Scientists' ability to predict 'flash droughts' could assist farmers


Flash droughts that can cause major crop damage can be predicted with weather data, new research says. Photo by Curt Reynolds, courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture

DENVER, March 5 (UPI) -- Scientists have identified ways to predict a type of quick-hitting drought, which could give farmers, ranchers and water managers early warning and options for irrigation and help them protect crops and livestock.

"Flash droughts" occur quickly and are characterized by their speed and high intensity. They can be devastating to agriculture and water supplies, a peer-reviewed essay published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change said.

"The weather will go from a normal state and then suddenly enter a drought within a few weeks, or a mild drought gets much worse very rapidly," lead author Angie Pendergrass, an atmospheric scientist at Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research, told UPI.

Giving a few weeks' notice to farmers and water managers might lessen the blow of a flash drought, said co-author Philip Mote, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

"Forewarned is forearmed," Mote said. "The more experience we get with making these forecasts, the more helpful they will be for water use."

Flash droughts could be predicted by factoring in the evaporation rate of the atmosphere when other weather patterns are in place, researchers said in "Flash droughts present a new challenge for subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction."

A combination of thirsty air, or high evaporative demand, combined with stretches of no rain and extra heat, can lead to a flash droughts, Pendergrass said.

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A 2012 flash drought hit the agricultural heartland of the Midwest and Great Plains, in early June, lasting through the summer and causing billions of dollars in crop losses, said Mary Knapp, assistant Kansas state climatologist.
"We got a cessation of rainfall at critical points when the crops were needing it with the highest demand," Knapp said.

Notice of flash drought conditions could help water managers in the West plan for irrigation and drinking water usage, she said.

RELATED Wetter and drier: Global warming drives weather extremes

"As we go into the spring, if we're going to see an onset of a flash drought, reservoir managers might not lower the storage levels because they will need that water later," Knapp said.

If farmers had a heads-up about the drought in 2012, they might have planted more water-tolerant crop varieties or increased row spacing in the fields so crops did not compete for water, she said.

But some decisions, like following a five-year planned crop rotation, would not have been alterable with only a few weeks' notice, Knapp said.

In summer 2017 in Eastern Montana and western North Dakota, a wet spring was followed by a flash drought.

Rangeland for cattle grazing suddenly dried up under extreme dry conditions. During the same period, a fast-moving wildfire destroyed 300,000 acres of rangeland.

Many producers weaned calves early and sold them to market, and many cut down their herds significantly that year, said Jay Bodner, executive vice president of the Helena-based Montana Stock Growers Association.

"Grass composition was such poor quality that the young calves were not putting on pounds and coming in underweight," Bodner recalled.

Giving ranchers a three-week lead time before a flash drought could have helped make some decisions about locating pasture options or alternative hay, he said.

"They might not have had to sell those animals," Bodner said.

Droughts are among the most complex weather patterns, still not well understood by climate scientists, the essay said. They can last for a few weeks or decades, and can affect a few square miles or stretch over continents.

Some parts of the western United States have been in a state of drought for decades, and that can increase wildfires.

Weather scientists and farmers try to predict how a drought is progressing via the U.S. Drought Monitor website, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Climate scientists might have predicted the flash drought of 2012 early if they added analysis of atmospheric thirst, or evaporative demand drought index, the paper said.

Evaporative demand numbers showed that by early May, weeks before the drought actually hit, arid, hot weather conditions already were building.

One thing climate scientists can't predict, however, is when a drought will end.

It's actually harder to predict when it will rain than whether atmospheric conditions are right for a flash drought, Pendergrass said.

Meanwhile, she said she hoped more research would lead to better predictions.

"If communities are able to make plans and have them at the ready, they can prepare ahead of time before a flash drought event gets too far underway," she said.

On this date in history: MARCH 5,  1946 Winston Churchill, in a famous speech in Fulton, Mo., stated that a Soviet Union "Iron Curtain" had "descended across" Europe. 

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." (1939)

File Photo courtesy Cecil Beaton/Imperial War Museums

March 5 (UPI) -- On this date in history In 1984, the Standard Oil Co. of California, also known as Chevron, bought Gulf Corp. for more than $13 billion in the largest business merger in U.S. history at the time.

THIS WAS ALSO THE TIME OF THE GREATEST CRASH IN OIL MARKET HISTORY, WHICH LED TO THE CREATION OF PETROCAN AND THE NEP
IN CANADA. PETROCAN BOUGHT UP ABANDONED CANADIAN OIL COMPANY SUBSIDIARIES LIKE CHEVRON AND GULF WHEN THESE MERGERS OCCURRED

On this date in history: MARCH 5,1933,

in German elections, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won nearly half the seats in the Reichstag (the Parliament).

