An out-of-control Chinese space station full of “highly toxic” chemicals may crash into lower Michigan, reports Aerospace.org, which has predicted an April 3 reentry with a margin of error of one week before and after. While the list of possible targets include locations in Northern China, South America, Southern Africa, Northern Spain and the United States. Lower Michigan in particular is among the regions with the highest probability of a direct hit.
The 8.5-ton Tiangong-1 had previously been expected to come crashing down to Earth sometime in March, while the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany, thinks the window for reentry is between March 24 and April 19. That said, most of it will burn up upon re-entry, leaving between 10 and 40 percent of the satellite expected to survive as debris.
“There is a chance that a small amount of Tiangong-1 debris may survive reentry and impact the ground,” Aerospace reports. “Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over.”
In January, Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said that it’s impossible to predict where the station will hit. “You really can’t steer these things,” McDowell said, adding “Even a couple of days before it reenters we probably won’t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it’s going to come down.
McDowell said Tiangong-1’s descent had been speeding up in recent months and it was now falling by about 6km a week, compared with 1.5km in October. It was difficult to predict when the module might land because its speed was affected by the constantly changing “weather” in space, he said.
“It is only in the final week or so that we are going to be able to start speaking about it with more confidence,” he said.
“I would guess that a few pieces will survive re-entry. But we will only know where they are going to land after the fact.” –The Guardian
According to a FAQ on the Tiangong-1, the actual impact of the space station might not even be the most dangerous aspect of the reentry. Potentially hazardous materials including hydrazine, a highly toxic chemical used in rocket fuel, might survive re-entry. If humans or animals come into contact with large quantities of the substance, it can cause serious liver, kidney and central nervous system damage.
As we previously reported, the Tiangong-1 was the first space station built and launched by China – equipped with two sleep stations and a habitable volume of 15 cubic meters (529 sq ft.).
Weighing in at 18,750 lbs, the two-module spacecraft – which means “Heavenly Palace,” lost contact with China’s space agency on March 21, 2016 after the completion of its extended mission, which included a six year service life that saw two manned missions to perform experiments for the larger multiple-module Tiangong station.
The first mission – Shenzhou 9, was a 13-day sojourn launched June 15, 2012 with three astronauts – including China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang. The mission completed two dockings – one computer controlled, and one crew-guided.
China’s second mission, the Shenzhou 10, launched June 11, 2013 with three astronauts as well.
President Trump has issued an executive order blocking Singapore-based Broadcom’s $117 billion takeover of U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm on national security grounds.
The heated battle for ownership of Qualcomm has ended with a presidential decree barring Broadcom from ever owning the company after CFIUS cited national security concerns with the prospect of such a deal. $QCOM. $AVGO
Bass explained on CNBC why he didn’t think the U.S. can allow Broadcom’s potential purchase of Qualcomm to go through because of QCOM’s importance to developing 5G technology: commented earlier in CNBC interview.
“We can’t possibly let the Broadcom Qualcomm merger go through. We can’t possibly allow that technology and that technological know how” to fall into hands of others.
The U.S. government is also worried about the issue. The Treasury Department wrote a letter Monday to lawyers involved in the deal expressing concern about Chinese competitors in 5G network development, which raises national security concerns over the Broadcom-Qualcomm merger. Broadcom said in a letter to Congress regarding its offer to acquire Qualcomm that the company will not sell any “critical national security assets” to any foreign companies.
But that was not enough to satisfy the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS).
As Bloomberg reports, the president acted on a recommendation by CFIUS , which reviews acquisitions of American firms by foreign investors. The decision to block the deal was unveiled just hours after Broadcom Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan met with security officials at the Pentagon in a last-ditch effort to salvage the transaction.
“There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that Broadcom Ltd.” by acquiring Qualcomm “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States,” Trump said in the order released Monday evening in Washington.
Trump’s order came after CFIUS found that Broadcom’s acquisition would undermine Qualcomm’s leadership in 5G wireless technology, opening the door for China’s Huawei Technologies Co. to become dominant.
And just like that, the China M&A premium in the tech market disappears…
Dr. Charles Hall may not be a name you instantly recognize, but it should be.
Now a Professor Emeritus of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Dr. Hall is a rigorous researcher of energy, oil, biophysical economics — and was a critical early pioneer in developing the key resource metric of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI).
Here’s how Hall describes EROEI in layman’s terms:
These energy investment ideas are everywhere in nature.
Certainly business people know about investments, but you’ve got to realize that anytime that you’re investing, you investing not only money, you’re investing energy. And, in fact, we consider money to be a lien on energy, a promissory note on energy.
So, if, for example, you buy in New York City a bagel for $1, that bagel cannot possibly get there without the use of a considerable amount of energy. And that energy is, for example, energy used in Louisiana to take natural gas and turn it into nitrogen fertilizer. And then it’s put in a barge and barged up the Mississippi River to Nebraska. And then a tractor spreads in on a field. And then it plows up the field and plants wheat seeds. And then later comes along and tills the soil and maybe takes care of the weeds or whatever and certainly harvests it. And then more energy is used to take the harvested wheat and grind it up and turn it into flour. And then they put it in a sack and put it on a railroad train and ship it to New York City. And there somebody boils a pot of water to cook the bagel. Oh, and they use electricity to mix the batter. And then you have a bagel.
