The smoke smothering Siberia is really intense



BY MARK KAUFMAN

The fires burning in Siberia this year continue to be exceptional.

First, overwintering zombie fires awoke in spring. Then, during an intense June heat wave with record-breaking temperatures, extreme fires burned across vast swathes of the Siberian Arctic Circle, a polar region atop Earth. Now in August, fires persist. Satellite images show a thick haze over the region, obscuring the verdant land below.

The enduring fires this summer continue the momentous burning in the Arctic Circle over the last two years, compared with the previous 16 years of this modern satellite record. Consider: Fires in the Arctic Circle during 2019 and 2020 have emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the previous 16 years combined.

These early August fires are similar in intensity to those in 2019, according to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

Such late-season burning is problematic because it shows the fire season in the far north could be growing longer, explained Jessica McCarty, an Arctic fire researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Miami University.

"As it keeps progressing into August it's more worrisome and more troubling," McCarty said.

The amount of smoke in the Siberian atmosphere looks similar to the wildfire smoke one might see from fires in the Western U.S. — not the polar realms up north. "It's a testament to the amount of fire that’s going on," McCarty noted.

As fires continue in Siberia, extensive smoke blankets the region.
Seen in GeoColor by Himawari-8: https://t.co/yKFcKMxbR2. pic.twitter.com/ZzutXhxq8J
— CIRA (@CIRA_CSU) August 6, 2020



Siberian wildfires on Aug. 3, 2020.
IMAGE: CIRA / RAMMB




Fire intensity in the Arctic Circle in 2019 and 2020 versus previous years.
IMAGE: EU COPERNICUS

When wildfires burn, they release copious amounts of heat-trapping carbon emissions into the atmosphere, as plants and vegetation are mostly composed of carbon. When fires burn more land for longer periods of time, more greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, adding to the planetary warming trend. Already, Earth is relentlessly heating.

This August, McCarty said it's likely a lot of grassland and peat (wetlands composed of ancient, decomposed plants) are burning. These fires usually don't inject tall, powerful plumes high into the atmosphere like a burning forest might, so the smoke tends to stay lower and stagnate (rather than dissipating over vast regions or across the world). When the smoke stays, people live in it, and breathe it.


SEE ALSO: The devious fossil fuel propaganda we all use

Burning peatlands are especially bad for the climate. Peat releases bounties of the greenhouse gas methane into the air. When it comes to trapping heat, methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of a century.

It's challenging to fight these remote fires. Russia's Sakha Republic, home to many of the blazes, is sprawling. It's the largest territory in Russia at one-fifth the size of the giant nation. So when a fire starts in a disparate area, it's not always easy to contain.

For people in the region, it can be a ghastly scene. "Everything smells like smoke all the time," noted McCarty.

Facebook just banned one of its biggest QAnon groups

Facebook removed the second biggest QAnon-related group from its platform this week.
IMAGE: SEAN RAYFORD/GETTY IMAGES

BY MATT BINDER

Hundreds of thousands of advocates of the QAnon conspiracy theory are going to have to find a new online hangout.

The second largest QAnon group on Facebook has been banned from the platform, the social network announced Thursday. The group, called “Official Q/Qanon,” had nearly 200,000 members at the time of its removal. Facebook said it took the page down on Tuesday.

A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the group was banned over posts that repeatedly broke the platform’s rules on misinformation, harassment, and hate speech.

BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh points out that the “Official Q/Qanon” group received more than 10 million engagements across 500,000 posts during the first 7 months of 2020. The group spiked in membership in early March, just as the full-force of the coronavirus pandemic began to hit the United States.

Look at how page likes went up after Covid hit. There's only one other QAnon Facebook group with more likes (215,000) and that one's still up. I just quickly had a look at the other BIG QAnon groups/pages and they're all still there; at least for now! Analysis via @crowdtangle pic.twitter.com/FnnQQXijtJ
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) August 7, 2020

The former members of that group won’t have to look far for a new online home for their conspiracy theories, however. There are still plenty of Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon on the platform, including one even bigger than the banned group, with more than 215,000 members. In its latest action, Facebook did not address other QAnon groups or content on its platform.

In May, Facebook removed a network of QAnon pages, groups, and profiles for coordinated inauthentic behavior, its term for users who create multiple fake accounts to game its engagement algorithm. The removals marked the first time the social media company took action against accounts related to the conspiracy theory.

Other social media platforms have taken even more serious approaches when it comes to QAnon.

