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The Gulf Coast is most at risk and least prepared for climate change

The Gulf Coast is most at risk and least prepared for climate change

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Eric Holthaus writes: There’s been a recent lull of high-profile hurricanes in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, but the Gulf Coast’s vulnerabilities go far beyond the attention-getting late summer storms. By many metrics, it’s the region most at risk — and least prepared — for climate change. A study published last year in Science magazine showed that for the country’s poorest counties, largely located in the Southeast, climate change could exacerbate already-pervasive economic inequality. If the region continues along a business-as-usual…

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How can China satisfy surging demand for meat without undermining the country’s commitment to combating climate change?

How can China satisfy surging demand for meat without undermining the country’s commitment to combating climate change?

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Marcello Rossi reports: Fueled by rising incomes rather than urbanization, meat consumption in China grew sevenfold over the last three decades and a half. In the early 1980s, when the population was still under one billion, the average Chinese person ate around 30 pounds of meat per year. Today, with an additional 380 million people, it’s nearly 140 pounds. On the whole, the country consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat — twice as much as the United States. And…

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Trump called Sessions a ‘dumb Southerner,’ but ‘without the South he wouldn’t be the president of the United States’

Trump called Sessions a ‘dumb Southerner,’ but ‘without the South he wouldn’t be the president of the United States’

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The Washington Post reports: Southern Republican senators defended Jeff Sessions after an explosive new book by Bob Woodward recounted how President Trump called his attorney general a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent. In the forthcoming chronicle of Trump’s White House, “Fear,” Woodward writes that the president privately called Sessions a “traitor,” saying: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.” The remarks are said to have…

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I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on

I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on

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Stanisław Aronson writes: Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp…

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Trump admin rejected report showing refugees did not pose major security threat

Trump admin rejected report showing refugees did not pose major security threat

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NBC News reports: The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugees did not present a significant threat to the U.S., three former senior officials told NBC News. Hard-liners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S. At a meeting…

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China and Russia have set a nuclear collision course with the United States

China and Russia have set a nuclear collision course with the United States

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Gordon G. Chang writes: China, the New York Times reported last week, “can now challenge American military supremacy in the places that matter most to it: the waters around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.” Therefore, Beijing can, in the words of the paper, “make intervention in the region too costly for Washington to contemplate.” Too costly to contemplate? Unfortunately, assessments like these, often heard in U.S. policy circles, can embolden the already arrogant Chinese and make their…

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Why China and Russia are obsessed with vast new war games

Why China and Russia are obsessed with vast new war games

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Peter Apps writes: As the West obsesses over Donald Trump’s legal and political challenges, Brexit and a host of other domestic crises, Chinese troops will join their Russian counterparts for Moscow’s largest military exercises in more than three decades. Coming six months after Beijing’s biggest ever offshore naval drills, the joint war games are another reminder of how central military posturing now is to the world’s two most powerful authoritarian states. While neither likely desires or expects war with the…

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A horrifying and believable path to nuclear war with North Korea

A horrifying and believable path to nuclear war with North Korea

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Robert Jervis writes: Many of us believe that if nuclear missiles were to strike the United States, they would most likely come from North Korea. However, it is hard to dramatize this possibility or to make a convincing case for the exact pathway to a war. Jeffrey Lewis, a respected nuclear analyst, sets this as his task in what he calls a “speculative novel,” The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. This way…

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Trump sees his ability to provoke fear as the foundation of his power

Trump sees his ability to provoke fear as the foundation of his power

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The Washington Post reports: [In his new book, Fear, Bob] Woodward depicts Trump’s anger and paranoia about the Russia inquiry as unrelenting, at times paralyzing the West Wing for entire days. Learning of the appointment of Mueller in May 2017, Trump groused, “Everybody’s trying to get me”— part of a venting period that shellshocked aides compared to Richard Nixon’s final days as president. The 448-page book was obtained by The Washington Post. Woodward, an associate editor at The Post, sought…

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Britain’s shared spaces are vanishing, leaving a nation of cliques

Britain’s shared spaces are vanishing, leaving a nation of cliques

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John Harris writes: In our towns, villages and suburbs, they are now such a common sight as to be mundane: boarded-up pubs, awaiting conversion to some new use or forlornly falling into dereliction. The current rate of closure is put at 18 a week. In rural areas, shuttered hostelries represent something particularly tragic: with churches reduced to silent visitor attractions and shops long since gone, they embody the demise of precious local assets in places where maintaining community life is…

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The effect of music

The effect of music

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Roger Mathew Grant writes: Can a melody provide us with pleasure? Plato certainly thought so, as do many today. But it’s incredibly difficult to discern just how this comes to pass. Is it something about the flow and shape of a tune that encourages you to predict its direction and follow along? Or is it that the lyrics of a certain song describe a scene that reminds you of a joyful time? Perhaps the melody is so familiar that you’ve…

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Arctic permafrost may be thawing much faster than expected

Arctic permafrost may be thawing much faster than expected

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National Geographic reports: Nikita Zimov was teaching students to do ecological fieldwork in northern Siberia when he stumbled on a disturbing clue that the frozen land might be thawing far faster than expected. Zimov, like his father, Sergey Zimov, has spent years running a research station that tracks climate change in the rapidly warming Russian Far East. So when students probed the ground and took soil samples amid the mossy hummocks and larch forests near his home, 200 miles north…

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Climate change is not only hiking up temperatures, but changing the dynamics of weather itself

Climate change is not only hiking up temperatures, but changing the dynamics of weather itself

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Stefan Rahmstorf writes: We’ve all become increasingly used to reports of extreme weather over the past few years. But this summer’s raft of dramatic weather events is significant: Not only does it show what warming can do, it points to the potential large-scale trouble that lurks in the disruption of the planet’s winds and ocean currents. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen extreme heat in Western Europe, Canada, Alaska, the western United States, Texas, Japan and Algeria, which…

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As the world stands by, Assad and Putin are ready to crush the last of the Syrian revolution’s democrats

As the world stands by, Assad and Putin are ready to crush the last of the Syrian revolution’s democrats

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Leila Al-Shami writes: The Syrian regime is determined to reconquer all of the territory it has lost. Aided by Russian bombers and Iranian troops, and emboldened by its success in terrorizing the populations of Ghouta and Daraa into submission, President Bashar al-Assad’s government is now preparing to attack Idlib, the last remaining province outside of his control. Idlib is home to some three million people, about half of them displaced, or forcibly evacuated, to the province from elsewhere. Many are…

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