1649: Stay Alarmed!

This is still not being discussed widely but Eli Lilly is reporting: Limited availability of all doses of Mounjaro are expected to continue until 31 August 2024.

Talking to other pharmacy’s they are reporting that they are getting nothing. Even the private pharmacy I use for my testesterone. They are getting zero Mounjaro doses. They used to get a percentage for what they ordered. It literally looks like nothing is being sent to Atlanta. Normally a pharmacy can call around and find something within thirty miles…. The entire metro area is getting zero doses according to the small survey of CVS, Publix, and independent pharmacies I have talked to.

Lee

Eli Lilly has now admitted they will be backordered until August 2024. This for Mounjaro and Zepbound. They say it is high growth, but something seems off. Every pharmacist says they are getting nothing from them. Not even at the levels they used to get a year ago. So where is it going? I suspect it is going to the private sellers like Ro who are selling it for full price.

The market is wide open for competitors. Any competitor to swoop in.

I am taking care of my requirements using a compounding pharmacy.

Lee

Microsoft and Quantinuum today announced a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Using Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware and Microsoft’s new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying the logical qubits.

Link

Japan, Australia, and the Philippines have joined with Washington for a joint military drill in waters claimed by Beijing

At the heart of the issue is what’s known as neutral payrolls growth — a speed limit, of sorts, for how fast payrolls can grow without tightening the labor market and stoking wage pressures. Economists contend that immigration is boosting that monthly breakeven rate, which they estimate at anywhere from 160,000 to 265,000 this year.

That’s markedly higher than the roughly 100,000 pace Powell identified back in 2022 as the long-run cruising speed for jobs growth and compares with average monthly gains of 251,000 last year.

Link

ITM,

As the resident poultry feed guy of No Agenda, I wanted to clarify about the fortified egg.

Eggland's Best is basically a marketing company. They contract with different egg laying companies to produce eggs at their specs. The "enriched" or "fortified" claim is based on Omega 3 content of the egg. How they achieve this claim is by adding flax seed to the layer's diet. The bird then passes the Omega 3s along into the egg (you are what you eat).

I personally know the nutritionist who does the formulation of these diets and have heard him speak at different conferences (good guy). In his words, "if you are worried about Omega 3s in your diet, just eat the flax seed yourself and buy the cheapest egg at the store." Nothing super nefarious, just a marketing scheme to get people to pay more for eggs.

PS

Keep a watch on bird flu crossing into other species. It has recently moved into the dairy industry in Texas and I believe Michigan.

Will

Upgrading money to the digital age

Funding and FInances

Helicopter money - Positive Money Europe

John and Adam,

It was fun listening to your segment on contrails. I have been forecasting contrails for years for military applications (we usually want to avoid them). Everything Jim Lee said makes a lot of sense. It wouldn't even take AI to do it. I could write a simple script to highlight areas of the country prone to contrails and what altitude to fly at to create them.

They want to create them only in the day because of how cirrus clouds react to radiation. Cirrus clouds are the flat clouds like you said, but they are defined by their altitude. They are the highest of clouds and made entirely of ice. They have a net warming effect on the atmosphere because the shortwave radiation from the sun mostly goes through them, while the longwave radiation from the surface of the earth is absorbed by them and re-radiated in all directions including back to earth. Cirrus during the day would maximize the shortwave reflected back to space, while no cirrus at night allows longwave from earth to escape to space.

Jim Lee also talked about supersaturated regions. This is how we forecast contrails. There can be greater than 100% humidity especially in the upper atmosphere because water vapor does not bind together to make a droplet of water very easily, it needs a "cloud condensation nuclei" to make it happen. In the lower atmosphere there is salt and other particulates that attract water. The upper atmosphere is cleaner. In the upper atmosphere a plane could fly through it decreasing the saturation vapor pressure required to make a droplet.

I realize that is too much to read on air, but I wanted to lend some credence to what you found.

NA Official Meteorologist

Long periods of flooding can cause water levels to rise leading to possible landslides. Those slides can "lubricate" faults and may account for a higher frequency of quakes, explained Dr. Marsellos.

Dr. Park indicated the continuous rise in sea levels can increase the amount of pressure exerted on the Earth's shelves and coastlines, resulting in mostly scattered and infrequent quakes with long lead times.

Link

Quick comment on yesterday’s discussion about Texas AG Ken Paxton’s investigation into Spirit Aerosystems. As you noted, the AG is looking into Spirit’s activities, including its DEI initiatives. JCD surmised that the AG was concerned that Spirit wasn’t doing enough DEI. _It’s just the opposite._

I’ve attached the AG’s information request to Spirit. The AG’s office is going to put Spirit’s quality control under a microscope. This includes Spirit’s DEI program. You need to take a look at requests 8 through 11 on page 7. They make pretty clear that the AG’s concern is not that too _little_ DEI is happening, but too much. Among other things, the AG wants Spirit to:

- Substantiate their claim that DEI leads to better decisions

- Show their demographics _before_ DEI was implemented

- Show their demographics now

- Show the demographics of who they laid off in 2020

It’s not hard to read between the lines: The AG is concerned that Spirit has purged “non-diverse” personnel and sacrificed quality and safety at the altar of wokeness. I hope this is useful!