Just two weeks ago, Twitter announced that it would block QAnon-related links from its platform. The company also said it would block QAnon content from its trends and recommendations sections. Shortly after Twitter’s announcement, TikTok also blocked QAnon-related terms and content from its search engine. In 2018, Reddit banned a number of QAnon subreddits, including its biggest.

Celebrities such as Chrissy Tiegen have complained of coordinated mass online harassment from QAnon believers.

QAnon is a far-right-wing conspiracy theory. Its followers believe that Donald Trump is secretly working to take down a global child-trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles in Hollywood and the Democratic Party. Various other conspiracy theories have been rolled into QAnon, such as fringe elements from the anti-vaccine communities.

The conspiracy began in 2017 when an anonymous internet user going by the name “Q” began posting on 4Chan about a secret plot by the supposed “deep state” to take down President Trump. Conspiracy theorists believe that Q is an individual close to Trump and the conspiracy has continued to grow regardless of the fact that all of Q’s predictions have been wrong.

UPDATES
Trump’s Executive Orders Hurt More Than TikTok and WeChat
The president’s latest actions against China may affect US tech firms, and Americans who communicate overseas through the social apps.

WeChat has over a billion users, most in China, but including millions in the US.PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES

IN ANOTHER MOVE destined to inflame tensions with the Chinese government, the Trump administration took aim Thursday at TikTok and WeChat. Citing national security concerns, the president signed a pair of executive orders that bar Americans or anyone subject to US jurisdiction from doing business with the social media apps. The orders take effect in 45 days, seemingly giving TikTok leeway to be acquired by Microsoft, which has said it is in talks to buy parts of the video platform from its parent company ByteDance.

While vaguely worded, the orders could have far-reaching consequences, including for the future of America’s relatively free and open internet. WeChat, owned by China’s Tencent, is used by millions of people in the US to maintain personal and business relationships with people in China. Many American technology firms also have customers in the country, and could be hurt by any response from Beijing. “The US business community is really concerned. I mean, who would buy an Apple phone in China if you can't use WeChat on it?" says Paul Triolo, an expert in global technology policy at Eurasia Group, a think tank.

In a statement, TikTok said it was “shocked” by the orders. The company has repeatedly insisted that it’s not beholden to the Chinese government, and it argues the Trump administration has failed to provide evidence that the app poses a risk to US citizens. “For nearly a year, we have sought to engage with the US government in good faith to provide a constructive solution to the concerns that have been expressed,” TikTok said. “What we encountered instead was that the administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.” TikTok, which has tens of millions of users in the US, began attracting the attention of lawmakers last fall, who expressed worries about its ties to Beijing.

A spokesperson for Tencent said the company was “reviewing the order to get more understanding.” WeChat has over 1 billion users, most of them in China, who rely on the app for everything from messaging to paying for coffee and booking doctor’s appointments. In the US, it’s an important way for immigrants and students to reach relatives and friends back home. “If this happens, and it really becomes impossible to use WeChat here, that will be a major factor for Chinese people considering studying here, visiting here, doing anything here,” says Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of SupChina and cofounder of the China affairs podcast Sinica.

“The US business community is really concerned. I mean, who would buy an Apple phone in China if you can't use WeChat on it?"

PAUL TRIOLO, EURASIA GROUP

At the same time, WeChat is strictly censored and surveilled, including abroad, and has become an avenue for the Chinese Communist party to oppress minority groups like Uighur Muslims. Yaqiu Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, says she and other critics of the Chinese government were already moving off of WeChat to private networks and encrypted apps such as Signal before Trump’s order. “There are ways to communicate freely and securely with people in China, for now,” she says. “They are cumbersome, but then you are not subjected to the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance.”

Tencent also owns Riot Games, maker of the popular League of Legends, and owns a large stake in Epic Games, maker of Fortnite. But a White House official told the Los Angeles Times that the order does not affect the games.

China has long blocked overseas competitors to WeChat like Facebook and Twitter. “The Chinese government is the one that is actively in the banning business, and they’ve got a big head start on the Trump administration,” Donald Clarke, a Chinese law specialist at George Washington University wrote in a blog post.

But civil liberties groups caution that stooping to China’s level won’t accomplish much. “Selectively banning entire platforms harms freedom of speech online and does nothing to resolve the broader problem of unjustified government surveillance, including by our own government,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security project said in a statement.

“The Chinese government is the one that is actively in the banning business, and they’ve got a big head start on the Trump administration.”

