We'll make it up to you in the year two thousand.
>CHEKA in full action.
not again
>and the silence of the morning breaks with aplomb
Global controls will have to be imposed,
and a world governing body will be created to enforce them.
Crises precipitate change.
I think this is racist
https://masksoftheworld.com/black-faced-monk-from-korea/
This mask is very popular in Yangju, South Korea. In the dance drama this ugly old man tries to seduce a pretty girl. The white dots on his black face are supposed to represent small pox. There are quite a few characters in these celebrations, but the favorites are monks and pretty girls. The girl masks are colored white and the monks are black. This one is made out of wood. The other common material used in Yangju is papier mache. Korean masks look much different from those of other countries around the world.
Did you get your vaccine?
it is pretty dank
https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-health-france-coronavirus-pandemic-655d8451d7494f8663ce2072e64cf7a6
France’s virus pass now required in restaurants, trains
People in France are now required to show a QR code proving they have a special virus pass to enjoy restaurants and cafes or travel across the country.
The measure is part of a government plan to encourage more people to get the vaccine and to slow down a surge in infections, as the highly contagious delta variant now accounts for most cases in France. Over 36 million people in France, or more than 54% of the population, are fully vaccinated.
The special pass is issued to people who are vaccinated against COVID-19, who have proof of recent recovery from the virus or who have a recent negative test.
The measure also applies to tourists visiting the country.
In hospitals, visitors and patients who have appointments are required to have the pass. Exceptions are made for people needing urgent care at the emergency ward.
The pass is now required on high-speed, intercity and night trains carrying over 400,000 passengers per day, Transports Ministry Jean-Baptiste Djebbari said Monday. It is also required on long-distance travels by plane and bus.
“We’re going to enforce massive controls,” Djebbari said.
Paper or digital documents are accepted.
Polls show that most French support the health pass. But the measure has prompted strong opposition from some people who say their freedoms will be compromised, notably by limiting movements and daily activities outside the home.
On Saturday, thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris and other French cities for a fourth consecutive week of protests against the measure.
The pass was already in place last month for cultural and recreational venues including cinemas, concert halls, sports arenas and theme parks.
The law also requires health care workers to be vaccinated against the virus by Sept. 15.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-science-climate-environment-and-nature-united-nations-1d89d5183583718ad4ad311fa2ee7d83
‘Nowhere to run’: UN report says global warming nears limits
Earth’s climate is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”
“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”
But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.
The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.
Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels in the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century and a half.
Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows.
“Our report shows that we need to be prepared for going into that level of warming in the coming decades. But we can avoid further levels of warming by acting on greenhouse gas emissions,” said report co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences at the University of Paris-Saclay.
In three scenarios, the world will also likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times — the other, less stringent Paris goal — with far worse heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours “unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades,” the report said.
“This report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said IPCC Vice Chair Ko Barrett, senior climate adviser for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.
For example, the kind of heat wave that used to happen only once every 50 years now happens once a decade, and if the world warms another degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), it will happen twice every seven years, the report said.
As the planet warms, places will get hit more not just by extreme weather but by multiple climate disasters at once, the report said. That’s like what’s now happening in the Western U.S., where heat waves, drought and wildfires compound the damage, Mearns said. Extreme heat is also driving massive fires in Greece and Turkey.
Some harm from climate change — dwindling ice sheets, rising sea levels and changes in the oceans as they lose oxygen and become more acidic — is “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” the report said.
The world is “locked in” to 15 to 30 centimeters (6 to 12 inches) of sea level rise by mid-century, said report co-author Bob Kopp of Rutgers University.
Scientists have issued this message for more than three decades, but the world hasn’t listened, said United Nations Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen.
Nearly all of the warming that has happened on Earth can be blamed on emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. At most, natural forces or simple randomness can explain one- or two-tenths of a degree of warming, the report said.
The report described five different future scenarios based on how much the world reduces carbon emissions. They are: a future with incredibly large and quick pollution cuts; another with intense pollution cuts but not quite as massive; a scenario with moderate emission cuts; a fourth scenario where current plans to make small pollution reductions continue; and a fifth possible future involving continued increases in carbon pollution.
In five previous reports, the world was on that final hottest path, often nicknamed “business as usual.” But this time, the world is somewhere between the moderate path and the small pollution reductions scenario because of progress to curb climate change, said report co-author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Lab.
While calling the report “a code red for humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres kept a sliver of hope that world leaders could still somehow prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, which he said is “perilously close.”
There is also a way for the world to stay at the 1.5-degree threshold with extreme and quick emission cuts, but even then, temperatures would rise 1.5 degrees Celsius in a decade and even beyond, before coming back down, said co-author Maisia Rojas Corrada, director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research in Chile.
