It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
WW3.0 Russia fires warning shots to deter U.K. warship in Black Sea
MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian warship fired warning shots and a Russian warplane dropped bombs Wednesday to force a British destroyer away from an area in the Black Sea near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the Russian warship fired warning shots after the British missile destroyer Defender had ignored a notice against intrusion in Russia’s territorial waters. It said that a Russian Su-24 bomber also dropped four bombs ahead of the British ship to persuade it to change course. Minutes later, the British warship left the Russian waters, the ministry said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it has summoned the U.K. military attache in Moscow to protest the British destroyer’s maneuver.
The U.K. Ministry of Defense said it was aware of the reports but had no immediate comment.
HMS Defender, a Type 45 destroyer, is part of the U.K. Carrier Strike Group currently heading to the Indo-Pacific region. However, it was announced earlier this month that it would be temporarily breaking away from the group to carry out its “own set of missions” in the Black Sea.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move that was not recognized by most countries in the world, gaining access to the peninsula's long Black Sea coastline. Russia has frequently chafed at NATO warships visits near Crimea, casting them as destabilizing.
NATO members Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria all are on the Black Sea, but warships from the U.S., U.K. and other NATO allies also have made increasingly frequent visits there in a show of support for Ukraine.
Speaking Wednesday just before the incident, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, sharply criticized the deployments of NATO warships near Russian waters.
“The moves by warships of the U.S. and its allies have been clearly provocative,” Gerasimov said at an international security conference in Moscow organized by the Russian Defense Ministry. “It creates preconditions for incidents and doesn't help ease tensions in the military sphere.”
He charged that the British destroyer Dragon intruded into the Russian waters near Crimea in October, and the U.S. destroyer John McCain violated the Russian border in the Sea of Japan in November.
In April, Russia imposed restrictions on foreign navy ships' movements near Crimea until November in a move that drew strong complaints from Ukraine and the West. Russia has rejected that criticism and noted that the restrictions wouldn’t interfere with commercial shipping.
Earlier this year, Russia also beefed up its troops near the border with Ukraine and warned Ukrainian authorities against using force to reclaim control of the country's east, where a conflict with Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 14,000 people in seven years. Moscow withdrew some of its forces after sweeping maneuvers, but Ukrainian officials say that the bulk of them have remained.
___
Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
Vladimir Isachenkov, The Associated Press
Catholic bishops are making American Catholicism a single-issue religion
Peter Weber, Senior editor
THE WEEK Mon, June 21, 2021, A cross. Illustrated | iStock, Amazon
Catholic leaders like to explain that Roman Catholicism doesn't fit comfortably in any political party, and doctrinally, that is true.
The Catholic Church has had a strong history of supporting labor movements since Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor), has taught that artificial contraception is sinful since Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, condemns both abortion and capital punishment, strongly supports immigration and finding safe harbor for refugees, opposes same-sex marriage and civil unions, and encourages strong global measures to mitigate climate change. There's plenty for Democrats and Republicans to love and hate.
But the American bishops on Friday took a big step toward making the U.S. Catholic Church a one-issue denomination. That one issue, of course, is abortion. And the apparent preferred mechanism to enforce doctrinal purity on abortion, according to a majority of U.S. bishops who voted by secret ballot last week, is threatening to deny errant politicians the Eucharist. The clear genesis of this push was the election of America's second Catholic president, Joe Biden.
The bishops, gathered virtually for the spring meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), voted 168 to 55, with 6 abstentions, to push forward with a document on the Eucharist that, in its draft form, would encourage bishops to deny the Eucharist to Catholic political figures who support legal access to abortion.
The Vatican had publicly urged the USCCB not to take this step without finding consensus. Pope Francis, who abhors abortion, has made his views fairly clear that the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is substantively the body and blood of Jesus, is "not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak," as he wrote in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel).
The pope reiterated that point on June 6. Jesus gave us the Eucharist on the night Judas, who "eats with Him, who dips the morsel in the same plate, is betraying Him," he told a crowd in St. Peter's Square. And Jesus does the same for us, the pope continued. "He knows that we need it, because the Eucharist is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners. This is why he exhorts us: 'Do not be afraid! Take and eat.'"
The U.S. bishops who support denying Democratic politicians Communion say they are doing so because having prominent Catholics, especially those involved in policy, participate in the Mass while publicly upholding the legal right to abortion gives the sense that the church sanctions or at least tolerates abortion. "There is a special obligation of those who are in leadership because of their public visibility," Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop Kevin Rhaodes, chairman of the USCCB doctrinal committee that will now write the document on the Eucharist, said after the vote.
But deploying what amounts to the Catholic nuclear option only on abortion signals that abortion is the only issue the Catholic Church really cares about.
Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, notes that nobody is accusing Biden of performing or procuring an abortion, just abiding by his oath to uphold the Constitution — which, under current Supreme Court precedent, recognizes a legal right to abortion.
