Punta Pacifica at sunrise: The former Trump Ocean Club in Panama — the tower shaped something like a sail — is also the subject of civil tax fraud allegations. The purchaser in bankruptcy — who later sold to an international hotel chain — said that the former Trump management concealed unpaid Panamanian taxes with respect to the operation. The building in question is at the left side of this archive photo by Eric Jackson.
Adding Panama to the list, not just to change the subject
by Eric Jackson
Trump supporters are notoriously playing “whataboutism,” as in pointing to other matters to demonstrate alleged hypocrisy. It was a tactic notoriously lampooned by June Foray, the voice of Pottsylvanian secret agent Natasha Fatale on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. But as the indictments come down, Trump detractors are also bringing in extraneous matters, and several criminal investigations are also working toward additions to the list of the former US president’s legal woes.
So where might Panama fit into the list? There was the swarm of unsavory allegations, situations and connections flying around the former Trump Ocean Club in Panama City’s Punta Pacifica neighborhood. As in thuggish peopleselling for The Trump Organization, corrupt people of various nationalities on the premises and a major sales effort to attract Russians in particular, all of which might be brushed off as below-the-belt “guilt by association” blows. There was this suspicious fire at the project’s adjacent marina for which, however, there have been no arrests or convictions.
But then, as it all came falling down in US bankruptcy proceedings, there were the Trump efforts to hold onto his company’s management contract that reportedly involved White House efforts to get Panama’s president at the time, Juan Carlos Varela, to waive various Panamanian laws in order to thwart a US court order to sell the property to a Cypriot bidder in a judicially mandated auction.
Panamanian condo owners have the right to vote a management company out, which they did as to The Trump Organization. But when the new owner arrived, Trump company goons prevented him from entering the building. It got resolved in Panama’s courts, not to Donald Trump’s liking.
There are legal gray areas and novelties as to the situation. The US Constitution arguably — not explicitly — makes personal acceptance of something of value from a foreign power an impeachable emolument. But what if it’s a favor instead of tangible property? What if the favor was only solicited but never delivered?
The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act explicitly makes it a crime to bribe an official of a foreign government. But what about bullying, browbeating or blackmailing a foreign official to do a valuable favor? The law surely covers an improper move aimed at “influencing any act or decision of such foreign official in his official capacity, including a decision to fail to perform his official functions….” Would a White House lean be an inducement contemplated in that statute?
Under the impeachment clause, would the acceptance of such a favor amount to “Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” within the meaning of the Constitution? Then you get a step or more removed to soliciting or conspiring to acquire such a thing.
Were a case to get before a US jury, under whatever theory, then there would be another knotty problem. Just what did Trump, or somebody on his behalf, say to Varela, or to somebody on the former Panamanian president’s behalf, to try to get the latter to waive enforcement of the law? It’s a problem because Varela is quite the impeachable witness, facing an upcoming mass trial for graft and money laundering as he is.
It’s a case that probably won’t get to court, but a legend that’s likely to outlive the people involved — or thought to be involved — in the annals of unsavory US-Panamanian relations.
Any allegation that Russian women were induced to invest by a redhead gun nut operative’s glowing descriptions of moose and squirrel hunting in Panama is probably exaggerated. Screenshot of a sales hype advertorial in womanadvice.ru.
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An easy primary win for the VP — but fewer than one-third of his party’s nearly three-quarters of a million members showed up and cast their votes for him. Graphic from Benicio Robinson’s Twitter feed.
Brave faces, but the PRD is in trouble
by Eric Jackson
As boosters of the nation’s largest political party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), have pointed out, at nearly 60 percent of membership participation the presidential primary was their best-attended such event since 2004.
Who won the PRD primary in the 2004 general election cycle? That would be Martín Torrijos, who went on to win the presidency and led an administration that chalked up a record of incompetence and corruption that disrupted the old alternation – the PRD lost the next two presidential races. We’re supposed to forget the deadly toxic cough syrup. We’re supposed to forget the kids in the comarca who died of starvation plus trivial diseases. We’re supposed to forget the “school excellence” program that was looted by political gangsters in a San Miguelito led entourage. We’re supposed to forget a canal expansion referendum that featured heavy vote suppression, low turnout and a campaign of climate change denial and other deceits.
How resounding was Gaby Carrizo’s victory this time around? He got about 55 percent of the vote, an easy win in a crowded field. But the main runners-up did not come to embrace him. Crispiano Adames called it a campaign of harassment and blackmail. Pedro Miguel González has long lamented that democracy is dead in the PRD. And some 15 percent of those who showed up to vote cast spoiled ballots.
Much closer than the race in the party primary is the “race” between Gaby Carrizo and PRD deputy Zulay Rodríguez, who’s petitioning to run for president as an extreme right independent. Gaby got a little less than 200,000 primary votes, as compared to Zulay’s little more than 140,000 petition signatures. Still, Gaby’s people were saving their venom for Martín Torrijos, who will run on the small Partido Popular’s ticket this time.
The race for the presidential nomination was called rather early, but as midnight approached there were few results from the down-ticket primary races. Who got ousted by his or her own party members and who did not will also be telltale signs for political analysts.
So, a Ricardo Martinelli sweep next year? Let’s see if he gets through this month without a criminal conviction that would disqualify him from next year’s ballot. And if he leaps that hurdle, in a few months the Odebrecht graft and money laundering trial is coming, which also could knock him out of the race.
The alliances for next year ought to be interesting. Can you say “instability?” Or perhaps, can you say former diplomat Ricardo Lombana running up the middle against legislator Zulay Rodríguez way out on the right wing and University of Panama economist Maribel Gordón out there on the left wing, albeit without the extreme pronouncements coming from the right this time. But what would that do to all the “pay to play” legislators and city council members down the ticket? Would things stay the same due to name recognition down the ballot, or would “I know THAT guy” be the recipe for a massive rejection of incumbents?
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Do low-calorie sweeteners help with weight management? And are they safe for long-term use?
This is among the most controversial topics in nutritional science. In early May 2023, the World Health Organization issued a statement that cautions against the use of nonsugar sweeteners for weight loss except for people who have preexisting diabetes.
Based on its interpretation of that large-scale review, the WHO recommended against using artificial sweeteners for weight control and concluded that there may be health risks associated with habitual consumption of nonsugar sweeteners over the long term. However, the WHO also acknowledged that the existing evidence is not conclusive and that more research needs to be done.
As neuroscientists, we study how dietary factors such as sweeteners affect the brain’s ability to perform critical functions, including metabolism, appetite, and learning and memory.
We found the WHO’s advisory surprising based on the study’s equivocal results. Determining the answers to these questions is immensely challenging, and public health messaging around recommendations can send mixed messages.
‘Healthy’ versus ‘unhealthy’ sugars
Natural sugars like glucose and fructose, together with fiber and other nutrients, are found in many food sources that are considered healthy, such as fruit. However, these simple carbohydrates have been increasingly added into manufactured food products, especially beverages. Sugar-sweetened beverages are usually high in calories and offer little else in the way of nutrition.
In the early 20th century, food and beverage manufacturers began incorporating naturally and chemically derived substances that satisfy sweet cravings but contain significantly fewer calories than natural sugars – and, in some cases, zero calories. Sugar substitutes became particularly widespread in the 1950s with the increasing popularity of diet sodas. Since then, consumers have increasingly turned to these sugar substitutes in their everyday lives.
Sugar substitutes go by many names, including high-intensity sweeteners, artificial sweeteners, nonnutritive sweeteners, low-calorie sweeteners and, as termed in the WHO report, nonsugar sweeteners.“ These include synthetic compounds like sucralose, acesulfame potassium and aspartame, and naturally derived ones, such as those from the plant Stevia rebaudiana, among many others.
Each nonsugar sweetener has a unique chemical structure, but they all activate sweet taste receptors at very low concentrations. This means that you need to add only a tiny amount of them to sweeten your coffee or tea, as opposed to heaping spoonfuls of natural sugar.
Nonsugar sweeteners are found in many soft drinks, sports drinks and energy bars.
Sugar substitutes and the quest for weight loss
Obesity and its associated metabolic conditions, like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are now among the leading causes of preventable death in the United States. The obesity epidemic has been linked in part to an increase in added sugar consumption over the past century.
Sugar substitutes were designed to help. The math seems straightforward: Replacing your favorite 12-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage that contains 150 calories with an artificially sweetened beverage of the same volume that contains zero calories should allow you to reduce the number of calories you take in each day and reduce your body weight over time.
However, there are conflicting studies from animal modelsand humans that have not found significant body weight gain associated with nonsugar sweeteners consumption.
Parsing the health impacts
Regardless of any potential benefits nonsugar sweeteners may have for weight control, their use must also be considered in the context of overall health.
Agencies like the WHO and the US Food and Drug Administration periodically review available evidence and assess the safety of various food additives, including nonsugar sweeteners, for use in foods and beverages within what is called an acceptable daily intake limit. In this context, the acceptable daily intake is based on the estimated amount of a specific nonsugar sweetener that can be safely consumed daily over one’s entire life without adverse effects on health.
Each agency sets its own daily allowance based on the best available data. But because these experiments cannot account for all possible conditions in which these substances are used in real life, it is critical that scientists continue to investigate the health effects of food additives.
The authors of the WHO report relied on three main types of published research studies to determine whether nonsugar sweetener consumption was linked to adverse health effects. The gold standard for assessing causation is what are called randomized controlled trials.
In these studies, people are randomly assigned to either an experimental group – which receives the experimental substance, such as a nonsugar sweetener – or a control group – which receives a placebo or different substance. Participants in both groups are then tracked for a period of time, typically weeks or months. The majority of studies involving randomized controlled trials on nonsugar sweeteners to date involve this type of comparison, with nonsugar sweeteners replacing consumption of natural sugar-sweetened beverages.
The analysis of almost 50 randomized controlled trials on which the WHO based its recommendation found modest benefits of using nonsugar sweeteners for weight loss and determined that the habitual use of those nonsugar sweeteners did not lead to diabetes symptoms or indicators of cardiovascular disease. But it did find that the use of nonsugar sweeteners was associated with a higher ratio of total cholesterol to HDL, short for high-density lipoprotein, which is considered the “good cholesterol.”
That means that habitual consumers of artificial sweetener had more of the low-density lipoprotein, or LDL version, in their system. That form of “bad cholesterol” is a risk factor for heart disease.
However, other potential adverse consequences of consuming nonsugar sweeteners may take more time to appear than can be identified in the limited time frame of a randomized controlled trial.
The authors also evaluated what are called prospective cohort studies. Those studies track participants’ self-reported use of sweeteners alongside health outcomes, oftentimes over many years. They also took into account case-control studies, which identify people with or without a certain health issue, such as cancer, and then use available health records and interviews to determine the extent of nonsugar sweetener use in their past.
Examination of the cohort and case-control studies found that regular consumption of nonsugar sweetener was associated with increased fat accumulation, higher body mass index and increased incidence of Type 2 diabetes. Those findings differ from the outcomes of the randomized control studies.
Analysis of the cohort and case-control studies also concluded that a history of regular nonsugar sweetener use was linked to increased frequency of stroke, hypertension, other adverse cardiovascular events and, in pregnant people, an increased risk for premature birth. The frequency of cancer in nonsugar sweetener consumers was very low in general, though saccharin, an FDA-approved sweetener found in many food products, was associated with a bladder cancer.
The history of artificial sweeteners.
Caveats and takeaways
On the face of it, these results are alarming, but they need to be taken with a grain of salt. As the WHO report points out, these studies have significant limitations that need to be considered.
Take, for example, in the cohort and case-control studies, that higher body mass index, or BMI, was associated with greater nonsugar sweetener intake and poorer health outcomes. One possibility is that people with obesity used nonsugar sweeteners to help cut calories more than others without obesity. This makes it difficult to determine whether the disease is caused by sustained artificial sweetener use or by the other underlying conditions associated with obesity.
Additionally, the way nonsugar sweeteners are consumed is not controlled in these types of studies. So negative health outcomes could be associated with other affiliated harmful behaviors, such as more sugar or fat in the diet.
