Friday, November 03, 2023

HENIOUS WAR CRIME

Israeli military strikes ambulance convoy in Gaza, saying it was used by Hamas PATHETIC


Smoke rises after the Israeli bombardment of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip Friday. Israel said on Friday that its forces struck an ambulance convoy in southern Gaza and said it was being used by Hamas. Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 3 (UPI) -- As Israeli forces encircled Gaza City on Friday, the military confirmed that its aircraft struck an ambulance convoy outside al-Shifa hospital, saying it was being used by Hamas.

The Palestinian Health Ministry, controlled by Hamas, said the ambulances were transporting injured patients to Egypt's Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza.

"An IDF aircraft struck an ambulance that was identified by forces as being used by a Hamas terrorist cell in close proximity to their position in the battle zone," the IDF said in a statement. "A number of Hamas terrorist operatives were killed in the strike. We have information which demonstrates that Hamas' method of operation is to transfer terror operatives and weapons in ambulances."

Witnesses reported dozens of casualties from the strike.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society posted images of one of its ambulances hit by the IDF in the strike outside of al-Shifa hospital on X.

The PRCS also posted another image of damaged ambulances it said were hit by Israel on Rashid Street in western Gaza.

"At precisely 16:30, Israeli occupying forces launched an airstrike on Rashid Street in the western part of Gaza. Their target was a group of ambulance vehicles returning from a mission to transport injured individuals to the Rafah border, which included an ambulance affiliated with the PRCS," PRCS wrote on X.

The strikes occurred as the Gaza health ministry reported 9,257 people have been killed by Israeli attacks so far, including 3,826 children.

And it happened as Gaza hospitals were critically low on fuel needed to keep life-saving machines and surgeries functional as casualties from Israel's heavy bombing of Gaza continued to surge.

Several developments were happening simultaneously Friday.

As the Biden administration called for a humanitarian pause in the war, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli leaders reiterating U.S. support for Israel but also urging more care be taken to avoid civilian casualties.

As he left the U.S. for Tel Aviv Blinken said, "When I see a Palestinian child -- a boy, a girl -- pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building, that hits me in the gut as much as seeing a child from Israel or anywhere else."

According to the State Department Blinken is urging Israel to "defend itself against terrorism consistent with international humanitarian law."

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrah said in his first public remarks since the war started that his forces are exchanging fire with Israel's military along the northern border with Lebanon designed to keep portions of the IDF tied up to lessen the burden on Hamas in Gaza.

"The Lebanese front has lessened a large part of the forces that were going to escalate the attack on Gaza," Nasrallah said. "Some in Lebanon say that we are taking a risk, it's true. But this risk is part of a beneficial, correct calculation."

He said the U.S. aircraft carrier fleets deployed as a deterrent doesn't intimidate Hezbollah. "Your fleets that you threaten us with, we are prepared for them as well," he said.

The Hezbollah leader called the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel a successful operation that was 100% Palestinian.

He said it was "a big event to shake this oppressive ... occupying, usurping Zionist regime and its supporters in Washington and London."

The first groups of American citizens that left Gaza through the Rafah crossing were welcomed by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo Friday afternoon.

Israel expelled thousands of Palestinian workers who began to re-enter Gaza Friday after being held in detention in the aftermath of the Hama Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there would be no ceasefire until Hamas frees all hostages abducted Oct. 7 from Israel.

At a Friday press conference, Gaza's health ministry described horrific conditions for civilians there as it urgently appealed for fuel to keep hospitals running on the 28th day of the Israeli bombardment.

The Israeli attack is in response to a surprise attack from Gaza by Hamas Oct. 7 that killed approximately 1,100 civilians and more than 300 soldiers in Israel as more than 200 hostages were taken into Gaza by Hamas.

The Gaza health ministry said Friday main electrical generators in the Al-Shifa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital have stopped due to lack of fuel. Secondary generators are operating to keep emergency services working while electricity has been cut in the rest of the hospital departments.

"We appeal to all international institutions to intervene urgently to supply the Al-Shifa Medical Complex and the Indonesian Hospital with fuel before an imminent disaster occurs," the Gaza Ministry of Health said in a Facebook statement

The ministry said Israel has deliberately targeted hospitals and other medical facilities.

"The Israeli occupation deliberately targeted 102 health institutions and put 16 hospitals and 32 primary care centers out of service as a result of the targeting or failure to bring in fuel," the Gaza health ministry said.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said in a statement that Israeli troops have surrounded Gaza in the northern part of the strip from several directions.

He said fuel would be allowed into Gaza through the Egyptian Rafah crossing if Israel determines that hospitals have run out of fuel.

In a separate statement the IDF said its forces worked with the Israeli Securities Authority and eliminated a Hamas battalion commander during overnight operations.

"Mustafa Dalul directed combat against IDF forces and held key positions in Hamas' Gaza City Brigade," it said. "Our ground, aerial and naval forces continue to operate to eliminate Hamas' chain of command and terrorist capabilities."

The IDF also said Friday its troops have uncovered tunnel shafts used by Hamas, rigged them with explosives and "neutralized Hamas's terrorist tunnels during special operations inside Gaza."

Gaza's health ministry called on Turkey to "intervene urgently to protect the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, supply it with fuel, and save 10,000 cancer patients."

The ministry thanked Egypt for allowing "the exit of dozens of wounded and their companions during the last three days."

The ministry said at the Friday press conference that "Israeli violations against the health system led to the death of 136 health personnel and the destruction of 25 ambulances."


Jordan to tell Blinken Israel must immediately stop war on Gaza -official statement

Reuters
Thu, November 2, 2023 

 Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi

AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi will tell U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Amman on Saturday that Israel must end its war on Gaza where he said it was committing war crimes by bombing civilians and imposing a siege.

In a foreign ministry statement, Safadi warned that Israel's unreadiness to end the war was pushing the region rapidly towards a regional war that threatened world peace.

"Safadi will stress (to Blinken) the need to move immediately to stop the Israeli war on Gaza ... and that Israel abide by international law and stop its breaches," Safadi said.

Speaking to reporters moments before departing on his second Middle East trip in less than a month, Blinken said discussions on the future of Gaza when and if Hamas is defeated, and ways to ensure the conflict does not spread will also be areas of focus during his trip.

The conflict has stirred long-standing fears in Jordan, home to a large population of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, that a wider conflagration would give Israel the chance to implement a transfer policy to expel Palestinians en masse from the West Bank.

Jordan, which shares a border with the West Bank, absorbed the bulk of Palestinians who fled or were driven out of their homes when Israel was created in 1948.

King Abdullah on Wednesday said Israel's "military and security solution" against Palestinians would not succeed, adding the only path to a just and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace were negotiations leading to a two-state solution.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Chris Reese and Sandra Maler)
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INDIA

Google and Microsoft Bet on 27-Year-Old Stanford Alum to Make AI Work For a Billion Users

Saritha Rai
Thu, November 2, 2023 



(Bloomberg) -- In her one-room home on a quiet street in Agara, a tiny village three hours southwest of Bangalore that’s fringed by rice paddies and groundnut fields, Preethi P. sits on a stool near a sewing machine. Normally, she would spend hours mending or stitching clothes, averaging less than $1 a day for her work. On this day, however, she is reading a sentence in her native Kannada language into an app on a phone. She pauses briefly, then reads another.

Preethi, who goes by a single name, as is common in the region, is among the 70 workers hired in Agara and neighboring villages by a startup called Karya to gather text, voice and image data in India’s vernacular languages. She is part of a vast, unseen global workforce — operating in countries like India, Kenya and the Philippines — who collect and label the data that AI chatbots and virtual assistants rely on to generate relevant responses. Unlike many other data contractors, however, Preethi gets paid well for her efforts, at least by local standards.

