ECOCIDE

Yemen's Huthis blew up stranded oil tanker: video

Sanaa (AFP) – Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels announced Thursday they had booby-trapped and detonated the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion, stranded in the Red Sea after a drone and missile attack earlier this month.


Issued on: 29/08/2024 - 

This picture released on by Yemen's Huthi Ansarullah Media Centre shows fireballs and smoke aboard the oil tanker Sounion 

© - / ANSARULLAH MEDIA CENTRE/AFP

The group's leader said the operation took place earlier this week. Since then, the rebels have agreed to allow rescue teams to access the ship.

A video shared on the rebels' media outlets showed masked men planting explosives on the vessel and then detonating them, causing several fires on board.

The Sounion was hit by the Huthis off the coast of Hodeida on August 21, according to the UKMTO maritime agency, which said at the time the attack caused a fire and cut engine power.

The European Union's Red Sea naval mission, Aspides, had rescued its 25 crew members last week, leaving the vessel -- now at risk of causing an oil spill -- abandoned.

The EU naval force was formed in February to protect merchant vessels in the Red Sea from attacks by the Huthi rebels, who have waged a campaign against international shipping that they say is intended to show solidarity with Palestinian group Hamas in its war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

Rebel chief Abdul Malik al-Huthi on Thursday said his forces had "stormed" the tanker earlier this week.

He added in a speech that the Sounion had violated the Huthis' "embargo" on shipping to Israeli ports.

The vessel had departed from Iraq and was destined for a port near Athens, carrying 150,000 metric tons of crude oil, according to Greek port authorities.

On Wednesday, Iran's mission to the UN said the Tehran-backed Huthis had agreed to "a temporary truce for the entry of tugboats and rescue ships into the incident area", citing fires and "subsequent environmental hazards".

A Huthi spokesman confirmed late Wednesday on social media the group had granted a request from "numerous international parties, particularly European" to access the vessel.

The Aspides mission said on Thursday there were "reports that multiple fires have been detected in several locations on the main deck of the vessel", but "there's no oil spill, and the ship is still anchored and not drifting".

The EU mission was "preparing to facilitate any courses of action, in coordination with European authorities and neighbouring countries, to avert a catastrophic environmental crisis", it said on social media platform X.

© 2024 AFP

Israel, Hamas agree to limited pauses in Gaza fighting to allow for polio vaccinations

Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization's senior official for the Palestinian territories, said on Thursday that Israel had agreed to limited pauses in the fighting in Gaza to allow vaccinations against polio. Hamas said it is “ready to cooperate with international organisations to secure the campaign", according to a statement from Hamas’s political bureau. The urgent campaign comes after a 10-month-old Palestinian boy was partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the virus, having missed the chance to be vaccinated because he was born just before the October 7 attacks by Hamas militants and Israel's ensuing offensive.


Issued on: 29/08/2024 -

Palestinian children play outside a medical tent in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, July 11, 2024.

 © Ramadan Abed, Reuters

By:NEWS WIRES|
Video by FRANCE 24

The U.N. World Health Organization said Thursday it has reached an agreement with Israel for limited pauses in fighting in Gaza to allow for polio vaccinations for hundreds of thousands of children after a baby contracted the first confirmed case in 25 years in the Palestinian territory.

Described as “humanitarian pauses” that will last three days in different areas of the war-ravaged territory, the vaccination campaign will start Sunday in central Gaza, said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories.

That will be followed by another three-day pause in southern Gaza and then another in northern Gaza, he said, noting that the pauses will last eight or nine hours each day. He thinks that health workers — more than 2,000 — will take part among U.N. agencies and Gaza’s Health Ministry might need additional days to complete the vaccinations.

Peeperkorn told reporters via video conference that they aim to vaccinate 640,000 children under 10 and that the campaign has been coordinated with Israeli authorities.

“We need this humanitarian pause,” he said. “And that has been very clear. We have an agreement on that, so we expect that all parties will stick to that.”

These humanitarian pauses are not a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that mediators U.S., Egypt and Qatar have long been seeking, including in talks that are ongoing this week.

Hamas is “ready to cooperate with international organizations to secure this campaign,” according to a statement from Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ political bureau.

An Israeli official said before the plan was announced that there was expected to be some sort of tactical pause to allow vaccinations to take place. The official had spoken on condition of anonymity before the plan was finalized.

Israel didn’t immediately comment Thursday on the vaccination campaign. The Israeli army has previously announced limited pauses in limited areas to allow international humanitarian operations.

