Russia's Shivulech volcano extremely active, threatens eruption - scientists

Story by By REUTERS • Sunday 11/20/22

The Shiveluch volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East has become extremely active, threatening a powerful eruption, the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team said on Sunday.

Shivulech volcano in Russia© (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

"A growth of the lava dome continues, a strong fumaroles activity, an incandescence of the lava dome, explosions, and hot avalanches accompanies this process," the observatory said on its website.

"Ash explosions up to 10-15 kilometers (9.32 miles) ... could occur at any time. Ongoing activity could affect international and low-flying aircraft."

This volcano is ready for action

Russia's state RIA news agency cited Alexei Ozerov, the director of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as saying that the dome of the volcano is very hot.

"At night, the dome glows almost over its entire surface. Hot avalanches with a temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius (1,832°F) roll down the slopes, pyroclastic flows descend. This state of the dome is observed, as a rule, before a powerful paroxysmal eruption."


Shivulech volcano in Russia (credit: Wikimedia Commons)© Provided by The Jerusalem PostShivulech volcano in Russia (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Shiveluch, one of Kamchatka's largest volcanoes with a summit reaching 3,283 meters (10,771 feet) is also one of the peninsula's most active ones, with an estimated 60 substantial eruptions in the past 10,000 years.

The volcano's last most powerful eruption took place in 2007, according to NASA.

Is Earth a self-regulating organism? New study suggests our planet has a built-in climate control

Story by Troy Farah • Yesterday -  SALON

Earth, sun and stars© Provided by Salon

Planet Earth, sun and stars Getty images/NASA/egal

The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also called The Great Dying, has certainly earned its nickname. It was the largest mass extinction in the geological record, wiping out between 83 and 97 percent of all species living on Earth. Although the exact cause is debated, extreme volcanic activity that perhaps cooked the planet has been fingered as the main culprit.

But somehow, despite being pummeled by asteroids and space radiation, life on this planet has kept on keeping on for almost four billion years. As our planet enters a Sixth Mass Extinction, driven by a wave of human activity that has wiped out thousands of species, the question of how this works — particularly, how the Earth seems to bounce back from large-scale disasters, or extreme changes in atmosphere or climate — becomes even more pressing.

It turns out the answer may, in part, be even stranger than anyone imagined. New research in the journal Science Advances suggests that Earth can self-regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, there are large-scale geologic processes that seem to absorb carbon dioxide over huge time scales. However, the time scales involved are far, far too long to correct for the sudden spike in carbon dioxide caused by fossil fuel combustion, meaning that the mechanism won't save us from climate change.

"You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time?"

Constantin Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, two researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, crunched the data from multiple datasets documenting the global temperature for the last 66 million years. These paleoclimate records include ice cores from Antarctica and the chemical makeup of prehistoric marine fossils, which can tell us a lot about what Earth's atmosphere was like in the distant past.

"This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records," Arnscheidt said in a statement. "Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart."

Related
Ocean spray may have created conditions for life to form on Earth, new study suggests

The two MIT scientists found a strong pattern suggesting that Earth employs feedback loops to keep its temperatures within a range where life can thrive. However, this happens on a timescale over hundreds of thousands of years, so while it implies our planet will bounce back from anthropogenic climate change, it won't happen soon enough to save us

"One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life," Arnscheidt said. "But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate."

The finding has big implications for our understanding of the past, but also how global heating is shaping the future of our homeworld. It even helps us better understand the evolution of planetary temperatures that can make the search for alien-inhabited exoplanets more fruitful.

"You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life," Arnscheidt said. "But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate."

Many scientists have proposed that Earth has self-regulated its temperature throughout history, but this has been difficult to prove. In the 1960s, the late inventor and environmentalist James Lovelock applied Darwinian processes to the entire planet, rather than a single organism, to explain how such a complex system evolved. He called this the Gaia hypothesis, which explains how Earth and its biological systems formed feedback loops that keeps our planet favorable for living organisms.

It also helped explain the Faint-Sun Paradox, first proposed by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Essentially, our Sun used to be a lot smaller and colder 4.5 billion years ago. Back then, based on our current understanding of the life cycle of stars, the Sun would have been about 30 percent dimmer than it is today. This in turn would have made Earth too cold for liquid water, preventing life from forming — yet obviously this happened. So how did our rocky world pull this off?

The answer seems to lie in how carbon is cycled through the planet. A prominent theory is that when our planet first formed, it had an atmosphere chock full of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, that allowed it to absorb heat, even though the Sun was colder.


"On the one hand, it's good because we know that today's global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback. But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues."

A complex process known as silicate weathering then removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and buries it at the bottom of the ocean. Over time, this cools the planet. Then, something like major volcanic eruptions or humans driving cars, pumps more carbon dioxide in the air, warming the planet again. Over the eons, Earth seems to be balancing between too cold and too hot, explaining why some call Earth a Goldilocks Planet.

The MIT study helps match existing data with this long-held theory, which helps us better understand our past and the consequences of unchecked climate change. And it would make sense that if these feedback loops exist on our planet, they may also exist in other galaxies, informing the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

"On the one hand, it's good because we know that today's global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback," Arnscheidt said. "But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues."

However, Arnscheidt's model was unable to account for this balance on timescales longer than one million years, so random chance may have also played an outsized role in life's success on this rock.

"There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback," Arnscheidt said. "We're able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable."

It may have been a mix of randomness and feedback loops like silicate weathering that influenced Earth's temperature in the past. But in humanity's future, it will be free will —our policy, our consumption, our choices — that determines the temperature of the planet going forward. And we may just overwhelm these natural systems so much that they won't be able to balance out, similar to prominent theories about potential life on Mars.

"The heating of the Sun has been slow enough to allow life to evolve, a process which takes millions of years. Unfortunately, the Sun is now too hot for the further development of organic life on Earth," Lovelock wrote in his 2019 book "Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence." "The output of heat from our star is too great for life to start again as it did from the simple chemicals of the Archean Period between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago. If life on Earth is wiped out, it will not start again."

How a U.S. Hydrogen Bomb Accidentally Turned a Pacific Island into Jello

An American hydrogen bomb test in 1954 threw up an estimated "two hundred billion pounds of coral reef and the sea floor," after the weapons yield turned out to be nearly three times what U.S. scientists had expected.

The detonation of the atomic bomb nicknamed "Smokey," as part of Operation PLUMBBOB in the Nevada desert, 1957. Several Pacific islands had to be evacuated after the test of another nuclear bomb in 1954, which turned out to be more powerful than expected.© CORBIS/GETTY


The test, called 'Castle Bravo,' took place on the Bikini Atoll, a coral reef that forms part of the Marshall Islands, on March 1, 1954.

Story by James Bickerton • Sunday, 20/11/22

Following the explosion radiation spread across 15 separate islands and atolls, causing many to be evacuated, with locals later suffering from cancerous tumors and birth defects.

By 1995 the U.S. Government had paid out $43.2 million in compensation to 1,196 claimants, according to the National Claims Tribunal.

Eric Schlosser wrote about the test, then the largest artificial explosion in history, in his 2013 book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.

Bernard O'Keefe, the lead scientist in the firing bunker when the explosion took place, described how the building felt like it was moved by nuclear detonation.

According to Schlosser, another scientist in the bunker commented: "Is this building moving or am I getting dizzy?"

O'Keefe replied: "Oh my God it is, it's moving."

He later described how, during the explosion, the bunker felt like it was "resting on a bowl of jelly."

Describing the aftermath, Schlosser wrote: "A light rain of ash white that looked like snowflakes began to fall. Then pebbles and rocks began dropping from the sky.

"The men ran back into the bunker, slammed the door shut, detected high levels of radioactivity within the bunker, and after a few moments of confusion, turned off the air conditioning unit."

Whilst this did cause radiation levels to fall within the bunker, they continued to increase outside of it.

The bomb's bigger than expected yield, along with a shift in wind direction, resulted in a larger fallout zone than had been anticipated.

After 48 hours the inhabited islands of Rongelap and Rongerik were evacuated due to radiation.

In 1957 residents were allowed to move back to Rongelap, but discovered the food they used to eat had either disappeared or made them ill, leading to a second evacuation.

The disaster took place during the early stages of the Cold War, with the U.S. locked in competition with the Soviet Union which carried out its first nuclear test in 1949. The only other nuclear armed power at the time was Britain, which successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1952.

In late October this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw nuclear drills, which were described on state TV as mock attacks on the U.S. and U.K.

The same month saw President Biden warn Russia that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, where the Kremlin's forces had suffered a number of reverses, would be "a serious, serious mistake."

In the event of a nuclear strike on the U.S. President Biden could board one of four 'Doomsday planes,' modified Boeing 747-200s designed to act as mobile command posts during a nuclear conflict.

Turkish air strikes target Kurdish militants in Syria, Iraq after bomb attack

Story by Reuters • Sunday, Nov 20,2022
By Ali Kucukgocmen and Suleiman Al-Khalidi


Aftermath of airstrikes Turkey's defence ministry says it carried out, in Derik© Thomson Reuters

ISTANBUL (Reuters) -Turkish warplanes carried out air strikes on Kurdish militant bases in northern Syria and northern Iraq on Sunday, destroying 89 targets, Turkey's defence ministry said, in retaliation for a bomb attack in Istanbul that killed six people one week ago.



Aftermath of airstrikes Turkey's defence ministry says it carried out, in Derik© Thomson Reuters

The strikes targeted bases of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey says is a wing of the PKK, the ministry added in a statement.

Ankara has blamed Kurdish militants for the blast on Istanbul's Istiklal Avenue on Nov. 13 that killed six people and injured more than 80. No group has claimed responsibility for on the explosion on the busy pedestrian avenue, and the PKK and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have denied involvement.



Aftermath of airstrikes Turkey's defence ministry says it carried out, in Derik© Thomson Reuters

"It is time to give account for Istiklal," Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

The Turkish air strikes were carried out in Qandil, Asos and Hakurk in Iraq and Kobani, Tal Rifat, Cizire and Derik in Syria, the ministry said.

The 89 targets destroyed included shelters, tunnels and ammunition depots, it said, adding that "many terrorists were neutralised" including "so-called directors of the terrorist organisation."

A spokesman for the SDF said that the Turkish strikes had destroyed infrastructure including grain silos, a power station and a hospital. Eleven civilians, an SDF fighter and two guards were killed, said Farhad Shami, head of the SDF media centre on Twitter.

