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Paul Manafort Resigns From Trump Campaign

Mother Jones

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Two days after a campaign shakeup that left his leadership role in doubt, and after a series of damaging reports about his work with a Russian-backed Ukrainian political party, Paul Manafort resigned from his post as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Friday morning.

Originally posted here – 

Paul Manafort Resigns From Trump Campaign

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Trump wants to start from scratch on the Paris climate deal

Trump wants to start from scratch on the Paris climate deal

By on May 17, 2016Share

Imagine for a second how tough it is to get 187 nations to agree on anything. The United Nations managed just that in December, with a largely non-binding climate change agreement that covers most of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution.

Donald Trump, naturally, thinks he could do better. The presumptive Republican nominee hopes to start from scratch on laying out a post-2020 roadmap for climate change, or so he told Reuters’ Emily Flitter and Steve Holland in an exclusive interview.

“I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum,” he said. “And at a maximum I may do something else.”

Trump doesn’t consider himself a “big fan” of the existing agreement because he believes the United States — historically the world’s biggest polluter — got the worse end of the deal, while other countries, namely China, won’t adhere to their promises.

Look at the political situations in the two nations, however, and you’ll notice it’s the United States, not China, that’s currently overrun with politicians who think climate change is a foreign-manufactured conspiracy and want to pull out from the agreement.

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More cheating automakers? Mitsubishi and Fiat are now in hot water too

More cheating automakers? Mitsubishi and Fiat are now in hot water too

By on Apr 27, 2016Share

Looks like VW isn’t the only carmaker with a truthiness problem.

Last week, Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi admitted that the company has been overstating the fuel economy of some of its models for the past 25 years, as well as using testing standards that weren’t in compliance with Japanese law.

Ryugo Nakao, executive vice president of the company, told the Guardian that although Japanese emissions regulations changed 25 years ago to better reflect urban driving patterns and stop-and-go traffic, Mitsubishi failed to update its testing methods. “We should have switched, but it turns out we didn’t,” Nakao said.

The Japanese press is reporting that Mitsubishi’s top two executives will step down. The company may have to answer to U.S. regulators as well: The EPA, along with the California Air Resources Board, has ordered the carmaker to conduct additional emissions tests on vehicles sold in the U.S.

But Mitsubishi isn’t the only new resident of the doghouse. Fiat is also being accused of behaving badly — in its case, by cheating on emissions tests. Reuters reports that a probe into other car manufacturers after last year’s VW scandal revealed that some Fiat diesel engines also showed irregularities in emissions tests. In particular, investigators allege that the Fiat 500X uses software that turns off emission-control devices after the car has been running for 22 minutes.

As bad as these scandals are for manufacturers, they are worse for all of us who depend on breathable air and an inhabitable climate. Volkswagen’s emissions cheats alone are estimated to have caused as much air pollution annually as all of the United Kingdom’s power stations, vehicles, industry, and agriculture combined.

As for the environmental damage Mitsubishi and Fiat have caused, it’s too soon to speculate, but the companies themselves will certainly pay a price. Mitsubishi’s stock price fell by nearly 45 percent after its 25-year-long deception came to light. And just look at Volkswagen: Its emissions cheating scandal is projected to cost the company more than $35 billion.

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More cheating automakers? Mitsubishi and Fiat are now in hot water too

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Aid Group Bombed for the Second Time in Three Weeks

Mother Jones

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For the second time in three weeks, a hospital belonging to the international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders has been bombed by warplanes.

The latest attack occurred on Monday night in Yemen, where aircraft from a coalition led by Saudi Arabia attacked a hospital belonging to the aid group, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières. While the group said patients and staff were in the hospital at the time of the attack, they did not report any deaths. The Saudi-led coalition has been bombing Yemen for seven months in a campaign against the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group that currently holds power in the country. But Doctors Without Borders says the Saudis were aware of the hospital’s location. “We provided the coalition with all of our GPS coordinates about two weeks ago,” Hassan Boucenine, Doctors Without Borders’ Yemen director, said to Reuters.

That mirrors the attack that took place three weeks ago, when an American AC-130 gunship destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 30 people. The group said the US military had been given the coordinates of the hospital and should have known its location. American officials at first said they didn’t know they had fired on a medical facility. “The hospital was mistakenly struck. We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility,” said Gen. John Campbell, the US military commander in Afghanistan. But more recent reports claim American special operations soldiers knew the building was a hospital but believed the Taliban were using it as a base. The decision to attack the hospital anyway may mean the strike was a war crime under international law.

Boucenine did not shy away from using that language to describe the Saudi strike last night. “It could be a mistake, but the fact of the matter is it’s a war crime,” he told Reuters. “There’s no reason to target a hospital.”