After three days of working with Karya, Preethi earned 4,500 rupees ($54), more than four times the amount the 22-year-old high school graduate usually makes as a tailor in an entire month. The money is enough, she said, to pay off that month’s installment on a loan taken to partly repair the crumbling mud walls of her home that have been carefully patched up with colorful saris. “All I need is a phone and the internet.”

Karya was founded in 2021, before the rise of ChatGPT, but this year’s frenzy around generative AI has only added to tech companies’ insatiable demand for data. India alone is expected to have nearly one million data annotation workers by 2030, according to Nasscom, the country’s tech industry trade body. Karya differentiates itself from other data vendors by offering its contractors – mostly women, and mostly in rural communities – as much as 20 times the prevailing minimum wage, with the promise of producing better quality Indian-language data that tech companies will pay more to obtain.

“Every year, big tech companies spend billions of dollars collecting training data for their AI” and machine learning models, said Manu Chopra, the 27-year-old Stanford-educated computer engineer behind the startup, told Bloomberg in an interview. “Poor pay for such work is an industry failure.”

If meager wages are an industry failure, it’s one that Silicon Valley bears some responsibility for creating. For years, tech companies have outsourced tasks like data labeling and content moderation to cheaper contractors overseas. But now, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent names are turning to Karya to address one of the biggest challenges for their AI products: finding high-quality data to build tools that can better serve billions of potential non-English speaking users. These partnerships could represent a powerful shift in the economics of the data industry and Silicon Valley’s relationship with data providers.

Microsoft Corp. has used Karya to source local speech data for its AI products. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working with Karya to reduce gender biases in data that feeds into large language models, the technology underpinning AI chatbots. And Alphabet Inc.’s Google is leaning on Karya and other local partners to gather speech data in 85 Indian districts. Google plans to expand to every district to include the majority language or dialect spoken and build a generative AI model for 125 Indian languages.

Many AI services have been disproportionately developed with English-language internet data, such as articles, books and social media posts. As a result, these AI models poorly represent the diversity of languages for internet users in other countries who are accessing AI-powered smartphones and apps faster than they’re learning English. Nearly one billion such potential users live in India alone, as the government pushes for a rollout of AI tools in every sphere from healthcare to education to financial services.

“India is the first non-Western country we are doing this in, and we are testing Bard in nine Indian languages,” said Manish Gupta, head of Google Research in India, referring to the company’s AI chatbot. “Over 70 Indian languages spoken by over a million people each had zero digital corpus. The problem is so stark.”

Gupta ticked off a list of issues that AI firms need to address in order to serve India’s internet users: Non-English datasets are dismally low quality; hardly any conversational data exists in Hindi and other Indian languages; and digitized content from books and newspapers in Indian languages is very limited.

When used for South Asian languages, some large language models have been found to make up words and struggle with basic grammar. There are also concerns these AI services may reflect a more skewed view of other cultures. It’s critical to have broad representation of training data, including non-English data, so AI systems “don’t perpetuate harmful stereotypes, produce hate speech, nor yield misinformation,” said Mehran Sahami, a professor in the computer science department at Stanford University.

Karya, a social impact startup headquartered in Bangalore and supported by grants, is able to broaden the pool of languages represented in part by specifically targeting workers in rural areas who might not otherwise be contracted for such tasks. Karya’s app can work without internet access and it provides voice support for those with limited literacy. In India, over 32,000 crowdsourced workers have logged into the app, completing 40 million paid digital tasks such as image recognition, contour alignments, video annotation and speech annotation.

For Chopra, the goal isn’t just to improve the supply of data but to fight poverty. Karya’s founder grew up in an impoverished neighborhood called Shakur Basti in West Delhi. He won a scholarship to study in an elite school where he was bullied because his classmates said he “smelled poor.” Chopra landed at Stanford to study computer science but realized he hated the “how you make a billion dollars” mindset he encountered there.

