Friday, September 11, 2020

The US Sanctioned One Of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian Allies For Election Interference

Andriy Derkach has helped Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, with his campaign to discredit Joe Biden.

Christopher MillerBuzzFeed September 10, 2020

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Rudy Giuliani

The Trump administration on Thursday blacklisted four Russia-linked individuals for attempting to influence the US election, including a Ukrainian lawmaker it called “an active Russian agent” who has helped Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

The sanctions come amid growing warnings from US intelligence services about Russia’s efforts to meddle in the upcoming presidential election, but also as President Donald Trump continues to downplay the Kremlin’s activities aimed at America.

The biggest name added to the list is that of Andriy Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, who the Treasury Department said in a statement “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services.”

Derkach is part of a ragtag group of Ukrainian operatives working with Giuliani and hoping to help congressional Republicans surface damaging details about Biden and his family ahead of the election to benefit Trump.

“Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that Derkach "maintains close ties to Russian intelligence and sought to influence the views of American voters through a Russian-directed covert influence campaign centered on manipulating the American political process to advance Russia’s malign interests in Ukraine. This operation was designed to culminate prior to Election Day."

In a statement sent to BuzzFeed News, Derkach called the US move to sanction him "revenge" by Biden's "deep state associates" and "a preventative response" to a press conference he said he will hold early next week where he said he plans to reveal "Dem[ocrat] corruption."

"Revenge is an integral part of their regular activities against Ukrainian investigators, journalists, experts who reveal more and more new schemes of international corruption," Derkach said.

"Such information from the US Treasury Department opens up the opportunity for me to defend my interests in the legal field — in court," he added.

Over the past few months, Derkach has released several audio tapes that purport to capture phone conversations between Biden and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko while the two were in office. The recordings have done nothing to substantiate, let alone advance, the accusations from Trump, Giuliani, and Republicans that Biden abused his power in Ukraine.

In July, Derkach said what he has released so far is “really only a small part of the vast volume of records” and that all of it has been “transferred to Ukrainian and American law enforcement agencies.”

Derkach also said he had sent materials to Senate Republicans investigating alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, a right-wing conspiracy theory that has been debunked.

The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, who leads the Senate Homeland Security Committee heading the Biden investigation, has denied receiving materials from Derkach.

The Treasury Department suggested Derkach’s actions amounted to an attempt to undermine the November election. It said the designation of Derkach was focused on exposing malign influence campaigns from Russia and protecting the upcoming elections from foreign interference.

“This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated,” the department’s statement read.

Derkach was schooled at a KGB academy in Moscow. He became a Ukrainian lawmaker and is remembered for voting for a Kremlin-like set of anti-protest laws that passed during the country’s pro-democracy revolution in 2014. In an interview with BuzzFeed News in July, he denied working for Russia and interfering in the US election.

Derkach was mentioned in a statement from William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, in August about Russia using a range of measures to primarily denigrate Biden and what the country sees as an anti-Russia “establishment.”

“Derkach is spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls — to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,” Evanina said.

The Treasury Department on Thursday also sanctioned three Russian nationals: Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev, and Darya Aslanova — all residents of St. Petersburg.

It named them as employees of the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency — an operation linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of President Vladimir Putin's — and said they supported the IRA’s cryptocurrency accounts.

“The IRA uses cryptocurrency to fund activities in furtherance of their ongoing malign influence operations around the world,” the statement said.

UPDATE
September 10, 2020, at 12:37 p.m.

This story was updated with a comment from Andriy Derkach.

UPDATE
September 10, 2020, at 11:51 a.m.

This story was updated with a statement from Mike Pompeo.

MORE ON THIS
Ukrainian Operatives Are Gearing Up Again To Take On The Bidens. They Say They Have Giuliani And Republicans On Their Side.

Christopher Miller · July 24, 2020

Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.

KARMA IS A BITCH

A prominent Ukrainian religious leader, who said earlier this year COVID-19 was "God's punishment" for same-sex marriage, has tested positive for the virus.

ORTHODOXY IS MEDIEVAL

Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine Filaret, seen here in Ukraine on May 15, 2019, said in March the pandemic was divine punishment for the "sinfulness of humanity." File Photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A prominent Ukrainian religious leader, who said earlier this year COVID-19 was "God's punishment" for same-sex marriage, has tested positive for the virus.

Patriarch Filaret, leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate, was hospitalized and diagnosed with the disease last week, the church said.

The church said earlier this week the 91-year-old Filaret was in "stable" condition and is being treated for the illness.

In March, he told Ukrainian television that the pandemic was divine punishment for the "sins of men and the sinfulness of humanity."

"First of all, I mean same-sex marriage," he specified.

"As the head of the church and as a man, the Patriarch has the freedom to express his views, which are based on morality."

The Kiev Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church comprises 25% of the country's nearly 30 million Orthodox followers.

The church said shortly after Filaret's comments that they didn't violate any Ukrainian law.

Court: Census must count undocumented immigrants for apportionment
SEPT. 10, 2020

Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29. A federal court approved an injunction blocking President Donald Trump's memorandum ordering the census not to count undocumented immigrants for apportionment. File Photo by Tasos Katopodis/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A federal court on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump's order preventing undocumented immigrants from being included in the census count to determine congressional seats.

The special three-judge panel in New York unanimously approved an injunction against Trump's July order. They didn't rule on whether the order is unconstitutional, but said it would cause harm for the next decade, until the next census is conducted.

"We declare the presidential memorandum to be an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the president by statute," the panel ruled.

Trump's memorandum ordered that undocumented immigrants should not be counted for the purpose of apportionment in the 2020 census, meaning they wouldn't be considered when determining how many representatives each state gets in the House.

The Trump administration at the time said excluding undocumented immigrants "from the apportionment base is more consonant with the principles of representative democracy underpinning our system of government."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the ruling.

"The law is clear: Everyone gets counted in the census -- you can't pick and choose," the organization said.

The Trump administration lost another legal challenge last year after it attempted to include a question on the census asking whether the respondent was living in the United States legally. Challengers feared that such a question would cause undocumented immigrants not to fill out the census for fear of being targeted for deportation or other actions.

A Whistleblower Has Accused Top DHS Officials Of Lying About Border Threats To Support Trump's False Claims

The complaint also accuses DHS officials of suppressing intelligence reports on Russia and making false statements to Congress.

Adolfo FloresBuzzFeed News Reporter

Last updated on September 9, 2020,

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf

A rare whistleblower complaint released Wednesday detailed behind-the-scenes efforts by top Department of Homeland Security officials to build a false narrative to support President Donald Trump's bogus claims about terrorists crossing the southern border.

Brian Murphy, the principal deputy undersecretary in the department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, said in his complaint that he was told to provide intelligence reports for former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that supported the White House's false argument of a border wall being necessary to keep out large numbers of terrorists crossing into the US from Mexico.

Despite Murphy's refusal and statements to Nielsen that the documented number of known or suspected terrorists only consisted of no more than three people — not the 3,755 she had told Congress on Dec. 20, 2018 — the former secretary knowingly made false statements to Congress on the topic again on March 6, 2019.

The complaint also says acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop producing intelligence reports on Russian disinformation efforts because it “made the President look bad.”

Ken Cuccinelli, a senior official performing the duties of deputy DHS secretary, also told Murphy to modify intelligence threat assessments on white supremacists to appear "less severe" and include information on the prominence of "violent 'left wing' groups," according to the complaint.

Murphy also says Wolf told him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”

CNN was the first to report on the existence and details of the complaint.

Earlier on Wednesday, Wolf gave the “State of the Homeland Address” and singled out Nielsen for her contributions to DHS. Wolf also called China a growing threat to the United States and protesters in Portland "violent rioters" who were attacking federal law enforcement officers.

Murphy claims he was later demoted from his post to assistant to the deputy undersecretary for the DHS Management Division in retaliation for not cooperating. The personnel move prompted him to file his complaint on Tuesday.

Before Murphy was demoted, the Washington Post reported that his office at DHS had compiled intelligence reports on journalists covering protests in Portland, Oregon, who published leaked and unclassified documents. The revelation prompted an immediate outcry, and former officials said the reports damaged the the intelligence office's reputation.

Murphy downplayed the reporting on the issue in the complaint, saying the reporting on the topic was "significantly flawed." Murphy said there were attempts to track publicly available reporting that had information from government sources, but that there were no efforts to surveil journalists' private data.

The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ordered Murphy to appear before the committee later this month, saying on Twitter that the alleged actions put "our national security at risk."

Young Latino Voters Say The Fight For Racial Justice Is Pushing Them To Vote In November

According to a new survey, 55.8% of young Latino voters said they’d actively participated in racial equality or Black Lives Matter movements.

Olivier Douliery / Getty Images

People hold placards at the Lincoln Memorial at a protest against racism and police brutality, on August 28, in Washington, DC.

Young Latinos are being pushed to vote in the upcoming election by the protests that have gripped the country throughout the summer over the fight for racial justice, according to new data from a national survey of Latino voters between the ages of 18 and 34.

The survey, conducted by Telemundo and BuzzFeed News earlier this summer, also found that young Latinos are motivated by the coronavirus pandemic's outsize influence on their community.

The country’s renewed push for racial justice after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the effects of the pandemic, and immigration reform have pushed young Latino voters to become engaged in the upcoming election, according to the survey.

The protests that have taken place across the country have become a focal point of the presidential race. The Republican National Convention heavily featured segments against widespread demonstrations and in favor of “law and order,” including an address from a Missouri couple who had been charged with unlawful use of a weapon after aiming guns at a group of protesters in their neighborhood. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden both visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week after protests erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

According to the survey, 55.8% of young Latino voters said they’d actively participated in racial equality or Black Lives Matter movements by protesting or boycotting, and half of young Latino people said protests across the country have motivated them to vote in the upcoming election. “Racial and ethnic social equality” motivates 62.7% of young Latino voters, according to the survey and 57% said reducing police brutality has pushed them to turn out for the election.

“Racial and ethnic social equality” was identified as the most important social or political issue for their generation by a majority of the Latino voters, with 16.6% identifying it as the top overall issue.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed racial inequities in how communities across the country are affected by its consequences, and it’s motivating Latino voters ahead of the general election. Just 24.6% of young Latino voters “somewhat or strongly approve” of the president’s response to the pandemic, compared to 35.6% of young non-Latino voters.

In the survey, 41.1% of Latino voters indicated that the pandemic has strongly motivated them to vote in the upcoming election. Part of that motivation comes from their own experiences: 13% of Latino voters said they have worked in a high-risk job without enough protection over the course of the pandemic, compared to 11.3% of non-Latino voters. And 12.5% of Latino people said that they had lost their job because of the coronavirus, compared to 10.3% of young non-Latino people.

The upcoming election has created conflicting feelings for many young Latino voters, with wide support for Biden matching a belief that Trump will ultimately win. The survey found that 53% of young Latino Biden supporters believe he’ll win the election, compared to the 52% of young Latino Trump supporters who believe that Trump will win.

While 60% of young Latino voters say they are supporting Biden’s campaign, recent polling has shown the former vice president lagging behind with Latinos overall compared to where Hillary Clinton was in 2016. A recent poll from Equis Research, which surveyed 1,081 Latinos in Florida, found that while Biden led Trump 53% to 37% among Latino voters, Biden was still behind where Clinton performed, according to 2016 exit polling from CNN.

Despite the Biden campaign’s lagging performance among Latino voters in Florida compared to Clinton’s 2016 performance, 75.3% of young Latino voters surveyed in the Telemundo–BuzzFeed News poll indicated that they believe it is more important to vote in this election than the 2016 election.

The survey questioned 638 people who identified as Latino and 685 non-Latino people between the ages of 18 and 34. It was conducted from June 5 to June 22.

Ryan Brooks is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

#HIDUTVA

Activists Are Demanding Facebook Suspend An Indian Executive Who Shielded Anti-Muslim Hate Speech

“I don’t know what the damn problem is at Facebook with anti-Muslim hate, but I would just say at this point that they don’t seem to care.”

Pranav DixitBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From New Delhi September 9, 2020

Erin Scott / Reuters

Mark Zuckerberg

NEW DELHI, India — More than 40 human rights groups and internet watchdog organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center and Muslim Advocates are calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend Ankhi Das, the company’s public policy director for India, South, and Central Asia, after the Wall Street Journal revealed that she decided not to apply the social network's hate speech policies to politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party who posted anti-Muslim hate speech.

In an open letter, the US- UK-, and New Zealand–based groups demanded that Das be put on leave pending an audit of Facebook India, and “should be removed from her role” if the audit substantiated the Journal’s reporting. They also asked for Facebook to work with civil society groups and human rights activists in India.

“It’s high time Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook take anti-Muslim hatred seriously and change how its policies are applied in Asia and across the world.”

“It’s high time Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook take anti-Muslim hatred seriously and change how its policies are applied in Asia and across the world,” Heidi Beirich, executive vice president for strategy at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, one of the signatories of the letter, said in a statement. “The scandal in the Indian office, where anti-Muslim and other forms of hatred were allowed to stay online due to religious and political bias, is appalling and the leadership in that office complicit.”