DONALD CLARKE, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Trump’s executive orders could have significant implications for US tech firms that do business in China, particularly if the Chinese government retaliates. Facebook, for example, earns billions of dollars from advertisers in the country who want to reach consumers overseas. It’s not clear how Trump’s order may affect Apple, which counts China as a major market for the iPhone. The directive appears to imply it could no longer offer WeChat in its app store globally, but it’s so vaguely worded that it’s difficult to tell. It’s also possible that Trump’s orders could face legal challenges. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Triolo, from Eurasia Group, believes that American companies are already bracing themselves for China’s response. “Beijing has been trying not to further poison the business climate, but this is the sort of thing that could push them over the edge,” he says. The executive orders follow a speech earlier this week by US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, in which he called for a new initiative to “clean” America’s internet of “malign actors” such as the Chinese Communist Party. Among other things, it directs US tech firms to stop providing apps to Chinese companies like Huawei, which is already banned from doing business with US companies.

The Trump administration’s latest measures are part of a wider strategy to distance the US from China. Relations between the two countries are at their lowest point in decades, following disagreements on a number of issues like trade and human rights. “This has got nothing to do with national security, it’s just another Trump lash-out at China for his own political ends,” says Kaiser Kuo, cofounder of the Sinica podcast and a former executive at the Chinese tech giant Baidu.

Ultimately, the executive orders contribute to a more digitally divided world. “The bifurcation of the internet, the formation of two parallel information and communication universes is becoming increasingly evident,” says Wang of Human Rights Watch.

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TikTok says Trump’s ban attempt shows ‘no adherence to the law’

15

‘We will pursue all remedies available to us’

By Jon Porter@JonPorty  Aug 7, 2020, 

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

TikTok has hit back at President Trump’s executive order to ban all transactions with its parent company ByteDance from September 20th, saying it shows “no adherence to the law.” The Chinese firm says the executive order was issued “without any due process” after a year in which it claims it has tried to address the US government’s concerns over its app.

TikTok suggests it intends to challenge the order in US courts. “We will pursue all remedies available to us in order to ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and our users are treated fairly — if not by the Administration, then by the US courts.” It adds that the order “risks undermining global businesses’ trust in the United States’ commitment to the rule of law.”

TIKTOK SAYS IT’S TRIED TO WORK WITH THE US GOVERNMENT TO ADDRESS ITS CONCERNS

The response comes after Trump signed an executive order attempting to address national security concerns leveled at TikTok. The order says that Chinese-developed apps like TikTok “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

President Trump took the unusual move of citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act along with the National Emergencies Act as providing the authority for the order. However, sanctions against individuals and corporations, like placing them on the “entity list,” normally come from the Commerce Department rather than the White House, or via the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Both processes appear to have not been used in ByteDance’s case.

TikTok says the order sets a “dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets.” It adds that it’s tried to engage constructively with the US government over the issues raised, and has offered solutions like opening up its algorithm and providing more transparency about its moderation policies. “We have made clear that TikTok has never shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content at its request,” TikTok says.

“We even expressed our willingness to pursue a full sale of the US business to an American company,” TikTok says, referring to the news that it is in discussions with Microsoft over a possible sale of the service’s operations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These discussions are due to complete on September 15th, around five days before the executive order is due to come into effect.

TikTok’s full statement is below:

TikTok is a community full of creativity and passion, a home that brings joy to families and meaningful careers to creators. And we are building this platform for the long term. TikTok will be here for many years to come.

We are shocked by the recent Executive Order, which was issued without any due process. For nearly a year, we have sought to engage with the US government in good faith to provide a constructive solution to the concerns that have been expressed. What we encountered instead was that the Administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.

We made clear our intentions to work with the appropriate officials to devise a solution to benefit our users, creators, partners, employees, and the broader community in the United States. There has been, and continues to be, no due process or adherence to the law. The text of the decision makes it plain that there has been a reliance on unnamed “reports” with no citations, fears that the app “may be” used for misinformation campaigns with no substantiation of such fears, and concerns about the collection of data that is industry standard for thousands of mobile apps around the world. We have made clear that TikTok has never shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content at its request. In fact, we make our moderation guidelines and algorithm source code available in our Transparency Center, which is a level of accountability no peer company has committed to. We even expressed our willingness to pursue a full sale of the US business to an American company.

This Executive Order risks undermining global businesses’ trust in the United States’ commitment to the rule of law, which has served as a magnet for investment and spurred decades of American economic growth. And it sets a dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets. We will pursue all remedies available to us in order to ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and our users are treated fairly – if not by the Administration, then by the US courts.

We want the 100 million Americans who love our platform because it is your home for expression, entertainment, and connection to know: TikTok has never, and will never, waver in our commitment to you. We prioritize your safety, security, and the trust of our community – always. As TikTok users, creators, partners, and family, you have the right to express your opinions to your elected representatives, including the White House. You have the right to be heard.