After graduating in 2017, he began working on his long-held interest: using technology to tackle poverty. “It takes a mere $1,500 in savings to make an Indian eligible to enter the middle class,” Chopra said. “But the impoverished can take 200 years to reach that level of savings.”

Microsoft, he learned, had been paying a hefty amount for collecting speech data, albeit of poor quality, to feed its AI systems and research. In 2017, for instance, although 1 million hours of digitized spoken data was available in Marathi, a language spoken in Mumbai and its Western India region, only 165 hours was available for purchase. His startup has since put together 10,000 hours of Marathi speech data for Microsoft’s AI services, read by men and women from five different regions.

“Tech companies want the data, accent and all,” Chopra said. “You cough, they want that in the speech – it represents natural language.”Saikat Guha, a researcher at Microsoft Research India who focuses on the ethics of data collection, said he has also used Karya’s content for a project to aid those with visual disabilities in finding jobs. “The quality of data is far better than any other source I’ve used,” said Guha. “If you pay workers fairly, they’re more invested in their work, and the end result is better data.”

Meanwhile, over 30,000 young, school-educated women are working with Karya to help collect “gender intentional” datasets – such as that the doctor or boss isn’t always a he – in six Indian languages for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s the biggest such effort in Indian languages and will serve as a corpus to build datasets to reduce gender-related biases in LLMs.Karya isn’t stopping with India. The company said it’s in talks to sell its platform as a service to organizations in Africa and South America who will do similar work.

For now, women in Yelandur, another village southwest of Bangalore, eagerly await Karya’s next project: transcribing from a Kannada audio recording. Among them is Shambhavi S., 25, who earned a few thousand rupees from a previous assignment while working in the quiet of her home after feeding her in-laws dinner and putting her children to bed.

“I don’t know what artificial intelligence is, I haven’t heard of it,” said Shambhavi. “I want to earn and educate my children, so they can learn how to use it.”

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Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos moves to Florida, where his parents live—and capital gains are not taxed


Christiaan Hetzner
Fri, November 3, 2023 

After launching Amazon from a garage in Seattle in 1994, centibilllionaire Jeff Bezos is leaving the Pacific Northwest behind and setting sail for Florida.

In an Instagram post, the world’s third wealthiest person—with a net worth estimated at $160 billion—said he wanted to be closer to my parents after they recently moved back to Miami.

“My parents have always been my biggest supporters,” he posted to his Instagram account, adding that his spacefaring company Blue Origin is increasingly shifting operations to Cape Canaveral.

Florida also offers a financial benefit to the Amazon founder—it doesn't charge capital gains tax which, for a man who's sold some $30 billion in stock since 2002, according to Bloomberg, can be quite substantial

Feeling at home

Even though Bezos said he’s relocating to Miami, not a whole lot will change for the owner of the Washington Post newspaper. He won't need to scout the real estate market for a new residence, since he already reportedly bought in August a $68 million Miami mansion on the small, man-made island of Indian Creek popularly known as “Billionaires Bunker”. In October, he added his next-door neighbor’s $79 million property as well.

But Miami is not the only place where Bezos lives. In addition to his collection of luxury cars and private Gulfstream jets, Bezos owns multiple properties valued recently at a half billion dollars.

Washington's historic tax

His move may have something to do with a Washington state supreme court decision in March of this year to uphold a 7% tax on capital gains that took effect in January 2022 despite a legal challenge.

The ruling is considered historic since legislators in Olympia took the opposite view of the Internal Revenue Service: they classified the tax as an excise tax rather than an income tax in order to circumvent the fact that Washington state does not have an income tax under state law. A majority of voters in Seattle are now in favor of a similar capital gains tax for the city itself.

Unlike most people, entrepreneurs and other ultra-high net worth individuals typically do not pay taxes on their personal earnings, since their wealth stems from assets rather than salaries and bonuses.

Instead, the IRS collects every time one of these assets is liquidated, a far more meddlesome issue for the super-rich. For this reason, Florida is popular among the billionaire class since the state does not impose its own levies on such disposals—as it has no income tax in the broader sense, either.

Even if Bezos’ tax dollars are set to move from the Pacific Northwest, the centibillionaire said he would still leave something behind as a token of his appreciation: “Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart.”

Oh, and the city still gets to keep Amazon.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Sustainable cotton group boosts tracking for top retailers

Wed, November 1, 2023

FILE PHOTO: A truck drives past bales of cotton in Luis Eduardo Magalhaes

By Ross Kerber

(Reuters) - Swiss-based sustainability group Better Cotton said on Thursday it has added new functions to a platform that big retailers use to trace materials through their supply chains.

Better Cotton said retailers including Walmart and Marks and Spencer will be able to tell where cotton was grown and traded, eventually to the level of individual farms. Currently the platform tracks only the total volume of cotton produced.

Jacky Broomhead, Better Cotton senior manager, said the current functionality is much like an electrical customer who knows the sources of generation feeding their local grid, but not to individual houses. "The changes mean you'll you know what you're getting. You'll be able to see the journey the cotton has taken to you as a retailer," she said.

Created by companies and several nonprofits including the World Wildlife Fund, Better Cotton aims to support improved practices in areas like water and soil stewardship and to promote better working standards. It says it supports 2.2 million farmers globally, accounting for 22% of world cotton production.

Fashion retailers face pressures from consumers and activist groups to sell products with less environmental impact and made in safe labor conditions.

Better Cotton has suspended its licensing of cotton sourced from the Chinese province of Xinjiang. At the time it cited factors including human-rights concerns and audit difficulties. Western retailers have faced backlash for raising human-rights issues.

Participants in the supply chain for cotton include spinners, traders and manufacturers. Marks and Spencer's head of materials and sustainability, Katharine Beacham, said it will use the new functionality to track cotton at scale.

"By improving the traceability of our cotton further down the supply chain, we're able to work with our suppliers more closely," she said.

(Reporting by Ross Kerber in Boston; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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Why Can’t We Just Quit Cows?

Naoki Nitta, Grist
Fri, November 3, 2023 
YOU WANNA QUIT ME, HUH, WELL DO YA


Photo: Jens Schlueter (Getty Images)


This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Cattle play a colossal role in climate change: As the single largest agricultural source of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, the world’s 940 million cows spew nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — much of it through belches and droppings.

For these reasons, greener diets are but one prong in a larger set of food-based solutions for curtailing human-caused climate change, said Stephen Sturdivant, an environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency. “We need a comprehensive combination of strategies to achieve a truly sustainable future,” he said. “We can’t just cherry-pick our way to get there.”

The nation’s taste for meat and dairy is undeniable. In addition to a steady, decade-long-rise in beef consumption, which hit 20 billion pounds in 2021, Americans gobbled up 12 percent more cheese, butter, and ice cream than in the previous year, continuing an upward trend that started half a century ago.

There’s a fundamental disconnect, though, between our growing demand for animal-based protein and its enormous carbon footprint. Producing a pound of steak generates nearly 100 times more greenhouse gas than an equivalent amount of peas, while cheese production emits eight times the volume of making tofu.

Although the American beef and dairy industries are among the most efficient in the world — due in part to better breeding, genetics, and nutrition — they still leave a significant hoofprint. The nation’s 92 million cattle generate 4 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gases and account for 40 percent of all agricultural emissions.

However, if those herds were to magically disappear, it wouldn’t eliminate the problem entirely. According to a peer-reviewed study, an animal-free agricultural system would shave just 2.6 percent off the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, any reduction would be noteworthy given the nation’s outsized role in climate change — that drop would be equivalent to three times Portugal’s annual emissions — though that benefit would come with drawbacks.