The picture is very mixed on both the benefits of nonsugar sweeteners for weight loss and their ties to adverse health issues. The WHO’s recommendation seems to have weighed the cohort and case-control studies over the randomized controlled ones, a decision that we found puzzling in light of the limitations of these studies for assessing whether nonsugar sweeteners have a causal role in disease.
As with all health-related choices, the science is complex. In our view, grabbing a diet drink to offset the calories in a slice of chocolate cake every once in a while will likely not be harmful for your health or lead to a significant weight change.
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Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bathroom — the place and manner to store Pentagon plans to attack Iran? But far worse would be if these were sold or shared to a foreign power.
Not the worst thing he did but heavy charges in any case
Editor’s note: Pompous proclamations, premature celebrations and incendiary rhetoric are bound to make this worse, but this is where US society is at in mid-2023. Let Republicans say what they will, but Democrats would be wise to heed the advice of their Senate caucus leader Chuck Schumer and House caucus leader Hakeem Jeffries and just calmly let the judicial process take its course.
Will we find out just how inappropriately written, how indiscriminate at the same time as selectively applied on often specious grounds the Espionage Act really is? Those who have not followed the travails of Reality Winner, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden may have missed those points. After this proceeding is over, perhaps it will be time for a congressional rewriting of the law.
Some commentators who are too impressed by celebrities are saying that Trump should get off with a scolding. Not years in prison like Winner and Assange, not years in exile like Snowden. Those overly impressed commentators have almost all been silent about the other Espionage Act cases.
Meanwhile, polls suggest that in the USA millions of people believe that violence against the government is justified. Common sense says that at least a few people are likely to act upon such impulses. The trick for the American people and government is to slap any such violence down but in doing so avoid rash reactions that make the situation worse.
Donald Trump took an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws, and to defend the United States against enemies domestic and foreign. He violated that oath in several ways. Let him and his accomplices suffer the consequences. Don’t let them mock, bully or change the subject in such a way that the entire nation suffers undeserved consequences. It’s why there is such a thing as the rule of law, annoying as that can often be.
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On this night in 1971, they took the parish priest away…
by Eric Jackson
On the evening of June 9, 1971, the guardia came for Father Gallego. The 33-year-old parish priest of Santa Fe de Veraguas was beaten and dragged from his home by a squadron of the Machos del Monte infantry of old Guardia Nacional — later in the dictatorship years to be divided between the army and police. There is some question as to whether civilians were also directly involved in his abduction. Three men, all uniformed members of the guardia, were identified.
In December of 2000 forensics experts dug up a mass grave beneath a parking lot at the old Puma infantry barracks near Tocumen Airport. But the boss, soon to be replaced, made a big televised show of mishandling and mixing the bones. They didn’t want the remains to be identified. Especially those who would erase the memory of Father Gallego didn’t want a body found and identified. It wasn’t until 2018 that DNA tests funded by the Catholic Church identified some of the bone fragments as belonging to Father Gallego
Why the phobia about identification, by folks who had nothing directly to lose? It’s a bit of Catholic dogma, wherein to be canonized as a saint, a person’s body needs to be found and identified with miracles. A lot of Panamanian Catholics want Gallego to be recognized as a saint — he’s already considered a martyr of the church — and then there are people who had nothing to do with his disappearance and death who would rather not see the man celebrated for the things for which he stood.
Detractors — including accusers — would have connected him to the radical priests of his native Colombia who were among the founders of the leftist ELN guerrilla army. In years before his arrival in Santa Fe, in the nearby mountains rebels had taken up arms in ephemeral guerrilla movements. Gallego had nothing to do with that, but it was thought to be a good story to scare the guardia into action.
Gallego preached the dignity and worth of all, regardless of class or race. It was and is a major strain in Catholic thinking, with opposition within the church, to be sure. At the time Archbishop Marcos Gregorio McGrath, born in the old Canal Zone to an Irish-American father and a French-Costa Rican mother, was trying to steer Panamanian Catholicism clear of some of the severe left versus right divisions that manifested themselves in some other Latin American countries. McGrath was getting complaints from some of the wealthier Catholics about this radical young priest, but Gallego was in good standing.