“Anything we can do to limit, to slow down, is going to pay off,” Tebaldi said. “And if we cannot get to 1.5, it’s probably going to be painful, but it’s better not to give up.”
In the report’s worst-case scenario, the world could be around 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now by the end of the century. But that scenario looks increasingly unlikely, said report co-author and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate change director of the Breakthrough Institute.
“We are a lot less likely to get lucky and end up with less warming than we thought,” Hausfather said. “At the same time, the odds of ending up in a much worse place than we expected if we do reduce our emissions are notably lower.”
A “major advance” in the understanding of how fast the world warms with each ton of carbon dioxide emitted allowed scientists to be far more precise in the scenarios in this report, Mason-Delmotte said.
The report said ultra-catastrophic disasters — commonly called “tipping points,” like ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents — are “low likelihood” but cannot be ruled out. The much talked-about shutdown of Atlantic ocean currents, which would trigger massive weather shifts, is something that’s unlikely to happen in this century, Kopp said.
The report “provides a strong sense of urgency to do even more,” said Jane Lubchenco, the White House deputy science adviser.
In a new move, scientists emphasized how cutting airborne levels of methane — a powerful but short-lived gas that has soared to record levels — could help curb short-term warming. Lots of methane the atmosphere comes from leaks of natural gas, a major power source. Livestock also produces large amounts of the gas, a good chunk of it in cattle burps.
More than 100 countries have made informal pledges to achieve “net zero” human-caused carbon dioxide emissions sometime around mid-century, which will be a key part of climate negotiations this fall in Scotland. The report said those commitments are essential.
“It is still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts,” Barrett said.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-belarus-1a8ab4ed8d1fee5b72623d821193c92a
Belarus leader accuses opposition of plotting a coup
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Belarus’ authoritarian leader on Monday charged that the opposition was plotting a coup in the runup to last year’s presidential election that triggered a monthslong wave of mass protests demanding his resignation.
President Alexander Lukashenko held his annual press conference on the one-year anniversary of the vote that handed him a sixth term in office but was denounced by the opposition and the West as rigged.
In his opening remarks, Lukashenko defended the election and accused the opposition of preparing a coup.
“We back then carried out preparation for the election and the election itself in the conditions of total transparency and democratization of political life,” Lukashenko said. “The difference was only that some were preparing for fair election, and others called for bashing the authorities — for a coup.”
Belarus was shaken by months of protests triggered by Lukashenko’s re-election, the largest of which drew up to 200,000 people. Belarusian authorities responded to the protests with a relentless crackdown that saw more than 35,000 people arrested and thousands beaten by police. Leading opposition figures have been jailed or forced to leave the country.
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 27 years, has denounced his opponents as foreign stooges and accused the U.S. and its allies of plotting to overthrow his government.
The authorities have ramped up their crackdown on dissent in recent months, targeting independent journalists and democracy activists with raids and arrests and sometimes going to extremes such as diverting a plane to the capital of Minsk and arresting a dissident aboard.
The pressure on dissents has elicited international outrage, and the United States and European Union have slapped Belarus with sanctions that target top government officials and key sectors of the country’s economy.
In response to the sanctions, Lukashenko has said his country will not try to stem a flow of illegal migrants to the EU. Lithuania in recent months has faced a surge of mostly Iraqi migrants it has blamed on Lukashenko’s government.
On Monday, the president also threatened to stop cooperating with the U.S. in the fight against smuggling of radioactive materials if the sanctions pressure continues.
“Who needs some dirty explosives going to the European Union?” Lukashenko said, citing the surge of migrants as an example of Western pressure backfiring. “We’re not blackmailing, we’re not threatening, we’re forced to react,” he said.
Last week, Belarus once again drew international attention. At the Tokyo Games, a Belarusian Olympic sprinter accused the country’s officials of trying to put her on a plane back to Belarus after she publicly criticized the management of her team at the games. Krystsina Tsimanouskaya refused to board the plane and instead sought refuge in Poland.
In his first comment on the incident, Lukashenko accused her of being a foreign stooge, saying that “she wouldn’t have done it herself if she hadn’t been manipulated.”
Around the same time, a Belarusian activist who ran a group in Ukraine helping Belarusians fleeing persecution was found hanged in Kyiv, with his allies alleging that Belarus’ authorities were behind his death.
Lukashenko on Monday brushed off these accusations and demanded Ukraine to investigate Vitaly Shishov’s death. “It needs to be figured out. But if you’ve accused us, (put) facts on the table. Facts on the table!” he said.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-8905fc1d3be22b7b83110f04e909753e
Fauci hopeful COVID vaccines get full OK by FDA within weeks
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — The U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Sunday that he was hopeful the Food and Drug Administration will give full approval to the coronavirus vaccine by month’s end and predicted the potential move will spur a wave of vaccine mandates in the private sector as well as schools and universities.
