday 23rd January in the UK, US and Australia, unless you are specifically asked to work from our offices.''

Ransomware attacks typically involve hackers gaining access to a company's computer system and then installing software that encrypts every document and file which can be found. The hackers then demand payment, often in Bitcoin, in order to restore systems by providing the target with the encryption key.

At the time the incident was first reported, Bateson and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner told staff: ''As everyone knows, there has been a serious incident which has affected our IT network and systems in the last 24 hours. We believe this to be a ransomware attack but are continuing to consider all possibilities.

Content from our partners''We are continuing to publish globally to our website and apps and although some of our internal systems are affected, we are confident we will be able to publish in print tomorrow. Our technology teams have been working to deal with all aspects of this incident, with the vast majority of our staff able to work from home as we did during the pandemic.

''We will continue to keep our staff and anyone else affected informed. We will update everyone again at the end of the day. With a few key exceptions we would like everyone to work from home for the remainder of the week unless we notify you otherwise.

''Thank you to everyone working hard throughout this incident to keep us publishing, looking after our readers, supporters and advertisers, and to keep our core systems available for colleagues.''

The attack is believed to have taken out internal wifi systems but has not impacted print or digital publication.

In February 2022, News Corp chief technology officer David Kline warned staff about cyber attacks on the business.

He said: ''Our preliminary analysis indicates that foreign government involvement may be associated with this activity, and that some data was taken.

''Mandiant [a cyber security firm hired to investigate] assesses that those behind this activity have a China nexus and believes they are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China's interests.

''We will not tolerate attacks on our journalism, nor will we be deterred from our reporting, which provides readers everywhere with the news that matters,'' he added.

News Corp said the attack had affected the business email accounts and documents of a ''limited number of employees'' inside its headquarters and across news technology services, Dow Jones, News UK and the New York Post.

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 17:03

House Republicans have proposed a rule change that could gut the chamber's independent, nonpartisan ethics office.

Credits: AOC, Getty Images; Capitol, AFP via Getty Images; Santos, Associated PressA few innocuous-sounding passages buried near the end of Republican's new House rules package could gut the chamber's independent, nonpartisan ethics office.

Established by the House in 2008, the Office of Congressional Ethics reviews allegations of misconduct against lawmakers and their staff. If the office determines it has a ''substantial reason to believe'' an ethics violation may have occurred, it refers the matter to the House Committee on Ethics, which consists of an equal number of lawmakers from both parties. In almost all instances, the office's reports become public (unlike investigations the committee initiates).

In the last Congress, notable subjects of the Office of Congressional Ethics' inquiries included Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), Alex Mooney (R-W.V.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.). This session was shaping up to be a busy one for the office. Last month, 36 former members of Congress called on the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate lawmakers involved in the January 6th riot at the Capitol. The office might also be gearing up to investigate incoming Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) for, well, lots of things.

If the House passes the GOP's new House rules, however, that work could get thrown off track. A clause on page 49 of the 55-page package would reinstate two four-year term limits for board members, which haven't been enforced since 2014. It also could require the board to hire the office's staff for the entire session within 30 calendar days of the rules package passing. Any new hires would require the approval of at least four board members. While those regulations may sound harmless, they could gut the office's neutrality and staff.

The term limits would immediately remove three of the four Democratic members from the office's board, but none of the four Republican board members would be dismissed. (Although members of each party chose the board's members, they are supposed to perform their duties independently of their affiliation.)

It could be difficult to fill the newly vacated spots within 30 days, which might leave the board with just five members. That would, in turn, make it harder to hire new employees, as four votes would be required to extend a job offer. The change also would leave Republican-appointed members with almost total control of staffing decisions. Even at full strength, hiring personnel sometimes take months. The Office of Congressional Ethics, for example, has been looking to bring on an investigative counsel since at least August.

Some government watchdogs were quick to criticize the proposed change. ''The Office of Congressional Ethics is essential for independent and nonpartisan ethics oversight and accountability in Congress. This is a disappointing development, Campaign Legal Center tweeted on Monday. According to a statement from the left-leaning nonprofit Public Citizen, ''Today's Republican party is rife with ethical transgressions. And it is now trying to make it much harder to hold members of Congress accountable to the standards of decency we expect.''

This Congress is not the first time Republicans have gone after the Office of Congressional Ethics. In 2017, House Republicans reversed their decision to eliminate the office after an outcry from voters and criticism from then-President Donald Trump.

Spokespeople for the House's top Republican, Kevin McCarthy of California, did not immediately respond to an inquiry.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump criticized House Republicans for attempting to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics

Twitter/Donald Trump

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:29

By Catherine Stoddard

Published January 2, 2023 3:18PM

Updated 3:19PM

articleFILE - The dashboard of the software-updated Tesla Model S P90D shows the icons enabling Tesla's Autopilot, featuring limited hands-free steering. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

BAMBERG, Germany - A driver in Germany had his license taken away after he appeared to have fallen asleep behind the wheel of his Tesla which was on autopilot and lead police on a chase.

On Dec. 29 at about 12 p.m. local time, police spotted a Tesla driving down Autobahn 70 leaving Bamberg, Germany, and heading toward Bayreuth, according to a news release from Bavarian police.

Officers attempted to stop the Tesla, but the vehicle did not pull over. The car was traveling at about 70 miles per hour and did not slow down or speed up during the attempted traffic stop, officials noticed.

The Tesla "kept the same distance from the patrol car in front" as they traveled down the autobahn, police said.

Officers pulled up next to the Tesla's driver's side window and noticed the driver, only identified as a 45-year-old male, reclined in his seat with his eyes closed and his hands off the steering wheel.

"This strengthened the suspicion that he had left the controls to the autopilot and had fallen asleep," police said.

The driver eventually woke up after 15 minutes into the pursuit and followed police instructions to pull over.

Police also believed that the driver was under the influence of drugs.

Further investigation revealed that the driver had placed a "so-called steering wheel weight in the footwell" of the car's driver's side.

"This device is attached to the steering wheel to trick the vehicle's safety system by pretending that your hand is on the wheel," the news release said.

The driver is being investigated for criminal endangerment of traffic, and his license has been suspended pending a formal hearing.

This story was reported from Los Angeles.

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:19

Delta Air Lines is investigating reports that one of its pilots blamed Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg for a grounded plane in an announcement to passengers.

Flights over Florida were grounded Monday due to widespread problems with an air traffic control system, according to Reuters. As the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worked to fix the problem, ''it slowed traffic into Florida airspace,'' causing delays for passengers in the United States.

The ground stops followed a difficult few weeks for US passengers after a winter storm caused flight delays and cancellations across the country just days before Christmas. Southwest Airlines, one of Delta's main competitors, spent more than a week recovering from staffing issues in the wake of the storm.

Amid frustration among staff and passengers, a pilot in Atlanta reportedly blamed the problems on Buttigieg in an announcement to passengers Monday.

Above is a Delta Air Lines plane next to a picture of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. A Delta pilot is under investigation for alleged political statements blaming Buttigieg for a technical problem that caused planes to be grounded in Florida on Monday. Mario Tama/Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty Image His political quips didn't go down well with everyone, however. One passenger, Stewart Lucas, called the pilot on Twitter about the politically charged comments and expressed concerns that making political statements over loudspeakers was not appropriate behavior for the employee.

''@Delta it's not okay that the pilot of flight 2274 ATL-RSW blames @PeteButtigieg for a ground stop in Florida,'' he tweeted. ''Completely unacceptable political dig just twice at gate over loudspeaker.''

Details of what the pilot said weren't immediately made clear, but airlines have a history of firing employees for making political statements to passengers. A Delta spokesman said news week The airline investigated this report.

''Delta will investigate this allegation,'' the spokesman wrote in a statement.

Some social media users defended the pilotand argued that American citizens should have the freedom to criticize government officials without recourse.

Christina Pushaw, a spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tweeted, ''Yes'...this is not China, Americans are allowed to criticize our government officials.''

While airline employees who criticize politicians in the workplace are protected from federal prosecution under the US Constitution for their comments, private companies have the ability to set their own policies on workplace conduct.

Airlines have previously investigated pilots for political tiradesAirline employees have been investigated for making political statements, which can be alienating for customers who do not share the same views.

In 2021, Southwest Airlines faced backlash after a pilot used the phrase ''Let's go Brandon,'' code for a gross insult against President Joe Biden, while signing off after greeting passengers over the plane's public address system.

Southwest apologized for the incident, saying it ''did not reflect the Southwest hospitality that we are known for and aim to provide every day on every flight,'' adding that the company will raise the issue with the employee.

In another incident that same year, a Southwest pilot's tirade attacking Liberals was picked up by a hot microphone before the plane took off. In addition to Southwest's statement that it was ''addressing the situation internally,'' the FAA was also investigating the incident, according to CBS News.

In 2017, a United Airlines pilot was replaced before takeoff after she had a political tirade in which she said she didn't vote for either former President Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton because they were both liars, according to Insider, alongside other statements of concern.

https://www.newsweek.com/delta-looking-pilot-blaming-pete-buttigieg-flight-problems-florida-ground-stop-1770741 Delta investigates pilot who blames Pete Buttigieg for flight problems

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:12

Photo: Hyoung Chang/Denver Post via Getty Images

Figuring out which pandemic safety measures were prudent and which were misguided is the monumental project left to scientists, ethicists, public-health experts, and others now that (roughly) normal life has resumed. Among the most important but controversial subjects for reassessment are the COVID-19 interventions that affected children, including their ability to go to school or otherwise participate in basic social activities. In large portions of the United States, schools were closed for many months or even more than a year, activities for young people were broadly canceled, and tens of millions of American children were kept inside their homes and away from peers, teachers, relatives, and friends. While the persistent and considerable consequences of those policies are still coming to light, the main justification for them was that exposure to children increased COVID risk for adults.

A pair of new findings casts serious doubt on that logic. The two studies were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences '-- one in August and one last month '-- and together they achieved something rare: They offered dramatic and important new information suggesting a correction to a commonly held narrative about children as dangerous viral vectors during the pandemic. But their results, according to multiple experts interviewed for this article, were also entirely expected.

The August paper found that ''exposure to young children was strongly associated with less severe COVID-19 illness.'' In an analysis of the records of more than 3 million adults in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system, the authors found that ''those without identifiable household exposure to children based on health insurance enrollment had a 27% higher rate of COVID-19 hospitalization and a 49% higher rate of COVID-19 hospitalization requiring ICU admission than those with young children.'' (In comparing adults with and without exposure to young children, the analysis matched each group for known COVID risk factors such as age, hypertension, diabetes, and BMI.) The study's researchers, from Kaiser, Stanford University, and Columbia University, said their findings suggest that cross-immunity from common coronaviruses '-- which sometimes cause the colds and sniffles that children tend to carry '-- may play a role in protection against severe COVID-19 outcomes.

The study published in November, by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Boston University School of Medicine, and the Veterans Administration, offered biological evidence for the Kaiser study's epidemiological finding. The researchers found that, during the first year of the pandemic, VA patients who had tested positive for some of the common-cold coronaviruses had an 80 to 90 percent reduction in likelihood of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. In other words, at least for a limited time, getting the common cold appeared to help some people's immune system protect against COVID.

These two studies '-- one relying on laboratory data, the other on observational data '-- complement each other so compellingly that the researchers behind the November study cite the August paper as the inspiration for theirs. Taken together, the findings suggest that social distancing and isolation at a population level, particularly from young children, may have counterintuitively put some people at greater risk of COVID infection or severe disease once they resumed normal contact. (Several of the experts I spoke with noted that this doesn't mean social distancing wasn't beneficial for those at high risk of bad outcomes who were able to remain uninfected until they were vaccinated.)

Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, whose work focuses on the epidemiology of infectious diseases, said cross-protection '-- that is, exposure to the common-cold coronaviruses triggering greater immune protection against COVID '-- had long been the subject of quiet speculation by experts. ''This hypothesis was aired since the beginning of the pandemic but was viewed as dangerous,'' he said. ''People avoided talking about this in polite circles.''

But the public discussion now seems to be happening. For instance, a recent essay in the New York Times on the relative absence then reemergence of certain viruses, co-authored by a virologist and an infectious-diseases epidemiologist, noted the possible effects of social distancing as well as cross-reactivity (infection from one virus conferring an immune-system benefit against other viruses) in this process.

The VA study adds intriguing new data to this conversation. There are four endemic coronaviruses that can cause the common cold. The VA researchers found that people who had tested positive within the past year for two them '-- either 229E or OC43 '-- had a significantly lower rate of COVID than patients who had not tested positive for either of these coronaviruses.

Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious-diseases specialist at Stanford University, said the VA study had some significant limitations, but its findings fit with the existing literature, which indicates ''there's good reason to believe exposure to human coronavirus can lead to some degree of cross-immunity to SARS-CoV-2.''

The evidence of cross-protection should cause people to question some commonly held assumptions that governed pandemic safety measures. Balloux, who is a co-author on a study published last year in the journal Nature exploring how exposure to endemic coronaviruses might help T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 infection, said the VA paper was just the latest small addition to the literature on the broader topic. And overall, Balloux said, it supports the idea that, at a population level, teachers or other professionals with exposure to young children were not at greater risk, as was the conventional wisdom during the pandemic, which drove policy decisions about shuttering schools and children's activities.

This protective concept exists beyond the endemic coronaviruses. Although Scott did not want to apply this lesson to any policy decisions around mitigations, he said, ''the infectious diseases that kids often spread are usually benign and can provide adults with certain immunological protection that they might not otherwise think about.''

To whatever extent school closures or social distancing from children reduce transmission, there may be a downside to those aggressive mitigations, said Dr. Paul Monach, one of the VA study's authors. ''It's been proposed that the current surge of RSV may in part be because our population didn't get it for two years,'' he said. ''It's plausible that we can overprotect ourselves from viruses.'' Instead, ''getting a mini- or even micro-booster periodically simply by going about your life would be very reassuring.'' He warned, though, that doing so is tricky and depends on how dangerous the virus is to children and everyone else.

While no one enjoys getting colds, these studies suggest that exposure to young children and their colds may offer a protective benefit against more serious illness. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-diseases specialist at University of California, San Francisco, said that, in light of the protective benefit of mild coronaviruses, ''we need to evaluate unintended consequences'' of preventing that exposure.

Sign Up for the Intelligencer NewsletterDaily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Spending Time With Kids Might Help Protect Adults From COVID

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:09

The way to save endangered mountain gorillas is to help people move away from wood fuel toward fossil fuels. Why are scientists like Stanford's Paul Ehlich (center) promoting the opposite? On CBS ''60 Minutes'' last night, scientists claimed that humans are causing a ''sixth mass extinction'' and that we would need the equivalent of five planet earths for all humans to live at current Western levels.

''No, humanity is not sustainable to maintain our lifestyle '-- yours and mine,'' claimed Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. ''Basically, for the entire planet, you'd need five more Earths. It's not clear where they're gonna come from.''

Both claims are wrong and have been repeatedly debunked in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

The assertion that ''five more Earths'' are needed to sustain humanity comes from something called the Ecological Footprint calculation. I debunked it 10 years ago with a group of other analysts and scientists, including the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLOS Biology.

We broke down the six measures that comprise the Ecological Footprint and found that five of the six, including food and forestry, were either in balance or surplus. The only thing out of balance was humankind's carbon emissions.

But reducing carbon emissions requires neither that rich nations become poor nor that poor nations remain poor. Rather, it simply requires that we move toward energy sources that produce fewer carbon emissions, namely natural gas and nuclear.

To its credit, CBS notes how wrong Ehrlich has been over the years. ''The alarm Erlich sounded in 1968 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine,'' noted CBS News' Scott Pelley. ''He was wrong about that. The Green Revolution fed the world.''

But Pelley goes on to claim that Ehrlich is right about humans causing a ''sixth mass extinction.'' He's not. He's wrong about that, too.

To cause a ''mass extinction,'' humans would need to be wiping out 75-90% of all species on Earth. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the main scientific body that tracks species, says just 6% of species are critically endangered, 9% are endangered, and 12% are vulnerable to becoming endangered.

Further, the IUCN has estimated that just 0.8% of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data set have gone extinct since 1500. That's a rate of fewer than two species lost every year for an annual extinction rate of 0.001%.

The huge increase in biodiversity during the last 100 million years massively outweighs the species lost in past mass extinctions. The number of genera, a measure of biodiversity more powerful than species count alone, has nearly tripled over the course of this time period. After each of these past five mass extinctions, the biodiversity in the fossil record dips between 15 to 20%. But each extinction is followed by much larger growth.

Conservationists, it turns out, are skilled at maintaining small populations of animals, from yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand to mountain gorillas of central Africa. The real challenge is expanding the size of their populations.

But it's not the case that humankind has failed to conserve habitat. By 2019, an area of Earth larger than the whole of Africa was protected , an area that is equivalent to 15 percent of Earth's land surface. The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 in 2020.

In fact, in rich nations around the world, wild areas are coming back , thanks to the more efficient use of land for producing food in general and meat in particular. Humans use about half of the ice-free land surface of the Earth. Of that half, we use about half for meat production, which is one the greatest threats to endangered species. But the amount of land humans use for meat has declined massively in recent decades, nearly an area the size of Alaska

But if we're not creating a ''sixth mass extinction,'' or using up ''five earths,'' why do so many people, including ''60 Minutes,'' believe we are?

The United Nations promoted wood fuel in the 1987 report, ''Our Common Future,'' authored by Gro Brundtland, the former Prime Minister of Norway, a nation which just a decade earlier had grown wealthy thanks to its abundant oil and gas reserves.

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:07

SOME of America's leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world's population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America's wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:45

The novel coronavirus could help us cure cancer. Well, certain cancers.

The COVID pandemic gave the pharmaceutical industry the push it needed to finally finish developing messenger-RNA technology so that companies such as Moderna and Pfizer could use the tech for its COVID vaccines.

Now the pharmaceutical industry is using the same mRNA platforms for cancer vaccines. Dozens of these new vaccines are in development'--and experts say there's a chance they'll drive the biggest decrease in cancer mortality in decades.

It's worth noting a key difference between mRNA shots for COVID versus mRNA shots for cancer. MRNA vaccines prevent COVID. They won't prevent cancer. Instead, they'll treat cancer after you've caught it. In that sense, ''vaccine'''--even though it's the accepted term'--is something of a misnomer when it comes to mRNA applications for cancer. ''Therapy'' might be a better term.

In any event, mRNA vaccines for cancer have been in the works for a couple of years now, but the first tangible sign of real progress came just last week. On Dec. 13, Massachusetts-based Moderna and partner Merck'--the New Jersey pharma giant'--announced the initial results of the first ever randomized human trial for an mRNA cancer vaccine.

The two companies enrolled 157 people with late-stage melanoma for the trial. Volunteers received either the antibody therapy Keytruda, or Keytruda combined with a new vaccine called mRNA-4157. Adding mRNA-4157 reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 44 percent, the companies reported.

The key to mRNA-4157, and any other mRNA cancer vaccine, is that it can be tailored for an individual patient. As its name implies, ''messenger RNA'' is just a medium that communicates a message. The message is a scrap of genetic material'--RNA'--that tells a person's immune system to produce a particular, disease-fighting protein.

Developers can encode mRNA to produce a wide array of proteins. For, say, preventing COVID'--or reducing different cancerous tumors. ''The flexibility is extraordinarily attractive,'' Elias Sayour, a University of Florida neurosurgeon whose RNA Engineering Laboratory is working on cancer vaccines, told The Daily Beast.

But the flexibility that makes an mRNA vaccine so attractive is also a problem. How do you know exactly what RNA to add to a particular patient's vaccine? ''Not all cancers are the same,'' Sayour explained. ''To overcome this, prediction algorithms are used to identify unique information in an individual's cancer that will be recognized by their immune system.''

MRNA was in development for nearly 50 years before COVID finally compelled governments to pump money into the effort, helping the industry finally finish the first mRNA vaccines two years ago. The basic platform for an mRNA cancer jab is actually pretty old. It's the algorithms that are new.

''The manufacturing process starts with the identification of genetic mutations in a patient's tumor cells that could give rise to neoantigens,'' the U.S. National Cancer Institute explained. Neoantigens are proteins that form on cancer cells. ''Computer algorithms then predict which neoantigens are most likely to bind to receptors on T-cells and stimulate an immune response,'' the institute added.

In theory, an mRNA-maker could produce a personalized cancer vaccine in as little as four weeks, Sayour said. In practice, we need a lot more mutation-detecting algorithms and a lot more testing before mRNA vaccines are ready for routine use on cancers.

Sayour stressed that mRNA will probably work better for some cancers than for others. Not all cancers are ''immunogenic,'' meaning they trigger an immune response. Without an immune response, we might not know which protein to encode in an mRNA jab. ''MRNA vaccines are likely to work in cancers like melanoma that are considered immunogenic,'' Sayour explained. Temper your expectations for other cancers.

There are other possible limitations on mRNA as a cure for cancer. Henry Wang, a chemical engineering professor who studies vaccine production at the University of Michigan, told The Daily Beast he's worried about production.

You can't churn out mRNA cancer shots the same way you churn out mRNA shots for COVID. How do you scale and manage production of a drug that requires such careful and detailed individualization? ''It creates an entirely different set of [quality-control] and manufacturing issues,'' Wang said.

There's also the issue of cost. Because they're essentially boutique products, each vaccine would be designed for one or a few people and manufactured in small quantities. That means mRNA cancer jabs may end up being really expensive. It's possible mRNA will work great against some or many cancers, but be too pricey for most people. ''Someone has to address the issue of cost versus benefit,'' Wang said.

Sayour, for one, said he's optimistic. Even taking into account the problems of customization and production, mRNA seems to be our best near-term pharmaceutical tool for reducing cancer deaths. ''It seems to have the best balance of commercialization and personalization.''

If pharmaceutical developers can write a host of algorithms, complete large-scale trials, figure out the production processes and thread the cost-benefit needle, cancer vaccines might be viable'--and save a lot of lives.

Even if they can't, and mRNA jabs for cancer fall flat, the basic tech could still have a bright future. Moderna is already working on mRNA jabs for around two dozen diseases, including herpes and Zika. German firm BioNTech SE is even working up mRNA for multiple sclerosis.

MRNA got its start preventing COVID. Treating cancer might be next. It's a safe bet that neither disease will be the last to square off with this particular tech.

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Archived Version

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:18

The balance of power in Washington will shift when Republicans officially take control of the House on 3 January.

Yet House Republicans begin the 118th Congress in a precarious position: their grip on power is fragile and their conference fractured.