Related video: Turkey launches airstrikes over northern Syria

Duration 1:10   View on Watch

 

The SDF said in a statement they would retaliate for the strikes. "These attacks by the Turkish occupied forces will not go without a response," it said.

Eight security personnel, including 7 police, were wounded as a result of a rocket attack by the YPG from Syria's Tal Rifat on a police post near a border gate in Turkey's Kilis province, the Interior Ministry said.

Separately, a Syrian military source told state media SANA that a number of servicemen had been killed in "Turkish aggression on Syrian land" on Sunday morning, in the countryside near northern Aleppo and Hasaka.

"CLAW SWORD"

Turkey's Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said in a statement Sunday morning that all necessary measures were taken to avoid damage to innocent people and the surroundings, adding that "only and only terrorists and structures belonging to terrorists were targeted."

"The claw of our Turkish Armed Forces was once again on top of terrorists," he added, dubbing the operation "Claw Sword."

The defence ministry said it was the first time it had launched an air strike on Kobani.

Regarding the air strikes, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told TASS news agency that Moscow favours "negotiated solutions."

Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country's 11-year war, while Ankara has backed rebels fighting to topple him.

Turkey has conducted three incursions so far into northern Syria against the YPG militia. President Tayyip Erdogan has previously said Turkey could conduct another operation against the YPG. Ankara has also escalated drone strikes in Syria in recent months, killing a number of key SDF officials.

Ankara regularly carries out air strikes in northern Iraq and has sent commandos to support its offensives against the PKK.

The PKK has led an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984. It is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

Washington has allied with the YPG in the fight against Islamic State in Syria, causing a rift with NATO ally Turkey.

Anadolu reported a Turkish court formally arrested two more people on Sunday over last week's bomb attack, after 17 were arrested this week. Bulgarian prosecutors have charged five people for aiding the attack.

(Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman;Additional reporting by Mahmoud Mourad, Nafisa Eltahir, Yasmin Hussein in Cairo, Kinda Makieh in Damascus, Caleb Davis in Gdansk;Editing by Chris Reese and Raissa Kasolowsky)

China's Xi Jinping just got a taste of democracy and he didn't like it

Opinion by Brett Bruen • Saturday Nov 19, 2022

We have seen more than a few awkward moments lately for the world’s more ambitious autocrats. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared large swaths of Eastern Ukraine annexed during an elaborate ceremony in Moscow. Days later his troops were roundly routed and forced into a long retreat. The prime minister of Vietnam got comically caught on a live feed, provided by none other than the U.S. Department of State, making disparaging remarks about the American president and his team. Then there were the reported leaks about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau taking China’s President Xi Jinping to task for alleged malicious meddling in his country’s elections.


China’s President Xi scolds Justin Trudeau over G-20 media leaks
Duration 0:54   View on Watch

That episode exploded into the public arena on Thursday when the media pool captured Xi upbraiding Trudeau at the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia for allegedly leaking to the press details of that private exchange, held on Tuesday. “Everything we discussed has been leaked to the paper. That’s not appropriate,” a smiling Xi said through a translator, according to the footage. “And that’s not the way the conversation was conducted.”

To his credit, Trudeau responded: “In Canada, we believe in free and open and frank dialogue, and that is what we will continue to have. We will continue to look to work constructively together, but there will be things we will disagree on.” Indeed, it’s standard operating procedure for democratic leaders to leak elements favorable to themselves to the press after meeting with foreign government officials.

Stepping out of their tightly controlled environments can be tough for these leaders. They cannot simply toss the journalists in jail, and their threats against Western nations are looking even more pathetically pyrrhic than usual. Leaders like Xi and Putin are starting to realize their limits, along with the liabilities that come with surrounding themselves with sycophants. Welcome to the free world.

What these leaders most detest, as evidenced by Xi’s videotaped temper tantrum with Trudeau, is transparency. We should be working hard to ensure they have to publicly face more of those inconvenient truths. Unfortunately and inexcusably, the Biden administration has underperformed on overexposure.

I remember when President Barack Obama went to Beijing. My colleagues in the press advance team, led by Johanna Maska, actually got Chinese officials to accept questions to their leaders from American reporters after their meeting. It made for a really remarkable moment, where The New York Times could publicly question the very same Xi Jinping about why his government was kicking the paper out of the country.

Ironically, for all his bluster, President Donald Trump’s team wasn’t that tough on Beijing when it came to basic things like this. Instead, they reverted back to the old, bad habit of not taking questions from reporters. Sadly, Biden hasn’t done much better. Obama held three times as many joint press conferences with world leaders at this point in his presidency.

The Biden administration came in claiming it would have the highest standards of transparency and would place human rights at the center of American foreign policy. It has not quite worked out that way. While they have great affinity for superficially strong statements and tweets, their actions belie a much more troubling trend. The State Department recently celebrated with numerous principled posts the importance of the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. But it still provided Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman with precisely that kind of impunity for ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

This is an ideal time for the Biden administration to expand press access. Xi is facing growing domestic pressure. The Vietnamese leader caught on camera was bragging about how easy it was to brush off American pressure to take a harder line on Russia. Let’s arrange to ask him a few more questions at the next global gathering.

American, but also European and other democratically elected leaders, need to push for more moments. Let journalists stay in the room longer. Provide more extensive briefings afterward. Go on the record instead of insisting on being referred to as an anonymous “official source.”

Autocrats are certainly not going to autocorrect. We need to see American and other officials modeling good behavior. Giving more interviews will put added pressure on a wide range of presidents, prime ministers and other heads of state to get themselves out more in front of the microphones. Advance teams need to insist on more press friendly setups and schedules.

Finally, the White House and State Department can give more honest readouts of meetings with foreign officials. Let us once and for all end comically vague language like, “We discussed important bilateral issues.” I can confess as a recovering diplomat that these are just a bunch of meaningless words we put out to fill space. Instead, write that we did tell the Chinese to stop killing Uyghurs and arresting protestors. Sure, just like Xi showed in Indonesia, it will temporarily ruffle some feathers.

But during my time at the White House, I saw how most of the time autocrats want these calls and meetings more than the United States does. They desperately seek the limelight and legitimacy only conferred by meeting with democratic leaders. It’s time we used our considerable leverage to make dictators and despots feel a little less comfortable when they deal with the world.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Mexico's president channels Trump as he targets his country's electoral system

Story by Evan Dyer • Saturday 11/20/22 POSTMEDIA

Canadians have gotten used to a certain politician south of the border who has a habit of only accepting election results when he wins, who invites his followers to lay siege to the capital when he loses, and who seeks to replace neutral election officials with people loyal to him.

In fact, there are two such leaders on the continent. One just saw his prestige within the Republican Party take a beating in the U.S. midterm elections. The other is Andrés Manuel López Obrador — still riding high as elected president of Mexico.

Donald Trump failed thoroughly this month to undermine the U.S. electoral system from the outside. But Lopez Obrador — better know in his country as AMLO — is in a far stronger position as a sitting president with Mexico's congress on his side, and he has set his sights on dismantling the country's independent elections authority.

An unexpected kinship

Speaking in New York City this week, former U.S. president Barack Obama warned that "the threat to democracy doesn't always run along a conservative/liberal, left/right axis. This has nothing to do with traditional partisan lines or policy preferences. What we are seeing, what's being challenged, are the foundational principles of democracy itself."

Obama could have been describing the curious affinity between Donald Trump and AMLO, who inhabit different ends of the left-right spectrum but who share a tendency to challenge principles of free elections and declare electoral institutions to be corrupt.



Then-U.S. president Donald Trump speaks next to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador before signing a joint declaration in the Rose Garden at the White House on July 8, 2020 in Washington, DC.© Win McNamee/Getty Images

Trump has referred to AMLO as a "socialist" but also a "good guy," a "great gentleman" and a "friend of mine." On Tuesday, AMLO seemed to sympathize with Trump's current struggles: "He's a capitalist and he's not perfect, but he's a good person and I respect him."

Both men have used the language of "only I can fix it" to describe their missions to weed out the supposed "deep state" actors they claim are flouting the true will of the people. In AMLO's case, the deep state is embodied by Mexico's National Electoral Institute, the country's equivalent of Elections Canada, known by its Spanish-language acronym INE.

'Hands off the INE'

This weekend, Mexico City and two dozen regional centres saw massive protests under the slogan "Hands off the INE." The protests brought hundreds of thousands of Mexicans into the streets — the biggest popular challenge AMLO has faced since winning office in 2018.

AMLO dismissed the marchers' concerns about the INE as "just an excuse."

"Those who marched yesterday did it because they are against the transformation that is taking place in this country," he said at his morning news conference. "They did it in favour of corruption. They did it in favour of racism."



Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador showed photos of the 'Hands off the INE' protest during his daily press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City on Nov. 14, 2022. He accused the marchers of supporting© AP

The INE, previously called the Federal Electoral Institute, began life in 1990 at the beginning of Mexico's transition away from one-party rule.

The INE worked to change a political system that for seven decades offered only a simulacrum of democracy. And it succeeded: the past three elections have seen each of Mexico's three main parties win office in turn, with peaceful transfers of power each time.

AMLO has a history of poor relations with, and allegations against, the INE.

During the 1990s, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, of which AMLO was a member, enjoyed several victories at the state level. But AMLO lost on the two occasions he ran for governor in his own state of Tabasco, and on both occasions he claimed fraud — a pattern he would repeat throughout his political career.

AMLO cries foul

In 2000, AMLO was elected mayor of Mexico City, a job he held with considerable success and high approval ratings. That left him ready to mount a presidential campaign in 2006 which saw him run neck-and-neck against Felipe Calderón of the centre-right National Action Party.


Thousands protest in Mexico against electoral reform proposal 

When the federal election authority declared Calderón had prevailed by a quarter of a million votes (0.58 per cent of the total) in an election that European Union observers declared to be fair, AMLO called on his supporters to set up a permanent protest camp in the centre of Mexico City. That blockade remained in place for 48 days, causing serious financial losses in the city.

AMLO continued to be a fixture on the Mexican political scene until the stars finally aligned for him with a new party of his own creation — MORENA — four years ago.

"The great paradox," former Mexican ambassador to Washington Arturo Sarukhan told CBC News, "is that Lopez Obrador himself is president today in Mexico thanks to these institutions that were created over the past two or three decades in Mexico, and which allowed for electoral processes to be run cleanly, fairly, transparently."

