SACRAMENTO, Calif — California state officials have released a final rule to reduce the risk that endangered whales and sea turtles will get entangled in commercial Dungeness crab gear. The new regulations, which go into effect Nov. 1, were prompted by steep annual increases in reported whale entanglements and a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity.
“It’s good to see California finally taking whale entanglements seriously,” said Kristen Monsell, the Center’s oceans legal director. “This new system should reduce the risk crab gear poses to whales and sea turtles. But we’re disappointed that officials didn’t do more to encourage a conversion to ropeless gear, which is the only way to truly eliminate the threat of entanglement for these ocean animals.”
Entanglements in the thick ropes that are connected to heavy commercial Dungeness crab traps injure and kill whales and sea turtles. The ropes cut into the animals’ flesh…
Conor McClory and Sophie Curran found the metallic tube along Bloody Foreland in Gweedore, County Donegal on Sunday.
When the crew and passengers of the nuclear-powered icebreaker ship 50 Years of Victory reached the north pole in 2018, they placed a time capsule in the ice floe.
The metal cylinder contained letters, poems, photographs, badges, beer mats, a menu, wine corks – ephemera from the early 21st century for whomever might discover it in the future.
The future came pretty swiftly. The cylinder was found this week on the north-western tip of Ireland after floating an estimated 2,300 miles from the Arctic Circle, where global heating is melting a record amount of ice.
The contents of the cylinder.
Conor McClory and Sophie Curran, surfers from the village of Gweedore in county Donegal, were checking sea conditions when they spotted the tube on the shore at Bloody Foreland, a beauty spot named for the red hue of the rocks at sunset.
“When I saw it, first I thought it was a steel pipe of a ship, then I lifted it and saw there was engraving on it. I thought it was a bomb then,” McClory told the Donegal Daily. “When I saw the date on it I thought it could be somebody’s ashes, so I didn’t open it.”Advertisementhttps://56a5ffc8ecb2dc7753d9591f63a5eb94.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
A Russian friend of a friend translated the engraving and told McClory it was a time capsule, so he opened it and discovered messages in Russian and English from the 50 Years of Victory’s polar expedition.
One letter in English, dated 4 August 2018, said: “Everything around is covered by ice. We think that by the time this letter will be found there is no more ice in Arctic unfortunately.”
McClory tracked down one of the letter’s authors, a Russian Instagram blogger in St Petersburg known as Sveta. In a Zoom call, Sveta said the crew and passengers had thought the cylinder might be discovered in 30 or 50 years and expressed shock it was found so quickly, McClory said.
The metal cylinder contained ephemera from the early 21st century.
In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. Arctic sea ice has reached its second-lowest extent in the 41-year satellite record.
Last year the Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million tonnes every minute. With annual snowfall no longer enough to replenish snow and ice lost during summer melting, scientists fear it has passed the point of no return.
A Nature Climate Change study predicts that summer sea ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035.
For €29,600 (£26,740) the Russian-owned 50 Years of Victory takes passengers on 14-day expeditions to the north pole, calling it a “magical destination”.
As of 5 a.m. ET on Thursday, Democratic nominee Joe Biden had a more flexible path to securing the 270 electoral votes needed to win than President Donald Trump.
However, the seats Biden could win to put him over the top — Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — are still counting their ballots.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, the 2020 US presidential race still did not have a clear winner, with races tightening as counts continue in crucial states.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden maintains a lead, though both he and President Donald Trump are in limbo early and absentee votes are tallied.
Biden, the former vice president, has held on to all the states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and also won Michigan and Wisconsin, two key battleground seats that Trump turned red in 2016.
Trump is now likely to take North Carolina and Alaska, but other key states — Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia — are less clear.
Which campaign will reach the required 270 electoral votes hinges on the results in those remaining states.
Here’s how Biden can get the extra 17 or more votes to reach 270:
He wins Pennsylvania (20 votes).
He wins Arizona and Nevada (11 + 6 votes).
He wins Arizona and North Carolina (11 + 15 votes).
He wins Georgia and Arizona (16 + 11 votes).