After a historically weak performance by the minority party in a midterm election, House Republicans have struggled to unite. Uncertainty hangs over the speakership election, as Kevin McCarthy attempts to quell a conservative revolt that could derail his long-held hopes of claiming the speaker's gavel.

Democrats meanwhile will begin the next Congress with a fresh slate of leaders, after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and her deputies stepped aside to pave the way for a new generation. Now, in a historical first, the triumvirate of top House Democrats includes no white men.

Here's a look at the highest-ranking members of the Republican and Democratic leadership for the 118th Congress.

The Republicans

Kevin McCarthy. Photograph: Michael McCoy/ReutersCongressman Kevin McCarthy of California, Republican nominee for speaker of the House

McCarthy, 57, has been plotting his path to the speakership for the better part of a decade. Whether he will finally win the top job remains unclear.

Elected to Congress in 2006, McCarthy was part of a triumvirate of self-styled Republican ''Young Guns'' (along with Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, neither of whom is currently in Congress) who rode the Tea Party wave to power. Republicans' romping success in the 2010 midterms catapulted McCarthy into one of the top leadership positions, House majority whip.

He was considered next in line for the speakership in 2015, but his bid imploded. McCarthy was eventually elected minority leader in 2018, after Democrats won the House.

Once considered a relative moderate, the California congressman has steadily moved to the right. He embraced Donald Trump early and remains one of his staunchest defenders on Capitol Hill. When Trump was defeated in 2020, McCarthy amplified his election lies. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, McCarthy condemned Trump's actions but quickly retreated and made amends.

Now McCarthy is in the fight of his political life as he again seeks the speakership. He won the party's internal leadership elections, dispatching a challenge from the far right. But the real test will come on the House floor, where he will need the support of nearly every member of his caucus to become speaker.

Steve Scalise. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ImagesCongressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana, majority leader

Scalise, 57, is a Louisiana native who was elected to the No 2 spot by voice vote, a sign of his broad support in the House Republican conference. Should McCarthy fall short in his quest to become speaker, Scalise has been mentioned as a potential alternative.

In 2017, Scalise was critically wounded when a gunman opened fire during a congressional baseball practice. He spent weeks in the hospital and required intensive rehabilitation. A staunch defender of the second amendment, Scalise said the experience only reinforced his support for gun rights.

A special election in 2008 brought Scalise to Washington, where he rose quickly through the Republican ranks. In 2012, he was elected chairman of the influential Republican study group, beating a candidate who had been handpicked by the group's founders. After that surprise victory, Scalise told reporters on Capitol Hill that his goal was to pull Republican leadership ''as far to the right'' as possible.

Tom Emmer. Photograph: US House of Representatives /ReutersCongressman Tom Emmer of Minnesota, majority whip

In 2020, as Democrats celebrated Joe Biden's victory, Republicans made an unexpectedly strong showing in the House. Emmer, in his role as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was widely praised for his party's performance.

Just two years later, Emmer, in the same role, faced blowback after Republicans only narrowly won the House, making far fewer gains than anticipated. In the wake of the disappointing results, he faced stiff competition in his bid to become the majority whip though he ultimately prevailed on the second ballot.

Emmer, 61, a former attorney and the father of seven, began his career in the Minnesota legislature. He narrowly lost a bid to become governor of Minnesota in one of the closest elections in state history. Four years later, he was first elected to Congress, winning the seat vacated by the conservative firebrand Michele Bachmann.

Elise Stefanik. Photograph: Government Printing Office/ReutersCongresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, Republican conference chair

Few politicians exemplify Trump's grip on the Republican party better than the New York Republican.

Once a mainstream conservative from a moderate district, Stefanik transformed into one of Trump's most loyal supporters, embracing his election lies, flirting with the QAnon conspiracy theory and amplifying ads that echoed themes of the racist ''great replacement'' theory.

Stefanik claimed the No 3 leadership post last year, after the conference ousted Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming over her vocal criticism of Trump in the wake of the Capitol attack. Despite speculation that Stefanik would run for majority whip if Republicans won the House in the 2022 midterms, she opted instead to keep her position, tasked with amplifying the party's message.

When Trump announced his intention to run again for the White House in 2024, Stefanik was one of only a handful of prominent Republicans to endorse him, a move that rankled those in her party wary of his attempts at a political comeback.

The Democrats

Hakeem Jeffries. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPACongressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, minority leader

With his unanimous election as Democratic leader, Jeffries, 52, becomes the first Black American to helm a major political party in congressional history. He inherits the job from Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats' long-serving leader. Yet he begins his tenure in the minority, after Democrats lost control of the chamber in the November midterms despite a stronger than expected performance.

The Brooklyn-born son of public sector workers, Jeffries speaks with pride about growing up in a working-class outer-borough neighborhood. After law school, he worked as a corporate attorney, representing clients such as Viacom and CBS.

His first foray into politics was unsuccessful. But he was soon elected to the New York state assembly, where he served for six years before running for Congress in 2012. He won the Brooklyn and Queens-based seat, parts of which were once represented by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.

His ascent to Democratic leader was long planned and came with the explicit backing of his predecessor. Now, as the new fresh face of House Democrats, Jeffries has vowed to bring his fractious caucus together with the goal of clawing back control of the chamber in two years. In remarks after his election, he said he hoped to work with Republicans, but would not remain silent if they continued to embrace extremism.

Katherine Clark. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesCongresswoman Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, minority whip

Elected by acclamation, Clark will become the highest-ranking woman in House Democratic politics. As the party's top vote-counter, her main task for the next two years will probably be to keep Democrats aligned in opposition to Republican-backed legislation, rather than whipping them in favor of bills.

Clark, 59, began her political career as a member of a local public school committee, before rising through the ranks in the Massachusetts state legislature. She was elected to Congress in 2013, where she has been a vocal advocate for women's reproductive rights and other policies affecting women and children.

For years, Clark and Jeffries worked in partnership, cementing their status as heirs apparent for the moment when Pelosi and her deputies stepped down. She is well-liked among the many caucuses and coalitions within her party and her colleagues have praised her as someone who always keeps in touch, a trait that will serve her well as Democratic whip.

Pete Aguilar. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPACongressman Pete Aguilar of California, Democratic caucus chair

With his rise to the No 3 spot, Aguilar, 43, is now the highest-ranking Latino in Congress and a member of a historic Democratic leadership team that includes no white men for the first time in history.

Raised in a working-class family in San Bernardino, Aguilar served as mayor of Redlands, a city in southern California. He lost his first bid for Congress in 2012, but tried again two years later and won.

Since then, Aguilar has risen steadily in House Democratic politics. He was named to the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol and led the panel's high-profile third hearing, which focused on Trump's efforts to pressure his vice-president, Mike Pence, to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Known among his colleagues as someone who can build alliances across factions and party lines, Aguilar is now responsible for Democratic messaging.

Jim Clyburn. Photograph: Meg Kinnard/APCongressman Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, assistant Democratic leader

Before Jeffries' elevation, Clyburn was the highest-ranking Black man in Congress. After serving as the Democratic whip alongside Speaker Pelosi and the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, Clyburn, 82, decided to remain in leadership even as they stepped aside, though at a lower rank.

He briefly faced the possibility of a younger challenger, but was ultimately elected unanimously by the caucus.

Born in the Jim Crow south, Clyburn was a civil rights activist before entering politics. Elected to Congress in 1992, he quickly became a leading voice within the caucus, gaining prominence as the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus before joining the Democratic leadership team. Often operating behind the scenes, Clyburn is known for mediating disputes within his caucus and using his clout to advocate for Black leadership.

Hailed as a kingmaker in South Carolina politics, his influence is widely felt. Clyburn helped power Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and is credited with rescuing Biden's foundering presidential campaign in 2020 when he offered his endorsement ahead of the state's primary.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:43

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This article, the second in a series on global migration caused by climate change, is a result of a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state's electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth '-- 130 degrees in Death Valley '-- and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.

Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state's 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.

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But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?

I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet '-- changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions '-- the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.

So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I'd been asking others: Was it time to move?

Firefighter Zach Leisure working to contain the Ranch 2 Fire near Azusa last month. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms '-- all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat '-- 20 more days than the previous record.

For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.

I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so '-- if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing '-- was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and ProPublica mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America's shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)

Read More New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States According to new data analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures, rising seas and changing rainfall will profoundly reshape the way people have lived in North America for centuries.

What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people '-- nearly 1 in 2 '-- will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation's federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.

Residents of Azusa watching the Ranch 2 Fire. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.

There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and 3 out of 4 now describe climate change as either ''a crisis'' or ''a major problem.'' This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities found that even Republicans' views are shifting: 1 in 3 now thinks climate change should be declared a national emergency.

Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what's next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save '-- often at exorbitant costs '-- and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California's suburbs are no longer safe.

It has already begun.

Pedro Delgado harvesting a cob of blue corn that grew without kernels at Ramona Farms in Pinal County, Arizona, last month. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Let's start with some basics. Across the country, it's going to get hot. Buffalo, New York, may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Arizona, does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer '-- which supplies nearly a third of the nation's irrigation groundwater '-- could be gone by the end of the century.

It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans '-- largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin '-- will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.

The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme projections of 8 to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move 3 miles closer to my house, as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school, a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first, but research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread: Nearly 1 in 3 people here in Marin County will leave, part of the roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.

From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of the nation's 20 largest metropolitan areas '-- Miami, New York and Boston among them '-- will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.

In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move '-- though difficult to predict precisely '-- could easily be tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The Great Migration '-- of 6 million Black Americans out of the South from 1916 to 1970 '-- transformed almost everything we know about America, from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many people moved? What might change?

Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient. Even a subtle environmental change '-- a dry well, say '-- can mean life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is often simply a question of survival.

By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money. So even as the average flow of the Colorado River '-- the water supply for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation's vegetable and cattle farming '-- has declined for most of the last 33 years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992 '-- and even as that state has become a global example of the threat of sea-level rise '-- more than 5 million people have moved to Florida's shorelines, driving a historic boom in building and real estate.

Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.

Homes being rebuilt near Coffey Park, the California community that was ravaged during the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa. Smoke filled the air as a construction crew worked and wildfires raged nearby. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies '-- and government subsidies '-- to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.

Perhaps no market force has proved more influential '-- and more misguided '-- than the nation's property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people's long-term decision-making.

Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. The regulations '-- called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements '-- are justified by developers and local politicians alike as economic lifeboats ''of last resort'' in regions where climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able to buy insurance.

At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and wildfires.

In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.

That's what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn't exist.

As a result, Florida's taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion '-- more than seven times the state's total budget '-- as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.

On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University's School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to '-- suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I'd spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where these migrants would be driven from.

Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all looking for his read on the state's future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It's an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. ''And once this flips,'' he added, ''it's likely to flip very quickly.''

Cassidy Plaisance surveying what was left of her friend's home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, after Hurricane Laura. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)In fact, the correction '-- a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans' appetite for reckless development '-- had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules.

On Oct. 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, virtually in my own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.

The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn't have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as ''basically zero risk,'' according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate '-- and price '-- the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other ''impossible'' fires. After a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm consumed Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said, ''alarm bells started going off'' for the insurance industry.

What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe 50% of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90% had been leveled. ''The destruction was complete,'' he told me. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California's autumn winds weren't getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. ''It's hard to forecast something you've never seen before,'' he said.

For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with California's rolling power blackouts last fall '-- an effort to preemptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire '-- which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing. Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the ''new abnormal.''

It was no surprise, then, that California's property insurers '-- having watched 26 years' worth of profits dissolve over 24 months '-- began dropping policies, or that California's insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February, the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the words of one consumer advocacy group, ''follow the lead of Florida'' by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California's FAIR plan for catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180% since 2015, and in Santa Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.

It's only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt '-- and devaluation '-- from door to door. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis.

Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk ''bluelining,'' and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.

Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here, were testament to Keenan's belief that the bluelining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy, starting in the nation's largest state.

Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt '-- climate-distressed mortgage loans '-- might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.

Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it's easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.

Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans' irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise '-- and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on '-- the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.

And that's when the real migration might begin.

As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians' exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, ''Should I be selling my house and getting '-- ''

He cut me off: ''Yes.''

Senior citizens at a cooling center in Phoenix last month during Arizona's record-setting heat wave. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers '-- ''Okies'' not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri '-- unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.

The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.

A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation's wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, ''abandonment is one option.''

Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America's cropland '-- plus the steady baking and burning and flooding '-- suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States '-- mostly across the South and the Southwest '-- will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.

That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65% of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10% will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities '-- not the places that empty out '-- that wind up bearing the brunt of America's reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.

A woman lost consciousness in a parking lot in Lake Charles after Hurricane Laura left her without electricity or air conditioning for several days. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)So what will happen to Atlanta '-- a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta '-- where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state's C+ infrastructure grade last year '-- already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.

Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn't ''fully grappled with'' such challenges now, said Na'Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, ''the city might be pushed to what's manageable.''

So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.

Erika Gonzlez and her son, Kevin, evacuating their home in Sonoma County, California, as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire approached in August. (Meridith Kohut for The New York Times)Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest '-- from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California '-- decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.

In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people '-- the nation's opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20% more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10%, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.

Read More Where Will Everyone Go? ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. This is what we found.

The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10%, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang's research forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit; Rochester, New York; Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put to good use. One day, it's possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho's up-and-coming wine country and the country's new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.

Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. The facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles '-- a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving '-- that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.

Al Shaw contributed reporting.

Clarification, Sept. 16, 2020: This article was updated to clarify that the mapping of danger zones was done by ProPublica staff.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:39

An earthquake rattled parts of Northern California on Sunday for the second time in two weeks. The 5.4-magnitude quake was centered about 30 miles south of Eureka. On Dec. 20, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake also struck near Eureka.

Now one quake prediction research firm warned that the next big one could be imminent.

On Monday morning, Quake Predictions published a warning that read for the next two days -- there is a "dangerous situation" of the likelihood of a 7.0-magnitude "in the San Francisco Bay to NW of Los Angeles area."

48 hour warning - (Dangerous situation) - WARNING: 7.0 earthquake is likely in the San Francisco Bay to NW of Los Angeles area 01/02 to 01/03- (huge quake signal just hit California) https://t.co/VMyuA1uw32 pic.twitter.com/goGyalmLFc

'-- EarthquakePrediction (@Quakeprediction) January 2, 2023The warning comes after two sizeable quakes hit Northern California in less than two weeks.

Sunday morning's earthquake was described as "more violent this time," Rio Dell Mayor Debra Garnes told CNN in an interview.

"It was shorter but more violent. My refrigerator moved two feet. Things came out of the refrigerator. There's a crack in my wall from the violence of it," Garnes said.

California has an average of five earthquakes per year with magnitudes between 5 and 6, according to LATimes. And the latest shakings might suggest a long overdue big quake could be nearing.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:33

Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md) is ending 2022 on an ominous note after declaring that ''if you espouse hate'... you're not protected under the First Amendment.'' The statement is obviously untrue, but it is only the latest example of the eroding support for free speech in Congress and the country at large. It is particularly chilling for one of the nation's most powerful politicians (sworn to ''support and defend the Constitution'') to show either a lack of knowledge or lack of fealty to the First Amendment.

He is not the first Democratic leader to make this clearly erroneous statement about the Constitution. Politicians such as Howard Dean have previously voiced the same view.

The First Amendment does not distinguish between types of speech: ''Congress shall make no law '... abridging the freedom of speech.'' Indeed, the language was explained most succinctly by Justice Hugo Black in Smith v. California: ''I read 'no law . . . abridging' to mean no law abridging.''

While the court has distinguished ''fighting words,'' criminal threats and other narrow categories, it does not bestow the government the open right to strip protection of speech that it deems ''hateful.'' Indeed, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Court struck down an Ohio law prohibiting public speech that was deemed as promoting illegal conduct. It supported the right of the KKK to speak even though it is a hateful organization. Likewise, in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul in 2011, it struck down a ban on any symbol that ''arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.'' Finally in Snyder v. Phelps in 2011, the Court said that the hateful protests of Westboro Baptist Church were protected.

Sen. Cardin seems to be channeling the European view of free speech. That is also concerning given the growing anti-free speech movement in the country.

We have been discussing efforts by figures like Hillary Clinton to enlist European countries to force Twitter to restore censorship rules. Unable to rely on corporate censorship or convince users to embrace censorship, Clinton and others are resorting to good old-fashioned state censorship, even asking other countries to censor the speech of American citizens. It is an easy case to make given the long criminalization of speech in countries like France, Germany, and England.

This view is being reinforced on campuses where almost half of students believe, like Sen. Cardin, that hate speech is not protected by the Constitution.

As someone who was raised in a liberal Democratic family in Chicago, I do not know when the party went from being the defender of free speech to its most determined nemesis. However, with demands for censorship and the all-out war on Twitter, the Democratic party seems to have crossed the Rubicon on the First Amendment. That leaves many liberals (particularly classical liberals) and independents in a growing bind.

Many of us view free speech as our defining American right. This coming year is likely to see a further escalation in the fight for free speech from the Supreme Court (in the 303 Creative case) to our campuses. Some college presidents have declared that even ''disingenuous'' speech is not entitled to protection.

Sen. Cardin is a lawyer but appears to hold an extraconstitutional view of free speech. His view of the First Amendment is not simply flawed but dangerous at a time when we are engaged in an existential fight for free speech.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:31

The Department of Justice is trying to prevent disclosure of 400 pages of sensitive documents on Hunter and Jim Biden's dealings with China, Russia and Ukraine '' by pretending they don't exist.

Colorado lawyer Kevin Evans sued the department in March after it failed to comply with his request for records on the Bidens' dealings under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Evans, a FOIA expert, asked for documents pertaining to 'any relationship, communication, gift(s), and/or remuneration in any form' between the president's son Hunter or brother Jim, and China, Russia or Ukraine.

He said government lawyers first admitted in court to having at least 400 pages of 'potentially relevant' documents '' but are now trying to get away with saying they can 'neither confirm nor deny' the existence of any records that match his request.

The DoJ is trying to prevent disclosure of 400 pages of sensitive documents on Hunter and uncle Jim Biden's dealings with China, Russia and Ukraine, DailyMail.com can reveal

Colorado lawyer Kevin Evans sued the department in March after it failed to comply with his request for records on the Bidens dealings under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

A Justice Department prosecutor, David Weiss, is currently considering a criminal case against Hunter with potential allegations of money laundering, illegal foreign lobbying and tax crimes in relation to the First Son's overseas business dealings.

The 400 pages are not the only cache of Biden records being sought from the government.

The National Archives and Records Administration is preparing to release hundreds of Obama White House internal documents containing information about Hunter's relationship with controversial Ukrainian gas company Burisma, Business Insider reported this month.

Joe Biden was vice president at the time, with responsibility for relations with Ukraine. His son was serving on the board of Burisma, getting paid $83,000 per month.

Biden's administration is able to veto the release, but must decide by February whether to invoke executive privilege to keep them hidden until 2029.

The records date back to 2014 and include 69 images and 260 email messages mentioning Burisma.

Evans' case has its next hearing in January.

The Greenwood Village, Colorado-based lawyer said he filed his FOIA request in November 2020 after reading about the Bidens' overseas business dealings, and the Justice Department strung him along for almost two years before he eventually sued them.

'They eventually produced about 60 pages of documents, but they're all letters from senators and congressmen asking about Hunter, and letters from DoJ back,' he said.

'Then towards the end of last year they said, ''well we have these 400 pages of potentially responsive documents, we need to review them.''

'In March I filed suit, and before Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty they made the same representation: they've done a thorough search, they've uncovered 400 potentially responsive documents.'

Evans said in his suit that he filed his FOIA request in November 2020 after reading about the Bidens' overseas business dealings, and the Justice Department strung him along for almost two years before he eventually sued them

Evans said the government dithered for a few more months, then made a confusing new argument: that they could 'neither confirm nor deny' the existence of any records.

Government agencies have a legal precedent to make such claims to avoid disclosures that could harm national security.

The precedent dates back to a 1975 Los Angeles Times story about a salvage ship secretly built by the CIA to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

The paper filed a FOIA request about it and the agency responded that it could 'neither confirm nor deny' it had records about the ship, USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer. The response, upheld by courts, became known as a 'Glomar response'.

'I don't know how the heck they now can take the take the position that Glomar is applicable,' Evans said. 'To me, it seems the cat's out of the bag here after having disclosed the documents exist.'

But the attorney thinks the government will try to avoid disclosure of the papers even so.

While Biden was vice president, Hunter was serving on the board of controversial Ukrainian gas company Burisma, getting paid $83,000 per month

Justice Department prosecutor, David Weiss, is considering a criminal case against Hunter with potential allegations of money laundering, illegal foreign lobbying and tax crimes

'I'm quite confident that they will move for summary judgment on the privacy exemptions under FOIA in an effort to avoid having to produce these documents,' he said.

'But I don't think they should in this instance, particularly when they've disclosed and put on the record that potentially responsive documents exist.

'The problem is, FOIA has become a toothless vehicle. Courts do not comply with the spirit of the law, they're more inclined to bend over backwards to accept the government's position rather than force disclosure.'

Emails from Hunter's abandoned laptop obtained by DailyMail.com, and testimony from whistleblowers, shows he was involved in a multi-million-dollar deal with a Chinese oil giant closely linked to the Chinese government.

Bank records show Hunter's Chinese business partners transferred $10million to their joint venture.

And emails, texts, and accounts from whistleblowers suggest Joe was aware of the deal, and may have even been involved.

The most infamous example is a 2017 email from one of Hunter's business partners, James Gilliar, who suggests that Hunter would hold 10% of the equity in the deal on behalf of 'the big guy' '' reference to his father.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:28

The airline industry is long overdue for a tech overhaul that takes full advantage of the cloud and data integration, analysts say

Updated Jan. 2, 2023 2:33 pm ETThe Southwest Airlines Co. meltdown that stranded thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year exposed a major industry shortcoming: crew-scheduling technology that was largely built for a bygone era and is due for a major overhaul.

...

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The Southwest Airlines Co. meltdown that stranded thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year exposed a major industry shortcoming: crew-scheduling technology that was largely built for a bygone era and is due for a major overhaul.

Southwest relies on crew-assignment software called SkySolver, an off-the-shelf application that it has customized and updated, but is nearing the end of its life, according to the airline. The program was developed decades ago and is now owned by General Electric Co.

During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work, executives of the Dallas-based carrier said.

Southwest's software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with hub-and-spoke networks, Southwest planes hopscotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor.

Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say.

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Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft. The airline sector has been among the slowest to adopt cloud-based and analytics technologies that could help solve complicated transportation network problems, those analysts say.