So what did Father Héctor DO to get himself martyred, other that preach social equality in a place where the dominant landowners and businesspeople didn’t believe in any of that?
He founded a cooperative store, the Cooperativa Esperanza de los Campesinos — the Hope of the Peasants Cooperative — with an eye toward it growing into a multi-services movement. The local elitists who didn’t like Gallego also didn’t like the modest agrarian reforms that General Torrijos was supporting, nor the adult literacy programs in which both church and state had a hand. But some of them also had the general’s ear.
Gallego was beaten up, briefly arrested, and denounced as a terrorist. The church stood up for him, but on June 9, 1971, the state came for him.
He wasn’t seen again, but the cooperative thrived and grew in his absence. It’s now a conglomerate of local businesses, the flagship of which is the coffee mill that produces Cafe El Tute, which mostly gets exported to cooperatives in Germany and elsewhere.
And every June 9 committed Catholics, cooperative members and labor unionists gather in church and march in and around the town of Santa Fe to preserve the memory of Father Gallego, who still may yet become a saint.
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Dr. William E. Spriggs. Photo from the Minneapolis Fed.
The loss of a giant
by Kelsey Moore — Center for Economic and Policy Research
CEPR was deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Bill Spriggs on June 6. His impact on the economics profession and economic policy will continue to be felt for many years to come. Bill dedicated his life to the passionate pursuit of racial and economic justice.
Bill graduated from University of Wisconsin’s economics program when Black Ph.D.s in economics were few and far between. Unfortunately, this is still the case. Bill felt a serious responsibility to try to address this problem, spending much of his career teaching at historically Black colleges or universities, including a long stint as the chair of the Economics Department at Howard University. He acted as a mentor to many aspiring Black economists.
He also sought to promote policies that improved the economic plight of Black people and working people more generally. He wrote numerous academic and policy pieces examining the causes of inequality and racial disparities. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the Assistant Secretary of Labor for policy and later spent many years as the chief economist at the AFL-CIO.
His influence expanded in these years as Bill grew into the role of public intellectual, speaking widely about the barriers facing Black workers and Black communities. His disarming manner put even those he was challenging at ease, and made space for uncomfortable conversations about the real causes and consequences of high Black unemployment and the disproportionate representation of Black workers in low-paying jobs. He could be a charming speaker, but he drove his points home with arguments grounded in a deep understanding of the economy and how it was shaped by policies that operated to the detriment of Black workers and, indeed, all workers.
In particular, Bill was one of the leading economists in the effort to get the Federal Reserve Board to reconsider its approach to monetary policy, arguing that the Fed had to give its mandate to promote full employment at least equal importance to its commitment to price stability. Bill pointed out that African-Americans and other disadvantaged groups were disproportionately the victims of the increased unemployment that results when the Fed focuses on price stability with insufficient regard for the other part of its dual mandate, full employment.
Bill’s views were at least partially vindicated in recent years, when Fed Chair Jerome Powell began using language very similar to Bill’s when speaking about the Fed’s mandate in the years leading up to the pandemic. Neel Kashkari, the Minnesota Fed Bank president, began reading out the unemployment rates for Black people and other minorities at every Fed meeting. In this respect, it’s worth pointing out that Black unemployment reached its lowest level on record just two months ago.
Bill was an invariably kind and generous person. He recognized the importance of keeping racial equity at the forefront of economic policymaking to ensure discussions about the working class included all workers. He was a friend and champion of CEPR. Those of us who had the honor of working with him personally have lost a dear friend and mentor. His contributions, wit and passion will be deeply missed.
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Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
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“Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we’ve seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies’ ability to collect data.” Edward Snowden said in an interview on June 8, 2023 that advances in surveillance technology have made it far easier for government agencies to spy on citizens than it was in 2013, when he first disclosed the broad use of spying by the NSA and other agencies. Image by Screenshot/Citizenfour.
Snowden: today’s surveillance tech makes 2013 look like child’s play
“We trusted the government not to screw us,” said Edward Snowden. “But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”
With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.
“If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today,” Snowden told The Guardian, “2013 seems like child’s play.”
Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.
As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products’ vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.
Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the software is known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.