He wins Georgia and Nevada (16 + 6 votes).
He wins Georgia and North Carolina (16 + 15 votes).
He wins Nevada and North Carolina (6 + 15 votes).
(None of the above include Alaska, which is very likely to go to Trump.)
Here’s how Trump can get the extra 56 votes to reach 270:
He wins Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia (20 + 11 + 15 + 16 votes).
He wins Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Alaska (20 + 11 +16 + 6 + 3 votes).
There is also a scenario which gives Trump 269 votes — enough for a tie.
He wins Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, and Alaska (20 + 11 + 15 + 6 +3 votes).
The Associated Press and Fox news both called Arizona for Biden, but as of early Thursday the race was still too close to call based on the projection by Decision Desk HQ, which is informing Insider’s election coverage.
As of early on Thursday morning, Biden led Trump 50.49% to 48.14% in the state.
In Georgia, Trump had a narrow lead of less than half a point, or roughly 23,000 votes, as of early on Thursday.
Decision Desk HQ called Wisconsin for Biden on Wednesday afternoon, when he was ahead by around 20,000 votes. The Trump campaign signaled on Wednesday that it would call for a recount in Wisconsin, though past recounts in the state have only affected a few hundred votes.
Trump’s campaign also filed a lawsuit in Michigan to stop counting there, claiming it had been denied “meaningful access” to watch the opening of ballots and the tally.
If the race came down Pennsylvania, that would likely be the most prolonged result in terms of vote counting.
The president signaled early Wednesday that Pennsylvania could be the center of a legal battle over which ballots ultimately get counted. However, as election experts have noted, it can be very difficult to get ballots discounted.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that election officials could receive and count ballots until November 6 as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. Republicans requested a stay from the US Supreme Court that would have blocked the state court’s ruling.
But the US Supreme Court was deadlocked at 4-4, leaving the lower court’s ruling in place. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito voted to grant Republicans’ request, while Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to participate in the case “because of the need for a prompt resolution of it and because she has not had time to fully review the parties’ filings,” the court said in a statement. However, Barrett has not recused herself, meaning she could still be the decisive fifth opinion.Read the original article on Business Insider
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – A second day of sometimes dueling demonstrations over the integrity of the U.S. presidential election started early on Thursday in Philadelphia and other cities as ballot counting dragged on in a handful of states that will decide the outcome.https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.422.0_en.html#goog_1869402186ADVERTISEMENT:Your content will begin in 25 seconds
Supporters of Joe Biden have rallied around the slogan to “count every vote,” believing a complete tally would show the Democratic former vice president had beaten Republican President Donald Trump. Some ardent Trump backers have countered with cries to “protect the vote” in support of his campaign’s efforts to have some categories of ballots, including some votes submitted by mail, discarded.
Both factions appeared outside a vote-counting center in Philadelphia on Thursday morning, where election staff steadily worked through a mountain of…
Lee Moran·Reporter, HuffPostWed, November 4, 2020, 11:42 PM PST·1 min readhttps://delivery.vidible.tv/htmlembed/pid=5668ae6ee4b0b5e26955d6a6/56000e19e4b0e4e194b84b31.html?vid=5fa2ba448a62e22b06a1404b&m.loadingplaceholder=1&m.timeline_preview_shape=rectangle&m.embeded=cms_video_plugin_us.edit.huffpost.net&m.sitesection=news&m.timeline_preview_border=3&m.fwkeyvalues=sponsorship%3dsponsorship_name&m.fwsitesection=composer&m.sound=muted
Eric Trump was busted on Wednesday for tweeting a fake viral video of what he claimed was someone burning dozens of ballots cast in favor of his father, President Donald Trump.
“A concerned citizen shared a video with us that ostensibly shows someone burning ballots,” the city said in a statement on its website. “They are NOT official ballots, they are sample ballots.”
Officials noted “the absence of the bar code markings that are on all official ballots” in a screenshot from the video.
“Fire investigators are looking into the illegal burning,” the city added.
The account that originally posted the clip has now been suspended.
