The following are some headlines from today’s news stories in the links below the fold.
- Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950s
- Climate crisis to shrink G7 economies twice as much as Covid-19, says research
- Israeli police stop far-right march through Jerusalem
- What's really behind the chip shortage and when will it end?
- Chinese birth-control policy could cut millions of Uyghur births, report finds
- Airline bosses demand UK-US travel corridor
- India to give adults free COVID shots after surge in infections
- What’s behind Ireland’s support for Palestine?
- Aducanumab: US approves new Alzheimer's drug
- Canada: 4 people killed in suspected hate crime in London, Ontario
- Is there a housing bubble?
- U.S. Has Recovered Some Of The Millions Paid In Ransom To Colonial Pipeline Hackers
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
The Guardian
Joe Biden may be pressing for 2021 to be a transformational year in tackling the climate crisis, but Republicans arrayed in opposition to his agenda have dug in around a unifying rallying theme – that the fossil fuel industry should be protected at almost any cost.
For many experts and environmentalists, the Republican stance is a shockingly retrograde move that flies in the face of efforts to fight global heating and resembles a head in the sand approach to the realities of a changing American economy.
In a recent letter sent to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, more than a dozen Republican state treasurers accused the administration of pressuring banks to not lend to coal, oil and gas companies, adding that such a move would “eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country” in order to appease the US president’s “radical political preferences”.
The letter raised the extraordinary possibility of Republican-led states penalizing banks that refuse to fund projects that worsen the climate crisis by pulling assets from them. Riley Moore, treasurer of the coal heartland state of West Virginia, said “undue pressure” was being put on banks by the Biden administration that could end financing of fossil fuels and “devastate West Virginia and put thousands of families out of work.
The Guardian
The economies of rich countries will shrink by twice as much as they did in the Covid-19 crisis if they fail to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions, according to research.
The G7 countries – the world’s biggest industrialised economies – will lose 8.5% of GDP a year, or nearly $5tn wiped off their economies, within 30 years if temperatures rise by 2.6C, as they are likely to on the basis of government pledges and policies around the world, according to research from Oxfam and the Swiss Re Institute.
The economies of G7 nations contracted by about 4.2% on average in the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic losses from the climate crisis by 2050 would be roughly on the scale of suffering a similar crisis twice every year, according to the research. The UK’s economy would lose 6.5% a year by 2050 on current policies and projections, compared with 2.4% if the goals of the Paris climate agreement are met.
The Guardian
Israeli police have blocked a planned march by Jewish nationalists through Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem after a similar parade last month played a key role in building the tensions that led to the latest Gaza conflict.
In a statement, police said a permit for a different time or route might be considered.
The decision came as Israel faced an anxious week ahead, with an opposition coalition pushing forward in its attempts to oust the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The fragile and ideologically diverse new government may not be voted on in the Knesset until 14 June, said the parliament speaker and Netanyahu ally Yariv Levin on Monday, giving the prime minister more time to knock it down.
C/NET
The world runs on microchips. Not just the elaborate ones at the heart of your phone or laptop but mostly a lot of ordinary ones that you aren't even aware of. They enable the power windows in your car and the timer in your coffee maker. But a chip shortage is putting a crimp in the production of all kinds of products, from dog washing booths to pickup trucks. Now what?
"A year ago people stopped buying just about anything" except home technology, notes CNET senior reporter Shara Tibken. "Now demand is coming back. What we're seeing is just about everything electronic is having trouble getting a supply" of chips. The chip industry's fabrication plants or "fabs" aren't well-suited to whipsawing demand.
"These are gargantuan battleships. They're not factories you take offline and back online on a whim," says CNET senior reporter Stephen Shankland. Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung are regarded as the big three -- but an array of lesser-known chip companies can hold up the production of products even if Intel or TSMC chips are available.
BBC
Chinese birth-control policies could reduce the ethnic minority population in southern Xinjiang by up to a third over the next 20 years, according to new analysis by a German researcher.
The analysis concluded that regional policies could cut between 2.6 and 4.5 million minority births in that time.
China has been accused by some Western nations of genocide in Xinjiang, partly through forced birth-control measures.
China denies the allegations, saying birth-rate declines have other causes.
The new study, by researcher Adrian Zenz, is the first such peer-reviewed academic paper on the long-term population impact of China's crackdown on the Uyghurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang.
It found that under China's birth-control policies in the region, the population of ethnic minorities in southern Xinjiang would reach somewhere between 8.6 and 10.5 million by 2040, compared to 13.1 million projected by Chinese researchers before Beijing's crackdown.
BBC
Airline bosses are urging the US and UK to allow travel to restart ahead of the G7 meeting in Cornwall.
The bosses of all airlines that offer UK-US flights and Heathrow Airport issued a joint call for a trans-Atlantic travel "corridor" on Monday.
The group said it would be "essential to igniting economic recovery" in a statement.
Nearly all passengers from the UK are currently banned from travelling to the US.
Al Jazeera
India will provide free COVID-19 vaccines to all adults, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said, in an effort to rein in a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and led to the world’s second-highest tally of infections.
Modi’s announcement came on Monday after weeks of criticism of a bungled vaccine rollout that has covered fewer than 5 percent of India’s estimated adult population of 950 million.
Health experts have warned that vaccination is the only way to protect lives from a feared third wave of infections after a surge in April-May overwhelmed hospitals in the big cities and in the vast hinterland.
India is the second worst-hit nation after the United States with just below 29 million confirmed COVID-19 infections.
Al Jazeera
After Abraham Aljamal Phelan moved to Dublin in the late 1980s, many customers at his grocery store, where the shelves were adorned with fresh figs and olives, were up to date with the latest news from his native Palestine.
During their exchanges about food, culture and history, his stories of home found sympathetic ears.
“They relate to what’s going on, for what we are going through, they relate to it in Ireland because of their history,” he told Al Jazeera.
Dublin may lie 4,000km (2,485 miles) from Jerusalem on the map, but in the Irish political imagination, Palestine feels much closer, with both perceived as sharing a history of struggle against colonialism and oppression.
Ireland’s Parliament voted unanimously last week to condemn Israel’s “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land in the occupied territories – the first European Union member state to do so.
DW News
The drug aducanumab has been approved in the US. It effectively combats the amyloid beta plaques in the brain that are indicative of Alzheimer's disease. But does it also slow down memory loss?
Great hopes in Alzheimer's research are currently pinned on the drug aducanumab. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday approved the drug, The European Medicines Agency (EMA) could approve it by the end of the year.
The drug has shown the ability to effectively remove harmful amyloid beta plaques (known as A-beta for short) from the brain. But debate continues in the scientific community: Is this also enough to stop memory decline?
A dilemma: Patients would have to take the drug long before they show the first symptoms of dementia.
DW News
Four members of an Ontario family were killed in a hit and run in Canada. Police suspect the attacker targeted them because of their Muslim faith.
A man struck and killed four pedestrians with his vehicle in a suspected hate crime, police in the Canadian city of London, Ontario, announced Monday.
"We believe this was an intentional act and that the victims of this horrific incident were targeted," Police Chief Steve Williams said. "We believe the victims were targeted because of their Islamic faith."
"We understand that this event may cause fear and anxiety in the community, particuarly in the Muslim community, in any community targeted by hate," he added.
London Mayor Ed Holder released a statement Monday following the collision late Sunday, saying:
Let me be clear: This was an act of mass murder, perpetrated against Muslims ... rooted in unspeakable hatred. This act of unspeakable hatred, the act of Islamaphobia, must be followed by acts of compassion.
Witnesses told the Global News network they saw the vehicle come over the median strip and added it looked like it had come from the other side of the road.
Vox
More than half of homes in the US are selling above list price. People are playing a lottery to see if they’ll win the honor of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a home. The Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index looks like a rocket ship launching into space. You’d be forgiven for flashing back to the aughts but listen closer, that’s not Fearless playing, it’s Fearless (Taylor’s version).
There’s a growing sense of unease. Renters at the lower end of the market have seen their rents rise in some places even as they’re more likely to be suffering the economic harms of the last year. Would-be homeowners are furious as they lose bidding war after bidding war, looking for someone to blame as they watch their peers land a home and lock in a low mortgage rate. And homeowners are riding high for now, exhaling sighs of relief that they made it into the exclusive club and eagerly watching their wealth skyrocket, worried about what might happen to change that.
NPR
The government has recovered a "majority" of the millions of dollars paid in ransom to hackers behind the cyberattack that prompted last month's shutdown of Colonial Pipeline, officials announced Monday.
"The Department of Justice has found and recaptured the majority of the ransom Colonial paid to the DarkSide network in the wake of last month's ransomware attack," Lisa Monaco, U.S. deputy attorney general, said during a press conference.
Monaco said the money has been recovered by the department's recently launched Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force. The task force was created as part of the government's response to an "epidemic" of ransomware attacks, which Monaco said have "increased in both scope and sophistication in the last year." It is the task force's first operation of this kind.
NPR Author interview
The old saying holds that history is written by the winners.
A new book explores the life of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who, through his writing, made history even though he lost. Harlan was on the court in 1896 when it endorsed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson and was the lone justice who voted no. He wrote the only dissenting opinion.
"His dissent was largely invisible in the white community, but it was read aloud in Black churches. It was published in Black newspapers. This was the one link of hope that white people might support them and see the law through their eyes," said Peter Canellos, author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero, in an interview on Morning Edition.
It took generations, but eventually the dissenter won. The court ruled differently in 1954.
Harlan, a white man from Kentucky, grew up before the Civil War in a family that enslaved people.
"One of the great mysteries of Harlan's career is that he grew up in such a family and yet became the leading defender of Black rights of his generation," Canellos. Part of the reason might have been a Black man who grew up with him, widely believed to have been his half-brother.
From Behind a PayWall ...
New York Times
GUATEMALA CITY — During her first foreign trip as vice president, Kamala Harris said the United States would bolster investigations into corruption and human trafficking in Guatemala, while also delivering a clear, blunt message to undocumented migrants hoping to reach the United States: “Do not come.”
Ms. Harris issued the warning during a trip that was an early yet pivotal test for a vice president currently tasked with the complex challenge of breaking a cycle of migration from Central America by investing in a region plagued by corruption, violence and poverty.
While President Biden campaigned on unwinding some of the Trump administration’s border restrictions, allowing migrants to apply for asylum at the U.S. border, Ms. Harris amplified the White House’s current stance that most of those who crossed the border would be turned away and would instead need to find legal pathways or protection closer to their home countries.
Washington Post
In the coronavirus pandemic’s early weeks, in neuropathology departments around the world, scientists wrestled with a question: Should they cut open the skulls of patients who died of covid-19 and extract their brains?
Autopsy staff at Columbia University in New York were hesitant. Sawing into bone creates dust, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued a warning about the bodies of covid patients — airborne debris from autopsies could be an infectious hazard.
But as more patients were admitted and more began to die, researchers decided to “make all the efforts we could to start collecting the brain tissue,” Columbia neuropathologist Peter D. Canoll said.
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