On this date in history: MARCH 5,1953, the Soviet Union announced that Joseph Stalin had died at age 73. Stalin had been in a coma after having a stroke four days earlier. 

WHO KILLED STALIN

File Photo by Library of Congress/UPI

SEE STALIN

New Study Supports Idea Stalin Was Poisoned

By Michael Wines
March 5, 2003

Fifty years after Stalin died, felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he was actually poisoned, perhaps to avert a looming war with the United States.

That war may well have been closer than anyone outside the Kremlin suspected at the time, say the authors of a new book based on the records.

The 402-page book, ''Stalin's Last Crime,'' will be published later this month. Relying on a previously secret account by doctors of Stalin's final days, its authors suggest that he may have been poisoned with warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner also used as a rat killer, during a final dinner with four members of his Politburo.

They base that theory in part on early drafts of the report, which show that Stalin suffered extensive stomach hemorrhaging during his death throes. The authors state that significant references to stomach bleeding were excised from the 20-page official medical record, which was not issued until June 1953, more than three months after his death on March 5 that year.



Four Politburo members were at that dinner: Lavrenti P. Beria, then chief of the secret police; Georgi M. Malenkov, Stalin's immediate successor; Nikita S. Khrushchev, who eventually rose to the top spot; and Nikolai Bulganin.

The authors, Vladimir P. Naumov, a Russian historian, and Jonathan Brent, a Yale University Soviet scholar, suggest that the most likely suspect, if Stalin was poisoned, is Beria, for 15 years his despised minister of internal security.

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Beria supposedly boasted of killing Stalin on May Day, two months after his death. ''I did him in! I saved all of you,'' he was quoted as telling Vyacheslav M. Molotov, another Politburo member, in Khrushchev's 1970 memoirs, ''Khrushchev Remembers.''

But Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent dismiss Khrushchev's own account of Stalin's death, in the same memoirs, as an almost cartoonish distortion of the truth. With virtually everyone connected to the case now dead, the real story may never be known, Mr. Brent said in an interview this week.

''Some doctors are skeptical that if an autopsy were performed, that a conclusive answer to the question of whether he was poisoned could be found,'' he said. ''I personally believe that Stalin's death was not fortuitous. There are just too many arrows pointing in the other direction.''

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The book, like most such volumes, paints a chilling portrait of Stalin, at once deeply paranoid and endlessly crafty, continually inventing enemies and then wiping them out as part of the terror that killed millions and kept millions more in the toil that enabled the Soviet Union to leap from czarism to the industrial age.


Yet modern Russians are torn about his memory. The latest poll of 1,600 adults by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, released today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death, shows that more than half of all respondents believe Stalin's role in Russian history was positive, while only a third disagreed.

By the poll's reckoning, 27 percent of Russians judge Stalin a cruel and inhumane tyrant. But 20 percent call him wise and humane -- among them the head of the Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, who today compared Stalin to ''the most grandiose figures of the Renaissance.''

Mr. Brent and Mr. Naumov, the secretary of a Russian government commission to rehabilitate victims of repression, have spent years in the archives of the K.G.B. and other Soviet organizations.

Russian officials granted them access to some documents for their latest work, which primarily traces the fabulous course of the Doctors' Plot, a supposed collusion in the late 1940's by Kremlin doctors to kill top Communist leaders.

The collusion was in fact a fabrication by Kremlin officials, acting largely on Stalin's orders. By the time Stalin disclosed the plot to a stunned Soviet populace in January 1953, he had spun it into a vast conspiracy, led by Jews under the United States' secret direction, to kill him and destroy the Soviet Union itself.

That February, the Kremlin ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for a second great terror -- this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.



But the terror never unfolded. On March 1, 1953, two weeks after the camps were ordered built and two weeks before the accused doctors were to go on trial, Stalin collapsed at Blizhnaya, a north Moscow dacha, after the all-night dinner with his four Politburo comrades.

After four days, Stalin died, at age 73. Death was laid to a hemorrhage on the left side of his brain.

Less than a month later, the doctors previously accused of trying to kill him were abruptly exonerated and the case against them was deemed an invention of the secret police. No Jews were deported east. By year's end, Beria faced a firing squad, and Khrushchev had tempered Soviet hostility toward the United States.

