Music: Lars Danielsson — ‘Berchidda’
The North American heatwave shows we need to know how climate change will change our weather
NASA By Christian Jakob, Monash University and Michael Reeder, Monash University Eight days ago, it rained over the western Pacific Ocean near Japan. There was nothing especially remarkable about this rain event, yet it made big waves twice. First, it disturbed the atmosphere in just the right way to set off an undulation in the jet stream – a river of very strong winds in the upper atmosphere – that atmospheric scientists call a Rossby wave (or a planetary wave)….
Lawmaker threatens to subpoena Exxon after revelations from secret video
The New York Times reports: The chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industry’s decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change. Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Friday he was prepared to use subpoena power to compel the companies to appear before lawmakers if they don’t do so voluntarily. The move comes a day after a secretive…
As Afghan forces crumble, an air of unreality grips Kabul
The New York Times reports: The security blanket that the United States provided for two decades haunts the Afghan government’s actions, inactions and policies, fostering an atrophying of any proactive planning, in the view of some analysts. If there is a plan to counter the Taliban advance, it is not evident as the government’s hold on the countryside shrinks. Some intelligence assessments have said that the Afghan government could fall under pressure from the Taliban in from six months to…
In case against Trump’s company, echoes of his father’s tactics on taxes
The New York Times reports: Long before Donald J. Trump’s company was accused of plotting detours around the tax code to compensate its chief financial officer with carpeting, televisions and car leases, there were the $16,135 boilers. The boilers were bought for that amount by Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, in the 1990s for his numerous apartment buildings. But in a bit of financial alchemy that embodied the family ethos of paying as little tax as possible, the elder Mr. Trump…
‘Time cells’ identified in our brains encode the flow of time, scientists say
Science Alert reports: How does the human brain keep track of the order of events in a sequence? New research suggests that ‘time cells’ – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which things happened. Evidence for these kinds of sequence-tracking time cells was previously found in rats, where specific neuron assemblies are thought…
Music: Arve Henriksen — ‘Waders’
How to live in a climate ‘permanent emergency’
David Wallace-Wells writes: The phrase Jay Inslee used was “permanent emergency.” This was before Lytton — the town that had, days earlier, set Canada’s all-time heat record, drawing waves of “heat tourists” as witnesses to “desert heat” north of 120 degrees in a place where typical June highs were in the mid-70s — burned to the ground just 15 minutes after the arrival of smoke. It was before wildfires raging in British Columbia produced their own pyrocumulus thunderstorms, which produced…
Democrats have one option left
Ronald Brownstein writes: Today’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster. Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis. In the state legislatures, Democrats lack the…
The Supreme Court is putting democracy at risk
Richard L. Hasen writes: In two disturbing rulings closing out the Supreme Court’s term, the court’s six-justice conservative majority, over the loud protests of its three-liberal minority, has shown itself hostile to American democracy. In one case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court has weakened the last remaining legal tool for protecting minority voters in federal courts from a new wave of legislation seeking to suppress the vote that is emanating from Republican-controlled states. In the other, Americans for…
Why the law is strong enough to take on Trump
Donald Ayer, Norman Eisen and E. Danya Perry write: A 15-count indictment for tax fraud and other charges filed in New York on Thursday against the Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has already stimulated as much hand-wringing as satisfaction from those who have called for accountability for Donald Trump. Some express concern that Mr. Trump himself was not charged and may never be. Others note that these are “only” state tax fraud counts against his…
The looming stagflationary debt crisis
Nouriel Roubini writes: In April, I warned that today’s extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies, when combined with a number of negative supply shocks, could result in 1970s-style stagflation (high inflation alongside a recession). In fact, the risk today is even bigger than it was then. After all, debt ratios in advanced economies and most emerging markets were much lower in the 1970s, which is why stagflation has not been associated with debt crises historically. If anything, unexpected inflation in…
Beyond coronavirus: the virus discoveries transforming biology
Nature reports: Mya Breitbart has hunted novel viruses in African termite mounds, Antarctic seals and water from the Red Sea. But to hit pay dirt, she has only to step into her back garden in Florida. Hanging around her swimming pool are spiny-backed orbweavers (Gasteracantha cancriformis) — striking spiders with bulbous white bodies, black speckles and six scarlet spikes that make them look like a piece of medieval weaponry. Even more striking for Breitbart, a viral ecologist at the University…
Music: Richard Bona & Metropole Orkest — ‘O Sen Sen Sen’
Trump was not indicted. But the charges still threaten him
The New York Times reports: After all the suspicion and anticipation, it was not a conspiracy involving Russia, widespread money laundering or a sweeping allegation of racketeering and corruption. Instead, it was an investigation that uncovered the alleged abuse of run-of-the-mill perks — like car leases, apartments and school tuition — that transformed Donald J. Trump’s family business from real estate branding empire to criminal defendant. On Thursday, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced charges against the Trump…
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Chris McGreal reports: After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way. Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern…