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Showing posts with label FACEBOOK OUTAGE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FACEBOOK OUTAGE. Show all posts

Friday, October 8, 2021

RSN: Andy Borowitz | Facebook Apologizes for January 6th: "We Put the Lives of Politicians We Own at Risk"

 



 

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A scene from the January 6th riots at the Capitol. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Andy Borowitz | Facebook Apologizes for January 6th: "We Put the Lives of Politicians We Own at Risk"
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Apologizing for his company's role in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged, 'We put the lives of politicians we own at risk.'"

"The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report.""


Apologizing for his company’s role in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged, “We put the lives of politicians we own at risk.”

“At Facebook, we have worked tirelessly to acquire a world-class collection of politicians,” Zuckerberg said. “On January 6th, we recklessly and foolishly endangered that very expensive investment.”

“We can—we must—do better,” Zuckerberg added.

Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who is now a Facebook executive, vouched for Zuckerberg’s sincerity. “As a politician who was purchased by Facebook, I can assure you that Mark is committed to protecting the lives of others in my asset class,” he said.

For his part, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would avoid enabling insurrections going forward and would instead focus on its core business of destroying users’ mental health.


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When the US Air Force Accidentally Dropped an Atomic Bomb on South Carolina'On March 11, 1958, the Gregg family was going about their business when a malfunction in a B-47 flying overhead caused the atomic bomb on board to drop on to their S.C. backyard.' (photo: The Daily Beast/Getty Images)

When the US Air Force Accidentally Dropped an Atomic Bomb on South Carolina
Allison McNearney, The Daily Beast
McNearney writes: "On March 11, 1958, the Gregg family was going about their business when a malfunction in a B-47 flying overhead caused the atomic bomb on board to drop on to their South Carolina backyard."

On March 11, 1958, the Gregg family was going about their business when a malfunction in a B-47 flying overhead caused the atomic bomb on board to drop on to their S.C. backyard.

On March 11, 1958, the Gregg family was going about their business when a malfunction in a B-47 flying overhead caused the atomic bomb on board to drop on to their S.C. backyard.

Given the history of nuclear proliferation throughout the 20th century, it seems like a miracle that only two atomic bombs were ever deployed against the human population. And, it turns out, it really was a very lucky break.

There is one part of atomic history that hasn’t made the history books. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. dropped several atomic bombs on unsuspecting people below, bombs that were multiple times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Rather than being acts of extreme aggression, these “broken arrows” as they became known, were pure accidents, explosive “oopsies” committed by the U.S. military against mostly U.S. citizens. In what has been hailed as either luck or very proficient engineering of safety devices, none of the nuclear components on the falling bombs actually detonated.

It’s a near miss that one family in South Carolina was intimately familiar with. On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 11, 1958, the Gregg family was going about their business—kids playing in the yard, parents puttering around the house—when a malfunction in a B-47 flying overhead caused the nuclear bomb on board to drop out of the cargo hold and onto their Mars Bluff backyard. Miraculously, the only lives lost that day were those of the family’s free roaming chickens.

“You can’t really describe it. The noise was incredible, and the dust was crazy”

The three young girls—Helen, 6, Francis, 9, and their cousin Ella Davies, 9—had been playing in their outdoor playhouse for most of the afternoon. A little after 4 p.m, they wandered about 200 feet away as they continued their games. Their mother was inside the house sewing, while her husband, Walter, was working in the garage with their 6-year-old son, Walter Jr.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Around 4:20 p.m., a loud boom sounded and the sides and roof of the garage were blown off. The family home was shifted off of its foundation, with holes opening in the exterior structure and the furniture inside reduced to rubble. The backyard garden—including the girls’ playhouse—had vanished. In its place was a massive crater over 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep. Dust and debris filled the air.

“You can’t really describe it. The noise was incredible, and the dust was crazy,” Walter Jr. told The Sun News in 2003. His father added, “You couldn’t see 10 feet in front of your face.”

As the confusion and the smoke began to clear, Walter set about tracking down the members of his family. Everyone was a little worse for wear, with cousin Ella suffering the most severe injury with a cut to her face that required 31 stitches, but they were all miraculously alive.

Two locals driving nearby heard the sound, saw a “large mushroom-shaped cloud”bloom over the Greggs’ property, and rushed to their neighbors’ aid. They loaded the Gregg family into their car and quickly drove them to the hospital. At that time, the Greggs still had no idea what had caused the sky to fall down around them.

In the meantime, the people who did know and who were no doubt in the middle of a massive panic attack, were the occupants of the B-47 now circling in that very same sky above, waiting for further instruction.

Mars Bluff was one of the earliest near misses on U.S. soil, but it was by no means the last. Today, it seems crazy no major action was taken to stop the flights that led to these Cold War accidents—or, at least, no major action that we know of. The public is still in the dark about much of this history. In 2018, nuclear weapons analyst Stephan Schwartz told WUNC that the Pentagon had come clean about 32 of these accidents, but that there was credible documentation that there were thousands more that they remain mum about.

"If you go through some of the archival evidence publicly available, it seems like once a week or so, there was some kind of significant noteworthy accident that was being reported to the Department of Defense or the Atomic Energy Commission or members of Congress,” Schwartz said.

The justification for this massive risk to the American people was the bigger risk posed by the Soviet Union. In order to keep the country on ready alert for a nuclear attack, the military had nuclear-armed bombers constantly flying in the skies above. Two years after the Mars Bluff accident, they would launch Operation Chrome Dome, which mandated that multiple B-52’s armed with two nukes each would be in the air 24 hours a day.

While this program had not officially launched when the Greggs’ home was bombed, preparations were being made.

The B-47 in question that day was in the middle of a training exercise named “Operation Snow Flurry,” which required the specialized crew to load their plane with an atomic bomb, and fly from Savannah, Georgia to the U.K. on a practice run.

Almost from the beginning, things started to go wrong. The crew was being timed, so the pressure was on to perform at their absolute best. Needless to say, stress was running high, especially as the delays began before they had gotten even close to getting off the ground. The source of those delays: their deadly passenger, which was refusing to properly lock into its seat in the cargo bay. So, the crew did what anyone would do with a troublesome atomic weapon more destructive than those dropped on Japan on their hands…they MacGyvered it.

“When the loading team had trouble engaging the steel locking pin, they called the weapons release systems supervisor for assistance. He took the weight of the weapon off the plane’s bomb-shackle mechanism, put it onto a sling, and then ‘jiggled’ the pin with a hammer until it seated,” Clark Rumrill wrote in American Heritage in 2000.

The problem with this solution became apparent soon after takeoff. During takeoff, it was policy for the locking mechanism to be disengaged to allow the crew to quickly offload the bomb in case of an emergency. Once in the air, they were required to lock the bomb back into place for the safety of all involved.

But the bomb wouldn’t re-lock and a red light began to flash in the cockpit. The plane’s 29-year-old navigator, Bruce Kulka, was sent to the cargo hold to manually adjust the locking pin. According to Rumrill, this required the entire plane to be depressurized, all of the airmen to go on oxygen, and for Kulka to ditch his parachute, as the passage to the cargo bay was too skinny for the extra bulk.