The strike is only a small part of destruction caused by the Saudi-led air campaign, which the United Nations says is responsible for most of the approximately 2,000 civilian deaths in Yemen that have occurred since strikes began in March. The bombings have also leveled historic parts of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, which had survived years of civil war and rebellion since the Arab Spring revolts hit Yemen in 2011.

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Aid Group Bombed for the Second Time in Three Weeks

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A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

spoiler alert!

A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

By on 7 Aug 2015commentsShare

Remember that big algae bloom that was sweeping the West Coast a few weeks ago? Here’s an update: It’s still there, and it’s bigger, denser, and more toxic than anyone suspected. You know what this means, don’t you? Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where we bring the worst news from our changing climate, straight to you.

This kind of toxic algae bloom — sometimes called a “red tide” — is not uncommon. But scientists have never known one to be this bad before, according to Reuters:

The bloom, which emerged in May, stretches thousands of miles from the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and has surprised researchers by its size and composition.

“It’s just lurking there,” Vera Trainer, research oceanographer with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Washington state, told Reuters on Thursday. “It’s the longest lasting, highest toxicity and densest bloom that we’ve ever seen.”

“It’s just lurking there.” Is it just me, or does that sound like the beginning of a creature feature flick about mutant mollusks? Before you ask, we’re not certain climate change is fully to blame — but we’re pretty sure we could be seeing more of these supercharged red tides in the future:

Researchers have yet to determine whether longer-term global climate change from rising levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions are playing a role, but the massive bloom may be a harbinger of things to come in any case, she said.

“Whether this is or is not due to climate change, I think it provides a window to the future of what we could see happen under climate change scenarios,” Trainer said.

What we do know for sure is that it’s costing us big time:

NOAA said in a statement that the closure of a Washington state razor clam fishery resulted in $9.2 million in lost income and has also damaged the state’s $84 million commercial crabbing industry.

First, with the salmon, then with the razor clams and crabs. It’s as if climate change is trying to turn us all into vegetarians — though that’s maybe not the worst idea, it’s not great news for my cioppino habit.

Source:
Massive toxic algae bloom reaches from California to Alaska

, Reuters.

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A huge, toxic algae bloom is basically eating the West Coast alive

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Warming waters are destroying your salmon burger

Spoiler Alert

Warming waters are destroying your salmon burger

By on 28 Jul 2015 4:52 pmcommentsShare

The Columbia River is many things: the fourth largest U.S. river by volume, the river that generates more hydroelectric power than any other in North America, and now, a mass salmon gravesite. Warming river water has killed or will kill more than 250,000 sockeye salmon this spawning season. Welcome to the latest installment of Spoiler Alerts, where climate change deflates all the balloons.

Al Jazeera America lays out the grisly details:

Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species and is wiping out at least half of this year’s return of 500,000 fish and by the end of the season that death toll could grow to as high as 400,000.

“We had a really big migration of sockeye,” Ritchie Graves of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told The Associated Press. “The thing that really hurts is we’re going to lose a majority of those fish.”

He said up to 80 percent of the population could ultimately perish.

One of the problems is that record low snowfall in the surrounding mountain ranges has resulted in little runoff that would normally cool the river. The fish, which start to experience stress around 68 degrees F, have been subjected to 70 degree waters since June, with some tributaries reaching 76 degrees. Which means you should wasabi up that Columbia River sashimi while you can — it might be going out of style. In addition to composing a healthy link in the Pacific Northwest ecosystem, Pacific domestic salmon made up about 80 metric tons of food for Americans annually between 2000 and 2004.

Not only are the effects of warming temperatures on the salmon population extreme, climatologists and animal scientists suggest that they’re an expected extreme. Al Jazeera America continues:

The devastation to the local sockeye salmon population is just one of climate change’s effects on wildlife and will “likely” reoccur intermittently over the next decade, James J. Anderson, a University of Washington fisheries scientist whose research focuses on the fish of the Columbia basin, told Al Jazeera.

“The larger problem is that the climate is changing faster than our ability to comprehend the magnitude of the problem,” he said. “Warmer rivers and salmon die-offs can be added to the many events that individually may be random, but which together reveal a rapidly changing world.”

This rapidly changing world has made for a bad month for animals and the climate. The sockeye news follows reports of climate-induced bee deaths and climate change culpability in the extinction of woolly mammoths.

When asked about the salmon deaths, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries manager John North told Reuters, “We’ve never had mortalities at this scale.” When the effects of climate change start sounding like a war zone, we’ve got a problem.

Source:
In hot water: Columbia’s sockeye salmon face mass die-off

, Al Jazeera America.

Thousands of salmon die in hotter-than-usual Northwest rivers

, Reuters.

