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Prattle of sexes: How trash-talking men helped UCLA women reach the Sweet 16
UCLA relies on talented male scout team players to help the Bruins prepare for opponents and fuel their NCAA tournament run.
latimes.com
She made a fairy trail for her autistic son; now it’s a public destination
The tiny wonderland trail in Milburn, N.J., now has volunteers that tend to it, and even its own festival.
washingtonpost.com
Not every student needs algebra 2. UC should be flexible on math requirement
Data science is a worthwhile course for future college students, as is statistics. Such courses, with their real-life applications, make math more appealing.
latimes.com
California legislators push law change after ruling against family in Nazi looted art case
California lawmakers will introduce a bill to strengthen state law in favor of Holocaust survivors and others seeking to recover looted artwork and other property.
latimes.com
AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.
Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images The energy needed to support data storage is expected to double by 2026. You can do something to stop it. In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its forecast for global energy use over the next two years. Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. The IEA estimates that, added together, this usage represented almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 — and that demand for these uses could double by 2026, which would make it roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Japan. We live in the digital age, where many of the processes that guide our lives are hidden from us inside computer code. We are watched by machines behind the scenes that bill us when we cross toll bridges, guide us across the internet, and deliver us music we didn’t even know we wanted. All of this takes material to build and run — plastics, metals, wiring, water — and all of that comes with costs. Those costs require trade-offs. None of these trade-offs is as important as in energy. As the world heats up toward increasingly dangerous temperatures, we need to conserve as much energy as we can get to lower the amount of climate-heating gases we put into the air. That’s why the IEA’s numbers are so important, and why we need to demand more transparency and greener AI going forward. And it’s why right now we need to be conscientious consumers of new technologies, understanding that every bit of data we use, save, or generate has a real-world cost. One of the areas with the fastest-growing demand for energy is the form of machine learning called generative AI, which requires a lot of energy for training and a lot of energy for producing answers to queries. Training a large language model like OpenAI’s GPT-3, for example, uses nearly 1,300 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, the annual consumption of about 130 US homes. According to the IEA, a single Google search takes 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, while a ChatGPT request takes 2.9 watt-hours. (An incandescent light bulb draws an average of 60 watt-hours of juice.) If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt=hours a year — the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents. I recently spoke with Sasha Luccioni, lead climate researcher at an AI company called Hugging Face, which provides an open-source online platform for the machine learning community that supports the collaborative, ethical use of artificial intelligence. Luccioni has researched AI for more than a decade, and she understands how data storage and machine learning contribute to climate change and energy consumption — and are set to contribute even more in the future. I asked her what any of us can do to be better consumers of this ravenous technology. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Brian Calvert AI seems to be everywhere. I’ve been in meetings where people joke that our machine overlords might be listening. What exactly is artificial intelligence? Why is it getting so much attention? And why should we worry about it right now — not in some distant future? Sasha Luccioni Artificial intelligence has actually been around as a field since the ’50s, and it’s gone through various “AI winters” and “AI summers.” Every time some new technique or approach gets developed, people get very excited about it, and then, inevitably, it ends up disappointing people, triggering an AI winter. We’re going through a bit of an AI summer when it comes to generative AI. We should definitely stay critical and reflect upon whether or not we should be using AI, or generative AI specifically, in applications where it wasn’t used before. Brian Calvert What do we know about the energy costs of this hot AI summer? Sasha Luccioni It’s really hard to say. With an appliance, you plug it into your socket and you know what energy grid it’s using and roughly how much energy it’s using. But with AI, it’s distributed. When you’re doing a Google Maps query, or you’re talking to ChatGPT, you don’t really know where the process is running. And there’s really no transparency with regard to AI deployment. From my own research, what I’ve found is that switching from a nongenerative, good old-fashioned quote-unquote AI approach to a generative one can use 30 to 40 times more energy for the exact same task. So, it’s adding up, and we’re definitely seeing the big-picture repercussions. Brian Calvert So, in material terms, we’ve got a lot of data, we’re storing a lot of data, we’ve got language models, we’ve got models that need to learn, and that takes energy and chips. What kind of things need to be built to support all this, and what are the environmental real-world impacts that this adds to our society? Sasha Luccioni Static data storage [like thumb drives] doesn’t, relatively speaking, consume that much energy. But the thing is that nowadays, we’re storing more and more data. You can search your Google Drive at any moment. So, connected storage — storage that’s connected to the internet — does consume more energy, compared to nonconnected storage. Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs — the specialized chips for training AI models — tends to consume more energy than the previous generation. They’re more powerful, but they’re also more energy intensive. And people are using more and more of them because they want to train bigger and bigger AI models. It’s kind of this vicious circle. When you deploy AI models, you have to have them always on. ChatGPT is never off. Brian Calvert Then, of course, there’s also a cooling process. We’ve all felt our phones heat up, or had to move off the couch with our laptops — which are never truly on our laps for long. Servers at data centers also heat up. Can you explain a little bit how they are cooled down? Sasha Luccioni With a GPU, or with any kind of data center, the more intensely it runs, the more heat it’s going to emit. And so in order to cool those data centers down, there’s different kinds of techniques. Sometimes it’s air cooling, but majoritarily, it’s essentially circulating water. And so as these data centers get more and more dense, they also need more cooling, and so that uses more and more water. Brian Calvert We have an AI summer, and we have some excitement and some hype. But we also have the possibility of things scaling up quite a bit. How might AI data centers be different from the data centers that we already live with? What challenges will that present from an ecological or environmental perspective going forward? Sasha Luccioni Data centers need a lot of energy to run, especially the hyperscale ones that AI tends to run on. And they need to have reliable sources of energy. So, often they’re built in places where you have nonrenewable energy sources, like natural gas-generated energy or coal-generated energy, where you flip a switch and the energy is there. It’s harder to do that with solar or wind, because there’s often weather factors and things like that. And so what we’ve seen is that the big data centers are built in places where the grid is relatively carbon intensive. Brian Calvert What kinds of practices and policies should we be considering to either slow AI down or green it up? Sasha Luccioni I think that we should be providing information so that people can make choices, at a minimum. Eventually being able to choose a model, for example, that is more energy efficient, if that’s something that people care about, or that was trained on noncopyrighted data. Something I’m working on now is kind of an Energy Star rating for AI models. Maybe some people don’t care, but other people will choose a more efficient model. Brian Calvert What should I think about before upgrading my data plan? Or why should I hold off on asking AI to solve my kid’s math homework? What should any of us consider before getting more gadgetry or getting more involved with a learned machine? Sasha Luccioni In France, they have this term, “digital sobriety.” Digital sobriety could be part of the actions that people can take as 21st-century consumers and users of this technology. I’m definitely not against having a smartphone or using AI, but asking yourself, “Do I need this new gadget?” “Do I really need to use ChatGPT for generating recipes?” “Do I need to be able to talk to my fridge or can I just, you know, open the door and look inside?” Things like that, right? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it with generative AI.
vox.com
Black voters, organizers in battleground states anxious about Biden enthusiasm
Black voters in battleground states say they're anxious about President Biden's level of support heading into the general election.
cbsnews.com
King Charles stresses ‘importance of friendship in times of need’ in poignant Easter message as Camilla attends service
The ailing monarch's pre-recorded audio message marks his first public comments since his daughter-in-law Kate Middleton revealed her cancer diagnosis last week.
nypost.com
DeSantis Takes Shots at Liberal States With Squatter Crackdown
Pedro Portal/Miami Herald via Getty ImagesFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law Wednesday aiming to crack down on residential squatters in his state by radically shortening the process by which homeowners request the removal of unauthorized people from property.“The squatter scam ends today with my signature on this piece of legislation and the state of Florida will be better for it,” DeSantis said, according to WTVJ. As well as making it simpler to evict squatters, HB 621 also “creates harsh penalties” for people who take part in squatting and “those who encourage squatting and teach others the scam,” DeSantis’ office said in a news release.The law, which comes into effect on July 1, means that homeowners will now be able to “fill out a form, give it to your local sheriff and the sheriff is instructed to go and remove the people who are inhabiting your dwelling illegally,” DeSantis said. Before the bill, squatters were afforded certain rights as tenants that meant a longer process was required to evict them.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Diddy’s ex-girlfriend Yung Miami accused of transporting ‘pink cocaine’ for him
The City Girls rapper, also known as Caresha Rameka Brownlee, transported the drug known as “pink cocaine” for Combs in April 2023, according to Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones’ $30 million lawsuit against Combs — which was amended on Monday.
nypost.com
How the Yankees’ and Mets’ frugal plans actually could pay off this season
As Opening Day arrives, there’s reason to believe both teams can have strong seasons.
nypost.com
Stop Putin now, or the war is coming your way, Ukraine's leader warns
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells CBS News that without more U.S. help, Ukraine won't be able to stop Putin from pushing his war onto NATO soil.
cbsnews.com
China's Economic Slump Wipes 155 Billionaires off Global Rich List
Despite the slump, China remains top of the list with 814 billionaires, a new report says.
newsweek.com
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns Putin's war could spread to NATO territory
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells CBS News' Charlie D'Agata in an exclusive interview that, without more U.S. help "now," Ukraine won’t be able to stop Vladimir Putin from pushing his war onto NATO soil.
cbsnews.com
New image reveals "twisted" magnetic fields around black hole
Supermassive black holes are believed to have emerged very early in the universe but their creation remains a mystery.
cbsnews.com
The Sports Report: Rui Hachimura comes up big against Memphis again
Rui Hachimura, who had a key role in ousting Memphis from playoffs last season, has big game in Lakers' victory.
latimes.com
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a cargo ship on March 26. | Scott Olson/Getty Images Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone. Line up a few years’ worth of tragedies and disasters, and the online conversations about them will reveal their patterns. The same conspiracy-theory-peddling personalities who spammed X with posts claiming that Tuesday’s Baltimore bridge collapse was a deliberate attack have also called mass shootings “false flag” events and denied basic facts about the Covid-19 pandemic. A Florida Republican running for Congress blamed “DEI” for the bridge collapse as racist comments about immigration and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott circulated among the far right. These comments echo Trump in 2019, who called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” and, in 2015, blamed President Obama for the unrest in the city. As conspiracy theorists compete for attention in the wake of a tragedy, others seek engagement through dubious expertise, juicy speculation, or stolen video clips. The boundary between conspiracy theory and engagement bait is permeable; unfounded and provoking posts often outpace the trickle of verified information that follows any sort of major breaking news event. Then, the conspiracy theories become content, and a lot of people marvel and express outrage that they exist. Then they kind of forget about the raging river of Bad Internet until the next national tragedy. I’ve seen it so many times. I became a breaking news reporter in 2012, which means that in internet years, I have the experience of an almost ancient entity. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge into the Patapsco River, though, felt a little different from most of these moments for me, for two reasons. First, it was happening after a few big shifts in what the internet even is, as Twitter, once a go-to space for following breaking news events, became an Elon Musk-owned factory for verified accounts with bad ideas, while generative AI tools have superpowered grifters wanting to make plausible text and visual fabrications. And second, I live in Baltimore. People I know commute on that bridge, which forms part of the city’s Beltway. Some of the workers who fell, now presumed dead, lived in a neighborhood across the park from me. The local cost of global misinformation On Tuesday evening, I called Lisa Snowden, the editor-in-chief of the Baltimore Beat — the city’s Black-owned alt-weekly — and an influential presence in Baltimore’s still pretty active X community. I wanted to talk about how following breaking news online has changed over time. Snowden was up during the early morning hours when the bridge collapsed. Baltimore’s X presence is small enough that journalists like her generally know who the other journalists are working in the city, especially those reporting on Baltimore itself. Almost as soon as news broke about the bridge, though, she saw accounts she’d never heard of before speaking with authority about what had happened, sharing unsourced video, and speculating about the cause. Over the next several hours, the misinformation and racism about Baltimore snowballed on X. For Snowden, this felt a bit like an invasion into a community that had so far survived the slow death of what was once Twitter by simply staying out of the spotlight. “Baltimore Twitter, it’s usually not as bad,” Snowden said. She sticks to the people she follows. “But today I noticed that was pretty much impossible. It got extremely racist. And I was seeing other folks in Baltimore also being like, ‘This might be what sends me finally off this app.’” Here are some of the tweets that got attention in the hours after the collapse: Paul Szypula, a MAGA influencer with more than 100,000 followers on X, tweeted “Synergy Marine Group [the company that owned the ship in question] promotes DEI in their company. Did anti-white business practices cause this disaster?” alongside a screenshot of a page on the company’s website that discussed the existence of a diversity and inclusion policy. That tweet got more than 600,000 views. Another far-right influencer speculated that there was some connection between the collapse and, I guess, Barack Obama? I don’t know. The tweet got 5 million views as of mid-day Wednesday. Being online during a tragic event is full of consequential nonsense like this, ideas and conspiracy theories that are inane enough to fall into the fog of Poe’s Law and yet harmful to actual people and painful to see in particular when it’s your community being turned into views. Sure, there are best practices you can follow to try to contribute to a better information ecosystem in these moments. Those practices matter. But for Snowden, the main thing she can do as her newsroom gets to work reporting on the impact of this disaster on the community here is to let time march on. “In a couple days, this terrible racist mob, or whatever it is, is going to be onto something else,” Snowden said. “ Baltimore ... people are still going to need things. Everybody’s still going to be working. So I’m just kind of waiting it out,” she said “But it does hurt.” A version of this story was published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
vox.com
Russian Flotilla Is a Sitting Duck for Ukraine, UK Says
The Dnieper River Flotilla could face the same Ukrainian drone strikes as the Black Sea Fleet, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said.
newsweek.com
Russia May Have Collected More Weapons From North Korea
A massive Russian Antonov An-12 is suspected of helping fuel Moscow's war effort in Ukraine.
newsweek.com
Sam Bankman-Fried faces decades in prison as he’s sentenced today for multi-billion-dollar fraud
The 32-year-old convicted fraudster will learn his fate at a Manhattan federal court hearing set for 9:30 a.m., capping an epic and swift fall from grace.
nypost.com
Stanford student called for Biden's assassination for advancing 'genocide' of Palestinians, classmate claims
Theo Baker, a student at Stanford University, revealed that the debate on campus over the Israel-Hamas war has become extremely hostile, even to President Biden.
foxnews.com
Map Shows Chinese Spy Plane's Pacific Flight Route
The intelligence-gathering aircraft flew the same route for the second time this month.
newsweek.com
Two injured after US Army exercises end in helicopter crash at Fort Carson in Colorado
An AH-64 helicopter with the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade, 4th Infantry Division crashed Wednesday evening during training at Fort Carson in Colorado, leaving two injured.
foxnews.com
Kenan Thompson breaks silence on ‘Quiet on Set’ documentary revelations
The "Saturday Night Live" star recalled his "tough" viewing experience while promoting Nickelodeon's "Good Burger 2" on the "Tamron Hall Show."
nypost.com
How Debit Cards For Migrants Compare to NYC Welfare Benefits
Migrants will get twice as much per week to spend on essential goods.
newsweek.com
Is Biden on track for defeat? The debate, explained
Ian Maule/Getty Images Should we take current polls seriously? Or are there good reasons to expect a Biden comeback? Is Joe Biden in deep reelection trouble, or is there good reason to think he’s headed for a comeback? The question has divided the political world for months. The case that Biden’s on track for defeat is pretty simple: He’s trailed Trump in a large majority of the national and swing state polls conducted since last September. That means it’s been six months with very little good polling news for Biden. If you take the polls seriously, he’s in trouble — and those who fear Trump’s return to power should be very worried indeed. The case for a Biden comeback, on the other hand, goes something like this: It’s still too early for the polls to tell us much, but there are a lot of reasons we might logically expect Biden to do better. After all, the economy has improved. Trump is headed to trial. Biden has a fundraising advantage. Democrats have been doing rather well in special elections, and they exceeded expectations in the 2022 midterms. And eventually, the general election will bring focus from the media and campaigns on a binary choice between Trump and Biden — which means more focus on Trump’s extremism and scandals. That all sounds convincing enough. But the Biden skeptics fire back: Aren’t you just coming up with excuses to explain away the unpleasant reality the polls are clearly showing? Aren’t you just reasoning backward from your belief that Biden should be winning — and ignoring the best evidence, which states that things look pretty dire for him? The case that Biden is in deep trouble Win McNamee/Getty Images President Joe Biden departs the White House March 22, 2024 in Washington, DC. Start with Biden’s low approval: According to FiveThirtyEight’s poll average, Biden has been deeply unpopular since late 2021 — his average approval rating has been in the high 30s or low 40s since then. Since the State of the Union address, Biden’s number has slightly improved — from 38.1 percent on March 7 to 39.3 percent as of March 27, per FiveThirtyEight. But that’s still a very bad approval rating. At this point in Trump’s term, his approval was about 45 percent — more than 5 points better. And, of course, he lost. Trump has led most national polls: An approval rating can’t tell you everything in a two-way race because your opponent may be deeply unpopular too. But the head-to-head poll numbers haven’t been comforting for Biden lately either, since they’ve shown Trump ahead for the past six months. (Biden very recently rose to about a tie in the Economist’s polling average, while Trump still leads by just over 1 point in RealClearPolitics’s average.) Trump leads most swing state polls: Of course, the presidency is decided by the Electoral College, not a national vote. And swing state polling for Biden has been very bad. In Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, Trump has led in every poll tracked by FiveThirtyEight since November, often by sizable margins. If he loses the three states above, Biden would need Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to win. Trump has led in most — but not all — polls in all three states in recent months. Other bad signs: Besides the polls, the skeptics believe there are other reasons to doubt whether Biden will be able to pull it off. Age: Voters have regularly said in polls that Biden’s age is a problem for them. Inflation: It has slowed recently, but voters still may resent hikes in prices and then interest rates that have occurred while Biden was president (even though much of the inflation was caused by factors out of Biden’s control, and he doesn’t directly control interest rates either). International comparisons: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are all extremely unpopular right now (even more so than Biden), suggesting it could just be a rough time to be an incumbent leader in a Western democracy. The case for Joe Biden being the Comeback Kid Win McNamee/Getty Images U.S. President Joe Biden departs the White House on March 19, 2024 in Washington, DC. Start with skepticism about early polls: With so much of the fear that Biden is doomed based on his bad polling, it’s worth noting that the election is still about seven months away. Polling from late March 2016 showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 11 points. Clearly things can change by quite a lot before election day. Instead of early polls, look at recent election results: In 2022, Democrats performed well in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The party held on to the Senate, and the House didn’t see the typical midterm blowout (the “red wave” many predicted) but instead a very close contest Republicans only narrowly won. Democrats have also done quite well in special elections over the past year. Now, don’t get too carried away with this. Democrats’ coalition is now heavily skewed toward college-educated high-engagement voters who are more likely to turn out in off-year elections. Skeptics argue that such an advantage will surely drop in a higher-turnout presidential year, when infrequent voters are more likely to show up. There’s another interesting wrinkle here. Because polls show Biden struggling badly among less-engaged voters, the topline results that he’s losing are effectively based on pollsters’ assumptions about how likely those less-engaged voters are to turn out. Are those assumptions solid? We won’t know until election day. Upcoming campaign and media dynamics may help Biden: Biden comeback believers contend that three main factors will likely help the president in the coming months. An improving economy: Voters have been negative about the economy for years, but their perceptions have improved somewhat in recent months. It’s true that that hasn’t seemed to helped Biden’s poll standing much yet, but perhaps it will take some time to sink in. Trump may become a felon: Trump’s indictments don’t seem to have hurt him up to this point, but polls have regularly shown many voters say they will reconsider supporting him if he’s actually convicted of a crime. His first criminal trial, in the New York hush money case, is set to begin April 15. More attention on Trump and Republicans’ extremism: As the election approaches, a well-funded Democratic campaign and outside group apparatus will spend heavily to remind voters about the threat Trump poses to American democracy and the threat the GOP poses to abortion rights — both issues that helped Democrats triumph in key 2022 races. The mainstream media will increasingly frame the choice before voters as “Trump vs. Biden” as well. Perhaps many of the disgruntled Democrats and tuned-out independents who currently say they won’t vote for Biden will eventually choose the lesser of two evils once Trump’s awfulness is hammered home to them. Can we already see the comeback in polls? Perhaps the strongest point made by the Biden skeptics is that the polls have been quite consistent for quite some time. Sure, they say, you can tell yourself that Biden will bounce back at some point — but those polls keep not budging, so when will it happen? Indeed, I wrote about Biden’s bad polls last April, last September, and last November, and evidence for any comeback in that time has been scant. But some now say we’re seeing our first signs in polls that the comeback is underway. As mentioned, Biden is currently tied with Trump in the Economist’s polling average — in recent months, he’s generally been down by 2 to 3 points. Polls released this week have shown some improvement for him in swing states and nationally, pointing toward a race that’s about tied, not one where Trump has a clear edge. Again, don’t get carried away. It’s too early to say whether this will prove to be a durable trend. But it’s worth keeping in mind that even when Trump has been polling best, the race hasn’t looked like a total blowout. Trump has had, on average, small single-digit leads both nationally and in key swing states. That’s the sort of lead that no candidate can really take for granted. The election was quite close in 2016 and 2020 — so close that any confident prediction about who would win was, in retrospect, overconfident. Given the repeat candidates, it’s reasonable to expect another close election this time around. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
vox.com
Mexico president says Baltimore bridge collapse shows migrants 'do not deserve to be treated as they are'
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore shows migrants should be treated better.
foxnews.com
Judge Offers Skeptical Retort to Hunter Biden Lawyers’ Bid in Tax Case
Kevin Lamarque/ReutersHunter Biden’s legal defense team on Wednesday asked a judge to dismiss the federal tax case against him, arguing that the president’s son has been subjected to a politically motivated prosecution.At a hearing in Los Angeles, U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi pressed Biden’s attorneys to show evidence to support their claims. He said he would likely rule on the motions to dismiss by April 17.Biden was not in attendance at the hearing where his legal team—led by Abbe Lowell—argued that GOP lawmakers and former president Donald Trump had an improper influence on the case, leading to the unraveling of a plea deal last summer, according to the Los Angeles Times. Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Man sentenced to 11 months in prison for threatening phone calls to Pelosi and Mayorkas
A California man who left threatening voicemails to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been sentenced to 11 months in prison
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foxnews.com
Ex-NBA star dismisses Caitlin Clark's chances of scoring in BIG3
Former NBA star Kenyon Martin dismissed any chance of Caitlin Clark being able to score if she decides to take up the BIG3 basketball league's offer.
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foxnews.com
Diddy News Update as More Celebrities Speak Out
After Sean "Diddy" Combs' properties were raided on Monday, celebrities have weighed in—and old Usher interviews have resurfaced.
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newsweek.com
Diddy Paid Instagram Model Jade Ramey as Sex Worker—Court Filing
An amended lawsuit filed against Sean "Diddy" Combs unveils a fresh batch of bombshell allegations.
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newsweek.com
Experts address biggest question of Baltimore bridge collapse and more top headlines
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.
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foxnews.com
Riverside's Lamont Butler driven to help San Diego State return to the Final Four
Lamont Butler, who grew up in Riverside, has overcome personal tragedy to play a key role in San Diego State's NCAA tournament success.
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latimes.com
With ‘seacuterie’ and dry-aged tuna, this chef treats seafood like meat
At GW Fins in New Orleans, chef Michael Nelson turns whole fish into dry-aged tuna steaks, swordfish charcuterie and more, all with an eye toward cutting waste.
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washingtonpost.com
The Death Penalty Is Important for America | Opinion
The death penalty has rightfully been used for heinous crimes, murder, and treason throughout our nation's history.
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newsweek.com
The World Cannot Ignore Sudan's Hunger Crisis | Opinion
The humanitarian agencies in Sudan are not getting enough funding to help the victims of the civil war.
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newsweek.com
President Biden Should Follow Through on Ending the Death Penalty | Opinion
Perhaps with wishful thinking, I expected bold leadership from President Joe Biden.
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newsweek.com
Kate Middleton Had to Tell Her Kids About Her Cancer Diagnosis. These Parents Know What That’s Like
Kate Middleton had to share her diagnosis with her children. These parents have been there.