That was just the tip of the iceberg of the issues with this fix-it attempt. More critical was the fact that Kulka didn’t actually know where the locking pin was located. He was sent in to deal with a nuclear weapon blind, so to speak. What happened next was like something out of a very dark comedy.

“A short man, he jumped to pull himself up to get a look at where he thought the locking pin should be,” Rumrill wrote. “Unfortunately, he evidently chose the emergency bomb-release mechanism for his handhold. The weapon dropped from its shackle and rested momentarily on the closed bomb-bay doors with Captain Kulka splayed across it in the manner of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.

“Kulka grabbed at a bag that had providentially been stored in the bomb bay, while the more-than-three-ton bomb broke open the bomb-bay doors and fell earthward. The bag Kulka was holding came loose, and he found himself sliding after the bomb without his parachute. He managed to grab something—he wasn’t sure what—and haul himself to safety.”

The bomb fell 20,000 feet below and landed almost exactly on the Gregg daughters’ playhouse. While the nuclear bomb didn’t detonate—it is believed that the core of the bomb was transported separately at the time, though it has never been 100-percent clear if that was the case—the TNT contained in the bomb in order to trigger an atomic blast did.

Within two hours of the bomb falling, the entire force of the military had descended on the 50-person town of Mars Bluff to do damage control. They announced that no radiation had been discovered in the area and commenced a military clean up.

Amazingly, there was no real fallout from this early Cold War accident, at least in the U.S. Americans understood the great risks being taken in the name of protecting the home front, and they seemed to be OK with them. The story received bigger and more critical play in places like Canada and the U.K., countries that were American allies and thus were also subject to armed U.S. bombers flying overhead.

Walter Gregg, for his part, was shockingly good natured about the incident. After being promised compensation by the government for his destroyed home and property, he joked, “I’ve always wanted a swimming pool, and now I’ve got a hole for one at no cost.”



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Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp All Go Down in Major OutageFacebook's Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp All Go Down in Major Outage
Andrew Griffin, The Independent
Griffin writes: "How long will Facebook be down? Company says it is aware of issue - but not why it has broken or when it will come back online."

How long will Facebook be down? Company says it is aware of issue – but not why it has broken or when it will come back online

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook have all gone down in a major outage.

The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.

Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect. The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work, but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.

Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.

The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues, and does not tend to explain them even after they are fixed. In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.

In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg note that such outages are a “big deal”. Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.

A company spokesperson said that it apologised for the problem but gave no indication of why the outage began or how long it might take to fix.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” spokesperson Andy Stone said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

The same statement was posted shortly after on the official Facebook Twitter page.

Instagram also shared a similar update.

“Instagram and friends are having a little bit of a hard time right now, and you may be having issues using them,” it wrote on its communications page. “Bear with us, we’re on it!”

And WhatsApp also updated users through its official Twitter account.

“We’re aware that some people are experiencing issues with WhatsApp at the moment. We’re working to get things back to normal and will send an update here as soon as possible,” it said.

“Thanks for your patience!”

Facebook’s shares had already plunged sharply as trading began on Monday, probably because of other ongoing criticism in the wake of allegations shared by a whistleblower who previously worked at the company.

The fall continued after the outage began, however, with the price dropping even more.


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As a DACA Recipient, We Need Path to Citizenship, Immigration Reform. Congress Has No Excuse for Not Taking Action.Migrant farm laborers with Fresh Harvest working with an H-2A visa line up for a meal in the company living quarters on April 28, 2020 in King City, California. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

As a DACA Recipient, We Need Path to Citizenship, Immigration Reform. Congress Has No Excuse for Not Taking Action.
Marí Perales Sánchez, Business Insider
Excerpt: "Now it's time for our policymakers to stop at nothing to deliver on their promises, including a permanent immigration status for all."

I immigrated to the US to reunite with my family when I was 8, so I have lived most of my life as an undocumented woman. Growing up here in America, I watched my relatives and other immigrant community members work under hazardous conditions with few protections. Their drive and sacrifices have always played a motivating role in my passion for social justice.

Undocumented immigrants like myself were unnerved but not defeated by the Senate parliamentarian's ruling against including a pathway to citizenship in the new budget reconciliation bill. Right now, the world is watching as lawmakers such as Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey prepare alternative pathways and continue to fight for a pathway to citizenship and permanent legal status for millions of immigrants. If an immigration package passes, this legislation will fundamentally improve the livelihoods of millions of members of my community.

As an advocate and directly impacted person who understands the many barriers removed by being able to access a permanent immigration status, I must demand that this bill covers as many members of my community as possible — including the thousands of essential migrant workers who come to the US on temporary visas.

Without additional protections, many essential migrant workers are being exploited by employers

In 2017, I joined my alma mater in suing the Trump administration for rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. While the Supreme Court sided with us and reinstated the program for thousands of immigrants, temporary status is far from enough. The same is true for the migrant workers on H-2 visas who work as farmworkers, landscapers, seafood processors, and in construction. In my role managing the policy area and gender equity projects at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a binational migrant workers organization, I see how H-2 workers are exposed to severe and abusive conditions every day: from extortion, coercion, and wage theft to sexual harassment and discrimination.

For this group of essential workers, a pathway to citizenship would provide an urgently needed arm of defense in the many structurally flawed labor migration programs where a worker's immigration status and employment are tied to a single employer, creating a deep power-imbalance between employer and worker.

During the pandemic, health and safety violations skyrocketed in seafood processing plants across the country where migrant workers worked, while the few existing legal protections ceased to be enforced. When migrant workers speak out, their employers retaliate and workers risk being fired and deported to their country of origin. I saw this happen to two Louisiana H-2B crawfish workers from Mexico, Maribel and Reyna, whose employer fired them after they sought medical treatment for COVID-19. They returned to Mexico as a result.

Congress must pass an inclusive immigration package

But a pathway to permanent immigration status for essential H-2 migrant workers means more than improved labor standards. Most migrant workers are practically barred from migrating with their families and children — regardless of how many years they have been coming to the US — causing unconscionable, seasons-long separations between families each year.

Last spring I had an emotional conversation with a Mexican woman who is an H-2B crab picker in Maryland and the bread-winner in her family. She was terrified she would never see her children again if she caught COVID-19, or that she would infect her family if she traveled back. A dignified immigration solution, like the one we advocate for, would enable migrant workers like her to migrate with their loved ones and as part of families — preventing their separation.

Adversaries may side with the parliamentarian, but they are overlooking the fact that immigrant and migrant communities will not give up. Last summer, after months of mobilization, we watched a conservative Supreme Court deliver a positive DACA decision when many presumed the worst. Now, a year later, due to extensive organizing, Senate leadership is exhausting as many avenues as possible, including returning to the parliamentarian with alternative immigration proposals.

As a DACA recipient, I'm all too familiar with the alternative: living in the limbo of temporary status at best, or under the threat of anti-immigrant litigation and at the mercy of the courts at worst. We cannot tolerate this option for H-2 workers and other essential workers like those in my family. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer must include them in the immigration bills.

