UAE
Cloud seeding denied
The nation yesterday was still grappling with the aftermath of a record-breaking storm this week, with experts denying that cloud-seeding was to blame for the scale of the rainfall. “It’s likely that the storm was kind of supercharged by climate change because there’s just more moisture available in the air for any storm system to then precipitate out,” said Colleen Colja, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. A government agency that oversees cloud seeding denied that any such operations took place before the storm, although the nation often deploys the technology. “It’s most certainly not cloud seeding,” private meteorologist Ryan Maue said. “If that occurred with cloud seeding, they’d have water all the time. You can’t create rain out of thin air per se and get 6 inches [15.2cm] of water. That’s akin to perpetual motion technology.”
UNITED STATES
Privacy laws expanded
Colorado on Wednesday expanded its privacy laws to include brain data gathered by gadgets people use for feedback about sleep, fitness, sports and lifestyle. The Neurorights Foundation said it worked with the state on the legal protection for neurological data gathered by devices not governed by privacy laws applied to medical information. Such neural data are “capable of revealing enormously sensitive information about the people from whom it was collected, including identifiable information about their mental health, physical health and cognitive processing,” it said.
UNITED STATES
Impeachment dismissed
The Senate on Wednesday dismissed all impeachment charges against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas after the House of Representatives sought to remove him from office over his handling of the Mexico border. Senators voted to dismiss both articles of impeachment and end the proceedings. The first article charged Mayorkas with “willful and systemic refusal to comply” with immigration law and second article charged him with a “breach of trust” for saying the border was secure. The votes were 51-48 and 51-49 respectively.
UNITED STATES
NPR editor resigns
Uri Berliner, a National Public Radio (NPR) editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal views, resigned on Wednesday, criticizing Katherine Maher, NPR’s new CEO, on the way out. Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, posted his resignation letter on X a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended for five days for contravening company rules about outside work done without permission. “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems” written about in his essay, Berliner wrote on X. In his essay, written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of former president Donald Trump. “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS