This was almost assuredly predictable considering Netanyahu's escalation of tensions under Trump.

The Netanyahu party went to far in the years of Trump. They ignored and oppressed the Palestinians and promoted a more aggressive Israel that would take on the region for greater expansion. They needed to address the issue of a more civil relationship with Palestine and did the opposite.

I am not surprised. I am confident Russia in Syria is happier today. The expansionist ambitions of Netanyahu were sure to begin a war all would regret.

A Palestine - Israel peace treaty and plans for permanent peace must begin..

June 13, 2021

Jerusalem - Israel’s parliament on Sunday narrowly approved a new coalition government, (click here) ending the historic 12-year rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sending the polarizing leader into the opposition.

Naftali Bennett, a former ally of Netanyahu turned rival, became prime minister after the 60-59 vote. Promising to try to heal a divided nation, Bennett will preside over a diverse and fragile coalition comprised of eight parties with deep ideological differences.

But the 71-year-old Netanyahu made clear he has no intention of exiting the political stage. “If it is destined for us to be in the opposition, we will do it with our backs straight until we topple this dangerous government and return to lead the country,” he said.

The vote, capping a stormy parliamentary session, ended a two-year cycle of political paralysis in which the country held four deadlocked elections. Those votes focused largely on Netanyahu’s divisive rule and his fitness to remain in office while on trial for corruption charges.

To his supporters, Netanyahu is a global statesman uniquely capable of leading the country through its many security challenges.

But to his critics, he has become a polarizing and autocratic leader who used divide-and-rule tactics to aggravate the many rifts in Israeli society. Those include tensions between Jews and Arabs, and within the Jewish majority between his religious and nationalist base and his more secular and dovish opponents....

The IAEA needs to require comment from scientists for their opinions.

It isn't that tritium will be released in water, it is HOW MUCH TRITIUM will be released in the water.

Tritium emits a very weak beta particle. (click here) People are exposed to small amounts of tritium every day, since it is widely dispersed in the environment and in the food chain. Tritium primarily enters the body when people swallow tritiated water, inhale tritium as a gas in the air, or absorb it through their skin. Once tritium enters the body, it disperses quickly and is uniformly distributed throughout the body. Since tritium is almost always found as water, it goes directly into soft tissues and organs. Tritium is excreted through the urine within a month or so after ingestion. Organically bound tritium (tritium that is incorporated in organic compounds) can remain in the body for a longer period.

May 7, 2021
By Bianca Nogrady

The earthquake and tsunami (click here) that struck the east coast of Japan on 11 March 2011 led to the catastrophic failure of cooling systems at the power station. In the subsequent decade, 1.25 million tonnes of seawater have been pumped through the damaged units to stop the molten fuel debris from overheating, and pumping continues. The contaminated water has been treated to remove radioactive material and stored in more than 1,000 steel tanks on the site.

The release of treated waste water is part of the standard operation of nuclear power stations. However, Vives I Batlle says that the huge quantities amassed at Fukushima, and the high original concentration of radionuclides in the water through its direct contact with the melted reactor, do mark this situation as unusual....

This was a fantastic photo in the Washington Post (click here)

The elephants traveled a great distance to find a place to be safe. I particularly found the way the youngest elephant has situated in the picture truly a statement about how precious it was to the group. 

So, amazing to find our values innate in the values of animals.

There are too many guns on the street.

I did a review on this blog years ago, perhaps even a decade ago, comparing the approach to gun violence and safety in other countries vs. the USA. The dynamic I spoke to then is the same today. Where the NRA has promoted gun ownership based on "fear of the other" there is an increase in gun deaths.

June 13, 2021
By Bill Hutchinson

At least four major U.S. cities were reeling from an onslaught of mass shootings (click here) over the weekend that left at least 39 people wounded, five dead and police officials alarmed that the surge in gun violence is a prelude to a bloody summer as the nation emerges from the pandemic.

Police in Austin, Cleveland, Chicago and Savannah were all investigating on Sunday mass shootings that erupted over a six-hour streak that began around 9 p.m. on Friday and spilled over into Saturday morning....

There isn't any deep-seated social problem. Where there is guns in abundance, there is a politician pushing it because his wealthy donor wants a quid pro quo. That is exactly what the NRA counts on, no different than the petroleum industry, when they give money away to politicians they expect quid pro quo. In the case of guns, there is a culture of guns and death that becomes part of the social dialogue.

January 3, 2019

By Neil Weinberg, Polly Mosendz and Bill Allison

When it comes to guns, (click here) Brazil and the U.S. have a few things in common. They rank first and second, respectively, in the number of citizens shot to death each year among the 195 countries that the American Medical Association tracks. The political dialogue in each country is dominated by a charismatic leader who says the answer to rampant violence is fewer gun laws and more guns. And both of those leaders—newly sworn-in President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and U.S. President Donald Trump—are big fans of America’s National Rifle Association.

Bolsonaro made gun rights one of the main planks in his campaign platform, liberally salting his speeches with NRA talking points: “Guns are our guarantee of freedom,” he said during an event in the southern city of Curitiba last March. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” his son Carlos posted on Facebook.

His victory shows that a core NRA principle—that armed citizens are safe citizens—is gaining political and popular traction far beyond America’s shores. Founded 148 years ago in New York by two Union Army vets to promote marksmanship, the group describes itself as the “oldest civil rights organization in America.” Its public events and messaging are often draped in the Stars and Stripes. Yet for all the patriotic symbolism, many of the forces shaping the NRA these days are distinctly non-American....

The terror that ran through the hearts of the American people during the global pandemic drove gun sales that are absolutely ridiculous. The graph below only goes up to 2016 for the USA.

April 11, 2018

Latin America boasts just 8% of the world’s population, (click here) but it accounts for 38% of its murders. The number of criminal killings in the region came to around 140,000 people last year, more than have been lost in wars around the world in almost all of the years this century. And the crime is becoming ever more common.

Yet the continent also has some of the biggest improvers. In many Colombian cities murder used to be the leading cause of death. The rate in Cali in 1994 was 124 per 100,000, four times worse than New York at its most lethal. The mayor was a surgeon who realised that murder was like a disease. Following an approach pioneered in New York and copied across the rich world, he set up “violence observatories” to study precisely how people, places and behaviour led to killings. They found that, even amid a raging drugs war, most murders resulted from drunken brawls. Restrictions on alcohol and guns helped cut murders by 35%. Other Colombian cities tweaked Cali’s evidence-based policing to suit their own needs—Medellín, for example, targeted drug cartels. Police and judicial reform, and aid from the United States, were crucial, too. In 2017 Colombia’s murder rate was 24 per 100,000, the lowest for 42 years....

8 April 2021

America's gun culture in charts (click here)

China has lots of rivers and flood plain, sea level rise is not a good idea.

June 1, 2021

By Global Times

China entered the main flooding season (click here) from Tuesday after experiencing a series of heavy rains in South China since May, said the Ministry of Water Resources (MOWR).

A new round of heavy rainfall will be seen in the southern parts of the country from Tuesday to Friday, which may cause floods exceeding warning levels in the Xiangjiang River in Central China's Hunan Province, and four rivers in East China's Jiangxi and Fujian Provinces and South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, it said.

Larger floods may occur in some small and medium-sized rivers in areas with rainstorms.

In Jiangxi, the water level of Poyang Lake, known as the "Kidney of Yangtze River," has reached 18 meters, approaching the 19-meter flood warning level, more than a month earlier than previous years, according to observation from the Institute of Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Monday.

South China's Guangdong Province launched a level-IV emergency response to flood prevention, also raising the alert for risks of waterlogging, on Monday. Twelve hydrometric stations in the province recorded heavy rain of more than 250 millimeters, with the largest cumulative rainfall being 476 millimeters, from Sunday night to Monday morning.

In Hunan, local water resources authorities and the Hydrological Bureau of the Yangtze River jointly carried out an emergency monitoring exercise at the section of the river along the Xiangjiang River on May 26 in response to flood warnings, said MOWR on Monday.

The exercise was aimed at simulating a situation in which heavy rains cause excessive floods to occur in the lower reaches of the Xiangjiang River, leading to a bank collapse that eventually leads to water flooding into cities and causing pollution incidents.

The water level of the Three Gorges Reservoir was expected to fall under the 145-meter limit set to control flooding before June 10 as planned, an official from MOWR said on Thursday, noting that 47 reservoirs along the Yangtze River basin have made preparations to relieve floods, most of which had been discharged to full levels....

Believe me, Moscow Mitch has an agenda and it isn't income equality.

2060 is too late to achieve needed measures to deter any further degradation of Earth.

October 15, 2021
By Lindsay Maizland

China’s environmental crisis (click here), the result of decades of rapid industrialization, not only threatens the health and livelihoods of the country’s 1.4 billion people but also the global fight against climate change. As the world’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, China suffers from notoriously bad air pollution. Its carbon-intensive industries have caused additional environmental challenges, including water scarcity and soil contamination. And, like the rest of the world, China will face increasingly harsh consequences of climate change in the coming decades, including flooding and droughts.

In response, Beijing has implemented policies to curb emissions and stem further degradation, such as by signing the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate and pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060. However, following through won’t be easy, experts say, as the government struggles to maintain economic growth; ease public discontent; and overcome tensions with the United States, the second-largest emitter....

The events of January 6, 2021 MUST be brought to justice. This is real. It needs to end. NOW!

June 11, 2021
By Connor Radnovich

Salem, Ore. - The Oregon House of Representatives (click here) ousted Republican Rep. Mike Nearman Thursday night, the first time in state history a sitting Oregon lawmaker has been expelled.

The tally was 59-1, with the only vote against coming from Nearman himself. He showed no contrition during brief comments on the floor of the House.

Nearman was removed for the disorderly behavior of allowing rioters into the closed Capitol building during a special legislative session on Dec. 21, 2020.

His actions led to dozens of people — some armed and wearing body armor — gaining access to the Capitol, thousands of dollars in damage and six injured Salem and Oregon State police officers.

"Colleagues, it couldn't be any clearer. Rep. Mike Nearman intentionally allowed armed protestors, occupiers, to illegally enter the building during the peak of the pandemic," Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, said on the floor of the House. "He coordinated with his supporters and extremist groups and then opened a door to let them in."...

When the axis of the planet shifts so does the travel of direct rays from the sun. It effects the seasons and Earth's delicate balance.

April 23, 2021
By Damian Carrington

The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating (click here) has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.

The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.

In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions....

The circumstances of a very changing Earth on it's rotation around the sun is about as serious as it can get. I don't know what has to happen next to get the entire human population to take themselves seriously. The Stratosphere is shrinking and the axis of Earth is changing. It is time to pay attention.

Doesn't Europe import more coal than it mines and the import is from China?

June 13, 2021

By Dulcie Lee and Joseph Lee

World leaders meeting in Cornwall (click here) are to adopt strict measures on coal-fired power stations as part of the battle against climate change.

The G7 group will promise to move away from coal plants, unless they have technology to capture carbon emissions.

It comes as Sir David Attenborough warned that humans could be "on the verge of destabilising the entire planet".

He said G7 leaders faced the most important decisions in human history.

The coal announcement came from the White House, which said it was the first time the leaders of wealthy nations had committed to keeping the projected global temperature rise to 1.5C.

That requires a range of urgent policies, chief among them being phasing out coal burning unless it includes carbon capture technology....

March 24, 2021

By Kira Taylor

Half of Europe’s 324 coal-fuelled power plants (click here) have either closed or announced a retirement date before 2030, it emerged on Monday (22 March) when French power utility EDF announced the 162nd plant will close in 2022.

EDF’s planned closure of the West Burton coal-fuelled power plant in the north of England – one of two remaining in Britain – means half of Europe’s coal plants will have closed by 2030.

“We are in the endgame for the coal industry in Europe,” said Kathrin Gutmann, campaign director at Europe Beyond Coal, an alliance of civil society groups campaigning to phase-out coal.

“After years of unrelenting decline, half of Europe’s coal fleet is history. Governments, energy companies and financial institutions must now plan for a 2030 or earlier coal exit, end all funding flows to coal and fossil gas, and instead, direct their support to sustainable renewables, and the just transition of impacted communities,” she added.

Coal produces the most CO2 per kilogram of all fossil fuels, producing nearly double the amount natural gas does. It also causes air pollution by releasing particulates when it burns.

Phasing out the use of coal is key to tackling climate change. Last week Mike Bloomberg, the UN’s special envoy for climate ambition and solutions, wrote an opinion piece for CNN with EU climate chief Frans Timmermans calling to end coal subsidies world-wide.

“If we want to tackle climate change and ensure people’s health and well-being, we have to accelerate our move away from coal. Ending our dependence on coal will save lives,” they wrote....

Moscow Mitch is in Trump's back pocket.

May 28, 2021
By Greg Sargent

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (click here) just staged a last-ditch effort to persuade Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to reconsider his opposition to a commission to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Alaska Republican appealed to her Kentucky colleague’s conscience.

In an extraordinary nine-minute session with reporters, Murkowski called on McConnell to stop placing “short-term political gain” before the need to grapple with what really happened on Jan. 6. At stake are the “principles of democracy we hold so dear,” which must be valued “beyond just one election cycle.”...

Maybe there is something else the Alaskan Senator has in common with President Biden. They both love the US Constitution and Earth without excessive atmospheric heat.

In three years time, the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica is breaking up.

First, the terminus was gone and resulted in the complete melting of the glacier as it hit the far warner water with every move to the ocean. Now, the glacier itself is breaking up and will melt far sooner than it has been melting. The more cracks in a glacier, the more warm air it is exposed to. This is a similar process that Greenland Ice is undergoing, except, this is the southern cap of Earth and not a glacier in the North Atlantic. Antarctica is more stable than Greenland because it's surroundings are far colder than the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic Ocean is down to new annual ice and not much more. It is succumbing to the heat in the troposphere created by anthropogenic greenhouse gas pollution.

June 12, 2021

By University of Washington

...These glaciers have attracted attention in recent decades (click here) as their ice shelves thinned because warmer ocean currents melted the ice’s underside. From the 1990s to 2009, Pine Island Glacier’s motion toward the sea accelerated from 2.5 kilometers per year to 4 kilometers per year (1.5 miles per year to 2.5 miles per year). The glacier’s speed then stabilized for almost a decade.

Results show that what’s happened more recently is a different process, Joughin said, related to internal forces on the glacier.

From 2017 to 2020, Pine Island’s ice shelf lost one-fifth of its area in a few dramatic breaks that were captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, operated by the European Space Agency on behalf of the European Union. The researchers analyzed images from January 2015 to March 2020 and found that the recent changes on the ice shelf were not caused by processes directly related to ocean melting.

“The ice shelf appears to be ripping itself apart due to the glacier’s acceleration in the past decade or two,” Joughin said....

June 11, 2021

By Seth Borenstein

...That ice shelf has retreated by 12 miles (20 kilometers) (click here) between 2017 and 2020, according to a study in Friday’s Science Advances The crumbling shelf was caught on time-lapse video from a European satellite that takes pictures every six days.

The tearing apart are crevasses in the ice becoming larger both due to added hot air exposure and the weight of the glacier is no longer supported by the terminus. I spoke to this years ago on the blog. The supporting ice structures will melt and finally, the ice cap will melt and fall into the oceans causing coastal disruption. These are huge ice structures at either end of the planet and they are melting and becoming circulating water for as long as the ocean circulation continues.

DO NOT CONTINUE THE POLITICS OF THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY.

“You can see stuff just tearing apart,” said study lead author Ian Joughin, a University of Washington glaciologist. “So it almost looks like the speed-up itself is weakening the glacier. ... And so far we’ve lost maybe 20% of the main shelf.”...

 

Manchin says he is going to make "the place" (US Senate) work. Not on our time.

The US Senate with Moscow Mitch leading the way with obstruction after obstruction is not working. Manchin is destroying the Democratic agenda in his attempt at bipartisanship. There are members of "the party" that aren't interested in the USA Constitution and Manchin thinks he is going to bring about bipartisanship? It will never happen because Moscow Mitch is going to prove he is still in charge.

June 13, 2021
By Daniel Dale

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (click here) was asked Tuesday where he stands on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a Democratic bill that aims to prevent states from implementing racially discriminatory voting laws.

McConnell's response, in which he expressed opposition to the bill, omitted a bunch of key context, got at least one fact wrong, and misleadingly described a top Democrat's comments on the issue.

McConnell's office declined to comment on the record for this article....

Come on, Joe. You know better than to play footsie with Moscow Mitch.

It's Sunday Night

The issues of today for women and minorities have not changed in over 60 years. All these issues of equality and climate have been stalled over and over again. There is no surprise that finally, a man in the Oval Office is speaking up for those that elected him to bring about EQUALITY and CONSCIENCE to our society.

Women have done all they could including burning bras and nothing was resolved. Then came President Obama and now his former Vice President, currently President Biden, has the helm and all is somewhat the same, but, different this time. The folks form the 1960s remember all the ATTEMPTS at equality and they are finished with attempts and want results. 

Enough of the filibuster. As if the obstruction isn't enough for Moscow McConnell, now Republican aides are saying McConnell is attempting to divide Democrats.

...Senate Republican aides say McConnell (click here) is daring Biden to split with progressives who want to shut down the bipartisan talks and pile as much of Biden’s $4.1 trillion spending agenda as possible into a budget reconciliation package, which under complicated Senate rules could bypass a filibuster and avoid the need for GOP support — if Democrats stick together.

One Republican aide who requested anonymity to discuss strategy said McConnell’s “posture all along has been he’s willing to work with Biden if he’s moderate.”

“The question is whether Democrats are willing to swallow that and that’s unclear at this point,” the GOP aide added....

Where Do We Go From Here by Deborah Cox

When you're in love
Some things you take for granted
Until someone pulls it apart
And leaves you with half of your heart
How do I trade
The best I had for less
Without giving up
Should I slowly accept that we'll be no more than just friends

How do I know
When to let go
I know what I'm feeling inside
But part of me still wants to try

So tell me
Where do we go from here
Why's my heart filled with so much fear
When all that you are
Is all I need and more

There's no winning bets
The battle's just begun
I know it's over
But I still feel the same
You'll always remain number one

'Cause letting go
More and so much
I know what I'm feeling inside
But part of me still wants to try

So tell me
Where do we go from here
Why's my heart filled with so much fear
When all that you are
Is…