WHO said health workers need to vaccinate at least 90% of children in Gaza to stop the transmission of polio.

“I’m not going to say this is the ideal way forward. But this is a workable way forward,” Peeperkorn said of the humanitarian pauses. Later he added, “It will happen and should happen because we have an agreement.”

The campaign comes after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza.

He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

(AP)

00:35

Do cats grieve?

The Conversation
August 29, 2024 

Cat (Youtube)

As we grieve the loss of a pet, we may not be the only ones feeling the pain. Research is showing that cats who are left behind when another animal in their home dies could be mourning along with us.

Grief is a well-documented human response to loss – but its roots may be far more ancient as some scientists believe it evolved in extinct species of humans. Corvids – members of the crow family – primates, and marine mammals like dolphins and whales, have all been observed to change their behaviour when one of their own dies, from carrying dead offspring for days, to staying close by the body, as if keeping vigil.

One theory is that grief is a by-product of the natural stress response to separation seen in social animals. According to this idea, distress and searching behaviour probably evolved to encourage animals to reunite with lost group members, which was beneficial for survival. These responses persist when separation is permanent, like in death, leading to the enduring pain of grief.

While there’s plenty of research on how losing a pet affects humans, much less is known about how cats cope with loss, something recent research by US-based comparative psychologists Brittany Greene and Jennifer Vonk investigated.

Unlike typical social species, the cat’s wild ancestor was largely solitary. However, domestication has reshaped their behaviour, enabling them to live in groups and form social bonds.

Green and Vonk’s study suggests that cats can grieve the loss of a fellow pet. In their study of 452 cats, many displayed signs of distress, such as increased attention-seeking, vocalising and reduced appetite, following the death of a companion. The study found that the strength of the bond between the animals, their time spent together, and daily interactions were key factors in this grief-like behaviour.



Cats showed altered behaviour after their companion died Julia Cherk

This study builds on earlier research by animal welfare researcher Jessica Walker and her team in 2016, which examined how cats and dogs react to the loss of a companion. Walker’s study, conducted in New Zealand and Australia, found that 75% of surviving pets showed noticeable behavioral changes, with cats showing increased affection, clinginess and anxiety-related vocalisations.


It should be noted that both studies relied on owner perceptions to assess changes in pet behavior, which presents a potential problem. While pet owners are often the most attuned to subtle changes in their animals, their observations may also be influenced by their own grief and emotional state.
Is it really grief?

There is an alternative explanation for changes in behavior the owners in studies observed after a companion’s death. The presence of a deceased animal can signal danger in the environment, causing pets to change their behavior as a safety measure, rather than being a grief response.

Although this hasn’t been studied in domestic cats, 2012 research on western scrub-jays revealed that seeing a dead member of their species can prompt alarm calls and behavior aimed at avoiding danger, much like how they would react to a predator.

Similarly, a 2006 study on bumblebees found that they were less likely to visit flowers that contained a freshly killed bee or its scent, probably reducing their own risk of being attacked.

This suggests that what we interpret as grief might, in some cases, be a survival instinct. Some behavior the owners in the studies noticed after the death of a companion, such as their cat hiding or seeking higher vantage points, could support this idea.

A question you might be asking is whether cats mourn the deaths of their owners. Though we would like to think that our cat would mourn our death, at the minute, we simply don’t know. There seems to be little to no research on how cats react to the death of their owner.

One unsettling behavior that has been well documented upon death of an animals’ owner is the consumption of their remains. While cats often get a bad reputation for this, dog lovers should note that both cats and dogs have been known to scavenge human remains.

In fact, pet dogs are more frequently documented doing so. Some scientists suggest this behavior might stem from hunger, but it has also happened when food was plentiful.

Another theory, better aligned with the idea of grief, is that scavenging might start as an attempt to revive an unresponsive owner. When nudging or licking doesn’t work, the animal may escalate to nipping or biting in an effort to rouse them.

So the jury is still out on whether cats grieve in response to loss, or if are they responding to changes in their environment that we have yet to fully understand.

Grace Carroll, Lecturer in Animal Behavior and Welfare, School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We discovered a new way mountains are formed – from ‘mantle waves’ inside the Earth

The Conversation
August 29, 2024 

The Drakensberg mountains form part of the Great Escarpment 

encircling southern Africa. Ondrej Bucek / Shutterstock

In 2005, I was navigating winding roads through the Drakensberg Mountains, in Lesotho, Southern Africa. Towering cliff-like features known as escarpments interrupt the landscape, rising up by a kilometer or more. Taken aback by the dramatic scenery, I was struck by a question: how on Earth did it form?

