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UN head warns of ‘global boiling’ as July set to be hottest month ever
Financial Times
The world faces a new era of “global boiling”, the head of the UN has warned, as scientific forecasts showed that July is expected to be the hottest month ever recorded.
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said on Thursday. […]
“All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” said Guterres, adding, “the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable.”
Extreme heat is covering more U.S. territory than it has all summer
The Washington Post
Extreme heat — which has scorched the southern tier of the United States for weeks — is ballooning to the northeast and covering more area than it has all summer.
The heat is gripping the nation as President Biden announced new measures to address dangerously hot temperatures on Thursday, including initiatives to protect outdoor workers who are particularly vulnerable.
More than half of the U.S. population is under excessive-heat warnings or heat advisories into the weekend, stretching from the beaches of Southern California to Maine’s south coast.
A large percentage of the 170 million people under these heat alerts are concentrated from the central states to the Interstate 95 corridor of the Northeast, which is bracing for its hottest weather of the summer so far.
Saguaro cacti collapsing in Arizona extreme heat
Reuters
Arizona's saguaro cacti, a symbol of the U.S. West, are leaning, losing arms and in some cases falling over during the state's record streak of extreme heat, a scientist said on Tuesday.
Summer monsoon rains the cacti rely on have failed to arrive, testing the desert giants' ability to survive in the wild as well as in cities after temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) for 25 days in Phoenix, said Tania Hernandez.
"These plants are adapted to this heat, but at some point the heat needs to cool down and the water needs to come," said Hernandez, a research scientist at Phoenix's 140-acre (57-hectare) Desert Botanical Garden…
Cacti need to cool down at night or through rain and mist. If that does not happen they sustain internal damage. Plants now suffering from prolonged, excessive heat may take months or years to die, Hernandez said.
Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', as experts flag worsening consequences for planet
ABC News (Australia)
This winter has confirmed what scientists had feared — the sea ice around Antarctica is in sharp decline, with experts now concerned it may not recover. Earlier this year, scientists observed an all-time low in the amount of sea ice around the icy continent, following all-time lows in 2016, 2017 and 2022.
Usually, the ice has been able to recover in winter, when Antarctica is reliably dark and cold. But this year is different. For the first time, the sea ice extent has been unable to substantially recover this winter…
Physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge has been communicating with scientists and the community about the drastic changes happening around Antarctica…
"To say unprecedented isn't strong enough," Dr Doddridge said.
"For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it's five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we'd expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years.
"100% coral mortality" found in coral reef restoration site off Florida as ocean temperatures soar
CBS News
Coral reefs play a vital role in the overall health of the planet. And off the coast of Florida, they're in jeopardy, as the relentless heat continues.
The Coral Restoration Foundation said in one coral reef restoration site off the state's coast, the extreme temperatures have proved deadly.
"On July 20th, CRF teams visited Sombrero Reef, a restoration site we've been working at for over a decade. What we found was unimaginable — 100% coral mortality," said Phanor Montoya-Mayoa, a restoration program manager at the foundation who has a doctorate in biology. "We have also lost almost all the corals in the Looe Key Nursery in the Lower Keys." […]
In the Florida Keys, ocean temperatures have been unusually high. A buoy off Vaca Key has been seeing temperatures above 93 degrees Fahrenheit — a reading much higher than the monthly average temperature in the area for the entire year. In July, the average temperature for the area is 89.1 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA.
US supreme court allows construction of Appalachian pipeline to resume
The Guardian
The US supreme court has allowed construction to resume on the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is a project to transport fracked gas 300 miles through West Virginia and Virginia.
The new ruling clears the way for construction to restart, lifting stays from lower courts that had halted work. The $6.6bn pipeline has been long opposed by environmentalists and enmeshed in legal challenges for years due to opposition from grassroots groups and landowners. […]
The International Energy Agency has made clear that there can be no new fossil fuel infrastructure built if the world is to avoid disastrous global heating.
On anniversary of climate bill deal, Democrats want more
E&E News
A year after striking a deal on the Inflation Reduction Act, climate hawks know they have a lot of unfinished business…
Most Democrats would prefer to talk about all the good things flowing out of the IRA — the single largest investment in battling climate change in the nation’s history — not the ones that got away. And there is much for them to celebrate.
Billions of dollars are pouring into clean energy initiatives, methane emissions are set to be curbed, and thousands of jobs are being created. Democrats plan to do a big sell of the bill in the 2024 elections.
Yet in more than a dozen one-on-one interviews with lawmakers and advocates, many said it was imperative that a political victory lap does not undermine the urgency of further action.
House Natural Resources Committee ranking member Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said the Democratic base will insist on it.
“It behooves us in the majority — if we’re there in two years — to understand the public sentiment” to do more on climate, said Grijalva, whose effort to insert environmental justice initiatives into the bill fell by the wayside, “and not to sit around planning but to take action.”
Heat waves currently happening in North America, Europe 'virtually impossible' without climate change: Report
ABC News
The dangerous heat waves currently plaguing North America and Europe would be "virtually impossible" without anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, according to a new report.
Intense weeks-long heat waves have been continuously breaking heat records on both continents, with no relief in sight. In Europe, prolonged sizzling temperatures are expected in countries like Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland, the European Space Agency announced last week. Regions in the U.S. that have been experiencing record-breaking heat, including the Southwest and Southeast, will continue to experience scorching temperatures for the foreseeable future, forecasts show.
The heat waves occurring in Europe, North America and China throughout July would not have been possible without global warming, according to a rapid attribution analysis by World Weather Attribution, an academic collaboration that uses weather observations and climate models to calculate how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of extreme weather events.
Why sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere can’t undo all the effects of climate change
The Verge
Sucking planet-heating carbon dioxide of the atmosphere doesn’t reverse all the effects of climate change, new research tells us. Carbon dioxide removal, as it’s called, can sound like science fiction — but many companies are already counting on it to undo some of the damage caused by their pollution.
Companies might try to prevent their greenhouse gas emissions altogether, or they might try to clean it up after the fact. That’s why we’re seeing all kinds of brands, from Microsoft to the Houston Texans, saying that they’ll plant trees or invest in new technologies that are supposed to filter CO2 out of the air. But even if they’re successful in trapping CO2, does it reverse the consequences of creating that pollution in the first place?
Not completely — at least not on a reasonable timeline, suggests a study published today in the journal Science Advances. It looks at the consequences carbon dioxide emissions have on an atmospheric circulation pattern called the Hadley cell that has a big impact on weather across much of the world. The study shows what might happen to the world if people keep polluting willy-nilly before finding a way to take those CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.
Days above 30 C more than double historic average in B.C. Interior, according to Environment Canada
CBC News
The number of days where temperatures climbed above 30 C in the B.C. Interior this year is far above historic averages, data from Environment Canada shows.
Prince George has been particularly hot compared to past averages. Normally, by Aug. 1, the city has only seen one day climb above 30 C. This year, eight days have already been recorded. […]
Rising temperatures exacerbate and accelerate climate disasters such as the record-breaking wildfire season and drought challenging British Columbia where hot temperatures and a lack of precipitation have helped fuel hundreds of wildfires across the province, including the largest ever recorded, and costing millions of dollars.
According to the CBC News climate dashboard, if the world continues to develop a fossil-fuel based economy, the average annual temperature in B.C. will increase from anywhere between 3.8 C to up to 8 C, depending on the exact location.
If governments make a major immediate shift toward lowering emissions, the increase could be between 1.2 C to 3.7 C.
Canadian wildfires burning land at record pace
Reuters
During an average wildfire season in Canada, 24,600 sq km of land will burn.
This year is different. Four times as much land has burned.
So far in 2023, more than 100,000 sq km of land has burned – and still counting.
That’s more land than any other fire season since 1990, the earliest for which data is available. And the season is barely halfway through. These have been some of the fastest-moving fires in the country’s history.
Washington state fire is now bigger than Seattle; more residents evacuated
The Seattle Times
The Newell Road fire in Klickitat County surpassed 61,000 acres Wednesday, reaching a size larger than Seattle’s land area.
The fire, which started Friday near Bickleton, was 50% contained as of Thursday morning. As of Wednesday afternoon, crews were removing unburned fuel and strengthening containment lines.
Ocean currents vital for distributing heat could collapse by midcentury, study says
AP News
A system of ocean currents that transports heat northward across the North Atlantic could collapse by mid-century, according to a new study, and scientists have said before that such a collapse could cause catastrophic sea-level rise and extreme weather across the globe.
In recent decades, researchers have both raised and downplayed the specter of Atlantic current collapse. It even prompted a movie that strayed far from the science. Two years ago the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said any such catastrophe is unlikely this century. But the new study published in Nature Communications suggests it might not be as far away and unlikely as mainstream science says.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is a vital system of ocean currents that circulates water throughout the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s a lengthy process, taking an estimated 1,000 years to complete, but has slowed even more since the mid-1900s.
Trump charged with seeking to delete security footage in documents case
The Washington Post
Federal prosecutors announced new charges against Donald Trump in his alleged hoarding and hiding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, alleging the former president and a newly-charged aide tried to keep security camera footage from being reviewed by investigators.
Trump was also hit with a fresh charge, in addition to the 31 counts he already faces, of illegally retaining national defense information.
The indictment charges that Trump and two aides, Waltine “Walt” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, requested that another Trump employee "delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
De Oliveira is the second Trump aide to be charged in the documents case. Nauta was indicted alongside Trump in June, accused of helping the former president mislead investigators as they sought to retrieve all of the classified documents that remained at the former president’s home and private club after he left the White House.
Gov. Abbott's border buoys are straining U.S. relations with Mexico, Justice Department says
Houston Chronicle
Texas’ new buoy barrier in the Rio Grande is damaging U.S. relations with Mexico, according to new filings by the Justice Department in their lawsuit against Gov. Greg Abbott over his latest border tactic.
According to the filing, Mexico has lodged formal protests at the “highest diplomatic levels” going back to June and has canceled a previously scheduled meeting about other matters related to the buoy barrier near Eagle Pass, which they say violates treaties between the two nations. On Wednesday, tensions over the buoys surfaced in a meeting in Ciudad Juárez meant to highlight U.S-Mexico cooperation on other issues.
“Deployment of the Floating Barrier is a source of diplomatic concern, and its continued presence is adversely affecting foreign policy,” Justice Department lawyers wrote.
Dengue is breaking records in the Americas — what’s behind the surge?
Nature
More than three million cases of dengue have been reported in the Americas so far this year. That means 2023 already has the second-highest annual incidence of the disease since 1980, when the Pan American Health Organization began collecting data on the number of cases (see ‘Dengue on the rise’).
“We do observe an increase in cases beyond what was expected for this period,” says Cláudia Codeço, an epidemiologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a biosciences and public-health institution in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Whether the record of 3.2 million cases reported in 2019 will be broken in 2023 depends on how the disease spreads in Central and North America, because most researchers think the peak of dengue season in South America has passed.
… Rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns might help to explain the trend, researchers say. Dengue’s main vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, thrives at temperatures around 30 °C and in humid conditions, which have become more frequent in the past few years as a result of record heat and extreme weather events.
There is no specific treatment for the disease, which can cause fever, headache and fatigue. Severe cases can be fatal: more than 1,300 people have died from dengue in the Americas so far this year.
With latest batch of judicial nominees, Biden has put forward 180 people for the federal bench
CNN
President Joe Biden unveiled his latest round of judicial nominees Thursday, bringing the number of people he has offered for the federal judiciary to 180 and continuing the White House’s emphasis on demographic and professional diversity.
The four newly announced nominees are being offered to fill vacancies on two federal appellate courts, as well as openings on US district courts in Minnesota and California.
“The President’s very top priority is nominating the most diverse and impressive judicial nominees and getting them confirmed,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said in a statement to CNN that pointed to the recent spree of Senate judicial confirmations that put a labor lawyer, a civil rights attorney and former public defender, and a reproductive rights lawyer on the federal bench.
After new law, Netanyahu vows to keep attorney general and return felon to office
NPR News
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he will not replace the country's top law enforcement official, but does expect to reappoint a convicted tax felon to a senior position in government, after passing a contentious law this week giving his government some unchecked powers over senior appointments.