That would not have taken place without the use of energy at every step.
And that same is true for everything that goes on in our economy. Everything that goes on in our economy requires energy for it to take place. And so we’ve examined that for a long, long time. Using the concept of energy return on investment and then later we’ve developed this into a whole approach called biophysical economics.
After a life’s career of looking at the world through the lens of EROEI, Hall is very concerned that, as a global society, we are hurtling towards an energy crisis that will forcefully (and likely painfully) downshift our standard of living within the lifetime of the current generation. And yet, our current economic models remain blind to the possibility of resource limits — so we are highly likely to be caught completely unprepared by this approaching crisis:
Economics is practiced in the United States as a social science. When I first looked into economics I was astonished that it’s not consistent with the law of conservation of energy nor the second law of thermodynamics nor the laws of conservation of mass. All of those things do not enter into the basic economic models. In fact, the basic economic models, as far as I’m concerned, just make no sense if you have a background in the natural sciences(…)
I think that we’re likely be really blindsided by the decline of oil and gas in near future. The people who have examined the long-term future of fossil fuel availability predict this well within a generation. We’re probably going to be faced by severe restrictions in all of our fossil fuels – in oil, in gas, and even coal. We may live in interesting energy times(..)
It’s just astonishing what I read in newspapers about people who don’t understand the importance of resources and the physical world in everything we do. Now, it is true, there has been a pretty health dose of examining climate and its relation to economics, and I think that’s good. But I think that’s, at most, half the story because I think resource limitations are likely to be at least as important as climate change going into the future, and then we have to think about them at least as much as we have been doing with climate. We have to think about the resource issues much better than we have.
Somehow people think the resource issues have been resolved by the market, but that’s not true at all, although, you know, I guess as long as the price of gasoline is fairly cheap, people don’t worry. They think the issue’s been resolved. The issue has not been resolved at all. The Limits To Growth and everything associated with that – they’re not been proven wrong. One might argue that their timing was not on the money, that things that are taking a little bit longer than was anticipated, but that doesn’t mean that the chickens aren’t coming home to roost. And I see them coming home rapidly and especially in the poorer countries of the world – they’re just getting creamed by the interaction of population growth and resource limitations. And depletion of oil wells and depletion of soils and on and on and on. It’s just a terrible situation for many countries.
Felix Sater, the man at the center of a controversial email “tying” President Trump to Russia while trying to work a business deal, has come forward in a comprehensive BuzzFeed NewsExposé, which if Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anthony Cormier and co-author Jason Leopold hadn’t verified – nobody would believe.
Sater in Los Angeles (Photo: Melissa Lyttle for BuzzFeed News)
Sater went from a “Wall Street wunderkind” working at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, to getting barred from the securities industry over a barroom brawl which led to a year in prison, to facilitating a $40 million pump-and-dump stock scheme for the New York mafia, to working telecom deals in Russia – where the FBI and CIA tapped him as an undercover intelligence asset who was told by his handler “I want you to understand: If you’re caught, the USA is going to disavow you and, at best, you get a bullet in the head.”
Sater, “The Quarterback”
Sater – whose code name was “The Quarterback,” ended up providing such valuable information to U.S. intelligence agencies – such as five of Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone numbers (by flipping Mullah Omar’s personal secretary, “who was living inside a cave with bin Laden”) – that the FBI and two federal prosecutors showed up at his trial after the $40 million stock scheme caught up with Sater – and vouched for him.
In 2009, 11 years after he formally started cooperating, the US government was finally going to hold up its end of the bargain. Sater headed to a federal courthouse in Brooklyn in October 2009 for his sentencing in the stock fraud scheme.
Two federal prosecutors and four FBI agents showed up to vouch for him. A transcript of that hearing is heavily redacted, but it makes clear that Sater was no ordinary cooperating witness.
Finally, it was Sater’s turn to face the judge. “Yes, I am guilty of the things that I have done,” he said. But, he added, “I am trying to rehabilitate myself.”
US District Court Judge I. Leo Glasser, who had sentenced dozens of people to prison based on information Sater had provided to the FBI, told him, “For 11 years, I would suspect you had gone to bed every night or every other night sleeping a little restlessly and wondering what your sentence is going to be. So, in effect, there has been a sentence which already has been imposed.” –BuzzFeed
Sater ended up paying a $25,000 penalty for the scheme.
Meanwhile, Sater is still working for the FBI, according to two current FBI agents. Moreover, he has relationships with at least six members of Robert Mueller’s team, “some going back more than 10 years.”
To this day, Sater continues to cooperate with the FBI and Justice Department, he said in his statement to the House Intelligence Committee. He wouldn’t disclose additional details, except to say that he works on “international matters.” Two US officials confirmed Sater continues to be a reliable asset.