Airline operations software historically has lagged behind other technologies because, in part, a small number of providers build dedicated systems that can handle the scale of a major airline like Southwest, said Tim Crawford, a CIO strategic adviser at enterprise IT advisory firm AVOA.

The global airline IT market generated $21.2 billion in revenue in 2019, market research firm Frost & Sullivan said, and leaders include Amadeus IT Group SA, International Business Machines Corp. , and Sabre Corp. , formed in 1960 through a joint initiative between American Airlines Group Inc. and IBM.

Partnerships with cloud providers like Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud and Amazon.com Inc.'s

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Dr. Edward Rothberg, chief scientist of Gurobi Optimization LLC, a startup that develops mathematical optimization software used by carriers including Air France-KLM , said Southwest's hopscotched ''point-to-point'' model'--rather than the hub-and-spoke model'--greatly increases the difficulty of the problem, requiring more computational power than its current systems are likely able to handle.

Much of the complexity behind airline-operations technology stems from the many real-time data points and constraints a single system must take into account, including federal regulations, weather, crew status and location, and aircraft maintenance and routing, said Jahan Alamzad, an airline analyst at consulting firm CA Advisors.

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Mr. Alamzad said the most serious IT challenge airlines face stems from the applications developed in silos by vendors or the airlines themselves. When carriers upgrade to newer analytics software to improve the routing of their aircraft, for example, those systems aren't connected with software they use to manage the crew who work those flights.

While that lack of connection isn't usually a problem in airlines' day-to-day operations, it can become disastrous during severe disruptions like the holiday storm, Mr. Alamzad said.

In Southwest's case, SkySolver works well during more typical disruptions, but didn't during the ''extreme circumstances'' of the past week's storm, Lauren Woods, the airline's vice president of technology platforms and incoming chief information officer, said Thursday.

Southwest Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan said that while the carrier has good systems in some areas, those systems still need ''better intelligence to talk to each other.'' For instance, he said ''The Baker,'' an optimization system developed by Southwest to automate disruption recovery and select flights to cancel, needs ''better visibility'' into its crew-scheduling systems.

Airlines generally have done a better job of maintenance and repair operations, but are much further behind in ''the human aspect'' of matching up crews, equipment, and passengers, said

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R ''Ray'' Wang, founder and principal analyst at IT consulting firm Constellation Research Inc.

Updating technology systems is particularly challenging for air carriers because of the business and operations risk of taking down a system, which can include grounded planes or stranded passengers, Mr. Crawford said.

Southwest recently completed an upgrade of its new reservation system and had been working through multiyear upgrades to systems used in its operations. But it had focused on maintenance and ground operations ahead of crew scheduling, said Southwest's Mr. Watterson. ''At the time that seemed like a proper sequence,'' he said.

Other carriers have given priority to upgrading customer-facing reservations platforms and flier loyalty programs over operations systems, Mr. Alamzad said.

Mr. Jordan said Southwest's meltdown may push forward some of its operations modernization. ''I cannot imagine that this doesn't drive changes to the plan,'' he said. ''It's the pace, maybe the level of spending. There may be a change in order of priority.''

'--Alison Sider contributed to this article.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:24

Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Cost-of-living payments are coming in various ways in the coming months

By Kevin Peachey

Cost of living correspondent

Eight million people receiving benefits and on low incomes will receive their £900 cost-of-living payments in three instalments, the government has said.

The first payment of £301 will be made in the spring, with a second of £300 in the autumn and a final £299 instalment in the spring of 2024.

Exact dates are yet to be finalised, but ministers said the money would help households with high energy bills.

A £400 discount for all energy billpayers looks set to end by April.

Charities have called on the government to do more to protect vulnerable households from soaring costs, claiming that support had not improved for those already struggling.

The government also confirmed that a £150 cost-of-living payment would automatically go to those with disabilities during the summer, and a further £300 payment would be paid to pensioners during the winter of 2023-24.

Cost-of-living payments have provided additional support for more vulnerable households, or those with higher energy costs, since the summer. The government also set a cap on the unit price of energy for households, which means the typical household pays £2,500 a year. This will rise to £3,000 a year when the cap is reset in April.

However, the universal £400 discount, which is being paid in monthly instalments over this winter is not expected to be continued.

Myron Jobson, senior personal finance analyst at Interactive Investor, said: "The various cost-of-living support schemes and measures past and present have and will help to ease the inflationary crunch on budgets - but most have a shelf life.

"It remains important to have a comprehensive understanding of your financial position and make the necessary adjustments to ensure that your financial position holds strong long after the cost-of-living measures expire."

Fuel poverty campaigners have argued that support for the most vulnerable people has not increased on what was announced last year.

"In fact, with the end of the Energy Bills Support Scheme looming, households will be worse off than they were this winter," said Simon Francis, co-ordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition..

"The government must go further to help the millions of homes in fuel poverty throughout 2023."

Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said: "We are sticking by our promise to protect the most vulnerable and these payments, worth hundreds of pounds, will provide vital support next year for those on the lowest incomes."

A survey for charity Nesta suggested that concerns about higher energy bills had pushed almost all households in the UK to try to save energy in at least one way, but many did not know which cut their bills the most.

The charity has a guide to turning down the boiler flow temperature on a combi boiler to save energy.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:07

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The Covid omicron XBB.1.5 variant is rapidly becoming dominant in the U.S. because it is highly immune evasive and appears more effective at binding to cells than related subvariants, scientists say.

XBB.1.5 now represents about 41% of new cases nationwide in the U.S., nearly doubling in prevalence over the past week, according to the data published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The subvariant more than doubled as a share of cases every week through Dec. 24. In the past week, it nearly doubled from 21.7% prevalence.

Scientists and public health officials have been closely monitoring the XBB subvariant family for months because the strains have many mutations that could render the Covid-19 vaccines, including the omicron boosters, less effective and cause even more breakthrough infections.

XBB was first identified in India in August. It quickly become dominant there, as well as in Singapore. It has since evolved into a family of subvariants including XBB.1 and XBB.1.5.

Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, said XBB.1.5 is different from its family members because it has an additional mutation that makes it bind better to cells.

"The virus needs to bind tightly to cells to be more efficient at getting in and that could help the virus be a little bit more efficient at infecting people," Pekosz said.

Yunlong Richard Cao, a scientist and assistant professor at Peking University, published data on Twitter Tuesday that indicated XBB.1.5 not only evades protective antibodies as effectively as the XBB.1 variant, which was highly immune evasive, but also is better at binding to cells through a key receptor.

Scientists at Columbia University, in a study published earlier this month in the journal Cell, warned that the rise of subvariants such as XBB could "further compromise the efficacy of current COVID-19 vaccines and result in a surge of breakthrough infections as well as re-infections."

The XBB subvariants are also resistant to Evusheld, an antibody cocktail that many people with weak immune systems rely on for protection against Covid infection because they don't mount a strong response to the vaccines.

The scientists described the resistance of the XBB subvariants to antibodies from vaccination and infection as "alarming." The XBB subvariants were even more effective at dodging protection from the omicron boosters than the BQ subvariants, which are also highly immune evasive, the scientists found.

Dr. David Ho, an author on the Columbia study, agreed with the other scientists that XBB.1.5 probably has a growth advantage because it binds better to cells than its XBB relatives. Ho also said XBB.1.5 is about as immune evasive as XBB and XBB.1, which were two of the subvariants most resistant to protective antibodies from infection and vaccination so far.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is leaving his role as White House chief medical advisor, has previously said that the XBB subvariants reduce the protection the boosters provide against infection "multifold."

"You could expect some protection, but not the optimal protection," Fauci told reporters during a White House briefing in November.

Fauci said he was encouraged by the case of Singapore, which had a major surge of infections from XBB but did not see hospitalizations rise at the same rate. Pekosz said XBB.1.5, in combination with holiday travel, could cause cases to rise in the U.S. But he said the boosters appear to be preventing severe disease.

"It does look like the vaccine, the bivalent booster is providing continued protection against hospitalization with these variants," Pekosz said. "It really emphasizes the need to get a booster particularly into vulnerable populations to provide continued protection from severe disease with these new variants."

Health officials in the U.S. have repeatedly called on the elderly in particular to make sure they are up to date on their vaccines and get treated with the antiviral Paxlovid if they have a breakthrough infection.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 22:21

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which screens foreign investments in the U.S. for national security risks, is by multiple accounts in conversation with the social media platform TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance. Little is publicly known about these conversations, but media reports indicate that CFIUS and TikTok are discussing a deal that would address U.S. government security concerns while also allowing TikTok to keep operating in the U.S. without sale by its parent ByteDance.

As this saga plays out behind closed doors, some members of Congress are pursuing a different approach. On Dec. 13, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), along with House members Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), introduced a new bill to ban TikTok and ByteDance from operating in the United States. There has been some bipartisan consensus around TikTok-related issues, but Democratic co-sponsorship is notable, as Republicans have on the whole been more vocal in calling for a complete ban. The members titled the bill the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act'--or the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act , for short. The bill's stated purpose is ''to protect Americans from the threat posed by certain foreign adversaries using current or potential future social media companies that those foreign adversaries control to surveil Americans, learn sensitive data about Americans, or spread influence campaigns, propaganda, and censorship.''

In several ways, the bill contributes to the risk assessment landscape around foreign technology companies. It defines terms such as ''entity of concern'' and establishes a list of criteria that would indicate a foreign social media platform is unduly subject to a foreign adversarial government's control. It also lists countries of concern beyond China, including Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.

The bill has several concerning components. While it describes particular risks associated with foreign social media platforms'--including the ability for a foreign government to compel a firm to hand over data or compel a company to modify its content moderation practices'--it is not clear the bill and its writers are building a policy that allows for a more nuanced risk assessment that translates into adaptable policy responses. Instead, the bill proposes a template, one-size-fits-all approach'--a complete ban'--to foreign social media companies identified as a security risk under the criteria. Notably, the bill would also circumvent an executive action limitation meant to constrain the president from overreaching in banning information-related transactions.

All told, it is a noteworthy piece of legislation, and it delineates between the risk of data access and the risk of content manipulation better than then-President Trump's executive order on TikTok. But it raises many questions about how the U.S. government should approach concerns about foreign social media platforms and national security'--and how the U.S. government should be able to respond to potential risks. In addition to clearly defining a problem and distinguishing between distinct security risks, a remaining imperative for legislators and policymakers is developing risk frameworks that are precise, nuanced, and compatible with a suite of tailored policy responses.

Invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act

This new bill has many provisions, but at its core, it directs the president of the United States to effectively ban certain foreign social media companies from operating in the United States'--explicitly specified herein as ByteDance and TikTok. Based on how the legislation is more broadly written, the call for a ban could theoretically expand in the future to cover other foreign social media platforms deemed to be a risk to U.S. national security (the bill's determination process for this status is discussed below). Calling for this action means rehashing, once more, one of the Trump administration's most infamous, and failed , tech policy actions: attempting to ban TikTok in the United States.

The bill states that 30 days after the bill is enacted, the president will use their powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to ''the extent necessary to block and prohibit all transactions in all property and interests of property of a social media company'' as laid out in the bill. IEEPA, as explained by law professor Bobby Chesney , essentially allows the president to impose sanctions and embargoes on foreign entities when the president deems there is a ''national emergency'' with U.S. interests at stake. Trump invoked this authority in August 2020 when he issued executive orders to ban TikTok and WeChat in the United States. (Multiple courts subsequently overturned these actions , and the Biden administration withdrew the orders in July 2021.)

In this case, the bill would exempt the president from 50 U.S.C. § 1701 and § 1702(b) of the IEEPA, meaning that the president would not have to declare a national emergency before invoking IEEPA (which is required under § 1701)'--and would not be constrained by the prohibitions (under § 1702(b)) on regulating the import or export of information or informational materials, among others. The former exemption is not surprising, because the bill's very premise is that certain social media platforms pose risks to national security through their U.S. operations. The latter exemption is more notable. IEEPA is written explicitly to have limitations. By not constraining the president by 50 U.S.C. § 1702(b), the bill would circumvent IEEPA's clear limitation on the president regulating or prohibiting, directly or indirectly, the importation or exportation ''whether commercial or otherwise, regardless of format or medium of transmission, of any information or informational materials.'' Social media platforms could arguably fall under this definition, which makes circumventing the limitation all the more significant and potentially concerning. If Congress does pass this bill, that would indicate a legislative belief that TikTok's security risks make it necessary to bypass the IEEPA constraint.

According to the bill, for a social media company to qualify for this blocking and prohibition, it must satisfy at least one of the following (paraphrased) criteria:

The company is domiciled, headquartered, or has its principal place of business in or is organized under the laws of a ''country of concern.'' A country and/or entity of concern directly or indirectly owns, ''controls with the ability to decide important matters,'' or holds 10 percent or more of the company's voting shares or stocks. The company uses software or algorithms that are controlled, or whose export is controlled, by a country or entity of concern. A country or entity of concern can substantially, directly or indirectly influence the company to (a) share data on U.S. citizens or (b) modify its content moderation practices. The bill explicitly states that ByteDance and TikTok are ''deemed companies'' that satisfy these criteria.

Defining Undue National Security Risks (Though Not in Those Words)

On top of designating ByteDance and TikTok as deemed companies, the bill defines a ''country of concern'' and an ''entity of concern'' in a way that could enable additional, future applications of this IEEPA social media platform ban. Notably, the bill is not just looking to compel executive action against ByteDance and TikTok. It would also establish a set of definitions and criteria against which other foreign social media companies could be compared in the future. As U.S. policy around foreign technology companies, products, and services evolves, these contributions to the risk assessment landscape illuminate policymaker thinking on identifying and mitigating risks. The bill would also effectively set a precedent by which the president bans a foreign social media platform on national security grounds, using IEEPA but without some of its constraints.

To define a ''country of concern,'' the bill points to the term ''foreign adversary'' in the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019 . According to that 2019 legislation, a foreign adversary is defined as ''any foreign government or foreign non-government person engaged in a long-term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or security and safety of United States persons.'' In this respect, the bill explicitly names the People's Republic of China (including the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau), Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. These countries are also frequently named as foreign adversaries in U.S. policy documents and legislative proposals around risks to national security.

In turn, the definition for ''entity of concern'' covers a wide range of scenarios. This definition includes the armed forces, the leading political party, or a governmental body at any level in a ''country of concern.'' It also includes:

(D) an individual who is a national of a country of concern and is domiciled and living in a country of concern, and who is subject to substantial influence, directly or indirectly, from a country of concern; or

(E) a private business or a state-owned enterprise domiciled in a country of concern or owned or controlled by a private business or state-owned enterprise domiciled in a country of concern.

From a national security risk perspective, some of this appears reasonable. Of course, if an entity in question is literally part of the armed forces of a country of concern to U.S. national security, it creates or heightens the risk that said entity will use its access to or control over a technology platform to assist with its own country's national security objectives. Many recent U.S. sanctions and other restrictions, for example, have targeted Russian and Chinese companies because of the ties they have to the Russian and Chinese militaries. If those militaries themselves had control over or substantial access to a social media platform, it would raise a number of important security questions. The same clear risk is present with entities that are part of a foreign political party or a foreign government, and this is especially true if that entity is a security agency.

The reference to individuals subject to ''substantial influence, directly or indirectly, from a country of concern'' likewise appears reasonable on its face. There are certainly foreign countries where law enforcement agencies or intelligence services are known to place intense, coercive pressure on individuals at technology companies to compel them to hand over information, to cooperate with the state on an ongoing basis, or even to send a message to company leadership. For example, in the fall of 2021, the Russian government demanded that Apple and Google delete opposition leader Alexey Navalny's voting app from their app stores, ahead of nationwide Russian elections. When the companies refused, the Kremlin sent masked thugs to sit around the Google Moscow office with guns, the Russian parliament called in company representatives and gave them lists of local employees who would be hauled off to jail, and the Federal Security Service, Russia's domestic security agency and the KGB's successor, went to the home of the top Google executive in Russia and then chased her to a second location. Sure enough, both companies reversed course and complied with Moscow's demand.

A definition that includes ''substantial influence'' speaks to real, high-risk intelligence and law enforcement activities in countries like Russia and China. Nonetheless, the proposal begs the question of how broadly this definition should be applied. There are many different scenarios in which it is arguably possible that a foreign government could exert substantial influence over someone at a foreign tech company. But possible does not equal probable , and part of a risk assessment is working to identify scenarios in which a harmful outcome is more likely. There are millions of people working in China's technology sector, for example'--which means that a policymaker assessing the risk of substantial Chinese government influence over a person or company must think through how to distinguish between higher-risk and lower-risk scenarios. It is not clear in the bill whether the legislation's authors have such a framework in mind. Taken literally, though, the bill's definition here suggests that the mere possibility of a foreign government's substantial influence over a foreign person or social media company'--when the company operates in the United States at a certain scale'--is enough to compel a U.S. national security action.

Additionally, the last part of this definition, referring to private businesses in countries of concern, speaks to a broader policy question that U.S. policymakers must attempt to answer. State-owned enterprises are one risk category. They are controlled by a foreign government, and the government is clearly and actively involved in managing the enterprise. This direct state ownership also suggests the company would be more cooperative with that state's law enforcement and intelligence agencies than an enterprise with no state affiliation, even if that private enterprise had limited room to push back. However, the inclusion of private businesses in this list begs the question of whether some policymakers'--such as Rubio and Gallagher'--perceive that a private technology company in China can exist in the global market at all without creating undue national security risks. I do not have the answer to this question. And it seems many policymakers don't, either. The relationship between economic security and national security policy is a point of frequent debate, as is the relationship between technological protection and economic security . Yet the new bill puts front and center the importance of policymakers articulating some kind of position on this question: Is a private technology company's existence in China sufficient to create an undue national security risk?

Other definitions in the bill put some constraints on its scope. For example, a ''social media company'' as defined in the bill is scoped to companies that have more than 1 million monthly active users ''for a majority of months during the preceding 12 months.'' The fact remains, though, that by this bill's definition, any private business that is ''domiciled in a country of concern'' (or owned by another private business that is) would be considered an ''entity of concern.'' WeChat, the subject of the Trump administration's second executive order on a foreign platform, is not explicitly listed in the bill alongside TikTok and ByteDance. While the company by some reports has millions of active U.S. users , it is not entirely clear whether WeChat could fall under the bill's definition of a social media company.

Distinguishing Between Distinct Security Risks

As I have written previously for Lawfare , a persistent problem with the Trump administration's TikTok executive order and other, subsequent proposals around foreign apps is the blurring together of distinct security risks. With TikTok, for instance, one can imagine several different risks that impact the security landscape, including the risk of data collection on U.S. government employees, the risk of data collection on non-government-employed U.S. individuals, the risk of TikTok censoring information in China at Beijing's behest, the risk of TikTok censoring information beyond China at Beijing's behest, and the risk of disinformation spreading on TikTok. In this bill, the top-line statement describes several risks associated with foreign social media companies: The governments that influence those companies surveilling Americans, learning sensitive data about Americans, and spreading influence campaigns, propaganda, and censorship.

The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act does a somewhat better job in articulating risks than the Trump executive order. In the bill's top-line statement, it lists risks, but they are clustered together and not clearly defined. For example, the supposed difference between a social platform ''surveilling Americans'' and a social platform ''learning sensitive data about Americans'' is unspecified. Perhaps the distinction is driven by the term ''learning'''--in one interpretation, suggesting that the former is gathering raw data, and the latter is using algorithms to derive sensitive information about people'--but that is not clear. The top-line statement also clusters together ''spreading influence campaigns, propaganda, and censorship,'' which similarly should be broken out.

The bill improves on this later, when describing the aforementioned four criteria for a company to be of concern. The bill clearly breaks out (a) the risk of a company sharing or being compelled to share data with a government or entity of concern and (b) the risk of a company having its content moderation practices substantially influenced by a government or entity of concern.

This is important, because failing to clearly distinguish between alleged security risks is a problem for several reasons. First, the risks are different. A foreign government requiring a company to hand over data on particular foreign users is different from that government using the platform to algorithmically push pro-regime content'--which is also different from that government requiring the platform to take down regime-critical speech, and so on. Articulating a security reasoning requires distinguishing between these different risks. The more the U.S. government conducts reviews of foreign investment, technology, data, and other issues, the more important articulating a security reasoning becomes to allow public scrutiny of decisions, to convey to companies a belief in greater accountability, and to help minimize the risk that decisions are made politically without substantive national security justifications.

Second, failing to properly distinguish between the risks suggests a failure to conduct a rigorous risk assessment. This is not necessarily to say there is no risk associated with TikTok's widespread use in the United States, for example, but to say that risk is a matter of likelihood (how likely a scenario is to happen, contingent on factors like an actor's opportunity , capability , and intent ) and severity (how bad it would be if said scenario happened). The likelihood of a foreign government requiring a foreign platform to hand over large data sets could be different from the likelihood of that government requiring that platform to continuously censor content. Breaking out the risks allows for a more granular analysis. It also enables analysts to create, if applicable, a priority order of risk. Perhaps one risk is far more likely than the others, and the response should thus be designed around addressing that outsized risk. In this way, the bill does a better job than Trump's TikTok order in clearly separating out, in the list of its four prohibition criteria, the risk of government-compelled data access and the risk of government-compelled content manipulation.

Perhaps most importantly, part of distinguishing between risks in policy is linking specific mitigation actions to specific risks at hand, and this is one place where the bill could be greatly improved. If the proposed policy solutions are not calibrated to the risks, they may not achieve the desired results. Take the example of a complete ban on TikTok in the United States (temporarily setting aside speech and other concerns). That action would not impact every possible security risk in the same way. There is no other major, Chinese-based social media platform in the U.S. with TikTok's reach. If a ban was instituted, that would certainly change the risk landscape vis-a-vis content censorship, because American citizens would not be able to use TikTok in the United States. Similarly, it would arguably change the risk landscape vis-a-vis TikTok algorithmically promoting Chinese government-favorable content.

However, that same action (a ban) would not meaningfully change the data risk landscape. TikTok does collect volumes of data on its users (much like every other social media platform), but the United States's incredibly weak data privacy and security regulations mean a vast amount of information on Americans'--from political preferences and demographic information to real-time GPS data and data on military personnel '--is widely available for purchase on the open market. The Chinese government has many vectors through which it can gather data on Americans, including data brokers, software development kits, real-time bidding networks for online ads, and more'--not to mention scraping and hacking data, too. Put simply, banning TikTok won't protect Americans' sensitive data . Just because a policy action could work for one risk or set of risks does not mean it works for them all.