The verse Carter cites is Romans 1:27, which, in the KJV reads “and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”

The ESV translation reads as “and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

In contrast, the QJV reads, “Men with men working that which is pagan and unseemly. For this cause God gave the idolators up unto vile affections, receiving in themselves that recompense of their error, which was meet.” Other verses, which were revised include Leviticus 18:22 and Jude 1:7.

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Russia will be blamed

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 14:33

1925 US legal case in Tennessee

Tennessee v. ScopesCourtCriminal Court of TennesseeFull case nameThe State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes DecidedJuly 21, 1925VerdictGuilty (overturned on technicality)Citation(s)NoneSubsequent action(s)Scopes v. State (1926)Judge(s) sittingJohn Tate RaulstonThe Scopes trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.[1] The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.[2][3]

Scopes was found guilty and was fined $100 (equivalent to $1,700 in 2023), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The trial served its purpose of drawing intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the high-profile lawyers who had agreed to represent each side. William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served as the defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the fundamentalist''modernist controversy, which set modernists, who said evolution could be consistent with religion,[4] against fundamentalists, who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools.

Origins [ edit ] State Representative John Washington Butler, a Tennessee farmer and head of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, lobbied state legislatures to pass anti-evolution laws. He succeeded when the Butler Act was passed in Tennessee, on March 25, 1925.[5] Butler later stated, "I didn't know anything about evolution ... I'd read in the papers that boys and girls were coming home from school and telling their fathers and mothers that the Bible was all nonsense." Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed the bill to gain support among rural legislators, but believed the law would neither be enforced nor interfere with education in Tennessee schools.[6] William Jennings Bryan thanked Peay enthusiastically for the bill: "The Christian parents of the state owe you a debt of gratitude for saving their children from the poisonous influence of an unproven hypothesis."[7]

In response, the American Civil Liberties Union financed a test case in which John Scopes, a Tennessee high school science teacher, agreed to be tried for violating the Act. Scopes, who had substituted for the regular biology teacher, was charged on May 5, 1925, with teaching evolution from a chapter in George William Hunter's textbook, Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), which described the theory of evolution, race, and eugenics. The two sides brought in the biggest legal names in the nation, Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, and the trial was followed on radio transmissions throughout the United States.[8][9]

Dayton, Tennessee [ edit ] The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offered to defend anyone accused of teaching the theory of evolution in defiance of the Butler Act. On April 5, 1925, George Rappleyea, local manager for the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, arranged a meeting with county superintendent of schools Walter White and local attorney Sue K. Hicks at Robinson's Drug Store, convincing them that the controversy of such a trial would give Dayton much needed publicity. According to Robinson, Rappleyea said "As it is, the law is not enforced. If you win, it will be enforced. If I win, the law will be repealed. We're game, aren't we?" The men then summoned 24-year-old John T. Scopes, a Dayton high school science and math teacher. The group asked Scopes to admit to teaching the theory of evolution.[10]

John ScopesRappleyea pointed out that, while the Butler Act prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution, the state required teachers to use a textbook that explicitly described and endorsed the theory of evolution, and that teachers were, therefore, effectively required to break the law.[12] Scopes mentioned that while he could not remember whether he had actually taught evolution in class, he had, however, gone through the evolution chart and chapter with the class. Scopes added to the group: "If you can prove that I've taught evolution and that I can qualify as a defendant, then I'll be willing to stand trial."

Scopes urged students to testify against him and coached them in their answers.[14] He was indicted on May 25, after three students testified against him at the grand jury; one student afterwards told reporters: "I believe in part of evolution, but I don't believe in the monkey business."[15] Judge John T. Raulston accelerated the convening of the grand jury and "... all but instructed the grand jury to indict Scopes, despite the meager evidence against him and the widely reported stories questioning whether the willing defendant had ever taught evolution in the classroom".[16] Scopes was charged with having taught from the chapter on evolution to a high-school class in violation of the Butler Act and nominally arrested, though he was never actually detained. Paul Patterson, owner of The Baltimore Sun, put up $500 in bail for Scopes.[17]

The original prosecutors were Herbert E. and Sue K. Hicks, two brothers who were local attorneys and friends of Scopes, but the prosecution was ultimately led by Tom Stewart, a graduate of Cumberland School of Law, who later became a U.S. Senator. Stewart was aided by Dayton attorney Gordon McKenzie, who supported the anti-evolution bill on religious grounds, and described evolution as "detrimental to our morality" and an assault on "the very citadel of our Christian religion".[19]

Hoping to attract major press coverage, George Rappleyea went so far as to write to the British novelist H. G. Wells asking him to join the defense team. Wells replied that he had no legal training in Britain, let alone in America, and declined the offer. John R. Neal, a law school professor from Knoxville, announced that he would act as Scopes' attorney whether Scopes liked it or not, and he became the nominal head of the defense team.[20]

Clarence Darrow in 1925, during the trialBaptist pastor William Bell Riley, the founder and president of the World Christian Fundamentals Association, was instrumental in calling lawyer and three-time Democratic presidential nominee, former United States Secretary of State, and lifelong Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan to act as that organization's counsel. Bryan had originally been invited by Sue Hicks to become an associate of the prosecution and Bryan had readily accepted, despite the fact he had not tried a case in thirty-six years. As Scopes pointed out to James Presley in the book Center of the Storm, on which the two collaborated: "After [Bryan] was accepted by the state as a special prosecutor in the case, there was never any hope of containing the controversy within the bounds of constitutionality."

In response, the defense sought out Clarence Darrow, an agnostic. Darrow originally declined, fearing his presence would create a circus atmosphere, but eventually realized that the trial would be a circus with or without him, and agreed to lend his services to the defense, later saying he "realized there was no limit to the mischief that might be accomplished unless the country was aroused to the evil at hand".[23] After many changes back and forth, the defense team consisted of Darrow, ACLU attorney Arthur Garfield Hays, Dudley Field Malone, an international divorce lawyer who had worked at the State Department, W. O. Thompson, who was Darrow's law partner, and F. B. McElwee.[24] The defense was also assisted by librarian and Biblical authority Charles Francis Potter, who was a modernist Unitarian preacher.[24]

The prosecution team was led by Tom Stewart, district attorney for the 18th Circuit (and future United States Senator), and included, in addition to Herbert and Sue Hicks, Ben B. McKenzie and William Jennings Bryan.[25]

The trial was covered by journalists from the South and around the world, including H. L. Mencken for The Baltimore Sun, which was also paying part of the defense's expenses. It was Mencken who provided the trial with its most colorful labels such as the "Monkey Trial" of "the infidel Scopes". It was also the first United States trial to be broadcast on national radio.

Proceedings [ edit ] The trial was front-page news all over the country, including this newspaper in Washington DC. Darrow was cited for contempt (at the time) and details on the many scientists that weren't allowed to testify.The ACLU had originally intended to oppose the Butler Act on the grounds that it violated the teacher's individual rights and academic freedom, and was therefore unconstitutional. Principally because of Clarence Darrow, this strategy changed as the trial progressed. The earliest argument proposed by the defense once the trial had begun was that there was actually no conflict between evolution and the creation account in the Bible; later, this viewpoint would be called theistic evolution. In support of this claim, they brought in eight experts on evolution. But other than Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from Johns Hopkins University, the judge would not allow these experts to testify in person. Instead, they were allowed to submit written statements so their evidence could be used at the appeal. In response to this decision, Darrow made a sarcastic comment to Judge Raulston (as he often did throughout the trial) on how he had been agreeable only on the prosecution's suggestions. Darrow apologized the next day, keeping himself from being found in contempt of court.[27]

H. L. Mencken in 1928The presiding judge, John T. Raulston, was accused of being biased towards the prosecution and frequently clashed with Darrow. At the outset of the trial, Raulston quoted Genesis and the Butler Act. He also warned the jury not to judge the merit of the law (which would become the focus of the trial) but on the violation of the Act, which he called a 'high misdemeanor'. The jury foreman himself was unconvinced of the merit of the Act but he acted, as did most of the jury, on the instructions of the judge.

Bryan chastised evolution for teaching children that humans were but one of 35,000 types of mammals and bemoaned the notion that human beings were descended "Not even from American monkeys, but from old world monkeys".[29]

Darrow responded for the defense in a speech that was universally considered the oratorical climax of the trial. Arousing fears of "inquisitions", Darrow argued that the Bible should be preserved in the realm of theology and morality and not put into a course of science. In his conclusion, Darrow declared that Bryan's "duel to the death" against evolution should not be made one-sided by a court ruling that took away the chief witnesses for the defense. Darrow promised there would be no duel because "there is never a duel with the truth."[a] The courtroom went wild when Darrow finished; Scopes declared Darrow's speech to be the dramatic high point of the entire trial and insisted that part of the reason Bryan wanted to go on the stand was to regain some of his tarnished glory.

Examination of Bryan [ edit ] On the sixth day of the trial, the defense ran out of witnesses. The judge declared that all the defense testimony on the Bible was irrelevant and should not be presented to the jury (which had been excluded during the defense). On the seventh day of the trial, the defense asked the judge to call Bryan as a witness to question him on the Bible, as their own experts had been rendered irrelevant; Darrow had planned this the day before and called Bryan a "Bible expert". This move surprised those present in the court, as Bryan was a counsel for the prosecution and Bryan himself (according to a journalist reporting the trial) never made a claim of being an expert, although he did tout his knowledge of the Bible. This testimony revolved around several questions regarding Biblical stories and Bryan's beliefs (as shown below); this testimony culminated in Bryan declaring that Darrow was using the court to "slur the Bible" while Darrow replied that Bryan's statements on the Bible were "foolish".[34]

William Jennings Bryan in 1925On the seventh day of the trial, Clarence Darrow took the unorthodox step of calling William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the prosecution, to the stand as a witness in an effort to demonstrate that belief in the historicity of the Bible and its many accounts of miracles was unreasonable. Bryan accepted, on the understanding that Darrow would in turn submit to questioning by Bryan. Although Hays would claim in his autobiography that the examination of Bryan was unplanned, Darrow spent the night before in preparation. The scientists the defense had brought to Dayton'--and Charles Francis Potter, a modernist minister who had engaged in a series of public debates on evolution with the fundamentalist preacher John Roach Straton'--prepared topics and questions for Darrow to address to Bryan on the witness stand.[35] Kirtley Mather, chairman of the geology department at Harvard and also a devout Baptist, played Bryan and answered questions as he believed Bryan would.[37] Raulston had adjourned court to the stand on the courthouse lawn, ostensibly because he was "afraid of the building" with so many spectators crammed into the courtroom, but probably because of the stifling heat.

Adam and Eve [ edit ] An area of questioning involved the book of Genesis, including questions about whether Eve was actually created from Adam's rib, where Cain got his wife, and how many people lived in Ancient Egypt. Darrow used these examples to suggest that the stories of the Bible could not be scientific and should not be used in teaching science with Darrow telling Bryan "You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion." Bryan's declaration in response was "The reason I am answering is not for the benefit of the superior court. It is to keep these gentlemen from saying I was afraid to meet them and let them question me, and I want the Christian world to know that any atheist, agnostic, unbeliever, can question me anytime as to my belief in God, and I will answer him."

Stewart objected for the prosecution, demanding to know the legal purpose of Darrow's questioning. Bryan, gauging the effect the session was having, snapped that its purpose was "to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible". Darrow, with equal vehemence, retorted "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States."[41]

A few more questions followed in the charged open-air courtroom. Darrow asked where Cain got his wife; Bryan answered that he would "leave the agnostics to hunt for her".[42] When Darrow addressed the issue of the temptation of Eve by the serpent, Bryan insisted that the Bible be quoted verbatim rather than allowing Darrow to paraphrase it in his own terms. However, after another angry exchange, Judge Raulston banged his gavel, adjourning the court.

End of the trial [ edit ] Darrow (left) and Bryan (right) during the trialThe confrontation between Bryan and Darrow lasted approximately two hours on the afternoon of the seventh day of the trial. It is likely that it would have continued the following morning but for Judge Raulston's announcement that he considered the whole examination irrelevant to the case and his decision that it should be "expunged" from the record. Thus Bryan was denied the chance to cross-examine the defense lawyers in return, although after the trial Bryan would distribute nine questions to the press to bring out Darrow's "religious attitude". The questions and Darrow's short answers were published in newspapers the day after the trial ended, with The New York Times characterizing Darrow as answering Bryan's questions "with his agnostic's creed, 'I don't know,' except where he could deny them with his belief in natural, immutable law".[43]

After the defense's final attempt to present evidence was denied, Darrow asked the judge to bring in the jury only to have them come to a guilty verdict:

We claim that the defendant is not guilty, but as the court has excluded any testimony, except as to the one issue as to whether he taught that man descended from a lower order of animals, and we cannot contradict that testimony, there is no logical thing to come except that the jury find a verdict that we may carry to the higher court, purely as a matter of proper procedure. We do not think it is fair to the court or counsel on the other side to waste a lot of time when we know this is the inevitable result and probably the best result for the case.

After they were brought in, Darrow then addressed the jury:

We came down here to offer evidence in this case and the court has held under the law that the evidence we had is not admissible, so all we can do is to take an exception and carry it to a higher court to see whether the evidence is admissible or not ... we cannot even explain to you that we think you should return a verdict of not guilty. We do not see how you could. We do not ask it.

Darrow closed the case for the defense without a final summation. Under Tennessee law, when the defense waived its right to make a closing speech, the prosecution was also barred from summing up its case, preventing Bryan from presenting his prepared summation.

Scopes never testified since there was never a factual issue as to whether he had taught evolution. Scopes later admitted that, in reality, he was unsure of whether he had taught evolution (another reason the defense did not want him to testify), but the point was not contested at the trial.[44]

William Jennings Bryan's summation of the Scopes trial, which was distributed to reporters but not read in court, read:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo. In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.[45]

After eight days of trial, it took the jury only nine minutes to deliberate. Scopes was found guilty on July 21 and ordered by Raulston to pay a $100 fine (equivalent to $1,700 in 2023). Raulston imposed the fine before Scopes was given an opportunity to say anything about why the court should not impose punishment upon him and after Neal brought the error to the judge's attention the defendant spoke for the first and only time in court:

Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom'--that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.[46]

Bryan died suddenly five days after the trial's conclusion.[47] The connection between the trial and his death is still debated by historians.[citation needed ]