The FDA has only granted emergency-use approval of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, but the agency is expected to soon give full approval to Pfizer.
The Biden administration has stated that the federal government will not mandate vaccinations beyond the federal workforce, but is increasingly urging state and local governments as well as businesses to consider such mandates. Fauci, who is President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said “mandates at the local level need to be done” to help curb the spread of the virus.
“I hope — I don’t predict — I hope that it will be within the next few weeks. I hope it’s within the month of August,” Fauci said of FDA approval of the vaccine. “If that’s the case, you’re going to see the empowerment of local enterprises, giving mandates that could be colleges, universities, places of business, a whole variety and I strongly support that. The time has come. … We’ve got to go the extra step to get people vaccinated.”
Fauci’s comments come as the Biden administration is weighing what levers it can push to encourage more unvaccinated Americans to get their shots as the delta variant continues to surge through much of the United States.
Biden recently approved rules requiring federal workers to provide proof of vaccination or face regular testing, mask mandates and travel restrictions. Biden is also awaiting a formal recommendation from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on potentially requiring U.S. troops to get vaccinated.
The administration has become more vocal in its support of vaccine mandates at a moment when high-profile companies have informed employees that coronavirus vaccination requirements are in the works, and some localities have adopted or are contemplating vaccine requirements to dine indoors.
United Airlines informed its employees that they will need to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 25 or five weeks after the FDA grants full approval to one of the vaccines — whichever date comes first.
Disney and Walmart have announced vaccine mandates for white-collar workers, and Microsoft, Google and Facebook said they will require proof of vaccination for employees and visitors to their U.S. offices. Tyson Foods has also announced it will require all U.S. employees to get vaccinated by November.
There’s also been pushback.
The U.S. Supreme Court last week was asked to block a plan by Indiana University to require students and employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19. It’s the first time the high court has been asked to weigh in on a vaccine mandate and comes as some corporations, states and cities are also contemplating or have adopted vaccine requirements for workers or even to dine indoors.
Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers union, said on Sunday that she personally supports a vaccine mandate for educators.
“As a matter of personal conscience, I think that we need to be working with our employers — not opposing them on vaccine mandates,” said Weingarten, who estimated about 90% of AFT members are already vaccinated.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, on Sunday all but endorsed vaccine mandates, saying, “I celebrate when I see businesses deciding that they’re going to mandate that for their employees.”
“Yes, I think we ought to use every public health tool we can when people are dying,” Collins said.
Fauci and Weingarten spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and Collins appeared on ABC’s “This Week.”
https://apnews.com/article/science-climate-environment-and-nature-united-nations-climate-change-3939c763c2e9f69f08b0bcae3074752f
5 things to know about the new UN report on climate change
GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.-appointed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report Monday summarizing the latest authoritative scientific information about global warming. Here are five important takeaways.
BLAMING HUMANS
The report says almost all of the warming that has occurred since pre-industrial times was caused by the release of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Much of that is the result of humans burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, wood and natural gas.
Scientists say that only a fraction of the temperature rise recorded since the 19th century can have come from natural forces.
PARIS GOALS
Almost all countries have signed up to the 2015 Paris climate accord that aims to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) — and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — by the year 2100, compared to the late 19th century.
The report’s 200-plus authors looked at five scenarios and concluded that all will see the world cross the 1.5-degree threshold in the 2030s — sooner than in previous predictions. Three of those scenarios will also see temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
DIRE CONSEQUENCES
The 3,000-plus-page report concludes that ice melt and sea level rise are already accelerating. Wild weather events — from storms to heat waves — are also expected to worsen and become more frequent.
Further warming is “locked in” due to the greenhouse gases humans have already released into the atmosphere. That means even if emissions are drastically cut, some changes will be “irreversible” for centuries, the report said.
SOME HOPE
While many of the report’s predictions paint a grim picture of humans’ impact on the planet and the consequences that will have going forward, the IPCC also found that so-called tipping points, like catastrophic ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents, are “low likelihood,” though they cannot be ruled out.
THE IPCC
The panel is composed of independent experts put forward by governments and organizations to provide the best possible scientific consensus on climate change.
Scores of scientists provide regular reports on a range of aspects of global warming that governments draw on when discussing what countries can contribute to curb greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
https://apnews.com/article/science-environment-and-nature-indonesia-3323c00f25c830db03f16a03ceb21ee4
Indonesia’s Mount Merapi erupts with bursts of lava, ash
Nobody censors you here?