With no livestock to feed, the acreage now used to grow silage and hay could be replaced with food crops. Yet because higher value fruits and vegetables require quality soil, specific climate conditions, and ample water infrastructure, most of that land would be limited to growing calorie-heavy, hardy broad acre crops such as corn and soybeans — a system change that would add its own climate impacts.

In fact, agriculture’s current emissions are a result of a certain balance between crops and livestock, said Robin White, a professor of animal and poultry science at Virginia Tech and the lead author of the research. Crops need fertilizer, a resource often provided by livestock, and producing synthetic versions is an energy-intensive process that typically requires fossil fuels and emits methane. Cattle also help keep agricultural byproducts — from fruit peels and pulp to almond hulls and spent brewery grains — out of landfills, reducing the carbon output of crop waste by 60 percent.

Eliminating the nation’s cattle and replacing feed production with food crops would create more food, White said, resulting in a caloric surplus of 25 percent. That abundance, however, would come with deficits in essential nutrients, as plant-based foods tend to fall short in vitamin B12, calcium, iron, and fatty acids. (Although existing studies reflect good long-term health in vegetarians, research on those who eschew all animal-derived foods is inconclusive.)

Larger discussions around sustainability tend to overlook these complexities, said White. Food insecurity is often tied to caloric sufficiency, but doesn’t always reflect nutritional needs, particularly those of vulnerable populations. Pregnant, lactating, and elderly women, for example, are susceptible to anemia and low bone density, mainly due to inadequate iron and calcium intake — nutrients readily available in red meat and dairy products, and easily accessible to large swaths of the population.

“These types of nuances get lost,” said White, when we focus exclusively on the broader metrics of diet change. While balanced choices can work for individuals, keeping the country adequately fed and healthy is a complicated endeavor. “There’s an entire agricultural system behind that food production,” she added, and changing the pieces within it requires careful examination.

Given the scale of the beef and dairy industries, the central role they play in feeding people, and the difficulty of removing them from the economy, cattle clearly aren’t moving on any time soon. For that reason, there’s been no shortage of resources aimed at, quite literally, the gut of the emissions issue.

As with most ruminants, cattle make the most of a paltry diet, converting cud, grains, and crop waste into muscle and milk. Extracting all that energy from cellulose and plant fibers requires the work of digestive microbes; cow rumens host entire colonies of bacteria, yeast, and fungi that ferment complex carbohydrates into microbial protein, which they then absorb, and volatile fatty acids, which they expel as methane and other gases.

Several dietary supplements have been shown to minimize bovine bloating. A twice-daily garlic and citrus extract can cut emissions by 20 percent, while a red seaweed additive can inhibit them by as much as 80 percent without impacting animal health or productivity or imparting detectable flavor to the resulting proteins. But having a transformative impact will require industrial-scale production and implementation. The promising strain of seaweed, for instance, prefers tropical waters, and developing a supply chain robust enough to serve tens of millions of cattle with a daily intervention leaves a trail of unanswered questions regarding effective farming, processing, and distribution techniques.

Ultimately, tinkering with the animals’ digestive system may hold the most scalable answer. Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for pioneering the CRISPR gene-editing tool, is leading a University of California team that hopes to do just that. The recently launched project aims to identify the offending gut bacteria through metagenomics, another breakthrough technology that maps the functions of complex microbial communities, then restructure their DNA to produce less methane. The goal is to develop an oral treatment for calves that, once administered, will continue repopulating their rumen with the genetically modified microflora.

“We’re trying to come up with a solution to reduce methane that is easily accessible and inexpensive,” Matthias Hess, an associate professor at UC Davis and a project lead, said in an interview. It’s a fix that, if successful, could make a serious dent in tamping down cattle emissions the world over.