Appeal to the Supreme Court of Tennessee [ edit ] Scopes's lawyers appealed, challenging the conviction on several grounds. First, they argued that the statute was overly vague because it prohibited the teaching of "evolution", a very broad term. The court rejected that argument, holding:

Evolution, like prohibition, is a broad term. In recent bickering, however, evolution has been understood to mean the theory which holds that man has developed from some pre-existing lower type. This is the popular significance of evolution, just as the popular significance of prohibition is prohibition of the traffic in intoxicating liquors. It was in that sense that evolution was used in this act. It is in this sense that the word will be used in this opinion, unless the context otherwise indicates. It is only to the theory of the evolution of man from a lower type that the act before us was intended to apply, and much of the discussion we have heard is beside this case.

Second, the lawyers argued that the statute violated Scopes' constitutional right to free speech because it prohibited him from teaching evolution. The court rejected this argument, holding that the state was permitted to regulate his speech as an employee of the state:

He was an employee of the state of Tennessee or of a municipal agency of the state. He was under contract with the state to work in an institution of the state. He had no right or privilege to serve the state except upon such terms as the state prescribed. His liberty, his privilege, his immunity to teach and proclaim the theory of evolution, elsewhere than in the service of the state, was in no wise touched by this law.

Third, it was argued that the terms of the Butler Act violated the Tennessee State Constitution, which provided that "It shall be the duty of the General Assembly in all future periods of this government, to cherish literature and science." The argument was that the theory of the descent of man from a lower order of animals was now established by the preponderance of scientific thought, and that the prohibition of the teaching of such theory was a violation of the legislative duty to cherish science. The court rejected this argument,[48] holding that the determination of what laws cherished science was an issue for the legislature, not the judiciary:

The courts cannot sit in judgment on such acts of the Legislature or its agents and determine whether or not the omission or addition of a particular course of study tends to cherish science.

Fourth, the defense lawyers argued that the statute violated the provisions of the Tennessee Constitution that prohibited the establishment of a state religion. The Religious Preference provisions of the Tennessee Constitution (Section 3 of Article I) stated, "no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship".[49]

Writing for the court two sittings and one year after receiving the appeal,[50] Chief Justice Grafton Green rejected this argument, holding that the Tennessee Religious Preference clause was designed to prevent the establishment of a state religion as had been the experience in England and Scotland at the writing of the Constitution, and held:

We are not able to see how the prohibition of teaching the theory that man has descended from a lower order of animals gives preference to any religious establishment or mode of worship. So far as we know, there is no religious establishment or organized body that has in its creed or confession of faith any article denying or affirming such a theory. So far as we know, the denial or affirmation of such a theory does not enter into any recognized mode of worship. Since this cause has been pending in this court, we have been favored, in addition to briefs of counsel and various amici curiae, with a multitude of resolutions, addresses, and communications from scientific bodies, religious factions, and individuals giving us the benefit of their views upon the theory of evolution. Examination of these contributions indicates that Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are divided among themselves in their beliefs, and that there is no unanimity among the members of any religious establishment as to this subject. Belief or unbelief in the theory of evolution is no more a characteristic of any religious establishment or mode of worship than is belief or unbelief in the wisdom of the prohibition laws. It would appear that members of the same churches quite generally disagree as to these things.

Further, the court held that while the statute forbade the teaching of evolution (as the court had defined it) it did not require teaching any other doctrine and thus did not benefit any one religious doctrine or sect over others.

Nevertheless, having found the statute to be constitutional, the court set aside the conviction on appeal because of a legal technicality: the jury should have decided the fine, not the judge, since under the state constitution, Tennessee judges could not at that time set fines above $50, and the Butler Act specified a minimum fine of $100.[9]

Justice Green added a totally unexpected recommendation:

The court is informed that the plaintiff in error is no longer in the service of the state. We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case. On the contrary, we think that the peace and dignity of the state, which all criminal prosecutions are brought to redress, will be the better conserved by the entry of a nolle prosequi herein. Such a course is suggested to the Attorney General.

Attorney General L. D. Smith immediately announced that he would not seek a retrial, while Scopes' lawyers offered angry comments on the stunning decision.[51]

In 1968, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas 393 U.S. 97 (1968) that such bans contravene the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because their primary purpose is religious.[12] Tennessee had repealed the Butler Act the previous year.[52]

Aftermath [ edit ] Creation versus evolution debate [ edit ] The trial revealed a growing chasm in American Christianity and two ways of finding truth, one "biblical" and one "evolutionist".[53] Author David Goetz writes that the majority of Christians denounced evolution at the time.[53]

Author Mark Edwards contests the conventional view that in the wake of the Scopes trial, a humiliated fundamentalism retreated into the political and cultural background, a viewpoint which is evidenced in the film Inherit the Wind (1960) as well as in the majority of contemporary historical accounts. Rather, the cause of fundamentalism's retreat was the death of its leader, Bryan. Most fundamentalists saw the trial as a victory rather than a defeat, but Bryan's death soon after it created a leadership void that no other fundamentalist leader could fill. Bryan, unlike the other leaders, brought name recognition, respectability, and the ability to forge a broad-based coalition of fundamentalist and mainline religious groups which argued in defense of the anti-evolutionist position.