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time.com
How Beyoncé Fits Into the Storied Legacy of Black Country
'Country is not as many have posited: a genre with Black influence but without Black presence,' writes Alice Randall.
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time.com
‘It’s Almost as If They Support a Hypothetical War’
“This is our 9/11,” an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. “Twenty 9/11s,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, “We are preventing the next 9/11.”I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.[George Packer: Israel must not react stupidly]Finally, I’m an American. My country is supporting Israel militarily and diplomatically, and so I have a stake in answering this question: Is the United States enabling Israel to make the same terrible mistakes we did after 9/11?In principle, Israel has a case for military action in Gaza, and it goes something like this. Across its border sat an army of tens of thousands of men intent on massacring civilians. Ghazi Hamad, from Hamas’s political bureau, declared that the atrocities of October 7 were “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Yes, rooting out Hamas would be brutal—the group welcomes civilian collateral damage and has entrenched itself in hundreds of miles of tunnels honeycombed through civilian infrastructure. But peace is illusory as long as Hamas remains in power.Perhaps, in an alternate world, Israel could have fought such a war with restraint, in order to degrade Hamas’s military power without playing into its hands by causing unnecessary civilian suffering. Israel would have helped, rather than hindered, the efforts of outside states to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza—showing that it distinguished the Palestinian people from Hamas battalions and valued their lives. If Israel had very different internal politics, it might even have signaled a positive vision for the war’s end—one premised on rebuilding a Gazan government led by Palestinians not committed to Israel’s destruction but to a fair-minded two-state solution that would ensure full political rights for Gazans. But this is not the war that Israel has fought.“Sometimes it sounds like certain officials, it’s almost as if they support a hypothetical war, instead of the actual war that Israel is fighting,” Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international-law professor at Rutgers University, told me.Friends of mine who support Israel have compared the Gaza campaign to the American and Iraqi fight against the Islamic State in Mosul, another large urban area of about 2 million people defended by an entrenched enemy hiding among civilians. At least 9,000 innocents died, many from American air strikes.I walked through the devastation in Mosul two years after the battle, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. Blocks of rubble, the skeletal remains of homes and shops, survivors living in the shatters who spoke of starvation and horror, collecting rainwater or risking their lives to go to the river, where soldiers shot at them. “It’s like Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” one man told me in the ruins of his home. But he also said that ISIS was gone from Mosul forever. “Even if all I have is a piece of wood,” he said, “I would fight them rather than let them return.”The war Israel is actually fighting in Gaza bears little resemblance to that brutal and far from perfect, but necessary, campaign. Rather, in Gaza, Israel has shown itself willing to cause heavy civilian casualties and unwilling to care for a population left without basic necessities for survival. It has offered no realistic plan for an eventual political settlement. Far from the hypothetical war for Israeli security, this looks like a war of revenge. Palestinians gather to collect aid food in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on February 26, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. ( AFP / Getty) Israel’s approach to civilian lives and infrastructure is the first and most obvious problem. John Spencer, the chair of urban-warfare studies at West Point, told The Wall Street Journal this month that Israel sets the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties. Defenders of Israel cite its use of precision munitions and its distribution of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.But evacuation orders can only do so much for a trapped population facing destroyed infrastructure, dangerous exit routes, and unrealistic time frames. Israel’s original evacuation order for northern Gaza gave 1.1 million people just 24 hours to leave. As Paula Gaviria Betancur, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, noted at the time, “It is inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could traverse an active war zone, without devastating humanitarian consequences, particularly while deprived of essential supplies and basic services.”And precision munitions are good only when used precisely. Senior Israeli officials complained even before the war that the list of possible military targets in Gaza was “very problematic.” Then Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credulity. Satellite images do not show pinpoint strikes but whole flattened neighborhoods. From October 7 to November 26, Israel damaged or destroyed more than 37,000 structures, and as CNN reported in December, about 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions used at that point were unguided missiles. Certainly Hamas’s practice of building its tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure means that destroying the tunnels will cause widespread damage, but the scale of this bombing campaign goes well beyond that.What does this mean for death tolls? Larry Lewis, the director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Naval Analyses, found that even if we accept the IDF’s claim that 12,000 of the roughly 29,000 Gazans reported dead by February 20 were enemy fighters, that would still mean that for every 100 Israeli air strikes, the IDF killed an average of 54 civilians. In the U.S. campaign in Raqqa, the American military caused an estimated 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 strikes.Israel’s lack of concern for civilian casualties is clear from well-documented individual strikes. On October 31, Israel struck the Jabaliya refugee camp with what appears to have been at least two 2,000-pound bombs, destroying entire housing blocks. News footage soon after showed at least 47 bodies, including children, pulled from the rubble in the refugee camp. Eventually the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry would claim 195 dead and hundreds more injured. The target of the strike was Ibrahim Biari, a Hamas commander who helped plan October 7, as well as a tunnel network and other Hamas fighters.[Read: Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer?]During the Battle of Mosul, strikes that could be anticipated to kill 10 civilians or more required sign-off from the commanding general of Central Command, which oversees all American military activity across the greater Middle East. Deliberate strikes might have been analyzed by multiple working groups, and precautions taken to limit civilian casualties by using a more precise weapon with a smaller blast radius. A strike might have been canceled if the harm to civilians outweighed the possible battlefield advantage. In the Jabaliya strike, Israel caused foreseeable civilian casualties an order of magnitude greater than anything America would have signed off on during the past decades of war. And yes, 2,000-pound bombs are among the munitions that the United States has been sending to Israel, and which Israel has been using for strikes that American commanders would never permit from their own armed forces.Even more troubling has been Israel’s failure to allow humanitarian relief to reach the civilian population it has put at risk. On October 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Since then, the Israeli bombing campaign has destroyed Gaza’s agriculture and infrastructure, and Israel has restricted aid coming from outside the Strip.The United States has played a game of push and pull, providing weapons but telling Israeli