Andrea Mitchell Asks Fauci If He Ever Found Out Why Trump Pushed False Covid-19 Cure: ‘Was There A Financial Interest In It?’

Story by Tommy Christopher • Yesterday 

MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell asked retiring infectious disease honcho Dr. Anthony Fauci if he ever found out why then-President Donald Trump pushed false Covid-19 “cure” hydroxychloroquine, asking “was there a financial interest?”

ABOUT HIS LONG CAREER. THE TRIUMPHS AND THE CHALLENGES.
Dr. Fauci: Twitter has become ‘almost a cesspool of misinformation’
View on Watch    Duration 7:52

Fauci has been on something of a weird bookless-book-tour lately, hitting all sorts of media outlets to reminisce about his decades of public service, his years as a reluctant member of the Trump Covid Improv Troupe, his current effort to ignore Elon Musk, and his future getting yelled at by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and his friends.

On Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, the veteran NBC News journalist found some different ground to go over, asking Fauci if he thought Trump pimped a fake cure because of a financial stake, and if misinformation cost lives:

ANDREA MITCHELL: So when you hear the president of the United States promoting hydroxychloroquine for COVID.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right.

ANDREA MITCHELL: And listening to advisors like a doctor from California and his trade advisor, and the government, the federal government spending, according to some reports, $20 million to buy that, stockpile other for COVID. What– what can you do in your role?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Speak up like I did. And it didn’t help much, because he just kept on doing what he wanted to do. But it had the result of creating a phenomenal amount of hostility against me among the people around him, which has spilled over into the people who are very much listening to everything that he has said. And that has made it very uncomfortable, the reason why I’m getting so many threats against me.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Did you ever figure out why they were pushing that hydroxychloroquine?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You know–

ANDREA MITCHELL: Was there a financial interest in it?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: No. I don’t think it had anything to do with financial, it had to do with just listening to some friend of yours that tells you something, which is completely out of the line of the normal scientific process. The normal scientific process, you look at the data and the data will tell you that either something works or it doesn’t work. And because somebody whispers in your ear– “You know, I gave it to somebody and they did well.” You know, N equals one. It doesn’t– that’s not a scientific study.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Do you think that lives were lost because of the way all of this became so polarized?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, if– you know, I– when I say things like that, it gets thrown out of proportion in sound bites. The but fact is vaccines save lives. If you say something or do something to dissuade people from getting vaccinated, then lives will unnecessarily be lost. That’s just a fact.

ANDREA MITCHELL: And masks.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Same thing. You know, masks, physical distancing, all the things that are good public health principles.

Watch above via MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.The post Andrea Mitchell Asks Fauci If He Ever Found Out Why Trump Pushed False Covid-19 Cure: ‘Was There A Financial Interest In It?’ first appeared on Mediaite.

Colby Cosh: A new look at 1979's mysterious nuclear (we think) explosion

The 'Vela Incident' remains one of the genuine whodunits — and whodunwhat — of the 20th century

Author of the article:Colby Cosh
Publishing date:Jan 23, 2018 

Nuclear explosions create an M-shaped signal on light detectors in the first second or so after they detonate.

There are many names for whatever happened in the South Atlantic on Sept. 22, 1979, but the most typical one is “the Vela Incident.” It is one of the genuine mysteries of 20th-century history — not a contrived mystery like “Who killed the Lindbergh baby?”, but the real deal: a whodunit, combined with a whatwuzzit. At just past midnight on the key date, an American satellite designed to detect nuclear explosions, Vela 6911, “announced” to ground stations that it was pretty sure it had just seen one.

The inferred location of the blast was about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica. This may not seem like an important clue to post-Cold War babies; people forget that South Africa is known to have had the bomb throughout the 1980s. The apartheid regime built a half-dozen warheads for tactical use and regional deterrence against such Communist-influenced neighbour states as Angola. In 1989, during the run-up to South African democracy, the republic voluntarily dismantled its nukes. Over the next decade it joined the major nonproliferation treaties, and even led the creation of a new one, the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty.

The new research paper on the Vela Incident, published in the journal Science & Global Security last month, is not a sensational novelty. Mostly I am mentioning it because it may be nice, in 2018, to imagine a rogue member of the Nuclear Club one day leaving it and becoming a leading anti-nuke sentinel.

South Africa is not necessarily the prime suspect in this whodunit

With all that said, South Africa is not necessarily the prime suspect in this whodunit. Vela 6911 was part of a global grid of satellites designed to help enforce the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which outlawed nuclear testing in the atmosphere (and in space). The satellites’ main instruments for spotting atmospheric nuke tests were arrays of light-detecting photodiodes called “bhangmeters” (whose name is a slightly complicated physicists’ joke about cannabis. Yes, really).

Nuclear explosions create an interesting double-humped or M-shaped signal on light detectors in the first second or so after they detonate. There’s an initial, brief fireball “set off” by X-rays heating the air (and anything else that might be very nearby) to hundreds of thousands of degrees. Then the mechanical shock wave of the explosion, at first opaque, conceals the first fireball.

Cooling as it expands, the shock wave becomes translucent, and there is a “second maximum” of brightness. The resulting M-shaped curve is the same for fission and fusion weapons, can be used to calculate the total energy of the explosion, and is not known to be imitated by any other natural phenomenon.

A test of a 23-kiloton A-bomb on Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean July 25, 1946, 

raised a mushroom cloud of radioactivity a mile high.

In the Vela Incident, two independent bhangmeters recorded an M-shaped light signal that sent the White House and the U.S. intelligence community racing madly off in all directions. Well, to be more specific, they went in two opposing ones.

The CIA studied the signal and decided that it was, in fact, the thumbprint of a low-yield nuke. President Jimmy Carter convened a blue-ribbon scientific panel to study the signal: it was led by Jack Ruina, an MIT electrical engineering prof who had once been director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is to say that Ruina had very strong science credentials, and equally impressive deep-state credentials. Ruina’s panel issued what one member called a “Scotch verdict”: it said it could not rule out a natural explanation for the signal.

The new paper by Christopher M. Wright and Lars-Erik de Geer pulls together the many shreds of public-domain knowledge about the physics of the Vela Incident. Some of them have come from material declassified piecemeal, and far from completely, over the intervening decades. The public has only been allowed to scrutinize selected items from a “zoo” of Vela false alarms cited by the Ruina panel as proof that the Incident might have been some kind of micrometeor phenomenon. Meanwhile, Vela readings from the last known atmospheric nuke tests have also been misplaced.

As Wright and de Geer document, even this threadbare evidence does not leave much room to doubt that the incident was a nuke. The panel’s alternate scenarios are pretty contrived, especially given what the human species has learned since about the statistics of very tiny particles that whiz about the cosmos and occasionally smash into satellites.

Wright and de Geer do not dig into the historical literature of Vela, which has been expanding persistently as intelligence-world memoirs and diaries are published or declassified. Even president Carter wrote, not long after his panel had completed its preliminary work, of “a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of South Africa.”

A growing belief that the Israelis did conduct a nuclear test explosion

There is now a panoply of published remarks by top U.S. spies deriding the White House panel report as a whitewash, and there has even been some sketchy confirmation of Israeli involvement, though it is less clear that South Africa participated. Israel’s membership in the nuclear club is no longer a secret in any way, but is still an unmentionable for the U.S. executive branch.

In 1980 such talk had the potential to start a war. Students of the Vela Incident have, ever since then, been drifting pretty steadily toward the conclusion that it was a nuclear test. But if there is the equivalent of a smoking gun, we still cannot be sure which country or countries held it.

• Email: ccosh@postmedia.com | Twitter: colbycosh

IT NEVER WAS JUST ABOUT ABORTION

A notorious Trump judge just fired the first shot against birth control

Story by Ian Millhiser • Yesterday 

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.


A protester dressed as birth control pills rallies outside the Supreme Court in 2014.© Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.

Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.

This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.

Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion is incompetently drafted and makes several obvious legal errors

Kacsmaryk’s opinion makes a number of legal errors, some of them egregious.

The Constitution, for example, does not permit litigants to file federal lawsuits challenging a government program unless they’ve been injured in some way by that program — a requirement known as “standing.” But Alexander Deanda, the father in this case seeking to stop Title X-funded programs from offering contraception to minors, does not claim that he has ever sought Title X-funded care. He does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care. And he does not even allege that they intend to seek Title X-funded care in the future.


Thus, this case should have been dismissed for lack of standing. As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit must show that they’ve been injured in a manner that is “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.” But Deanda has offered nothing more than conjecture that, if Title X continues to operate as it has for decades, one of his daughters might, at some point in the future, obtain contraception. Kacsmaryk nevertheless allowed his suit to proceed.

Additionally, Kacsmaryk places an astonishing amount of weight on a Texas state law which provides that parents have a right to consent to their child’s “medical and dental care.” But the Constitution states explicitly that federal law is “the supreme Law of the Land,” and when state laws prevent a federal law from operating as Congress intended — including the federal law creating the Title X program — then the state law must yield.

