Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's Journal'We could lose our status as a state': what happens to a people when their land disappears
Small island nations would rather fight than flee, but rising sea levels have prompted apocalyptic legal discussions about whether a state is still a state if its land disappears below the waves.
The Pacific Islands Forum, which represents many of the most vulnerable countries, has invited international legal experts to consider this question and begun a diplomatic campaign to ensure that political statehood continues even after a nation’s physical fabric is submerged.
At the heart of this discussion is the scientific certainty that oceans will continue to rise for at least another century and a sense of injustice that those worst affected are among the least responsible for the climate crisis. The Alliance of Small Island States represents more than a quarter of the world’s countries, but is responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions, most of which come from big industrialised countries in the global north.
This has locked in an expansion of the world’s oceans that is already under way and will accelerate in the second half of this century. Island maps are already being slowly redrawn and coastlines are increasingly threatened by storm surges. Within decades, archipelagos could lose outlying atolls that define national borders. A century from now – if not sooner – entire states could become uninhabitable, raising doubts about what will happen to their citizens, governments and resources.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/27/we-could-lose-our-status-as-a-state-what-happens-to-a-people-when-their-land-disappears
A man is fatally shot in a New Mexico movie theater over a seat dispute
An argument over seating at an Albuquerque movie theater escalated into a shooting that left a man dead and sent frightened filmgoers scrambling to flee, police said Monday.
Detectives with the Albuquerque Police Department filed charges Monday in Metropolitan Court against 19-year-old Enrique Padilla in connection with the Sunday evening shooting at a cinema complex next to an interstate highway.
Padilla was at a hospital under guard Monday evening while being treated for a gunshot wound, police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said. It was unclear whether Padilla had a legal representative who could speak on his behalf.
Witnesses told police that a man later identified as Padilla arrived at the theater with his girlfriend and found another couple in at least one of their reserved seats.
Theater staff attempted to help resolve the dispute, but it escalated with a hurled bucket of popcorn, shoving and then gunfire, according to police.
Michael Tenorio, 52, was shot and died at the scene. His wife, Trina Tenorio, said he was unarmed.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184455537/a-man-is-fatally-shot-in-a-new-mexico-movie-theater-over-a-seat-dispute
Movie seats? Really? Can it get any stupider?
Webb telescope shows fantastic powers by zooming into alien planet
The rocky worlds of the TRAPPIST solar system have captivated scientists.
Until recently, these Earth-sized planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, have remained largely mysterious. But researchers suspect some could host water, and maybe even conditions suitable for extraterrestrial life. With the power of the James Webb Space Telescope — the most advanced space observatory ever built — astronomers can analyze these worlds in unprecedented detail. So far, Webb has viewed the two closest planets to their star, TRAPPIST-1.
Scientists recently trained the Webb telescope on TRAPPIST-1 c, the second of the seven-known TRAPPIST planets, and one that orbits just some 1.5 million miles from its small "red dwarf" (also called an "M dwarf"
star. They published(opens in a new tab) the research in the science journal Nature. Astronomers found this hot planet likely doesn't harbor a thick atmosphere (perhaps similar to Venus), as astronomers once speculated, and instead has little to no water and isn't a great candidate for habitability. There are more TRAPPIST planets, however, for Webb to deeply observe.
"TRAPPIST-1 c is interesting because it’s basically a Venus twin: It’s about the same size as Venus and receives a similar amount of radiation from its host star as Venus gets from the sun," Laura Kreidberg, an exoplanet researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and a study coauthor, said in a statement(opens in a new tab). "We thought it could have a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere like Venus."
(The planet is hot, at some 225 degrees Fahrenheit on its dayside, but not nearly as warm as scorching Venus, which is as hot as a pizza oven.)
https://mashable.com/article/james-webb-space-telescope-trappist-planet
My inner 10 year old wannabe astronomer is agog.......
The Hell of Providing Health Care in a Post-Dobbs America
In her 32 years as an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist, Mary Norine Walsh has seen very sick patients and many deaths. “We’re not like orthopedists who only see one in their entire career,” says Walsh, a physician at a Catholic hospital system in Indianapolis and the former president of the American College of Cardiology. Among those very sick patients are pregnant people. Over the decades, Walsh made caring for these types of patients her specialty. She became known for it, and began to receive referrals from other providers for whom pregnancy was too challenging a complication.
Walsh describes pregnancy as “nature’s stress test.” A person’s blood volume more than doubles, which can worsen preexisting conditions and expose countless new ones, such as heart disease. For instance: If a woman develops peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare type of heart failure, she is in danger of her heart muscle weakening—a condition that could threaten her life, even in future pregnancies. Though cardiovascular issues affect only a small percentage of pregnancies, they are responsible for more than half of postpartum maternal deaths in the United States, making them the leading cause of death among pregnant people.