At the USCCB's 2018 spring meeting, a bishop recommended applying "canonical penalties" on Catholics who participated in the Trump administration's family separation immigration policy, Jack Jenkins recounts at Religion News Service. "The proposal did not gain traction, however, and did not trigger calls for a Eucharistic document."
With abortion, the bishops seem willing to alienate about half the U.S. church to make a political point. Because even if the bishops follow through in the November meeting and issue a document encouraging each other to bar Biden from receiving Holy Communion, Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory has made clear he will not. And unless the bishops unanimously adopt the document on the Eucharist, which seems unlikely, it would need sign-off from the Vatican to take effect. That seems even less likely.
Sixty Catholic House Democrats issued a response to the USCCB's vote, laying out their vision of what supporting human life and dignity looks like and "solemnly" urging the bishops to "not move forward and deny this most holy of all sacraments, the source and the summit of the whole work of the gospel over one issue." A Pew Research survey in March found that 67 percent of U.S. Catholics believe Biden should be allowed to receive Communion regardless of his abortion politics.
"Any effort by this conference to move in support of the categorical exclusion of Catholic political leaders based on their public policy will thrust the bishops of our nation into the very heart of the toxic partisan strife, which has distorted our own political culture and crippled meaningful dialogue," Cardinal Joseph Tobin of New Jersey said during the USCCB debate.
There's also the elephant in the room: the bishops' own moral credibility.
After decades of sexual abuse facilitated by bishops came to light in 2002 and 2003, the bishops should have emerged "humbled," with "a long period of atonement and a commitment to holding themselves accountable," tweeted Fr. Jeremy Zipple, a Catholic priest and Jesuit. "Instead, they quickly pivoted to a culture war fight over gay marriage then ObamaCare," and now this, wrecking the "U.S. church's credibility."
The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, also met last week, and its delegates stepped back from ramping up its cultural warfare. "Whenever the church gets in bed with politics, the church gets pregnant," outgoing SBC leader J.D. Greear said in his final presidential address. "And our offspring does not look like our Father in Heaven."
Baptists and other evangelicals, historically, have long valued the separation of church and state more than the Catholic Church, which is headquartered in its own sovereign city state and used to control European empires. But alienating one of two American political parties is bad politics, especially in a moment where the president, Supreme Court majority, and House speaker are all Catholic.
More to the point, it seems like bad flock-tending and bad religion.
In the same letter Pope Francis said the Eucharist isn't "a prize for the perfect" but "nourishment for the weak," he added of his fellow pastors: "Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators. But the Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems." In America, we'll see.
An electric car fire is like 'a trick birthday candle' — and a nightmare for firefighters
Cyrus Farivar
·11 min read
It’s the kind of blaze that veteran Chief Palmer Buck of The Woodlands Township Fire Department in suburban Houston compared to “a trick birthday candle.”
On April 17, when firefighters responded to a 911 call at around 9:30 p.m., they came upon a Tesla Model S that had crashed, killing two people, and was now on fire.
They extinguished it, but then a small flare shot out of the bottom of the charred hulk. Firefighters quickly put out those flames. Not long after, the car reignited for a third time.
“What the heck? How do we make this stop?’” Buck asked his team. They quickly consulted Tesla’s first responder guide and realized that it would take far more personnel and water than they could have imagined. Eight firefighters ultimately spent seven hours putting out the fire. They also used up 28,000 gallons of water — an amount the department normally uses in a month. That same volume of water serves an average American home for nearly two years.
By comparison, a typical fire involving an internal combustion car can often be quickly put out with approximately 300 gallons of water, well within the capacity of a single fire engine.
As the popularity of electric vehicles grows, firefighters nationwide are realizing that they are not fully equipped to deal with them. So they have been banding together, largely informally, to share information to help one another out. In fact, Buck recently spoke on Zoom about the incident before a group of Colorado firefighters.
That’s because the way that electric vehicles are powered triggers longer-burning fires when they crash and get into serious accidents. Electric cars rely on a bank of lithium-ion batteries, similar to batteries found in a cellphone or computer. But unlike a small phone battery, the large batteries found in the Tesla Model X, for instance, contain enough energy to power an average American home for more than two days.
The remains of a Tesla vehicle are seen after it crashed in The Woodlands, Texas (Scott J. Enlge / via Reuters)
So when an electric vehicle gets in a high-speed accident and catches on fire, damaged energy cells cause temperatures to rise out of control, and the resulting blaze can require a significant amount of water to put out. Such vehicles, given their large electrical energy storage capacity, can be a considerable hazard, known as “stranded energy,” to first responders.
But training to put out these fires can’t come fast enough as more electric vehicles arrive on U.S. roads every day. According to IHS Insight, an industry analysis firm, the number of registered electric vehicles reached a record market share in the United States of 1.8 percent and is forecast to double to 3.5 percent by the end of this year. But IHS notes that 1 in 10 cars are expected to be electric by 2025.
Still, most firefighters across America have not been adequately trained in the key differences between putting fires out in gas and electric cars. Some counterparts in Europe have developed a different approach, sometimes even putting a burning electric vehicle into a converted shipping container or dumpster -- essentially giving it a bath -- so that it cannot do further harm. Tesla says in its publicly available first responders guide that this method is not advisable and that departments should just use lots of water to put fires out.