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

One of Facebook’s most powerful executives, Das came under scrutiny after the Wall Street Journal showed that she had intervened to protect T. Raja Singh, a state-level BJP politician, and at least three other Hindu nationalists, from Facebook’s hate speech rules, saying that doing so would be bad for business. She also claimed that the company “lit a fire” to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s social media campaign before he won elections in 2014.

Last month, Das apologized to Facebook employees for sharing a post on her personal Facebook page that called India’s Muslims a “degenerate community” for whom “nothing except purity of religion and implementation of Shariah matter.”

The reports have sparked a political controversy in India, Facebook’s largest market, which has more than 300 million users. Last week, more than a dozen members of a parliamentary committee grilled Ajit Mohan, Facebook’s top executive in India, about its content moderation policies. A separate government panel is also investigating whether hate speech on Facebook sparked riots in New Delhi earlier this year, where more than 50 people — mostly Muslims — were killed.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has come under scrutiny for not taking down content that instigates violence. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook failed to take down an event created by the Kenosha Guard, a self-proclaimed militia, where members discussed plans to “kill looters and rioters” despite being flagged 455 times. The page asked followers to bring weapons to an event meant to counterprotests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A 17-year-old at the protest allegedly shot and killed two protesters.

In Myanmar, Facebook was used to spread anti-Muslim hate speech, including calls for violence against the minority Rohingya community. In 2018, Facebook acknowledged that it was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar after soldiers in the country massacred thousands of Rohingya people and forced more than 800,000 people to flee into Bangladesh. The United Nations described it as genocide.

“Moderation bias in Facebook’s Delhi office affects many South Asian markets, including hundreds of millions of users across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh,” said Dia Kayyali, program manager for tech and advocacy at Witness, a Brooklyn-based human right nonprofit organization and one of the letter’s signatories, told BuzzFeed News.

Kayyali said that although human rights organizations from India and South Asia have weighed in on the letter, concerns about backlash from India’s increasingly authoritarian government kept them from signing it. “Given the declining rights situations across the region, many organizations felt unsafe in engaging in any public advocacy at this time, especially given the existence of warning signs of genocide,” they said.

“I don’t know what the damn problem is at Facebook with anti-Muslim hate,” said Beirich, who said she had repeatedly brought the topic up with Facebook executives, including the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. “But I would just say at this point that they don’t seem to care. The needle doesn’t move.”

MORE ON THIS
Facebook Said It Removed A Militia Event Page Threatening Violence In Kenosha. It Didn’t.

Ryan Mac · Sept. 3, 2020

A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules.

Ryan Mac · Aug. 28, 2020

Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg's Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence

Ryan Mac · Aug. 28, 2020

How Facebook Failed The Rohingya In Myanmar

Megha Rajagopalan · Aug. 27, 2018

Pranav Dixit is a tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Delhi.

Without otters, Alaskan reefs more vulnerable to climate change, urchins

Without sea otters around to eat urchins, Alaska's kelp forests and algal reefs have been left vulnerable to overgrazing. Photo by Matt Knoth/Flickr

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Keystone predators provide ecological equilibrium, a kind of stability that allows ecosystems withstand sudden changes. Without them, the effects of climate change are more severe.

That's the case off the coast of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, where coral reefs and kelp forests have been left vulnerable to climate change and sea urchin predation in the absence of the Aleutian sea otter, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Since the 1990s, the Aleutian sea otter has been "functionally extinct," researchers said.

"A 'functional extinction' indicates that, although the sea otter has not gone extinct as a species, its abundance is so low that it no longer has a meaningful ecological impact in the ecosystem," Douglas Rasher, senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, told UPI in an email.

Without sea otters around, local sea urchin populations have exploded. Having thinned the region's once-dense kelp forests, these voracious herbivores have begun gnawing their way through the coralline algae that forms the reef on which kelp grows.

Uranium-thorium dating suggests that some of the reefs, formed by the red alga Clathromorphum nereostratum, are more than 800 years old.

To better understand the resiliency of these unique reefs, researchers examined the layers of calcified skeleton formed by the algae. Each year, the algae builds new layers, cementing a record of their growth.

By examining the thickness of the different algal layers, researchers were able to identify previous sea urchin grazing events.

The layers showed earlier grazing events corresponded with the decline of otters during the height of the fur trade, but that the region's coralline algae was able to withstand previous surges in local sea urchin populations.

Today, the coral-like reefs aren't fairing so well.

To figure out why sea urchins are proving more deadly than they were more than a century ago, researchers paired algae and sea urchins in tanks of seawater back in the lab. Some tanks featured cooler, less acidic conditions, comparable to preindustrial seawater, while other tanks featured temperature and acidity levels comparable to modern ocean conditions.

The experiments proved warmer, more acidic ocean conditions, caused by anthropogenic climate change, have made Clathromorphum nereostratum algae more vulnerable to lethal sea urchin grazing.

"Although sea urchins likely abounded in the Aleutian Islands during and after the fur trade, our experiments indicate that the alga's skeleton was stronger, and rates of sea urchin grazing were much lower, during those past centuries," Rasher said.

The findings serve as a reminder that climate change doesn't alter ecosystems in isolation.

"Our study shows that species interactions and climate change interact in complex ways, highlighting that we must study the processes of predator loss and climate change together," Rasher said.

Sea urchins have proliferated in a variety of ecosystems beyond Alaska's reefs. From the coast of Kenya to the Caribbean islands to the Gulf of Maine, the loss of large fish and other marine predators have led to the explosion of local sea urchin populations, decimating kelp forests and algal reefs.

Reefs and kelp forests often serve as an anchor for diverse marine ecosystems, providing both food and shelter to variety of species. When they become overgrazed, biodiversity declines.

"New consumers are also showing up in many marine ecosystems," Rasher said. "Tropicalization of kelp forests of western Australia has caused the arrival of new herbivorous fishes, who are now preventing the recovery of kelp forests after marine heat waves occur. Moreover, new carnivores are shifting poleward in the Gulf of Maine where red hake and black sea bass have arrived for the first time in recorded history."

upi.com/7037153

Even Climate Scientists Are Freaked Out By This Year’s Wildfires

"We have not reached the peak. In fact, no one knows where the peak is,” one expert said.

Peter AldhousBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 10, 2020

Josh Edelson / Getty Images

FIRENADOES ARE OCCURRING MORE FREQUENTLY DUE TO

THE FIERCENESS OF WILDFIRES

Butte County firefighters watch as the Bear fire towers over their truck in Oroville, California, Sept. 9, 2020.

Across large parts of California, daylight never arrived on Sept. 9. Caught under a vast sheet of smoke streaming from fires to the north, the San Francisco Bay Area woke to a sickly orange glow that only darkened as the morning progressed.

Just over the border in Oregon, thousands of people were evacuated from the city of Medford as the fast-growing Glendower fire surged up Interstate 5, burning through the towns of Phoenix and Talent to the southeast.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown described the weather conditions that spawned her state’s fires as a “once-in-a-generation event.” Others have called it a “new normal” in the face of climate change.

But this isn’t simply a new normal, because it will likely get worse: Climate change is bound to pile on several more decades of warming and drying in the West, no matter what steps the world’s nations take to cut carbon emissions.

“This is very much a way station on the path to a new future,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told BuzzFeed News. “We have not reached the peak. In fact, no one knows where the peak is.”

Swain and other experts are as alarmed as everybody else about what’s going on — but they’re not surprised.

“I admit to being a little freaked out right now,” Alexandra Syphard, chief scientist with Vertus Wildfire Insurance Services and an ecologist at San Diego State University, told BuzzFeed News. “But nothing so far has happened that couldn’t have been predicted.”

Swain added that the increased severity of the wildfire season also takes an emotional toll on the scientists paying the most attention. “This is horrible. It is very hard to process,” he said. “Personally, I’m exhausted by all of this.”

These experts had few words of comfort for anxious West Coasters who yearn for a return to normalcy in the months and years to come. “For some of the scientists, that dread is amplified even more because we know what’s coming,” Swain said.

Scientists also warned that there are no quick fixes to the West Coast’s fire woes. Reducing the inevitable damage from future big wildfires will require restrictions to curb the sprawl into wildlands that has been a defining feature of California’s real estate development in recent decades, strict building codes to ensure that at-risk homes are designed for fire safety, and efforts to reduce the number of fires ignited by people, power lines, and other infrastructure.

Given that it’s only going to get hotter and drier in the foreseeable future, it will also require efforts to make California’s forests less of a tinderbox. After decades of misguided attempts to suppress wildfires in the Sierra Nevada, the spine of mountains that runs down the east of the state, the forests are much denser than they would naturally be. What’s ultimately needed, experts say, is a return to historical conditions, when an even greater area burned each year — but with much less ferocity, leaving big trees to survive instead of blowing to the winds and falling as ash.

This will not be comfortable. Storied landscapes will change as some burned forests are replaced by more drought- and heat-tolerant scrubland. And West Coasters may have to get used to smoky skies as state and federal officials literally fight fire with fire via prescribed burns to try to reduce fuel for wildfires.