Other countries drawn into dispute

AMLO is proposing to eliminate the INE and replace it with a new body over which he would have considerable control. The seven individuals who would run the new elections agency — individuals AMLO has said would be chosen by "the people" in some unspecified way — would come from a group of 60 nominees.

Twenty of those nominees would be chosen by the executive (controlled by AMLO), 20 would be chosen by congress and the senate, and the remaining 20 would be picked by the judiciary.

Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden are expected to travel to Mexico next month for the traditional "Three Amigos" summit.

Although Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly met with her Mexican counterpart Marcelo Ebrard this week at the G20, threats to the independence of Mexico's election body were not among the topics they discussed.

But the U.S. government has been drawn into the fray.

"Independent institutions free of political influence are a cornerstone of democracy, and non-partisan electoral institutions in particular ensure that all voices are heard in fundamental democratic processes," said a statement from the U.S. State Department.

The Russian Embassy in Mexico City, eager to curry favour with a Mexican president who has described Vladimir Putin as "a friend," subsequently denounced "another intervention in Mexico's internal affairs by the government of the United States.

"This time, the representatives of a 'free democracy' have decided to advise Mexico on the best way to carry out electoral reform," the embassy said in a media statement.

Also speaking out on the proposed changes is the European Union, which instructed its Venice Commission of constitutional experts to look at the proposed changes.

"This reform, if adopted, will radically change the electoral system in Mexico and the management of its electoral process," they concluded.

"Previously all constitutional electoral reforms had been proposed by the opposition. This is the first time that the president, whose political supporters have the majority in the Congress, initiates such ambitious constitutional changes, which will significantly affect the next elections to take place in 2024."

The commission said the reform law "should be reconsidered as it is not in line with the international standards and best practices in the electoral field."

The 'Fourth Transformation'

AMLO does not see himself as merely another in a long line of presidential administrators, but rather as a historic figure whose arrival has inaugurated what he calls the "Fourth Transformation" of Mexico (the first three being the War of Independence begun in 1810, the reforms of Benito Juarez in the mid-19th century, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910).

That grandiose vision, combined with his history of disputing election results, leads some Mexicans to fear what AMLO might do as he approaches the end of his six-year term.

Some of his critics see his plan to abolish Mexico's independent election authority as part of a plan to smooth the path of an anointed successor, or perhaps even to try to hang on to power himself — even though Mexico's constitution strictly forbids a second run for office.

AMLO has denied any such intent, saying that the INE is "corrupt" and he merely wants to clean it up while streamlining the system for electing the Mexican congress.

'Return to the past'

At the weekend's mass rally at Mexico City's Angel of Independence monument, former head of INE José Woldenberg reminded the crowd how the independent authority had transformed Mexico since the 1970s.

"As a country, we were able to build a budding democracy. We left behind the country of only one party, of oppressive presidentialism, of elections without real options or competition," he said.

"I want to call your attention to one fact: peaceful, constitutional transfer of presidential power occurred, for the first time in Mexico, thanks to that democratizing process. In almost 200 years of independent life, our country had never achieved it.

"Mexico cannot go back to an electoral institution aligned with the government, incapable of guaranteeing impartiality in the whole electoral process. Our country doesn't deserve to return to the past."

AMLO's supporters don't appear to acknowledge the progress of the past 30 years, said Sarukhan.

"It's like the debate between creationists and evolutionists. Many Mexicans, including yours truly, believe that democracy has been slowly evolving in Mexico over the past decades," he told CBC News. "Central to this has been the slow creation, modernization of a fully autonomous, effective centralized electoral authority.

"Lopez Obrador believes that democracy in Mexico started with his electoral victory."

This week, AMLO organized his own march to the Angel of Independence for November 27, inviting his followers to show support for the proposed overhaul and promising to create a new corps of "incorruptible" election overseers, "not lackeys, employees of the oligarchy, people without moral scruples."

Tonga's strange volcanic eruption was even more massive than we knew

Story by Maya Wei-Haas 

NAT GEO 

Saturday, 11/20/22

Crimson hues flushed across the early morning skies over the Kingdom of Tonga as Grace Frontin-Rollet spotted a pair of small rocky islands from the bow of the RV Tangaroa. Though the scene was picturesque, a tinge of sulfur in the air reminded the marine geologist what she and a team of scientists had traveled for six days over rough waters to see. In the expansive gap between the two bits of land, hidden on the ocean floor, lay the crater of a massive volcano that erupted just months before in one of the largest and strangest blasts ever seen.


In December 2021, a volcano in the Kingdom of Tonga, known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, began erupting in an event that culminated in an explosion so powerful it sent atmospheric ripples circling the planet multiple times. The eruption destroyed much of the volcanic peak that poked above the waves, shown here.© Photograph by Maxar via Getty Images

"I don't think the scale of what had happened hit us until we reached the site," says Frontin-Rollet, who is from New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

In December 2021, the volcano—called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai after the two islands that sit on its rim—awoke in a series of tantrums that turned into outright turmoil on January 15, 2022. The peak unleashed a blast so loud it was heard in Alaska, some 6,000 miles away. But much of what happened that day has remained a mystery, until now. Scientists, including the team aboard the RV Tangaroa, are finally putting together the pieces, and the picture that has emerged is mind-boggling.

The Tonga eruption explained, from tsunami warnings to sonic booms

As the team announced today, recent surveys of the seafloor suggest that the blast excavated about 2.3 cubic miles of rock. If confirmed, the eruption would be the largest recorded in the last century, surpassing the 1991 blast at Mount Pinatubo.

Other recent analyses reveal even more record-breaking measures. The blast jettisoned a plume of searing hot gas and ash 35.4 miles into the sky, higher than ever seen before. It injected an unprecedented 146 teragrams of vaporized water into the atmosphere, which some speculate might result in a slight, temporary warming of the climate. And it sparked a tsunami that surprised scientists when it traveled around the world.


This photograph, taken by an astronaut on board the International Space Station, shows clouds of ash lingering in the atmosphere a day after the intense explosion of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai.

© Photograph by NASA

"It's just a massive event," says Kevin MacKay, a marine geologist at NIWA who was also on the RV Tangaroa. "The more we study it, the bigger the event becomes."

Understanding the explosive peak's many effects is far from just scientific curiosity. Many similar submarine volcanoes lurk offshore coastlines around the world. Most that have been identified are not monitored—and even more are yet to be discovered.

"We along with other nations of the Pacific Ring of Fire know only too well how at mercy we are to nature," says Taaniela Kula, Tonga's Deputy Secretary for Natural Resources, in a May press conference. The eruption, he says, "is a reminder that there's always more to learn about the giants of our home planet Earth."

Window into the deep

An ancient tectonic battle between the Pacific and Indo-Australian plates birthed a line of volcanoes in the South Pacific Ocean, including the mighty Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai. Today, the only parts of the volcano that poke above the sea are the two little islands that signaled to Fontin-Rollet that the team had arrived. She describes the sobering realization that their nearly 230-foot ship was tiny compared to the geologic beast that lay hidden under the water before them

This shroud of water has made it challenging for scientists to learn what happened during the tumultuous eruption last January. Whenever magma and water mix, billowing steam forms and thus big eruptions ensue. But what sparked the surprising cascade of events at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai? To find answers scientists had to get a closer look.

In April, the RV Tangaroa arrived on site in the first leg of a two-part survey conducted as a collaboration between NIWA and The Nippon Foundation called Tonga Eruption Seabed Mapping Project (TESMaP). The expedition was followed in August by SEA-KIT International's uncrewed vessel Maxlimer, which was remotely operated by a team in the United Kingdom. The research efforts scrutinized the region, mapping the seafloor, snapping pictures and taking video, analyzing the water column, and collecting samples of volcanic rock and ash.

In total, the team mapped almost 8,500 square miles around the volcano, discovering much of the area devoid of life, blanketed in a ghostly white layer of fine sediments. Rocky cores collected in these zones reveal the source of devastation: a deadly fast-moving avalanche of hot ash and volcanic rubble called a pyroclastic flow that forms from the collapse of the rising plume of ash and gas.

Scientists can only speculate about the dynamics of pyroclastic flows under the water, MacKay cautions, because none have been witnessed in person. It’s theorized that as the debris plunges into the sea, the hot ash may vaporize the water to form a gas layer that helps propel the tongue of material across the ocean floor like a Slip ‘N Slide.

Evidence of multiple pulses of pyroclastic flows radiated around the caldera's rim. The volcanic avalanches traveled up over rises and into valleys, extending to the edge of the team's survey area some 50 miles away, hinting debris perhaps traveled even further.

The pyroclastic flows likely were also behind the severing of both domestic and international communication lines for Tonga, which hindered initial recovery efforts. Modeling conducted by NIWA's Emily Lane suggests that volcanic material poured into a valley that housed one of the cables, ricocheting off the walls of the depression. Such behavior could help explain how a broken fragment of the cable was dragged northward back toward the peak.

The latest research also documented that the volcano’s blast excavated down 2,300 feet of rock in the central crater. That confirms results from an earlier survey in May by volcanologist Shane Cronin from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a team from Tonga Geological Services. "There's a huge hole in the ground where it wasn't before," says Richard Wysoczanski, a marine geologist with NIWA. "It's quite spectacular."

Three quarters of the excavated and erupted rock appears to have landed within 12 miles of the volcano. Much of the remaining material likely circulated in the atmosphere as dust for months, intensifying the colors of sunrises and sunsets, MacKay says. The same phenomenon happened after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and likely inspired the red skies in Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.”

While the eruption has quieted, the volcano hasn't fully returned to its slumber: Now it’s piping out hot water laced with fragments of volcanic glass. "It's not completely dead," Wysoczanski says, but adds that another big eruption in the near future is unlikely.

View from the sky

Scientists were surprised to find that the blast left the volcanic slopes intact. All the eruptive energy seems to have been directed straight up to the sky, says MacKay. This oddity may help explain another remarkable feature of the eruption: plume height.

When the volcano let loose, gas and ash billowed skyward, captured by Earth-orbiting satellites. Just how high did the plume travel? When Simon Proud, an expert in satellite remote sensing at the UK's National Centre for Earth Observation, worked through the calculations, he initially stared at his numbers in disbelief. A double check of his work confirmed the improbable figure: The plume shot 35.4 miles high into a layer of atmosphere called the mesosphere, a zone where most planes can't fly and shooting stars light night skies.

"We've never seen anything get up anywhere near this high before," says Proud, lead author of the paper on the plume height. "It really was quite breathtaking."