As for his regular life, when he relocated back to the US in 2010, he recalled, “Donald said, ‘Where have you been?’” Sater said Trump asked him to join the Trump Organization. “That’s when I became senior advisor to him,” he said. The Trump Organization and the White House declined to comment. –BuzzFeed
In effect, the Brooklyn native – at least according to BuzzFeed, is more or less a rockstar opportunist spy with a shady past, who redeemed himself as an asset for the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI. During the course of his work for the agencies, all unpaid, BuzzFeed confirmed the following exploits:
He obtained five of the personal satellite telephone numbers for Osama bin Laden before 9/11 and he helped flip the personal secretary to Mullah Omar, then the head of the Taliban and an ally of bin Laden, into a source who provided the location of al-Qaeda training camps and weapons caches.
In 2004, he persuaded a source in Russia’s foreign military intelligence to hand over the name and photographs of a North Korean military operative who was purchasing equipment to build the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Sater provided US intelligence with details about possible assassination threats against former president George W. Bush and secretary of state Colin Powell. Sater reported that jihadists were hiding in a hut outside Bagram Air Base and planned to shoot down Powell’s plane during a January 2002 visit. He later told his handlers that two female al-Qaeda members were trying to recruit an Afghan woman working in the Senate barbershop to poison President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.
He went undercover in Cyprus and Istanbul to catch Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals around 2005. After the FBI set him up with a fake name and background, Sater posed as a money launderer to help nab the suspects for washing funds stolen from US financial institutions.
And how did he get bin Laden’s sat phone numbers? He tricked his Northern Alliance source into believing he would become the “Alan Greenspan of Afghanistan” – running the country’s federal reserve after the U.S. invasion.
Sater said he set up Delaware LLCs in the US — for the “Bank of Kabul” and the “Bank of Afghanistan.” He registered websites to convince the Northern Alliance source that he was serious about his intentions, going so far, he said, as to print out the corporate registrations, adorn them with ribbons, and use a wax stamp to make them seem more official. He said he mailed the documents, and a satellite phone, to the source.
Two former Justice Department officials said Sater took these steps without the FBI’s knowledge or authorization, telling his handlers about it only after the fact. –BuzzFeed
Sater and Trump
Sater, among many other projects, is the guy behind Trump licensing his name to real estate projects through his Real Estate firm, Bayrock Group.
Bayrock rented office space in Trump Tower, and one afternoon the ever-confident Sater said he knocked on Trump’s office door and introduced himself: “I’m going to be the biggest developer in New York City — and you want to be my partner.”
Bayrock worked deals all over the world, paying Trump a fee to use his name while others put up the money to actually build the various projects. “Sater and Trump are pictured celebrating deals together across the globe, and Sater accompanied Ivanka Trump and her brother Don Jr. on a trip to Russia,” writes BuzzFeed.
After a 2007 New York Times article outed Sater’s involvement in the pump-and-dump scheme, investors bailed on Bayrock, and Sater “had to leave the company that I built with my own hands.” He moved abroad, working deals in Russia with a large real estate developer, the Mirax Group – and worked on two London projects, “including a group of townhouses near Regent’s Park” that he says made good money.
(Photo: Melissa Lyttle)
The Email
Long before Russia became the catch-all bogeyman to blame everything from Hillary Clinton’s loss to trending Twitter hashtags popular with conservatives, Sater says he saw Trump’s 2015 Presidential bid as an opportunity to line up a real estate deal.
In emails initially revealed by the Washington Post, Sater wrote to Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, boasting about being able to finally line up a real estate development in Moscow — a deal the Trump Organization had long sought.
In one of the emails, Sater told Cohen that he could get buy-in from Putin himself and that “we will get Donald elected” in the process. Those emails have become a flashpoint in the Trump-Russia investigation — but Sater, who denied having anything to do with Russian interference in the election, told BuzzFeed News he was just doing what he’s always done: working a deal.
Did he actually know Putin?
“No, of course not.”
Did he think the Trump Moscow deal could get Trump elected?
Even Trump “is fucking surprised he became the president.”
Then why send that email?
“If a deal can get done and I could make money and he could look like a statesman, what the fuck is the downside, right?” –BuzzFeed
This email is perhaps the strongest “evidence” tying Trump to Putin, which many believe has become a key focus of the Mueller investigation.
Sater, Russia and Ukraine
After Trump won the presidency, Sater – with his connection to the new President, saw another opportunity to cut a profitable deal while brokering peace between Ukraine and Russia.
In early 2017, Sater says he was trying to close an Eastern European energy deal with a Ukrainian politician and others – estimating that he and his partners could earn billions. As the deal approached completion, the Ukrainian, Andrey Artemenko, reportedly asked Sater if he would broker a meeting with Trump’s team “to discuss a “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia.”
The deal, which Sater said set out a way to lift sanctions on Russia, surely would have pleased the Kremlin, but it would have been a sharp departure from previous US policy. Still, Sater summoned Trump’s personal lawyer, Cohen, to a Midtown Manhattan hotel in February 2017, and Artemenko gave him a letter about the plan. Cohen has denied passing the plan to the White House and told BuzzFeed News he threw it out.