Tesla S Car Crash in The Netherlands (Caspar Huurdeman / Hollandse Hoogt via Redux)
The problem has become widespread enough that late last year the National Transportation Safety Board published a report noting the “inadequacy” of all car manufacturers’ first responder guides. The agency further noted that while there are electric disconnection mechanisms, known as “cut loops,” they are often damaged in serious crashes. Finally, the NTSB also said that first responders generally lack an understanding of how to put out fires that can result from such crashes.
“The instructions in most manufacturers’ emergency response guides for fighting high-voltage lithium-ion battery fires lack necessary, vehicle-specific details on suppressing the fires,” the NTSB said
But there’s little that the board can do to fix the problem.
“We do not have any regulatory power, we do not have any enforcement power,” said NTSB spokesperson Eric Weiss, pointing out that such authority sits with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA.
In an email, Lucia Sanchez, a spokesperson for the safety administration, said that this topic remains important for the agency, one that it is “actively engaged in with our stakeholders including members of the first responder community.” In recent correspondence with the NTSB, the regulatory agency said that it continues to conduct research on “developing practical strategies for responders.”
Tesla, the largest electric-vehicle seller in the United States, did not respond to requests for comment about the NTSB report. But Capt. Cory Wilson, a 14-year veteran of the fire department in Fremont, California, where all U.S.-made Teslas are manufactured, said that Tesla has worked directly with his department for the past eight years. Still the best advice that Wilson gave was to advise firefighters to print out and keep Tesla safety guides in their trucks.
“Tesla has done a good job trying to get first responders educated,” he said.
Benedikt Griffig, a Volkswagen spokesperson, said in an email that German firefighting authorities have largely reached the same conclusion as their American counterparts, noting that they, too, may need considerable volumes of water to put out such a fire. Nissan spokesperson Ashli Bobo declined to respond to questions, but pointed to the company’s publicly available first responder guide. David McAlpine, a General Motors spokesman, said the company has actively worked on providing guidance for first responders working with electric vehicles and that "General Motors is committed to developing products that are safe and enjoyable for all our customers." Ford did not respond to requests for comment.
Recent discovery
While the first Tesla vehicles hit American streets in 2008, the National Transportation Safety Board did not investigate its first electric-vehicle battery fires until after an Aug. 25, 2017, crash of a Tesla Model X. That car was driving an estimated 70 mph or more down a residential street in Lake Forest, California, about an hour’s drive southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
According to the NTSB, the driver lost control of the car, crossed a sidewalk, traveled down a drainage ditch, hit a culvert and a property wall, and finally zoomed into an open garage and collided with a parked BMW, narrowly missing a man inside.
The Tesla caught fire, which spread to the BMW, then the garage and the house itself.
While Orange County Fire Authority’s firefighters put out most of the fire within 20 minutes, they found that a fire continued to burn in the attic above the fire, fueled by the burning Tesla. It took another 30 minutes for them to get the Tesla out of the garage, after which it reignited.
Firefighters battle a blaze sparked by a Tesla in Lake Forest, Calif., on Aug. 25, 2017. (Orange County Fire Authority)
But 45 minutes after the flames on the Tesla were extinguished, it reignited again. Firefighters began hosing it down with copious amounts of water, up to 200 gallons per minute, but “that did not extinguish the flames,” according to the NTSB. At approximately 9:13 p.m., nearly three hours after the first alarm was received, firefighters had to pour out more than 600 gallons of water per minute. In the end, two firefighters sustained minor smoke inhalation-related injuries, and the agency used 20,000 gallons of water.
Capt. Sean Doran, the spokesperson for the Orange County Fire Authority, said that electric vehicle-related fires are a “game changer,” given that they require such huge amounts of water, and incidents can last hours longer than what most departments may be used to.
“One of the concepts in firefighting is don’t start what you can’t finish,” he said. “We don’t want to start applying water before we have a water source.”
It’s also often difficult for firefighters to get that volume of water outside of a mid-size city with adequate hydrants or other natural sources. That’s also what The Woodlands Township Fire Department, which responded to the Tesla crash in April, concluded.
“On a highway, to figure out how you’re going to get 20,000 gallons is a planning and logistics nightmare,” Buck, the fire chief, said.
Seeking help
Fire department officials say one of the biggest problems they face is that Tesla and other major car manufacturers often don’t include enough detail in their model guides for first responders as some fire agencies would like.On May 8, 2018, a 2014 Tesla Model S took a curve at 116 mph in a 30-mph zone in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The car hit a wall in a residential area before it erupted in flames, then continued down the road and hit a light pole, finally stopping in a driveway. The driver and front passenger were both killed, while the rear passenger was seriously injured.
Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue arrived four minutes after a 911 call was placed and began hosing down the car.