It is the first time Netanyahu has publicly stated what he expects to do with the new legislation passed Monday limiting a power of the Supreme Court. The law has sparked months of unprecedented domestic protest over concerns it will erode the democratic separation of powers.
Speculations over the future of Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, whose office is leading the charge against Netanyahu in an ongoing corruption trial, have been swirling since the prime minister's return to power in December.
Niger situation remains ‘fluid’ as army backs coup plotters
Al Jazeera
The situation in Niger “remains fluid” a day after mutinous soldiers detained toppled President Mohamed Bazoum and announced they had seized power in a coup because of the West African country’s deteriorating security situation.
Tensions remain high between supporters of the coup and people loyal to the deposed government… Supporters of the coup ransacked and set fire to the headquarters of the governing party in the capital Niamey on Thursday. Plumes of black smoke billowed from the building after hundreds of coup supporters who had gathered in front of the National Assembly moved there.
A statement tweeted by the army command’s account declared that it would back the coup to avoid a “murderous confrontation” that could lead to a “bloodbath”.
Meanwhile, Bazoum defiantly declared that democracy would prevail in the country.
As more soldiers go missing, desperate families left in limbo
The Kyiv Independent
Sixteen months have passed since Halyna Nikiforova's husband went missing on Ukraine's eastern front line. But the 40-year-old Sloviansk native still texts him daily stories about their children. […]
Nearly a year-and-a-half into the full-scale war, thousands of relatives are enduring an unbearable wait, not knowing whether their loved ones were killed or captured by Russian forces on the front line.
Ukraine doesn't provide the official count of dead, injured, or missing soldiers, with each category believed to be in multiple thousands.
Social media in Ukraine are filled with posts from people looking for family members and friends.
Desperate to hear anything, relatives have filed hundreds of appeals to the military and various branches of law enforcement, begging them to speed up the search.
Romania: War edges closer to NATO's border
Deutsche Welle
NATO has reacted with restraint to Russia's attack on Ukrainian ports just 200 meters from the Romanian border. The Russian strikes are about more than just hampering Ukraine's grain exports.
Early on Monday morning, barge pilots and workers on the Romanian side of the river opposite the Ukrainian Danube port of Reni stared in disbelief at the skies, filming a swarm of approaching drones on their smartphones.
As the tiny dots in the sky came closer and their high-pitched buzz grew louder, the men's astonishment quickly turned to panic. "They're going to let them explode here," shouted one. "They're going to hit the port!"
Putin Promises Free Grain to Win Over Africa
Foreign Policy
[…] Russian President Vladimir Putin is making grand promises to African countries to try to shore up support against the West. On Thursday, Putin hosted the Russia-Africa summit in his hometown of St. Petersburg, where he promised six African nations up to 50,000 metric tons of free grain in the next three to four months despite Western sanctions on Russian exports.
But Moscow’s lucky grain recipients weren’t chosen randomly. Of the six nations offered free grain, one of them (Somalia) has repeatedly supported Putin on United Nations resolutions to condemn and halt Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And two of them (Mali and the Central African Republic) remain strongholds of Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group. Africa’s poorer nations have been repeatedly “screwed over” by Ukrainian grain suppliers, Putin said on Thursday, claiming that Kyiv gives 70 percent of its exports only to high- or above average-income countries. According to the Black Sea Grain Initiative’s Joint Steering Committee, 65 percent of wheat exported from Ukraine under the deal went to developing countries.
Russia last week suspended its participation in the Black Sea grain deal, which ensured the safe transportation of grain out of the region. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday that Putin’s decision to leave the agreement as well as Moscow’s bombing of a Danube River port in Ukraine were “especially devastating for vulnerable countries struggling to feed their people,” such as nations in the Horn of Africa. The East African region is dependent on Russian and Ukrainian grain exports, and Russia’s war in Ukraine has worsened its already dire food scarcity crisis.
Qin Gang: Foreign minister's downfall leaves China red-faced
BBC News
As mystery swirls over the removal of China's foreign minister Qin Gang, questions have also arisen over what his downfall means for China's diplomacy.
Following weeks of unexplained absence, Mr Qin this week was decisively rooted out by the Chinese leadership - even all mention of him was scrubbed off the foreign ministry website.