Eric Trump, who late Wednesday falsely claimed that his father had already won Pennsylvania, has not deleted his own tweet.
Tom NicholsAuthor of The Death of ExpertiseEnjoy unlimited access to The Atlantic for less than $1 per week.Sign inSubscribe Now
PETER VAN AGTMAEL / MAGNUM PHOTOS FOR LIBERATION
The moment every Donald Trump opponent has been waiting for is at hand: Joe Biden seems to be taking the lead. So why am I not happy?
I am certainly relieved. A Biden victory would be an infinitely better result than a Trump win. If Trump were to maintain power, our child-king would be unfettered by bothersome laws and institutions. The United States would begin its last days as a democracy, finally stepping over the ledge into authoritarianism.
Your guide to life on a warming planet
Discover Atlantic Planet, a new section devoted to climate change and the ways it will reshape our worldExplore
A win for Biden would forestall that terrible possibility.
But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.
To be clear, I never expected a Biden landslide in a country as polarized as the United States. I was a wet blanket even among my Never Trump comrades, holding out only the modest hope that Biden would recapture the states Clinton lost in 2016, and possibly flip Arizona. But I expected the margins in all of those states—and especially in Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania—to be higher. I suspected that Biden had no real chance in places such as Texas or Georgia or even North Carolina, all states in the Trumpist grip.
Nor was I among the progressives who believed America would repudiate Trump’s policies. For one thing, I am a conservative—and I know my former tribe. Trump voters don’t care about policy. They didn’t care about it in 2016, and they don’t care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.
It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power. Although Trump appears to have received a small uptick in votes from Black men and Latinos, the overwhelming share of his supporters are white. The politics of cultural resentment, the obsessions of white anxiety, are so intense that his voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office. Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not overcome this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.
My greatest fear, aside from an eventual Trump victory over the coming days, is that no matter the outcome, both parties will rush to draw the wrong lesson from this close election. The Republicans will conclude that just a bit more overt racism (but less tweeting about it) will carry the day the next time. They will see the exit polls that called for a “strong national leader,” and they will replace the childish and whiny Trump with someone who projects even more authoritarian determination. They will latch on to the charge that democracy is a rigged game, and they will openly despise its rules even more than Trump has.
If the vote plays out as it seems it will at this point, Biden will become our 46th president. But Americans can take very little pride in the overall vote and what it reveals about nearly half of our electorate.
American voters, including those who didn’t show up or who voted third-party in 2016, are now like drunks who have been bailed out of jail in the morning, full of relief as their lawyers explain that the police aren’t pressing charges. If Biden wins, we will have a second chance to keep our democracy intact. Some of us will have a moment of clarity. Most of us will just want to go home, throw up, change our clothes, and hope for the best.
But many millions, eyes dimming and livers failing, are still reaching for the bottle.
(Reuters) – Facebook IncFB.Oon Thursday said it had taken down a rapidly growing group where some supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump posted violent rhetoric and baseless claims that Democrats were stealing the election.Slideshow( 2 images )
On Thursday afternoon, the “Stop the Steal” group, which called for “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote,” was adding 1,000 new members every 10 seconds and had grown to 365,000 members in a single day.
“The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement.
She said the move was in line with the “exceptional measures” Facebook was taking during “this period of heightened tension.”
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark will cull its mink population of up to 17 million after a mutation of the coronavirus found in the animals spread to humans, the prime minister said on Wednesday.Slideshow ( 2 images )
Health authorities found virus strains in humans and in mink which showed decreased sensitivity against antibodies, potentially lowering the efficacy of future vaccines, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said.
“We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well,” Frederiksen told a news conference.
The findings, which have been shared with the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, were based on laboratory tests by the State Serum Institute, the Danish authority dealing with infectious diseases.
The head of the WHO’s emergencies programme, Mike Ryan, called on Friday for full-scale scientific investigations of the complex issue of humans – outside China – infecting mink which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans.
“We have been informed by Denmark of a number of persons infected with coronavirus from mink, with some genetic changes in the virus,” WHO said in a statement emailed to Reuters in Geneva. “The Danish authorities are investigating the epidemiological and virological significance of these findings.”