We have done our part: Immigrants' rights activists, leaders, and allies have ensured that an inclusive pathway to citizenship is on the table. Now it's time for our policymakers to stop at nothing to deliver on their promises, including a permanent immigration status for all.


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Pleas for Clemency Grow Ahead of Ernest Lee Johnson's ExecutionActivists gather to protest the upcoming execution of Ernest Lee Johnson at the Boone County Courthouse. Johnson's execution is set for Tuesday. (photo: Julia Eastham/Missourian)

Pleas for Clemency Grow Ahead of Ernest Lee Johnson's Execution
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "Pleas for clemency on behalf of Ernest Lee Johnson, who was convicted of a 1994 murder, are growing more frantic ahead of his scheduled execution by lethal injection in Missouri on Tuesday after the Pope and two members of the US Congress issued calls for the sentence to be set aside."

Missouri Democrats Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II join Pope in calls to governor for sentence to be set aside


Pleas for clemency on behalf of Ernest Lee Johnson, who was convicted of a 1994 murder, are growing more frantic ahead of his scheduled execution by lethal injection in Missouri on Tuesday after the Pope and two members of the US Congress issued calls for the sentence to be set aside.

In a statement last week, Pope Francis requested clemency for Johnson in a letter to Missouri governor Michael Parson. The letter did not deny that “grave crimes such as his deserve grave punishment” but called on Parson to consider “the simple fact of Mr Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life.” If carried out it will be the first execution by Missouri since May 2020.

The Pope’s call for clemency has been joined by two of Missouri’s Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II, who petitioned the governor to halt the execution.

Bush and Cleaver, both members of the Congressional Black Caucus, urged the governor to acknowledge “the moral depravity of executions” and argued that Johnson’s execution perpetuates the same cycles of trauma and violence against Black people as “slavery and lynching did before it”.

“The fact of the matter is that these death sentences are not about justice. They are about who has institutional power and who doesn’t,” they wrote. “Like slavery and lynching did before it, the death penalty perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence and state-sanctioned murder in Black and brown communities.”

Advocates for the condemned man, including Bush and Cleaver, say that he has had developmental delays since birth, when he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother who battled addiction. Johnson, 61, has also had an operation to take out a tumor that removed as much as 20% of his brain tissue, the AP reported, which advocates say has further reduced his intellectual capacity.

Johnson’s public defender, Jeremy Weis, has said that Johnson has scored between 67 and 77 in IQ tests and “meets all statutory and clinical definitions” of intellectual disability. Missouri law broadly defines intellectual disability as “substantial limitations in general functioning.”

But last month, the Missouri supreme court ruled that Johnson is not, as he claims, intellectually disabled and denied his request for execution by firing squad based on his claim that death by lethal injection would cause severe pain.

Johnson’s death sentence stems from February 1994 when he walked into a general store near his home in northeast Columbia and bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot three employees, Mary Bratcher, 46; Mable Scruggs, 57; and Fred Jones, 58, before hiding their bodies in a walk-in cooler and robbing the store for drug money.

Johnson’s scheduled execution has highlighted racial and social inequities in the application of justice. Issuing a call for clemency, the Kansas City Star’s editorial board noted that Parson had swiftly pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white St Louis couple who plead guilty to assault after waving weapons at Black Lives Matter demonstrators last year.

The board criticized the governor for failing to convene a board of inquiry but said it did not “even dare to hope that the evidence that Johnson today has the awareness of a child might convince our governor to commute his sentence”.

It added: “When the state, our state, does kill this man, as it almost certainly will, it will be yet another indictment of a system so bloodthirsty that it delights in vengeance against those who don’t even know why they’re being punished.”

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A Farmer Protest in India Turns Deadly, Leaving 9 Dead and a Town on EdgeIndian farmers protesting against Sunday's killing of four farmers in Uttar Pradesh state after being run over by a car owned by India's junior home minister Ajay Mishra. (photo: Mahesh Kumar A/AP)

A Farmer Protest in India Turns Deadly, Leaving 9 Dead and a Town on Edge
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Indian authorities suspended internet services and barred political leaders from entering a northern town Monday to calm tensions after nine people were killed in a deadly escalation of a yearlong demonstration against contentious agriculture laws."

Indian authorities suspended internet services and barred political leaders from entering a northern town Monday to calm tensions after nine people were killed in a deadly escalation of a yearlong demonstration against contentious agriculture laws.

Four farmers died Sunday when a car owned by Junior Home Minister Ajay Mishra ran over protesting farmers in the Uttar Pradesh town of Lakhimpur Kheri, officials and farm leaders said.

Mishra said his driver and three members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who were in the car were all killed by the protesters in the violence that broke out after the incident.

"They were beaten to death by the farmers," Mishra said in a statement.

Farm leaders alleged that Mishra's son was in the car when it ran over the protesters, but Mishra denied it.

Police on Monday said they had so far arrested six people and filed a criminal complaint against 14 more, including the minister's son, in connection with the death of the four farmers. The BJP also lodged a criminal complaint against the protesting farmers over the death of its members and the car driver, said Arvind Chaurasia, a senior official in charge of the district.

Police also said they recovered the body of a local journalist from the spot where violence ensued Sunday but did not provide further details on how he was killed.

The violence marked an escalation in ongoing protests against agriculture laws that farmers say will shatter their livelihoods. The protests have lasted since the government passed the laws last September and have been one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Last week, thousands of farmers gathered at the edges of the capital New Delhi to mark one year of demonstrations. The government says the changes in the laws were needed to modernize agriculture and boost production through private investment. But the farmers say the laws will devastate their earnings by ending guaranteed pricing and will force them to sell their crops to corporations at cheaper prices.

Police officer Arun Kumar Singh told The Associated Press that all schools have been shut in the district and people have been advised to stay indoors following the violence in Lakhimpur Kheri, 200 kilometers (124 miles) southeast of Uttar Pradesh's capital, Lucknow.

Authorities also barred leaders from various opposition parties from entering the district to meet the farmers amid concerns it could cause further disorder.

Senior police official Prashant Kumar said the administration would provide monetary compensation to the families of the deceased farmers and also set up a judicial inquiry to probe the violence. Farm leaders, however, demand action against the minister and his son, saying Mishra should be removed from office.

The farmer protests have been largely peaceful, though clashes in January left one protester dead and hundreds injured after demonstrators broke through police barricades to storm a historic fort in Delhi.

Thousands of farmers have camped for nearly a year on the outskirts of New Delhi, and more than a dozen rounds of talks between the government and the farmers have failed to resolve the issues.


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Here's How Congress Could Hold the EPA Accountable for Its 'Dereliction of Duty'Raul Grijalva speaks during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing. (photo: Michael Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)


Here's How Congress Could Hold the EPA Accountable for Its 'Dereliction of Duty'
Yvette Cabrera, Grist
Cabrera writes: "At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump Administration announced a policy that relaxed federal environmental monitoring and reporting requirements for polluting industries across the country."

Upcoming congressional hearings would interrogate the EPA's relaxation of environmental enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic.


At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump Administration announced a policy that relaxed federal environmental monitoring and reporting requirements for polluting industries across the country. The March announcement meant that the agency, which is charged with enforcing the country’s environmental laws, wouldn’t likely seek penalties from facilities who failed to monitor or report regulatory violations due to the pandemic.