authorities that they must allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; Israel fails to sufficiently comply, and Gazans starve. In February, the deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, Carl Skau, announced that one out of every six Gazan children under the age of 2 was acutely malnourished. “Hundreds of trucks are waiting to enter, and it is absolutely imperative to make crossing points work effectively and open additional crossing points,” the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on March 18. “It is just a matter of political will. Israel has to do it.”A UN Security Council resolution noted on December 22 that under international law, all parties must “allow, facilitate, and enable the immediate, safe, and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale directly to the Palestinian civilian population.” That Israel lets some aid through is not a defense. As Tom Dannenbaum, an associate professor of international law at Tufts University, pointed out at the beginning of the conflict, even when starvation is being used as a weapon of war, “often there can be a trickle of humanitarian relief or a stop-start permission of essentials into a territory that is besieged.” In Gaza, starving children fill desperately strained hospital wards. Israel can make no plausible argument that it’s meeting its obligations here.Perhaps the most damning indictment of Israel’s conduct is that it is fighting this war without any realistic vision of its outcome, other than the military defeat of Hamas. The “day after” plan that Netanyahu released in February suggests an indefinite Israeli military occupation of Gaza, rejects international negotiations toward a permanent settlement with the Palestinian people, and gives only a vague nod toward a reconstruction plan “financed and led by countries acceptable to Israel.” On March 14, Ophir Falk, one of Netanyahu’s advisers, declared in The Wall Street Journal that the military campaign was “guaranteeing that Gaza will never pose a threat to Israel again.” This is delusional.Violent repression can backfire or produce Pyrrhic victories. Look at my war. Toppling Saddam Hussein created a fertile chaos for insurgent groups of all types. When I deployed to Iraq as part of the American surge of troops in 2007, we successfully worked with Sunni leaders to bring down the level of violence, only for ISIS to rise from the country’s unstable politics over the decade that followed.Repression rarely completely eradicates terrorist groups. Even Israeli intelligence admits that Hamas will survive this war. And as the terrorism expert Audrey Kurth Cronin has noted, repression is difficult for democracies to sustain, because it “exacts an enormous cost in money, casualties, and individual rights, and works best in places where the members of terrorist groups can be separated from the broader population.” The latter is manifestly not the case in Gaza.Sheer force cannot make Palestinians accept the violence done to them, the destruction wrought on their homes, and their fate as a subject population, deprived of self-determination. Recent polls show two-thirds of Gazans blaming Israel for their suffering, and most of the rest blaming the United States, while in the West Bank support for armed struggle has risen. Defenders of Israel will often reference a quote attributed to Golda Meir: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” But that’s not how Palestinians experience it. Even before October 7, the rate of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank was on track to reach an all-time high in 2023. More attacks followed.Making this combustible situation still worse are international actors who benefit from stoking conflict. Iran has long helped train, supply, and fund armed Palestinian groups, offering a reported $350 million in 2023 alone. More arms, training, and funding will flow in the future, not only to Gaza but around the region. Netanyahu has suggested that Israel will maintain military control of Gaza, operating a security buffer zone inside Gaza and closing the border with Egypt. From a military perspective alone, such an expensive commitment to endless repression within Gaza would be shortsighted. As Cronin points out, historically, “using overwhelming force tends to disperse the threat to neighboring regions.”A good pretext for a war does not make a war just. War needs to be carried out without brutality and drive at a just political end. Israel is failing on both counts. Hamas may be horrific, but just because you’ve diagnosed a malignant tumor doesn’t mean you hand a rusty scalpel to a drunk and tell him to cut away while the patient screams in terror.[Graeme Wood: Pressuring Israel works]All of which calls into question America’s support for this war. Washington never even tried to make its aid conditional on Israel’s abiding by the standards of wartime conduct that Americans have come to expect. The Biden administration has twice bypassed congressional review in order to provide weapons to Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed having the State Department investigate possible Israeli human-rights violations, but the Senate rejected the bid. Any policy relying on less debate and greater ignorance should raise alarms in a democracy. The administration’s policy has already hurt America’s standing globally.“All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost,” a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times in October. “Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”Defenders of the war often ask: If not this, what should Israel be doing? Some of the answers to that question are fairly easy. Israel should not approve strikes that will predictably kill more than 100 civilians for limited military gain. It should not bomb entire neighborhoods to rubble. And it must make an aggressive commitment to providing humanitarian relief, rather than being a stumbling block to groups trying to save lives in the midst of starvation.Other answers are more difficult, because to imagine a postwar Gaza that might lead to peace, or at least to the weakening of violent forces around the region, would be to imagine a very different Israeli government—one that could credibly commit to helping facilitate the rebuilding of a Palestinian government in Gaza and the provision of full political rights to the people there. Instead, Israel has a government that just announced the largest West Bank land seizure in decades, and whose prime minister offers nothing to Palestinians but “full Israeli security control of all the territory west of the Jordan.”The Biden administration has assured its critics that it is pressuring Israel to do better. It recently allowed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire to pass, even as it abstained and criticized the resolution for failing to condemn Hamas. But this will hardly repair the damage to America’s international reputation. Washington needs to address the war that is, not the hypothetical war U.S. officials would like to see. As Adil Haque told me, “It’s been five and a half months now, and there’s no indication that Israel will ever change its tactics in a significant way, so you either support the way it fights, or you can’t support it at all.” Washington needs to stop making excuses for Israel and stop supporting this war.So perhaps October 7 will be Israel’s 9/11, or 20 9/11s—not just because of the scale of the losses, but because of the foolishness and cruelty of the response. And a few years from now, if I talk with a survivor of this devastating war, will he blame Hamas for provoking it? I would guess that he’ll blame the country that bombed him without mercy and restricted the delivery of food while his family starved to death. And he’ll blame America for enabling it. And so will the rest of the world. And they’ll be right.
1 h
theatlantic.com
We Were the Lucky Ones Comes So Close to Transcending the Typical Holocaust Drama
The Hulu series about a Jewish family torn apart by the Nazis' invasion of Poland comes so close to transcending the typical Holocaust drama.
1 h
time.com
These Are All the Different Types of Eclipses
There are many more types of eclipses than you might think. The April 8 sky show is just one of a whole family of eclipses.