Nowhere in the bill does it allow for particular actions to be taken in response to particular risks. The bill proposes what is effectively a template, static response'--a complete ban'--to a foreign platform in the United States where the platform and its use meet the listed security criteria. This raises the question of whether a one-size-fits-all approach to distinct content moderation, data privacy, and other risks is most appropriate and most sustainable over the long term. One could imagine, for example, a different policy framework that has a spectrum of possible responses to foreign platform security risks, such as a ban in some cases where risk mitigation measures are deemed to be wholly insufficient'--and in others, some kind of middle ground that imposes a set of unique content or security requirements on a company.

Conclusion

The Biden administration, to its credit, had begun to move away from the Trump administration's dysfunctional and legally overturned approach to TikTok. On June 9, 2021, Biden signed Executive Order 14034, entitled Protecting Americans' Sensitive Data From Foreign Adversaries . The order revoked Executive Orders 13942 (the so-called TikTok ban) and 13943 (the so-called WeChat ban). It also revoked Executive Order 13971 , which Trump signed on Jan. 5, 2021, just before leaving office to prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with Chinese companies Alipay, CamScanner, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, WeChat Pay, and WPS Office, citing concerns they could ''permit China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors'' and ''build dossiers of personal information'' by gathering data that Beijing could access. Importantly, the June 2021 Biden executive order stated explicitly that ''the Federal Government should evaluate these threats through rigorous, evidence-based analysis and should address any unacceptable or undue risks consistent with overall national security, foreign policy, and economic objectives, including the preservation and demonstration of America's core values and fundamental freedoms.''

Simultaneously, CFIUS and other security review bodies appear to be conducting more and more reviews as there are concerns raised as well about national security creep in cross-border investment reviews. CFIUS's reported conversations with TikTok are another example of how the interagency committee might consider mitigation agreements that allow a particular company to describe how it has addressed security risks, rather than outright forcing companies to undo transactions. Concerns about national security creep are valid and especially important to ask in a democracy. In tandem, the individuals involved in those reviews should have a great interest in transparency, accountability, and targeted risk assessment. After all, a risk framework that says the risk to the United States is the same for every single company in a given country (such as China), for example, does not help to identify the most urgent cases for review'--or the places where action is not needed and could unnecessarily consume limited security review resources.

This is why this bill is so significant. Not only does it propose to reattempt the Trump administration's ban on TikTok, while concerningly skipping around limitations on IEEPA, but it also lays out a set of definitions and criteria that could be applied to other foreign social media platforms in the future. Security concerns about foreign technology companies are clearly not going away, which means it is all the more imperative for legislators and their staff to design substantive, nuanced risk assessment frameworks that help distinguish between real security risks and situations where risks are conflated and responses are not properly tailored.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 20:44

The virus appears to be evolving in ways that evade immunity.

Public-health experts are sounding the alarm about a new Omicron variant dubbed XBB that is rapidly spreading across the Northeast U.S. Some studies suggest it is as different from the original Covid strain from Wuhan as the 2003 SARS virus. Should Americans be worried?

It isn't clear that XBB is any more lethal than other variants, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection and vaccines as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments. Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations...

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Public-health experts are sounding the alarm about a new Omicron variant dubbed XBB that is rapidly spreading across the Northeast U.S. Some studies suggest it is as different from the original Covid strain from Wuhan as the 2003 SARS virus. Should Americans be worried?

It isn't clear that XBB is any more lethal than other variants, but its mutations enable it to evade antibodies from prior infection and vaccines as well as existing monoclonal antibody treatments. Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus's rapid evolution.

Prior to Omicron's emergence in November 2021, there were only four variants of concern: Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma. Only Alpha and Delta caused surges of infections globally. But Omicron has begotten numerous descendents, many of which have popped up in different regions of the world curiously bearing some of the same mutations.

''Such rapid and simultaneous emergence of multiple variants with enormous growth advantages is unprecedented,'' a Dec. 19 study in the journal Nature notes. Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection.

The same study posits that immune imprinting may be contributing to the viral evolution. Vaccines do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out the original Wuhan variant. But when new and markedly different strains come along, the immune system responds less effectively.

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Bivalent vaccines that target the Wuhan and BA.5 variants (or breakthrough infections with the latter) prompt the immune system to produce antibodies that target viral regions the two strains have in common. In Darwinian terms, mutations that allow the virus to evade common antibodies win out'--they make it ''fitter.''

XBB has evolved to elude antibodies induced by the vaccines and breakthrough infections. Hence, the Nature study suggests, ''current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.''

A New England Journal of Medicine study published last month provides more evidence of the vulnerability caused by immune imprinting. Neutralizing antibodies of people who had received the bivalent were 26 times as high against the original Wuhan variant as they were against XBB and four times as high as they were against Omicron and the BA.5 variant.

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Similarly, a study this month in the journal Cell found that antibody levels of people who had received four shots were 145 times as high against the original Wuhan strain as the XBB variant. A bivalent booster only slightly increased antibodies against XBB. Experts nevertheless claim that boosters improve protection against XBB. That's disinformation, to use their favored term.

A Cleveland Clinic study that tracked its healthcare workers found that bivalent vaccines reduced the risk of getting infected by 30% while the BA.5 variant was spreading. But, as the study explained, the reason might be that workers who were more cautious'--i.e., more likely to wear N95 masks and avoid large gatherings'--may have also been more likely to get boosted.

Notably, workers who had received more doses were at higher risk of getting sick. Those who received three more doses were 3.4 times as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated, while those who received two were only 2.6 times as likely.

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''This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19,'' the authors noted. ''We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination, and in addition to a vaccine's effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.''

Two years ago, vaccines were helpful in reducing severe illness, particularly among the elderly and those with health risks like diabetes and obesity. But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.

It might not be a coincidence that XBB surged this fall in Singapore, which has among the highest vaccination and booster rates in the world. Over the past several weeks a XBB strain has become predominant in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, making up about three-quarters of virus samples that have been genetically sequenced. The variant has been slower to take off in other regions, making up only 6% of the Midwest and about 20% in the South. The Northeast is also the most vaccinated and boosted region in the country.

Hospitalizations in the Northeast have risen too, but primarily among those over 70. One reason may be that the T-Cell response'--the cavalry riding behind the front-line antibodies'--is weaker in older people. The virus can't evade T-Cells elicited by vaccines and infections as easily as it can antibodies. Because of T-Cells, younger people are still well-protected against new variants.

Another reason may be that monoclonal antibodies are ineffective against XBB, and many older people who catch Covid can't take the antiviral Paxlovid because they have medical conditions such as severe kidney disease or take drugs that interfere with it.

The Biden administration's monomaniacal focus on vaccines over new treatments has left the highest-risk Americans more vulnerable to new variants. Why doesn't that seem to worry the experts?

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 18:41

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Friday, December 16, 2022

Tim Canova

By Tim CanovaProfessor of Law and Public FinanceNova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of LawWhile there has been much public attention on the U.S. Supreme Court's present consideration of the ''independent state legislature'' theory in Moore v. Harper involving North Carolina's redistricting, that case would not immediately upend the 2020 presidential election. In contrast, a little-known case that appeared recently on the Court docket could do just that. The case of Brunson v. Adams, not even reported in the mainstream media, was filed pro se by ordinary American citizens '' four brothers from Utah '-- seeking the removal of President Biden and Vice President Harris, along with 291 U.S. representatives and 94 U.S. senators who voted to certify the electors to the Electoral College on Jan. 6, 2021 without first investigating serious allegations of election fraud in half a dozen states and foreign election interference and breach of national security in the 2020 presidential election. The outcome of such relief would presumably be to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.The important national security interests implicated in this case allowed the Brunsons to bypass an appeal that was frozen at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit and get the case to the Supreme Court which has now scheduled a hearing for January 6, 2023. The Brunson Petition for a Writ of Certiorari would require the votes of only four justices to move the case forward.It seems astounding that the Court would wade into such waters two years to the day after the Congressional vote to install Joe Biden as president. But these are not normal times. Democrats may well push legislation in this month's lame duck session of Congress to impose term limits and a mandatory retirement age for justices, and thereby open the door to packing the Court. Such a course would seem to be clear violations of Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution which provides that Justices ''shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.'' In addition to such institutional threats to the Supreme Court, several justices and their families have been living under constant threats to their personal security since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.Perhaps these institutional and security threats have provided powerful incentives for the Court to put Brunson v. Adams on its docket as a shield to deter any efforts by the lame duck Congress to infringe on the Court's independence. Or perhaps conservatives on the Court are serious about using the Brunson case as a sword to remove public officials who they believe have violated their constitutional Oaths of office by rubber-stamping electors on Jan. 6th without first conducting any investigation of serious allegations of election fraud and foreign election interference.Moreover, recent weeks have brought a cascade of news suggesting the likelihood of an impending constitutional crisis that could be difficult to resolve without the Court's intervention. It is now clear that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was colluding with social media giants Twitter and Facebook to censor news of Hunter Biden's laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election '' a most egregious First Amendment violation intended to rig the election outcome and perhaps to install an unaccountable and criminal puppet government. Meanwhile, the Jan. 6 committee may soon send a criminal referral to the Justice Department to arrest President Trump even though his reinstated tweets are a reminder that he was not calling for insurrection but for peaceful protest on Jan. 6. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was reportedly working with Big Tech to censor election critics.Supreme Court justices may well see these approaching storm clouds and conclude that the Court's intervention is necessary to prevent larger civil unrest resulting from constitutional violations that are undermining public trust and confidence in the outcomes of both the 2020 and 2022 elections. When they break the Constitution '-- the supreme law of the land '-- to rig an election, the only recourse may be the Supreme Court or military tribunals.As the Brunson lawsuit argues, all of Congress was put on notice prior to its January 6th vote by more than a hundred of its own members detailing serious allegations of election frauds and calling for creation of an electoral commission to investigate the allegations.Moreover, the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was required to submit a report on foreign threats to the 2020 Presidential election by December 18, 2020. That deadline was set by executive order and by Congress itself. When December 18th came and went without ODNI submitting its report, Congress should have started asking questions and investigating. In fact, DNI John Ratcliffe announced on that day that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies he was overseeing had found evidence of foreign election interference but were split as to its significance and whether such breach of national security was sufficient to overturn the outcome of the election. And yet there was no action whatsoever by Congress, no inquiry and no investigation. Instead, Congress approved the possibly fraudulent election results on Jan. 6 without asking any questions of the DNI and the Intelligence Community.When the results of the 1876 presidential election were in doubt, Congress created a special Electoral Commission made up of five House members, five Senators, and five Supreme Court Justices to investigate. In contrast, in early 2021 Congress had nearly two weeks to investigate before the January 20th date of the presidential inauguration. Had Congress waited even just one more day to Jan. 7, they would have received the long-awaited ODNI report reflecting a split in the Intelligence Community and the DNI's own conclusion that the People's Republic of China had interfered to influence the outcome of the presidential election.As Dr. Barry A. Zulauf, the Analytic Ombudsman for the Intelligence Community, concluded at the time, the Intelligence Community shamefully delayed their findings until after the January 6th Electoral College certification by Congress because of their political disagreements with the Trump administration. This paints a picture of collusion and conspiracy involving members of Congress and U.S. intelligence agencies to cover up evidence of foreign election interference and constituting the crime of treason.The Brunson lawsuit does not claim the election was stolen, merely that a large majority of Congress, by failing to investigate such serious allegations of election rigging and breaches of national security, violated their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic '' an oath also taken by Supreme Court justices and members of the U.S. military.The fact that the Brunson case has made it to the Court's docket suggests profound concerns about a lawless Jan. 6 congressional committee, politicized federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies and major constitutional violations intended to overthrow an elected government by manipulating the outcome of the presidential election.Tim Canova is a Professor of Law and Public Finance at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law, with broad experience in law teaching, private practice and public policy. He teaches Constitutional Law II: First Amendment Law, Corporations, Business Entities, Regulation of Financial Institutions, and a Seminar on Law, Finance, and Markets at Nova. This column is p ublished with the permission of The Gateway Pundit https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/tim-canova-supreme-court-considers-case-seeking-overturn-2020-presidential-election/ . Search only accepts letters and numbers.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:36

JERUSALEM '-- The Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel National Parks Authority and the City of David Foundation announced days before the new year that the Pool of Siloam, a biblical site cherished by Christians and Jews, will be open to the public for the first time in 2,000 years in the near future.

"The Pool of Siloam's excavation is highly significant to Christians around the world," American Pastor John Hagee, the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, told Fox News Digital. "It was at this site that Jesus healed the blind man (John:9), and it is at this site that, 2,000 years ago, Jewish pilgrims cleansed themselves prior to entering the Second Temple.

"The Pool of Siloam and the Pilgrimage Road, both located within the City of David, are among the most inspiring archeological affirmations of the Bible.

"Christians are deeply blessed by the City of David's work and Israel's enduring commitment to ensuring religious freedom to all who visit and live in the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem '-- the undivided capital of Israel."

'JESUS' FACE' UNCOVERED AT ANCIENT CHURCH IN THE ISRAELI DESERT

Rendering of the Pool of Siloam, Second Temple period (Shalom Kveller, City of David Archives)

Ze'ev Orenstein, the director of international affairs for the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem, told Fox News Digital, "One of most significant sites affirming Jerusalem's Biblical heritage '-- not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact '-- with significance to billions around the world, will be made fully accessible for the first time in 2,000 years."

The Pool of Siloam is situated in the southern portion of the City of David and within the area of the Jerusalem Walls National Park.

CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES DISCOVERED NEAR SEA OF GALILEE, ARCHAEOLOGISTS SAY

A small section of the pool, which has been fully excavated, has been accessible to the public for several years. The vast majority of the pool is being excavated and will either be opened piecemeal or once the entire site is unearthed. The archeological project to fully excavate the pool will last a few years. There is a plan for space for visitors to the pool to view the ongoing excavation.

"Despite ongoing efforts at the United Nations and Palestinian leadership to erase Jerusalem's heritage, in a few years time, the millions of people visiting the City of David annually will literally be able to walk in the footsteps of the Bible, connecting with the roots of their heritage and identity," Orenstein noted.

The Siloam Inscription dating from the eighth century B.C. found in Hezekiah's Tunnel describes in early Hebrew script the drama of digging the tunnel. (Zeev Radovan City of David archives)

The pool was first built roughly 2,700 years ago as part of Jerusalem's water system in the eighth century B.C. The construction unfolded during the reign of King Hezekia as cited in the Bible in the Book of Kings II, 20:20, according to the two Israeli agencies and the City of David Foundation.

According to estimates, the Pool of Siloam passed through many stages of construction and reached the size of 1¼ acres.

"When I think of this news, I think of another phrase from the Hebrew Bible, 'My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you,'" Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, told Fox News Digital.

ANCIENT CITY GATE FROM THE TIME OF KING DAVID DISCOVERED IN ISRAEL

"This news means that one of the most important archeological discoveries in history can soon be seen by visitors from all over the world. It will affirm all they believe. Having faith is part of worshipping God, but faith alone isn't required to believe. There are historic facts attesting to the truth of Scripture."

Moore, who is the on the advisory board of The Combat Antisemitism Movement, added, "In the Pool of Siloam, we find evidence of history preserved for us, revealed at just the right time. This is a truly historic event. Theologically, it affirms Scripture, geographically it affirms history and politically it affirms Israel's unquestionable and unrivaled link to Jerusalem. Some discoveries are theoretical. This one is an undeniable. It is proof of the story of the Bible and of its people, Israel."

Northern perimeter of the Pool of Siloam (Koby Harati, City of David Archives)

A stroke of luck revealed the pool in 2004 when infrastructure work carried out by the Hagihon water company uncovered some of the pool's steps. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), under supervision of professors Roni Reich and Eli Shukron, launched a survey. As a result, the northern perimeter, as well as a small section of the eastern perimeter of the Pool of Siloam, were uncovered.

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"The perimeter of the pool was built as a series of steps, allowing the bathers to sit and immerse themselves in the waters of the pool," according to the IAA.

Mayor of Jerusalem Moshe Lion, said, "The Pool of Siloam in the City of David National Park in Jerusalem is a site of historic, national and international significance. After many years of anticipation, we will soon merit being able to uncover this important site and make it accessible to the millions of visitors visiting Jerusalem each year."

Benjamin Weinthal reports on Israel, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Europe for Fox News Digital. Benjamin has contributed articles to The Wall Street Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, Forbes and The New York Post. You can follow Benjamin on Twitter @BenWeinthal.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:35

Data: MoffettNathanson; Chart: Tory Lysik/Axios Visuals

2022 was one of the hardest years ever for traditional television companies '-- and it's only expected to get worse as the ad market continues to slow and cord-cutting accelerates.

Why it matters: The transition to streaming has wreaked havoc on the business models of major media firms, driving a new wave of consolidation and putting smaller channels' survival at risk.

State of play: Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal are all expected to sell or combine with other media entities in the next few years, in order to give their businesses the scale needed to possibly compete with tech firms like Amazon, Netflix and Google.

Smaller TV companies are also scrambling to adjust. Lionsgate is looking to spin off Starz. Paramount is beginning to bundle Showtime with its primary streaming service. AMC Networks is laying off 20% of its staff. Details: Most challenges plaguing TV giants today stem from the false assumption that streaming would be able to easily make up for linear TV losses.

Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Comcast don't expect their standalone streaming offerings to break even until 2024 or 2025 at least.In the interim, not only is cord-cutting accelerating faster than expected, but so are drops in linear TV viewing broadly, including broadcast.Digital "skinny bundles," like Sling TV or Hulu with Live TV, are not growing enough to make up for the declines regular cable packages. Today, roughly two-thirds of U.S. households pay for a cable, satellite or fiber TV subscription, down from 79% in 2017 and 85% in 2007.Zoom in: Media giants are having a particularly tough time convincing Wall Street that their streaming bets will eventually pay off.

Despite surpassing expectations for new subscribers, Disney's stock cratered to its lowest level in 21 years last quarter, thanks to widening losses in its streaming division. The few firms that have opted not to enter the subscription streaming wars, like Fox Corp., have fared better amongst investors. Data: YCharts; Chart: Tory Lysik/Axios Visuals

Between the lines: The migration of the country's biggest sports rights packages from linear TV networks to streaming will expedite the inevitable collapse of the cable bundle.

The NFL last week said its coveted Sunday Ticket rights package will be awarded to YouTube beginning next season. It's the second major NFL deal to move exclusively to a Big Tech firm, following the NFL's landmark Thursday Night Football deal with Amazon. Google will pay roughly $2 billion a year for the package, up from the roughly $1.5 billion that DirecTV currently pays to distribute the games. Amazon is paying roughly $1 billion annually for Thursday night games, up from the reported $650 million per year that Fox previously paid. The big picture: Today, most media giants are left in limbo, trying desperately to reap what's left of their lucrative linear television businesses while simultaneously investing in their expensive new streaming services.

Nearly every streamer has introduced an ad-supported streaming tier, in an effort to lure more subscribers as competition heats up. Some companies, like Warner Bros. Discovery, are beginning to license more of their programs to other TV distributors, after initially hoarding their own content to boost their own standalone services. Go deeper:

Investors sour on streaming growth without profitSports is saving linear TVStreamers pivot to ads

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:34

The head of Nasa is worried China may claim the moon as its own territory '' and prevent the US from landing there again.

'It is a fact: we're in a space race,' the current Nasa Administrator, Bill Nelson, said in an interview.

'And it is true that we better watch out that they [China] don't get to a place on the moon under the guise of scientific research.

'And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they say, ''Keep out, we're here, this is our territory,''' Nelson added.

Nelson, who was appointed to the top job at Nasa by President Biden in 2021 claimed he and others are increasingly concerned about China's plans for lunar exploration.

The country's space presence has grown massively over the last few years and in 2019, it became the first country to explore the far side of the moon with the Chang'e 4 probe.

But according to Nelson, the Communist nation could be planning to corner the market on resource-rich locations on the moon's surface. It could then try to block out the US and other countries from setting up lunar bases and carrying out other activities there.

'If you doubt that, look at what they did with the Spratly Islands,' he said in the interview with Politico.

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The Spratly Islands are a contested piece of land in the South China Sea. Beijing has claimed ownership of the archipelago and used it as weapons storage facility. It's rumoured that structures on the islands are large enough to house ballistic missile launchers.

After lying relatively untouched for fifty years, the moon has become a very attractive target again for both nations. It's believed a base on the moon could function as a jumping-off point for exploration and scientific missions further into the solar system.

Nasa's Artemis Program aims to return humans to the moon by 2024 and set up a sustained human presence that would allow astronauts to regularly visit the moon.

The Apollo-era lunar missions saw astronauts live on the moon for only a few days at a time but the Artemis mission aims to be the stepping stone for long-term lunar bases.

'This time when we go to the moon we're going to stay. That's what we're looking to do,' Nasa's former director, Jim Bridenstine, had said of future moon missions previously.

To this end, Nasa has recently awarded a £47,000,000 contract to build habitats and roads on the moon.

Ultimately, Nasa hopes to establish a base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.

Meanwhile, China's expansion into space over the last few years has been nothing short of astronomical.

The country has launched orbiters, landers, and rovers that have reached both the moon and Mars. It is also working on its own independent space station '' because it has been banned from involvement with the US-led International Space Station.

'China within the last decade has had enormous success and advances,' Nelson said.

'It is also true that their date for landing on the moon keeps getting closer and closer.'

MORE : How to declutter your space to help bring in new energy for the New Year

MORE : Five space exploration missions to look out for in 2023

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:46

A massive, $1.7 trillion funding bill was approved in the US Congress last Friday and will become law once signed by President Biden.And once that happens, it will bring into force proposed legislation introduced last year, INFORM Consumers Act, designed to regulate a sensitive segment of online marketplaces, delving deep into and disclosing sellers' personal data under some circumstances.

Namely, the Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) for Consumers Act will require e-commerce companies to collect, verify, and disclose ''certain information from high-volume, third-party sellers.''

In case these third parties carry out 200 or more transactions with revenues reaching $5,000 or more during one year, platforms like Amazon, eBay, Facebook and others will acquire their bank account numbers, government issued ID, tax identification numbers, and contact information, the original proposal read.

As per the bill's text, online marketplaces will make sure that consumers have access to sellers' names and contact information, but also other unspecified data, included in product listings. This will include sellers' phone number and email and physical address.

However, sellers will be able to protect their phone number and address if they communicate with buyers by answering their customer support via the marketplaces.

After Amazon and several other sites voiced their opposition to the bill, claiming to be concerned about sellers' privacy '' but also that they would become the underdog while competing with brick-and-mortar stores '' one limit was raised to $20,000 in annual revenues, but only regarding the obligation to disclose personal information to customers.