By later in the spring, research was already showing a connection between elevated COVID-19 death rates and air pollution, and a national coalition of environmental justice organizations challenged the policy. Earlier this year, new research confirmed the coalition’s fears. The study, conducted by two American University scholars, found that counties with more industrial facilities that release toxic chemicals experienced increases in air pollution after the rollback of federal environmental enforcement. The study also found that increased pollution led to large and statistically significant increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths, and that the increased pollution exposure was more severe in those counties with a greater number of Black residents.

Now, in an effort to address long-standing systemic environmental inequities as well as the implications of the 2020 EPA decision to relax enforcement of the country’s environmental protection laws, the House Committee on Natural Resources is leading an effort to hold congressional hearings that would publicly acknowledge and examine the effects of that decision. The ultimate goal is to promote legislative solutions that tackle the cumulative effects of environmental injustices that have been magnified in vulnerable communities during the public health crisis.

“What just happened is an abject example of something that happens and has happened historically far too many times,” Democratic U.S. Representative and Committee on Natural Resources Chair Raúl M. Grijalva told Grist. “We need to codify into law the protections and the rights that communities will have moving forward.”

While the Natural Resources Committee is preparing to hold hearings, Grijalva said that ultimately his goal is to move toward joint House committee hearings to encourage broad participation on issues that cut across multiple federal agencies. “We’re working with our counterparts on other committees,” he continued, ”to see how we can collaborate around a congressional response to these concerns about cumulative impacts, civil rights protections, environmental concerns, and now the issue of enforcement and accountability.”

Last year, a coalition of environmental groups called the EPA decision reckless, filed a lawsuit, and asked the agency to issue an emergency rule requiring those polluters who took advantage of the relaxed standards to submit written notice to the EPA — and for that information to be made public. The court, however, found that the groups had no legal standing to move forward with the lawsuit.

Last month, a coalition of some of those same organizations, in partnership with the Vermont Law School Environmental Justice Clinic, issued a report calling for public transparency around the implementation and effects of this policy, which was in place for more than five months as COVID-19 cases skyrocketed among Indigenous tribes, communities of color, and in low-income areas across the country, many of which have borne the brunt of environmental degradation for decades.

Jose Bravo is the executive director of the San Diego-based Just Transition Alliance, a national coalition of environmental justice organizations and labor unions that was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and a member of this coalition. Bravo told Grist that understanding how the EPA’s relaxed standards affected air pollution levels and other types of contamination is paramount to understanding how much of an impact the policy had on vulnerable communities. “It is very hard to see, because everybody left their post,” he said.

The report, titled Federal Dereliction of Duty: Environmental Racism under COVID-19, calls for an audit by the EPA Office of Inspector General and for Congress to investigate the effects of the EPA’s rollback through congressional hearings. Additionally, the report calls on Congress to pass several federal environmental justice bills, including the Environmental Justice for All Act, to protect the civil rights of vulnerable communities.

Grijalva and his fellow Democratic representative, A. Donald McEachin of Virginia, introduced the act in early 2020. Through a collaborative working group process with stakeholders from communities that have historically been over-exposed to environmental hazards, the Environmental Justice for All Act seeks to legislate fairer policies and more open processes at the federal level. Among other protections, the bill requires federal agencies to consider how health effects might compound over time when making permitting decisions under the federal Clean Air and Clean Water acts. The bill would also amend the Civil Rights Act to allow private citizens and organizations that experience discrimination to seek legal remedies when a program, policy, or practice causes a disparate impact.

The EPA established its enforcement pause three days after the American Petroleum Institute requested regulatory compliance relief in a written letter to the agency. Bravo was especially concerned by the agency’s apparent deference to industry, given that many of the communities hardest hit by COVID-19 are areas where residents were already battling high asthma rates and respiratory illnesses due to heavy air pollution.

“For us, it was important that people understand that we just can’t sit here and let these things happen and let communities worsen — let situations of contamination and health effects worsen in our communities — just because the American Petroleum Institute says, ‘please do away with laws,’” said Bravo,paraphrasing the letter. The coalition has continued to press for accountability, he said, out of concern that the policy decision slowed enforcement efforts — and that monitoring has not returned to pre-COVID-19 levels.

In an email response to Grist for comment on the report, an EPA spokesperson said the agency is “committed to vigorously addressing violations and providing tangible benefits to communities impacted by noncompliance.” The spokesperson noted that EPA Administrator Michael Regan has tasked the agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, or OECA, with increasing federal enforcement in communities that are disproportionately burdened by pollution, as well as resolving cases where polluters didn’t comply with environmental laws through remedies that offer tangible benefits for impacted communities. The OECA is also conducting outreach in local communities regarding enforcement cases in those regions, and providing enforcement program resources to communities across the country.

An EPA Office of Inspector General, or OIG, report on federal regulatory enforcement issued earlier this year found a general decline in enforcement nationally, regionally, and by environmental statute from fiscal years 2007 to 2018. Although it conducted a limited analysis of 2020, the OIG found a similar national decline in enforcement last year. “The decline in compliance monitoring activities meant that, over time, the Agency and the public had less knowledge about compliance by regulated entities and whether facilities emitted pollutants that could be harmful to people,” the report stated. “The associated decline in enforcement actions that include penalties or injunctive relief could mean that the EPA is not adequately addressing violators, who thereby gain an advantage over other regulated entities that comply with environmental regulations.”

Ultimately, the EPA’s actions during the pandemic highlighted two major gaps in the country’s environmental and civil rights law, according to Amy Laura Cahn, visiting professor and director of the Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School and one of the report’s authors. The first is the lack of a mandate to address the adverse harms that policies such as the EPA enforcement rollback have on vulnerable communities. The second involves the lack of legal redress for individuals and communities who are harmed by entities that receive funding from the federal government and engage in disparate impact discrimination. The Environmental Justice for All Act creates a mechanism to do this work and a process that’s enforceable, she said.

“You take away the deterrents, and unregulated facilities will pollute because they’ve suddenly been permitted to pollute,” Cahn told Grist. “But we need to ensure that communities actually understand what those impacts are in real time.”

While some provisions of the Environmental Justice for All Act, such as funding for urban parks and tribal climate resilience programs, have been incorporated into the congressional budget reconciliation bill, Grijalva said that other key issues have not. For this reason, he says, Congress should still pass the full Act to protect communities from policy decisions that increase environmental hazards. The bill would establish mechanisms that remedy the concerns raised in the Dereliction of Duty report, he added.

“That’s what [the Environmental Justice for All Act is] meant to do,” he said.

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Thursday, October 7, 2021

RSN: Jason Linkins | Corporate Democrats Are Killing Biden's Agenda

 

 

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Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaks to reporters outside of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30, 2021. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Jason Linkins | Corporate Democrats Are Killing Biden's Agenda
Jason Linkins, The New Republic
Linkins writes: "We should recall that there are stark choices that need to be made. For the Democrats' midterm plan to work, something resembling President Biden's popular agenda actually needs to pass."

And in doing so, they’re threatening the party’s electoral future.

In recent weeks, I’ve been trying to puzzle together how the Democrats’ midterm elections strategy can square with the complicated set of legislative maneuvers the party has to pull off in a few weeks’ time. The central conundrum is this: Democrats want to run a messaging campaign all next year highlighting the popular components of the Biden agenda—yet that agenda hasn’t been passed, and one of the two bills with the best chance of carrying it out—the budget reconciliation package—keeps getting watered down.

Those making big plans to sell the Democrats in next year’s midterms may want to make sure legislators haven’t already cashed someone else’s checks. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the moderates who have been steadily whittling down the Biden agenda are doing so at the behest of lobbyists and corporate interests, who are powerful enough to alter the legislative agenda but cannot actually guarantee enough voters will keep the party in power after the damage is done.

We should recall that there are stark choices that need to be made. For the Democrats’ midterm plan to work, something resembling President Biden’s popular agenda actually needs to pass. As certain Senate Democrats (looking at you, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin) refuse to part with the filibuster, once the budget reconciliation bill and the bipartisan infrastructure deal get enacted, our lawmakers’ lawmaking duties will in all likelihood be done for a number of years. So there really is no Plan B: The only things that Democrats will be able to brag about for the next two elections are in these measures.

The good news is that the budget reconciliation bill is very popular with the public. The bad news is that some Democrats appear allergic to its most popular provisions. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick recently wrote, this aversion extends to “government action to reduce drug prices,” several tax hikes on wealthy earners, and a “proposed expansion of Medicare to include dental, hearing and vision coverage.”

Elsewhere, Reuters’ Jarrett Renshaw reported that while the “$3.5 trillion Biden proposal outlined earlier this year included free community college, expanded child tax credits and universal preschool for any U.S. citizen,” Democrats are now hard at work adding means tests and eligibility caps, sacrificing universality for the sake of satisfying budget hawks.

And, as The Week’s Ryan Cooper documented at length, a similar effort is underway for the Family Act—a simple, straightforward, and universal parental family leave measure that would “provide 12 weeks of paid leave per year for new parents, people caring for family members, or people with serious illness.” Thanks to Representative Richard Neal, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, the original bill has become “mangled … beyond recognition” into a means-tested “nightmare of complexity” that will force families to jump through unnecessary hoops, and exclude some of the most needful families from vastly diminished benefits.

When you consider the fact that Democrats are also not likely to fully renew the wildly popular expansion of the child tax credit, the Biden agenda’s already worrying trajectory appears to have worsened considerably in a short amount of time. As Leonhardt and Philbrick note, the “well-financed, well-organized lobbying groups strongly oppose some of the bill’s major provisions,” and are a major driver of this trend. Cooper’s analysis of the state of play over the Family Act broadly reaches the same conclusion: “Some insurance companies already offer private paid leave plans, and they’ve been donating hand over fist to most Ways and Means Democrats for years, Neal included. They want a piece of the action.”

This dynamic should receive more media attention. Throughout the past few weeks, the Beltway press has focused on the intraparty tensions between a progressive coalition that’s made a lot of concessions but continues to support a bill that’s popular with the public and stands to do some material good and a more conservative faction of moderates who have been hostile to the Biden agenda. This conflict has been largely framed as a clash of competing philosophies: profligate spenders versus miserly austerians.

It’s well past time, of course, to end the practice of blindly lending legitimacy to the positions of deficit hawks. But that’s grist for another mill. What’s important to note here is that the moderates aren’t actually coming by their ideological imperatives in an honest manner. If the media wants to continue covering these internecine conflicts, they might do well to remember that only one side is acting out of principle. The other has been bought off.


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The Supreme Court's Conservatives Cook Up a Stew of Abortion, Guns, Religion and MoreJustice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)

Nina Totenberg | The Supreme Court's Conservatives Cook Up a Stew of Abortion, Guns, Religion and More
Nina Totenberg, NPR
Totenberg writes: "The docket for this term is a humdinger with major cases involving the biggest social issues of the day: abortion, guns, separation of church and state, and potentially affirmative action in higher education."

For the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Monday marks the first time nearly all of them will gather together in the courtroom since the lockdown a year and a half ago. But if some of the justices greet the new term with great anticipation for a new conservative legal era, others likely are facing the term with dread.

The docket for this term is a humdinger with major cases involving the biggest social issues of the day: abortion, guns, separation of church and state, and potentially affirmative action in higher education.

"It seems like every few years, we say we're going to see radical conservative takeover of the Supreme Court in American law," says Tom Goldstein, publisher of SCOTUSblog. But this time, he adds, "We really mean it. "

As Goldstein observes, the court has changed composition with the addition of three Trump appointees; it has six really solid conservative members and it has decided to put on the docket "front and center, massive social issues that it has ducked in the past because it couldn't get five solid conservative votes to change the law. And now it looks like it may be time."

The issues before the court are not a haphazard collection. Rather, they were deliberately selected by the court's new conservative supermajority with an eye to chipping away, hacking away, or outright overruling nearly 50 years' worth of abortion decisions, for instance, or expanding other decisions, like those protecting gun rights and religious rights.

"We may have come to a turning point"

No outcome, of course, is a sure bet, but it isn't just activists on one side or another who seem rattled. Listen, for instance, to the normally noncommittal Irv Gornstein, the longtime executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.

"I think we may have come to a turning point. Within a span of two to three terms, we see sweeping right-sided decisions over left-sided dissents on every one of the most politically divisive issues of our time," he says. "Voting, guns, abortion, religion, affirmative action."

The perception of the court may be "permanently altered," he warns.

Gorstein adds: "It is all well and good for justices to tell the public that their decisions reflect their judicial philosophies, not their partisan affiliation, but if right-side judicial philosophies always produce results favored by Republicans, and left-side judicial philosophies always produce results favored by Democrats, there is little chance of persuading the public there is a difference between the two."

Abortion rights may be in peril

Three of the court's nine members have preached the nonpartisan message in speeches over the last month, but it doesn't seem to be working. The court, in two major and reputable polls, has taken a big hit. A Gallup Poll, for instance, found that public approval of the court's job performance slid to a new low of 40%, including "less than a majority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents."

Pollsters indicate that some of this precipitous decline occurred after the court allowed a Texas law banning all abortions after six weeks to go into effect. Because the law was written to make it difficult to be challenged, the five justices in the majority said this was not the time to examine it. But that did not change the fact that the court, through its decision not to intervene, allowed almost all abortions to be banned in Texas for the foreseeable future.

At the same time the court is scheduled to hear arguments in December testing a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks. That time frame is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions, which declared that women have a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy up to the point when the fetus can survive outside the womb — at about 24 weeks.

There are multiple ways the court could decide the Mississippi case: narrowly or broadly. Narrowly might stave off a major backlash in public opinion. But however the court rules to restrict abortion rights, the effect of those steps could be analogous to what happens to a frog tossed into water as it heats up on a stove. He doesn't know when he's cooked.

The court revisits Second Amendment rights

If abortion represents nearly a half-century of Supreme Court precedents, guns do not. In 2008, the court ruled for the first time that people have a constitutional right to have a gun in their homes for self-defense. But beyond that principle, for all practical purposes, the court went silent. Now, for the first time in more than a decade, the court has accepted a major challenge to existing gun laws. The case was brought by gun owners against a New York law that requires a person who wants to carry a gun outside the home to get a special license, issued at the discretion of local authorities, after showing that there is a "proper cause," or need for carrying the gun. New York turned down the gun owners in this case because it said they did not have any special need to carry weapons outside the home for self-defense.

Supreme Court advocate Roman Martinez notes that the text of the Second Amendment does protect the right to keep and bear arms. But he also points to the historical record dating back to the time of the founding. New York state, he says, has "actually put forward a lot of evidence showing that really there were these restrictions on the right to carry arms outside of the home" long before the modern era.

The court is friendly to religious rights groups

After guns this term, there is religion. In particular, restrictions on taxpayer aid to religious schools. Before the court is a case from Maine that presents the issue rather starkly. Maine is a basically rural state. It has about 260 so-called administrative districts (tiny towns). Of those, more than half are too small to have public schools. But Maine law requires the towns to provide an education for all minors. Under the state law, the towns can contract with a nearby public school or private school to take their students, or the town can pay the tuition at a public or private school that a parent chooses. There is one exception. Tuition can only be paid to a nonsectarian school, so that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund religious education.

For generations, the Supreme Court did erect a high wall of separation between church and state when it came to state funding. But as the court grew more conservative, it increasingly viewed these restrictions as discriminatory.

"It's going to be difficult for Maine to make a compelling case in court that it has the kind of interest that's going to get past this nondiscrimination principle," says former Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, who served in the Trump administration.

SCOTUSblog's Goldstein notes that the conservative justices could face competing concerns this term. One is that if public lack of confidence in the court as an institution grows, the other two branches could launch a counter-revolution to change the structure and makeup of the court. That would seem to be a long way off, for now. But as Goldstein points out, "On the other hand, the conservatives feel very strongly about this stuff. They really do think that Roe was wrongly decided, that there are too few gun rights, and there's too much separation between church and state."


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Taliban-Style Security Welcomed by Some, Feared by OthersTaliban fighters mobilize to control a crowd during a rally for Afghanistan's independence day in Kabul on August 19. (photo: Marcus Yam/Getty Images)

Taliban-Style Security Welcomed by Some, Feared by Others
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Many Afghans fear the harsh ways of the Taliban, their hard-line ideology or their severe restrictions of women's freedoms. But the movement does bring a reputation for not being corrupt, a stark contrast to the government it ousted, which was notoriously rife with bribery, embezzlement and graft."

It wasn't 7 a.m. yet and already the line outside the police station's gates was long, with men bringing their complaints and demands for justice to Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers.

Something new they immediately found: The Taliban fighters who are now the policemen don't demand bribes like police officers did under the U.S-backed government of the past 20 years.

"Before, everyone was stealing our money," said Hajj Ahmad Khan, who was among those in line at the Kabul District 8 police station on a recent day. "Everywhere in our villages and in government offices, everyone had their hands out," he said.

Many Afghans fear the harsh ways of the Taliban, their hard-line ideology or their severe restrictions of women's freedoms. But the movement does bring a reputation for not being corrupt, a stark contrast to the government it ousted, which was notoriously rife with bribery, embezzlement and graft.

Even residents who shudder at the potential return of punishments - such as chopping off the hands of thieves - say some security has returned to Kabul since the Taliban swept in on Aug. 15. Under the previous government, gangs of thieves had driven most people off the streets by dark. Several roads between cities are again open and have even been given the green light for travel by some international aid organizations.

Still, there are dangers. On Sunday, a bomb outside Kabul's Eid Gah mosque killed several civilians and targeted Taliban members attending a memorial service. No one took responsibility for the bombing but the rival Islamic State group has ramped up attacks against the Taliban in an IS stronghold in eastern Afghanistan.

During their last time in power in the late 1990s, the Taliban offered a trade-off: They brought a stability Afghans desperately sought and eliminated corruption, but they also imposed their harsh interpretation of Islamic law. That included punishments like the hand amputations, executions of murderers with a single bullet to the head, most often by a relative of the murder victim and all carried out in public. Religious police beat men for trimming their beards or for not attending prayers.

In the past week, the Taliban arrested 85 alleged criminals, some accused of petty crimes, and others of murder, kidnapping and robbery, said Noor Ahmad Rabbani of the Taliban's anti-crime department.

The Taliban say they will bring back their previous punishments. The only question is whether they will carry them out publicly, Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, former justice minister and current official in charge of prisons, told The Associated Press.

Some punishments have already reappeared. The bodies of four men were hung from cranes in the center of the city of Herat, after being killed by Taliban while allegedly attempting a kidnapping. On at least two occasions in Kabul, petty thieves were paraded around the streets to shame them, handcuffed, with their faces painted or with stale bread stuffed in their mouths.

Gun-toting Taliban have taken up positions at checkpoints across Kabul and gradually some have been made to wear uniforms — the beginnings of a new national security force, officials say. For many Kabul residents — particularly the young who grew up on horror stories about the previous period of Taliban rule — the sight of the fighters is frightening as they roam the streets freely, with their signature long hair, traditional dress and Kalashnikov rifles hanging by their sides.

But so far, they appear to have brought relief from corruption. Before the Taliban takeover in August, people had to pay bribes simply to settle a utility bill. Rampant fraud in the military was one reason it collapsed so quickly in the face of the advancing Taliban. Despite the overt graft, the U.S. and Europe poured billions of dollars into the government with little oversight.

As in the past, the Taliban have turned to tribal elders to settle disputes. Last week, a group of elders gathered in a Kabul mosque to adjudicate a stabbing attack that caused minor injuries. The elders ordered the culprit's father to pay the victim the equivalent of nearly $400, enough to cover the medical expenses.

Muhammed Yousef Jawid accepted his punishment.

"It's fast, and much less expensive than it was under the previous system," he said.

At the District 8 police station, the new commander, an affable Taliban named Zabihullah, said the Taliban had fought for 20 years to bring Islamic laws to Afghanistan. "Now people are safe under our government," he said.

Zabihullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name, is from central Ghazni province, where the insurgents waged some of their most bitter battles during the last two decades.

At 32, he said he hasn't trained to be a police commander, with most of his education at a madrassa, or religious school. But Zabihullah said his years at war and adherence to the Taliban interpretation of Islamic law had prepared him.

Outside the police station gates, the line was getting longer.

Sixty-year-old Khan had come from eastern Khost province to seek Taliban help in collecting an outstanding loan. He said he supported Taliban punishments like amputations, though not for petty thieves.

He said they have brought some security "because they treat the criminal under Islamic law."

A school principal, who didn't want to give his name fearing repercussions, had come to the police station to complain about parents who are months behind on school fees.

He said he wanted to give Taliban rule a chance. Under the previous government, he was charged bribes each time he went to the police to complain about delinquent payments.

"America invested lots of money in Afghanistan, but it was a mafia that was running the country," he said.

Another complainant, who gave his name only as Dr. Sharif, had returned recently from Saudi Arabia where he had worked for several years. He had no objection to Taliban-style punishments but argued strenuously against putting Taliban leaders and religious clerics in charge of government departments.