Adam Shapiro criticized the view that the Scopes trial was an essential and inevitable conflict between religion and science, claiming that such a view was "self-justifying". Instead, Shapiro emphasizes the fact that the Scopes trial was the result of particular circumstances, such as politics postponing the adoption of new textbooks.[55]

Anti-evolution movement [ edit ] The trial escalated the political and legal conflict in which strict creationists and scientists struggled over the teaching of evolution in Arizona and California science classes. Before the Dayton trial only the South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Kentucky legislatures had dealt with anti-evolution laws or riders to educational appropriations bills. [citation needed ] After Scopes was convicted, creationists throughout the United States sought similar anti-evolution laws for their states.[56][57]

By 1927, there were 13 states, both in the North and in the South, that had deliberated over some form of anti-evolution law. At least 41 bills or resolutions were introduced into the state legislatures, with some states facing the issue repeatedly. Nearly all these efforts were rejected, but Mississippi and Arkansas did put anti-evolution laws on the books after the Scopes trial, laws that would outlive the Butler Act (which survived until 1967).[58][59] However, the influence of Christian fundamentalists declined following the trial and Bryan's death, and it was not until the rise of the Christian right in the late 1970s that conservative fundamentalists became politically powerful again.[60][61]

In the Southwest, anti-evolution crusaders included ministers R. S. Beal and Aubrey L. Moore in Arizona and members of the Creation Research Society in California. They sought to ban evolution as a topic for study in the schools or, failing that, to relegate it to the status of unproven hypothesis perhaps taught alongside the biblical version of creation. Educators, scientists, and other distinguished laymen favored evolution. This struggle occurred later in the Southwest than elsewhere, finally collapsing in the Sputnik era after 1957, when the national mood inspired increased trust for science in general and for evolution in particular.[59][62]

The opponents of evolution made a transition from the anti-evolution crusade of the 1920s to the creation science movement of the 1960s. Despite some similarities between these two causes, the creation science movement represented a shift from overtly religious to covertly religious objections to evolutionary theory'--sometimes described as a Wedge Strategy'--raising what it claimed was scientific evidence in support of a literal interpretation of the Bible. Creation science also differed in terms of popular leadership, rhetorical tone, and sectional focus. It lacked a prestigious leader like Bryan, utilized pseudoscientific rather than religious rhetoric, and was a product of California and Michigan instead of the South.

Teaching of science [ edit ] The Scopes trial had both short- and long-term effects in the teaching of science in schools in the United States. Though often portrayed as influencing public opinion against fundamentalism, the victory was not complete.[64] Though the ACLU had taken on the trial as a cause, in the wake of Scopes' conviction they were unable to find more volunteers to take on the Butler law and, by 1932, had given up.[65] The anti-evolutionary legislation was not challenged again until 1965, and in the meantime, William Jennings Bryan's cause was taken up by a number of organizations, including the Bryan Bible League and the Defenders of the Christian Faith.[65]

The effects of the Scopes Trial on high school biology texts has not been unanimously agreed by scholars. Of the most widely used textbooks after the trial, only one included the word evolution in its index; the relevant page includes biblical quotations.[64] Some scholars have accepted that this was the result of the Scopes Trial: for example Hunter, the author of the biology text which Scopes was on trial for teaching, revised the text by 1926 in response to the Scopes Trial controversy.[64] However, George Gaylord Simpson challenged this notion as confusing cause and effect, and instead posited that the trend of anti-evolution movements and laws that provoked the Scopes Trial was also to blame for the removal of evolution from biological texts, and that the trial itself had little effect.[66] The fundamentalists' target slowly veered off evolution in the mid-1930s. Miller and Grabiner suggest that as the anti-evolutionist movement died out, biology textbooks began to include the previously removed evolutionary theory.[65] This also corresponds to the emerging demand that science textbooks be written by scientists rather than educators or education specialists.[64]

This account of history has also been challenged. In Trying Biology Robert Shapiro examines many of the eminent biology textbooks in the 1910''1920s, and finds that while they may have avoided the word evolution to placate anti-evolutionists, the overall focus on the subject was not greatly diminished, and the books were still implicitly evolution based.[55] It has also been suggested that the narrative of evolution's being removed from textbooks due to religious pressure, only to be reinstated decades later, was an example of "Whig history" propagated by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, and that the shift in the ways biology textbooks discussed evolution can be attributed to other race and class based factors.[67]

In 1958 the National Defense Education Act was passed with the encouragement of many legislators who feared the United States education system was falling behind that of the Soviet Union. The act yielded textbooks, produced in cooperation with the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which stressed the importance of evolution as the unifying principle of biology.[65] The new educational regime was not unchallenged. The greatest backlash was in Texas where attacks were launched in sermons and in the press.[64] Complaints were lodged with the State Textbook Commission. However, in addition to federal support, a number of social trends had turned public discussion in favor of evolution. These included increased interest in improving public education, legal precedents separating religion and public education, and continued urbanization in the South. This led to a weakening of the backlash in Texas, as well as to the repeal of the Butler Law in Tennessee in 1967.[64]

Publicity [ edit ] Edward J. Larson, a historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (2004), notes: "Like so many archetypal American events, the trial itself began as a publicity stunt."[68] The press coverage of the "Monkey Trial" was overwhelming.[69] The front pages of newspapers like The New York Times were dominated by the case for days. More than 200 newspaper reporters from all parts of the country and two from London were in Dayton.[70] Twenty-two telegraphers sent out 165,000 words per day on the trial, over thousands of miles of telegraph wires hung for the purpose;[70] more words were transmitted to Britain about the Scopes trial than for any previous American event.[70] Trained chimpanzees performed on the courthouse lawn.[70] Chicago's WGN radio station broadcast the trial with announcer Quin Ryan via clear-channel broadcasting first on-the-scene coverage of the criminal trial. Two movie cameramen had their film flown out daily in a small plane from a specially prepared airstrip.

H.L. Mencken's trial reports were heavily slanted against the prosecution and the jury, which were "unanimously hot for Genesis". He mocked the town's inhabitants as "yokels" and "morons". He called Bryan a "buffoon" and his speeches "theologic bilge". In contrast, he called the defense "eloquent" and "magnificent". Even today, some American creationists, fighting in courts and state legislatures to demand that creationism be taught on an equal footing with evolution in the schools, have claimed that it was Mencken's trial reports in 1925 that turned public opinion against creationism.[71] The media's portrayal of Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan, and the play and movie Inherit the Wind (1960), caused millions of Americans to ridicule religious-based opposition to the theory of evolution.[72]

The trial also brought publicity to the town of Dayton, Tennessee, and was hatched as a publicity stunt.[69] From The Salem Republican, June 11, 1925:

The whole matter has assumed the portion of Dayton and her merchants endeavoring to secure a large amount of notoriety and publicity with an open question as to whether Scopes is a party to the plot or not.

Courthouse [ edit ] The Rhea County Courthouse is a National Historic Landmark.In a $1-million restoration of the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, completed in 1979, the second-floor courtroom was restored to its appearance during the Scopes trial. A museum of trial events in its basement contains such memorabilia as the microphone used to broadcast the trial, trial records, photographs, and an audiovisual history. Every July, local people re-enact key moments of the trial in the courtroom.[73] In front of the courthouse stands a commemorative plaque erected by the Tennessee Historical Commission, reading as follows:

2B 23 THE SCOPES TRIALHere, from July 10 to 21, 1925 JohnThomas Scopes, a County High School teacher, was tried for teaching that a man descended from a lower order of animals in violation of a lately passed state law. William Jennings Bryan assisted the prosecution; Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Dudley Field Malone the defense. Scopes was convicted.

The Rhea County Courthouse was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 1976.[74] It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.[75]

Humor [ edit ] Cartoonist Rollin Kirby depicts fundamentalist education in Tennessee taken to an extremeAnticipating that Scopes would be found guilty, the press fitted the defendant for martyrdom and created an onslaught of ridicule, and hosts of cartoonists added their own portrayals to the attack. For example:

American Experience has published a gallery of such cartoons,[76] and 14 such cartoons are also reprinted in L. Sprague de Camp's The Great Monkey Trial.Time magazine's initial coverage of the trial focused on Dayton as "the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war".Life magazine adorned its masthead with monkeys reading books and proclaimed "the whole matter is something to laugh about."[77]Both Literary Digest and the popular humor magazine Life (1890''1930) ran compilations of jokes and humorous observations garnered from newspapers around the country.[78]Overwhelmingly, the butt of these jokes was the prosecution and those aligned with it: Bryan, the city of Dayton, the state of Tennessee, and the entire South, as well as fundamentalist Christians and anti-evolutionists. Rare exceptions were found in the Southern press, where the fact that Darrow had saved Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty continued to be a source of ugly humor. The most widespread form of this ridicule was directed at the inhabitants of Tennessee.[79] Life described Tennessee as "not up to date in its attitude to such things as evolution".[80] Time magazine related Bryan's arrival in town with the disparaging comment "The populace, Bryan's to a moron, yowled a welcome."[81]

Attacks on Bryan were frequent and acidic: Life awarded him its "Brass Medal of the Fourth Class" for having "successfully demonstrated by the alchemy of ignorance hot air may be transmuted into gold, and that the Bible is infallibly inspired except where it differs with him on the question of wine, women, and wealth".[82]

Vituperative attacks came from journalist H. L. Mencken, whose syndicated columns from Dayton for The Baltimore Sun drew vivid caricatures of the "backward" local populace, referring to the people of Rhea County as "Babbits", "morons", "peasants", "hill-billies", "yaps", and "yokels". He chastised the "degraded nonsense which country preachers are ramming and hammering into yokel skulls". However, Mencken did enjoy certain aspects of Dayton, writing