Amazon, eBay, and Etsy then dropped their criticism and supported the bill, because there's something big in it for them, too '' INFORM Act, as federal legislation, supersedes any state laws.

The Federal Trade Commission will be tasked with enforcing the bill, while e-commerce operations will have to enable consumers to report activity they consider ''suspicious'' '' either online or by phone.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:45

HomeNewsLifes-little-mysteries Kyawthuite, found in Myanmar, is the rarest mineral in the world. (Image credit: Courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM))Most human eyes have seen the mystical beauty of quartz, possibly without knowing it is the most common mineral on Earth, but which is the rarest?

Minerals are scattered everywhere on our planet, from glittering flecks in gravel or sand to actual hidden gems. According to the U.S. Geological Society (opens in new tab) , minerals are naturally occurring elements or compounds that are inorganic, meaning they do not contain carbon. Each type of mineral exhibits order in its internal structure and has a unique chemical makeup. The form a mineral's crystals take, as well as its other physical properties, can vary.

The rarest mineral on Earth is kyawthuite. Only one crystal, found in the Mogok region of Myanmar, is known to exist. Caltech's mineral database (opens in new tab) describes it as a small (1.61-karat) deep orange gemstone that the International Mineralogical Association (opens in new tab) officially recognized in 2015.

However, little is known about kyawthuite, so let's move on to the second-rarest mineral in existence. This is painite, which appears as deep red hexagonal crystals (though there are some pinkish exceptions). Though painite is now more easily found than it used to be, this mineral is still rare, and its chemical structure makes it something of a scientific enigma.

Related: How long does it take to make petrified wood?

In 1952, the English gem collector and dealer Arthur Pain acquired two crimson crystals in Myanmar, according to George Rossman (opens in new tab) , a professor of mineralogy at CalTech, who has been researching painite since the 1980s and maintains an extensive database (opens in new tab) of all the samples he has analyzed microscopically.

There is only one known sample of Kyawthuite on the planet. (Image credit: Courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM))Pain thought the crystals were rubies, which the region is famed for, but unbeknownst to him they were actually something far rarer.

Painite (which took on Arthur's surname) is sometimes unearthed along with rubies and other gemstones. That explains why Pain assumed the crystals were rubies when, according to Rossman, he donated them to the British Museum in 1954 for further study. Another painite sample from Myanmar surfaced in 1979, and until 2001, those three crystals were the only known specimens of painite in the world.

The very first painite crystal discovered, known as painite #1, was later analyzed by Rossman. His latest painite study was published in Mineralogical Magazine (opens in new tab) in 2018.

"I conducted [studies] of the [first] sample," he told Live Science. "[My results] became the standards by which further discoveries of painite were confirmed."

It was through this research that Rossman determined which elements make up painite. With infrared spectroscopy, infrared radiation is used to identify elements based on how they absorb, reflect and emit that light. With Raman spectroscopy, a laser is used to scatter visible, infrared or ultraviolet light, which makes the molecules give off unique vibrations that make them identifiable.

Rossman also found there was an error in the chemical makeup originally determined by scientists at the British Museum. While they had correctly identified aluminum, boron, calcium and oxygen, the element zirconium was missing. Another thing Rossman found out was what gave painite its reddish hue; It has trace amounts of vanadium and chromium that might make it deceptively appear like a ruby.

Here we see corundum (red) in a painite crystal specimen from Myanmar. (Image credit: The Natural History Museum via Alamy Stock Photo)But what makes painite so rare? For one, it is only found in Myanmar, but the real reason lies in its formation. Painite is a borate crystal, meaning it contains boron. It also contains zirconium. Boron has a notoriously difficult time bonding with zirconium. In fact, painite is the only mineral in which the two have been found bonded in nature. While the reason is still unclear, zirconium and boron have not been found together in significant concentrations, as Rossman said. It is also thought that these elements may not be very stable together compared with other elements they could bond with.

"To my knowledge, no one has done a serious study of what it takes to form painite," Rossman said. "I know of no attempt to synthesize it in a lab."

Related: How do we tell the difference between geologic ages?

Why Myanmar?What Rossman does have an idea of is why painite and so many other gems, such as kyawthuite, are found in Myanmar. When the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana began to split about 180 million years ago, India crept north and collided with what is now South Asia. Pressure and heat from the collision formed a treasure trove of rocks, many of them gemstones. He thinks the boron in painite and other borate minerals possibly came from shallow seas around the newly formed land mass.

Rossman has had many crystals suspected to be painite sent to him for identification. Some have been hidden in plain sight for decades, as they were often stashed in bags of rough gemstones or in the hands of dealers and collectors who misidentified them.

Painite suitable for luxe jewelry is hard to come by and valued as high as $60,000 a carat, Rossman said. What determines the price can be subjective, but the fewer flaws, the better.

It should be noted that there are ethical concerns about mining in Myanmar, also famous for other gemstones and specimens of tiny prehistoric creatures trapped in amber. Human Rights Watch (opens in new tab) raises awareness about human rights abuses from the military government, which profits from the mining industry, which has unsafe and disease-infested mines, forced labor and child labor. Some jewelry companies refuse to purchase gems mined there for this reason and some scientists decline to study specimens (opens in new tab) from this country.

Painite is now more common than it once was. Multiple crystals began to appear in 2005, all within that year, and most painites can now be found in Myanmar's Wet Loo and Therein Taung regions.

Though painite no longer wears the crown of rarest mineral, it's still a real gem.

Elizabeth Rayne is a contributing writer for Live Science. Her work has appeared in SYFY WIRE, Forbidden Futures, Grunge and Den of Geek. She holds a bachelor of arts in English literature from Fairfield University in Connecticut and a master's degree in English writing from Fordham University, and most enjoys writing about space, along with biology, chemistry, physics, archaeology and paleontology.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:41

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Howard Fischer, a 63-year old investor living north of New York City, has a wish for when he dies. He wants his remains to be placed in a vessel, broken down by tiny microbes and composted into rich, fertile soil.

Maybe his composted remains could be planted outside the family home in Vermont, or maybe they could be returned to the earth elsewhere. ''Whatever my family chooses to do with the compost after it's done is up to them,'' Fischer said.

''I am committed to having my body composted and my family knows that,'' he added. ''But I would love for it to happen in New York where I live rather than shipping myself across the country.''

Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation on Saturday to legalize natural organic reduction, popularly known as human composting, making New York the sixth state in the nation to allow that method of burial.

Washington state became the first state to legalize human composting in 2019, followed by Colorado and Oregon in 2021, and Vermont and California in 2022.

For Fischer, this alternative, green method of burial aligns with his philosophical view on life: to live in an environmentally conscious way.

The process goes like this: the body of the deceased is placed into a reusable vessel along with plant material such as wood chips, alfalfa and straw. The organic mix creates the perfect habitat for naturally occurring microbes to do their work, quickly and efficiently breaking down the body in about a month's time.

The end result is a heaping cubic yard of nutrient-dense soil amendment, the equivalent of about 36 bags of soil, that can be used to plant trees or enrich conservation land, forests, or gardens.

For urban areas such as New York City where land is limited, it can be seen as a pretty attractive burial alternative.

Michelle Menter, manager at Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve, a cemetery in central New York, said the facility would ''strongly consider'' the alternative method.

''It definitely is more in line with what we do,'' she added.

The 130-acre (52-hectare) nature preserve cemetery, nestled between protected forest land, offers natural, green burials which is when a body can be placed in a biodegradable container and into a gravesite so that it can decompose fully.

''Every single thing we can do to turn people away from concrete liners and fancy caskets and embalming, we ought to do and be supportive of,'' she said.

But not all are onboard with the idea.

The New York State Catholic Conference, a group that represents bishops in the state, has long opposed the bill, calling the burial method ''inappropriate.''

''A process that is perfectly appropriate for returning vegetable trimmings to the earth is not necessarily appropriate for human bodies,'' Dennis Poust, executive director of the organization, said in a statement.

''Human bodies are not household waste, and we do not believe that the process meets the standard of reverent treatment of our earthly remains,'' he said.

Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, a full-service green funeral home in Seattle that offers human composting, said it offers an alternative for people wanting to align the disposition of their remains with how they lived their lives.

She said ''it feels like a movement'' among the environmentally aware.

''Cremation uses fossil fuels and burial uses a lot of land and has a carbon footprint,'' said Spade. ''For a lot of folks being turned into soil that can be turned to grow into a garden or tree is pretty impactful.''

'--'--'--

Maysoon Khan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Maysoon Khan on Twitter at: twitter.com/MaysoonKhan.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:36

Phase 1 has surfaced several key learnings on the potential design of a CBDC:

Select ideas from cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain technology can provide unique functionality and robust performance. We suspect existing database and distributed systems technology is sufficient to provide a more traditional payment architecture for CBDC where one actor stores users' accounts, users cannot custody their own funds, and there is no transaction scripting functionality. We created a new design to offer both these features and new opportunities for different intermediary roles.

A CBDC can provide functionality that is not currently possible with either cash or bank accounts. For example, a CBDC could support cryptographic proofs of payment, more complex transfers to or from multiple sources of funds, and flexible forms of authorization to spend, such as varying transaction limits.

We found that separating a transaction processor into modular components improves system scalability and flexibility; for example, we can scale and replicate transaction validation independently from preventing double spending and committing transactions, and our architecture can support many future designs for programmability and privacy.

Despite using ideas from blockchain technology, we found that a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals. Specifically, a distributed ledger does not match the trust assumptions in Project Hamilton's approach, which assumes that the platform would be administered by a central actor. We found that even when run under the control of a single actor, a distributed ledger architecture has downsides. For example, it creates performance bottlenecks, and requires the central transaction processor to maintain transaction history, which one of our designs does not, resulting in significantly improved transaction throughput scalability properties.

CBDC design choices are more granular than commonly assumed. Currently, CBDC designs are categorized as direct, two-tier, or hybrid models, with "token" or "account" access models 1 2 7 12 15. We found these limited categorizations lacking and insufficient to surface the complexity of choices in access, intermediation, institutional roles, and data retention in CBDC design 10. For example, wallets can support both an account-balance view and a coin-specific view for the user regardless of how funds are stored in the database.

By breaking transaction processing into steps like creation, authorization, submission, execution, and storing history, CBDC designers can consider the potential roles for intermediaries at each stage, creating opportunities for innovation.

By implementing a robust system, we identify new questions for CBDC designers and policymakers to address, regarding tradeoffs in performance, auditability, functionality, and privacy. Our work raised important questions to address in how the technical architecture might affect the use and function of CBDC in payments. For example, it is an open question how important from an economic perspective it might be to support atomic transactions. In database parlance, this implies multiple operations to different pieces of the data are applied in a way that appears instantaneous (atomic), or the set of updates does not happen at all; there is no partial application 4 14. In the context of a payment processor, this means users could reliably issue payments that might transfer multiple bills (or funds from multiple accounts) entirely, and would never see partial transfers, even if there are crashes or system errors. We chose to implement atomic transactions, which has a direct impact on the performance of the system 8.

The main functional difference between our two architectures is that one materializes an ordered history for all transactions, while the other does not. This highlights initial tradeoffs we found between scalability, privacy, and auditability. In the architecture that achieves 1.7M transactions per second, we do not keep a history of transactions nor do we use any cryptographic verification inside the core of the transaction processor to achieve auditability. Doing so in the future would help with security and resiliency but might impact performance. In the other architecture, we can audit the set of unspent funds to make sure they were created correctly. Storing the history of transactions implies the central transaction processor can reconstruct the transaction graph, which, in combination with other data sources, could reveal sensitive user information 16 17. In the next phase of work, we will focus on adding privacy-preserving designs for auditability.

Similarly, our goals of supporting self-custody and reducing data stored in the core of the transaction processor had direct implications on data users might be required to store, failure scenarios, recovery protocols, and on what types of payment functionality we can support.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:33

Espionage jargon

A limited hangout or partial hangout is a tactic used in media relations, perception management, politics, and information management. The tactic originated as a technique in the espionage trade.

Concept [ edit ] According to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA Victor Marchetti, a limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."[1][2] While used by the CIA and other intelligence organizations, the tactic has become popularized in the corporate and political spheres.[3]

Modified limited hangout [ edit ] In a March 22, 1973, meeting between United States President Richard Nixon, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, John N. Mitchell, and H. R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman incorporated the term into a new and related one, "modified limited hangout".[4][5]

The phrase was coined in the following exchange:[6]

PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the '' let it hang out, so to speak?

DEAN: Well, it's, it isn't really that ''HALDEMAN: It's a limited hang out.DEAN: It's a limited hang out.EHRLICHMAN: It's a modified limited hang out.

PRESIDENT: Well, it's only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.

Before this exchange, the discussion captures Nixon outlining to Dean the content of a report that Dean would create, laying out a misleading view of the role of the White House staff in events surrounding the Watergate burglary. In Ehrlichman's words: "And the report says, 'Nobody was involved ' ". The document would then be shared with the United States Senate Watergate Committee investigating the affair. The report would serve the administration's goals by protecting the President, providing documentary support for his false statements should information come to light that contradicted his stated position. Further, the group discusses having information on the report leaked by those on the Committee sympathetic to the President, to put exculpatory information into the public sphere.[6]

The phrase has been cited as a summation of the strategy of mixing partial admissions with misinformation and resistance to further investigation, and is used in political commentary to accuse people or groups of following a Nixon-like strategy.[7] It has also been described as the release of a package of sensitive information mixed with discoverable falsehoods in hopes that discovery of the falsity of part will lead to the entire package being considered false,[8] and as the release of a package with a core of falsehoods wrapped in secret but verifiable information in hopes that verification of the wrapping will reinforce the believability of the false core.[9]

Writing in The Washington Post, Mary McGrory described a statement by Pope John Paul II regarding sexual abuse by priests as a "modified, limited hangout".[10]

See also [ edit ] Half-truthMinimisation (psychology)Spin (propaganda)References [ edit ] ^ Marchetti, Victor (August 14, 1978). The Spotlight. ^ "720 F2d 631 Hunt v. Liberty Lobby Dc". OpenJurist. November 28, 1983 . Retrieved July 13, 2016 . ^ Johnson, Robert. "Escaping the Limited Hangout". Global Intel Hub. Global Intel Hub . Retrieved July 20, 2022 . ^ Frost, David; Nixon, Richard (1977). Frost/Nixon: The Complete Interviews. Paradine Television. ^ Safire, William (March 26, 1989). "On Language; In Nine Little Words". The New York Times Magazine . Retrieved June 23, 2013 . ^ a b "Transcript of a recording of a meeting among the President, John Dean, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and John Mitchell on March 22, 1973 from 1:57 to 3:43 p.m." History and Politics Out Loud. Archived from the original on January 4, 2004 . Retrieved August 27, 2006 . ^ Carroll, Jon (May 1, 2002). "The Richard Nixon playbook". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved August 27, 2006 . ^ Wexler, S.; Hancock, L. (2018). Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. Catapult. p. 201. ISBN 978-1-64009-022-4 . Retrieved April 10, 2022 . ^ Ebrahim, Zahir (2012). The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity (PDF) (3 ed.). p. 20. ^ McGrory, Mary (April 25, 2002). "From Rome, A 'Limited Hangout' ". The Washington Post. p. A29 . Retrieved April 30, 2010 .

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:24

United States Air Force officer

Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 '' June 5, 2001)[1] served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. A former colonel in the United States Air Force, he retired from military service to become a bank executive. He subsequently became a critic of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), about which he had considerable inside knowledge.

Prouty was the inspiration for the character "Mr. X" in Oliver Stone's film JFK.[2]

Early life [ edit ] Family [ edit ] Prouty was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on January 24, 1917, to Marie Ozias Desautels, age 32, and Leroy Flecther Prouty, a municipal government employee, age 28.[3][4] He was the first child in a growing family and would eventually become one of five, with two brothers and two sisters.[4]

His first brother Robert Vincent was born one year later on May 9, 1918, and they were joined by a sister Muriel two years after that on September 28, 1920.[4] Another baby girl joined the family on March 24, 1921, and was named Corinne Marie;[4] she later went by Corinne Toole.[5] The youngest of the Prouty children, a boy named Norman Peter, was born 1926.[4] Corinne was his only sibling to survive him.[5]

Prouty married Elizabeth Ballinger on October 5, 1942, and with her he fathered three children: David Fletcher, Jane Elizabeth, Lauren Michele.[3]

Education [ edit ] Prouty attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst (then known as Massachusetts State College), and on September 20, 1936, he was elected President of his freshman class, "the Class of 1940," succeeding Daniel G. Lacey.[6][7][3] He later pursued his graduate studies in banking at the University of Wisconsin''Madison Graduate School of Banking.[8]

Prouty belonged to a handful of membership organizations: the National Defense Transportation Association, the American Bankers Association, the Tokyo Toastmasters Club, and the Army Navy Club.[3]

Government service [ edit ] World War II [ edit ] Prouty was commissioned as a reserve 2nd lieutenant in the cavalry on June 9, 1941, and began his military career with the 4th Armored Division in Pine Camp, New York. He was promoted to 1st lieutenant on February 1, 1942. He transferred to the United States Army Air Forces on November 10, 1942, and earned his pilot wings that same month. He arrived in British West Africa (specifically the British Gold Coast colony) in February 1943 as a pilot with Air Transport Command.[9]

In the summer of 1943 he was the personal pilot of General Omar Bradley, General John C. H. Lee and General C. R. Smith (founder and president of American Airlines), among others. He flew the U.S. Geological Survey Team in Saudi Arabia, October 1943, to confirm oil discoveries in preparation for the Cairo Conference. He was assigned to special duties at the Cairo Conference and the Tehran Conference November''December 1943. He flew Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese delegation (T. V. Soong's delegates) to Tehran.[citation needed ]

An important mission he was involved in was the evacuation of the British commandos made famous by the novel Guns of Navarone involved in the Battle of Leros from Leros to Palestine. He was promoted to captain on February 1, 1944. In 1945 he was transferred to the Southwest Pacific and flew in New Guinea, Leyte and was on Okinawa at the end of war. He landed near Tokyo at the time of the surrender with the first three planes carrying General Douglas MacArthur's bodyguard troops. He flew out with American POWs.[citation needed ]

Post-war service [ edit ] After the war, Prouty accepted an assignment from the U.S. Army in September 1945 to inaugurate the ROTC program at Yale University, where he also taught during each scholastic year from 1946 to 1948. This timeline intersects with the years that George Bush and William F. Buckley, Jr. also spent at Yale. Prouty fondly recalled Buckley at that time in his role as editor of the Yale Daily News, and Prouty later told an interviewer in 1989 that he had written for Buckley on several occasions.

In 1950 he transferred to Colorado Springs to build Air Defense Command. From 1952 to 1954 he was assigned to Korean War duties in Japan, where he served as Military Manager for Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) during the post-war U.S. occupation.

In 1955 he was assigned to the coordination of operations between the fledgling U.S. Air Force and the CIA.[1] As a result of a CIA commendation for this work he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the U.S. Air Force, promoted to colonel, and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.[citation needed ]

Following the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency and termination of the OSO by Secretary Robert McNamara, Prouty was transferred to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and charged with the creation a similar organization on a global scale.

From 1962 to 1963 he served as Chief of Special Operations with the Joint Staff. In an chance encounter with Edward Lansdale in the hallways of the Pentagon, a "month or two before" the assassination (as Prouty tells it), Lansdale informed Prouty he had arranged for him [Prouty] to accompany a group of VIPs to the South Pole from November 10 to 23, in the capacity of Military Escort officer.[10]

The ostensible purpose of the trip was the activation of a nuclear power plant at the United States Navy Base at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, to provide heat, light, and sea water desalination.[citation needed ] Prouty later described his confusion at the unusual assignment, but he expected the job to be a "paid vacation" and accepted the task.

Prouty retired in 1964 as a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. As recognition of his long and distinguished career in the service of his country, he was awarded one of the first three Joint Service Commendation Medals by General Maxwell D. Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[citation needed ]

Post-military [ edit ] Railroads [ edit ] He was a senior director of public affairs for Amtrak during the 1970s, and a director of the National Railroad Foundation and Museum. During this period he worked out of the Amtrak Corp. office in Washington, D.C.[citation needed ]

Writing [ edit ] Prouty authored two major books during his life, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World in 1973 and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy in 1992.

He served alongside friend and fellow researcher Eustace Mullins as contributing editor for a conspiracy magazine titled Criminal Politics.[11]

Prouty also published articles in a wide variety of publications, from pornographic magazines to peer-reviewed journals to academic textbooks, illustrating the wide diversity in his intended audiences for different writings. His areas of expertise were cultivated by direct experience as well as research, and they range from railroads to assassinations to transportation to military strategy and logistics.[citation needed ]

His writings even include entries on Railroad Engineering and Foreign Railroad Technology for McGraw-Hill's Scientific Encyclopedias and Scientific Yearbooks, as well as contributions to ROTC textbooks.[citation needed ]

Church of Scientology [ edit ] In the early 1980s, Prouty's services as an expert witness were retained by the legal team of the Church of Scientology to act as consultant in the investigation of L. Ron Hubbard's military record.

By early 1985, Hubbard's naval record was again the subject of increasing scrutiny. Julie Christofferson Titchbourne of Portland, Oregon brought her case against the Church at that time, and Scientology's lawyers again turned to Prouty to help them manage the public relations fallout.[12] Prouty was forthcoming with an affidavit on their behalf by February. In it, he stated his belief that the records released by the U.S. Navy documenting Hubbard's service in the armed forces "are incomplete ... those materials and records provided give ample evidence that proves the existence of other records that have been concealed, withheld and overlooked."[13]

"...to provide proof of the fact that the records, data and related materials provided by the U.S. Navy (USN) and other government sources, all said to be the complete record and file on the military service, active and inactive, of Mr. L. Ronald Hubbard, formerly Lt. Commander, U.S. Navy Reserve, are incomplete ... [and] to attest to the fact that those materials and records provided give ample evidence that proves the existence of other records that have been concealed, withheld and overlooked."[13]

Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had said that he sustained combat injuries during his military service in World War II and that he healed himself through measures that would become Dianetics.[14] However, Hubbard's military record does not show that he was wounded in combat. Church officials have stated that those records were incomplete and may have been falsified.[14] Prouty, according to Church of Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, reported that Hubbard was an intelligence agent, and because of this his military discharge papers were "sheep dipped," meaning two sets of government records were created documenting Hubbard's service.[12][15]

Prouty's association with Scientology also provided him with a platform for his writing over the following decades, serving as senior editor of Freedom magazine, an official publication of the Church.[16] Between 1985 and 1987, Freedom published a 19-part series by Prouty which it described as having "provided a unique and highly informative view of the events which led up to the Vietnam War." The magazine later covered his perspective on the Jonestown affair. At times, he has described himself as "an editorial adviser to publications of the Church of Scientology."

Oliver Stone's JFK film [ edit ] Prouty served as a technical adviser to Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK. He was the inspiration for the mysterious "X" (played by Donald Sutherland), who assists Jim Garrison in the movie.[17]

Later life [ edit ] Colonel Prouty died on June 5, 2001, at the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. His funeral service was held the next day at the Fort Meyer Chapel, and he was subsequently buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.[18]

Controversy [ edit ] As a critic of the CIA, Prouty pointed out its influence in global matters, outside the realm of U.S. congressional and government oversight. His works detailed the formation and development of the CIA, the origins of the Cold War, the U-2 incident, the Vietnam War, and the John F. Kennedy assassination. Prouty wrote that he believed Kennedy's assassination was a coup d'(C)tat, and that there is a secret, global "power elite," which operates covertly to protect its interests'--and in doing so has frequently subverted democracy around the world.[2]

Alexander Butterfield [ edit ] On July 12, 1975, prior to closed-door questioning by the staff of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Prouty told reporters that Alexander Butterfield was a contact for the CIA at the White House.[19] He said he had learned the information over four years earlier from E. Howard Hunt while doing work for the National League of Families.[19][20] Prouty said that most federal government departments, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department, had similar CIA contacts and that he assumed that former president Richard Nixon was aware of Butterfield's role.[19][20] Senator Frank Church said the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities had found no evidence that the CIA planted an undercover agent within the White House or other government agencies.[19]

A few days later, Prouty partially walked back his comments in a telephone interview: "They may have told me the wrong name in order to cover up the real informer."[20] In a telephone statement to UPI that same day, Butterfield called the allegations "wholly false and defamatory" and stated that he had never met nor seen Hunt and had just recently heard of Prouty.[20] In an interview with CBS News from Eglin Air Force Base where he was serving his prison term for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Hunt denied the allegation calling it an "unfortunate invention on Mr. Prouty's part."[21] Also interviewed by CBS, Prouty again stated it was Hunt who told him about Butterfield.[21]

In a personal letter sent to Roger Feinman at CBS News Radio on July 14, 1975, Harold Weisberg expressed his belief that "the clear inference of the Prouty connection is that as a CIA man Butterfield pulled the plug on Nixon."[22]

On July 19, Church said that his committee found that there was "no scintilla of evidence" to support Prouty's allegations, and that his committee had ruled out the possibility that Butterfield served as a liaison officer for the CIA.[23] Church also stated, "on close interrogation, Mr. Prouty is unable to substantiate his earlier statement and acknowledges this to be the case."[23]

Kennedy assassination [ edit ] According to Prouty, people within the intelligence and military communities of the United States government conspired to assassinate Kennedy.[1] He maintained that their actions were a coup d'(C)tat to stop the President from taking control of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[1] Prouty stated that the assassination was orchestrated by Edward Lansdale ("General Y" in Oliver Stone's film JFK) and that Lansdale appeared in photographs of the "three tramps."[1]

In 1975, Prouty appeared with Richard Sprague at a news conference in New York to present what they believed was photographic evidence of a conspiracy.[24] According to Prouty, the movement of Kennedy after a bullet struck his head was consistent with a shot from the grassy knoll.[24] He also suggested that the actions of a man with an umbrella, the "Umbrella Man", were suspicious.[24]

1960 U-2 incident [ edit ] In his 1973 book The Secret Team, Prouty provided an alternative view of the 1960 U-2 incident. He charged that the flight was sabotaged in such a way by anticommunist elements in our government as to cause the U-2 to lose altitude mid-flight, allowing the Soviets to shoot it down. Prouty believed the ultimate purpose of the operation was the engineering of the subsequent international incident that put an end to the increasingly amicable U.S.''Soviet relations and doomed any hope for a positive outcome between Khrushchev and Eisenhower at the Four Power Paris Summit set to begin May 16. The summit began as scheduled but quickly collapsed as a result of fallout from the incident.[25]

William Blum made his own case for Prouty's version of events in his own book, Killing Hope, published in 2008.[25]

Prouty's version of events was rejected by former CIA director Richard Helms, Bissell, Walter Pfoigheimer and other career officers of the Central Intelligence Agency. Helms commented on Prouty's reframing of the interests and outcomes of the incident, offering the following: "I simply don't believe that Prouty is accurate. There is no substance to the charge."[26]

Bissell later claimed that Prouty was not authorized for access to U-2 information and said, "I don't see what information there could have been aboard that aircraft that could have helped the Russians" to bring down Powers' U2.[26]

Antisemitic association [ edit ] Prouty was a featured speaker at the 1990 convention of the Liberty Lobby.[27] Prouty was also named to the advisory board for the Lobby's Populist Action Committee. Prouty also sold the reprint rights for The Secret Team of the Noontide Press, the publishing arm for the Institute for Historical Review, a holocaust denial organization.[28][27]

Prouty denied having known of the racist and antisemitic associations of the Lobby, noted that he also spoke at a ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and assured Oliver Stone "... that he was neither a racist nor an anti-Semite... but merely a writer in need of a platform."[citation needed ] In a response to an article about Prouty in Esquire, which he labeled a "character assassination," Stone lamented Prouty's association with the Liberty Lobby but questioned its relevance to Prouty's reliability as a source.[29] In an obituary in The Guardian, Michael Carlson wrote that "[a]lthough Prouty himself never espoused such [anti-semitic] beliefs, the connection enabled critics to dismiss his later writings."[1]

Awards [ edit ] Prouty was awarded many decorations during his distinguished career in national and public service:

Command Pilot WingsOffice of the Secretary of Defense Identification BadgeOffice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification BadgeLegion of MeritJoint Service Commendation MedalAmerican Defense Service MedalAmerican Campaign MedalEuropean-African-Middle Eastern Campaign MedalAsiatic-Pacific Campaign MedalWorld War II Victory MedalArmy of Occupation Medal with "Japan" claspKorean Service MedalNational Defense Service Medal with starAir Force Longevity Service Ribbon with four oak leaf clustersPhilippine Liberation MedalUnited Nations Korea MedalBibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. Inglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall (1973). ISBN 0137981732. Full text.JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Introduction by Oliver Stone. New York: Birch Lane Press (1992). ISBN 1559721308. Full text.[30]Book contributions [ edit ] "Anatomy of Assassination." In: Uncloaking the CIA. Conference on the CIA and World Peace at Yale University (1975)."Kennedy's Policy on Vietnam Led to His Murder." In: Assassination of John F. Kennedy. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press (2003). ISBN 978-0737713558, 978-0737713541.Encyclopedic [ edit ] "Railroad Engineering." McGraw-Hill Scientific Encyclopedia."Foreign Railroad Technology." In: McGraw-Hill Scientific Yearbook-1982.Letters to the editor [ edit ] Letters

"U-2 Shootdowns." Air Force Magazine, vol. 79, no. 4 (Apr. 1996). Full issue.Remarks on the 1960 U-2 incident involving Francis Gary Powers.Replies

Prouty's reply to "The Umbrella Man" (letter), by David R. Gallery (May 1976)Filmography [ edit ] Documentaries [ edit ] World in Action [series] (Jun. 16''30, 1975)."The Rise and Fall of the CIA (Part 1)." Season 11, Episode 38. (Jun. 16, 1975)."The Rise and Fall of the CIA (Part 3)." Season 11, Episode 40. (Jun. 30, 1975).The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis (1987). Special Report by Bill Moyers.Who Killed Martin Luther King? (1989). Written and directed by John Edginton for BBC. Emmy-nominated.The Men Who Killed Kennedy (1991). Directed by Nigel Turner.The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes (1992). Written and directed by John Barbour.The JFK Conspiracy (Apr. 15, 1992). Hosted by James Earl Jones. Written and directed by Daniel Helfgott.Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy (1992). Directed by Barbara Kopple and Danny Schechter. Features Carl Oglesby.Media appearances [ edit ] Tomorrow with Tom Snyder: JFK Assassination. NBC (April 15, 1975) [56 min.]One in this series of late-night topical interview programs hosted by Tom Snyder. This installment, occurring on the 110th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death, focuses on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the many ongoing questions surrounding his death. Panelists include: forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, attorney Bernard Fensterwald, and retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy.[31]Interviews [ edit ] "An Interview with Colonel Fletcher Prouty" [audio]. All Things Considered... NPR (March 22, 1973)Alan Douglas Show [video]. (April 12, 1973)Who's On the Secret Team? [audio]. Interviewed by Paul McIsaac, Nanette Rainone and Carl Oglesby. Pacifica Radio Archives (December 11, 1973). 110 min. catalog.Gray, Marvin L. (Jr). "Staff Interview." Counsel for the Presidents Commission on CIA Activities. [print]. Washington, D.C. (May 15, 1975)Schorr, Dan. Interview [video]. CBS (July 11, 1975)Ratcliffe, David T. "Understanding Special Operations and Their Impact on the Vietnam War Era: 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty" [audio]. Rat Haus Reality Press (1989)The Mind of L. Fletcher Prouty [video] (1992).Produced by Jim Grapek for Prevailing Winds Research, this interview was conducted by John Judge and took place in Colonel Prouty's home in Alexandria, Virginia.Steinberg, Jeffrey. "'President Kennedy Was Killed by a Murder, Inc.'" [video]. Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 19, no. 6 (February 7, 1992), pp. 34''38. Full issue.Valentine, Tom. Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty and Trenton N. Parker. Radio Free America [audio]. (July 29, 1993)[32]James, Gary. "An Interview with 'Mr. X.'" [print]. Table Hoppers, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 30, 1995)Wray, Tim, and Jeremy Gunn, Christopher Barger, Joan Zimmerman. Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty. Summary prepared by Christopher Barger on October 23, 1996 [print]. Assassination Records Review Board (September 24, 1996)Meet Mr. X: The Personality & Thoughts of Fletcher Prouty [video]. (2001) 11 min.This interview session is featured on the 2-disc JFK: Special Edition, released on DVD in 2001.References [ edit ] ^ a b c d e f Carlson, Michael. "L Fletcher Prouty: US officer obsessed by the conspiracy theory of President Kennedy's assassination" (obituary). The Guardian (June 21, 2001). Archived from the original. ^ a b "JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy". Publishers Weekly. August 31, 1992. ^ a b c d "L. Fletcher Prouty." In: Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale (February 19, 2003). Gale In Context: Biography. Gale H1000080064. ^ a b c d e "Leroy Fletcher Prouty Jr, 1917''2001." Ancestry.com. (subscription required) . Accessed July 28, 2021. ^ a b Staff writer. "Leroy Letcher Prouty, Jr." (obituary). Washington Post (January 9, 2001). Archived from the original. ^ Staff writer. "Forester's Group Votes Faith in Commissioner." Boston Globe (January 29, 1937), p. 12. ^ The Index (1937). University of Massachusetts Amherst Yearbook, p. 158."...we decided to elect temporary class officers. Several glorified neophytes were nominated and after the ballots were counted we found that a toil youth from Springfield, Fletcher Prouty, had been elected President; and a pretty brunette from Pittsfield, Betty Bates had been elected Vice President." (p. 158) ^ Prouty, L. Fletcher. "Transportation at the Crossroads." Traffic Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1981), pp. 385''399. ISSN 0041-0713. OCLC 33850586. ^ https://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/lfprouty.htm ^ Ratcliffe, David. Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty, at his home (audio). (1989). ^ "A good example of these other paths is Criminal Politics, where Lawrence Patterson and his cohorts, including Eustace Mullins and Fletcher Prouty, scour the world for evidence of conspiracies within the world's power structure." Danky, Jim, and John Cherney, "An outpouring of right-wing publications cover all social issues", St. Louis Journalism Review, 25.n179 (Sept 1995): 27(1). InfoTrac OneFile. Thomson Gale. ^ a b Wright, Lawrence (February 14, 2011). "The Apostate; Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology". The New Yorker . Retrieved July 18, 2014 . ^ a b Prouty, L. Fletcher. Scientology affidavit(February 1, 1985). Archived from the original. ^ a b Sappell, Joel; Welkos, Robert (June 24, 1990). "The Making of L. Ron Hubbard: Creating the Mystique." Los Angeles Times, p. A38:1 ^ "The Church Of Scientology, Fact-Checked". NPR. February 8, 2011 . Retrieved July 18, 2014 . ^ Masthead. Freedom, vol. 18, no. 4 (Dec. 1985), p. 1. ^ Toplin, Robert Brent (1 January 1996). "JFK". History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. pp. 50''51. ISBN 978-0-252-06536-1. ^ "Burial Detail: Prouty, Leroy Fletcher (Section 66, 6580)". ANC Explorer. Arlington National Cemetery. ^ a b c d "Butterfield called CIA contact in White House". Chicago Tribune. Vol. 129, no. 193 (Final ed.). July 12, 1975. Section 1, page 2 . Retrieved June 19, 2017 . ^ a b c d "Ex-CIA contact alters story on Butterfield". Chicago Tribune. Vol. 129, no. 196 (Final ed.). UPI. July 15, 1975. Section 1, page 2 . Retrieved June 19, 2017 . ^ a b "Hunt Denies Linking Butterfield, C.I.A." The New York Times. July 17, 1975. p. 14 . Retrieved June 20, 2017 . ^ Weisberg, Harold. Personal letter to Roger Feinman, CBS News Radio (July 14, 1975). Harold Weisberg Collection at Hood College. ^ a b "Find No CIA Tie to Butterfield; Senate Panel Clears Him". Chicago Tribune. Vol. 129, no. 200 (Final ed.). July 19, 1975. Section 1, page 3 . Retrieved June 19, 2017 . ^ a b c "2 Claim Conspiracy Proof in JFK's Death". Milwaukee Sentinel. UPI. September 4, 1975. p. 3 . Retrieved January 18, 2013 . ^ a b Jacques, Geoffrey. "Bridge of Spies." Cin(C)aste, vol. 41, no. 2 (Spring 2016), p. 51. JSTOR 26356500. ^ a b Powell, Dave."JFK's Murder, Ex-agent Claims." National Insider, vol. 24, no. 23 (June 8, 1974) ^ a b Berlet, Chip. Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, And Why They Must Be Rejected. Political Research Associates (February 27, 1999) ^ Anson, Robert Sam (November 1991). "The Shooting of JFK". Esquire. ^ Stone, Oliver (December 1991). "Esquire Letter: Stone Shoots Back". Esquire. ^ Steinberg, Jeffrey. "Unique View of JFK Assassination." Review of JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty. Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 19, no. 45 (November 13, 1992). Full Issue. ^ Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy (1992). Directed by Barbara Kopple & Danny Schechter. 90 min. Tomorrow with Tom Snyder: JFK Assassination (TV).'', The Paley Center for Media. Archived from the original. ^ Stich, Rodney. Drugging America: A Trojan Horse. (2nd Ed.) Silverpeak Enterprises (2005), p. 29. ISBN 0932438350 / ISBN 978-0932438355."[Trenton N. Parker] shared the two-hour program ... describing the mechanics of the CIA's Operation Interlink. Prouty stated during the show that Parker's revelations 'make this one of the most important shows on the CIA that has ever occurred'." Further reading [ edit ] McAdams, John. "L. Fletcher Prouty: Fearless Truth Teller, or Crackpot?" John McAdams' The Kennedy Assassination website.Steinberg, Jeffrey. "Unique View of JFK Assassination." Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 19, no. 45 (Nov. 13, 1992). Full Issue."Coup d'Etat in America: Col. L. Fletcher Prouty" (eulogy). Criminal Politics (Jun. 30, 1991).External links [ edit ] Appearances on C-SPANL. Fletcher Prouty at IMDbLeroy Fletcher Prouty, Jr. at ArlingtonCemetery.net (unofficial)

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:20

55 Years Of Failed Eco-pocalyptic PredictionsNone of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.By Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy | CEI.org

Thanks go to Tony Heller, who first collected many of these news clips and posted them on RealClimateScience.

SUMMARYModern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

1967: 'Dire famine by 1975.'

Source: Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1967

1969: 'Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989.'

Source: New York Times, August 10 1969

1970: Ice age by 2000

Source: Boston Globe, April 16, 1970

1970: 'America subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.'

Source: Redlands Daily Facts, October 6, 1970

1971: 'New Ice Age Coming'

Source: Washington Post, July 9, 1971

1972: New ice age by 2070

Source: NOAA, October 2015

1974: 'New Ice Age Coming Fast'

Source: The Guardian, January 29, 1974

1974: 'Another Ice Age?'

Source: TIME, June 24, 1974

1974: Ozone Depletion a 'Great Peril to Life'

But no such 'great peril to life' has been observed as the so-called 'ozone hole' remains:

Sources: Headline

NASA Data | Graph

1976: 'The Cooling'

Source: New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976

1980: 'Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes'

Noblesville Ledger (Noblesville, IN) April 9, 1980

But 10 years later, the US government program formed to study acid rain concluded:

Associated Press, September 6, 1990

1978: 'No End in Sight' to 30-Year Cooling Trend

Source: New York Times, January 5, 1978

But according to NASA satellite data there is a slight warming trend since 1979.

Source: DrRoySpencer.com

1988: James Hansen forecasts increase regional drought in 1990s

But the last really dry year in the Midwest was 1988, and recent years have been record wet.

Source: RealClimateScience.com

1988: Washington DC days over 90F to from 35 to 85

But the number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since.

Source: RealClimateScience.com

1988: Maldives completely under water in 30 years

Source: Agence France Press, September 26, 1988

1989: Rising seas to 'obliterate' nations by 2000

Source: Associated Press, June 30, 1989

1989: New York City's West Side Highway underwater by 2019

Source: Salon.com, October 23, 2001

1995 to Present: Climate Model Failure

Source: CEI.org

2000: 'Children won't know what snow is.'

Source: The Independent, March 20, 2000

2002: Famine in 10 years

Source: The Guardian, December 23, 2002

2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020

Source: The Guardian, February 21, 2004

2008: Arctic will be ice-free by 2018

Source: Associated Press, June 24, 2008

2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013

But'... it's still there:

Source: WattsUpWithThat.com, December 16, 2018

2009: Prince Charles says only 8 years to save the planet

Source: The Independent, July 9, 2009

2009: UK prime minister says 50 days to 'save the planet from catastrophe'

Source: The Independent: October 20, 2009

2009: Arctic ice-free by 2014

Source: USA Today, December 14, 2009

2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015

Source: The Guardian, July 24, 2013

The paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02550-9 (open access)

Gas hydrate dissociation off Svalbard induced by isostatic rebound rather than global warming

Abstract

Methane seepage from the upper continental slopes of Western Svalbard has previously been attributed to gas hydrate dissociation induced by anthropogenic warming of ambient bottom waters. Here we show that sediment cores drilled off Prins Karls Foreland contain freshwater from dissociating hydrates. However, our modeling indicates that the observed pore water freshening began around 8 ka BP when the rate of isostatic uplift outpaced eustatic sea-level rise. The resultant local shallowing and lowering of hydrostatic pressure forced gas hydrate dissociation and dissolved chloride depletions consistent with our geochemical analysis. Hence, we propose that hydrate dissociation was triggered by postglacial isostatic rebound rather than anthropogenic warming. Furthermore, we show that methane fluxes from dissociating hydrates were considerably smaller than present methane seepage rates implying that gas hydrates were not a major source of methane to the oceans, but rather acted as a dynamic seal, regulating methane release from deep geological reservoirs.

2013: Arctic ice-free by 2016

Source: The Guardian, December 9, 2013

2014: Only 500 days before 'climate chaos'

But'...

Sources: Washington Examiner

Since then the climate catastrophists have only escalated.

And bringing us up to date in 2022'...As CEI reports, climate alarmists and their media allies once again made a slew of claims about natural disasters being caused by man-made emissions in 2022. And once again, these claims clashed with reality and science.

Here are 10 fact checks of climate disaster claims made by the Associated Press and other media outlets in 2022.

The Bottom Line: There is not a single natural disaster, nor trend in any type of natural disaster that can be credibly linked with emissions or whatever gradual ''climate change'' may be occurring for whatever reason, including natural climate change. Attributing natural disaster damages to emissions and climate change is without a factual or scientific basis. And that certainly goes for 2022.

Regardless of one's view of what passes as ''climate science,'' the good news is that even researchers who believe that ''climate change'' is a problem acknowledge that the number of weather-related deaths and the cost of weather-related damage are actually on the decline '' despite ever-increasing emissions and whatever slight warming may be occurring.__________

(TLB) editors:We just could not end this article without giving Gretta the last word from a Twitter grab'...

(TLB) published this article by Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy | CEI.org with our appreciation for their hard work compiling this overview and report.Header featured image (edited) credit Therm/Sky/Getty Images

Emphasis added by (TLB) editors

''''

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Archived Version

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:40

A new logo?

02/17/14; 11:06AM Links for Jan 30 2014Whither Europe on emissions?

EU 2030 Objectives: emissions vs. renewables

2030-Should a robot decide when to kill?

2030 (novel) - Wikipedia

Vietnam gets flooded in the disaster epic Nuoc 2030

VIDEO-2030-Robots could replace 1/4 of US combat soldiers by 2030

01/30/14; 23:00PM Today's Links11 Signs We're Entering A "Demograpylypse"

Third of Mississippians to have diabetes by 2030, doctors claim

U.S. Army general says robots could replace one-fourth of combat soldiers by 2030

The world is not enough for all our needs

01/24/14; 17:07PM Today's 2030 LinksTalent2030

The 2030 Challenge

Tea 2030

The 2030 Palette

2030 Water Resources Group

REMAP 2030

Global Marine Trends 2030

The Pyramid 2030 campaign

Visions 2030

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation | My Hope for 2030

Future State 2030

2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America

01/21/14; 16:23PM Australia can go 100% renewable energy by 2030If a country so dependent on coal can do it, we all can

01/20/14; 17:58PM Daily 2030 Stories for Sat Jan 19 2014French: "Global Warming: Act before 2030 or the task will be more difficult"

Global investment in clean energy technologies needs to reach $1 trillion per year by 2030

Book: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds [Kindle Edition]

01/18/14; 12:28PM Creative Disruption SurveyTake the survey and find out what will happen in 2030!

01/17/14; 16:14PM What about our writing skills?Email and social to destroy the art of letter writing by 2030

01/17/14; 15:13PM Study Predicts Obesity Apocalypse by 2030 - ABC News

01/16/14; 15:38PM Joy! Apocalypse delayed until 2030 | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

Last built: Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:07 AM

By

Adam Curry,

Monday, February 17, 2014 at 11:07 AM

.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:37

MADISON, Wis. (AP) '-- A Dane County judge has ruled that people can sell a wide range of homemade food without a commercial license or kitchen.