Authorities in Denmark said five cases of the new virus strain had been recorded on mink farms and 12 cases in humans, and that there were between 15 million and 17 million mink in the country.
Outbreaks at mink farms have persisted in the Nordic country, the world’s largest producer of mink furs, despite repeated efforts to cull infected animals since June.
Denmark’s police, army and home guard will be deployed to speed up the culling process, Frederiksen said.
Christian Sonne, professor of Veterinary and Wildlife Medicine at Aarhus University, said in an email he believed culling the herd now as a precautionary measure was a sound decision and could prevent a future outbreak that would be more difficult to control. Sonne co-authored a letter published in the journal Science last week calling for the cull.
“China, Denmark, and Poland should support and extend the immediate and complete ban of mink production,” Sonne and his co-authors wrote last week.
Tougher lockdown restrictions and intensified tracing efforts will be implemented to contain the virus in some areas of Northern Denmark, home to a large number of mink farms, authorities said.
“The worst case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark,” said Kare Molbak, director at the State Serum Institute.
Minks have also been culled in the Netherlands and Spain after infections were discovered.
A Jefferson County woman is asking for help in finding the person who shot her horse with an arrow while riding in the Kettle Moraine Forest Wednesday afternoon, resulting in the death of the horse.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is now searching for the hunter associated with the arrow, after the horse had to be put down due to the extent of its injuries.
The incident occurred shortly before 3:15 p.m., according to a release from the DNR, near Viele Lane near Palmyra.
Lisa Schreier, who owned the horse, said she and two friends were out riding on the horse trails in the forest, talking and laughing. Schreier said she was riding another of her horses and a friend was riding the horse, named Sam,that was struck with the arrow. At the time, the friend was wearing a bright…
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark will cull its mink population of up to 17 million after a mutation of the coronavirus found in the animals spread to humans, the prime minister said on Wednesday.Slideshow ( 2 images )
Health authorities found virus strains in humans and in mink which showed decreased sensitivity against antibodies, potentially lowering the efficacy of future vaccines, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said.
“We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well,” Frederiksen told a news conference.
The findings, which have been shared with the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, were based on laboratory tests by the State Serum Institute, the Danish authority dealing with infectious diseases.
The head of the WHO’s emergencies programme, Mike Ryan, called on Friday for full-scale scientific investigations of the complex issue of humans – outside China – infecting mink which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We have been informed by Denmark of a number of persons infected with coronavirus from mink, with some genetic changes in the virus,” WHO said in a statement emailed to Reuters in Geneva. “The Danish authorities are investigating the epidemiological and virological significance of these findings.”
Authorities in Denmark said five cases of the new virus strain had been recorded on mink farms and 12 cases in humans, and that there were between 15 million and 17 million mink in the country.
Outbreaks at mink farms have persisted in the Nordic country, the world’s largest producer of mink furs, despite repeated efforts to cull infected animals since June.
Denmark’s police, army and home guard will be deployed to speed up the culling process, Frederiksen said.
Christian Sonne, professor of Veterinary and Wildlife Medicine at Aarhus University, said in an email he believed culling the herd now as a precautionary measure was a sound decision and could prevent a future outbreak that would be more difficult to control. Sonne co-authored a letter published in the journal Science last week calling for the cull.
“China, Denmark, and Poland should support and extend the immediate and complete ban of mink production,” Sonne and his co-authors wrote last week.
Tougher lockdown restrictions and intensified tracing efforts will be implemented to contain the virus in some areas of Northern Denmark, home to a large number of mink farms, authorities said.
“The worst case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark,” said Kare Molbak, director at the State Serum Institute.
Minks have also been culled in the Netherlands and Spain after infections were discovered.
Reporting by Nikolaj Skydsgaard and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Michael Erman in Maplewood, N.J. Editing by Jon Boyle, Nick Macfie, Timothy Heritage and Tom Brown
© Drew Angerer/Getty Images Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks one day after Americans voted in the presidential election, on November 04, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