Where some see the meeting as foreign interference in US policy, Sater sees opportunity. If he could grease the skids with a potential business partner while bringing peace to a war-torn region, Sater said, who could argue with that? “No more war,” Sater said. “People not getting killed. Beautiful situation.”
But the encounter is now reportedly part of the special counsel’s investigation, and Sater finds himself in the spotlight. Of the Ukrainian plan, Sater said, “I thought everybody wins. Turns out, I lost.” –BuzzFeed
Sater has been summoned to discuss his affairs with congressional investigators – and is scheduled to speak with the Senate Intelligence Committee in April. Moreover, he’s been questioned by Mueller’s team – “several of whom he knows from his past undercover work.” Of note, Mueller was the FBI director for most of the time Sater was providing undercover information.
The U.S. attorney who oversaw Sater’s pump-and-dump scheme was none other than Loretta Lynch – President Obama’s Attorney General. During Lynch’s confirmation, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asked her about Sater’s fraud case, to which she replied:
“The defendant in question, Felix Sater, provided valuable and sensitive information to the government during the course of his cooperation, which began in or about December 1998. For more than 10 years, he worked with prosecutors providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra. For that reason, his case was initially sealed.”
Paying the price…
Sater says that since the Russia investigation began to heat up, things haven’t gone so well. His marriage of 29 years collapsed, his reputation is in tatters, and he has “recently been the subject of anti-Semitic messages and phone calls from neo-Nazi groups.” He’s also more than a little hurt that Trump – who he considered a good friend, now pretends not to know him.
Trump has denied knowing the man who had an office three doors down from his own and who helped his company explore deals across the globe. In a 2013 deposition, Trump said of Sater, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Over dinner last week at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Sater was clearly hurt when he spoke about the president’s statement. “It’s very upsetting but, you know, what am I going to do?” Sater said. “Start calling him a liar?” Sater said he hasn’t talked with Trump in a couple of years, but he sees an angle to keeping in Trump’s good graces.
That said, Sater is pressing on.
“First thing I plan to do when Trump leaves office, whether it’s next week, in 2020 or four years later, is march right into his office and say, ‘Let’s build Trump Moscow.’
In a surprise announcement, Republican Rep. Mike Conway – who has been overseeing the committee’s probe into whether or not Trump and his associates colluded with Russia – said that the committee is closing its probe with the conclusion that there was no collusion, as President Trump has insisted all along:
US HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE ENDING INTERVIEW PHASE OF TRUMP-RUSSIA INVESTIGATION, SENIOR REPUBLICAN COMMITTEE MEMBER CONAWAY SAYS IN FOX NEWS CHANNEL INTERVIEW
SENIOR HOUSE INTELLIGENCE REPUBLICAN SAYS PANEL FOUND “NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION” BETWEEN TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIAN MEDDLING IN 2016 U.S. ELECTION – FOX NEWS CHANNEL INTERVIEW
Conway made the announcement during an interview with Fox News. Per Fox, the committee will interview no more witnesses and Republicans are in the process of preparing a final report. A draft of that roughly 150-page report will be delivered to committee Democrats for review on Tuesday.
“We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians,” Conway said.
Furthermore, after an investigation that lasted more than a year, the committee came to the conclusion that the intelligence community’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “supposed preference” for then-candidate Trump isn’t accurate.
According to a World Health Organization doctor, a global pandemic is imminent, and no one will be prepared for it when it hits. Dr. Tedros Adhanom, director-general for WHO, has said that the next outbreak that will hit us will be a “terrible” one, causing a large death all over the world.
“Humanity is more vulnerable in the face of epidemics because we are much more connected and we travel around much more quickly than before,” said WHO specialist in infectious diseases Dr. Sylvie Brand.
“We know that it is coming, but we have no way of stopping it,” said Brand.
According to Dr. Tedros, the flu is extremely dangerous to everyone living on the planet. This fear was also promoted by experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month.
“This is not some future nightmare scenario. A devastating epidemic could start in any country at any time and kill millions of people because we are still not prepared.”
“The world remains vulnerable. We do not know where and when the next global pandemic will occur, but we know it will take a terrible toll both on human life and on the economy,” said Dr. Tedros.
However, not everyone is so sure of Tedros’ terrible warnings…
“Hidden underneath this fear-mongering message of a global pandemic is a far more sinister W.H.O. agenda,” warns Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, publisher of Medicine.news.
“The real agenda is a global push for blind, fear-based acceptance of unsafe, unproven vaccines that will be rolled out alongside the next global pandemic,” Adams warns.
“Fear circumvents rational thinking, which is why the vaccine-pharma cartels routinely turn to irrational fear propaganda to demand absolute and unquestioning acceptance of risky medical interventions that should always be scrutinized for safety and efficacy.” –Natural News
Dr. Tedros’ comments come on the heels of the plague outbreak in Madagascar, which was the most recent epidemic to receive international aid attention amid fears it would spread.