Judge Rhonda Lanford issued the decision earlier this week, the Wisconsin State Journal reported Saturday. The ruling expands the types of food that can be made and sold from home to items like candy, cocoa bombs, fried doughnuts and roasted coffee beans.

The ruling marks the second court victory in five years for three women who have been fighting to sell food from home.

Bed-and-breakfast owner Lisa Kivirist and farmers Dela Ends and Kriss Marion won a ruling in 2017 that a state ban on selling home-baked goods was unconstitutional. They filed a follow-up lawsuit in 2021 arguing that people should be able to sell other shelf-stable goods out of their homes as well.

The Wisconsin Cottage Food Association, which represents people who make homemade foods for sale in the state, joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff.

State law has for years drawn a line between which types of shelf-stable food items are exempted from license and commercial kitchen requirements. Statutes allow people to sell items like cider, maple syrup and pickles and allows nonprofit organizations and churches to sell all foods and meals.

State attorneys argued that food safety is the issue. But Lanford agreed with the plaintiffs' arguments that homemade food is just as safe as other food.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:33

Charles Guerin/Abaca/Sipa via AP Images

Founder of crypto disaster FTX and second largest Democrat donor in 2022 Sam Bankman-Fried had at least four meetings at the White House this year with President Joe Biden's administration, two of which took place within the 2 months leading up to his crypto company's spectacular collapse and SBF's subsequent arrest on charges that include campaign finance violations.

That revelation comes from reporting by Bloomberg and the extensive ''S.B.F. Chronicles'' at Puck.

Bankman-Fried, who has been vocal and visible spinning his role and intent throughout the collapse and fallout, was using ''dirty money'' to ''buy'' influence, primarily to Democrats but also to some Republicans, say U.S. Attorneys. During his post-collapse spin, SBF suggested he donated equal sums to Republicans, but secretly in order to avoid backlash from the liberal press. The words ''Republicans'' and ''dark money'' have attracted a great deal of media attention, with some baselessly stating as fact that he gave ''the same amount'' to both parties, but of the verifiable money that's been tracked it has been vastly in favor of Democrats and Democrat-aligned groups.

And in his blitz of Democrat schmoozing and influence-buying, SBF not only got plenty of face time with former Biden-Harris transition team member and current SEC chair Gary Gensler, but at least four in-person White House sit-downs, as well.

These included at least two meetings with Steve Ricchetti, Counselor to the President, one with Biden's deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, and an apparent two-day meeting after that, participants not reported. SBF's brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, who is one of the names used in for the FTX/SBF political donation schemes, also had a meeting at the White House this year.

From Bloomberg:

Bankman-Fried met Sept. 8 with Steve Ricchetti, one of President Joe Biden's senior advisers, White House officials familiar with the matter said. The meeting, previously unreported, was the latest in a handful of sessions.

Puck adds these details from a conversation that a television producer and former Wall Street banker named Laura Goldman had with Bankman-Fried in September 2021:

As it turned out, S.B.F. was all too happy to meet with politicians and ply them with millions. He told Goldman he had given away about $25 million to that point. ''There are cases where I wish I gave more in retrospect,'' he said.

Goldman took S.B.F. at face value when it came to his interest in pursuing regulation for the crypto industry. Figuring he really wanted the industry to be regulated, after the interview, Goldman introduced S.B.F. to the White House public engagement team. ''He's planning a Washington visit and would like to meet with people in the WH,'' she wrote. Zach Butterworth, the White House Director of Private Sector Engagement, responded to Goldman that S.B.F.'s team should be in touch with Jana Plat, in the White House Office of Public Engagement.

The political donations, made apparently at the expense of FTX's customers and investors, are a major part of the case being built against Bankman-Fried, who is controversially out on bond at this time.

The attorney now in charge at FTX, John Jay Ray III, who previously reclaimed millions for Enron investors, has vowed to claw back the massive donations to help make individual investors whole. Some of the big names on the hook for those funds include next House minority leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).

Charges Bankman-Fried faces include: conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers, wire fraud on customers, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders, wire fraud on lenders, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and most relevantly to the topic, conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate campaign finance laws.

A source who spoke to Bloomberg about the White House meetings amusingly claimed that neither politics in general nor FTX's particular political interests were discussed at those meetings.

Uh-huh.

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

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Brian Gerrish, Mike Robinson, Alex Thomson and Debi Evans with today's UK Column News.

00:31 Beware the Kraken (Xbb.1.5)

00:56 Daily Mirror: ''They broke our NHS''

01:21 Annual number of hospital beds in the (UK) from 2000 to 2021

02:10 Number of nurses workforce England from 1995 to 2021

04:00 Covid pandemic blamed for increase in heart deaths

05:17 Teratogenic. Adjective. ter·'‹a·'‹to·'‹gen·'‹ic

05:48: UK Column Extracts Clips from UK Column News (Please share)

06:40 Thalidomide changed our relationship with new medicines for ever.

07:24 Yellow Card Scheme looks to the future at 50th anniversary forum

08:42 20,000 women still taking dangerous #Valproate

10:40 ''No one should be on Valporate''

12:42 Disabilities caused in babies by epilepsy drug a 'scandal'

18:52 MHRA Caught Hiding Crucial Vaccine Safety Data

19:17 Joan and Derek Bye, whose child, Helenor, was 12 when she died in Cardiff after being treated for misdiagnosed epilepsy with the drug Epilim

19:44 UK Column Live Special - Paediatric & Drug Company Abuse

20:10 Valproate pregnancy prevention programme

20:31 Thousands infected from blood transfusion

21:27 What is the contaminated blood inquiry?

22:00 Infected blood: Parents and pupils reveal they were kept in dark

22:44 Infected Blood Inquiry Youtube

31:29 The UK Column Yellow Card reporting

32:54 Blood inquiry: Former health minister (Ken Clarke) defends himself

36:30 Hearings at Aldwych House Risk Assessment

38:11 UK Covid-19 Inquiry Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster NOTICE OF DETERMINATION

39:20 Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed has been appointed as chair of the Commission on Human Medicines

39:50 MHRA's letter to Debi Evans

41:30 NHS launches new dementia diagnosis drive

41:45 Debi Evans Blog: 3 January 2023

41:01 Nine in ten patients positive about NHS community pharmacies

42:44 Rapid NHS rollout sees 200,000 diabetes patients get lifechanging devices

43:09 Debi's FOI response

45:20 New pandemic dress rehearsal 'Catastrophic Contagion'

46:50 What is medicrime?

48:01 NHS100K Podcast with MP Andrew Bridgen

49:21 Looking for peace in Ukraine? - https://zeitgeschehen-im-fokus.ch/

52:28 Don't Let Russia Fool You About the Minsk Agreements

52:43 EU sanctions against Russia over Ukraine

53:04 Merkel: EU will lift Russia sanctions when Minsk accords implemented

57:00 Swiss graffiti ''Truth is to be lived, not lectured''

57:33 The Delingpod: The James Delingpole Podcast

57:38 Does Ukraine Need To Be Denazified?

58:44 Ukrainian rebel song

1:00:45 Greek Catholic songs of praise

1:02:13 Priest attacked

1:04:00 Dismembered Russian Federation map

1:05:41 Zelenski's speech coach

1:06:30 Ukraine Receives EUR 200 Million Of Preferential Loan From Netherlands

1:07:05 Zelensky prepares for Ukraine's participation at WEF in Davos

1:07:36 President discussed with the CEO of BlackRock

1:07:55 Ukraine's President and the Danish Prime Minister to open conference

1:09:32 Inflation to continue into 2023

1:11:12 The Guardian and GCHQ

1:13:26 Ministers studying plans for UK child-specific terrorism orders

1:15:18 Constitutional reform report a 'turning point' for UK economy

1:16:35 Pºblico

1:18:00 What would happen if Orbn did what Germany just did?

1:19:38 Final slides

1:21:40 LUKAS LION - Digital Age (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

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GB News : 'Germany basically imported civil war and it came to life during New Years.'@EvaVlaar provides more information a'... https://t.co/TEoJRbilC0

Wed Jan 04 20:55:40 +0000 2023

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:56

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - The porn industry has been around for a while and in today's digital age business is booming. When Laurie Schlegel isn't seeing her patients who struggle with sex addiction, she's at the Louisiana State Capitol.

The Republican state representative from Metairie passed HB 142 earlier this year requiring age verification for any website that contains 33.3% or more pornographic material.

''Pornography is destroying our children and they're getting unlimited access to it on the internet and so if the pornography companies aren't going to be responsible, I thought we need to go ahead and hold them accountable,'' said Schlegel.

According to Schlegel, websites would verify someone's age in collaboration with LA Wallet. So, if you plan on using these sites in the future, you may want to download the app.

''I would say so,'' said Sara Kelley, project manager with Envoc. ''I mean, I think it's a must-have for anyone who has a Louisiana state ID or driver's license.''

Kelley added there are other ways websites could ask you to verify your age if you cannot access LA Wallet. She added that although some personal information will be required, companies must not retain personal data after complete verification.

''It doesn't identify your date of birth, it doesn't identify who you are, where you live, what part of the state you're in, or any information from your device or from your actual ID. It just returns that age to say that yes, this person is old enough to be allowed to go in,'' explained Kelley.

It will be the website's responsibility to ensure age verification is required when accessing their site in Louisiana. Schlegel said there will be consequences for those who fail to follow the law.

''Someone could sue on behalf of their child; they can sue if children are getting access to pornography. So, it would be up to the user to sue the company for not verifying age first,'' continued Schlegel.

She said problems like depression, erectile dysfunction, lack of motivation, and fatigue can be directly linked to porn. She also said to prevent these issues from occurring at younger ages, this law is imperative.

''It's tied to some of the biggest societal ills of human trafficking and sexual assault. And in my own practice, the youngest we've ever seen is an 8-year-old,'' noted Schlegel.

There is legislation in Washington, D.C. that looks to implement something like this on a national level. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a bill similar to Schlegel's.

Click here to report a typo.

Copyright 2022 WAFB. All rights reserved.

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Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:11

Ryan Fournier : ðŸ--¥ðŸ--¥ðŸ--¥ @mattgaetz unleashed: ''Maybe the right person for the job of Speaker isn't someone who wants it so bad. Maybe'... https://t.co/QLpI4dZLMX

Tue Jan 03 19:38:33 +0000 2023

Some Name Here : @RyanAFournier @mattgaetz Republicans love having child rapists in House leadership ðŸ¤

Wed Jan 04 15:02:45 +0000 2023

Lisa Hensel : @RyanAFournier @mattgaetz I agree 100%

Wed Jan 04 14:43:43 +0000 2023

Tyler R : @RyanAFournier @mattgaetz #JimJordanForSpeaker

Wed Jan 04 14:43:31 +0000 2023

Smitty : @RyanAFournier @mattgaetz You tell them Matt!!!!!!!

Wed Jan 04 13:50:10 +0000 2023

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There has been a surge in sudden deaths amongst seemingly healthy young people throughout the last two years. Television hosts have collapsed in the middle of live broadcasts. Professional athletes in optimal physical condition are dropping like flies. The fastest-growing page on Facebook in 2022 was Died Suddenly'-- a support group for grieving friends and family members who lost loved ones unexpectedly. After quickly gaining nearly 300,000 members, it was removed from the platform. Increasing numbers of concerned citizens are beginning to question what is responsible for the explosion in these 'inexplicable' fatalities.

Mainstream news outlets are using a variety of creative excuses to justify the rapidly rising excess mortalities. Spoiler alert: none suggest an experimental mRNA concoction being used on a mass scale for the first time in human history. Perhaps this has something to do with the millions of dollars in funding media conglomerates receive from their pharmaceutical company sponsors. From 'winter vagina' to feeling joy, here is a list of unconventional cover stories being used by so-called journalists:

Laughter & Giggling [Mirror]

Falling Asleep with the TV On [New York Post]

Having Sex [Wales Online]

Loud Noise [AARP]

Napping [SciTech Daily]

Playing Video Games [BMC Psychiatry]

Gardening [The Sun]

Holidays [The News Tribune]

Solar Storms [New Scientist]

Feeling Joy [Mirror]

Working Out [Men's Journal]

Watching Movies [News 18]

Drinking Soda Too Fast [Forbes]

'Winter Vagina' [The Sun]

Masturbating [Men's Health]

Cold Showers [Express]

Climate Change [The Guardian]

Planes Flying Overhead [Daily Mail]

Skipping Breakfast [Express]

Drinking Water [The Sun]

Drinking Cold Water [The Sun]

Drinking Coffee [Inside Edition]

Shoveling Snow [Daily Mail]

Living Alone [LA Times]

Singing [NBC News]

Physical Activity [Irish Times]

Eating Meat [Newsroom]

Driving [American Journal of Preventative Medicine]

Playing Basketball [Knoxville News]

Breakups [Yahoo]

These moronic reasons might be comical if it wasn't for the fact that they dismiss a travesty currently unfolding. Since Operation Warp Speed first began, overall death rates in adults ages 18-64 have risen by an unprecedented 40%. Life Insurance companies paid out a record $100 billion in 2021. Each day diagnoses of fatal cancers, heart conditions, and autoimmune diseases continue to soar. Meanwhile, drug manufacturers earn over $1,000 in profits per second from COVID-19 inoculations. Until those behind the vaccine distributions are stopped, we will continue to see more ridiculous headlines pointing towards fictitious culprits.

For further reading material, check out Cause Unknown: the Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 by Edward Dowd.

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Sweet Contrarian Jane : @vgclements1 Whoever did this really nailed him. 🤌🏼 https://t.co/ESW9x7pins

Wed Dec 28 23:35:26 +0000 2022

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:27

Barbara Walters' legacy as a trailblazing journalist 01:57

Jeremy Renner in critical condition after snowplowing accident 01:30

Delays and cancellations close out holiday travel season 02:01

Rep. Kevin McCarthy bid for House Speaker in jeopardy 01:37

Father of University of Idaho murder victim speaks out 02:15

Dozens of Russian troops killed in deadly Ukrainian attack 01:34

Thousands mourn Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI 02:04

Deadly flooding in California devastates homes, roads 01:30

Russia rings in New Year attacking Ukraine with 45 drones 01:38

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Four sisters, all in their 80s, share remarkable musical bond 02:16

Parents of suspect in Idaho University student murders speak out 02:17

Deadly California flooding leaves thousands without power 01:37

Violent machete attack blocks away from Times Square New Year's Eve celebration 01:56

Goodbye 2022: Reflecting on joyous moments and big surprises 02:46

Is expensive champagne worth the cost? 02:36

Man accused of stabbing Idaho University students plans to waive extradition 02:40

Remembering Barbara Walters 03:23

Pope Benedict XVI dies at 95 03:22

New Year's celebrations around the world 02:06

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:21

Photo prints of the late Guru Jagat for sale at the RA MA Santa Monica yoga studio. Emily Guerin/KPCC/LAist hide caption

toggle caption Emily Guerin/KPCC/LAist Photo prints of the late Guru Jagat for sale at the RA MA Santa Monica yoga studio.

Emily Guerin/KPCC/LAist QAnon '-- the baseless conspiracy theory that claims that a cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking elites control politics and media '-- is closely identified in political circles with some supporters of former President Donald Trump. But it also has a toehold in yoga and wellness circles.

Themes like everything is connected, nothing happens without a purpose, and nothing is what it seems are central to both yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking.

"If you've been practicing yoga, these are going to be very familiar ideas to you," said Matthew Remski, a former yoga teacher and journalist who hosts a podcast about conspiracies, wellness and cults called Conspirituality.

During the pandemic, many yoga teachers began to speak more openly about their belief in conspiracies, to the point that there is now a term to describe this phenomenon: the "wellness to QAnon pipeline."

To understand what wellness and conspiracy theories have in common, I decided to follow the radicalization journey of a Los Angeles-based Kundalini yoga teacher named Guru Jagat (to hear the full story, subscribe to the LAist Studios podcast Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories," which publishes on Jan. 3).

An LA yoga teacher with celebrity followers Guru Jagat was born as Katie Griggs but used her "spiritual name" professionally.

She ran a Kundalini yoga studio in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles called the RA MA Institute for Applied Yogic Science and Technology, where she taught celebrities like Alicia Keys and Kate Hudson. Part of why she was so popular was that she was something of a contradiction: She wore white flowing clothes, wrapped her hair in a turban, and could chant in Sanskrit, but she also swore profusely and talked about sex and fashion in class.

Jaclyn Gelb first took a class with Guru Jagat in 2013 and was immediately drawn in.

"A yoga teacher that talked like that, that was real. That was grounded," she recalled. "I knew instantly. This is my teacher."

Soon, Gelb was practicing four to six hours a day, taking cold showers (which is a Kundalini yoga thing), and trying to get friends and family to join.

Gelb always liked that Guru Jagat was an edgy disruptor, unafraid of speaking her mind. Before the pandemic, she spoke about conspiracies occasionally, but that seemed like part of her schtick. But after the pandemic started, Gelb noticed her teacher beginning to speak more openly in class and in her podcast, Reality Riffing.

Guru Jagat shared her belief that the government wanted everyone at home for reasons other than public health. She suggested that the coronavirus was being sprayed in airplane chemtrails. She said that artificial intelligence was controlling our minds and suggested meditation as a way to take back control.

"And she said, 'This is what you get for spending the weekend on YouTube, watching alien videos,'" Gelb recalled. "That caught my attention, because it was like, 'Oh, she's, she's falling into rabbit holes.'"

Soon, Guru Jagat was defying local stay-at-home orders to practice maskless and in-person. On her podcast, she began to interview controversial people with fringe beliefs, like Arthur Firstenberg, a New Mexico-based writer and activist who believes 5G wireless internet caused the coronavirus pandemic.

Gelb said it was hard for her to watch her teacher change, but she also couldn't look away. She began to wish someone close to Guru Jagat would "figure out a way to wake her up, a way to snap her out of it."

But in December 2020, Gelb reached her limit. That's when Guru Jagat invited David Icke to speak at the studio and on her podcast.

"That just was not something that the woman I knew before would do," Gelb said. "That was so deeply offensive."

British conspiracy theorist David Icke at an anti-lockdown protest in Birmingham in 2020. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Christopher Furlong/Getty Images British conspiracy theorist David Icke at an anti-lockdown protest in Birmingham in 2020.

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Icke is a well-known conspiracy theorist and antisemite who claims that reptilian extraterrestrials control the world. By the time Guru Jagat interviewed him in January 2021, he'd been banned from Twitter for spreading falsehoods about COVID.

Their conversation ranged from the lockdown to other far-right talking points.

"The wellness industry, it's been hijacked by all of this, this kind of woke agenda," she said.

Guru Jagat wasn't the only yoga teacher to plunge down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole during the pandemic.

From yoga philosophy to conspiratorial thinkingRemski, the host of Conspirituality, noticed a number of yoga teachers flirting with QAnon during the early months of the pandemic. At first, he suspected it was a marketing ploy. With yoga studios around the country suddenly closed, teachers were forced to compete for the same online audience. But as the pandemic progressed, some teachers, like Guru Jagat, did not walk back their rhetoric.

Of course, many people practice yoga without believing in conspiracy theories. However, yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking have a lot in common, Remski said, making it easy to slide from the former into the latter.

In both circles, there is an emphasis on "doing your own research" and "finding your own truth." And many people who practice and teach yoga distrust Western medicine, preferring to find alternative solutions or try to let their body heal itself.

"The relativism around truth, which has so long been a part of wellness culture, really reared its head in the pandemic," said Natalia Petrzela, an author and historian at The New School. "This idea that 'truth is just in the eye of the beholder' is something which can feel kind of empowering when you're sitting in yoga class, but when it's the pandemic, and that kind of language is being deployed to kind of foment, like, vaccine denial or COVID denialism, it has the same power, because we're all steeped in this culture ... it can be used for real harm."

QAnon, in particular, may have a particular resonance for yoga practitioners, according to Ben Lorber, a researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank that monitors right-wing movements, because both communities share the idea of a higher truth accessible to a select few.

The secret truth that QAnon followers believe is that the world is controlled by "the Deep State," an evil cabal of elites who worship Satan and sexually assault children. In yoga, it's more nuanced, but could include ideas like enlightenment or spiritual awakening.

One follower leaves, but others remainJaclyn Gelb stopped taking classes with Guru Jagat; she was angry with her former teacher.

"She was so intelligent. She had so much power," she said. "She could have done so much good."

But as Guru Jagat radicalized, she kept many of her followers.

Nancy Lucas is another one of Guru Jagat's long-time students who said she liked hearing what she called "every side of the story" in her class and on her podcast.

"I think she was giving people from all walks of life that opportunity to come there and speak and give their point of view," she said. "I do think she felt that the press was being biased, and I think I do too. I mean, if you're banning people's comments from Twitter and Facebook, we don't have an open forum for dialogue."

Guru Jagat's story came to a sudden, unexpected end on Aug. 1, 2021, when she died of a pulmonary embolism. She was 41.

Since her death, her yoga studio, the RA MA Institute, initiated an elaborate period of mourning, including two weeks of continuous chanting, a gong ceremony, and a 13-day-long "Mayan ceremony for clarity and direction."

Since then, Guru Jagat has become a saint-like figure to many of her followers.

In a YouTube tribute, student Angela Sumner described her this way: "Even if you think that she's a scam artist, even if you think she's a conspiracy theorist, you can't look at her eloquence and her teachings and deny that she is one of the greatest teachers that's ever lived during our time."

To hear the full story, listen to Imperfect Paradise: Yoga's "Queen of Conspiracy Theories" from LAist Studios beginning Jan. 3.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:09

Scientists: Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction

Earth currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction, according to scientists | 60 Minutes 13:17 In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet's 3 and a half billion people were sustainable. But on this New Year's Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you're about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs. We're going to show you a possible solution, but first, have a look at how humanity is already suffering from the vanishing wild.

In Washington state, the Salish Sea helped feed the world.

Dana Wilson: With this weather and the way things feel once I get out here, it's time to be fishing, that's what it feels like.

Commercial fisherman Dana Wilson supported a family on the Salish Sea's legendary wealth of salmon. He remembers propellers churning the water off blaine, washington and cranes straining for the state's 200 million dollar annual catch.

Dana Wilson: That used to be a buying station, they're gone now, they don't buy anymore. So, that building over there used to buy salmon, they don't buy salmon anymore, it's just not here.

In 1991, one salmon species was endangered. Today, 14 salmon populations are foundering. They've been crowded out of rivers by habitat destruction, warming, and pollution. Dana Wilson used to fish all summer. Today, a conservation authority grants rare, fleeting, permission to throw a net.