According to Asst. Fire Marshal Stephen Gollan, his agency had “minimal training” before this incident, but he knew enough to consult the Tesla online emergency response guide, which describes the “cut loops” that shut down the high voltage system. But firefighters couldn’t reach the loops.
The instructions for this model also includes the warning: “use large amounts of water to cool the battery. DO NOT extinguish fire with a small amount of water,” according to Tesla.
But Gollan said that not only does Tesla's manual lack a definition of “large amounts” of water, it also provides little detail about what firefighters should do with the remaining damaged batteries that may still contain dangerous stranded energy. In the end, Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue used a combination of water and firefighting foam, even though Tesla does not recommend using foam.
“The Tesla manuals only say to use copious amounts of water,” he said. “They don't provide any direction as to how to remove that energy.”
In the end, the Tesla was loaded onto a tow truck for removal from the crash site. But the battery reignited twice during that process.
Like Buck in The Woodlands case, Gollan found himself quickly fielding calls from numerous agencies trying to learn more about how to put out electrical vehicle fires from someone who had done it firsthand.
“Following the incident we did substantial debriefings with NTSB and other municipal fire departments,” he said. “And since that time I've had multiple calls with other agencies from across the U.S.”
Support groups
While some firefighters are now turning to one another for help, like Buck speaking to his counterparts in Colorado, other groups like the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), a lobbying and research arm for the fire insurance and firefighting community, are also trying to address the growing demand for their firefighter courses.
While the NFPA has trained approximately 250,000 firefighters and emergency responders in the last 12 years on this issue, that leaves nearly 80 percent of the more than 1.1 million firefighters nationwide left to train, according to the organization. Of those, approximately two-thirds are volunteers and may be harder to reach.
The scene where an Oregon man crashed a Tesla while going about 100 mph, destroying the vehicle, a power pole and starting a fire when some of the hundreds of batteries from the vehicle broke windows and landed in residences in Corvallis, Ore., in November 2020. (Corvallis Police Dept. via AP)
“With EVs (electric vehicles), especially for the fire service, it’s a new paradigm,” said Andrew Klock, the group’s emerging issues lead manager.
Robert Swaim, who retired nearly two years ago, spent more than 30 years at the NTSB. He began digging into the issue with lithium-ion batteries after a Boeing 787 caught fire in Boston in 2013.
Swaim has been offering his own training, comparable to ones offered by NFPA, except his classes are live -- and he brings his own Chevy Volt to class. He points out that his in-person and hands-on training is considerably more helpful than the myriad of PDFs that various manufacturers put out. He said that after recently posting some of his presentation slides, traffic to his website has jumped by more than a factor of 10.
“You’re going to tell me that a volunteer firefighter is going to go to the Ford website and learn about Ford’s emergency response guide?” he said. “That’s not going to happen.”
Continuing problems
In the meantime, fire departments are facing far more time-intensive fires. In the past, most car fires were put out in well under an hour. Then the scene was turned over to local law enforcement, and a tow company moved the car.
“Then we are going to have to sit on scene usually for 45 minutes to an hour with our [thermal imaging camera] to make sure the battery is not continuing to heat up,” said Wilson, the Fremont Fire captain.
Later this summer, Buck is set to give another presentation to his former agency, the Austin Fire Department, where he worked for 27 years. The Texas capital is set to become Tesla’s new manufacturing hub, known as Gigafactory Texas, where the company’s new all-electric Cybertruck is expected to be produced.
Buck fears that as electric cars become larger, they’re going to need bigger batteries, which could mean even longer-burning fires. He notes that this is too big a burden on small fire departments.
“The time on scene is more concerning than even the amount of water — the fact that I might have a unit tied up for multiple hours while it cools down,” he said. “I'm just babysitting, and that’s problematic.”
Hunger, drought, disease:
UN climate report reveals dire health threats
Patrick GALEY Tue, June 22, 2021
Hunger, drought and disease will afflict tens of millions more people within decades, according to a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet.
After a pandemic year that saw the world turned on its head, a forthcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), seen exclusively by AFP, offers a distressing vision of the decades to come: malnutrition, water insecurity, pestilence.
Policy choices made now, like promoting plant-based diets, can limit these health consequences -- but many are simply unavoidable in the short term, the report says.
It warns of the cascading impacts that simultaneous crop failures, falling nutritional value of basic foods, and soaring inflation are likely to have on the world's most vulnerable people.
Depending on how well humans get a handle on carbon emissions and rising temperatures, a child born today could be confronted with multiple climate-related health threats before turning 30, the report shows.
The IPCC's 4,000-page draft report, scheduled for release next year, offers the most comprehensive rundown to date of the impacts of climate change on our planet and our species. It predicts that up to 80 million more people than unger by 2050. today will be at risk of hunger by 2050.
It projects disruptions to the water cycle that will see rain-fed staple crops decline across sub-Saharan Africa. Up to 40 percent of rice-producing regions in India could become less suitable for farming the grain.
Global maize production has already declined four percent since 1981 due to climate change, and human-induced warming in West Africa has reduced millet and sorghum yields by up to 20 and 15 percent respectively, it shows.