Analysts say that while this episode is unlikely to have a huge impact on foreign relations, it nevertheless has left Beijing red-faced.
China's use of exit bans leaves Americans at risk of being arbitrarily detained
NBC News
Sweeping “exit bans” and arbitrary detentions in China are having a chilling effect, among not just the Chinese diaspora with ties to their homeland but also international businesses increasingly anxious about operating there, Western experts and human rights watchdogs say.
Under President Xi Jinping’s decadelong rule, China has become more authoritarian by seeking to control many aspects of public life, from internet censorship and rewriting high school textbooks to imposing ideological crackdowns on the music and entertainment industries. […]
It was against this backdrop that the State Department issued its advisory in late June, urging Americans to “reconsider travel” to mainland China because of “arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”
U.S. citizens of Chinese descent “may be subject to additional scrutiny and harassment,” the advisory reads, with officials potentially using these bans to pressure the family members of alleged dissidents abroad and gain leverage over foreign governments.
Record youth unemployment in China after Beijing clampdown on private sector
Nikkei
New graduate Glonee Zhang had high hopes when he landed a job at a lithium battery company in Shenzhen last summer. Now, like more than one in five young people in China, he's out of work. […]
Caught between a long-running regulatory crackdown by Beijing on private enterprise, and a slide in hiring by foreign firms in the country, young people now face a record jobless rate of 21.3%. Since the official number only includes people actively seeking work, some economists say the percentage of young people not in employment, education or training could be significantly higher. […]
The world's second-biggest economy is producing twice the number of graduates it did 10 years ago, with nearly 12 million this year - but not the jobs they're qualified to do.
EPA says three widely used pesticides driving hundreds of endangered species toward extinction
Missouri Independent
[…] Today, the bumblebee is among more than 200 endangered species whose existence is threatened by the nation’s most widely used insecticides (one classification of pesticides), according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The endangered species range from Attwater’s greater prairie chicken to the Alabama cave shrimp, from the American burying beetle to the slackwater darter. And the star cactus and four-petal pawpaw are among the 160-plus at-risk plants.
The three neonicotinoids — thiamethoxam, clothianidin and imidacloprid — are applied as seed coatings on some 150 million acres of crops each year, including corn, soybeans and other major crops. Neonicotinoids are a group of neurotoxic insecticides similar to nicotine and used widely on farms and in urban landscapes. They are absorbed by plants and can be present in pollen and nectar, and have been blamed for killing bees or changing their behaviors.
Pesticide manufacturers say that studies support the safe use of these chemicals, which in addition to seed coatings, are also sprayed on more than 4 million acres of crops across the United States, including cotton, soybeans, grains, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. But conservation groups said that the EPA’s analysis has “gaping holes” and downplays the harm to endangered species.
Hexagon heaven: Scientists reveal bees and wasps use the same math to build their nests
Salon
[…] In a study published by the scientific journal PLOS Biology, scientists revealed the results of their research into five honeybee and five wasp species' nests, analyzing the data on 22,745 individual cells. These come in two "dimorphic" sizes, "small worker cells and large reproductive cells, which forces the builders to join differently sized hexagons," the authors explain. "Together, this inherent tiling problem creates a unique opportunity to investigate how similar architectural challenges are solved across independent evolutionary origins."
Indeed, despite the similarities between wasps and bees, both being in the order hymenoptera (along with ants), they have been evolving independently for an estimated 179 million years — yet they've both arrived at the same conclusion to the same problem when it comes to building their homes.
Simply put, if the size difference between two hexagonal cells is small, the insects build medium-sized hexagonal cells in between; if the difference between two hexagonal cells is large, they use five-sided cells and seven-sided cells at the join. This is consistent with fundamental geometric rules, showing a level of intelligence humans consistently do not expect from insects. Incredibly, the smart little bugs figured out these principles regardless of the substances they were using to compose their nests.
Amid government inaction, Indonesia’s rhinos head toward extinction (analysis)
Mongabay
[…] The Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) and the Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus) are arguably the most endangered large mammals on Earth. Today only found in Indonesia, there are around 50-60 Javan rhinos left and fewer than 50 Sumatran rhinos.
Yet the programs to save them appear to be cratering. Multiple sources paint a picture of the Indonesian government as risk-averse and more concerned about looking bad than about saving rhinos. Critical actions to save the Sumatran rhinos have been put on hold for years — and in the case of Javan rhinos, decades.
Last year, the wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC and the Asian Rhino Specialist Group at the IUCN released an estimate that said only 34-47 Sumatran rhinos were left. None of the subpopulations, of which there may only be two, are likely to be viable in the long term. The much-touted capture program has only succeeded in capturing a single female, who has not been used for breeding either naturally or artificially.
Scientists Resurrect Nematodes Frozen for 46,000 Years in Siberia
Vice
Scientists have revived tiny animals called nematodes from a slumber that lasted 46,000 years, reports a new study.
The microscopic animals were successfully woken from a state of suspended animation after researchers found them in the permafrost, or frozen soil, that flanks Siberia’s northern Kolyma River. A radiocarbon analysis revealed that they hail from a prehistoric era when Neanderthals and dire wolves still roamed the world, and that they belong to a functionally extinct species called Panagrolaimus kolymaensis that was previously unknown to science.
The astonishing discovery is “important for the understanding of evolutionary processes because generation times could be stretched from days to millennia, and long-term survival of individuals of species can lead to the refoundation of otherwise extinct lineages,” according to a study published on Thursday in the journal PLoS Genetics.
‘You Are a Pussy’: McCarthy and Swalwell Get in House Floor Feud
Daily Beast
[…] On June 21, the day Republicans voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Democrats stood on the House floor and shouted “Shame!” at their GOP colleagues. As the spectacle was taking place, one of the leaders of the demonstration, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), was standing in the well of the House near the speaker's podium and delivered some harsh words to his fellow Californian.
“This is pathetic,” Swalwell allegedly told McCarthy, who was presiding over the House at the time. “You’re weak. You're a weak man." […]
…the next day…
“McCarthy said, ‘If you ever say something like that to me again, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you,’” […]
After some back-and-forth, with chests puffed out, McCarthy issued a challenge to Swalwell: “Call me a pussy again, and I’ll kick your ass,” the Speaker allegedly said. […]
“You. Are. A. Pussy,” Swalwell told McCarthy.
After both men stared each other down for another moment, McCarthy eventually relented. He stepped to the side and let Swalwell through to the bathroom...
Oppenheimer’s test site wasn’t remote. It was populated by Hispanos and Native Americans
Los Angeles Times
In the course of a single afternoon in 2017, the whole of Paul Pino’s life clicked. At a meeting of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, Pino thought about the people he’d lost, the family members he’d mourned — his mother, who died of bone cancer, his brother who died of stomach cancer, and his sister who died of thyroid cancer — and as he listened to the consortium’s two-hour presentation, tears streamed down his face, and his grief turned into anger.
Pino is one of hundreds of thousands of people known as “downwinders” — those living in the fallout zone of nuclear test sites, exposed to high levels of radiation that increase the risk of cancer. While downwinder communities span several states including Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho, as a result of decades of nuclear weapons testing, the people of New Mexico were the first victims of the atomic bomb, the result of the Manhattan Project’s Trinity Test on July 16, 1945 — less than a month before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Learning the truth made me vow to fight for justice in the memory of my family,” Pino said.
A nearly 20-year ban on human spaceflight regulations is set to expire
Ars Technica
In 2004, Congress passed a law that established a moratorium on federal safety regulations for commercial astronauts and space tourists riding to space on new privately owned rockets and spacecraft. The idea was to allow time for new space companies to establish themselves before falling under the burden of regulations, an eventuality that spaceflight startups argued could impede the industry's development.
The moratorium is also known as a "learning period," a term that describes the purpose of the provision. It's supposed to give companies and the Federal Aviation Administration—the agency tasked with overseeing commercial human spaceflight, launch, and re-entry operations—time to learn how to safely fly in space and develop smart regulations, those that make spaceflight safer but don't restrict innovation.
Without action from Congress, by the end of September, the moratorium on human spaceflight regulations will expire. That has many in the commercial space industry concerned.