Scott Pelley: There was a season.

Dana Wilson: There was a season.

Scott Pelley: Now there's a day?

Dana Wilson: There's a day, and sometimes it's hours. Sometimes you might get 12 hours, 16 hours. that's what we're down to.

Dana WilsonHere, the vanishing wild scuttled a way of life that began with native tribes a 1,000 years ago.

Armando Brionez: I don't remember anybody doing anything other than salmon fishing.

Fisherman Armando Brionez is a member of the Lummi Tribe, which calls itself "people of the salmon." He didn't imagine the rich harvest would end with his five fishing boats.

Armando Brionez: All of a sudden, you're trying to figure out, "Well, how am I gonna make that paycheck for my family?" Well for me it was like well, I have a backup for a backup, for a backup, for a backup.

Armando BrionezBrionez's 'backups' include his new food truck, switching to crab fishing, and consulting on cannabis farms. His scramble to adapt is being repeated around the world. A World Wildlife Fund study says that in the past 50 years, the abundance of global wildlife has collapsed 69%, mostly for the same reason.

Paul Ehrlich: Too many people, too much consumption and growth mania.

At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true.

Scott Pelley: You seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable?

Paul Ehrlich: Oh, humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you'd need five more Earths. Not clear where they're gonna come from.

Scott Pelley: Just in terms of the resources that would be required?

Paul Ehrlich: Resources that would be required, the systems that support our lives, which of course are the biodiversity that we're wiping out. Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we're sawing off.

In 1968, Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford, became a doomsday celebrity with a bestseller forecasting the collapse of nature.

Scott Pelley: When "The Population Bomb" came out, you were described as an alarmist.

Paul Ehrlich: I was alarmed. I am still alarmed. All of my colleagues are alarmed.

Paul EhrlichThe alarm Ehrlich sounded in '68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world. But he also wrote in '68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice and humanity would overwhelm the wild. Today, humans have taken over 70% of the planet's land and 70% of the freshwater.

Paul Ehrlich: The rate of extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time.

How agriculture hastens species extinction We know the rate of extinction is 'extraordinarily high' because of a study of the fossil record by biologist Tony Barnosky, Ehrlich's Stanford colleague.

Tony Barnosky: The data are rock solid. I don't think you'll find a scientist that will say we're not in an extinction crisis.

Barnosky's research suggests today's rate of extinction is up to 100 times faster than is typical in the nearly 4 billion year history of life. These peaks represent the few times that life collapsed globally. And the last was the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.

Tony Barnosky: There are five times in Earth's history where we had mass extinctions. And by mass extinctions, I mean at least 75%, three quarters of the known species disappearing from the face of the Earth. Now we're witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction where the same thing could happen on our watch.

Liz Hadly: it's a horrific state of the planet when common species, the ubiquitous species that we're familiar with are declining.

Tony Barnosky's colleague in the study of extinction is his wife, biologist Liz Hadly, faculty director at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Research Preserve in California.

Tony Barnosky and Liz HadlyLiz Hadly: You know, I see it in my mind and it's a really sad state. If you've spent any time in California, you know the loss of water. The loss of water means that there are dead salmon you see in the river right before your eyes. But it also means the demise of those birds that rely on the salmon fishery, eagles. It means, you know, things like minks and otters that rely on fish. It means that our habitats that we're used to, the forests that-- you know, 3,000-year-old forests are going to be gone. So it means silence. And it means some very catastrophic events because it's happening so quickly.

Tony Barnosky: It means you look out your window, and three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That's what mass extinction looks like.

Liz Hadly: What we see just in California is, you know, the loss of our iconic state symbols. We have no more grizzly bears in California.

Scott Pelley: The only grizzly bears in California are on the state flag?

Tony Barnosky: that's our state mammal and they are not here anymore.

Scott Pelley: Is it too much to say that we're killing the planet?

Liz Hadly: No.

Tony Barnosky: I would say it is too much to say that we're killing the planet, because the planet's gonna be fine. What we're doing is we're killing our way of life.

The worst of the killing is in Latin America where the World Wildlife Fund study says the abundance of wildlife has fallen 94% since 1970. But it was also in Latin America that we found the possibility of hope.

Mexican ecologist Gerardo Ceballos is one of the world's leading scientists on extinction. He told us the only solution is to save the one third of the Earth that remains wild. To prove it, he's running a 3,000-square-mile experiment. In the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve near Guatemala, he is paying family farmers to stop cutting the forest.

Gerardo Ceballos: We're going to pay each family certain amount of money that is more than you will get cutting down the forest, if you protect it

Scott Pelley: And how much are you paying out every year?

Gerardo Ceballos: For instance, each family here will get around $1,000.

Gerardo CeballosMore than enough, here, to make up for lost farmland. In total, the payouts come to $1.5 million a year. Or about $2,000 per square mile. The tab is paid through the charity of wealthy donors.

Gerardo Ceballos: the investment to protect what is left is, I mean, really small

The payoff on that investment is being collected on Ceballos' jungle cameras. Thirty years ago the jaguar was very nearly extinct in Mexico. Now Ceballos says they've rebounded to about 600 in the reserve.

Scott Pelley: There are other places where there are reserves around the world where they've been able to increase the populations of certain species. But I wonder, are all these little success stories enough to prevent mass extinction?

Gerardo Ceballos: All the big success that we have in protecting forests and recovering animals, like tigers in India, jaguars in Mexico, elephants in Botswana, and so on, are incredible, amazing, successes. But they are like grains of sand in a beach. And to really make a big impact we need to scale up this 10,000 times. So, they are important because they give us hope. But they are completely insufficient to cope with climate change.

Scott Pelley: So what would the world have to do?

Gerardo Ceballos: What we will have to do is to really understand that the climate change and the species extinction is a threat to humanity. And then put all the machinery of society: political, economic, and social, towards finding solutions to the problems.

Finding solutions to the problems was the goal, two weeks ago, at the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, where nations agreed to conservation targets. But at the same meeting in 2010, those nations agreed to limit the destruction of the Earth by 2020'--and not one of those goals was met. This, despite thousands of studies including the continuing research of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Scott Pelley: You know that there is no political will to do any of the things that you're recommending.

Paul Ehrlich: I know there's no political will to do any of the things that I'm concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to.

In the 50 years since Ehrlich's population bomb, humanity's feasting on resources has tripled. We're already consuming 175% of what the Earth can regenerate. And, consider, half of humanity, about four billion, live on less than $10 a day. They aspire to cars, air conditioning and a rich diet. But they won't be fed by the fishermen of Washington's Salish Sea, including Armando Brionez.

Scott Pelley: The tribe has been fishing salmon here for hundreds of years?

Armando Brionez: Yeah.

Scott Pelley: And your generation is seeing the end of that?

Armando Brionez: It's getting harder and harder. I hate to say-- I don't wanna say it's the end of it.

Scott Pelley: why do you feel so emotionally attached to this?

Armando Brionez: It's everything we know. I'm fortunate enough to know where I know a lot of different things. I've done a lotta different things in my life. I've gotten good at evolving and changing. But not everybody here is built like that. To some of us this is what they know, this is all they know.

The five mass extinctions of the ancient past were caused by natural calamities'--volcanoes, and an asteroid. Today, if the science is right, humanity may have to survive a sixth mass extinction in a world of its own making.

Produced by Maria Gavrilovic. Associate producer, Alex Ortiz. Broadcast associate, Michelle Karim. Edited by April Wilson.

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In: Climate Change Scott Pelley Correspondent, "60 Minutes"

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:45

My name is John Campbell, I am a semi-retired clinical nurse, nurse lecturer, academic, researcher and author of numerous articles and two text books.

My specialisms are human physiology and pathophysiology, as applied to clinical practice. I have also produced many educational videos which are used extensively around the world.

In my view the UK health authorities should pause the current covid-19 vaccination programme, due to the risks associated with vaccination.

As time has passed since the early days of 2020, the number of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 infection has continued to decline since it's peaks in previous waves. This is clearly seen in data published by the UK government and the Office for National Statistics.

In addition, the proportion of patients in hospital with COVID-19 is now greater than the patients admitted to hospital for COVID-19. This is true for general hospital admissions as well as ICU admissions. In other words, most Covid positive patients admitted to hospital are now incidental, and were not admitted purely for COVID-19 complications.

As a result of mass infection during the various waves of the pandemic, especially the huge numbers of people infected with the omicron variant, most people have developed levels of natural immunity to the virus.

This natural infection also generates mucosal compartment immunity in the respiratory tract, which the injected vaccines do not produce.

While prior infection does not always prevent symptomatic disease, it does provide levels of protection against severe disease and hospitalisation.

This means the overall risk from COVID-19 infection with SARS coronavirus 2 is significantly less than it was when the vaccination programmes were first instigated.

However, risks associated with ongoing vaccination are probably the same as they were in the early stages of the pandemic and mass vaccination programmes.

If I am correct in this evaluation, this means that the risk of COVID-19 infection has gone down, while the risk of vaccination remains the same.

This fundamentally alters the risk benefit analysis of this vaccination programme.

I therefore consider that the UK government authorities should pause the current covid mass vaccination programme, until a full, population scale risk / benefit analysis is carried out, and published for free and open peer review.

I further call on the UK health authorities to review the intramuscular injection technique used in the delivery of mRNA vaccines. Currently, after insertion of the needle the syringe is not aspirated to ensure the tip of the needle in not in a blood vessel.

This leaves open the possibility of inadvertent intravascular administration, resulting in systemic spread of the mRNA particles in seconds. This would mean that mRNA vaccine particles would circulate, in a relatively undiluted form through the vessels of the major organs of the body.

This video is specific to the current mRNA vaccines, I continue to promote the massive benefits of other forms of vaccination in the UK and around the world.

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:44

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:39

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:20

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:36

Libs of TikTok : Losing weight, even if it's for your health is fatphobic- unless you're also a fat liberation activist https://t.co/p84xwkNwPO

Mon Jan 02 19:40:12 +0000 2023

AC : @libsoftiktok I love my thicc wife. I'll admit I'm a chubby chaser, no shame in it.

Tue Jan 03 13:36:10 +0000 2023

Samuel Burns : @libsoftiktok so smokers had to pay $50 a month as a ''tax'' from issuance companies to offset a users bad choices. b'... https://t.co/1P5ZcR7aIU

Tue Jan 03 13:36:01 +0000 2023

The Real McCoy : @libsoftiktok Listen, nobody is scared of fat people. That's what a phobia is- the fear of something. The only thin'... https://t.co/infatXjtXn

Tue Jan 03 13:35:39 +0000 2023

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Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:31

After the Senate passed the $1.7 billion omnibus bill with the help of 18 Republicans, Sen. Mitch McConnell said he was proud of the work those GOPers did with Dems to get through a bill that contains ''all our priorities'':

McConnell: "I'm pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities." pic.twitter.com/RuVcsvNX0B

'-- Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 20, 2022

Now it looks like McConnell is so proud of the bill that he's joining others in hosting President Biden in Kentucky on Wednesday to celebrate:

.@LeaderMcConnell to host @POTUS Biden in Kentucky for event celebrating president's 'economic plan' https://t.co/K5hetuWkwC

'-- Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 2, 2023

From the Washington Examiner:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will join President Joe Biden for a rare joint event held in the senator's state on Wednesday.

The visit from the president comes after McConnell joined Democrats in voting for legislation that has drawn a rebuke from former President Donald Trump and certain conservative Republicans. Joining the president and the Kentucky senator will be Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D), and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), according to a White House official.

''The President will deliver remarks on how his economic plan is rebuilding our infrastructure, creating good-paying jobs that don't require a four-year degree, and revitalizing communities left behind,'' the brief advisory from the White House read.

Biden said he's going to the event with McConnell because ''it's a giant state and there's a lot of money'':

Q. ''Why is it important to go with Mitch McConnell to Kentucky?

Biden: ''It's his state.''

Q: Why is it significant to be with McConnell there?

Biden: ''We've been friends a long time'... It's a giant state and there's a lot of money.'' pic.twitter.com/9bUn2e14gH

'-- Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 2, 2023

Well, we're certainly glad the bipartisan contingency will be celebrating while regular people are hit with inflation and so many other problems.

The uniparty laughs at you https://t.co/1iFMXRt7Vd

'-- Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) January 2, 2023

Are you paying attention yet? https://t.co/iZRvjeru1b

'-- Mostly Peaceful Memes (@MostlyPeacefull) January 2, 2023

The problem with the GOP in a nutshell 👇🏼 https://t.co/CjvTOVUMHs

'-- It's all a distraction (@it_distraction) January 2, 2023

The reason(s) there wasn't the predicted huge ''red wave'' in November is starting to become clearer by the day.

***

Related:

Mitch McConnell looking forward to working with President Joe Biden on infrastructure

At Nat'l Prayer Breakfast, President Biden calls Mitch McConnell 'a man of honor' (does Biden remember what he said a couple weeks ago?)

***

Editor's Note:Help us keep owning the libs! Join Twitchy VIP and use promo code AMERICAFIRST to receive a 25% discount off your membership!

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:40

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:43

A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.

Researcher Matt Kunze discovered the issue and received $107,500 for responsibly reporting it to Google last year. Earlier this week, the researcher published technical details about the finding and an attack scenario to show how the flaw could be leveraged.

Compromise processWhile experimenting with his own Google Home mini speaker, the researcher discovered that new accounts added using the Google Home app could send commands to it remotely via the cloud API.

Using a Nmap scan, the researcher found the port for the local HTTP API of Google Home, so he set up a proxy to capture the encrypted HTTPS traffic, hoping to snatch the user authorization token.

Captured HTTPS (encrypted) traffic (downrightnifty.me)The researcher discovered that adding a new user to the target device is a two-step process that requires the device name, certificate, and "cloud ID" from its local API. With this info, they could send a link request to the Google server.

To add a rogue user to a target Google Home device, the analyst implemented the link process in a Python script that automated the exfiltration of the local device data and reproduced the linking request.

The linking request that carries the device ID data (downrightnifty.me)The attack is summarized in the researcher's blog as follows:

The attacker wishes to spy on the victim within wireless proximity of the Google Home (but does NOT have the victim's Wi-Fi password).The attacker discovers the victim's Google Home by listening for MAC addresses with prefixes associated with Google Inc. (e.g. E4:F0:42).The attacker sends deauth packets to disconnect the device from its network and make it enter setup mode.The attacker connects to the device's setup network and requests its device info (name, cert, cloud ID).The attacker connects to the internet and uses the obtained device info to link their account to the victim's device.The attacker can now spy on the victim through their Google Home over the internet (no need to be close to the device anymore).The researcher published on GitHub three PoCs for the actions above. However, these should not work Google Home devices running the latest firmware version.

The PoCs take things a step further from just planting a rogue user and enable spying over the microphone, making arbitrary HTTP requests on the victim's network, and reading/writing arbitrary files on the device.

Possible implicationsHaving a rogue account linked to the target device makes it possible to perform actions via the Google Home speaker, such as controlling smart switches, making online purchases, remotely unlocking doors and vehicles, or stealthily brute-forcing the user's PIN for smart locks.

More worryingly, the researcher found a way to abuse the "call [phone number]" command by adding it to a malicious routine that would activate the microphone at a specified time, calling the attacker's number and sending live microphone feed.

The malicious routing that captures mic audio (downrightnifty.me)During the call, the device's LED would turn blue, which is the only indication that some activity is taking place. If the victim notices it, they may assume the device is updating its firmware. The standard microphone activation indicator is a pulsating LED, which does not happen during calls.

Finally, it's also possible to play media on the compromised smart speaker, rename it, force a reboot, force it to forget stored Wi-Fi networks, force new Bluetooth or Wi-Fi pairings, and more.

Google fixesKunze discovered the issues in January 2021 and sent additional details and PoCs in March 2021. Google fixed all problems in April 2021.

The patch includes a new invite-based system to handle account links, which blocks any attempts not added on Home.

Deauthenticating Google Home is still possible, but this can't be used to link a new account, so the local API that leaked the basic device data is also inaccessible.

As for the "call [phone number]" command, Google has added a protection to prevent its remote initiation through routines.

It's worth noting that Google Home was released in 2016, scheduled routines were added in 2018, and the Local Home SDK was introduced in 2020, so an attacker finding the issue before April 2021 would have had plenty of time to take advantage.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:24

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 15:19

An "unprovoked" machete attack on three New York City police officers near Times Square on New Year's Eve is being investigated as a possible terrorist incident. The suspect is allegedly a 19-year-old man from Maine, whose online posts indicate recent Islamic radicalization, sources told ABC News.

Investigators are looking into whether the suspect came to the annual ball drop specifically to wage an attack on law enforcement, the sources said.

The incident occurred just after 10 p.m. on Saturday near West 52nd Street and 8th Avenue, outside the secure area that had been set up for New Year's Eve celebrations, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters at a news conference at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital.

"Unprovoked, a 19-year-old male approached an officer and attempted to strike him over the head with a machete," Sewell said. "The male then struck two additional officers in the head with the machete."

Trevor Bickford, 19, suspected in the machete attack on three New York City police officers near Times Square on New Year's Eve, is pictured here in this undated photo.

Handout

One of the officers fired their weapon, striking the suspect in the shoulder, Sewell said. The suspect was taken into custody, she said.

The three injured officers were taken to Bellevue, Sewell said. All three officers were released from the hospital on Sunday.

Suspect relatives reported concernsWhile a motive remains under investigation, authorities are not ruling out the possibility that the suspect came to New York City specifically to attack police officers at the Times Square ball drop, law enforcement sources told ABC News.

Multiple law enforcement sources identified the suspect as Trevor Bickford, 19, of Wells, Maine. He took an Amtrak train to New York City on Dec. 29, the sources said.

Federal and local law enforcement investigators are combing through the suspect's online postings, which indicate recent extremist Islamic radicalization, the sources said.

Bickford has no prior arrests. His mother and aunt notified law enforcement in recent weeks about their concerns he was gravitating toward dangerous Islamist ideologies, the sources said. The report prompted the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force to look into the suspect, the law enforcement sources said.

The NYPD counterterrorism bureau is investigating the New Year's Eve attack in conjunction with the FBI.

Should authorities determine the attack was motivated by an Islamist ideology, it would make it the first terror incident associated with New Year's Eve in Times Square, authorities said.

Prior to New Year's Eve, the NYPD noted in a pre-event assessment that throughout December "multiple pro-ISIS users disseminated extremist propaganda graphics broadly calling for attacks in advance of the New Year, advocating a wide range of low-tech tactics." Islamist terror groups have long promoted knife attacks.

Both federal and local law enforcement stressed at Sunday morning's news conference the attack appeared to be an isolated incident and there was no longer a threat.

Injured officers in stable conditionOne of the injured officers, an eight-year veteran of the NYPD, suffered a laceration to the head, officials said. Another hurt officer had just graduated from the police academy on Friday, and as is traditionally the case, his first assignment was the New Year's Eve detail in Times Square. The rookie officer was also struck in the head, resulting in a skull fracture and large laceration, officials said.

"We are really pleased by the response and how our officers handled this situation," Mayor Eric Adams said. "All three of the officers are in stable conditions and there are no critical threats to New Yorkers at this time."

FBI Assistant Director in Charge Mike Driscoll said the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force is involved to "ascertain what is the nature of the attack." He said that the FBI believes the attacker was acting alone.

The New York Police Department released an image of a knife they said had been recovered at the scene of an officer-involved shooting near Times Square on New Year's Eve.

NYPD

The NYPD released an image of a weapon, saying it had been recovered at the scene. The weapon appeared to be a Gurkha knife, a type of curved blade, according to ABC News contributor Darrell M. Blocker, a retired CIA operative.

Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, said, "Let's think about those family members here who are in shock right now, never thinking the first call of the year would be their son, their husband, their family member would be here in Bellevue Hospital."

'Everybody's panicking'Videos from the scene appeared to show revelers jogging through the rain as they were directed away from the scene by columns of police officers.

David Lyugovski, of California, told ABC News that he saw dozens of officers, some with guns drawn, running toward the scene of the incident.

A police officer walks after the first public New Year's event since the COVID-19 pandemic, at Times Square, in New York, Jan. 1, 2023.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

"They're all telling us to go towards the viewing area for the ball drop and everybody's running, everybody's panicking," Lyugovski said.

Lyugovski and his brother-in-law, Andrew Dyachkin, of South Carolina, were in New York to watch the Times Square ball drop, they said in a joint video interview.

"Somebody's yelling, 'Calm down, calm down,' because everybody's on edge," Dyachkin said. "Like, I'm sure in the back of all of our minds, now this could be a target for, you know, shooting."

He added, ''We thought someone is trying to shoot, you know, as many people as possible. Another mass shooting.''

One of the officers involved in the incident had graduated from the police academy on Friday, Sewell said.

Adams spoke at the officer's graduation ceremony, he said.

"It just goes to show you, it could be your first day or it could be your last day, the actions that police officers must take every day are life-threatening situations," Adams said.

ABC News' Josh Margolin, Keith Harden, Patricio Chile and Mark Crudele contributed to this report.

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 14:43

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Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:34

For most of 2022, CNN has tried to redeem it self after losing more than half of its viewers due to constantly reporting on fake news and throwing Trump supporters under the bus.

I'm attempt to dial it back, CNN announced that it was going to limit hosts alcohol consumption during the live coverage of New Years Eve.

However, that didn't stop the network's liberal hosts to still make a fool of themselves.

As the clock stroke midnight, CNN host Don Lemon dances to ''Back That Azz Up,'' leaving a foul taste in viewers mouths.

Instead of celebrating the new year with the traditional toast of champagne, Lemon was seen ''throwing beaded necklaces into the dancing crowd, only moments later seeming to realize that the countdown and announcement had been missed,'' according to Business Insider.

CNN has redeemed itself by ringing in the new year in New Orleans with "Back That Azz Up" and not acknowledging the stroke of midnight in any way pic.twitter.com/tieCeHc4sA

'-- Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) January 1, 2023 Apparently, Lemon's earpiece stopped working and he was unable to hear the producers, making him miss the countdown to midnight.

The network was already on thin ice after hosts were over served while on air last year.

While ringing in the 2022 year, Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper made comments that would normally be frowned upon had they not been drinking.

Cohen called former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) a ''horrible mayor,'' including a salute saying included a salute while saying, ''sayonara sucka.''

The liberal network has averaged only 730,000 viewers, compared to Fox News with 2.3 million.

In 2022, new CEO Chris Licht promised to make the network about reporting real news once again.

So far, his new plan has yet to work and the way the network rang in the new year doesn't give much hope for change.