So when Walsh meets with sick women who are of reproductive age, she brings up contraception. If a patient is already pregnant, Walsh raises the idea of abortion. “The usual recommendation that we have with a very high-risk cardiac condition is a termination,” she says. Without one, says Walsh, her patients could die. Since Walsh doesn’t perform abortions herself, she refers women to a maternal-fetal medicine specialist to receive further care and discuss options, including termination. Walsh has spent years developing her expertise to save women’s lives—a specialty of extraordinary value given that most cardiology studies have been done on men. In some cases, her patients successfully go on to deliver babies, navigating complicated heart conditions with her help. In others, they come back to her pregnancy free, having avoided a possibly lethal health crisis.
But after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling nullified the nearly 50-year-old Constitutional right to an abortion and handed the responsibility for its regulation back to the states, what was often a black and white decision to protect the life of the mother is now a grueling calculus of legal risk for doctors like Walsh.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/abortion-dobbs-health-care-doctors/
Very much worth reading all the way through.
The Hell of Providing Health Care in a Post-Dobbs America
In her 32 years as an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist, Mary Norine Walsh has seen very sick patients and many deaths. “We’re not like orthopedists who only see one in their entire career,” says Walsh, a physician at a Catholic hospital system in Indianapolis and the former president of the American College of Cardiology. Among those very sick patients are pregnant people. Over the decades, Walsh made caring for these types of patients her specialty. She became known for it, and began to receive referrals from other providers for whom pregnancy was too challenging a complication.
Walsh describes pregnancy as “nature’s stress test.” A person’s blood volume more than doubles, which can worsen preexisting conditions and expose countless new ones, such as heart disease. For instance: If a woman develops peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare type of heart failure, she is in danger of her heart muscle weakening—a condition that could threaten her life, even in future pregnancies. Though cardiovascular issues affect only a small percentage of pregnancies, they are responsible for more than half of postpartum maternal deaths in the United States, making them the leading cause of death among pregnant people.
So when Walsh meets with sick women who are of reproductive age, she brings up contraception. If a patient is already pregnant, Walsh raises the idea of abortion. “The usual recommendation that we have with a very high-risk cardiac condition is a termination,” she says. Without one, says Walsh, her patients could die. Since Walsh doesn’t perform abortions herself, she refers women to a maternal-fetal medicine specialist to receive further care and discuss options, including termination. Walsh has spent years developing her expertise to save women’s lives—a specialty of extraordinary value given that most cardiology studies have been done on men. In some cases, her patients successfully go on to deliver babies, navigating complicated heart conditions with her help. In others, they come back to her pregnancy free, having avoided a possibly lethal health crisis.
But after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling nullified the nearly 50-year-old Constitutional right to an abortion and handed the responsibility for its regulation back to the states, what was often a black and white decision to protect the life of the mother is now a grueling calculus of legal risk for doctors like Walsh.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/abortion-dobbs-health-care-doctors/
Very much worth reading all the way through.
Here's How Small Farmers Across Africa Are Bringing Back Trees
For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation in Africa. And they are true—the continent’s forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. But the trees? Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields.
Across the continent—from Senegal and Niger in the west to Ethiopia in the east, and Malawi in the south— smallholder farmers are rejecting government advice that trees should be expunged from fields because they get in the way of growing crops. Instead, they are allowing previously suppressed trees to regenerate on their land—to improve soils and crop yields; to provide harvests of fruit, fuelwood, and fodder for their livestock; and ultimately to achieve a better life for their families.
As large areas of farmland across Africa turn from brown to green, the results are also good for local economies, offering an easy and cheap way to intensify their farming and increase output, as well as benefiting biodiversity and the global climate. An acre of growing trees on farmland captures and stores up to 4 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, researchers say.
The latest published evidence of Africa’s resurgent farmland trees comes in the first-ever detailed analysis of satellite images of the continent carried out at a scale that can identify individual large trees outside forests. Florian Reiner, a remote-sensing analyst at the University of Copenhagen, working with an international team of colleagues, reported in Nature Communications last month that at least 29 percent of tree cover in Africa is “outside areas previously classified as forest.”
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/06/how-small-farmers-across-africa-are-bringing-back-trees/
This is wonderful! Also I've recently read about a man in India who started planting a tree when his first daughter was born 30 years ago and now plants one for every girl born in the village---there's a substantial small grove there now.
During an Extreme Texas Heat Wave, Gov. Abbott Ended Local Rules Requiring Water Breaks for Workers
Amid a dangerous heatwave that has brought blistering temperatures across Texas, the state’s governor signed a law last week eliminating local rules requiring water breaks for workers.
The measure, which will take effect later this year, will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin and Dallas that mandate 10-minute breaks for construction workers every four hours. It also prevents any other local governments from passing similar worker protections.
Just days after Greg Abbott, the governor, ratified the law, officials said a 35-year-old utility lineman working to restore power in Marshall, Texas, died after experiencing symptoms of heat illness. The heat index—which takes into account both the temperature and humidity—was 100F while he was working.
It was an omen of what could come after HB 2127 takes effect in September, wrote the Texas branch of the AFL-CIO union, referring to the far-reaching law that not only curbs cities’ right to enact worker protections, but a number of labor, agriculture, natural resources, and finance measures. “Banning required rest breaks for construction workers in the Texas heat is deadly.”
The law’s passage has enraged workers’ advocates, who warn that it will result in even more heat-related deaths and illnesses in a state that already tallies the highest number of worker deaths due to high temperatures.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/during-an-extreme-texas-heat-wave-gov-abbott-ended-local-rules-requiring-water-breaks-for-workers/
Not to mention that the heat would be even more dangerous for him, the paralyzed SOB...but I'm sure he never gets out of the A/C for one second!
Without paid family leave, teachers stockpile sick days and aim for summer babies
Karli Myers had her son, Luke, in November, while working as a high school English teacher outside Tulsa, Okla. Her district didn't offer parental leave, so she used sick leave to get more than two months at home with Luke – sick leave she spent years collecting, with a baby in mind.
"So we accrue 10 sick days a year, so I essentially never took a sick day in seven years of teaching to be able to account for all of this," Myers said.
According to a survey by the National Council on Teacher Quality, less than one fifth of the nation's largest school districts offer paid parental leave for teachers. And only a handful of states guarantee it, including Delaware, Oregon and Georgia.
In many places, that leaves a teacher who wants to have a baby with few options: take limited unpaid leave, save up sick leave, hope for colleagues to share their sick leave, pay for their own substitute teacher, or try to time the birth for summer break.
But timing a pregnancy isn't an exact science. Jennifer Williams taught high school English in northeast Oklahoma for several years. During that time, she and her husband decided to try for a second child. That meant getting pregnant in September, for a summer birth, or not at all.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1183570525/paid-family-leave-teachers-summer-babies
The US, only developed country with NO paid family leave. Shameful.
A White Nationalist Took MDMA For a Drug Study and Renounced His Racist Views
A former white nationalist leader renounced his racist views after doing a single dose of MDMA as part of a study.
The man, identified as Brendan in a BBC article based on Rachel Nuwer’s book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, was outed for leading the Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a preppy white supremacist group best known for helping organize the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He subsequently lost his job and was cut off from family and friends, according to a report published in the Biological Psychiatry in June 2021.
In early 2020, Brendan joined a study run by University of Chicago researchers about how MDMA enhances the pleasantness of certain types of physical touch. At the time, he later told researchers, he was still holding onto his racist ideology—until he got high.
“I felt in that moment that all of my priorities in my life were just so messed up, the way I was interacting with people, particularly people who are close to me. But there was also an almost euphoric feeling, a feeling of love, and I concluded that was the sort of feeling that I should strive to permeate across the world,” said Brendan, who added he was radicalized by consuming pro-Donald Trump news, which led him to antisemitic content.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7eea8/a-white-nationalist-took-mdma-for-a-drug-study-and-renounced-his-racist-views
Interesting, possibly promising.
'I can't say my own name': The pain of language loss in families
Do you want to know a secret? A secret so shameful that I hid it for decades? It's only because of a chance conversation that I revealed it at all.
I was talking to a friend and colleague, Jacinta Nandi. She's an author, like me. Her father comes from northeastern India, like mine. Both of our fathers grew up speaking Bengali. Her father emigrated to England, and mine to Germany, where I grew up. Jacinta's father taught her a wealth of English puns – but, she says, "he never taught me a single word in Bengali". Like mine.
My father always spoke German to me. Of course I heard him speak Bengali: on the phone, or to the few Indian friends living in Germany. But I couldn't understand what he was saying. Even worse, my name, Mithu, is Bengali, but native Bengali speakers have told me that I don't pronounce it correctly.
Yes, that's right, I can't even say my own name.
Up until my conversation with Jacinta I'd thought there was something seriously wrong with me. What kind of child doesn't learn their father's language?
Many of us, as it turns out.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230608-what-happens-when-you-cant-speak-your-parents-native-language
Interesting article that touches on bilingualism. More of my thoughts below.
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