More than 10,000 British Airways staff to lose their jobs as airline scrambles to cut costs
By FRANCESCA WASHTELL FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED:7 August 2020 

More than 10,000 British Airways staff are being made redundant as the airline scrambles to cut costs to survive the

In a sign of the brutal cuts workers were facing at Britain's flag carrier, more than 6,000 employees across the business applied for voluntary redundancy.

A further 4,000 were due to be told yesterday that they were being laid off.

In a sign of the brutal cuts workers were facing at British Airways, more than 6,000 employees across the business applied for voluntary redundancy

Many of the remaining staff will suffer steep pay cuts and will see significant changes to their contracts.

Long-serving cabin crew claim they could lose up to 50 per cent or 60 per cent of their income from the shake-up – which caps the amount cut from their basic pay at 20 per cent but will strip out a number of take-home allowances.
Unions branded the day 'Black Friday' and accused BA of 'industrial thuggery'. BA has been at loggerheads with cabin crew unions Unite and GMB over the job-cutting plans, which it insists are crucial to its long-term survival.

BA's owner IAG plunged to a £3.8billion loss during the first six months of the year after the number of passengers on its flights fell by 98 per cent in the second quarter.

The company is planning to raise £2.5billion of emergency funding, backed by its largest shareholder Qatar Airways, to shore up its finances as it fears it could take until at least 2023 for business to recover.

Rivals including Virgin, Ryanair and Easyjet are all planning to cull jobs and slash spending to survive the crisis as they face months of lower passenger numbers.

IAG boss Willie Walsh has said Covid-19 is the biggest crisis the airline has ever faced.

A British Airways spokesman said: 'We are having to make difficult decisions and take every possible action now to protect as many jobs as possible.'

The airline said back in April it could axe as many as 12,000 jobs to help it stay afloat during the coronavirus crisis. This is around 17 per cent of its 42,000-strong workforce.

The company has several different crew divisions – which it calls 'fleets' – that operate as separate units with their own contracts.

It wants to put all crew on the same terms and conditions that will see staff who have joined in the last decade potentially get a small salary increase.

Those who the company chooses to make redundant will have the option of entering the airline's priority return pool of workers and will be fast-tracked into any roles that become available.

But unions have blasted the move as a 'fire and rehire' strategy.

The tussle with cabin crew unions comes after pilots voted to accept a deal hashed out between BA and pilot union Balpa.

The airline had originally planned to axe around 1,250 of its 4,300 pilots – but this has been cut to 270 because remaining staff will take pay cuts for three years.

The Tragic Physics of the Deadly Explosion in Beirut
A blast injury specialist explores the chemistry—and history—of explosions like the one captured in videos that swept across the world.

Early reports of the blast revealed that the building that sparked the eruption may have been storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate, a flammable chemical that has relatively harmless manifestations as fertilizer but has also been experimented with as a rocket fuel.PHOTOGRAPH: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

ON AUGUST 4, 2020, a massive explosion blasted deadly waves through downtown Beirut. Then, video of the fireball rippled around the world almost as quickly. Now, details of the blast that started in a fireworks storage area by a small storage building at the end of a Beirut pier trickle in as the world waits to hear what the final death, injury, and destruction tallies will be. However, in a way, the world already has some idea what to expect, because similar blasts have occurred before.

As a biomedical engineer with a doctorate in the patterns of injury and trauma that follow an explosion, scraping together information from accidental blasts is part of my daily work. The more mundane explosions are rarely this size, but the same principles of physics and chemistry apply. Science, along with a few case studies from history, let me do some preliminary calculations to puzzle out this explosion, too.

In 1917, an accidental detonation of 6 million pounds of hodgepodge high explosives in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, left a swath of wreckage that, at least until Tuesday, was the largest nonnuclear explosion ever created by humanity. As we learn more about Beirut, which could possibly challenge that record, the story of Halifax tells us what we might expect to learn about the ensuing trauma, and the modern cell phone videos, along with the blast physics gleaned by scientists in the intervening century, tell us why those patterns of trauma occurred in quite the way they did.

Every fire is a rearrangement of molecules, and an explosion is basically a fire turbocharged into a hyper-energy-fueled frenzy. Unstable structures barter and swap atoms with one another until all of them, happy with their trades, blissfully settle into more relaxed, lower-energy states, like rocks reaching the bottom of a hill. But their excess energy has to go somewhere. In a campfire, where the chemical reactions are facilitated in a leisurely way by the oxygen in the air alone, energy is released slowly as enjoyable levels of heat and light. In an explosion, however, the devilish little instigator that is oxygen shoves the process into overdrive.