In their book, Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent cite wildly varying accounts of Stalin's last hours as evidence that -- at the least -- Stalin's Politburo colleagues denied him medical help in the first hours of his illness, when it might have been effective.

Khrushchev and others recalled long after Stalin's death that they had dined with him until the early hours of March 1. His and most other reports state that Stalin was later found sprawled unconscious on the floor, a copy of Pravda nearby.

Yet no doctors were summoned to the dacha until the morning of March 2. Why remains a mystery: one guard later said that Beria had called shortly after Stalin was found, ordering them to say nothing about his illness. Khrushchev wrote that Stalin had been drunk at the dinner and that his dinner companions, told of his illness, presumed that he had fallen out of bed -- until it became clear things were more serious.

More telling, however, is the official medical account of Stalin's death, given to the Communist Party Central Committee in June 1953 and buried in files for almost the next 50 years until unearthed by Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent. It maintained that Stalin had become ill in the early hours of March 2, a full day after he actually suffered a stroke.



The effect of the altered official report is to imply that doctors were summoned quickly after Stalin was found, rather than after a delay.

The authors state that a cerebral hemorrhage is still the most straightforward explanation for Stalin's death, and that poisoning remains for now a matter of speculation. But Western physicians who examined the Soviet doctors' official account of Stalin's last days said similar physical effects could have been produced by a 5-to-10-day dose of warfarin, which had been patented in 1950 and was being aggressively marketed worldwide at the time.

Why Stalin might have been killed is a less difficult question. Politburo members lived in fear of Stalin; beyond that, the book cites a previously secret report as evidence that Stalin was preparing to add a new dimension to the alleged American conspiracy known as the Doctors' Plot.

That report -- an interrogation of a supposed American agent named Ivan I. Varfolomeyev, in 1951 -- indicated that the Kremlin was preparing to accuse the United States of a plot to destroy much of Moscow with a new nuclear weapon, then to launch an invasion of Soviet territory along the Chinese border.

Mr. Varfolomeyev's fantastic plot was known in Soviet documents as ''the plan of the internal blow.'' Stalin, the book states, had assigned the Varfolomeyev case highest priority, and was preparing to proceed with a public trial despite his underlings' fears that the charges were so unbelievable that they would make the Kremlin a global laughingstock.

Mr. Naumov said in an interview today that that plan, combined with other Soviet military preparations in the Russian Far East at the time, strongly suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war along the United States' Pacific Coast. What remains unclear, he said, is whether he planned a first strike or whether the mushrooming conspiracy unfolding in Moscow was to serve as a provocation that would lead both sides to a flash point.

''I am told that the only case when the two sides were on the verge of war was the Cuban crisis,'' in 1962, he said. ''But I think this was the first case. And this first time that we were on the verge of war was even more dangerous,'' because the devastation of nuclear weapons was not yet an article of faith.



Mr. Brent said he believes that fear of a nuclear holocaust could have led Beria and perhaps others at that final dinner to assent to Stalin's death.

''No question -- they were afraid,'' he said. ''But they knew that the direction Stalin was going in was one of fiercer and fiercer conflict with the U.S. This is what Khrushchev saw, and it is what Beria saw. And it scared them to death.''

The authors say that Stalin knew of his comrades' fears, citing as proof remarks at a December 1952 meeting of top Communist leaders in which Stalin began laying out the scope of the Doctors' Plot and the American threat to Soviet power.

''Here, look at you -- blind men, kittens,'' the minutes record Stalin as saying. ''You don't see the enemy. What will you do without me?''


Correction: March 8, 2003

An article on Wednesday about the death of Stalin and the possibility that he was poisoned by Politburo members to avert a looming war with the United States misstated the title and author of a memoir that included such a theory. It was by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, not by Nikita S. Khrushchev, and published in 1992 as ''Molotov Remembers.''

On This Day: Hula Hoop patented
On March 5, 1963, Wham-O patented the Hula Hoop, which then became a fad across the country.
UPI


A woman performs with a Hula Hoop as she walks in the St. Louis Mardi Gras Parade on February 22. Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo

LGBTQ

Virginia governor signs law banning conversion therapy for minors

BAN IT OUTRIGHT


Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill to ban conversion therapy, making it the 20th state with laws to protect children from the practice that seeks to change a child's sexuality or gender identity. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo

March 4 (UPI) -- Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has signed a bill banning conversion therapy for minors in the state.

With the signing of the law Wednesday, Virginia became the 20th state to protect youth from the practice that attempts to forcibly change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity.

"Conversion therapy sends the harmful message that there is something wrong with who you are," Northam said. "This discriminatory practice has been widely discredited in studies and can have lasting effects on our youth, putting them at a greater risk of depression and suicide. No one should be made to feel they are not okay the way they are -- especially not a child. I am proud to sign this ban into law."

Virginia Delegate Patrick Hope, who introduced the bill in the state House, described conversion therapy as "a dangerous, destructive practice."

"We should be supporting and celebrating our LTGBQ youth, not putting them in harm's way," Hope said.

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah Vermont, Washington, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have similar laws, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Watchdog: FBI failed to correct issues identifying domestic terror threat

THE FBI SPENT TOO MUCH TIME CHASING 
ECO TERRORISTS THAN WHITE SUPREMACISTS

March 4 (UPI) -- The Justice Department's inspector general on Wednesday released a report describing problems with the FBI's handling of investigations into potential terrorists based in the United States.

In the report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz described multiple instances in which individuals who were identified by the FBI but had their cases dropped without further action went on to carry out terrorist attacks.

"Since September 11, 2001, [homegrown violent extremists] have carried out over 20 attacks in the United States, some of which occurred after the FBI closed a counterterrorism investigation or assessment on the individual," the report said.

The Justice Department describes a homegrown violent extremist or HVE as an individual in the United States who has been radicalized in the country andis not working directly with a foreign terrorist organization.

The investigation cited at least six attacks committed in the United States by individuals who had been previously assessed or investigated by the FBI between 2009 and 2017, including the attackers behind shootings in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 and Orlando's Pulse night club in 2016 as well as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

An internal FBI document said the agency had a "fundamentally complete understanding of the HVE threat at a national level" and noted that it is extremely complex to determine whether individuals are planning to commit terrorist attacks or simply consuming terrorist propaganda.

After several of the attacks, the FBI conducted reviews into how they typically assess suspects who carry out those attacks but Horowitz said the FBI "did not ensure that all field offices and headquarters implemented recommended improvements and subsequent policy requirements.

The report says the FBI sought to review its assessment of potential threats in 2017 but found that nearly 40 percent of cases the FBI believed warranted further investigation went unaddressed for 18 months even after that time.

It also found that 31 percent of lone-actor terrorists have a documented history of mental illness but agents were restricted from opening actual federal investigations into individuals with identifiable mental health conditions, resulting in many not developing into terrorism cases.

"The concerns of these agents suggest that the FBI should ensure that it has a comprehensive strategy to document the information it receives about non-terrorist threats to public safety and to coordinate the sharing of such information to other assessment programs within the FBI and as importantly with external partners on the federal state and local level as permissible," Horowitz said.

LIKE THE VERSAILLES IN FRANCE;
THE WALL IS A VANITY PROJECT

19 states sue Trump over plan to divert more defense funding to build border wall

The Trump administration requested the diversion of funds

 in February. File Photo by Ariana Drehsler/UPI | License Photo

March 3 (UPI) -- A group of 18 states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over its latest plans to divert billions of dollars in military funds to the construction of a border wall.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, came in response to a request last month by the Pentagon to divert $3.8 billion from weapons procurement to wall construction.

"President [Donald] Trump is risking the safety of every American by diverting taxpayer dollars from our military to fund the same xenophobic campaign promises he's made for the last four years," said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

"The courts have already once rejected the president's unlawful attempt to shift funds to his hateful pet project, so as long as this administration continues down the path of illegally subsidizing an ill-advised border wall we will not hesitate to take action," she added.

Joining New York in the lawsuit were attorneys general representing California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

In a reprogramming request filed Feb. 13, the Pentagon south to shift $2.02 billion in fiscal 2020 defense appropriations and $1.6 billion in fiscal 2020 overseas contingency operations in order to fund construction of the wall.

On the chopping block are aircraft purchases, including some F-35 joint strike fighters, C-130J cargo aircraft, MQ-9 Reaper drones and P-8 maritime surveillance planes, as well as ground vehicles and naval equipment.

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Aircraft procurement for the Navy and Marine Corps would go down by $558 million if the request is honored, and by $861 million for the Air Force.

President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign was fueled in part by promises to expand the border wall, which began construction in 2006, and continuing construction has been a key priority as he faces re-election in November.

In September 2019, the Pentagon approved reallocation of $3.6 billion in funding for 127 military construction projects to fund 11 border wall construction projects.

---30---

Progressive Christian group tours U.S. to challenge Trump re-election
"Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught to love about Jesus," 

said Arkansas pastor and Vote Common Good Political 

Director Robb Ryerse.