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NYC Doctors Allegedly Used Free Shoes to Lure Homeless Into Medicaid Fraud

Mother Jones

Nine New York City physicians and 14 other medical workers have been charged with fraudulently billing Medicaid $7 million dollars in expenses for homeless and poor patients whom they convinced to undergo unnecessary medical testing in exchange for free shoes, Reuters reports.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson said in a statement: “These defendants allegedly exploited the most vulnerable members of our society and raked in millions of dollars by doing so.”

The doctors allegedly offered the “guinea pigs”—as the medical workers referred to the homeless and poor patients they recruited from shelters and welfare centers—a free pair of kicks if they produced a Medicaid card and agreed to have their feet examined. Prosecutors said that in some cases the patients underwent unneeded physical therapy, extensive testing that sometimes lasted days, and were given leg braces and other pieces of equipment they had no use for.

Daniel Coyne, deputy Medicaid inspector general for investigations, told Reuters that by getting the arbitrary testing, the patients’ actual medical problems could have gone untreated.

If convicted, the doctors face up to 25 years in prison.

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NYC Doctors Allegedly Used Free Shoes to Lure Homeless Into Medicaid Fraud

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BP’s missing oil is found — where else? — on the bottom of the Gulf

BP’s missing oil is found — where else? — on the bottom of the Gulf

By on 4 Feb 2015commentsShare

After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, some of the estimated 200 million gallons of oil that spilled were never recovered. They were missing. Now researchers have found some of them: A good 10 million gallons are sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

A new study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, hypothesizes that about 5 percent of oil from the spill made it to the seafloor. A separate study in October put that number at about 10 percent. “Our number is a little bit more conservative than theirs,” said Jeff Chanton, lead author of the new study, but “if the two approaches agree within a factor of two, that’s pretty good for estimating all of the oil on the seafloor.” Basically, a lot of oil is down there.

And that oil can cause a lot of problems. Because there’s less oxygen deeper in the Gulf, it will take more time to decompose. And the oil can lead to tumors and lesions in sea animals, the researchers found.

“Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It’s a conduit for contamination into the food web,” Chanton said. “This is going to affect the Gulf for years to come.”

The findings come as BP continues trying to weasel its way out of paying fines and reparations for the spill. Reuters reports that the company is pushing back against a multi-billion-dollar government fine under the Clean Water Act:

In arguments that wrapped up on Monday, BP tried to whittle away at $13.7 billion in potential fines if faces under the Clean Water Act for the worst offshore disaster in U.S. history.

BP has said its fine should be modest as it took extensive steps to mitigate the disaster and that the defendant named in the case, BP’s exploration and production unit, known as BPXP, cannot afford a big penalty.

And the Associated Press reports that the company is still seeking to challenge the way in which businesses affected by the spill are compensated — by attacking the man in charge of distributing the funds.

BP says the claims administrator, Patrick Juneau, failed to disclose that he worked on previous oil spill litigation for the state of Louisiana when he was hired to oversee settlement payouts.

Attorneys for Juneau told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that he hid nothing improper and his record of work for the state was public well before BP and others agreed to his hiring in 2012.

All sides hailed the settlement when it was approved in 2012. But BP later argued that Juneau was misinterpreting the settlement and paying claims to businesses that didn’t deserve them.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier and the 5th Circuit ruled that, under the settlement BP agreed to, businesses do not have to prove they were directly harmed by the spill to collect money — only that they made less money in the three to eight months after the spill.

In case you weren’t feeling sorry enough for BP already, today also brings news that the company’s profits and share price are both down because of low oil prices. Cue the tiny violins.

Source:
“Missing oil” from 2010 BP spill found on gulf seafloor

, CBS News.

Ruling on BP fine over 2010 U.S. oil spill months away: lawyers

, Reuters.

BP Urges Judges to Remove Head of Oil Spill Settlement Fund

, The Associated Press.

BP profits hit by lower oil price

, BBC News.

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BP’s missing oil is found — where else? — on the bottom of the Gulf

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Pakistani Taliban Kills At Least 145 People—Including More Than 100 Kids—in Savage School Massacre

Mother Jones

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The Pakistani Taliban is claiming responsibility for a deadly attack inside a military-run school in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, on Tuesday, that has left as many as 145 dead, more than 100 of them students. The BBC has described the attack as the deadliest massacre ever carried out by the Taliban in Pakistan.

Gunmen entered Army Public School and Degree College by scaling the walls of the campus’ main building. The attackers held students hostage for more than eight hours, as they moved systematically from classroom to classroom firing at children. Reuters quoted a local hospital as saying that the dead and injured were aged between 10 and 20 years old.

Six gunmen were reportedly killed in the gunfire. A spokesperson for the terrorist group says the massacre was a retaliation against earlier Pakistani military activities against militants in North Waziristan.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani said, according to Reuters. “We want them to feel the pain.”

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who has traveled to Peshawar, has called for three days of national mourning.