As the terrifying plume spread over the island nation, tsunami waves began crashing on nearby shores; by some estimates, swells were more than 50 feet high. To scientists' surprise, the disturbance spread to oceans around the globe, causing sea levels to rise by a foot in the Mediterranean Sea on the opposite side of the world.

A multitude of events conspired to produce such an unusual tsunami. Close to the volcano, factors like the collapse of the caldera floor and pyroclastic flows stirred the turbulent sloshing of the sea. The blast also caused sharp drops in the air pressure, "pumping energy into the tsunami," says NIWA's Lane, who is an expert in the violent phenomena.

Far from the volcano, a slightly different process was at work. The enormous volcanic plume bursting into the sky shoved aside the atmosphere, sending ripples racing around the world four times over six days. "The explosion was so large that it started making the atmosphere oscillate," says Quentin Brissaud, a geophysicist with the Norwegian Seismic Array and an author on a paper describing the eruption's atmospheric effects.

As they zipped around the globe, these ripples disturbed the ocean surface in what's known as a meteo-tsunami. The only other time this has been recorded was during the 1883 explosion of Krakatau, one of the most powerful and deadly volcanic eruptions in recorded history.

Still, many questions remain unanswered about Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, including exactly what triggered the volcano's ferocious bellow.

As Wysoczanski says, "The science is just starting."

FASCIST REACTION

Bolsonaro supporters hold encampments in front of barracks to call for a coup d’état

Supporters of Brazil's outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, continue with protests and rallies in front of military bases calling for a coup d'état two weeks after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's victory in the Brazilian presidential elections.


Protests by Jair Bolsonaro supporters calling for a coup d'état - 

SILVIA MACHADO / ZUMA PRESS / CONTACTOPHOTO

Story by Daniel Stewart • News 360  Saturday 11/20/22

The rallies have turned into encampments and vigils of hundreds of activists in a territorially extensive initiative --with presence in Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Florianopolis or Recife--, but without defined national leaders.

The state and federal authorities - Ministry of Defense or Public Security - have not provided data on the number of people attending these rallies or on how many protest points are active, according to the newspaper 'Estadao'.

The demonstrators are camped to ask for "relief" and have punctually carried out blockades and roadblocks, as reported by the Federal Traffic Police.

Related video: Right-wing protesters in Vila Velha demand military intervention to prevent 'communism' in Brazil   Duration 3:34   View on Watch

Protest breakout across Brazil as Bolsonaro suffers defeat

Reports from the Military Police, the Civil Police and the Federal Police point to a majority presence of elderly people, with hardly any young people, and state that they are financed by politicians, policemen, trade unionists and rural workers.

"We are staying here until the Armed Forces prevent the real coup, which is the inauguration of Lula", explained Luiz, one of the demonstrators gathered in front of the Eastern Military Command, in the center of Rio de Janeiro.

The encampments are plagued with tarpaulins and gazebos and adorned with banners with slogans such as "Armed Forces, save Brazil", "We want clean elections" or "The people are camping so that the thief does not go up the ramp" in reference to the ramp of the Planalto Palace, presidential headquarters.

Stops to sing the national anthem are common and the Brazilian national soccer team t-shirts, symbol of Bolsonaro's campaign, abound.

"If Bolsonaro doesn't speak, we will be robbed," added another man who accuses Lula's Workers' Party of wanting to confiscate the population's assets. "God willing this will end before the World Cup," has indicated another participant, in reference to the start of the World Cup in Qatar this Sunday, November 20.

Yangtze River estuary sees improving ecology

Aerial photo taken on Nov. 13, 2020 shows the scenery along the Yangtze River in Nantong City, east China's Jiangsu Province. (Xinhua/Ji Chunpeng)

Yangtze River estuary sees improving ecology© Provided by XINHUA

Story by Zhao Jiasong,Zhu Guoliang

NANJING, Nov. 20 (Xinhua) -- Zhang Zhiping, 59, has finally seen clear water and jumping fish in the river again, a scene that had been common in his childhood but disappeared in the 1980s.

"The finless porpoises are back. And when the river gate opened, I could see the fish jumping!" said Zhang, a resident of Nantong City, east China's Jiangsu Province.

Living near the Kuzigang River, which runs to the Yangtze River, in Chongchuan District, Zhang is a witness to the improved environment and ecology, which was accelerated by a series of policies on the protection of the river, especially in the past decade.

He recalled that in the 1980s and 1990s, factories along the Yangtze River increased, bringing about much pollution. Oil and garbage floated in the river, and with overfishing, there were fewer fish.

In recent years, the Yangtze River has become better protected, more factories along the coast have been closed, and fishermen have returned to the land for other businesses. Zhang, who fished almost throughout his lifetime, stopped in 2018.

Related video: Migrating White Swans Stay At The Sanggan River in Zhangjiakou, China

Duration 4:06   View on Watch

"Although I can no longer fish, I am happy to see such changes," Zhang said.

Now, Zhang goes to the river banks every two or three days and volunteers as an inspector for river protection. Finding improper behavior or environmental damage, he will stop it or report it to the relevant authorities.

Yuantuojiao Tourist Resort of Nantong, located in the estuary of the Yangtze River, also sees a dramatic change. Xu Nannan, a staff member with the resort, said it used to be a chaotic fishing port crowded with illegal ferries. Many fishermen from other cities lived on boats, and illegal behaviors such as heavy fishing were often reported.