The Frisky Chemistry of Ammonium Nitrate


Early reports of the blast revealed that the building that sparked the eruption may have been storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate, a flammable chemical that has relatively harmless manifestations as fertilizer but has also been experimented with as a rocket fuel. Oxygen is the key to ammonium nitrate’s deadly habit of exploding, and given that 47 known, major, accidental ammonium nitrate explosions have occured in the last century, it is undeniably a habit. “Ammonium” is a nitrogen atom with four hydrogens, written NH4+, whereas the “nitrate” part of the mix is a nitrogen with three oxygens, NO3-. Under boring everyday conditions, the + of the ammonium and the – of the nitrate pull the two molecules into a harmless hug, but when you add a spark—or a firework—the molecules realize that their very atoms can get a little friskier and convert into something completely new.

When ammonium nitrate is manufactured as fertilizer, it is mixed with other chemicals that usually stop this reaction from happening, though as the 2013 explosion at the West Fertilizer Company proved, those chemicals are not always successful. The first reports out of Beirut suggested fertilizer may have once again been the culprit. However, photos shared on social media showed bags marked “Nitroprill HD” supposedly being stored at the Beirut pier, and some have speculated that if those photos are accurate, Nitroprill may be a knockoff of the name-brand blasting agent Nitropril. Nitropril is designed for use in coal mines, so this particular breed of ammonium nitrate would not have been mixed with quieting chemicals like a fertilizer would be; rather, it would have been mixed to blow.

And nitrate, when mixed to blow, wants to ditch those little Os. It’s chemically unstable, meaning the bonds between the Ns and the Os vibrate with an unhappy level of physical tension. Overloaded with three oxygens, NO3- is eager to shove some onto any neighbor, and with a little bit of heat to get things moving, it will do so willingly. NH4+ is all too happy to accept.

The chemical rearrangement of ammonium nitrate answers a lot of the public questions about the videos, including the source of the startling red color of the plume. One of the byproducts of NO3- as it sheds all that oxygen is nitrogen dioxide, which has a logically obvious chemical structure of NO2 and looks deep, blood red. Many explosive materials give off tints and hues during a blast that suggest their chemical composition—chemical additives to color both smoke and explosions have been around since before the 1920s and are how we get different-colored fireworks and signaling flares—and it’s nitrogen dioxide that gives an ammonium nitrate explosion its signature, ominous blood-like tone. A small blast can look subtle and orange-ish, but on a large scale like at Beirut, the sunlight helps deepen its hue.

According to Brad Wojtylak, a special agent bomb technician and certified explosive specialist with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, when smoke plumes are large enough, they begin to catch the sunlight, and refraction will darken the normal colors produced by any explosion. Wojtylak is not directly involved in the Beirut investigation but has 16 years of experience investigating blast accidents. He says as sunlight bounces around within the cloud of contaminants, other, less determined wavelengths get refracted off in different directions. When a smoke plume happens on such a large scale, only the longest wavelengths, the red shades, persevere all the way through to the viewer on the other side. So, the natural reddish color becomes even deeper, richer, darker than it would be for a small blast.

An explosive with a pure burn, like any explosive used in military-grade weaponry, will produce smoke that looks equally pure: snowy, billowy white, or sometimes a pale grey. But accidental explosions are far less tidy, and their sloppy combustion also produces ash, particulates, and gross black charred contaminated matter. This black gunk billows into the sky along with the other byproducts, coloring the smoke plume, like the charcoal residue left behind after the more efficient parts of the campfire wood have burned away. To a blast expert, the videos, with their roiling cloud of black and red curling over the pier of Beirut, scream “ammonium nitrate.”
Not a Shock Wave

The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.

No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.

Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.

The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.

By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.

In the 6 million-pound Halifax explosion of 1917, the propagation of the shock wave through downtown left a swath of fatalities reaching 1.5 miles from the center of the blast, killing an estimated 1,950 and leaving another 8,000 with devastating injuries. (The ships that exploded in the harbor were known to be carrying high explosives, which by their nature always make shock waves.) In Beirut, thankfully, while building damage has been reported up to 5.6 miles away, because the low-explosive ammonium nitrate made a pressure wave rather than a shock wave, the fatality estimates so far are still in the hundreds, even though the charge size was likely larger than the bomb in Halifax.

Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.

As an aside, nuclear weaponry is set to detonate several hundred feet above ground level, and therefore doesn’t exert enough force directly on the soil to create a crater. The detonation of the first atomic weaponry above Hiroshima occurred almost exactly 75 years ago to the day, and despite its historically unprecedented trauma to the city and populace, it left behind no crater.