Originally posted here:

Pakistani Taliban Kills At Least 145 People—Including More Than 100 Kids—in Savage School Massacre

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What you need to know about the next big climate report

What you need to know about the next big climate report

29 Oct 2014 10:40 AM

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What you need to know about the next big climate report

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The rumblings are starting: There’s a big climate report on the way. But wait — you’ve heard this one before, right? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — its report already came out recently, didn’t it? More than once, come to think of it?

Well, yes, but there is still one more IPCC report coming out this Sunday, Nov. 2. It’s related to the others, but is also sort of different. For starters, a leaked draft uses stronger words to describe the climate threat we face if we don’t take strong action, words like “severe, pervasive and irreversible,” according to the AP.

The IPCC’s latest big survey of climate research has been unveiled in installments over the past 13 months, and what comes out on Sunday is the final summary, called a “synthesis report.” Its authors are meeting in Copenhagen this week to wrangle over the final wording and ultimately put the finishing touches on it.

The panel intends for this assessment report to guide international negotiators as they work, in the run-up to the big Paris climate summit in December 2015, to hammer out an agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The U.N. hopes nations will find a way to squeeze through the ever-shrinking window of opportunity and cut a deal to keep the planet from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the goal scientists have set to avoid the worst impacts of climate change — before we blow right past that target.

Rajendra Pachauri.

Kris Krüg

Opening the IPCC meeting on Monday, Rajendra Pachauri, the group’s chair, acknowledged that stuff doesn’t look super great right now. But he called on these U.N. negotiators to resist despair. The AP:

“May I humbly suggest that policymakers avoid being overcome by the seeming hopelessness of addressing climate change,” Pachauri said. “Tremendous strides are being made in alternative sources of clean energy. There is much we can do to use energy more efficiently. Reducing and ultimately eliminating deforestation provides additional avenues for action.”

Representatives of participating nations have been telling the IPCC what changes they’d like to see in the summary report before it becomes final. One leaked draft had more than 2,000 suggestions for changes. From the British news website Responding to Climate Change (RTCC), which got its hands on the draft:

The UK wants the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study to focus more [on] the “risks of delaying action” as well as the “co-benefits of action”.

US comments say the study should stress how richer countries could be affected by future extreme weather events. “There are very few references to the vulnerability of wealthier countries to climate change,” they write.

The US also says the final IPCC synthesis report, which pulls together three 1,000+ page studies released in the past 12 months, needs to be more accessible to readers without deep technical knowledge of climate issues.

“This document should be prepared so as to be effective for the people who will only read the gray boxes. This report is a story, of what happens if we don’t act, and what can happen if we do … it should be an effective story.”

Not all comments addressed big-picture concerns, RTCC notes.

“I have zoomed 150% in the pdf and have a huge monitor. The [Figure SPM 4] has a low resolution which makes it hard to read on paper,” a Danish official writes.

You can’t get much past those Danes.

The IPCC, a group affiliated with the U.N., has been putting together reports since 1988. Thousands of climate scientists volunteer their time to summarize the latest and best research out there on climate change. The group put out its first assessment report in 1990, and then three more in 1995, 2001, and 2007. (See John Upton’s excellent “WTF is the IPCC?” for more background.)

The panel has been working for over three years on this latest report (they do take their time). The gargantuan assessment report (sometimes referred to by wonks as AR5, for “assessment report 5”) is made up of three working-group reports, which are each quite long, and then the big summary that’s due out on Sunday.

The first part, you may recall, came out last September. From the first of the three working groups, it reiterated that humans are the main driver of climate change, at least since 1950, and highlighted research indicating that oceans have been absorbing more heat since the 1990s than in previous decades. It put the target for total CO2 we could release into the atmosphere at 1 trillion tons — and we’ve already released more than half of that.

The second working group released its report in March of this year. It looked at vulnerable communities and adaptation, and found the world to be frighteningly underprepared. And the third working group’s report came out in April. It looked at mitigation — wonk-speak for cutting emissions — and methods of doing so justly through global cooperation.

AR5 is intended, more than past reports, to prompt some action. U.N. climate summits haven’t yielded binding global agreements. Environmentalists are calling last week’s E.U. agreement to cut emissions a “weak compromise.”

There’s one more annual, high-level U.N. negotiating session on climate before the big 2015 conference, and it convenes in December in Lima, Peru. “The [IPCC] report will be a guide for us,” Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal told Reuters. At the Lima meeting, negotiators hope to lay the groundwork for a plan that will be put into action the following year in Paris. Many see that conference as the last chance to work out a deal that will keep the climate from spinning too far out of control.

Source:
IPCC Chairman Pachauri Urges Governments To Keep Up Hope Amid Climate Change Battle

, The Associated Press.

US and UK call on UN science panel to stress climate risks

, Responding to Climate Change.

U.N. climate change draft sees risks of irreversible damage

, Reuters.

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What you need to know about the next big climate report

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