One week after Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited California to officially announce the Justice Department’s lawsuit challenging the state’s “sanctuary” laws during a speech in Sacramento, President Trump is preparing to visit the Sunshine state on Tuesday in his first visit since taking office.
And as one might expect, his planned visit is already generating controversy in the state. Though the LAPD says they haven’t received any permits for a “Woman’s March” sized rally, small protests are being planned throughout the city – including in Beverly Hills, where he will attend a fundraising dinner Tuesday evening, as the Fresno Bee reported.
Given California’s status as the largest and most economically productive US state, Trump’s reluctance to visit it has only strengthened the backlash against him. Trump has taken longer to visit California than any sitting president since FDR.
Of course, just because the police haven’t received permit applications, doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t be greeted by a swarm of protesters. LA Police are bracing for spontaneous demonstrations to erupt in the city’s streets.
Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Horace Frank, who oversees the counterterrorism and special operations bureau, said that although no permitted protests in the form of marches are planned, authorities do expect to see both opponents and supporters out in numbers during a presidential visit.
“We are prepared for anything,” he said.
Smaller protests are also being planned in San Diego, where Trump is planning to visit eight prototypes for his planned border wall. California politicians have complained that Trump could’ve chosen to visit a wall prototype in another state – so his decision to visit the San Diego border is being interpreted as a deliberate provocation.
California Gov. Jerry Brown sent Trump a letter asking him to instead visit a high-speed rail project, which the governor said would fit squarely with Trump’s infrastructure push.
At least one protest is planned in Beverly Hills area between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m Tuesday by a Facebook group, Trump Not Welcome in LA. More than 1,000 people have indicated they will attend. The Los Angeles Police Department is preparing for many more protests of various sizes on the Westside. Trump’s earlier visits to L.A. while he was a candidate did bring out demonstrators.
Some protests are also planned for the San Diego area, where Trump is planning to visit one of the prototypes for his planned border wall. The visit has
Ron Gochez, a political secretary with political group Union del Barrio’s Los Angeles chapter, is organizing the Beverly Hills protest. The same group plans a rally against Trump on Monday evening in San Diego, the day before he arrives in the region to inspect prototypes for his proposed southern border wall. He plans to visit Beverly Hills the same day, where he plans to attend a Republican fundraiser.
As of Friday afternoon, Gochez said, more than a thousand people were following the Beverly Hills protest Facebook page even though he was still unclear about where the protest would take place.
“He cannot step foot in this state and not expect an organized response to denounce him,” Gochez said. “We have dignity and we can only demonstrate that through denouncing Trump and fighting for freedom from fear. We are not just going to stand with our arms crossed while they deport us or attack Muslims or women’s rights.”
While this isn’t the first time a state has so fiercely resisted the federal government, several southern states defiantly opposed desegregation, California’s situation is unique in that it’s such a large and important state to the US economy.
This isn’t the first time a state has so vehemently opposed a sitting president, said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine.
For instance, a cluster of southern states stood in defiance in the late 1950s and early ’60s when the federal government sought to desegregate schools.
Still, California stands out in that “you’ve never had a state as large and as economically and politically important to the nation and the world standing in outright opposition to a sitting president on a number of policies, including immigration,” DeSipio said.
To be sure, more than 4 million Californians voted for Trump, and he’s not without his supporters in the state. Indeed, several pro-Trump groups plan to cheer the president on.
Of course, Trump does have his supporters in the Golden State. And a few groups plan to support him at a rally Tuesday morning near the border fence prototypes in San Diego.
Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising, a Claremont-based organization against illegal immigration, said she’ll be there. She’s heartened by the visit.
“I always point to the fact that more than 41/2 million Californians voted for Trump,” she said.
Hvidston said Trump’s visit demonstrates he is serious about the border.
Craig Griffin, a 71-year-old Paramount resident, said he supports the president’s immigration enforcement, but he doesn’t plan to attend any rallies. He’s hoping any anti-Trump protest will be peaceful.
“I think he’s been doing great,” he said. “He’s been shaking things up.”
Taken alone, California’s economy would be the sixth largest in the world – right behind the UK. Still, Trump’s visit will be exceedingly brief: He plans to make the five-hour flight there and back in one day – meaning his visit definitely won’t exceed 24 hours, per Bloomberg.
Trump is expected to avoid California Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, all of whom have positioned themselves as antagonists to his presidency.
Over the weekend, he bashed Waters during a rally in Pennsylvania, saying she has “a very low IQ”.
In addition to the DOJ lawsuit, Trump has threatened to pull ICE agents from the state, and has also threatened to cut off federal funding.
His threats prompted governor Brown to declare that the administration was “basically going to war against the state of California, the engine of the American economy.”
To be sure, California has lobbed several bombs at the administration and sought to sabotage its policies ranging from immigration to health care at every turn.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who until last year represented downtown Los Angeles in the House for more than two decades, has filed 28 lawsuits against the Trump administration. He’s fought every version of the administration’s travel ban. He sued to block Trump from ending the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation. Becerra has also sued to prevent construction of the border wall.