The frequency of sudden food production losses has already increased steadily over the past 50 years.
"The basis for our health is sustained by three pillars: the food we eat, access to water, and shelter," Maria Neira, director of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health at the World Health Organization, told AFP.
"These pillars are totally vulnerable and about to collapse."
- Emerging hotspots -
Even as rising temperatures affect the availability of key crops, nutritional value is declining, according to the report.
The protein content of rice, wheat, barley and potatoes, for example, is expected to fall by between six and 14 percent, putting close to 150 million more people at risk of protein deficiency.
Essential micronutrients -- already lacking in many diets in poorer nations -- are also set to decline as temperatures rise.
Extreme weather events made more frequent by rising temperatures will see "multi-breadbasket failures" hit food production ever more regularly, the report predicts.
As climate change reduces yields, and demand for biofuel crops and CO2-absorbing forests grows, food prices are projected to rise as much as a third at 2050, bringing an additional 183 million people in low-income households to the edge of chronic hunger.
Across Asia and Africa, 10 million more children than now will suffer from malnutrition and stunting by mid-century, saddling a new generation with life-long health problems -- despite greater socioeconomic development.
As with most climate impacts, the effects on human health will not be felt equally: the draft suggests that 80 percent of the population at risk of hunger live in Africa and Southeast Asia.
"There are hotspots emerging," Elizabeth Robinson, professor of environmental economics at the University of Reading, told AFP.
"If you overlay where people are already hungry with where crops are going to be most harmed by climate you see that it's the same places that are already suffering from high malnutrition."
- Water crisis looming -
It doesn't end there.
The report outlines in the starkest terms so far the fate potentially awaiting millions whose access to safe water will be thrown into turmoil by climate change.
Just over half the world's population is already water insecure, and climate impacts will undoubtedly make that worse.
Research looking at water supply, agriculture and rising sea levels shows that between 30 million and 140 million people will likely be internally displaced in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America by 2050, the report says.
Up to three quarters of heavily tapped groundwater supply -- the main source of potable water for 2.5 billion people -- could also be disrupted by mid-century.
The rapid melting of mountain glaciers has already "strongly affected the water cycle", an essential source for two billion people that could "create or exacerbate tensions over water resources", according to the report.
And while the economic cost of climate's effect on water supply varies geographically, it is expected to shave half a percent off global GDP by 2050.
"Water is one of the issues that our generation is going to confront very soon," said Neira.
"There will be massive displacement, massive migration, and we need to treat all of that as a global issue."
- 'Fault lines' -
As the warming planet expands habitable zones for mosquitoes and other disease-carrying species, the draft warns that half the world's population could be exposed to vector-borne pathogens such as dengue, yellow fever and Zika virus by mid-century.
Risks posed by malaria and Lyme disease are set to rise, and child deaths from diarrhoea are on track to increase until at least mid-century, despite greater socioeconomic development in high-incidence countries.
The report also shows how climate change will increase the burden of non-communicable illnesses.
Diseases associated with poor air quality and exposure to ozone, such as lung and heart conditions, will "rise substantially", it says.
"There will also be increased risks of food and water-related contamination" by marine toxins, it adds.
As with most climate-related impacts, these diseases will ravage the world's most vulnerable.
The Covid-19 pandemic has already exposed that reality.
The report shows how the pandemic, while boosting international cooperation, has revealed many nations' vulnerability to future shocks, including those made inevitable by climate change.
"Covid has made the fault lines in our health systems extremely visible," said Stefanie Tye, research associate at the World Resources Institute's Climate Resilience Practice, who was not involved in the IPCC report.
"The effects and shocks of climate change will strain health systems even more, for a much longer period, and in ways that we are still trying to fully grasp."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has a few burning questions.
When Politico's Natalie Fertig introduced herself to Sanders as the publication's cannabis reporter, Sanders asked, incredulously, if she was "stoned" right now. The senator then wondered out loud if being stoned was a job "requirement," to which Fertig replied, "It's actually not."
Controversial St. Croix refinery ceases operations given 'extreme financial constraints'
Juliet Eilperin and Darryl Fears
WASHINGTON POST Mon, June 21, 2021
Limetree Bay, a massive oil refinery in the Caribbean, announced Monday that it is ceasing operations following a number of catastrophic errors that rained oil droplets on St. Croix, sent residents to emergency rooms after noxious gas releases and raised fears among homeowners that their drinking water was laced with toxic chemicals.
The plant, which had closed a decade ago under a previous owner after toxic spills helped push it into bankruptcy, was plagued with problems from the start after the Trump administration granted it permission to reopen in February.
"Limetree had a very high rate of environmental violations over a very short period of time," said Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who monitored the plant under the Obama administration. "It was an environmental catastrophe unfolding in real time."
The refinery's pollution impacts on Black and Brown people in communities that surround it quickly emerged as a priority under President Joe Biden, who made environmental justice a major focus of his climate agenda. In May, the EPA ordered the refinery to suspend operations for 60 days as it weighed whether it had become "an imminent threat" to people's health.
