USA: Smoke and flames engulf West Coast as blazes force evacuation of 12% of Oregon's population

The California governor said, “We don't have a fire season anymore. It starts in the beginning of the year and goes all year around and so it has created, of course, big challenges."

That isn’t Gavin Newsom, the current Democratic governor, talking. It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was the Republican governor in 2008. It didn’t make the relentless climate science deniers filling the ranks of his party’s elite happy when he dared blame the situation at least partly on climate change. Scientists have no doubt. As apocalyptic wildfires in California, Oregon, Washington, and other Western states burn millions of acres, destroy thousands of structures, kill scores of people, blanket the air with unhealthy smoke, and force the evacuation of dozens of communities, denial has become ever less tenable and the not-so-distant future ever more worrisome.

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Smoke and flames engulf West Coast as blazes force evacuation of 12% of Oregon's population

USA - A Nation Divided: The Republican Revolt Against COVID Science and Common Sense - by Jonathan Chait

Last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America.

It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined.

During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.” The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.

Our former peer nations are now operating in a political context Americans would find unfathomable. Every other wealthy nation in the world has successfully beaten back the disease, at least significantly, and at least for now. New Zealand’s health minister was forced to resign after allowing two people who had tested positive for COVID-19 to attend a funeral. The Italian Parliament heckled Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte when he briefly attempted to remove his mask to deliver a speech. In May — around the time Trump cheered demonstrators into the streets to protest stay-at-home orders — Boris Johnson’s top adviser set off a massive national scandal, complete with multiple calls for his resignation, because he’d been caught driving to visit his parents during lockdown. If a Trump official had done the same, would any newspaper even have bothered to publish the story?

It is difficult for us Americans to imagine living in a country where violations so trivial (by our standards) provoke such an uproar. And if you’re tempted to see for yourself what it looks like, too bad — the E.U. has banned U.S. travelers for health reasons.

The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.

For the compledt report click on this link:
The Republican Revolt Against COVID Science and Common Sense

Russian Election Meddling: Everything We Learned About Russian Election Interference From Facebook, Twitter, and Google - by Kate Conger and Dell Cameron

Representatives for Twitter, Facebook, and Google testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee today about Russian interference on their platforms. Here’s what we learned:

We’ve known for a while that Russian trolls spent $100,000 to promote ads on Facebook during the 2016 election, and we learned this week that posts created by these trolls reached 126 million Americans—more than a third of the US population. But Facebook has continuously downplayed the impact of Russian spending on its platform, arguing that real political campaigns spend far more on advertising. During today’s hearing, Facebook’s vice president of AR and VR and former VP of advertising Andrew Bosworth tweeted, “Legit political ad spend was three orders of magnitude more than the $100k here. Similar story for organic content.”

However, Sen. Richard Burr demonstrated today that Russian-funded ads were influential even though they weren’t expensive. He showed ads sponsored by two troll-backed Facebook pages, “Heart of Texas” which was liked by more than 250,000 people and “United Muslims of America” which was liked by more than 320,000 people, that promoted competing protests outside an Islamic center in Houston, Texas. The ads spurred a real-life protest.

According to news reports, roughly a dozen anti-Muslim protesters and more than 50 counter-protesters heeded the call. “Establishing these two competing groups, paying for the ads and causing this disruptive event in Houston cost Russia about two hundred dollars,” Burr said.

If Google, Facebook and Twitter don’t step up their game, Feinstein said, Congress would step in to regulate them. “You’ve created these platforms and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will,” she said.

Read more: Everything We Learned About Russian Election Interference From Facebook, Twitter, and Google

US Infrastructure: Decaying infrastructure taking a toll on America

America's infrastructure is in a state of crisis. Roads and train lines are old, dangerous and cost the country billions of dollars in economic growth. Trump wants to repair damages but he is at the mercy of investors.

The summer of hell began for New Yorkers last Monday. Beginning at four o'clock in the afternoon people hurried home from work, clogging midtown Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station.

Over 600,000 people trek to Manhattan daily from faraway places like New Jersey and Long Island, entering the city via Penn Station. More people transit through Penn Station than all three of New York's airports: JFK, LaGuardia and Newark. Yet on Monday many tracks were shut down for the summer so the city can begin tackling urgently needed repairs.

During his campaign, Trump promised trillions of dollars to tackle this issue. Yet a look at the budget says otherwise: The government will spend only $200 billion on the infrastructure package. The remaining $800 billion must come from states and municipalities - no major problem for wealthy states. But the rural areas remain in disrepair.

Decaying infrastructure taking a toll on America | Business | DW | 17.07.2017

Global Economy: IMF cuts 2017 growth forecasts for UK and US - by Larry Elliott

The International Monetary Fund has cut its growth forecast for the UK economy this year after a weak performance in the first three months of 2017.

In its first downgrade for the UK since the EU referendum in June last year, the IMF said it expected the British economy to expand by 1.7% this year, 0.3 points lower than when it last made predictions in April.

The Fund raised its forecasts for the UK after the Brexit vote as a result of the much stronger than envisaged activity in the second half of 2016. In October 2016, it pencilled in growth of 1.1% for 2017, raising this forecast to 1.5% in January this year and to 2% in April.