California is also unique in that it has possibly the weakest state Republican party of any major US state.
Governor Brown is in his second consecutive term (and his fourth overall). Democrats control the cities and hold supermajorities in the legislature.
Only 14 of California’s 53 members in the House of Representatives are Republicans and several are seen as vulnerable in the 2018 midterm elections. Two of them, Representatives Darrell Issa and Ed Royce, have decided not to run for reelection.
In perhaps the biggest sign of the party’s weakness, it was unable to recruit a candidate with statewide name recognition to challenge Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has voted with Trump more than 30% of the time. This fact has not been lost on the ultra-liberal wing of the state party, which has fielded a left-wing challenger to primary the long-serving senator.
Trump received 31.6% of the vote in California in 2016, underperforming Mitt Romney in every county. Republican leaders in the state say their function is to export campaign donations to bolster the president’s 2020 run.
Tickets to Trump’s fundraiser on Tuesday in Beverly Hills, on behalf of the Republican National Committee, start at $35,000 and run as high as $250,000.
“We know our job here is to export dollars to win the presidential election in other places,” California Republican Party Chairman Jim Brulte said in an interview.
California politics are so lopsided that frustrated conservatives have started moving to Texas in droves instead of tolerating unaccountable Democrats.
The energy market is undoubtedly in a state of flux. The current power play between the U.S., OPEC and Russia is symptomatic of the changing geopolitical and economic dynamics of the entire market, U.S. tight oil seems set to completely upset the apple cart, and rapid technological advances are putting hitherto unattainable reserves within our reach. These are just a few of the factors that are currently calling to question everything we know about the market, but perhaps the biggest paradigm shift is still on the horizon – the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy.
When we think of clean energy we usually discuss wind, solar, hydro and geothermal.
Hydro and geothermal are extremely good sources of reliable energy, but they are of course location specific, meaning you either have access to it or you don’t.
Another type of clean energy that has enormous potential is wave, or ocean energy. However, as of writing, this potential is yet to be cost effectively harnessed. Although we are making great strides in this field, we can hardly include it as an energy game changer until we see much more substantial progress.
That leaves us with solar and wind energy. Solar can be split into several types, most notably photovoltaic solar energy and solar hot water. Aside from issues with efficiency, wind and solar share a common problem – availability. We can only generate power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and that means that we cannot rely on them as a primary power source. Efficiency is constantly being improved in both areas, and breakthroughs in energy storage mean that both systems are on their way to usurping the dominance of fossil fuels. That day is still a long way off, so for now at least, it seems fossil fuels are in complete control.
But what about atomic power? What happened to the promise of clean, inexpensive and abundant energy that so many households in the 50s were seduced by?
While some may argue that nuclear fission is vastly cleaner than the burning of fossil fuels, incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima are still very fresh in our minds. Indeed it is Fukushima that led to a dramatic shift in German energy policy which has set them on a path to completely phase out its nuclear reactors by 2022. Germany is certainly not alone in this decision, and with phasing out being the rule rather than the exception, we appear to be at the end of the era of atomic power.
This is where another player steps in – nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission generates energy by the splitting of large and unstable isotopes (atoms with the same number of protons but different number of neutrons) into smaller ones, which in turn go on to create a chain reaction. Fusion occurs when 2 light isotopes are combined to create a single heavier isotope, and a much vaster amount of energy. The major disadvantages of fission are the byproduct of radioactive waste, and the potential for the failure of containment of the chain reaction, such as happened in Chernobyl.
The reason it has taken us so long to turn to fusion is the extremely high temperatures and pressures involved. In order to successfully create a fusion reactor we need to heat and pressurize plasma to equal those found on the surface of the sun. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not achieving this heat that is the challenge, it is sustaining it.
Now it seems that feat is within our grasp. Scientists from 35 nations are currently building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) in Southern France. This vast and extremely complex undertaking is currently at around 50 percent completion, putting the team on course for their initial firing, when they will generate ‘first plasma’. This plasma will reach 150,000,000?C, which is ten times hotter than the sun, and then be contained in giant magnets that are cooled to -269?C. Should this test be successful, the team anticipate that we could see our first fusion reactors coming online by 2040.
Director general of ITER, Dr Bernard Bigot talked with no uncertainty about fusion being a viable energy source that will replace fossil fuels, going on to say that “[p]roviding clean, abundant, safe, economic energy will be a miracle for our planet.” This may sound very familiar to those that were sold on the idea of nuclear fission, but we will soon see whether the new atomic age can deliver where the previous one failed.
It should go without saying that homelessness elevates an individual’s risk of illness, injury and death. Having little access to health care or healthy food, even homeless people living in milder climates like, for example, the Bay Area, pass away decades earlier than people who have access to housing and health-care.
According to data provided by the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, the average age of death for a homeless person is 50 – which was the average age of deaths for all Americans in 1900, before the discovery of modern antibiotics.
But while the bitter reality that homeless people face is evident to every American who feels the sting of guilt every time they ignore a panhandler on a busy city street,, few state and local governments accurately collect comprehensive data specifically identifying a deceased individual as homeless – meaning that the data is incomplete.
In rapidly gentrifying Oakland, an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle determined that thousands of homeless who die within the city limits aren’t officially identified as homeless on their death certificates, making it easier for public officials to ignore a worsening crisis as rising property values and rents increasingly push the most vulnerable individuals out onto the streets.
Meanwhile, Mayor Libby Schaaf is more concerned with protecting undocumented immigrants, even immigrants with violent criminal histories than she is with ensuring the city’s most vulnerable legal residents are attended to – or, at least, that some degree of outreach or acknowledgement is extended to this steadily rising population.
In its story, the Chronicle, opens with the example of Larry Bothelo, whose dead body was discovered decomposing in his truck, which he kept parked near the Oakland Airport. Nothing in Bothelo’s documents indicated that he was homeless. In fact, the corner listed his address as the streetcorner from which his truck was eventually towed away.
It had been weeks since Larry Joseph Botelho was spotted outside the box truck he lived in and kept parked near the Oakland airport.By the time someone asked police to check on him, the 63-year-old homeless man’s body was decomposing on a makeshift bed in the truck.
The Alameda County coroner’s office determined he died of natural causes. An investigator tracked down doctors, social workers and former employers, ran fingerprints, reviewed government records and an ancestry website, but found no relatives.
Botelho was cremated as an indigent — his ashes sent to Holy Cross Cemetery in Antioch, and his truck towed. Coroner’s case No. 01378 was closed.
Nothing in the official record shows he died homeless. His death certificate lists a home address: the spot on 98th Avenue where his truck was parked.
As the Chronicle notes, Alameda County – a county that encompasses Oakland and the surrounding area – does not collect data on how many homeless people die each year or their causes of death. And even if it did – neither the state nor the federal government track these data, or require them to be collected, meaning that even the figures cited above constitute very rough estimates.
However, even without clear data, advocates for the homeless agree that the twin problems of homelessness and homeless mortaility are rapidly getting worse – not just in the Bay Area, but across the US. In New York City and many other cities across the country, homeless people are dying in obscurity at increasingly high rates.
The Chronicle checked with coroners’ and medical examiners’ offices, county public health departments, the California Department of Public Health, U.S. Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and found that none had records on how many homeless people die — or mandates to collect the information.
The California Electronic Death Registration System, a database run by the state Department of Public Health, occasionally gets a death certificate where “homeless” or “encampment” is listed in place of a person’s residence, said spokeswoman Theresa Mier. But there aren’t any guidelines for doctors or medical examiners on when to use the designation.
Likewise, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department doesn’t have information or know of any national estimates on deaths of homeless individuals, said spokeswoman Carla Daniels.
What’s left is a smattering of local agencies and nonprofits that track homeless death rates in a piecemeal way. Their data lack a standardized definition of what constitutes homelessness, rendering their numbers erratic and unrealiable.
One local official justified this approach by arguing that it helps keep the dignity of the deceased intact – and that often, in cases when a next of kin can be found – it shows that the police aren’t judging them.
Once a homeless person dies — usually decades earlier than the U.S. life expectancy — investigators proceed with the same steps they do for any deceased person, said Lt. David Vandagriff, who runs the Alameda County coroner’s bureau.
First, they identify the dead. Next, they track down the family. Autopsies are conducted and reports are made. But a person’s housing status often does not make it into the official record.
If investigators can track down an address associated with the dead — where an estranged spouse lives or the place they would pick up mail — they often won’t be marked as homeless in the paperwork that documents how they died and who they were. If they find no address, they may write “homeless” or “transient” in that section of a death record.
“We are duty bound to show them respect and dignity,” Vandagriff said. “Quite often when we’re interacting with next of kin, we want to show them that this is not something that we’re judging your departed on. We’re not classifying them as anything other than a departed member of your family.”
Unlike Oakland, San Francisco and Contra Costa County do keep track of homeless mortaility data – but in each case, officials cautioned that the data are likely a significant underestimation.
In San Francisco, a woman named Alice, who for years lived on the sidewalk outside a Burger King, likely will not be included in the city’s 2018 count because she moved into a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Mission before she died last month, said Rachael Kagan, spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Public Health.
Unlike Oakland, San Francisco compiles the number of homeless people who die each year. But officials caution that their count is probably a significant underestimation because homeless people who spend their last days in housing or a hospital may not make the tally.
In Contra Costa County, Capt. Steve Simpkins of the coroner’s office provided numbers but emphasized they aren’t perfectly accurate. They showed that an average of 33 homeless people died each year over the past decade, but last year the figure jumped to 64. He said nothing was readily apparent to explain the increase.
The lack of systematic data — or any data at all — when it comes to people dying on the streets is in sharp contrast to the concerted effort to count how many people are living on the streets.
One recent attempt to conduct an informal census of the homeless population in Oakland revealed an alarming figure: Last year in Alameda County, the so-called point-in-time census revealed a 25% jump in the homeless population in Oakland and a nearly 40% increase countywide.
Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, said it’s vital to know the mortality rate of the homeless population.
“It’s the first and most basic measure of health or public health: Is someone alive or dead?” he said. “It’s an extremely important measure. It’s something we need to know. Some localities do a better job than others.”
Cities that do make efforts to collect data noted an increase in homeless deaths last year, Watts said.
The collection of uniform and reliable homeless death data could help create policies to prevent deaths, say some health and homeless services providers. It could also help spur action to tackle the crisis.
“This is information that can be used to create interventions and just to underscore the long-term solution of housing,” Watts said. “It doesn’t have to be 100 percent accurate, but it’s better to have some good information than none at all.”
Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, said if more people knew how dire homelessness is — by way of mortality statistics, for instance — there might be a heightened sense of urgency.
“A lot of people don’t understand how serious a problem this is and who is affected and why,” she said. “When people are dying — that’s just another piece of evidence that it’s a public health emergency.”
Lucy Kasdin, deputy director of Alameda County’s Health Care for the Homeless unit, said statistics on homeless deaths would be “incredibly valuable” in developing interventions and figuring out how to best allocate resources.
But even as city officials pour money into clinics for the homeless, one researcher says data conclusively show that the only real remedy for improving longevity would be to provide housing – everything else is like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.
Josh Bamberger, a UCSF physician who has been treating homeless patients for the past two decades, said there’s already sufficient data on the perils of homelessness.
“We have mountains of data to tell us why homelessness is bad,” he said. “It’s bad for your health, it’s expensive, and it kills you at a younger age.”
He pointed to a 2009 research paper he co-authored that examined the impact of housing on the survival of homeless people with AIDS. Only two out of 71 placed in housing died after five years. In the same period, three-quarters of the 610 people without housing had died. Some studies have indicated that homelessness is correlated with a 25-year decrease in one’s life expectancy.
“If the health care system embraced housing as the one and true treatment to improve the health of homeless people, that money would be well spent,” Bamberger said. “I used to believe I should put my energies in providing the best care. … But there’s an absurdity in having a patient with perfect blood pressure, perfect control of their sugar and treatment of their cancers and then rolling them out in their wheelchair into the rain.”
But as mayors like Schaaf risk losing federal block-grant funding over their categorical defenses of “sanctuary cities” and the undocumented, the downside of this is the population that is truly the most vulnerable is shunted aside and ignored.
Which begs the question: How many bodies in the streets will it take before city officials decide to take a closer look at homeless mortality and the steps that could be taken to ameliorate it.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today accused the Nebraska state prison system of violating federal drug laws to obtain lethal injection drugs to use in upcoming executions.
The Nebraska branch of the ACLU says the Nebraska State Penitentiary may have illegally imported and stored fentanyl that it intends to use to execute two inmates. In a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), released today, the group asks the agency to investigate the alleged misdeeds—and to immediately suspend the DEA registrations allowing Nebraska to carry out the executions.
The letter says the penitentiary may have repeatedly misled federal authorities by importing and storing fentanyl under DEA registrations issued to an inmate clinic located at the same prison as the state’s death row. The registrations allow medical practitioners at the clinic to administer controlled substances to inmates.
“Prisoners who are to be executed by lethal injection are not being diagnosed or treated, nor are they being provided any other form of medical care,” ACLU of Nebraska Legal Director Amy Miller wrote in the letter.
The civil rights group also argues that Nebraska may have violated federal law by importing fentanyl from overseas without a proper DEA license. Fentanyl is a Schedule 2 narcotic under the Controlled Substances Act, and the penitentiary’s license only allows it to import Schedule 3 and 4 drugs, the ACLU says.
Nebraska is attempting to resume capital punishment in the state after a 21-year hiatus, but it has struggled to obtain execution drugs, a problem facing almost every state that still practices the death penalty.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts told reporters at a press conference this morning that the ACLU “is fabricating charges in a desperate attempt to foil the will of the people of Nebraska.” A Nebraska Department of Corrections spokesperson claimed to the Omaha World-Herald that the department legally obtained the drugs and that the ACLU’s letter “contains inflammatory language clearly intended to discredit the department.”
With the state facing scrutiny from media and advocacy organizations, the state government began an aggressive campaign to keep details about its death penalty protocols secret. In January the legislature passed new laws tightening what information could be released.
The World-Herald and several other media organizations are currently suing the state for refusing to disclose the source of its execution drugs, information that it used to provide to news outlets.
If the allegations made by the ACLU are true, it would not be the first time that Nebraska has skirted the law while trying to get execution drugs.
A 2015 BuzzFeed investigation revealed that Nebraska, along with at least three other states, paid Harris Pharma, a mysterious company in India run by a man with no pharmaceutical background, to ship sodium thiopental to them, despite a Food and Drug Administration ban on importing the drug.
Nebraska ordered $54,000 worth of the stuff from Harris—enough to perform 300 executions—but the feds intercepted the shipment, leaving Nebraska taxpayers on the hook for the bill.
The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today accused the Nebraska state prison system of violating federal drug laws to obtain lethal injection drugs to use in upcoming executions.