Now the island stands as a critical test for the president, who has promised to devote 40% of federal spending on the environment to disadvantaged communities. Even as many residents welcomed the plant's closure Monday, they questioned how the territory would recover from the harm it has already caused.
Monday's announcement suggests that the refinery, which now owes tens of millions of dollars to contractors and faces multiple class-action lawsuits from residents, might never restart. The company, which will continue to operate an adjoining oil export terminal, told all 271 refinery employees that they will be terminated as of Sept. 19. On Friday, many of the remaining contractors were sent home. On Monday, contractors moved some of their equipment outside of the plant's fence line.
There are objections to the name because J'ouvert is the name of a festival celebrating Caribbean culture held annually in Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada during Carnival — and celebrated internationally.
Squad goals: Ocasio-Cortez warns Biden patience is wearing thin
David Smith in Washington
THE GUARDIAN Sun, June 20, 2021, Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
They were pointed questions, not personal criticisms. But they will have conveyed a warning to Joe Biden that the patience of the left of the Democratic party and its leaders in ‘the Squad’ of progressive politicians is not infinite.
“Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most?” asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand New York congresswoman and best known member of the squad. “Are we passing the deal that makes the most jobs? Are we passing a deal that brings down the most climate emissions? Are we passing a deal that raises wages and actually improves our infrastructure for the next generation?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance on the influential TV program Morning Joe last week came with the US president weeks into negotiations with Republicans over a massive infrastructure spending package – and apparently little to show for it.
The squad and others on the left of the party have remained broadly supportive of Biden as he seeks to restore an era of bipartisan cooperation. But with his agenda stalling on Capitol Hill, frustrations are mounting and threatening to crack the facade of Democratic unity.
It was Ocasio-Cortez, a social media star with a global profile, who hailed Biden’s first hundred days in office as having “definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had”. After all, the president’s staggering $1.9tn coronavirus relief package had been swiftly passed by Congress and signed into law, albeit without a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage that liberals have long sought.
Now cold reality is intruding, however. Legislation on voting rights, gun safety, immigration and police brutality is faltering in a House of Representatives where Democrats hold a slender 220-211 majority and a Senate split 50-50 with Republicans (vice president Kamala Harris gives the party the tie-breaking vote).
Biden’s next big ticket item, the American Jobs Plan, which initially proposed more than $2trn for infrastructure, is facing a rockier road. He conceded ground in negotiations with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito that ultimately collapsed. Then a bipartisan group of senators came up with a $1.2trn proposal but, progressives say, it fails to address the climate crisis, healthcare and childcare.
Democratic leaders are now discussing a two-step process in which they pass a smaller bill with bipartisan support but then follow up with a second measure passed through a process known as budget reconciliation, which would require near total party unanimity.
The underlying challenge for Biden is how to keep together an unwieldy Democratic coalition that encompasses conservative senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia – which is Donald Trump country – and senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist from Vermont, who this week drafted a $6trn infrastructure package.
Then there is the squad, the left-leaning group of House members that now consists of seven people of color. The more that Manchin digs in his heels against ambitious legislation, the more restive the squad is likely to become, raising difficult questions over whether Biden is applying sufficient pressure to bring the doubters on board.
Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive organization Democracy for America, said: “Right now people are really getting frustrated because it’s been six months and we don’t see Joe Biden engaging in the way that he should to push for more support. In fact, he’s negotiating against us and what Democrats want. The party’s left wing is not convinced Biden is applying sufficient pressure to bring the doubters on board. Photograph: Carlos BarrÃa/Reuters
“So I think there’s a growing sense of frustration among progressives and it’s understandable. We’re feeling like the clock is running out and we’re wasting valuable time and that’s where you’re going to start to see the squad and other members of the progressive movement push back and saying, ‘OK, we’ve got a limited window of time here. We need to put up or shut up’.”
With more than two in three Americans supporting the infrastructure bill, according to a Monmouth University poll, Simpson argues that the squad is on the right side of history. “Their relentlessness, their fearlessness and their persistence on this should be rewarded; they should not be punished because they are fighting for what we should be doing anyway.
“There’s going to be some blowback if the squad is fighting for things that we actually should get done and the rest of the party is saying, oh no, Republicans aren’t on board, oh no, let one person decide that he’s going to hold up an entire agenda for the entire nation, that the entire nation wants overwhelmingly.”
Although the Biden administration has actively engaged with progressives in its early months, there have been some flash points. Ocasio-Cortez and others were quick to speak out when it emerged that Biden intended to retain Trump’s cap on the number of refugees allowed into the US; the administration blinked first and backed down.
Squad members including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib sharply criticized Israel for its recent bombing of Gaza and challenged the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the country. And when Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come” to the US, Ocasio-Cortez called the comment “disappointing” and noted that it is legal to seek asylum.
Ocasio-Cortez has also been pushing Biden to face up to the fact that bipartisanship with a radicalized Republican party is a doomed enterprise. She tweeted: “Pres. Biden & Senate Dems should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake w GOP Senators is really worth the dismantling of people’s voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.”