Germany, too, knows the destructive power of improperly stored ammonium nitrate, and an accident in that country reinforces the calculation of the charge size. In 1921, a fertilizer explosion in Oppau, Germany, carved a remarkably similar crater. At 120 meters in diameter, following the explosion of 4.1 million kilos of ammonium nitrate, the size of the Oppau crater supports the idea that the Beirut pier, which early reports said held only 2,750 metric tons—2.75 million kilograms—may have held some number of millions more kilograms of charge. However even using only those 2,750 metric tons, Special Agent Wojtylak says his preliminary calculations indicate that those safe from all risk of carnage would have needed to be at least 15 kilometers from the Beirut pier.

Within that radius, the injuries from such a massive blast in a downtown location can be as varied as the victims who experience them, but a number of them are likely from glass and other flying projectiles. Flat, delicate, frangible, and installed in large sheets, glass is the perfect target for a blast wave of even minuscule magnitude; it shatters and flies easier than any other substance.

In Halifax, the fire that eventually triggered the main explosion meant that citizens were already positioned at their windows to watch the excitement when the bomb detonated. As a result, of those wounded on that morning in 1917, injuries of shattered glass penetrating the eyes of onlookers were described as “extraordinarily prevalent.” The accident of the fireworks storage area and its alarming plume of smoke similarly guaranteed plenty of onlookers for Beirut. Without smoke drawing these witnesses, we would not have such ample cell phone footage, but there also might have been fewer injuries.
After the Blast

The Halifax explosion resulted in the same series of events that, according to Duke University Hospital emergency room physician Dan Buckland, still occurs in emergency rooms today after mass casualty incidents. Buckland treated casualties following a natural gas explosion in Durham, North Carolina, in 2019 which, while substantially smaller in size, occurred in a densely populated downtown area. The first wave of patients are those who were physically near emergency services, he says, those unlucky enough to get hurt but lucky enough to do it in close proximity to an ambulance. After that, the hospitals get flooded by “walking wounded,” those who are wounded enough to seek medical care but intact enough to transport themselves. The key to increasing the number of survivors, Buckland says, is getting the third wave of patients through the door, through the crowds of this second wave. The third wave is made up of those at the core of the site, too injured to walk, whom the emergency responders combing the wreckage medically prioritize next.

After a blast in a civilian area, emergency responders aren’t the only heroes. Just after 9 am on December 6, 1917, in Halifax, mustachioed 45-year-old train dispatcher Vincent Coleman knew the lazy plume of smoke coming from the explosive-laden vessel in Halifax harbor was a terrifying portent of worse to come. But as the other dispatchers ran for their lives, Coleman realized the number of train passengers set to arrive at Halifax any moment, and so he stayed long enough to send one final telegram: “Hold up the train. Munitions ship on fire and making for Pier 6 ... Goodbye boys.” Coleman died in the blast at 9:05, but his final message saved thousands, not just the passengers on the trains that were able to stop before entering the zone of destruction, but also the citizens already in Halifax: The telegram signal reached every operator in the surrounding region, and because of Coleman’s quick thinking, every doctor who felt the earth rumble, up to 160 km away, had almost immediate access to news about what had happened. They rushed in to help.

Medical personnel dealt with as many of the first, second, and even third waves of injured patients as fast as humanly possible, some of them even creating makeshift treatment centers on trains. From Beirut too, will gradually emerge stories of heroism and savvy, along with the final accounting of lives lost. But in the meantime, between those who filmed the blast and the application of physics, we can prevent any escalation of conspiracy theories or misunderstandings. The explosion wasn’t a military-grade bomb; it most certainly wasn’t a nuclear one. It was, sadly, tragically, history repeating itself yet again: Explosives can be devastatingly lethal, and we should never underestimate their destructive fury.

Rachel Lance is a biomedical engineer who specializes in patterns of injury and trauma from explosions. Her investigations of historical blasts include incidents from WWI, WWII, and the explosion set by the submarine *HL Hunley*, which was the topic of her recent book [In the Waves: My Quest to Solve... Read more

Jerry Falwell Jr. Is Stepping Back From Liberty University After A Photo Of Him With His Pants Unzipped

(NOT JUST HIM BUT THE YOUNGER WOMAN NOT HIS WIFE, IN THE PHOTO WITH HIM HAD HER PANTS UNZIPPED TOO)

"I did not think this, of all things, would have done it," one Liberty student told BuzzFeed News of the controversial photo.

Stephanie K. Baer BuzzFeed News Reporter

Last updated on August 7, 2020


Emily Elconin / AP
Jerry Falwell Jr.


Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., one of the most prominent and influential evangelical Christians in the US, is stepping back from the school after he posted a photo of himself with his pants unzipped and underwear showing, sparking backlash and calls for his resignation.

An executive committee for the Virginia university's board of trustees requested that Falwell "take an indefinite leave of absence" on Friday from his roles as president and chancellor "to which he has agreed, effective immediately," according to a statement released by the university.


Last week, Falwell shared a photo of himself, which was later deleted, with one hand on a woman's waist and the other carrying a cup with a dark liquid in it, which he jokingly described as "black water," in an Instagram post featuring photos from his vacation. The two had their pants unzipped and their shirts pulled up, showing their bare midriffs as they smiled for the camera.



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Liberty students are banned from drinking alcohol and are required to abide by a dress code that stresses "modesty at all times."

The photo quickly drew backlash, with some calling for Falwell to resign, including from Rep. Mark Walker, a Republican representing North Carolina who has ties to the school.


“How is this Jerry Falwell Jr. photo even real?” tweeted Meghan McCain. “Also if you're running the largest Christian university in America maybe don't put photos of yourself on social media with your pants undone on a yacht - with random women in bad wigs. So gross, so hypocritical.”

Falwell said in an interview on Wednesday that he had apologized for the photo, saying he should have never posted it.

“And I’ve promised my kids I’m going to try to be — I’m gonna try to be a good boy from here on out," he told the MorningLine show on WLNI, a local radio station.

Falwell, one of President Trump's most loyal and prominent supporters, was criticized early this year for keeping Liberty's residence halls and campus open amid the coronavirus pandemic and downplaying the severity of the health crisis.

His statements created confusion around whether students would be finishing the school year in person or online.

Liberty student Clayton Didinsky, who is starting his senior year, told BuzzFeed News he and his classmates were "shocked" by Friday's announcement but supported the decision for Falwell to take a leave of absence.

"I did not think this, of all things, would have done it," Didinsky said. "My reaction to the whole yacht thing is that it was hypocritical. It's obvious he was not drinking 'black water,' and students can't drink, even if you're 21."

He added that students who do drink get into a lot of trouble if they get caught.

Falwell, who was appointed to the president position in 2007, has been embroiled in controversy before.

In December 2015, days after a San Bernardino County health department employee and his wife opened fire on his coworkers at a holiday party, killing 14 and injuring more than 20 others, Falwell said that if more people had concealed carry permits, "we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them."


He went on make a huge endorsement of Trump for president in 2016, delivering a huge base of Evangelical, conservative voters.

In 2018, Falwell landed back in the news when he acknowledged putting up $1.8 million for a business venture managed by a young pool attendant he befriended during a stay at a luxury hotel. BuzzFeed News first reported on a lawsuit that claimed that the Falwells and pool attendant who was to manage the Miami hostel wrongly cut a father and son out of the venture.

But his controversies at Liberty has continued to erode his support in the campus community.

Last year, a former editor of Liberty’s student newspaper, the Champion, wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post that Falwell "silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics."

"What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life," said Will E. Young, former editor-in-chief of the student-run weekly newspaper.


Didinsky, the rising senior, said he was curious to see who will be named to replace Falwell and how this episode will impact his legacy.

"You have people on both spectrums: people who love him and people who hate him. He is a good businessman, and this is coming from someone who is not the biggest fan of him, and even I will admit he's done a lot for Liberty," Didinsky said. "He has built the school up to where it is now, but I think his legacy could also be tarnished by this."

Brianna Sacks contributed reporting.

Hackers Flood Reddit With Pro-Trump Takeovers

By apparently compromising moderator accounts, the attackers were able to post MAGA materials all over at least 70 popular subreddits.

WIRED AUGUST 7,2020

PHOTOGRAPH: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

IN WHAT APPEARS to be a massive coordinated strike against Reddit, hackers took over dozens of pages on Friday afternoon, using their access to plaster pro-Donald Trump imagery across subreddits with huge followings.

Coming just over three weeks after hackers used access to high-profile Twitter accounts to tweet a bitcoin scam, the wave of Reddit compromises has a similarly eye-popping reach. Reddit communities with well over a million members—including r/space, r/food, and r/NFL—were all defaced with Make America Great Again campaign banners and other pro-Trump signage.

Sometime on Friday morning, hackers began breaking into the accounts of the moderators of dozens of subreddits, ranging from the popular channels cited above to more niche fare like r/beerporn. They used that access not only to splash the pro-Trump imagery all over the page, but in many cases posted a MAGA missive from the moderator’s account with the subject “We Stand With Donald Trump #MIGA2020.”