The outer shell of our planet is fractured into seven or eight major sections, or tectonic plates, on which the continents sit. We expect to see the continents rise up at the active boundaries of these plates, where volcanism and earthquakes are often concentrated.

But why – and how – do these dramatic features form far away from these boundaries? Our new theory, published in Nature after nearly two decades of thinking and forensic work, explains how uplift like that seen in Drakensberg can occur in supposedly stable parts of continents.

The continents we now recognise were once united as single, great “supercontinents”. One such example was Gondwana, which existed hundreds of millions of years ago and started to break up during the age of the dinosaurs. We believe that when these supercontinents break apart, it triggers a kind of stirring process under the continents, which we now call a “mantle wave”. This motion deep in the Earth ripples slowly across the partially molten underbelly of the landmass, disturbing its deep roots.

The mantle is the 2,900km-thick layer of Earth that lies beneath the outer crust that we live on. To study what happens when continents break apart, we built sophisticated dynamic models to mimic the properties of the Earth’s crust and mantle, and how they are physically strained when forces are applied.


Cross section through Earth showing the mantle. USGS

When continents separate, the hot rock in the mantle below rushes up to fill the gap. This hot rock rubs against the cold continent, cools, becomes denser, and sinks, much like a lava lamp.

What had previously gone unnoticed was that this motion not only perturbs the region near what’s called the rift zone (where the Earth’s crust is pulled apart), but also the nearby roots of the continents. This, in turn, triggers a chain of instabilities, driven by heat and density differences, that propagate inland beneath the continent. This process doesn’t unfold overnight – it takes many tens of millions of years for this “wave” to travel into the deep interior of the continents.


This theory could have profound implications for other aspects of our planet. For example, if these mantle waves strip some 30 to 40 kilometers of rocks from the roots of continents, as we propose they should, it will have a cascade of major impacts at the surface. Losing this rocky “ballast” makes the continent more buoyant, causing it to rise like a hot air balloon after shedding its sandbags.


Steep slopes are more susceptible to erosion by rivers. Andrew Mohamed

This uplift at Earth’s surface, occurring directly above the mantle wave, should cause increased erosion by rivers. This happens because uplift raises previously buried rocks, steepens slopes, making them more unstable, and allows rivers to carve deep valleys. We calculated that the erosion should amount to one or two kilometers or even more in some cases.

The innermost parts of the continents are considered some of the toughest and most stable parts of the planet, so removing a few kilometers from these regions is no mean feat.

But near the edges of these stable continental regions, called cratons, we get kilometer-high escarpments, just like the one in Lesotho. These giant escarpments encircle these regions, extending for thousands of kilometers. They are testament to a fundamental disruption of the landscape at roughly the same time that the supercontinent Gondwana broke apart – starting around 180 million years ago.

Mystery plateaus

Inland from these great escarpments, we find plateaus, such as the Central Plateau of South Africa, which rise over a kilometer above sea level. The origins of these plateaus have long been enigmatic and have typically not been linked with the escarpments.

Some scientists have previously invoked a phenomenon known as mantle plumes – colossal upwellings of hot, buoyant material from deep within the Earth – as a possible explanation for the plateaus.

Such plumes could potentially push up and dynamically support the Earth’s crust. However, there is no evidence of such an inner continental plume feature in geological records from surrounding continents or oceans during the relevant time period. Could our mantle wave offer a fresh explanation?

To test our predictions, we turned to thermochronology –- a science that helps us understand how rocks, now at or near the surface, have cooled over time. Certain minerals, like apatite, are sensitive to both temperature and time. Much like a flight recorder, these minerals capture a “cooling history”, providing snapshots of how the temperature of a given rock has changed.

Here, we used multiple existing measurements scattered across Southern Africa. This analysis confirmed our model’s predictions: several kilometers of erosion occurred across the region at broadly the times suggested by our models. Even more remarkably, the erosion moved across Southern Africa in a pattern closely mimicking the mantle wave in our simulations.

To probe this linkage further, we applied a different kind of simulation called landscape evolution modeling, which examines how water interacts with the landscape and how, as the landscape is sculpted by rivers, the Earth’s surface effectively bounces or “flexes” in response.

When we included the mantle wave in our computer model, it showed how it could, in theory, form a high elevation plateau. Our results explain how vertical movements of continents can occur far from active tectonic plate boundaries, where most uplift is generally known to occur.

The massive erosion that occurs during these mantle wave events can give rise to intense chemical weathering of rocks, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, promoting global cooling. These uplifts can also physically separate flora and fauna, leading to speciation and shaping evolution. We’ve come a long way in understanding the processes that lead mountain ranges to form away from the edges of continents. And it still amazes me that all this started with an awe-inspiring view of Lesotho’s landscape.


Thomas Gernon, Professor in Earth & Climate Science, University of Southampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Monkey monikers: Like humans, marmosets give each other names

Washington (AFP) – Naming others is considered a marker of highly advanced cognition in social animals, previously observed only in humans, bottlenose dolphins and African elephants.


Issued on: 29/08/2024 - 

Pygmy marmoset cubs are pictured with their mother in their enclosure at the Mulhouse Zoo, eastern France 

© SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP/File

Marmoset monkeys have now joined this exclusive club, according to a new study published in Science on Thursday.

The diminutive primates use loud, high-pitched calls to assign each other "vocal labels," as shown in research conducted by a team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"We are very interested in social behavior because we think that social behavior is essentially what drove us humans to be so special compared to other animals," senior author David Omer told AFP.

"We don't run fast, we don't fly, we don't excel in anything else besides being social and all our achievements as a society are our societal achievements."

Marmosets are ideal subjects to study the evolution of social behavior and language in humans, he explained, because they exhibit similar traits, living in small monogamous family groups of six to eight individuals that cooperatively rear their young.

Led by graduate student Guy Oren, the researchers recorded natural conversations between pairs of marmosets separated by a visual barrier, as well as interactions between the monkeys and a computer system that played back pre-recorded calls.

They discovered that marmosets use "phee calls" -- very high-pitched vocalizations, as loud as power tools -- to address one another. Notably, the monkeys could recognize when such calls were directed at them and were more likely to respond when addressed by their name.

Machine learning advances

The ten marmosets they tested came from three separate families, and the research also revealed that members within a family group used similar sound features to code different names, akin to dialects or accents in humans. This held true even for adult marmosets that weren't related by blood, suggesting they learned from others within the family group.

Marmosets are relatively distant relatives of humans. We last shared a common ancestor around 35 million years ago, while the split between ourselves and chimpanzees could have happened 5-7 million years ago.

Rather than genetic proximity, Omer attributes the acquisition of vocal labels by marmosets to "convergent evolution," or the idea that they evolved similar traits in response to comparable environmental challenges.

For marmosets, vocal labeling may have been crucial for maintaining social bonds and group cohesion in the dense rainforests of South America, where visibility is often limited.

How and when humans first began talking is a matter of debate, but until recently many scientists had dismissed the idea we could look to other primates for clues. Omer stressed the latest research was yet another blow to that long-standing opinion.

"We can still learn a lot from non-human primates about the evolution of language in humans," he said.

The team's statistical analysis of the marmosets' calls was made possible by recent advancements in computational power and machine learning, he added. Looking ahead, one exciting avenue for future research could be leveraging AI to further decipher the content of marmoset conversations.

© 2024 AFP

Harris election bid galvanizes Black students at her alma mater

Washington (AFP) – At Howard University, the historically Black college that educated Kamala Harris four decades ago, students are dreaming about how her victory in the US presidential election could elevate the institution -- and their own ambitions.


Issued on: 29/08/2024

Howard University in Washington is one of around 100 so-called Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the United States 

© Andrew CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP

"I like seeing people that look like me and are doing such great things, like Kamala," said Serena Evans, who said she experienced racism at majority-white schools in her native North Carolina before she enrolled at Howard two years ago.

Evans followed in the footsteps of Democratic presidential nominee Harris, who began her studies in 1982 at the university, located in the nation's capital -- one of around 100 such institutions nationwide that cater primarily, though not exclusively, to African Americans.

For many, these so-called "historically black colleges and universities" or HBCUs serve as safe havens in a country still marred by racism -- even if those same racist attitudes lead to some doubting Howard's credibility.

"People think that we're underdeveloped compared to Ivy League schools like Harvard," said Evans, who is studying classics.

But with Harris aiming for the White House in November's vote, Howard students are feeling "on top of the world," 20-year-old Jomalee Smith told AFP.