Their mission launched earlier this year, funded by the TED Audacious Project. Along with livestock, microbiomes generate nearly two-thirds of global methane emissions through landfills, wastewater, and rice paddies. If successful, “our technology could really move the needle in our fight against climate change,” Doudna said in a recent TED Talk.

Even as science tries making cows more climate-friendly, the tide of consumption has seen a steady shift. In the last two years, the majority of Americans have upped their intake of plant-based foods, with almost half of Millennials and Gen Z-ers regularly eating vegan. But there’s also been another notable tip in the scale: Just 12 percent of the country eats half the nation’s beef. And for many in the meat-heavy minority, the perils of climate change seem to do little in nudging them toward planet-friendlier meals.

A global study of factors that encourage greener diets found that climate risk perception is but one influencing factor, along with health implications and economic circumstances. Yet it’s the people around us, said Sibel Eker, the report’s lead author, who hold the most sway in changing individual attitudes, beliefs, and values — in other words, there’s power in herd mentality.

“If there are more vegetarians or flexitarians around you, you tend to think that this is the norm in society,” said Eker, a sustainable service systems researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. “So if you have the intention of changing your behavior, the social cost [to do so] becomes lower.”

In fact, when it comes to influencing environment-related behaviors such as recycling and ditching cars, social norms and comparisons are incredibly effective, far outpacing other drivers such as financial incentives and public appeals, according to a separate study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. And positive visibility and reinforcement — by individuals, a community, or mass and social media — do more to encourage climate action than shaming people who aren’t fully on board, Eker said. Otherwise, it just makes the matter alienating and polarizing.

In the end, the overarching nature of the food system requires a collective approach to shrinking its enormous emissions. While there’s no denying the outsized environmental footprint of animal-based foods, dietary shifts are part of a much larger strategy around food-based climate action, said the EPA’s Sturdivant. Along with improved farming practices such as maximizing yields and minimizing inputs, reducing food loss and waste is just as critical. And for these reasons and more, Meatless Mondays, vegan Fridays, and less polluting cows all have their place in mitigating the role cattle play in warming the world.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/agriculture/why-cant-we-just-quit-cows/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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FOURTH FEMALE TEAM WALK
NASA Astronauts Accidentally Lose Tool Bag During Space Walk

Victor Tangermann
Fri, November 3, 2023 


Orbital Oopsy

During a Thursday spacewalk outside of the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were tasked with replacing a bearing of an assembly allowing the station's solar arrays to stay pointed at the Sun.

But as they were getting to work, the pair "inadvertently lost" a "tool bag" in an "orbital oopsy," according to a NASA update, an object that was later spotted by flight controllers harmlessly floating off into the distance.

Fortunately, the tools "were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk," allowing the two astronauts to return back inside.

More importantly, the bag's trajectory meant it was unlikely to "recontact" — or smack into — the space station, meaning the accident hopefully won't be a big deal.

Space Snafu

It's far from the first time astronauts have lost track of tools in space. Back in 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White infamously lost a spare glove during a spacewalk outside of his Gemini 4 spacecraft. Over the decades, several other astronauts have lost other objects, from spare bolts in 2006 to an entire bag ironically containing a debris shield in 2017.

In some cases, tools are even intentionally jettisoned. Case in point, earlier this year, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin intentionally let a sizeable bundle of discarded hardware drift off into space.

"Bye bye," said one of the cosmonauts after letting go of the bundle during a livestream of the spacewalk. "Just flies beautifully."

The problem, of course, is that not every piece of space debris will stay out of the way of future space travelers. Scientists have long been worried about the sheer amount of junk littering our planet's orbit, something that's actively endangering the lives of astronauts.

While the latest space "snafu" likely won't pose any threat to the astronauts currently stationed on board the ISS, that doesn't mean there aren't any risks associated with losing track of a bolt or an entire tool bag during the next spacewalk.

More on astronauts littering: Cosmonauts Caught Littering Directly Into Space 

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