Day: August 12, 2022

Talk about hot nights. America got some for the history books last month.

The continental United States in July set a record for overnight warmth, providing little relief from the day’s sizzling heat for people, animals, plants and the electric grid, meteorologists said.

The average low temperature for the Lower 48 states in July was 17.6 degrees Celsius (63.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which beat the previous record set in 2011 by a few hundredths of a degree. The mark is the hottest nightly average not only for July but for any month in 128 years of record keeping, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climatologist Karin Gleason. July’s nighttime low was more than 5.4 degrees C (3 degrees F) warmer than the 20th-century average.

Scientists have long talked about nighttime temperatures — reflected in increasingly hotter minimum readings that usually occur after sunset and before sunrise — being crucial to health.

“When you have daytime temperatures that are at or near record high temperatures and you don’t have that recovery overnight with temperatures cooling off, it does place a lot of stress on plants, on animals and on humans,” Gleason said Friday. “It’s a big deal.”

In Texas, where the monthly daytime average high was over 37.8 C (100 degrees F) for the first time in July and the electrical grid was stressed, the average nighttime temperature was a still toasty 23.5 C (74.3 F) — 7.2 degrees C (4 degrees F) above the 20th-century average.

In the past 30 years, the nighttime low in the U.S. has warmed on average about 3.8 degrees C (2.1 degrees F), while daytime high temperatures have gone up 3.4 degrees C (1.9 degrees F) at the same time. For decades, climate scientists have said global warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas would make the world warm faster at night and in the northern polar regions. A study earlier this week said the Arctic is now warming four times faster than the rest of the globe.

Nighttime warms faster because daytime warming helps make the air hold more moisture, then that moisture helps trap the heat in at night, Gleason said.

“So it is, in theory, expected, and it’s also something we’re seeing happen in the data,” Gleason said.

NOAA on Friday also released its global temperature data for July, showing it was on average the sixth-hottest month on record, with an average temperature of 16.67 C (61.97 F), which is 0.87 C (1.57 F) warmer than the 20th-century average. It was a month of heat waves, including one in the United Kingdom that broke its all-time heat record.

“Global warming is continuing on pace,” Colorado meteorologist Bob Henson said.
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A divided Congress gave final approval Friday to Democrats’ flagship climate, tax and health care bill, handing President Joe Biden a back-from-the-dead triumph on coveted priorities that the party hopes will bolster its prospects for keeping control of Congress in November’s elections. 

The House used a party-line 220-207 vote to pass the legislation, which is but a shadow of the larger, more ambitious plan to supercharge environment and social programs that Biden and his party envisioned early last year.

Even so, Democrats happily declared victory on top-tier goals like providing Congress’ largest ever investment in curbing carbon emissions, reining in pharmaceutical costs and taxing large companies, a vote they believe will show they can wring accomplishments from a routinely gridlocked Washington that often disillusions voters. 

“Today is a day of celebration, a day we take another giant step in our momentous agenda,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat. She said the measure “meets the moment, ensuring that our families thrive and that our planet survives.” 

Republicans solidly opposed the legislation, calling it a cornucopia of wasteful liberal daydreams that would raise taxes and families’ living costs. They did the same Sunday but Senate Democrats banded together and used Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote to power the measure through that 50-50 chamber. 

“Democrats, more than any other majority in history, are addicted to spending other people’s money, regardless of what we as a country can afford,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican. “I can almost see glee in their eyes.” 

Biden’s initial 10-year, $3.5 trillion proposal also envisioned free prekindergarten, paid family and medical leave, expanded Medicare benefits and eased immigration restrictions. That crashed after centrist Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, said it was too costly, using the leverage every Democrat has in the evenly divided Senate. 

Still, the final legislation remained substantive. Its pillar is about $375 billion over 10 years to encourage industry and consumers to shift from carbon-emitting to cleaner forms of energy. That includes $4 billion to cope with the West’s catastrophic drought. 

Spending, tax credits and loans would bolster technology like solar panels, consumer efforts to improve home energy efficiency, emission-reducing equipment for coal- and gas-powered power plants, and air pollution controls for farms, ports and low-income communities. 

Another $64 billion would help 13 million people pay premiums over the next three years for privately bought health insurance. Medicare would gain the power to negotiate its costs for pharmaceuticals, initially in 2026 for only 10 drugs. Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket prescription costs would be limited to $2,000 starting in 2025, and beginning next year they would pay no more than $35 monthly for insulin, the costly diabetes drug. 

The bill would raise around $740 billion in revenue over the decade, over a third from government savings from lower drug prices. More would flow from higher taxes on some $1 billion corporations, levies on companies that repurchase their own stock and stronger Internal Revenue Service tax collections. About $300 billion would remain to defray budget deficits, a sliver of the period’s projected $16 trillion total. 

Against the backdrop of GOP attacks on the FBI for its court-empowered search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate for sensitive documents, Republicans repeatedly savaged the bill’s boost to the IRS budget. That is aimed at collecting an estimated $120 billion in unpaid taxes over the coming decade, and Republicans have misleadingly claimed that the IRS will hire 87,000 agents to target average families. 

Representative Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican, said Democrats would also “weaponize” the IRS with agents, “many of whom will be trained in the use of deadly force, to go after any American citizen.” Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, asked Thursday on “Fox and Friends” if there would be an IRS “strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person.” 

Few IRS personnel are armed, and Democrats say the bill’s $80 billion, 10-year budget increase would be to replace waves of retirees, not just agents, and modernize equipment. They have said typical families and small businesses would not be targeted, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen directing the IRS this week to not “increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold” that would be audited. 

Republicans say the legislation’s new business taxes will increase prices, worsening the nation’s bout with its worst inflation since 1981. Though Democrats have labeled the measure the Inflation Reduction Act, nonpartisan analysts say it will have a barely perceptible impact on prices. 

The GOP also says the bill would raise taxes on lower- and middle-income families. An analysis by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, which didn’t include the bill’s tax breaks for health care and energy, estimated that the corporate tax boosts would marginally affect those taxpayers but indirectly, partly due to lower stock prices and wages. 

The bill caps three months in which Congress has approved legislation on veterans’ benefits, the semiconductor industry, gun checks for young buyers and Ukraine’s invasion by Russia and adding Sweden and Finland to NATO. All passed with bipartisan support, suggesting Republicans also want to display their productive side. 

It’s unclear whether voters will reward Democrats for the legislation after months of painfully high inflation dominating voters’ attention and Biden’s dangerously low popularity with the public and a steady history of midterm elections that batter the party holding the White House. 

The bill had its roots in early 2021, after Congress approved a $1.9 trillion measure over GOP opposition to combat the pandemic-induced economic downturn. Emboldened, the new president and his party reached further. 

They called their $3.5 trillion plan Build Back Better. Besides social and environment initiatives, it proposed rolling back Trump-era tax breaks for the rich and corporations and $555 billion for climate efforts, well above the resources in Friday’s legislation. 

With Manchin opposing those amounts, it was sliced to a roughly $2 trillion measure that Democrats moved through the House in November. He unexpectedly sank that bill too, earning scorn from exasperated fellow Democrats from Capitol Hill and the White House. 

Last-gasp talks between Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, seemed fruitless until the two unexpectedly announced agreement last month on the new package. 

Manchin won billions for carbon capture technology for the fossil fuel industries he champions, plus procedures for more oil drilling on federal lands and promises for faster energy project permitting. Centrist Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, also won concessions, eliminating planned higher taxes on hedge fund managers and helping win the drought funds.
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New York state and city health authorities said Friday that poliovirus, which causes paralytic polio, had been detected in samples of New York City sewage, suggesting the disease likely was circulating in the city.

Their statement followed the initial discovery of the virus in wastewater in neighboring counties in May, June and July. A man in Rockland County, north of New York City, was confirmed to have polio last month.

Health officials fear that the detection of the poliovirus in New York City could precede other cases of paralytic polio. Polio can lead to permanent paralysis of the arms and legs and even death.

In a statement Friday, State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett said, “The detection of poliovirus in wastewater samples in New York City is alarming, but not surprising. … The best way to keep adults and children polio-free is through safe and effective immunization.”

The spread of the virus poses a risk to unvaccinated people, but a three-dose course of the vaccine provides at least 99% protection. Health officials are urging unvaccinated adults to get vaccinated and parents to vaccinate their children if they have not done so.

The health department reports most adults in New York City were vaccinated as children.

Overall, about 86% of children 5 and younger in New York City have been vaccinated, though the city health department said some neighborhoods were lagging.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports polio was once one of the nation’s most feared diseases, with annual outbreaks causing thousands of cases of paralysis, many of them in children.

Vaccines became available in 1955, and a national vaccination campaign cut the annual number of U.S. cases to fewer than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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A Republican-leaning state in America’s socially conservative heartland recently shocked both sides of the long-running battle over abortion, calling into question the conventional wisdom about how and where the procedure might be restricted or banned. 

Voters in Kansas cast ballots last week on a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution that would have eliminated an existing right to abortion. The amendment was expected to pass handily in a state no Democratic presidential contender has won in nearly 60 years and where Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by 15 percentage points in the 2020 election. 

Voters rejected the ballot measure, preserving abortion rights. 

“The consensus was that Republicans in Kansas were going to ban abortion like in many other conservative states,” University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock told VOA. “But we got a big surprise. Kansas voted to uphold abortion protections and the only way to explain it is that the vote exposed a rift. There seems to be a difference between what Republican politicians want and what voters – including some Republican voters – want.” 

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in June, it gave each U.S. state the ability to decide whether to allow or ban abortion. 

Until last week, initial results seemed to follow states’ partisan leanings, with Republican-controlled states moving to outlaw abortions and Democrat-led states preserving and, in some cases, moving to bolster abortion protections.  

For example, just days after the Kansas vote, lawmakers in another conservative breadbasket state, Indiana, became the first in the post-Roe era to pass a law banning most abortions. Before the Supreme Court’s June ruling, several Republican-led state legislatures had passed so-called “trigger laws” that restricted or ended access to the procedure once Roe was overturned. 

“The difference between Kansas and the states like Indiana,” Bullock said, “is that in Indiana politicians in the legislature voted on the proposed laws, while in Kansas, the public got to vote directly. It turns out that distinction makes a big difference.” 

And the Kansas vote was decisive, defeating the anti-abortion-rights amendment 59% to 41%. 

While the result will impact the lives of women and families across the Sunflower State, Bullock believes the shock waves could be far reaching. 

“Politicians and activists from around the country are watching and analyzing what happened in Kansas,” he said, “and you might see both sides employing the lessons they’re learning when the fight comes to their own states.” 

Rift among Republicans 

Ann Mah, a Democratic member of the Kansas State Board of Education, remembers the moment she first thought abortion rights backers could win the amendment battle. 

“You have these Republican politicians who are always moving to the right to appeal to the loudest members of their base so they can win their primary,” she told VOA, “But I was getting the sense some conservative voters were becoming uneasy with the amount these proposed abortion policies were reaching into their private lives.” 

One day as the vote neared, Mah spoke with a neighbor she described as “ultra-conservative.”  

“We don’t agree on hardly anything, me and this person,” she said, “but he came to my house and asked for a ‘Vote No’ yard sign because he didn’t support the amendment. That’s when I knew we had a chance.” 

Not everyone believes what happened in Kansas will carry over to other states, however.

“I’m not from Kansas or Indiana so I can’t speak to what people do in those states,” said Sarah Zagorski, communications director at Louisiana Right to Life, an anti-abortion-rights advocacy organization, “but I can say that one negative result in a state isn’t necessarily indicative of how the country feels about abortion. For pro-life people here in Louisiana, they just won’t be voting for radical abortion extremists and their policies.” 

But former Louisiana state Representative Melissa Flournoy, a Democrat, believes the reality and consequences of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision are only just now registering for many.  

Flournoy pointed to a recent case that made national headlines in which a child victim of rape had to be taken to another state in order to terminate a pregnancy. 

“We’re confronted with this story about a 10-year-old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and was about to be denied an abortion – that’s shocking to most of America,” Flournoy told VOA. “It’s like, ‘Yes, we really are outlawing abortion in all circumstances.’ It’s disorienting, and the implications are coming into focus, even among some voters who consider themselves pro-life.” 

Polling data 

An Ipsos/USA Today poll released Wednesday found 54% of respondents would vote to keep or make abortion legal in their state, with 28% indicating they would vote against abortion-rights measures. 

While it’s more common for legislatures to handle these matters, voters are increasingly clamoring for a direct say. In Republican-controlled South Dakota, for example, the Kansas vote has spawned an effort to pursue a statewide referendum on reestablishing abortion rights in the state. 

Additionally, this November, voters in California, Kentucky, Montana and Vermont will have the opportunity to weigh in on abortion rights via the ballot box, while plans are being finalized to give residents in Colorado and Michigan that same opportunity. 

In fact, according to the Ipsos/USA Today poll, 70% of Americans say they want to vote on abortion via state ballots, including 73% of Democrats, 77% of Republicans and 67% of independents.  

“Opinion on reproductive choice isn’t only based on party lines,” said Cynthia Lash, chair of the Osage County Democratic Central Committee in Kansas, speaking with VOA. “In our state, several nonpartisan groups formed solely to defeat the amendment. They canvassed, they texted voters in all counties regardless of party affiliation, they developed yard signs, they held rallies — they were much more active than traditional campaigns in reaching out to everyone.”  

Osage County is deeply Republican, but even there, 56% of voters opposed the abortion-rights amendment last week.  

“In our small, rural county, only 17% of registered voters are Democrats,” Lash said. “Even in the unlikely case that every Democrat and unaffiliated voter voted against the amendment, that means 31% of Republican voters cast a ballot against the amendment as well. That’s how unpopular it was.” 

Not all anti-abortion activists, however, are convinced a vote against the amendment was a vote against restricting abortions. 

“In Kansas, voters rejected an amendment that allows the legislature to limit or allow abortions as those politicians see fit,” said Laura Knight, president of Pro-Life Mississippi. “Maybe those voters wanted a total ban of abortion. Maybe they felt the amendment wasn’t strong enough. We don’t know.”  

Electoral implications 

Some in the Republican Party worry they are pushing too far in banning abortion, months before midterm elections that will determine control of the U.S. Congress. This past Sunday, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina compared the impact of anti-abortion initiatives to the fictional portrayal of an America in which women have no rights in a popular U.S. television series. 

“It will be an issue in November if we’re not moderating ourselves. ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ is not supposed to be a road map,” Mace said.

Others are urging anti-abortion officeholders to stay true to their beliefs. 

“Government officials are elected to vote their conscience, not to check in with the public on everything,” Tara Wicker, who leads Louisiana Black Advocates for Life, told VOA. “Children who are born of rape or incest are still innocent children and we should be protecting them, regardless of how popular that decision is among a subset of voters.” 

Bullock from the University of Georgia sees warning signs for advocates of abortion measures who ignore the will of voters. 

“Both sides have things they can learn from what we’re seeing in states like Indiana and Kansas,” he said, “and for Republicans, the warning is they seem to be pushing beyond what their voters want. It’s a lesson they’ve been confronted with before, but they don’t seem to be learning it.” 

At a time of economic uncertainty in America, the degree to which abortion could determine election outcomes remains to be seen. 

A recent poll in the swing state of Nevada by The Nevada Independent, a news website, and OH Predictive Insights, a market research company, showed abortion laws were the second most powerful issue for respondents – behind only the economy. But the gap between the two remained substantial (40% for the economy and 17% for abortion laws).

“Inflation and the economy as a whole is still front-of-mind for most Americans, but that doesn’t mean the abortion debate can’t impact elections this November,” Bullock said. “This is going to be a big issue for suburban white women, many of whom typically vote Republican. If 50,000 here or 100,000 there change their mind in especially tight districts or states, that’s enough to flip a result or two, and potentially even [determine] control of the [U.S.] Senate.” 
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Ukraine’s top cyber official addressed a room full of security experts at a hackers convention following a two-day trip from Kyiv to a casino in Las Vegas.

During his unannounced visit, Victor Zhora, deputy head of Ukraine’s State Special Communications Service, told the so-called Black Hat convention Wednesday that the number of cyber incidents that have hit Ukraine tripled in the months following Russia’s invasion of his country in late February.

“This is perhaps the biggest challenge since World War II for the world, and it continues to be completely new in cyberspace,” Zhora told an audience at the annual conference.

Ukraine faced a number of “huge incidents” in cyberspace from the end of March to the beginning of April, Zhora said, including the discovery of the “Industroyer2” malware that could manipulate equipment in electrical utilities to control the flow of power.

Russian hackers also hit Ukraine at the onset of the war though a cyberattack that took down regional satellite internet service.

Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine had detected over 1,600 “major cyber incidents,” Zhora said.

Zhora told Reuters in an interview that Microsoft, Amazon and Google had offered pro bono cloud computing services to the Ukrainian government as it moves its data out of the country, away from the destruction wreaked by Russian bombs and missiles.

Some of Ukraine’s data archives are being held within data centers across “multiple [European] countries,” he added, without elaborating.

Zhora said his trip to Las Vegas took two days. He traveled to neighboring Poland to stay a night before flying to the United States.

Zhora said he would not waste time on the slot machines at the sprawling Mandalay Bay casino, where the Black Hat conference is being held: “It would be inappropriate for me to gamble here while Ukrainian soldiers are defending our land.” 
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