"We need professional people ... we need economic specialists, not a maulvi who has no idea about business," he said, using a word for a Muslim cleric.

Still, he welcomed having his complaint heard without any demand for a bribe from the Taliban police. Before, police demanded a bribe just to get into the station.

"The mistake of the past governments," he said, "was that they put all the money into their pockets."


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This Is What the Fight Looks Like to Save the Wildlife Impacted by the California Oil SpillVolunteers clean a brown pelican. (photo: Joe Proudman/UC Davis)


This Is What the Fight Looks Like to Save the Wildlife Impacted by the California Oil Spill
Christina Zdanowicz and Stella Chan, CNN
Excerpt: "With about 126,000 gallons of oil leaked about 5 miles off Huntington Beach, California, experts from wildlife organizations are concerned for animals."

As oil-covered animals come ashore, the broader effect of the California oil spill on wildlife is unknown, experts say.

A brown pelican was the first casualty of the oil spill, wildlife officials said. The bird was euthanized Sunday after it was injured in the spill off the Orange County coast, Michael Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN), said at a press conference Monday morning.

Officials captured four live birds as of Monday afternoon, Ziccardi said. A coot, ruddy duck and pelican were captured Sunday and a sanderling came in on Monday. Other oiled birds have been spotted in flight, but they’ve been difficult to catch, he said.

“When we heard of the large size of the slick with the volume that was reported released, we had grave concerns about this impact,” Ziccardi said. “In our initial assessment of the area, the number of birds in the general area seems to be lower than we had feared.”

With about 126,000 gallons of oil leaked about 5 miles off Huntington Beach, California, experts from wildlife organizations are concerned for animals.

The number killed is unknown. Wildlife experts are collecting animals as they come to shore.

“At this point, we are cautiously optimistic related to the number of animals that might be affected at this point,” said Ziccardi, who added that it’s too early to tell the impact on wildlife.

Birds come first to help, then marine life

Birds are the priority, since they’re most likely to come ashore after an oil spill, Ziccardi said.

“Birds have a high body temperature; they use their feathers almost like a dry suit to keep themselves warm in the marine environment,” Ziccardi said. “If they get soiled, their first response is to get warm as quickly as possible. That’s why they usually come ashore quickly, so that they can try to stay warm.”

The organizations rely on offshore cleanup operators who may spot dolphins or other marine life in distress, he said.

The good news for dolphins is that these mammals are “much less susceptible to oil impacts than birds,” Ziccardi said.

There isn’t enough information to speak to the long-term effects of an oil spill on marine mammals, Ziccardi said. It depends on how much oil the marine life ingest or inhale, he said.

“Just now we are starting to learn some of those long-term effects from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill more than 10 years ago,” Ziccardi said.

Oil pollution was found in thousands of fish 10 years after the disaster, according to a study published in 2020. Millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico’s waters over 87 days in that spill.

Leave the oiled animal care to the experts

OWCN is based out of the University of California at Davis (UC Davis). Its job is to respond to oil spills that affect or could threaten wildlife anywhere in the state, Ziccardi said.

The organization has more than 1,600 responders trained to go to an oil spill. Since 1994, OWCN has responded to more than 75 oil spills and cared for 10,000 animals.

Animals collected from the oily waves have a shot at recovering and returning to the wild, Ziccardi said.

“Oiling is a traumatic experience for these animals, but in our experience, as far as large-scale spills we’ve responded to, we have more than a 50% to 75% success rate to return animals back into a clean environment,” he said.

How they clean and care for the animals

Field teams are out at the site collecting animals and bringing them to a “field stabilization site” so they can give them basic first aid, Ziccardi said.

“We’re giving them warmth, we’re giving them fluids, we’re giving them a bit of time from the stress of being captured here. Then from this location we have an organized transport up to our Los Angeles Oiled Bird Care and Education Center,” he said.

When the animals are at the center, workers photograph each animal and document as much as they can. The animals are then stabilized for 24 to 48 hours, he said.

They’re cleaned of the oil before their human helpers give them “time, good nutrition, observe them carefully,” Ziccardi said. For birds, this process takes an average of 10 to 14 days, he added.

If you see oiled animals, do not pick them up. It’s not safe for the humans or the animals, Ziccardi said.

He encourages people to call the 877-UCD-OWCN hotline to report oiled animals. The organization is not taking volunteers, but instead it’s relying on its 1,600 trained responders, he added.

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Senior State Department Official Calls Biden's Deportation of Haitians 'Inhumane' and 'Illegal'Haitian migrants use a dam to cross to and from the United States from Mexico, Friday, September 17, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. Thousands of Haitian migrants have assembled under and around a bridge in Del Rio. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)

Senior State Department Official Calls Biden's Deportation of Haitians 'Inhumane' and 'Illegal'
John Hudson, The Washington Post
Hudson writes: "A top lawyer at the State Department left his job Friday and excoriated President Biden's deportations of migrants at the southern border, calling the policy 'inhumane' and 'illegal.'"

A top lawyer at the State Department left his job Friday and excoriated President Biden’s deportations of migrants at the southern border, calling the policy “inhumane” and “illegal.”

The rebuke by Harold Koh, the top political appointee in the Office of the Legal Adviser, is the latest example of passionate dissent within the Biden administration on immigration issues following the resignation of Biden’s special envoy for Haiti last month.

In an internal memo to colleagues, Koh takes aim at the Biden administration’s use of the public health authority known as Title 42, which has been invoked to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants since Biden came into office, saying it is unworthy of an administration “I so strongly support.”

“I believe this administration’s current implementation of the Title 42 authority continues to violate our legal obligation not to expel or return . . . individuals who fear persecution, death, or torture, especially migrants fleeing from Haiti,” he wrote in the memo, which was first reported by Politico.

President Donald Trump first invoked Title 42, a rarely used public health authority, to expel immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Liberals decried the move as the exploitation of the global pandemic to impose hard-line immigration policies. Biden has continued the policy to the chagrin of immigration advocates and invoked it most recently to deport thousands of Haitian asylum seekers in Texas back to the impoverished Caribbean country.

In the memo, Koh said the scale of the Biden administration’s use of the authority is “startling.”

“Nearly 700,000 people have been expelled under Title 42 since February of this year, and . . . this past August alone, 91,147 were forcibly removed,” he said, citing U.S. government statistics.

When asked about the letter, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the continuation of the policy, saying “it remains in place because we are in the middle of a pandemic.”

In rejecting Koh’s claim that the policy is “inhumane,” Psaki said “there are several exceptions for Title 42, including those who are fleeing persecution who express a concern of fear.”

Critics have said such exceptions should apply more easily to Haitians whom the Biden administration has deported back to a country overwhelmed with an array of crises, including the proliferation of powerful armed gangs, food insecurity, the spread of the coronavirus and the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in August.

In September, Biden’s special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, quit after six months on the job, saying he couldn’t be “associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti.”