1 h
time.com
The Strange Intimacy of Middle Names
In 2011, demographic researchers across America realized something surprising: Census forms had a lot of spots left blank. When one person fills it out for the whole household, they might skip certain sections—especially the middle-name column. Sixty percent of people left out the middle names of their extended family members, and nearly 80 percent omitted those of roommates they weren’t related to. Respondents weren’t trying to keep secrets. Much of the time, they just didn’t know the middle names of the people they lived with.Middle names occupy a strange space in American society. We use them most in bureaucratic contexts. They show up on driver’s licenses and passports, but they aren’t required when booking plane tickets. You probably don’t include it in your signature, and you probably don’t put it in your social-media profiles. For many of us, the name feels like a secret. Only about 22 percent of Americans think they know the middle names of at least half of their friends or acquaintances, according to a poll conducted for The Atlantic by The Harris Poll. Yet you still might be offended if a spouse or a close friend forgets yours. Knowing this seemingly benign piece of information has become emblematic of your connection. “She don’t even know your middle name,” Cardi B laments about an ex-partner’s new fling in her song “Be Careful.” But the intimacy you miss out on when you don’t know someone’s middle name can be more than symbolic. The names can be Trojan horses of meaning about ourselves or our ancestors, couriers of overlooked parts of our identity.[Read: The least common, least loved names in America]This wasn’t always the case. Middle names were probably an export of medieval Italy’s tradition of double first names, the historian Stephen Wilson wrote in The Means Of Naming: A Social History. Over the next few centuries, the practice of giving children two names ricocheted across the European elite. In the late 19th century, it gained traction in America, predominantly among the upper class. It spread across social strata during the early 1900s as part of the rise of life insurance and Social Security cards. Prior to World War I, many Americans didn’t maintain consistent spellings of their first and last names. But with more official documents tracking who they were, spelling their names the same way each time and tacking on an extra one to distinguish family members with the same name just made sense. The result was a veritable takeover: By the late 1970s, 75 percent of Americans had middle names.In many other cultures, middle names either don’t exist or don’t serve the same purpose. Countries such as Japan, Korea, and China don’t have anything that directly correlates to American middle names, though many Americans with family from these countries give their kids one anyway. Meanwhile, in other communities in the United States, middle names are quite prominent. You might know a neighbor’s middle name, for instance, if you live in the American South. Southerners are more likely to go by their middle name than people living in any other part of the country, probably because they more often hand down the same first name across multiple generations and need a differentiator. Others in the region may opt for compound first-and-middle names, such as “Sarah Beth.” These are also common in many Hispanic families.But for many of the rest of us, hearing our middle name can seem oddly formal. It’s jarring when a parent uses it to scold us, because doing so injects a dose of ceremony and distance into a typically close relationship, Wijnand van Tilburg, a professor at the University of Essex, in England, told me. Some of us have become so hardwired to associate our middle name with wrongdoing, in fact, that even seeing it written down makes us less indulgent. In one study, participants were less likely to want a product that might be seen as a guilty pleasure—in this case, a bottle made to hold sugary drinks—after they imagined their full name, middle name included, engraved on it.Despite these formal, bureaucratic connotations, a variety of factors—be they idiosyncratic preferences or deep familial meaning—shape why these names are chosen, transforming them into far more than legalese. For some parents, the names are a creative exercise. Many of the most popular middle names in America—such as Marie and Ann, which ranked in the top-10 middle names for every single decade from 1900 until 2015—may have been chosen for their pleasing poetic rhythm, Sophie Kihm, the editor in chief of the baby-naming site Nameberry, told me. Metaphor-driven names such as Moxie are taking off too, as are more artistic ones, such as Symphony and Rembrandt. Kihm is also seeing a lot of animal names, such as Hawk and Lynx; the rapper Macklemore gave his daughter the middle name Koala. Others use the spot for something more personal. Forty-three percent of middle names honor a family member, compared with just 27 percent of first names. Indeed, middle names are commonly used to acknowledge where you came from. Many middle-class Mexican American families have chosen to give their children an English first name and a Spanish middle name; Kihm told me she’s seen many Asian Americans do the same in their respective languages. [Read: The rise of gender-neutral names isn’t what it seems ]In some cases, the middle name might reflect what parents would be most drawn to, if they weren’t concerned with social scrutiny. “People are willing to take bigger risks there than they are with the first name,” Kihm told me. Although scholars have observed that political tensions can trickle down into how parents name their kids, the virtue signals rarely spread to middle names. In America, the rise of anti-French sentiment during the early years of the Iraq War led to a marked decline in French first names—but there was no discernible impact on middle names. Recently, even as gender-neutral first names have become common, middle names have quietly subverted gender norms further. Kihm pointed out that girls are getting more traditionally masculine middle names, and vice versa. James, for instance, has become a popular middle name for girls; Rihanna recently gave her son the middle name Rose.This slot, then, is a place for parents to hide their values in plain sight. Sometimes we seem to expect the middle name to reveal something fundamental. Look no further than the TV and movie trope in which a character announces that some meaningful word—subtle, courageous, slick—is actually their middle name. (In Austin Powers, it goes: “Danger is my middle name.”) Your middle name, in this understanding, is a secret weapon, a raw reflection of your personality or of a hidden skill. This has filtered into actual naming trends in the past decade, as middle names with symbolic meaning such as Love have become more popular, according to Kihm.Middle names can’t telegraph all of who we are. But maybe sharing them feels so intimate because they carry a small piece of us. More than being a few letters printed on your ID, they’re a window into your family history, your parents’ tastes, and sometimes even their aspirations for who you might become.