"I feel like once Kamala wins, (Howard) will not only be an American thing, it will be a global thing," said Smith, an international relations student.

"More people will know about Howard. It will showcase more job opportunities internationally, not just domestically," Smith added.
'She loves Howard'

Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech on abortion at Howard University in April 2023 © Stefani Reynolds / AFP/File

Among the red-brick buildings and their tall columns, white students are rare, and it's difficult to find anyone who isn't proud to be studying at the vice president's alma mater.

For her part, Harris, 59, regularly returns to the Washington campus -- and was there earlier this month to prepare for her September debate against Donald Trump, according to the New York Times.

"She loves Howard," said Yusuf Kareem, who came from Texas on the advice of a cousin who was disappointed by her experience at a majority-white university.

"For people to see that a Black woman could be the president of the United States, and she went to Howard University -- they can't take us as a joke," Kareem said.

Other major figures have passed through Howard, including Nobel Prize in Literature winner Toni Morrison, and the first Black Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.

"All we want is a fair shot, you know, a foot in the door," said Kareem, a second-year finance student.

'Refuge'

Access to education is still an ongoing battle for racial minority groups in the United States © Andrew CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP

Access to education is still an ongoing battle for racial minority groups in the United States.

Among Black adults, 28 percent have an undergraduate degree or higher, compared to about 40 percent of all Americans, according to 2022 data from the Pew Research Center.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court effectively ended the right for colleges and universities to consider race when admitting applicants.

MIT, a prestigious college in Boston, said it saw a nine percentage point drop in admissions of students identifying as Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander following the ruling.

Developments like that make Howard -- where 82 percent of the incoming class last year was Black, in a country where African Americans make up 14 percent of the population -- stand out more than ever before.

For Howard law student Opeyemi Faleye, historically Black colleges provide a "refuge, a sanctuary, where you don't have to pretend, you don't have to engage in that kind of performance, you just are accepted, and that allows you to thrive."

Sitting on a campus bench with a laptop on his knees, he said the colleges "have been sort of the hallmark of Black-centered education."

"And I feel if things continue to go the way that they are, where other institutions become increasingly hostile or increasingly sort of discriminatory, then historically Black universities will sort of become even more of a refuge," Faleye said.

© 2024 AFP

'More than triple-checked it': Data expert shocked by new Dem voter registration numbers

Maya Boddie, Alternet
August 29, 2024

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to the press after meeting with Israeli Prime

 Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25, 2024 (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP)

New York Times reporter Francesca Paris earlier this month noted that "new voter registration data" in Pennsylvania and North Carolina — both battleground states — proves that Vice President Kamala "Harris' candidacy has energized potential Democratic voters."

Paris emphasized, "For nearly the entire year, more people had been registering as Republicans than as Democrats when signing up to vote in" the two states, which "use party registration and that release this data regularly."

On Wednesday, Tom Bonier, with the data firm Target Smart, shared new numbers with CBS News' Major Garrett, according to Mediate.

"We're tracking something really interesting right now — it’s a surge in voter registration in key groups ahead of the November election," Garrett said. "Among young Black women, registration is up more than 175%. You heard that right. More than 175% in 13 states. That’s compared to the same time in 2020. This, according to the data firm Target Smart, registration has also increased among young Latinas and Black Americans."

Garrett then asked Bonier, "Could that possibly be right? If you must have triple-checked this or many more times than that."

The data expert replied, "You’re right to repeat the number because I more than triple-checked it. It’s incredibly unusual to see changes in voter registration that are anywhere close to this. I mean, there might be 175% is almost tripling of registration rates among this specific group. You just don’t see that sort of thing happen in elections normally."

Responding to the question of what the increase says about voter "enthusiasm," Bonier said, "Tells us a lot. The reason that we look at this voter registration data is because the polls will only tell us so much. The polls tell us how people are going to vote. They don’t tell us if or who is going to vote. It’s a big question.'"

He emphasized, "The best indicator of that is the actions that people are taking. Number one, registering to vote. Someone who says, I want to participate in this election. And so as we’ve seen these questions of which side has the advantage and intensity and enthusiasm, we look for changes in voter registration like this. People who are newly registered to vote are much more likely to vote on Election Day."