Jamaal Bowman, one of the squad’s newest members, said bluntly that Manchin “has become the new Mitch McConnell”, referring to the Republican senate minority leader infamous for obstruction, after the West Virginia senator declared support for the legislative filibuster while opposing an expansive voting rights bill.
The interventions carry weight in part because of the squad’s outsized influence in both mainstream and social media. Ocasio-Cortez has 12.7m followers on Twitter. Activists praise them for speaking with moral clarity about Washington’s failings in a way that strikes a chord with the public.
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said: “I don’t think they are outside mainstream thinking around the frustrations that people have with the Senate as an institution or the limitations that present themselves with such a narrow margin and with Joe Manchin continuing to buck his own caucus. They’re playing a very useful role.”
Their willingness to dissent is a sign of party strength, not weakness, Mitchell argues. “When Joe Biden moves the struggle forward, they will give him credit for it. There are examples where the Biden administration has been outside of what we would consider progressive values and they’ve course corrected and it was, I think, because the squad were not afraid to call it.
“It led to the Biden administration actually getting better on those issues. That’s an example not of disunity, but co-equal branches operating as they should.”
But when it comes to the current legislative gridlock, some commentators argue that the squad would be wrong to take out their frustrations on the president, given the balance of power in the Senate.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I don’t know how you criticise Biden for Manchin. Biden is putting up the legislation they’d like. The problem is Congress and the sheer numbers. It’s an arithmetic problem more than an ideology problem.”
Democrats’ narrow majority in the House should, in theory, give the squad more leverage over party leadership than ever. They threatened to torpedo a $1.9bn spending bill to upgrade US Capitol security in the wake of 6 January insurrection over concerns about more money going to police; eventually three voted no, three voted present and one voted yes; the bill passed by a single vote.
Dave Handy, a New York-based political activist and consultant who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, said: “We have a very slim majority in Congress. The squad now wield more power than they’re giving themselves credit for. I don’t know why they’re ignorant of their bargaining position and the hand that they’re holding.”
“Everybody else at the table seems to be aware of this. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate are very aware of the cards that they’re holding. The squad is completely aloof. I’m not even sure they know that they’re playing poker. They might think they’re playing checkers.”
Handy argues that the squad should pressure Biden and other Democratic leaders much harder. “I don’t think that they’re wielding as much influence as they could be. The squad was elected to be rabble rousers. They are there to agitate. Theirs is the role of a reformer in Congress and, in my estimation, in this current Congress, they have not been doing that.”
Liberals to introduce new hate speech bill, possibly bringing back controversial Section 13
Anja Karadeglija
NATIONAL POST
JUNE 22,2021
Right before the House of Commons breaks for summer, the Liberal government will introduce a new bill tackling hate speech, which could bring back a controversial law under the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Justice Minister David Lametti has given notice the government will introduce a new bill, dealing with “hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech.” Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has been working on a new online harms bill with Justice and other ministries, though government spokespeople declined to say Tuesday whether that bill is the legislation that will be tabled by Lametti.
One possibility is that Lametti’s bill could leave out online regulation and focus only on changes to hate speech law the government consulted on last year — though if that includes bringing back a civil remedy for hate speech, the bill still stands to garner much opposition.
Guilbeault told an industry conference last week that the upcoming online harms legislation, which will deal with hate speech and other illegal content, will be even more contentious than broadcasting bill C-10. That legislation finally passed through the House of Commons in the early hours of Tuesday morning after nearly two months of concern about its impact on free expression.
“Now, this is going to be controversial. People think that C-10 was controversial. Wait till we table this legislation,” Guilbeault said at an appearance at the Banff World Media Festival.
Spokespeople for Guilbeault and Lametti said they couldn’t provide any information about what will be in Lametti’s bill because of parliamentary privilege. Guilbeault and Arif Virani, Lametti’s parliamentary secretary, told the National Post in March the online harms bill would include both a Justice ministry piece in the form of a codifying in law a new definition of online hate, and new rules for online platforms, including a regulator that would enforce 24-hour takedowns for illegal content.
According to the notice paper, Lametti’s bill will “amend the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act and to make related amendments to another Act (hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech).”
As part of the work on building up the online harms bill, Virani held consultations across the country on Lametti’s behalf. That consultation included questions about reintroducing a form of a hate speech law — Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act — that was widely criticized over free speech rights before it was repealed in 2013.
Virani said in the spring bringing back a form of that law was something the government got “feedback on both sides of the ledger” from. He confirmed the government was “examining” section 13.
Under section 13, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal could issue cease-and-desist orders and impose fines up to $10,000 in response to complaints from individuals about matters likely to expose them “to hatred or contempt” for the reason of those individuals being “identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
Cara Zwibel, the director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s fundamental freedom’s program, said in an interview the fact that Lametti’s bill “is going to make amendments to the Criminal Code and to the Canadian Human Rights Act makes me think that … they will either reintroduce Section 13 or introduce something similar, but maybe not exactly the same.”