Widespread power cuts, as utilities shut down the grid to prevent their power lines from sparking fires during high winds, will also become a common experience. A study published last month from Swain and others estimated that Northern California will experience an average of 1.6 million person-days of annual power cuts in the years to come, based on historical climate conditions and utilities’ stated thresholds for when they will pull the plug.

So far, more than 3.1 million acres in California have burned in 2020, according to the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. That has eclipsed the state’s previous record of more than 1.9 million acres, set in 2018 — and there are still at least a couple of months of the fire season still to go.

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via Cal Fire

The total area burned by wildfire in California by year from 1987.

A Perfect Storm

The total area burned this year isn’t the whole story. Indeed, nationally, this isn’t even a particularly severe fire season by that measure: According to the National Interagency Fire Center, just under 5.3 million acres had burned in 2020 by Sept. 10, below the 10-year average of 5.76 million acres for the year to date. That’s largely because it’s been a relatively quiet year for fires away from the coastal states.

What is more worrying is that so many large fires have erupted in such a short time in a relatively small area, including the south of Oregon, around the San Francisco Bay, and the Sierra Nevada mountains. The fires have burned within touching distance of major population centers, affecting millions of people with unbreathable air and a burnt orange sky.

The latest set of wildfires kicked off Aug. 17, when an unusual series of “dry lightning” storms swept across Northern California, igniting dozens of fires, some of which coalesced into three massive complexes that are now the first, third, and fourth largest fires in recorded state history.

“Up until the lightning siege, it was a rather unremarkable season,” John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced, told BuzzFeed News.

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via Cal Fire

Major incidents recorded by Cal Fire from 2010 to 2020. Each fire is a circle that is scaled by the area burned, centered on the date the alarm was sounded. The current season is remarkable for the multiple large fires that erupted in a short period from mid-August.

Since this lightning siege, the West Coast has been hit by successive record-breaking heat waves, further drying the landscape and heightening the potential for rapid fire spread. The result has been more fires in California, Oregon, and Washington that have burned with an intensity that has shocked even seasoned fire-watchers. Some of these fires have generated their own weather systems, including the Creek fire that erupted in the Sierra National Forest in Fresno County, California, over the Labor Day weekend, requiring more than 200 campers to be evacuated by military helicopters.

CIRA / NOAA
The Creek fire exploded in area and formed a massive smoke plume on Sept. 5.

“It’s hard to not focus on the extent burned, but the nature and behavior of the fires is one of the most astonishing things,” Dakota Smith, a satellite analyst with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University, told BuzzFeed News.

Experts likened the conditions that created this year’s inferno to a perfect storm, as critical fire weather was unleashed into an environment that was already primed to explode into flames. The unnatural density of the state’s forests is just part of the problem: They also contain some 150 million dead trees, mostly in the southern Sierra Nevada, weakened by drought and finished off by bark beetle infestations.

“There’s not been time for them to decompose,” Kate Wilkin, a fire ecologist at San Jose State University, told BuzzFeed News. “This was a particularly sensitive time in that process.”

Then there is the steady march of climate change, which has warmed and dried the region, making the fire season longer. According to a 2019 study, the annual area burned by wildfires in California has increased fivefold since the early 1970s. A warming and drying trend is locked in for several more decades, even if nations take rapid measures to cut emissions.

“We are going to have to embrace more fire.”

The main focus, then, is trying to thin the forests and reduce fire loads. But how to do so in a safe and effective way is an intense scientific controversy. Forestry interests tend to back mechanical thinning, but many ecologists are concerned that once logging companies get involved, they tend to take the bigger trees that are most important to retain for a healthy forest ecosystem, rather than thinning out undergrowth and saplings to mimic the effects of natural fires.

In terms of area, the extent of California’s historic fires, which were encouraged by Indigenous tribes to manage the landscape, exceeded even this year’s conflagration. In 2007, a University of California, Berkeley, research team studying traditional Native American burning practices and records including fire scars on ancient trees estimated that before European settlement of California, an average of more than 4.4 million acres burned each year. Other estimates put that figure as high as 12 million acres a year. The difference is that these were much lower-intensity fires that left the biggest trees alive, rather than destroying everything in their path.

“We killed off the natural fire regime,” Swain said.

Restoring California’s fire ecology to something more like its natural state will be hard and potentially hazardous — given that any fire can spiral out of control.

It is also likely to cause concerns over air quality. “Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period,” the UC Berkeley researchers noted in their 2007 paper.