Watch the video below 

https://www.alternet.org/data-voter-registration-harris/

Poll shows Missouri voters back Trump, Hawley, abortion rights and minimum wage hike

Rudi Keller, Missouri Independent
August 29, 2024

Former President Donald Trump greeted then- Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley before speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention during a 2018 stop in Kansas City at Municipal Auditorium. - Tammy Ljungblad/Kansas City Star/TNS

Missourians seem poised to legalize abortion and increase the minimum wage in November but are unlikely to embrace the Democratic statewide candidates who are among the ballot measures’ most ardent supporters, a new poll shows.

The proposal to enshrine the right to abortion up until the point of fetal viability in the Missouri Constitution drew support from 52% of people surveyed between Aug. 8 and 16 for the St. Louis University/YouGov poll. The minimum wage increase, to $15 an hour by Jan. 1, 2026, had even stronger backing, with 57% of those surveyed saying they support it.

The poll also found majorities supporting every Republican running statewide, who each held at least a 10-percentage point lead over Democratic opponents. Former President Donald Trump was selected by 54% of respondents, with 41% backing Vice President Kamala Harris. The poll gives Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe a 51% to 41% advantage over House Minority Leader Crystal Quade in the governor’s race.

The best-funded Democratic statewide candidate, Lucas Kunce, was 11 percentage points behind incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, with the poll showing Hawley with a 53% to 42% edge.

“I’d be very surprised if any Democrat won a statewide race this year,” poll director Steven Rogers said. “It’s not breaking news that Democrats struggle in statewide races in Missouri.”

The poll surveyed 900 voters and has a 3.8% margin of error. It included 69 questions, seeking views on major issues facing the state in addition to tracking approval ratings for politicians and testing election contests.

The results showed:

The economy is the biggest concern for voters, listed as the No. 1 issue by 47%. The survey also showed 69% view the national economy as fair or poor and 71% give that rating to the state economy. Health care, at 18%, and education, 16%, are the second and third issues listed as top concerns.

A plurality of voters, 42%, oppose four-day school weeks, but those aged 18 to 29 support it by a 44% to 35% margin. Voters 65 years old or older had the strongest opposition. A new law requiring a public vote to adopt a four-day week in districts in charter counties and cities larger than 30,000 people had overwhelming support at 77%, which was consistent across all demographic, income and partisan groups.

Laws to require a background check for gun sales and banning minors from carrying guns on public property without adult supervision also had overwhelming support, 79% and 85% respectively. But voters oppose other measures to control firearms, including allowing local ordinances that are stronger than state law.

Polling by SLU/YouGov began in 2020, making this the second presidential election year for the project. Its last poll before the 2020 election pointed correctly to the outcome, but Republican candidates generally did better than the poll indicated.

Gov. Mike Parson was shown with a 50% to 44% lead over Democratic State Auditor Nicole Galloway and ended up winning by a 57-41 margin. That poll showed then-President Donald Trump with a 52% to 43% advantage over Joe Biden, with the final result a Trump win, also by a 57-41 margin.

Democrats are banking heavily on voter support for ballot measures, especially the abortion rights proposal, to help overcome some of the other disadvantages they face. No Democrat has won a statewide race since 2018.

Historically, however, ballot measures have only a marginal impact on candidate races, said Rogers, an associate professor of political science at St. Louis University.

“A presidential election year is probably the least effective time to have something else to boost turnout,” he said.

Ballot measures can drive turnout. Three of the most high-profile Missouri ballot measures this century — same-sex marriage in 2004, right to work in 2018 and Medicaid expansion in 2020 — were placed on the August primary ballot by governors worried about the impact of ballot-measure voters on November campaigns.

In 2004, the issue coincided with a titanic battle for the Democratic nomination for governor and 847,000 Democrats voted. In 2018, with no significant primary, 607,577 votes were tallied in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and in 2020, where there again was no hotly contested primary, 537,000 Democrats voted in the gubernatorial race.

In years with no high-profile ballot measures, Democrats since 2000 have averaged about 350,000 voters in statewide primaries for governor and U.S. Senate.

Republicans also showed an increase in primary voters in the years with ballot measures, but not by the same degree. In years without controversial ballot measures, the GOP has averaged about 530,000 voters in statewide contests for governor and U.S. Senate. The average for 2004, 2018 and 2020 was about 640,000 votes.

That data shows that ballot measures can impact low-turnout elections, Rogers said. Presidential election years traditionally have the highest turnout.

“Those voters may already be turning out, and so the difference that you’re making is probably going to be marginal,” Rogers said.

The poll found very few voters are undecided, so the target for Democrats will have to be voters who support the ballot measures but intend to vote for Republican candidates. The poll shows that about one-third of voters who said they will vote for Trump, Kehoe and Hawley will also support the abortion rights amendment and minimum wage propositions.