She noted the government had also consulted about potentially creating a new peace bond under the Criminal Code, which would deal with hate incidents that wouldn’t be prosecuted “to the fullest extent by the Crown, but where they’d still want to try and impose some sort of restrictions.”
The CCLA opposed Section 13, and Zwibel said it wouldn’t be a good idea to reintroduce it. “If it’s going to be something a little different from Section 13, then I guess I would reserve my judgment up until after I’ve seen exactly what it is,” she noted.
Zwibel said the concern with bringing back Section 13 is that it could create a chilling effect on free speech.
“The worry with, for example, reintroducing a remedy under the Canadian Human Rights Act is that with the Criminal Code we have the requirement that the attorney general approve a charge to pursue a promotion of hatred charge under the Criminal Code,” she said.
She said the same kind of screening mechanism isn’t there under a human rights regime. Even if the Human Rights Commission decides not to pursue cases and bring them forward under a tribunal, “there can be this chilling effect on people because they’ve been the subject of a complaint.”
Zwibel said “even if the mechanism works well” and the commission is not pursuing cases that shouldn’t be pursued, “there is still a cost to free speech associated with investigating those complaints.”
Virani also told the National Post back in March the online harms bill would codify a definition of hate speech based on previous court decisions and how the Supreme Court has defined hate.
Zwibel said when it comes to defining hate speech, “there’s a lot that remains subjective and potentially vague in the definition. And codifying it doesn’t really alleviate those concerns.”
She added: “I just wouldn’t want it to hinder the ability of the courts to take all the context into account.”
The online harms bill was initially supposed to be tabled in the spring. Guilbeault told a Parliamentary committee in early June that the bill was delayed because of the controversy and Conservative Party opposition over Bill C-10.
While C-10 finally passed through the House of Commons, with the support of the NDP and the Bloc, it is set to hit a roadblock at the Senate. Senators from various caucuses told the National Post last week the majority of senators have no interest in fast-tracking the bill before the end of the Parliamentary session.
If the bill isn’t fast-tracked, it will be studied at a Senate committee, most likely in the fall. That means it’s likely to die on the order paper if a federal election is held then. The same would go for Lametti’s hate speech bill, which is set to be introduced on the last scheduled sitting day before Parliament breaks for summer.
Does outer space end – or go on forever?
Jack Singal,
Associate Professor of Physics, University of Richmond Mon, June 21, 2021 It can stretch your mind to ponder what's really out there.
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. What is beyond outer space? – Siah, age 11, Fremont, California
Right above you is the sky – or as scientists would call it, the atmosphere. It extends about 20 miles (32 kilometers) above the Earth. Floating around the atmosphere is a mixture of molecules – tiny bits of air so small you take in billions of them every time you breathe.
Above the atmosphere is space. It’s called that because it has far fewer molecules, with lots of empty space between them.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel to outer space – and then keep going? What would you find? Scientists like me are able to explain a lot of what you’d see. But there are some things we don’t know yet, like whether space just goes on forever.
Planets, stars and galaxies
At the beginning of your trip through space, you might recognize some of the sights. The Earth is part of a group of planets that all orbit the Sun – with some orbiting asteroids and comets mixed in, too. A diagram of the solar system, showing the sun and its orbiting planets.
You might know that the Sun is actually just an average star, and looks bigger and brighter than the other stars only because it is closer. To get to the next nearest star, you would have to travel through trillions of miles of space. If you could ride on the fastest space probe NASA has ever made, it would still take you thousands of years to get there.
If stars are like houses, then galaxies are like cities full of houses. Scientists estimate there are 100 billion stars in Earth’s galaxy. If you could zoom out, way beyond Earth’s galaxy, those 100 billion stars would blend together – the way lights of city buildings do when viewed from an airplane.
If you could watch for long enough, over millions of years, it would look like new space is gradually being added between all the galaxies. You can visualize this by imagining tiny dots on a deflated balloon and then thinking about blowing it up. The dots would keep moving farther apart, just like the galaxies are.
Is there an end?
If you could keep going out, as far as you wanted, would you just keep passing by galaxies forever? Are there an infinite number of galaxies in every direction? Or does the whole thing eventually end? And if it does end, what does it end with?
These are questions scientists don’t have definite answers to yet. Many think it’s likely you would just keep passing galaxies in every direction, forever. In that case, the universe would be infinite, with no end.
Some scientists think it’s possible the universe might eventually wrap back around on itself – so if you could just keep going out, you would someday come back around to where you started, from the other direction.
One way to think about this is to picture a globe, and imagine that you are a creature that can move only on the surface. If you start walking any direction, east for example, and just keep going, eventually you would come back to where you began. If this were the case for the universe, it would mean it is not infinitely big – although it would still be bigger than you can imagine.
In either case, you could never get to the end of the universe or space. Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space.
But nobody knows for sure. How to answer this question will need to be figured out by a future scientist.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
This article has been updated to correct the distances to the nearest star and galaxy.
Jack Singal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