Cal Fire’s target is to reduce fuel loads across the state across more than 500,000 acres per year, using a combination of mechanical thinning, timber removal, and prescribed burns.

In the most recent fiscal year, actions by the state, private landowners, and the federal government — which is actually responsible for most of California’s forests — got about halfway to that target, according to Cal Fire spokesperson Lynne Tolmachoff. But the vast majority of that was through timber removal and mechanical thinning, rather than the prescribed burns that many ecologists want to become the norm.

“To diminish the ‘fire deficit’ and thereby mitigate fire risk, the Forest Service and partners will need to step up the use of prescribed fires in concert with mechanical treatments,” Babette Anderson, a US Forest Service spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News by email.

Whatever path the West takes in the next few decades, experts warn, it is going to involve more fires — both good ones and bad.

“We are going to have to embrace more fire on the landscape,” Swain said.

MORE ON THIS
How A Booming Population And Climate Change Made California’s Wildfires Worse Than Ever

Peter Aldhous · July 28, 2018

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Peter Aldhous is a Science Reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

For small island nations, marine plastic cleanup is prohibitively expensive

The cost of cleaning up plastic along the coasts of island nations like the Seychelles requires bigger, richer nations -- some of which are responsible for the pollution -- to contribute to the cause, researchers say. Photo by SCAPIN/Pixabay

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Island nations like the Seychelles are uniquely vulnerable to the barrage of plastic pollution pouring into the world's oceans, and research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the cleanup bill is prohibitively expensive.

"The Indian Ocean is fringed with countries that have poor waste management infrastructure," lead researcher April Burt told UPI in an email.

"Other studies have shown that most of the marine plastic litter in the oceans is coming from ten rivers, the majority of which are in Asia," said Burt, an ecologist and graduate student at Oxford University in Britain.

Cleanup efforts on the Seychelles revealed an abundance of plastic shoes, mostly flip flops, as well as netting and line from commercial fishing operations.

To estimate the financial burden the barrage of plastic places on small island nations like the Seychelles, Burt and her research partners first calculated the effort to clean a small portion of the coast.

Scientists determined a 2019 cleanup, comprising 980 hours of work by 12 volunteers over the course of five weeks, cost a total of $224,538.

Next, researchers set out to estimate the total amount of plastic found strewn across Aldabra, the Seychelles' outer islands and the world's second-largest coral atoll.

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"We conducted a series of transects at 20 locations along the coast in each of the main coastal habitat types: beach, vegetation and limestone karst," Burt said. "For each transect we separated and weighed the litter found into six main categories and used this to extrapolate up to estimate total litter accumulated."

The six litter categories included: consumer plastic items, such as toothbrushes and cigarette lighters; plastic packaging material like plastic bottles; fishing-related items, such as buoys and netting; plastic footwear; small, unidentified plastic fragments; and other materials like glass.

"Our research shows that the main source was from the industrial tuna fisheries -- this industry exports tuna worldwide," Burt said.

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When researchers added it all up, they determined it would require 18,000 hours of labor and cost $4.68 million to clean up all the plastic pollution found along the Aldabra coast.

Because much of the plastic pollution that makes its way to the shores of smaller island nations is coming from bigger, richer nations and extractive industries, the researchers suggest that wealthier countries help pay for the cleanup.

"We hope our findings will be used by local and regional governments to call out the need for international funding for dealing with the issue of marine plastic litter," Burt said.

Burt also said more must be done to ensure the commercial fishing industry can't continue to dump waste with impunity.

"The huge costs involved in removal are way beyond the financial capacity of local organizations and governments who are responsible for these island ecosystems," she said.

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States sue EPA over pollution in Chesapeake Bay

The lawsuit said the federal government failed to ensure Pennsylvania and New York implemented plans that lived up to an agreement to protect the Chesapeake Bay from pollution. File Photo by Bill Portlock/Chesapeake Bay Foundation

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- The attorneys general of three mid-Atlantic states and Washington, D.C., on Thursday sued the Environmental Protection Agency, accusing it of failing to protect the Chesapeake Bay.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said the EPA has failed to meet its obligations under an agreement to reduce pollution and restore local waters. Delaware and Virginia were also listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

"The Chesapeake Bay is a national treasure," Frosh said. "Restoring the health of the bay will take a coordinated, comprehensive effort by each of the watershed states. EPA has walked away from its responsibility to regulate and manage the efforts of the bay states. Today, we are asking the court to force EPA to do its job."