Last month, journalists and civil society groups called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries.
Protecting the public from surveillance “is an ongoing process,” Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. “And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives and beyond.”
In 2013, Snowden revealed that the US government was broadly monitoring the communications of citizens, sparking a debate over surveillance as well as sustained privacy rights campaigns from groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.
“Technology has grown to be enormously influential,” Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. “We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”
Last month ahead of the anniversary of Snowden’s revelations, EFF noted that some improvements to privacy rights have been made in the past decade, including:
The sunsetting of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which until 2020 allowed the US government to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records;
The emergence of end-to-end encryption of internet communications, which Snowden noted was “a pipe dream in 2013”;
The end of the NSA’s bulk collection of internet metadata, including email addresses of senders and recipients; and
Rulings in countries including South Africa and Germany against bulk data collection.
The group noted that privacy advocates are still pushing Congress to end Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans’ communications, and “to take privacy seriously,” particularly as tech companies expand spying capabilities.
“Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we’ve seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies’ ability to collect data… or regulate biometric surveillance, or close the backdoor that allows the government to buy personal information rather than get a warrant, much less create a new Church Committee to investigate the intelligence community’s overreaches,” wrote EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia, executive director Cindy Cohn, and assistant director Andrew Crocker. “It’s why so many cities and states have had to take it upon themselves to ban face recognition or predictive policing, or pass laws to protect consumer privacy and stop biometric data collection without consent.”
“It’s been 10 years since the Snowden revelations,” they added, “and Congress needs to wake up and finally pass some legislation that actually protects our privacy, from companies as well as from the NSA directly.”
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“As scientists, we’ve been warning about the loss of Arctic summer sea ice for decades,” said one researcher. In the 2006 canal expansion referendum the Martín Torrijos administration and the Panama Canal Authority assured us that this would not happen. The photo is of ice breaking away and melting off of Greenland. Navigable Arctic shipping routes changes some calculations for the Panama Canal. Rawpixels photo in the public domain.
Complete loss of Arctic summer sea ice now inevitable, warn scientists
Scientists on Tuesday warned that the planet is rapidly headed toward the consequences of the climate crisis that they have been warning about for decades as researchers published a new study showing that a complete loss of Arctic sea ice in the summer months is now unavoidable.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in 2021 alarmed many with its warnings that if high or even intermediate planet-heating fossil fuel emissions continued, the Arctic would be ice-free by the 2040s—but its authors implored policymakers to focus on their finding that the region would retain its summer ice if decisive action was taken to limit an increase in global temperature rises to 2°C or less.
The new study published by researchers in South Korea, Germany, and Canada in Nature Communications found that even far-reaching action will no longer save the sea ice.
The scientists found that even in a low-emissions scenario, summer ice in the Arctic will be gone by the 2050s.
In an intermediate- or high-emissions scenario—which is far more likely, considering the United States, the largest historic source of fossil fuel emissions, has recently moved to approve massive projects such as the Willow oil drilling project and the Mountain Valley Pipeline—the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer months starting in the 2030s.
“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice,” Dirk Notz, a climatologist at the University of Hamburg and co-author of the study, told The Guardian. “As scientists, we’ve been warning about the loss of Arctic summer sea ice for decades. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming. People didn’t listen to our warnings.”
The researchers examined satellite data and climate models to analyze changes in the Arctic sea ice between 1979 and 2019 and found that previous models underestimated ice melting trends and that 90% of the loss of sea ice was the result of human-caused planetary heating.
Summer ice in the Arctic has receded by 13% each decade since 1979, they found.
The planet is already experiencing the effects of increased open water in the Arctic during the summer months, lead author Seung-Ki Min of Pohang University in South Korea noted, and policymakers must now prepare communities to adapt to those impacts, including extreme weather events.
“The most important impact for human society will be the increase in weather extremes that we are experiencing now, such as heatwaves, wildfires, and floods,” Min told The Guardian. “We need to reduce CO2 emissions more ambitiously and also prepare to adapt to this faster Arctic warming and its impacts on human society and ecosystems.”