Democrats will have a tough time switching voters, Rogers said.

“There isn’t much evidence of what we would call reverse coattails for ballot measures,” he said.

The only Democrat already airing television ads in advance of the November election is Kunce, who has spent $2.7 million through Tuesday, according to FCC records reviewed by The Independent. Hawley has spent $1.2 million on television ads in defense of the seat he won in 2018.

Hawley is in the best position he has been in any of the previous SLU/YouGov polls. His approval rating is 53%, which is 14 percentage points higher than his negative rating. That is the best overall number recorded, Rogers said.

He also had a 14-point net positive rating in July 2021 in the first SLU/YouGov poll after the Jan. 6 attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Hawley’s lowest net positive was two points in an August 2022 poll taken just after video of him running away from the Senate chamber during the Jan. 6 riot was included in hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. In that survey, Hawley had a 46% favorable rating and a 44% unfavorable rating.

The only Republican statewide candidate who equals Hawley’s support is state Sen. Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg, shown with a 54-36 lead in the secretary of state race over state Rep. Barbara Phifer, the Democratic nominee.

Hoskins ran in the primary as a team with state Sen. Bill Eigel, who finished second in the primary for governor. Eigel’s combative style found an enthusiastic audience in some areas and that is likely helping Hoskins, Rogers said.

Hawley also has a reputation for being combative and that may explain why he is doing so well, Rogers said.

“Hawley is not Eigel, but he sometimes acts Eigel-like,” he said.

The poll found support for the abortion rights initiative, which is slated to appear on the November ballot as Amendment 3, is increasing. It is eight percentage points higher than found in a February poll, Rogers said.

Amendment 3 has a plurality or majority of voters in most demographic, income and education subgroups, with only Republicans, as a group, and voters in rural areas of northeast and southern Missouri showing more opposition than support.

The abortion measure would overturn a Missouri law that took effect in June 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that provided federal constitutional protection for abortion. Under current Missouri law, abortions are only allowed to save the life of the mother or when “a delay will create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

Exactly how many initiative proposals will be on the Nov. 5 ballot remains uncertain.

The abortion rights measure and the proposal to legalize sports wagering must survive court challenges, and backers of a proposal to allow a new casino near the Lake of the Ozarks are trying to overturn the decision that they fell short of the required signatures in one congressional district.

No hearing had been set as of Wednesday afternoon for the challenge to the abortion rights amendment. Attorneys will be in court Sept. 5 for arguments over the sports wagering proposal, which would be Amendment 2 on the ballot, and on Friday for the casino proposal.

With no legal challenge, the campaign committee for increasing the minimum wage, known as Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages, has already begun reserving television ad time for the final three weeks of the campaign. Through Tuesday, the committee had spent $904,000, according to FCC records.

The minimum wage proposal, which also includes a requirement for businesses to provide paid time off to full-time employees, is supported across all regional, demographic, income, and education subgroups. Only Republicans, as a group, showed more opposition than support. On another question, pollsters surveyed what voters thought the minimum wage should be in Missouri and the median was $15, the level targeted in the initiative.

Support for sports wagering, seen in 50% of those polled, was also widespread. Only one subgroup, voters in southeast Missouri, showed more opposition to sports wagering than support.

Each of the initiative campaigns is poised to spend millions to hold and expand the support shown in the polls. Rogers said he’s confident that effort will pay dividends.

“My anticipation,” he said, “is that as the campaigns become more active, and based off our previous polling, that support will only go up.”

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and X.

The absurdity of calling Kamala Harris a commie

Bruce VanWyngarden, Memphis Flyer
August 27, 2024 

Vice President Kamala Harris (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage / AFP)

Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM!

Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space, with their cursed Sputnik satellites. The Russians were so bold they even propped up Fidel Castro in a communist state 90 miles away from Miami. Russia, we were told by our teachers and parents, was determined to force everyone in the world to live in a commune and toil under communism, a fate presumably worse than death.

In our schools, we had two kinds of drills: fire drills, in which at the sound of a long bell, every student high-tailed it “single file” down the stairs and out the doors onto the schoolyard lawn, goose-assing and laughing all the way. (If you were lucky, you attended a school that had one of those cool fire-escape slides out a third-story window, which livened up the process.) But the real serious stuff took place during the air-raid drills, where, at the sound of a keening siren, we had to “duck and cover” under our desks, which, as everyone knows, will protect you against nuclear holocaust. Mainly, of course, it just scared the crap out of us and traumatized a couple generations.