1 h
theatlantic.com
Yes, even most temperate landscapes in the US can and will burn
Photo by Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images Wildfire risk is increasing everywhere, especially in the East and South. Here’s a major reason why. Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu via Getty Images Smoke rises over the forest during a wildfire in Viña del Mar, Chile, on February 3, 2024. Last month, a heat wave persisted for days in the Chilean coastal city of Viña del Mar. The landscape, already affected by an El Niño-supercharged drought, was baked dry. So, when wildfires sparked, they ripped through densely populated and mountainous terrain. In just a few days, the fires — the deadliest in Chile’s history — burned 71,000 acres and killed at least 134 people. Devastating wildfires like these are becoming increasingly common. Climate change is partly to blame — while research has found that both El Niño and climate change have contributed to intense wildfires in Chile in recent years, scientists disagree whether climate change had a statistically significant impact on these particular February fires. But the Chilean fires also underscore another ominous dynamic: Grasses, shrubs, and trees that humans have introduced to new ecosystems are increasing wildfire occurrence and frequency. In central Chile over five decades, timber companies have converted natural forests to homogenous, sprawling plantations of nonnative eucalyptus and Monterey pine that grow rapidly in the country’s Mediterranean climate. These trees contain an oily resin that makes them especially flammable but coupled with hotter and drier conditions due to climate change, they can be explosive, says Dave McWethy, an assistant professor at Montana State University. Our relationship with such nonnative species is fraught. We enable the spread of nonnatives by purposely transporting species to landscapes that haven’t previously existed with them. Take English ivy, a popular choice for stabilizing soil as an ornamental plant. Or the Norway maple, which was introduced to the East Coast of the US in 1756, quickly becoming popular for the shade it provided. In the process, such nonnatives can displace local ecologies and native species, disrupt agriculture, or transmit disease. Once a critter or a plant is introduced, either accidentally or purposefully, it can spread rapidly and outpace efforts to catch them at checkpoints or, as is the case for Florida’s state-sponsored “rodeos” for species like pythons, kill them. A report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimates that the approximately 3,500 geographically invasive plants and animals worldwide cost the global economy $423 billion annually. Climate change is also shuffling the ecological deck: As Vox has reported, ecologists expect climate change to create “range-shifting” or “climate-tracking” species that move to survive hotter temperatures. Perhaps some of those species will be more fire-prone. “Fires in places that are not used to fires are going to become much worse because of invasive species,” said Anibal Pauchard, co-author of the IPBES report and a professor at the University of Concepción and director of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity in Chile. Such trends are causing wildfires to burn in unexpected places in the US as well. Last summer, for example, a wildfire — fueled by guinea grass, molasses grass, and buffel grass — killed at least 101 people in Maui. According to research published in the journal PNAS, eight species of nonnative grasses are increasing fire occurrence by between 27 and 230 percent in the US. This means, due in part to the spread of nonnative species, millions of people in the US will be affected by more frequent wildfires and the unhealthy smoke they produce. As the research shows, invasive grasses are altering historic fire activity and behavior in a variety of locations across the US. This includes those living in the arid West (especially the Great Basin and the Southwest) but also those in more humid parts of the country, particularly people living near eastern temperate deciduous forests, which cover the eastern US, and pine savannah ecoregions from central South Carolina to central Florida. Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images A firefighter helps battle a brush fire in the Meadowlands near Metlife Stadium in Carlstadt, New Jersey, in 2012. Fire departments struggled to bring under control one of many brush fires that broke out in New Jersey and New York that year. Such brush fires are increasing common in the Eastern US as the climate continues to change. The nonnative grasses driving wildfire risk in the US While no one factor causes a big fire to happen on its own, nonnative grasses have played a more important role in recent decades — especially in low-elevation regions without much fire historically, said Seth Munson, an ecologist with the Southwest Biological Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. The annual invasive grass cheatgrass, known for its hairy tops, is found in an estimated 50-70 million acres nationwide, mostly in the Great Basin states. Lands with at least 15 percent cheatgrass are twice as likely to burn as those with a low abundance of the grass, and four times more likely to burn multiple times, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Idaho, and University of Colorado. According to the latest data, eight of the largest fires on record in the Great Basin have happened since 2010. That includes Nevada’s Martin Fire, which burned over 435,000 acres in 2018 and destroyed large swaths of grazing pastures for cattle and habitat of the federally protected sage grouse. Another invasive grass, cogongrass flourishes across Florida and the Gulf States, infiltrating traditional pine woodlands. These landscapes are already burning, with harsh human consequences. Wildfires in northwest Florida in recent years have scorched homes, prompted the evacuation of over a thousand people, and cost millions of dollars. The largest wildfire in Texas state history, only recently contained, damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes, killing at least two people and thousands of cows. Hundreds of wildfires in Louisiana last summer also resulted in two deaths. Buffelgrass is taking root all over Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and red brome is spreading in the Mojave and other deserts. Highly flammable tamarisk shrubs have taken root in thick stands near streams in the western US, and eucalyptus — one of the primary invasive trees blamed for worsening Chile’s recent wildfires as well as fires in Portugal — increases wildfire risk in California. What can be done? Limiting the introduction of nonnative plants, when possible, addresses the problem at its root. But many invasive species already have a foothold somewhere nearby. In that case, early detection of invasive species, by satellite imagery or by people on the ground, is the best way to stop invasives with a variety of removal techniques, be that herbicide or something else, in an attempt to keep them somewhat contained. Federal agencies across the country, like the one Munson works for, as well as states, tribes, nonprofits, and others, are already monitoring for the movement of invasive species on the landscape and attempting to manage them as they inevitably spread. Work is also underway to help native plants reestablish faster after fires, giving them a chance against invasives angling for the same open space. You can do your part by finding out which nonnative plants exist in your area, especially those that increase wildfire risk. And if you’re looking to spruce up your home’s landscaping, don’t plant them; consider a native alternative instead.
1 h
vox.com
Work Advice: Co-worker’s smells have everyone’s nose out of joint
When a stinky sitcom situation comes to life at the office, the question is not “What Would Jerry Do?” but “Where is HR?”
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washingtonpost.com
Billy Donovan has sage advice for UConn as it seeks March Madness repeat
Everything Dan Hurley and Connecticut are going through — the pressure, the expectations, the distractions — Billy Donovan has experienced.
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nypost.com
MoMA stabbing suspect is on his ‘deathbed’ after cancer diagnosis: lawyer
The unhinged man accused of stabbing two Museum of Modern Art employees in a fit of rage is on his “deathbed” at a New York City hospital, according to his attorney — who is looking to have the case tossed, The Post has learned. Gary Cabana, 62, may not make it after being diagnosed with...
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nypost.com
They were each other’s first crushes. 70 years later, they said ‘I do.’
Elaine Hall and Roland Passaro, both 88, were smitten with each other as classmates, but went their separate ways until reconnecting at a 50th reunion.
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washingtonpost.com