If the law worked any other way, then states would have the power to fundamentally alter federal welfare programs. Republican state lawmakers who believe that the Medicare or Social Security eligibility age should be 75 — or 125, for that matter — could pass a law imposing this new age requirement, thus destroying Congress’s power to create universal programs that benefit all Americans regardless of whether they live in a red state or a blue state.

Kacsmaryk attempts to weaponize the Constitution against birth control

The idea that parents have a constitutional right to shape their child’s upbringing — and that this right undermines government-funded contraceptive care — has been around for nearly half a century. It’s just never gained any real traction in federal court.

In Doe v. Irwin (1980), a federal appeals court case, the plaintiffs brought a similar challenge as Deanda against a state-operated family planning clinic that served both adults and teenagers. Doe acknowledged that a line of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1920s establish that parents have a limited constitutional right “to the care, custody and nurture of their children.” At the same time, however, Doe held that “as with adults, the minor’s right of privacy includes the right to obtain contraceptives.” And so the plaintiffs’ claims in Doe placed these two constitutional rights in tension.

But the court found an easy way to relieve this tension. In each of the Supreme Court’s previous parental rights cases, “the state was either requiring or prohibiting some activity” — that is, the government used its coercive power to either require a child to take an action their parents did not like, or forbid the child from taking an action their parents wanted the child to take.

A program like Title X cannot violate this rule against coercion because there is nothing coercive about it. The federal government provides grants to health providers who voluntarily offer family planning services to their patients. And those providers, in turn, offer their services to patients who voluntarily seek out contraceptive care. No one is required to receive reproductive health care services funded by Title X.

This distinction between coercive government programs which compel certain behaviors, and welfare programs which merely fund voluntary activity, is implicit in the Constitution’s text. The Supreme Court (somewhat controversially) found the right of parents to shape their children’s upbringing in the Constitution’s due process clause, which provides that no one may be deprived of “liberty” without “due process of law.” But it’s impossible to deprive someone of liberty by creating a voluntary program that no one is required to participate in. “Liberty,” by definition, means the freedom to do as you choose.

To all of this, Kacsmaryk offers a hodgepodge of half-formed arguments that layer several additional pages onto his opinion without presenting much legal reasoning. One of his primary arguments rebutting Doe, for example, relies on the fact that the Supreme Court’s parental rights decision in Troxel v. Granville (2000) “does not rely on a heavy distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘compulsory’ programs.” But Troxel involved a coercive state law governing who is allowed to interact with a child against their parents’ wishes — so there was no reason for Troxel to discuss voluntary programs because such a program was not before the Court.

Similarly, he claims that “the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.” But English and early American law permitted minors to consent to sex as early as age 12, a fact that is simultaneously deeply upsetting and completely inconsistent with Kacsmaryk’s implication that 17-year-olds historically did not have control over their sexuality.

That leaves him with a policy argument against the rule announced in Doe. Kacsmaryk claims that limiting the scope of parents’ constitutional rights to cases involving actual coercion would lead to “absurd results,” such as preventing “parents from becoming aware of what books their children are reading in school and deny[ing] them the right to exempt their children from an offensive reading curriculum,” or preventing parents from intervening if a doctor provides care that is genuinely harmful.

But even if you assume that parents have a right to exempt their children from public school curriculums, a mandatory school assignment is a coercive act — so decisions like Doe are consistent with a rule allowing parents to exempt their children from certain school assignments.

Similarly, Kacsmaryk’s decision reaches far beyond the unlikely circumstances when a family planning clinic prescribes medically harmful treatments to teenagers. According to Kacsmaryk, “parental consent does not depend on the particular form of contraception or the environment in which the contraception is distributed.” So his decision would even prevent a public university from leaving out a basket of free condoms that anyone, including students who are not yet 18, can take from as they choose.

Obviously, questions about teenage sexuality are fraught. But the bottom line is that the people’s elected representatives in Congress debated these difficult issues, and they chose to enact a Title X program that provides funding that Kacsmaryk finds objectionable. It is simply not a judge’s job to short-circuit this democratic process of determining how the law should approach teenage sexuality. Nor is it Kacsmaryk’s job to impose his own well-documented prudishness on a federal program like Title X.

So what happens to Title X now?

Although Kacsmaryk claims that Title X “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” he has not yet ordered the federal government to halt the program. His opinion concludes by requiring the parties in Deanda to submit proposals by this Thursday laying out just what action Kacsmaryk should take against the federal government.

But Deanda’s lawyers have already signaled that they want an aggressive injunction that could temporarily shut down Title X, and permanently harm teenagers’ ability to obtain reproductive care.

In their complaint, these lawyers ask Kacsmaryk to prohibit the federal government from “funding any family-planning project in the United States that fails to obtain parental consent before distributing prescription contraception or other family-planning services to minors.” Should Kacsmaryk issue a such a sweeping order, which he could very well do given his past record, that could force the federal government to hit pause on the entire Title X program. To comply with such an order, Title X could have to build systems to determine which reproductive health providers give parents a veto power over medical care provided to their teenaged children.

There is a decent chance that Kacsmaryk will eventually be reversed by the Supreme Court — among other things, the standing problem in this case is so glaring that it may be hard for Deanda’s lawyers to convince five justices that they are allowed to bring this case in the first place. But it may be a while before that happens. Kacsmaryk’s decision will appeal first to the exceedingly conservative Fifth Circuit, which has a history of rubber-stamping outlandish decisions handed down by Kacsmaryk and similarly minded judges.

In the short term, in other words, Kacsmaryk could create a great deal of chaos for reproductive health clinics, which may lose an important source of funding for months or longer.

FORTEAN PHENOMENA

'It looks like baby Nessie!' Mystery sea creature washes up on Dorset beach

Story by Jessica Warren For Mailonline • Yesterday 

A mystery creature found washed up on a British beach has been dubbed a 'mini Loch Ness Monster' after photos of its remains left people baffled.

Lindsay Freeman said she spotted what 'looked like a sea monster' while on the beach in Poole, Dorset, and could not figure out what it was.

She said: 'I was walking on the beach at the time. It caught my eye because it was so unusual looking and large.

'I couldn't think of an animal that had a tail like a shark, but also legs like a turtle. It also looked like it had little arms and a very strange head.

'It looked like a sea monster.'


A mystery creature found washed up on a British beach has been dubbed a 'mini Loch Ness Monster' after photos of its remains went viral

© Provided by Daily Mail


Lindsay Freeman said she spotted what 'looked like a sea monster' while on the beach in Poole, Dorset

© Provided by Daily Mail

She continued: 'I thought it was very cool and wanted to know more.

'I sent an email to my family first and when we couldn't figure it out, it just ate at me — I wanted to know what it was; it had to have an explanation.

'I've never encountered something like this.'

Ms Freeman spotted the remains in November, but only shared her images online last week, where she attracted a flurry of bemused responses.

Several said it was a 'baby Loch Ness Monster' taking a break from the Highlands.

One commenter took a guess at a Liopleurodon, a prehistoric predator of the deep last seen some 150 million years ago.

Another suggested it was a facehugger, the parasitic movie monster from the 1979 flick, Alien.

And one self-proclaimed marine biologist said it was a sea cucumber.


One person suggested it was a Liopleurodon, a prehistoric predator of the deep last seen some 150 million years ago

© Provided by Daily Mail

'I thought it was some kind of strange shark with legs,' said Ms Freeman.

'It was definitely smooth like a fish or water animal. Friends and family guessed it was a dogfish, turtle without a shell, or the Loch Ness Monster. None [of these answers] seemed satisfying.

'Online, there were lots of suggestions like dogfish, turtle, salamander, lizard, sea monster, Loch Ness monster.

'Once we posted it, we got a flood of funny and serious responses — it seemed to capture many people's imaginations.'

But some of those commenting may have spotted the real answer.

Several suggested it was a ray of some sort, perhaps with its fins or 'wings' missing.


Rob Deaville, project manager for the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, said it looked like 'the remains of a skate or a ray'. 

File image© Provided by Daily Mail

Rob Deaville, project manager for the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, agreed that it appeared to be an elasmobranch — a grouping that includes rays and sharks.

He said: 'I'm not an expert in elasmobranch identification, but to my untutored eye, this looks like the remains of a skate or a ray.

'It looks like there are claspers next to the tail and eyes dorsally on the top of the head.

'I assume the pectoral fins have been removed and the rest of the body discarded.'

For Ms Freeman too, it's the answer that makes the most sense.

She said: 'There was some suggestion of how it might have lost its wings — like it was caught by fishermen and eaten.

'I am very curious to know how it ended up in its current state.'

'Extreme shifts:' New report details effects of changing Arctic climate

Yesterday

YELLOWKNIFE — A new report details how widespread changes in the Arctic, from warming air temperatures to sea-ice loss, have affected animals, plants and people living there.


'Extreme shifts:' New report details effects of changing Arctic climate© Provided by The Canadian Press

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest annual Arctic report card Tuesday, complied by more than 100 experts from 11 countries. It provides an update on vital signs in the region and includes new chapters on precipitation, the impacts of rapid climate change on Indigenous communities and the need for more research on pollinators.

The report reinforces long-term trends but also noted regional differences. Among its major findings were that Arctic surface air temperatures between October 2021 and September 2022 were the sixth warmest on record since 1900, and conditions were wetter than normal, with precipitation increasing significantly since the 1950s. The report also noted lower-than-average sea-ice coverage, increased ocean plankton blooms and the 25th consecutive year of Greenland ice sheet loss.

"Few parts of the world demonstrate such extreme seasonal shifts in temperature, land and ocean cover, ecological processes, and wildlife movement and behaviour as the Arctic," said the report.

"These extreme shifts across the annual cycle are a source of the Arctic region's heightened sensitivity to climate changes and to climate-related disturbances."

Lawrence Mudryk, a scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, was the lead author of the chapter on terrestrial snow cover. He said, overall, the report shows the seasons are shifting in the Arctic and there have been several disturbances due to, or worsened by, climate change, such as storms and extreme weather.

Related video: Tackling climate change (Indian Country Today)
Duration 26:46   View on Watch

"It sometimes gets a little overwhelming to hear all these reports about bad news and how climate change is causing disruptions and going to lead to bad consequences across the globe," he said. "But I think it's important to also acknowledge that it's something that we can take control of and do something about still."

Mudryk wrote in his chapter that June Arctic snow cover was the second-lowest in the 56-year record in North America and third-lowest in Eurasia because of early snow melt. He said that's part of a long-term trend since at least 2008.

"There's subsequent effects on soil moisture, the timing of vegetation growth and subsequent fire risk, even. It also affects the timing of essentially when winter ends and summer starts," he said. "Also, a big thing is that this snow reflects a lot of sunlight, so it controls the energy that comes in the springtime into the Arctic."

Syd Canning, another scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, contributed to an essay on Arctic pollinators. It highlights a significant knowledge gap on long-term pollinator trends in the Arctic and how they're being affected by rapid climate change.

"Pollinators, I think, more and more are being recognized as being really important in both general ecosystems and in sort of human food supply," Canning said. "In the Arctic, pollinators are really important in creating a good berry supply, which is good for animals, birds, people and the whole Arctic ecosystem."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 13, 2022.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Emily Blake, The Canadian Press

Starving seabirds on Alaska coast show climate change peril

Yesterday 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dead and dying seabirds collected on the coasts of the northern Bering and southern Chukchi seas over the past six years reveal how the Arctic's fast-changing climate is threatening the ecosystems and people who live there, according to a report released Tuesday by U.S. scientists.



Local communities have reported numerous emaciated bodies of seabirds — including shearwaters, auklets and murres — that usually eat plankton, krill or fish, but appear to have had difficulty finding sufficient food. The hundreds of distressed and dead birds are only a fraction of ones that starved, scientists say.

“Since 2017, we’ve had multi-species seabird die-offs in the Bering Strait region,” said Gay Sheffield, a biologist at University of Alaska Fairbanks, based in Nome, Alaska and a co-author of the report. “The one commonality is emaciation, or starvation.”

The seabirds are struggling because of climate-linked ecosystem shifts — which can affect the supply and the timing of available food — as well as a harmful algal bloom and a viral outbreak in the region, she said.

And their peril jeopardizes the human communities, as well: “Birds are essential to our region — they are nutritionally and economically essential,” said Sheffield.

The data on seabirds is part of an annual report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, called the “Arctic Report Card,” that documents changes in a region warming faster than anywhere else on Earth.

“With climate change, the food chain is changing rapidly,” said Don Lyons, a conservation scientist at the National Audubon Society's Seabird Institute, who was not involved in the report. “Food isn’t predictable in the way it used to be, in terms of where the food is, at different times of the year."

Related video: WION Climate Tracker | Research: Birds laying eggs at least 20 days earlier (WION)
Duration 3:01
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While seabirds naturally experience some lean years, the report documents a worrying pattern, said Lyons. “It seems like we’ve passed a tipping point — we’ve moved into a new regime where events that we used to think of as rare and unusual are now common and frequent.”

In the past year, Arctic annual surface air temperatures were the sixth warmest since records began in 1900, the report found. And satellite records revealed that for several weeks last summer, large regions near the North Pole were virtually clear of sea ice.

“The sea ice extent was much lower than long-term average,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice expert at the University of Colorado Boulder and a co-author of the report.

“The most notable thing we saw was during the summer, we saw a lot of open-water areas up near the North Pole, which was once very rare,” he said. “Several kilometers with very little or no ice, within a couple hundred kilometers of the North Pole.”

“The changes that are happening in the Arctic are so fast and so profound,” said Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the report.

Seabirds are metaphorical canaries in the coal mines, when it comes to showing broader ecosystem changes, Marra said, adding, “We need to do a much better job of monitoring these sentinel populations.”

___

Follow Christina Larson on Twitter: @larsonchristina

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Christina Larson, The Associated Press

Peruvian congressmen file no-confidence motion against prime minister after three days in office

The progressive party Juntos por el Perú (JPP) has announced this Tuesday in Congress a motion of censure against the Peruvian Prime Minister, Pedro Angulo, due to the clashes between the Police and demonstrators in the protests that are taking place in the south of the country and that have left at least six people dead.


Peru's Prime Minister Pedro Angulo -

 PRESIDENCIA CONSEJO DE MINISTROS PERÚ© Provided by News 360

Specifically, Congresswomen Sigrid Bazán and Ruth Luque have begun to gather the necessary signatures to present a motion of censure against the president of the country's Council of Ministers, who was sworn in on Saturday, for "poor management of the political crisis facing the country", as detailed by RPP radio station.

"The actions carried out by the Government, whose head is Prime Minister Pedro Angulo, have not contributed at all to the resolution of the conflict and, on the contrary, his statements and the measures that his cabinet has been adopting are dangerous for the reestablishment of calm and social peace", states the document presented by the JPP congresswomen.

According to Bazán and Luque, Angulo has not carried out any measure to solve the problem of "disproportionate police repression", alleging that the deaths registered so far, as well as the "abufant material circulating in various media", prove it.

"The facts described should alert us to take the present measure to reject and depose from political office those who have allowed to put the life and health of the Peruvian population at risk", the congresswomen reiterate.

Peru's Prime Minister, who has been in office since Saturday, called on Monday for dialogue after announcing that the government of Dina Boluarte will form a crisis cabinet to deal with the protests of demonstrators that have broken out in different parts of the country.

"We call on those people who are causing violence to desist from violence. We want dialogue: we open our arms to solve the problems that, we know, have not been solved before by the governments in office", he indicated, as reported by the Andina news agency.

To date, the protests originated in the south of the country after the dismissal of former president Pedro Castillo to pressure the new government to dissolve the Congress and call presidential elections have claimed the lives of at least six people.

A Meteorite That Landed In England Might Answer One Of Earth's Greatest Questions

Story by Jennifer Shea • Yesterday 

When Earth was a young planet, it was scorching hot — so hot, in fact, that much of the planet was molten, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As it rocketed around our solar system, crashing into other masses, Earth's top-of-atmosphere temperature soared to over 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.


Planet Earth in space© Getty Images/Getty Images

Scientists believe that early Earth was too hot to provide a habitat for much in the way of raw materials for life such as water, per the BBC. So how did Earth go from such hellish heat to a blue-green orb blanketed by ocean tides?

One previous theory was that icy comets rained down upon Earth at some point in the planet's history, according to the BBC. However, others cast doubt on that theory; the comets' chemistry would have been pretty different from the water that today makes up roughly 70% of Earth's surface. So what first brought water to Earth?

A Clue From Above


Two meteorites in space© Nazarii_Neshcherenskyi/Shutterstock

Scientists believe they've found a clue that literally fell out of the sky one day. A carbonaceous chondrite, a type of meteorite, happened to whizz down and embed itself in pieces around the town of Winchcombe, which is in Gloucestershire, England, last year, per the BBC.

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Upon closer examination of the meteorite pieces, scientists were able to determine that the meteorite held water that closely corresponded to the chemical structure of the water on our own planet. The meteorite pieces collectively weighed over a pound, according to the BBC. And they were as uncompromised and as much in their original condition as it's possible for meteorite chunks landing on Earth to be, per Science News.

That's because scientists were able to gather the meteorite pieces in under 12 hours after they collided with the surface of our planet, according to Science News. Researchers then tested the meteorite pieces in a lab, heating them up, peppering them with electrons, X-raying them, and blasting them with lasers to test their composition.

Familiar Waters


Jupiter's orbit in space© Naeblys/Getty Images

Through those tests and by analyzing video from meteor-tracking cameras around the world as well as doorbell cams from locals in the U.K., scientists ascertained that the meteorite was that rare specimen known as a carbonaceous chondrite, per Science News. They were able to trace its origins to an asteroid orbiting Jupiter, from which it broke off roughly 300,000 years ago.

The meteorite was approximately 11% water. The water itself contained deuterium, a heavier type of hydrogen, with the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium coming very close to the ratio in our planet's atmosphere, according to Science News.

"It's a good indication that water [on Earth] was coming from water-rich asteroids," London Natural History Museum scientist Ashley King told Science News. Meteorites like the one found in England have to move fast in order not to disintegrate, but if they did make it here in Earth's past millennia, that would explain how our planet eventually got water. What's more, those meteorite fragments remain intact, so scientists will keep on studying them until they unlock more secrets of our solar system.

Explainer-Oil storage situation in Canada and U.S. after Keystone spill

Story by By Nia Williams and Arathy Somasekhar • Yesterday 

FILE PHOTO: Investigators, cleanup crews begin scouring oil pipeline spill in Kansas© Thomson Reuters

(Reuters) -Six days after TC Energy Corp's Keystone pipeline shut following a 14,000-barrel spill into a creek in Kansas, traders are questioning whether there is enough oil in storage in key areas if the pipeline remains closed for a number of weeks.

There is still no official timeline for a restart of the line, which will need approval from regulators.

Here is the latest data on storage inventories, and other factors affecting crude cash prices in Canada and the United States:

WESTERN CANADIAN INVENTORIES

As of the week ending Dec. 2, or the week before the spill, Canadian inventories were just below 29 million barrels, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, with about 16 million barrels of spare capacity available.

On Tuesday, the latest data for the week ending Dec. 9 showed inventories rose 1.4 million barrels to around 30.4 million, according to a trader. Wood Mackenzie, which sends its inventory data to clients a day or two ahead of making it widely available, declined to confirm those numbers.

Following a previous Keystone leak in 2019, which triggered a 13-day shutdown, inventories climbed by 13.6 million barrels over five weeks. The spare capacity on hand this time suggests Canadian storage hubs have ample space for any barrels stranded in Alberta.

Canadian crude prices remain broadly steady. The discount on Western Canada Select (WCS) heavy crude for delivery in December fell to $33.50 a barrel below the U.S. crude benchmark the day the leak was reported, before recovering. WCS for January delivery last traded at a discount of $28.20 a barrel, only slightly wider than before the spill.

"It looks like nothing has really changed in Canada, but Canada still has enough storage space," the trader said.

U.S. GULF INVENTORIES

Before the Dec. 7 spill, crude oil stocks at the Gulf Coast were at their lowest in more than eight months, at about 226.5 million barrels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's data for the week to Dec. 2.

Weekly Gulf Coast gross input into refineries stood at 9.4 million barrels per day.

However, analysts were not worried about inventory.

"The Gulf Coast is reasonably well supplied. I don't think that there is any sort of significant panic in terms of lack of heavy (crude) in the Gulf Coast, particularly given that we could pull more Colombian as well Latin American barrels into the Gulf," said Michael Tran, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Prices of U.S. sour crude oil grades strengthened slightly on Monday, as refiners sought alternatives to Canadian barrels.

CUSHING STORAGE HUB

Inventories at the key U.S. crude storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, totaled 28.3 million, according to Wood Mackenzie data for the week ending Dec. 9.

That puts inventories at about a third of capacity and less than 4.5 million barrels above the operational floor, based on operational capacity and historical low utilization.

West Texas Intermediate crude futures have jumped over 6% this week as traders are starting to grow concerned that an ongoing shutdown will cause a drop in inventories at Cushing, also the delivery point for the benchmark. [O/R]

Weekly industry inventory figures from the American Petroleum Institute are scheduled to be released at 4:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT) on Tuesday, followed by U.S. Energy Department data on Wednesday.

Numerous refineries in the U.S. Midwest usually pull barrels from the storage hub, but cash crude prices at Cushing has not moved much because traders expect part of Keystone to reopen soon.

The leak occurred just south of a key junction in Steele City, Nebraska, where Keystone splits into two legs. The leg that flows to Patoka, Illinois, could be reopened as it was not affected, said Dylan White, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

So far, TC has not commented on a partial restart of the Patoka leg.

(Reporting by Nia Williams and Arathy Somasekhar; Editing by David Gregorio and Marguerita Choy)

Bolsonaro supporters who rioted in Brasilia will face punishment, says future minister

Story by By Ricardo Brito, Eduardo Simões and Maria Carolina Marcello • Yesterday .


Demonstrations erupt in Brasilia© Thomson Reuters

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's next justice minister on Tuesday vowed accountability for supporters of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro who burned buses and attacked police on the day authorities certified the victory of leftist President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Flavio Dino also told GloboNews that any authorities found responsible for failing to contain rioters in Brasilia on Monday night would also face punishment, with no "magic amnesty," as questions mounted about the official response to the violent protests.

Senior members of Brazil's Supreme Court (STF) and Federal Electoral Court (TSE) believe Brasilia's security forces were too lenient and should have acted more forcefully, two court sources told Reuters, in the latest example of tensions between the judiciary and the federal district's law enforcement.


Demonstrations erupt in Brasilia© Thomson Reuters

In an interview late on Monday, Brasilia security chief Júlio Danilo denied security failures, saying that those involved will be identified and held accountable.

Monday's protests in the capital, in which Bolsonaro supporters set fire to cars and buses after trying to invade the federal police headquarters after the arrest of a protest leader, capped weeks of post-election tensions.

Although he has not blocked the handover of power, Bolsonaro has refused to concede defeat, and some supporters have camped outside army bases urging the military to overturn the result of October's presidential vote, citing conspiracy theories that the election was "stolen."



Demonstrations erupt in Brasilia© Thomson Reuters

Dino said he hoped the protesters would now see the futility of their actions, and urged them to return to their homes.

"It's over, the page has been turned, let's look ahead. In 2026, there will be fresh elections," he said.

Yet that may be optimistic, public security experts told Reuters, with even the short-term outlook appearing complicated.

"The problem is, we don't know if this was a warning of what is still to come, or if they emptied the chamber already," said João Roberto Martins Filho, an expert on military relations at the Federal University of São Carlos, in reference to Lula's Jan. 1 inauguration.

In his interview with GloboNews, Dino said he maintained regular contact with Brasilia's Governor Ibaneis Rocha, as well as its public security department, over policing arrangements for Lula's inauguration. But he noted a "strange silence" from federal authorities, in a thinly veiled dig at Bolsonaro's team.

The president has barely spoken in public since losing to Lula on Oct. 30, and the only comment from his government on Monday came from Justice Minister Anderson Torres.

"Nothing justifies the lamentable scenes we saw in the center of Brasilia," he wrote in a tweet.

Opposition lawmakers questioned why there were no arrests of the rioters by Brasilia's security forces.

"I think it's time to think about more rigorously interpreting the leniency of current government officials, who are irresponsibly and permissively indulging these criminal practices," said Fábio Trad, a federal lawmaker on Lula's transition team.

Brasilia's public security department said in a statement on Tuesday that the riots had been controlled, but no arrests related to "civil disturbances" had occurred.

Within the STF and the TSE, Monday's riots add to growing discontent with Brasilia's security forces for failing to get tough with Bolsonaro supporters who view the justices as their principal foes, said the two sources on condition of anonymity.

Last year, one of the sources said, the Supreme Court asked Governor Rocha to provide more security for court employees to protect them from Bolsonaro supporters approaching the tribunal. It was not clear if it was provided. Both sources said they believed it was time to disband the protest camp established outside the military headquarters in Brasilia.

The justice ministry did not respond to a request for comment on whether such a plan was underway.

(Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Maria Carolina Marcello in Brasilia, Eduardo Simoes in Sao Paulo; Editing by Gabriel Stargardter and Rosalba O'Brien)

Italian researchers discover ancient Roman villa with mosaic

Story by By JERUSALEM POST STAFF • Yesterday 

Researchers from the University of Naples discovered an ancient mosaic while working at the Pausilypon archaeological park in Italy, according to Heritage Daily.

Villa of Vedius Pollio in Naples, Italy

The park is located in the coastal area of Campania, where wealthy Romans once built extravagant villas, such as the Villa of Vedius Pollio.
When was the villa constructed?

The villa was built by Publius Vedius Pollio in the first century, BCE.

According to Roman poet Ovid, the villa was "like a city."

Vedius was known for his cruelty to his slaves; he even allegedly fed them to lampreys when they angered him. In one account, the Roman Emperor Augustus was eating at Vedius' home when a cupbearer broke a glass. Vedius was about to have the slave fed to the lampreys, but Augustus intervened, ordering all of Vedius’ glasses destroyed and the pool in which the lampreys lived filled in.


Publius Vedius Pollio depicted on a coin 

“A stratigraphic dating is still missing, but based on the style, the hall could date back to the late Republican age or Augustan at the latest.”Marco Giglio, University of Naples

When Vedius died, he bequeathed his estate to Augustus under the condition that he erect a monument there, and then it was passed down to every emperor until Hadrian died in 138 CE.

Augustus had at least part of the house demolished and erected a monument to his wife Livia Drusilla in its place, which Ovid viewed as a statement against immoral luxury.

The archaeologists from the University of Naples, including Marco Giglio, found a mosaic floor located in a large hall, intentionally buried beneath renovations made by Augustus.

“A stratigraphic dating is still missing, but based on the style, the hall could date back to the late Republican age or Augustan at the latest,” said Giglio.