This went on through the 1980s, at which point, President Reagan had turned standing up to Russia into performance art (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). It turned out to be a surprisingly effective gambit, or at the worst, Reagan’s timing was spot-on. The Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing during the 1980s, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and lending a measure of stature to Reagan’s latter years in office.

ALSO READ: Trump's 'communist' attack on Harris 'simply not credible' — and costing him: GOP pollster

If there was one benefit of this strange, decades-long international game of Russian roulette, it was the fact that we were actually taught what communism is. We learned most of Karl Marx’s greatest one-liners, including the scariest one: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which we Americans were taught to see as the mantra of a system that destroyed ambition and the drive to succeed that American capitalism was built upon. I think that’s simplistic, but it’s also mostly true. Living on the dole is living on the dole. All communism does is narrow economic opportunity to oligarchs. Everyone else? Pass the beans and borscht and keep your head down, comrade.

The fact is that communism has proven to be a horrible system of government, one that concentrates power under an authoritarian rule, censors books and newspapers, offers only rudimentary education for the poor, discriminates on the basis of gender and race, and controls healthcare. In communist countries, posters of the authoritarian Dear Leader are plastered on every open space. Flags with his image are flown in every public square.

That’s why it seems so absurd to me to hear MAGA types — and Donald Trump himself — call Kamala Harris and Democrats “communists.” It sounds like you’re being tough when you call someone a communist, but they literally appear to have no idea what a communist is.

Think of the two major American political parties: When it comes to a cult of personality, one that features posters of Dear Leader, flags, religious iconography, clothes, and even tattoos, which party comes to mind? Which party has come out in support of banning books? Which party wants to give public tax dollars to private schools? Which party openly demonizes LGBTQ Americans and people of color? Which party wants to centralize power and give it to an authoritarian who will “be a dictator on day one”? Which party wants to control the healthcare decisions of the country’s females? Which party literally rejected democracy in 2020?

If your answer to those questions is anything other than the Republican Party, you’ve gone down into a scary rabbit hole, a place where the light of the obvious won’t penetrate. It’s like you’re in a permanent duck-and-cover drill.

ALSO READ: Even Trump's fans aren't buying his scaremongering threats: analyst

'Wow': Observers stunned by new polls showing Harris 'surging' over Trump in national vote

Brad Reed
August 29, 2024 

Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris 

Nick Oxford and Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)

A pair of new polls released on Thursday morning indicate that Vice President Kamala Harris has surged ahead of former President Donald Trump in the national polls, although the race remains very tight in crucial battleground states.

The two polls in question come from USA Today/Suffolk, which shows Harris with a five-point national lead, and Reuters, which shows Harris with a four-point national lead.

Political observers said that the polls appeared to be good news for Harris but cautioned that the race is still up for grabs thanks to much tighter polling in swing states.

"Harris's margin in the poll among likely voters is 4.3%," wrote The Bulwark's conservative Bill Kristol. "Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 4.5%. So Harris has--to her great credit--gotten the race from a Trump lead back up to the 2020 numbers. But this is still (especially in the EC) a knife's edge race."

"A bunch of new polls out this morning, both national and battleground," wrote national security attorney Bradley Moss. "Harris maintains a solid national lead for now but the battlegrounds remain tight as ever. Vote."

Semafor reporter Dave Weigel argued that while the polling now may look similar to the polling in 2016, Harris's lead may be more durable than Clinton's given that her favorable numbers are significantly higher at the moment than the 2016 Democratic nominee's.

"Polling looks a lot like it did around Labor Day 2016, with one big difference — both candidates have much higher favorables, so there’s less scatter to third parties," he noted.

CBS News' Norah O'Donnell highlighted some striking differences in how Harris is polling now compared to how President Joe Biden was polling before he dropped out of the race.

"Voters 18 to 34 years old moved from supporting Trump by 11 points to supporting Harris by 13 points, 49%-36%," she observed. "Hispanics moved from supporting Trump by 2 points to supporting Harris by 16 points, 53%-37%."

Anti-Trump attorney and conservative activist George Conway, however, did not include any caveats in his analysis and said that it looked like a clear win.

"Is this bad for convicted felon Donald Trump?" he asked sarcastically. "Because it kinda seems bad."

Independent's White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg simply replied with, "Wow."