Since 2017, the resort has conducted a radical renovation, cleaning up 20,000 square meters of illegal construction, more than 300 abandoned ferries, and 12 unlawful docks, and taking advantage of social funds to build a tourist and leisure block.

"The environment has become beautiful. The number of tourists in the resort has surged in recent years, reaching more than 2 million. The income obtained by residents through opening homestays and farmhouses far exceeds that from farming and fishing," Xu said.

According to data from the Nantong ecology and environment bureau, Nantong has closed two chemical parks along the Yangtze River and more than 400 chemical enterprises in recent years.

Yang Jian, a researcher at the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, said the monitoring of the Yangtze River estuary and its adjacent waters showed the Yangtze long-tailed anchovy resources are continuously recovering. Such flagship migratory species in the Yangtze even appeared in Dongting Lake and other waters where the fish had not been found for more than a decade.

On Jan. 1, 2021, a 10-year fishing ban took effect in pivotal waters of the Yangtze, after 332 conservation areas along the river enforced the fishing ban a year ago, to help the river recover from dwindling aquatic resources and degrading biodiversity.

The fishing ban lays the foundation for the sustainable recovery of estuarine migratory species in rivers and seas. The green development of coastal areas along the Yangtze River estuary, especially in water pollution prevention and shoreline regulation, has improved the environment of the habitat, said Zhong Xiaming, Party secretary of the Jiangsu Marine Fisheries Research Institute. ■

Are humans inherently violent?

Story by Joe Phelan • Sunday, Nov 20,2022

The earliest human civilizations appeared between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago; since then, humans as a species have been entirely at peace for approximately 268 years. And as many as 1 billion people may have perished as a direct result of war, according to "What Every Person Should Know About War" (Free Press, 2003)


A soldier stands among the ruins of war.© Diy13 via Getty Images

Violence is clearly not a modern phenomenon, but is it an inherent part of being human? Have we evolved to be aggressive?

It turns out the answer isn't simple. A 2014 study published in the journal Nature noted that lethal violence was common in the communities of one of our closest living primate relatives: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

That suggests that violence may have been part of the human repertoire at least as far back as our last shared ancestor with chimps, which would have lived about 8 million years ago.

Related: What's the deadliest month of the year?

So clearly, violence has been prevalent for as long as humans have been around, experts told Live Science.

"Violence is a driver of much of human history," David C. Geary, a cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, told Live Science in an email. "All of humanity's early empires were built through intimidation and violence."

"There's also evidence of aggression before recorded history: bones with evidence of violent death, like embedded arrow points or skulls staved in," Pat Barclay, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario told Live Science in an email. That suggests violence predated complex societies and the rise of civilization.

But on the flip side, rates of violence vary (and have historically varied) wildly across cultures and communities, Barclay said. That suggests violence can be dialed up or down dramatically in our species.

Nomadic peoples, for example, tend to have lower levels of lethal interpersonal human violence, while eras filled with societies bent on plunder and conquest, unsurprisingly, had higher levels.

And modern day American culture is more violent than most of those in Europe.

"There's wide variation in violence rates — order of magnitude difference," Barclay noted. "In some specific recorded societies, up to half of all men die violently at the hands of other men. In other societies, physical violence is very rare, like in modern Japan."

Related video: People gathered to discuss solutions to end violence

Duration 2:51 View on Watch

Why do people become violent?

Violence tends to breed violence, meaning that cultures where conflict is common are more likely to experience violence generation after generation, Geary said. In this way, violence is "transmitted" as a contagious disease would be, according to University of Illinois epidemiologist Gary Slutkin.

However, Brad Evans, a professor of political violence at the University of Bath in the U.K., pointed out that even people in the most progressive and peaceful communities are capable of violence. "Ordinary, lawful persons can quickly turn into monsters once conditions change; equally, some who are most dislikeable can end up showing remarkable acts of kindness. There is no clear formula as to why a person acts in a violent way. And that is why it is such a complex problem," Evans told Live Science in an email.

Additionally, according to both Barclay and Evans, it can be far easier to carry out violent acts if the individual committing the violence is distant from their victims; it is far easier to press a button launching a nuclear missile than it is to physically and directly strike a killing blow.

For instance, in Stanley Milgram's classic studies of obedience, in which an experimenter told participants to deliver electric shocks of increasing intensity to other people, participants were more reluctant to shock victims if they were physically closer to them, Barclay noted.

And historically, acts of genocide occur after perpetrators dehumanize, or create psychological distance, between themselves and those of a different race or ethnicity.

Types of violence

There may also be "two types" of aggression in human evolution: proactive and reactive, Richard Wrangham, a research professor in the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, reported in 2017 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Proactive violence has historically been related to conquest, when a group is determined to take the resources or land of another. Reactive violence, on the other hand, can be described as the direct response to such aggression.

However, despite violence seeming to be an ingrained human characteristic, Barclay is confident there is room for optimism — up to a point.

"Objectively speaking, any individual is much less likely to suffer violence today than in previous eras," he said. "We are currently in history's most peaceful era. But that doesn't guarantee it'll stay that way. Unless we fight climate change, there will be more scarcity, more disasters, more desperation and more reason for conflict."

Originally published on Live Science.