President Donald Trump speaks last fall at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. Vote Common Good aims to open the eyes of religious Americans who voted for Trump four years ago and now see his "un-Christian" policies that are backed by the Republican Party. File Photo by Pete Marovich/UPI | License Photo

March 4 (UPI) -- Religious conservatives in the United States are one key segment of the population on whom President Donald Trump is counting this fall for re-election. But he most likely won't curry favor with a small group of progressive Christians who are traveling the country to challenge the belief he's got their vote locked up.

Vote Common Good, a group of self-identified "progressive evangelicals," is presently on a national bus tour with stops in several primary states its members hope will sway faith-based voters to vote against Trump by appealing to once-dominant traditions of American religious liberalism.

The tour began in January and will run through April 26 -- covering all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Future dates will take the tour to states that include Missouri, Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.

The group's mission may seem counterintuitive, given recent political realities.

With about 75 percent of white evangelicals approving of his job performance in mid-2019, Trump's support among the key cadre of white evangelicals who formed the bedrock of his 2016 election still appeared largely intact by the time of the first primaries this year.

Continuing support was visible in December after an editorial in Christianity Today, a magazine founded by evangelical icon Billy Graham, broke ranks with the Republican Party and called for Trump's impeachment on moral grounds.

More than 200 prominent conservative evangelical leaders, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, quickly jumped to his defense in a letter to the magazine that said it not only targeted "our president," but also targeted "those of us who support him, and have supported you."

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Trump has been working non-stop to solidify Christian support ever since -- appearing last month at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., and declaring himself the "most pro-life president in American history."

Vote Common Good, however, says it senses backlash brewing among some of Trump's evangelical supporters -- over issues like his harsh treatment of immigrants -- and that it's perhaps enough to make a difference in November.

The group first surfaced ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, and wants to persuade at least some religious supporters to reassess support for Trump -- and his actions that do not align with Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious traditions and values.

Their pitch, said Minneapolis-based pastor and Vote Common Good Executive Director Doug Pagitt, is to back the "common good" of the United States.

"Our message to evangelicals is, even if you're a Republican, it doesn't mean you have to vote for the guy in the White House," Pagitt said at a tour stop in Boston. "In New Hampshire, for instance, we held an event with Republican presidential candidate William Weld. We're telling religious voters there are other choices."

Vote Common Good hopes to open the eyes of religious Americans who voted for Trump four years ago, who now can recognize his "un-Christian" policies and personal behaviors that are wholly backed by the Republican Party.

Arkansas pastor, former Republican congressional candidate and Vote Common Good Political Director Robb Ryerse summed up the group's position in Time magazine last month.

"Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught to love about Jesus, everything I was taught about how to live out my faith," he wrote in an op-ed. "His disdain for decency, disrespect toward basic tenets of right and wrong and complete disregard for the most vulnerable among us could not be more fundamentally un-Christian."

This view has earned Vote Common Good harsh criticism from some conservative quarters. Last fall, the Family Research Council declared it a group of "ultra-liberal pastors and speakers" whose aim was to "dress up" a radical political agenda in "biblical terms" and to "sow confusion and division among Bible-believing Christians."

Pagitt, however, said the group's message -- which harks back to the religious roots of the late 19th-century progressive movement -- nevertheless remains a powerful one for some evangelicals. And while admitting that Trump most likely will retain most of his religious base, losing even a small number could make a substantial difference.

"We know there are many people who felt like they gave a try to Donald Trump in 2016, but who are now having a crisis of faith," he said. "We think they're not going to fall in line to the same degree this time.

"And if he doesn't get 80 percent of them in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, he's in trouble."

How successful can Vote Common Good be in taking a piece of Trump's religious base? It's probably too early to tell. The group's strategy is not the same as those of former Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg and candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who have courted the religious progressives who have never supported Trump.


"What these progressive groups seem to be doing is trying to tap into a long history of religious support for progressive issues," said David Mislin, an expert in American religious history at Philadelphia's Temple University.

"This goes back to the Social Gospel and support for the labor movement in the early 20th century and continued through the Civil Rights Movement."

He said, though, that he questions how much Vote Common Good's message might resonate among the Catholic and evangelical voters it wants -- mainly because of its perceived "leftist" rhetoric.

"It's offering a pretty progressive message, while nevertheless presenting itself as trying to reach a broad constituency," Mislin said. "But I think it's very much an open question as to whether this pitch will get any traction. Personally, I'm skeptical that it will."

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