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a non-profit group devoted to protecting the region, concurrently filed its own lawsuit against the EPA in the same court. Anne Arundel County, Md., and the Maryland Watermen's Association were also listed as plaintiffs.

RELATED For small island nations, marine plastic cleanup is prohibitively expensive

The states' lawsuit accuses the EPA of failing to ensure Pennsylvania and New York implement plans to reduce pollutants that affect the bay's watershed. The attorneys general said the plans didn't meet goals outlined by the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, which was signed in 2014.

Neither plans cut down on the amount of nitrogen or phosphorus that enters the bay.

"This is the moment in time for the Chesapeake Bay. If EPA fails to hold Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent New York, accountable the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint will be yet another in a series of failures for Bay restoration," said CBF President William C. Baker. "It doesn't have to be this way. Under the Blueprint we have seen progress. But unless pressure is brought to bear on Pennsylvania, we will never get to the finish line.

In response to the lawsuit, the EPA touted progress it said has been made in the watershed, including expanding underwater bay grass by 28,000 acres from 1984 to 2019.

"We have taken and will continue to take appropriate actions under our Clean Water Act authorities to improve Chesapeake Bay water quality," the agency said in a statement.

"In the past year alone, EPA and its federal partners have provided nearly a half billion dollars to support Bay watershed restoration activities, and EPA has delivered thousands of hours of technical assistance to the states, as well as comprehensive reviews of state implementation plans and progress forecasts to identify strengths and weaknesses. EPA's focus is on continuing to make unprecedented progress to restore the Chesapeake Bay and local waters."

It's unbearable': Lesbos refugees sleep on streets after devastating fire

Residents of Moria camp struggle to salvage what they can as protesters try to block efforts to rebuild

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Refugees sleep on the road, close to Mytilene, after fire destroyed Moria refugee camp. Photograph: Miloš Bičanski/Getty Images

Plumes of smoke rise above the ashes and twisted metal. In many parts this is all that remains of Europe’s largest refugee camp.

Just a few days ago, the Moria camp in Lesbos was home to thousands of children and their families. Now all that is left are the smoldering ruins and jagged outlines of scorched tents.

Helicopters and small planes buzz over the devastation, trying to tackle the remaining blazes. The camp is still a tinderbox of dry wood, tents and living containers. A young man asks police if he can access a part of the camp to get his things but a small fire has just started and is growing. The police shake their heads and tell him to come back tomorrow to check if anything still remains.

In other parts of the camp, young men emerge through the smoke, dragging what belongings they can salvage.

Somaya, 27, a graduate in political science from Afghanistan, sits quietly holding a bundle of her remaining possessions. Until Tuesday, she was living in a part of the camp assigned to single women. “Everything happened very quickly,” she said. “Police helped us to leave and a few minutes [later] all of our section burned in the fire.”

Since Tuesday evening, she has been sleeping on the street along with thousands of other people. “We have had a very bad night last night,” she said, “we haven’t anything.”

Thousands left without shelter as fire rips through Lesbos refugee camp – video

Ali, who is aged 19 and lived alone in Moria, says that people are struggling to cope. On Wednesday night, people huddled in the doorways of supermarkets and outside the police station as the cold set in. “We don’t have any other place to go,” he says.

Although food has been delivered to some of those who fled the camp, Ali hasn’t eaten for nearly two days. “Everything is very bad and [getting] worse,” he says. “We don’t know what will happen to us.”

Faris Al-Jawad of aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières said that their teams had been treating babies with smoke inhalation as well as children who had been on the streets for over two days. The response from the authorities, was “lacklustre”, he said. People needed to be immediately evacuated to the mainland and other European countries, he added.

Across the island the fire has caused anger, indignation and despair, and divided the community on what should come next. Some local people express solidarity with the refugees but many hope that the camp will not be rebuilt. On Thursday, two trucks blocked the road to stop construction vehicles reaching the burnt-out ruins of the camp.

The mayor of Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, Stratis Kytelis, is among those opposing a new camp and told local media that he will not accept any reopening of the Moria facility.

Three miles down the road, other refugees at the smaller Kara Tepe camp have been sharing their food and consoling those who fled the flames at Moria, yet can do little to provide shelter. There appear to be no official plans to help relocate those who have lost their homes and shelters, and no sign of the ferries reportedly on their way to provide somewhere for people to sleep.

For now, the thousands who fled Moria have nowhere to go. The family of Mohammed, 35, who worked as a government employee in Afghanistan, are some of those facing another night on the street. “Please,” he says simply, “this situation is unbearable.”

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