Koh had been an internal critic of the Biden administration’s deportation policy for months, but the 3,000-word memo amounted to his lengthiest criticism of the policy, according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In the memo, Koh urged the administration to consider “more lawful” and “more humane” policy options, including determining whether recent Haitian migrants may have legal status and family ties in other countries where they could be sent, such as Brazil or Chile, instead of returning them to Haiti. He also calls for the immediate suspension of all Title 42 flights, “but especially to Haiti.”

Koh was appointed to the State Department in the winter and had long planned to step down this fall to take on a professorship at the University of Oxford, according to people familiar with the matter. Under the arrangement, Koh would continue consulting the department on a number of issues, though it is unclear whether the agreement remains in place following his dissent.

“I ask you to do everything in your power to revise this policy, especially as it affects Haitians, into one that is worthy of this Nation we love,” Koh wrote to his colleagues.


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Facebook Outage: What Went Wrong and Why Did It Take So Long to Fix After Social Media Platform Went Down?A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)


Facebook Outage: What Went Wrong and Why Did It Take So Long to Fix After Social Media Platform Went Down?
Josh Taylor, Guardian UK
Taylor writes: "Facebook and its other platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, went down globally for close to six hours on Monday and Tuesday, depending on your time zone. As services are being restored, questions are being asked about what caused the outage, and why it took so long to fix."

Billions of users were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for hours while the social media giant scrambled to restore services

Facebook and its other platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, went down globally for close to six hours on Monday and Tuesday, depending on your time zone. As services are being restored, questions are being asked about what caused the outage, and why it took so long to fix.

Why did Facebook go down?

Just before 5pm UTC, people began noticing they could not access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger. It would be more than five hours before services would begin to be restored.

Facebook issued a statement on Tuesday confirming that the cause of the outage was a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centres, which had a cascading effect, bringing all Facebook services to a halt.

It meant not only was Facebook gone, but everything Facebook runs disappeared too.

Others have provided a bit more detail on why Facebook vanished from the internet.

Cloudflare – which had its own recent internet outage issues – has provided a detailed explanation about what happened.

It involves two things that sort out how the internet is the internet – that is Domain Name System (DNS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

The internet is a lot of connected networks. A lot. So that means to keep order of things, you need something like BGP to tell you where you need to go. DNS is essentially the address system for the location of each website – its IP address – while BGP is the roadmap that finds the most efficient way to get to that IP address.

Cloudflare said Facebook on Monday essentially told BGP through a series of updates that those paths to Facebook no longer existed. But not just for Facebook, everything Facebook runs. That meant people trying to reach Facebook couldn’t find the path to access it.

Why were Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp down?

All of Facebook’s services were affected, not just Facebook. It included Facebook’s own internal systems, with reports staff were locked out of offices, and could not access their own internal communications platform.

Why did it take so long to fix?

Facebook’s own internal systems are run from the same place so it was hard for employees to diagnose and resolve the problem.

As the Guardian’s UK technology editor, Alex Hern, put it on Twitter, “Facebook runs EVERYTHING through Facebook”, so the usual way you would fix a problem like this was also not working.

Facebook staff were reportedly unable to access their own communications platform, Workplace, and were unable to access their office due to the security pass system being caught up in the outage.

Facebook indicated the duration and severity of the outage meant the systems were being brought back to full capacity slowly.

How did they eventually fix it?

Facebook so far has not gone into much detail about what went wrong and how it was fixed, but there were multiple reports the social media giant sent a technical team out to its servers in California to manually reset the servers where the problem originated.

Can this sort of outage be avoided in future?

This one is fairly uncommon but not something that can be completely avoided. However, the Facebook outage, along with others including the Cloudflare outage in 2020, and the Fastly one in June, show the problems with having a single point of failure for a vast number of online services people rely on.

People rely on Facebook not only to connect with friends and family, but businesses use it to log into other services including online sales websites. In some countries, it is the dominant means of communication through services like WhatsApp. That an outage can have such a profound impact on billions of people for several hours will give some pause for thought.

Was my personal data at risk?

No more than when Facebook is up and running.

Isn’t this all weird timing for Facebook?

Yes. Facebook is not having a good time right now. Last week Facebook paused a plan to launch Instagram for kids, after leaked internal research showed the company was aware the app could affect girls’ mental health.

Then on Sunday, the former Facebook civic integrity product manager Frances Haugen went public with explosive allegations that Facebook had prioritised growth and profit over public safety.

“The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she told 60 Minutes.

How much did it cost?

We haven’t seen a cost estimate yet for how much it cost businesses who rely on Facebook. The outage, along with the whistleblower story on Sunday, prompted Facebook’s share price to drop 4.9% on Monday, causing founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth to drop $6bn, according to Bloomberg.


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Global Warming Kills 14 Percent of World's Corals in 10 YearsA diver swims through bleached coral. (photo: AMCS)

Global Warming Kills 14 Percent of World's Corals in 10 Years
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Global warming helped wipe out 14 percent of the world's coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, the largest-ever survey of coral health has found, warning that more of the vibrant underwater ecosystems were likely to die if oceans warm further."

Climate change combined with overfishing, coastal development and declining water quality destroyed ecosystems home to at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants.

Global warming helped wipe out 14 percent of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, the largest-ever survey of coral health has found, warning that more of the vibrant underwater ecosystems were likely to die if oceans warm further.

Corals in South Asia and the Pacific, around the Arabian Peninsula, and off the coast of Australia, were the hardest hit, according to the report which was released on Tuesday, compiled by more than 300 scientists in the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network.

The report spanned data for 40 years, 73 countries and 12,000 sites and found the total area destroyed equal to about 11,700 square kilometres (4,517 square miles).

“Climate change is the biggest threat to the world’s reefs,” co-author Paul Hardisty, the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said in a statement.

Coral reefs cover only 0.2 percent of the ocean floor, but they are home to at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants.

Besides anchoring marine ecosystems, they also provide food, protection from storms and shoreline erosion and jobs for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The study looked at 10 coral reef-bearing regions around the world and found that reef loss was mainly the result of coral bleaching, but also overfishing, unsustainable coastal development and declining water quality.

“There are clearly unsettling trends toward coral loss, and we can expect these to continue as warming persists,” Hardisty said.

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions and bleaching takes place when corals, under stress from warmer water, expel the colourful algae living in their tissues and turn white.

Cautious optimism

A single so-called bleaching event in 1998 caused by warming waters wiped out 8 percent of all corals.

“Since 2009 we have lost more coral worldwide than all the living coral in Australia,” noted UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen.

“We can reverse the losses, but we have to act now.”

The UN’s climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, projects with “high confidence” that global warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels will see between 70 and 90 percent of all corals disappear.

In a 2C world, less than 1 percent of global corals would survive.

Earth’s average surface temperature has already increased by 1.1C above that benchmark.

The report titled: Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2020, found reasons for cautious optimism.

“Some reefs have shown a remarkable ability to bounce back, which offers some hope for the future recovery of degraded reefs,” Hardisty said.

East and Southeast Asia’s so-called Coral Triangle, which contains nearly 30 percent of the world’s coral reefs, were hit less hard by the warming waters and in some cases showed recovery.

This resilience could be due to species unique to the region, potentially offering strategies for boosting coral growth elsewhere, the authors said.


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