Maurice Obstfeld, the IMF’s economic counsellor, pointed to a marked change in early 2017. He said the UK’s growth forecast had been lowered based on its “tepid performance” so far this year, adding: “The ultimate impact of Brexit on the United Kingdom remains unclear.”

The IMF left its growth forecast for the UK in 2018 unchanged at 1.5% but said one key risk facing the global economy was that the Brexit talks would end in failure.

It contrasted its gloomier outlook for the UK with a rosier forecast for the rest of the EU, with 2017 growth upgrades for the four biggest eurozone countries – Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Germany has been revised up by 0.2 points to 1.8%, France by 0.1 points to 1.5%, while Italy and Spain have both been revised up by 0.5 points to 1.3% and 3.1% respectively.

The Fund produces a world economic outlook in April and October to coincide with its spring and annual meetings, but provides updates in January and July.

Launching the report in Kuala Lumpur, Obstfeld said the IMF had left its global growth forecasts unchanged at 3.5% in 2017 and 3.6% for next year, noting that the stronger performance by the eurozone, China and Japan had been offset by weaker performances elsewhere.

“The recovery in global growth that we projected in April is on a firmer footing; there is now no question mark over the world economy’s gain in momentum,” Obstfeld said.

He added that Donald Trump’s failure so far to push through his promised package of tax cuts had dampened US growth prospects.

“From a global growth perspective, the most important downgrade is the United States,” he said.

“Over the next two years, US growth should remain above its longer-run potential growth rate. But we have reduced our forecasts for both 2017 and 2018 to 2.1% because near-term US fiscal policy looks less likely to be expansionary than we believed in April.”

Read more:IMF cuts 2017 growth forecasts for UK and US | Business | The Guardian

TTIP: Signing EU-US TTIP Free Trade Deal Impossible Without EU-Canada CETA

The EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free-trade deal can only be signed, if the European Union and Canada seal their Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a source in the EU Parliament told RIA Novosti Monday.

The European Council failed to approve CETA due to Wallonia, a region in Belgium, not giving the country its approval to sign the agreement. The Walloon government voted against the trade deal for fear it would water down EU labor, consumer and environmental protections, and give too much power to multinationals.

Read moreL Signing EU-US TTIP Free Trade Deal Impossible Without EU-Canada CETA

USA: Ignoring science isn't a Republican problem. It's an American problem.- by Dan Rather

How many times have you heard that lately from politicians who are trying to duck questions about important scientific topics like climate change and vaccines?  So many times that it's even become a Wikipedia entry.

But what does that phrase even mean? I'm not a cardiologist.

So I go to one to have my heart checked. I'm not an electrician, so I hire one to rewire my house. I trust people who have training in those fields to give me advice on important things. You're right, Mr. or Ms. Presidential Candidate, you are not a scientist. So, why won't you listen to the men and women who are?

I grew up in an age where children were crippled and died from diseases like polio and measles, and now we have Donald Trump irresponsibly repeating long-discredited links between vaccines and autism. It's an offense to reason. Equally, so was the reaction of the two doctors on stage, Rand Paul and Ben Carson.

Sure, if you read their words, they support vaccines, yet raise questions about the timing of giving vaccines that is without scientific merit. Moreover, their tone is apologetic and equivocal. About vaccines! These are medical advances that have done more to alleviate human suffering than anything ever conjured by the ingenuity of the human mind.

The stated position of almost every Republican candidate flies in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. The only "debate" over climate change in essentially the entire world occurs in the United States. I can hear some Democrats I know thinking this anti-science farce is a Republican problem.

But when I talk to scientists about this frightening trend, they don't just mention climate change. They bring up things like Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs); most of the anti-GMO heat comes from the political left.

If you excoriate climate change deniers along the lines that there is overwhelming scientific evidence for manmade climate change, you can't ignore the fact that that same scientific consensus exists on the safety of GMOs. You can argue that GMOs aren't as important a problem as climate change. And that may be true. But the anti-science spirit remains the same, and that is dangerous. This isn't to say we can't have a debate about how we use GMOs or how we respond to climate change. We just can’t ignore the science.

Vaccines, climate change, GMOs. If you are a Republican reading this you are likely to criticize me for at least one of these issues; if you are a Democrat, maybe another.

Why has science become political? Many intelligent people have written about this issue and surely there are many factors — loss of faith in authority, suspicion of big corporations, a general political balkanization. I am in no position to judge the relative influence of these components. But let me add another on which I feel qualified to weigh in on: my own profession, the press.

It's not just that we don't understand the facts, or that we hype certain "advances" that are more PR than science, or that we shy away from covering important stories because they're "too complicated." It's that we don't even do a good job explaining how scientific research works. We don't understand how data should be analyzed or what a scientific consensus actually means. And with cuts to newsrooms and "specialized beats," it's only getting worse. There are some science news outlets and individual reporters at media companies big and small that do a great job.  If I were to generously grade the "mainstream media" on science coverage, I would give us a C -..

Read more: Ignoring science isn't a Republican problem. It's an American problem.