The loss of summer sea ice would trigger a feedback loop known as “Arctic amplification,” with the dark ocean absorbing more solar heat and causing additional planetary warming,
Arctic warming has also changed weather patterns in the northern hemisphere, such as storm formation and wind speeds—leading to extreme heat and rainfall.
“We need to prepare ourselves for a world with warmer Arctic very soon,” Min told CNN. “The earlier onset of an ice-free Arctic also implies that we will be experiencing extreme events faster than predicted.”
Scientists last year said the extreme heat wave that struck Pakistan and India was made 30 times more likely due to planetary heating, and officials called the flooding that killed more than 1,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands in Pakistan “climate dystopia at our doorstep.”
Min said the impending loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic is a “tipping point” and a sign that the region is “seriously ill.”
“We can regard the Arctic sea ice as the immune system of our body which protects our body from harmful things,” Min told CNN. “Without the protector, the Arctic’s condition will go from bad to worse quickly.”
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It would be easy to dismiss El Panamá América by saying that it always was yellow journalism. But in its century it has been more than only that. It’s one of our cultural landmarks. Started as the English-language Panama American in the 1920s by Harmodio Arias of the racist Accion Comunal movement that advocated the expulsion of the Afro-Antillean and Asian ethnicities, at its best the newspaper that — according to trial testimony — Ricky Martinelli bought with public funds is also a valuable part of Panama’s historical record. What to do about it raises many questions about who we are.
The New Business trial
We shall see how Judge Marquínez rules. With all the games run on her, it would be understandable for her to lash back in her verdict and any sentence. Let’s hope that she has a calmer judicial temperament than that.
The trial put the details and the depravity of Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal’s operation on display for the Panamanian people. It should scream much louder than any US declaration about the man’s character, for a variety of reasons. Recall, for example, how American officials, The Panama News and so many others looked askance at Balbina Herrera in the 2009 presidential election – all with good reason – and what we got was Ricky Martinelli. Official Washington and its representatives here do not lie when they characterize Martinelli now, but leave it to Panamanians to judge, and to figure out how to proceed.
If things go as one might expect, the government will confiscate El Panama America, La Critica and Dia a Dia as stolen public property. As it should.
However, there is left the dilemma of what to do about this newspaper empire that began with a racist English-language newspaper in the 1920s, The Panama American. Turn it into a state-owned PRD propaganda operation? Auction it off to the highest bidder, to give us another rabiblanco medium, or perhaps a foreign-owned newspaper chain? Those would be the habitual defaults for this current political caste.
It would be better to elect from the ranks of people who worked on those papers before, those who work there now and Panamanian journalists in general a new editorial advisory board, and turn these media over to student journalists – perhaps one to those at the University of Panama, one to those at USMA and one to those at UNACHI. And pay little heed to the laments of the Martinelista hacks who would be left jobless in such a transaction. Panama needs a new generation with better ethics to dominate this country’s journalism in the years and decades to come.
Joe Biden explains his debt ceiling deal. White Hous photo.
A deal that everyone likes to hate
In a democracy, elections have consequences. The alternatives are a ruling aristocracy to which public preferences mean little or nothing or a functional breakdown wherein every disagreement brings on paralysis.
The Republicans want to consolidate their hereditary aristocracy but the smarter among them know that their main man, Donald Trump, is unlikely to make it across any general election finish line. They may swing behind some other right-wing totalitarian, but that’s not where most of the American people are at.
The Democrats are eternally squabbling, but so long as they don’t allow those on that side of the political divide who consider themselves entitled to do whatever they want because of this or that reason, ought to pull together as a winning coalition. However, we have the wretched cliques who ran the 2016 national campaign as a monument of how arrogance and incompetence can lose an easy to win election.
The United States got divided government in 2020 and 2022, and thus a bipartisan punt on a debt ceiling issue that the Republicans created. Does the GOP Freedom Caucus complain? Do the Justice Democrats complain? In either case the way past that is to win the 2024 elections, better in a convincing, across-the-board fashion.
Dame Edna. Photo by Eva Rinaldi.
You mustn’t judge Australia by the Australians.
Dame Edna Everage
Bear in mind…
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
Victor Hugo
Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.
Dorothy Thompson
We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.
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