“We on behalf of the American people want to implore and strongly encourage you all to vote Trump in the 2020 elections of the USA of America,” read one such message, posted to the college-football-focused r/cfb. The post goes on to call the novel coronavirus a “hoax,” loosely compares Trump to Batman, and ends with a list of “Ten Things Democrats Did Wrong,” which includes “Nice people are hated by the Democrats” as a bullet point. In the case of r/cfb, the hackers also set the community to private, leaving only an emoji-strewn pro-Trump message on the landing page for those locked out.

“An investigation is underway related to a series of vandalized communities,” said a Reddit spokesperson. “It appears the source of the attacks were compromised moderator accounts. We are working to lock down those accounts and restore impacted communities.”


Hackers attempted to claim credit for the attacks on Twitter, saying, “We combined password stuffing and social engineering together to beat the teenage bitcoin cheater,” an apparent reference to alleged Twitter hack ringleader Graham Ivan Clark, who was arrested last week. Credential stuffing is when attackers use previously leaked passwords to break into accounts made by the same email address, taking advantage of the common human tendency to reuse passwords. Social engineering is a catch-all for ways to trick people into giving you information that helps break into their account or someone else’s; it’s at the heart of many so-called SIM-swap attacks that help hackers get around two-factor authentication.

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Claims of hacking credit on Twitter should be taken with hefty boulders of salt, but some combination of password reuse and SIM-swapping could certainly be at the heart of the Reddit hacks. Since the takeovers occurred, Reddit users have been scrambling to figure out what happened, and to protect their own accounts. A post published Friday afternoon by a Reddit community moderator warns people to look for unexpected password reset emails and encourages mods to change their passwords. A post on r/SubredditDrama includes a “Guide to unfucking your subbreddit” that initially led off with “#ENABLE TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION” but was edited to say that some accounts were compromised even with two-factor in place.

There’s also the possibility, as in the case of the Twitter hacks, that attackers gained access to Reddit’s internal tools. That would help explain the huge scope of the problem and how the attackers were able to move so quickly across the platform.

At least 70 subreddits experienced issues. Many of the subreddits were restored by later in the afternoon, but some victims, including r/GreatBritishBakeOff and r/buffy, remained MAGAtized.

COURTESY OF BRIAN BARRETT VIA REDDIT
So far the fallout appears to be limited to subreddit vandalism, although presumably the hackers also had access to the affected moderators’ private messages. If password reuse was how the attackers got in, those moderators' other accounts may be vulnerable, as well.

Fortunately, the clean-up seems relatively straightforward: Once they have control of their subreddits back, moderators need only to revert the changes and delete the uploaded images to put things back to normal.

The MAGA messaging itself is less disturbing than the hackers' ability to pull off this coordinated stunt. How worrisome it is, though, depends on whether they hit individual moderators with sloppy passwords or mounted a more sophisticated assault against Reddit’s internal controls.

And while there’s no reason to believe that the two are connected, the MAGA-laced Reddit hack does come just a little over a month after more than a thousand profiles in the online multiplayer game Roblox were hacked to include the phrase "Ask your parents to vote for Trump this year!”

For now, other than a few lingering subreddits, the attack seems to be under control. We’ll update this article if and when Reddit shares more details about not just what happened, but how.

Many Reddit communities vandalized with pro-Trump content, possibly due to compromised moderator accounts
Some hugely popular subreddits were affected

By Jay Peters@jaypeters Aug 7, 2020, 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A number of subreddits were taken over and vandalized on Friday, possibly as part of a coordinated campaign. Hackers reportedly posted messages or changed a subreddit’s design in support of President Donald Trump.

“An investigation is underway related to a series of vandalized communities,” a Reddit spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “It appears the source of the attacks were compromised moderator accounts. We are working to lock down those accounts and restore impacted communities.”

What r/Japan looked like when it was vandalized. Image: r/Japan

It’s unclear right now how the accounts were compromised. A post on r/subredditdrama listed dozens of subreddits that were affected, and many were quite popular, including r/CFB, r/food, r/Japan, r/nfl, r/podcasts, and r/space. It appears that subreddits are in the process of reverting back to normal, and some moderators have posted messages noting that their subreddit was compromised.

The attack on Reddit marks another moment in an increasingly worrying trend of social media accounts being hijacked. Twitter fell prey to an unprecedented hack in mid-July, resulting in some of the social network’s most notable accounts being taken over to tweet a bitcoin scam. (Three people have been charged in connection with that attack.) And some YouTube accounts have been compromised in recent days to show “live streams” that are actually bitcoin scams.