The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, with darkies snoozing on the horse-blocks, pigs rooting under the houses and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty'--a somewhat smallish but nevertheless very attractive Westminster or Balair.[83]

He described Rhea County as priding itself on a kind of tolerance or what he called "lack of Christian heat", opposed to outside ideas but without hating those who held them.[84] He pointed out "The Klan has never got a foothold here, though it rages everywhere else in Tennessee."[85] Mencken attempted to perpetrate a hoax, distributing flyers for the "Rev. Elmer Chubb", but the claims that Chubb would drink poison and preach in lost languages were ignored as commonplace by the people of Dayton, and only Commonweal magazine bit.[86] Mencken continued to attack Bryan, including in his withering obituary of Bryan, "In Memoriam: W.J.B.", in which he charged Bryan with "insincerity"'--not for his religious beliefs but for the inconsistent and contradictory positions he took on a number of political questions during his career.[87] Years later, Mencken did question whether dismissing Bryan "as a quack pure and unadulterated" was "really just".[88] Mencken's columns made the Dayton citizens irate and drew general indignation from the Southern press.[89] After Raulston ruled against the admission of scientific testimony, Mencken left Dayton, declaring in his last dispatch "All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant."[90] Consequently, the journalist missed Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan on Monday.

In popular culture [ edit ] Spencer Tracy (left) as Darrow surrogate Henry Drummond, and Fredric March (right) as Bryan surrogate Matthew Harrison Brady in the trailer for the film Inherit the Wind; Harry Morgan (in the background) plays the judge. Stage, film and television [ edit ] Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee's play Inherit the Wind (1955), fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a means to discuss the then-contemporary McCarthy trials. It portrays Darrow and Bryan as the characters who are named Henry Drummond and Matthew Brady.[91] In a note at the opening of the play, the playwrights state that it is not meant to be a historical account,[92] and there are numerous instances where events were substantially altered or invented.[93][94] Despite the disclaimer in the play's preface that the trial was its "genesis" but it is "not history",[95] the play has largely been accepted as history by the public.[94][96][97][98] (Lawrence and Lee later said that it was written in response to McCarthyism and was chiefly about intellectual freedom.)[99][100]Adaptations:Inherit the Wind was made into a 1960 film directed by Stanley Kramer, with Spencer Tracy as Drummond and Fredric March as Brady. Although there are numerous changes in the plot, they include more of the actual events which are recorded in the trial transcript, such as when Darrow implies that the court is prejudiced, being cited for contempt of court for his comments and his subsequent statement of contrition that persuaded the judge to drop the charge.There have also been three television versions of the play, with Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley in 1965, Jason Robards and Kirk Douglas in 1988, and Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott in 1999.Peter Goodchild's play, The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial (1993), was based on original sources and transcripts of the Scopes trial, because it was written with the goal of being historically accurate.[101] It was produced as part of L.A. Theatre Works' Relativity Series, which features science-themed plays and receives major funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which seeks "to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world".[102] According to Audiofile Magazine, which pronounced this production the 2006 D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award: "Because there are no recordings of the actual trial, this production is certainly the next best thing."[103] The BBC broadcast The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial in 2009, in a radio version starring Neil Patrick Harris and Ed Asner.[104]Gale Johnson's play Inherit the Truth (1987) was based on the original transcripts of the case.[105] Inherit the Truth was performed yearly during the Dayton Scopes Festival until it ended its run in 2009.[106] The play was written as a rebuttal of the 1955 play and the 1960 film, which Dayton residents claim did not accurately depict either the trial or William Jennings Bryan.[107] In 2007 Bryan College purchased the rights to the production and began work on a student film version of the play, which was screened at that year's Scopes Festival.[108][109]The film Alleged (2010), a romantic drama which is set around the Scopes Trial, starring Brian Dennehy as Clarence Darrow and Fred Thompson as William Jennings Bryan, was released by Two Shoes Productions.[110] While the main storyline is fictional, all the courtroom scenes are accurate according to the actual trial transcripts. Coincidentally, Dennehy had played Matthew Harrison Brady, the fictionalized counterpart of Bryan, in the 2007 Broadway revival of Inherit the Wind.In 2013, the Comedy Central series Drunk History retold portions of the trial in the "Nashville" episode, with Bradley Whitford portraying Bryan, Jack McBrayer as Darrow, and Derek Waters as Scopes.[111]In 2018, the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts presented a reading of a musical adaptation entitled "Nothing to See Here", with book and music by Bryan Blaskie and book and lyrics by Laurie Hochman.[112]Art [ edit ] Gallery: Monkey Trial shows cartoons made in reaction to the trial.[113]Literature [ edit ] Ronald Kidd's 2006 novel, Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial, set in summer 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, is based on the Scopes Trial.[114][115]Music [ edit ] A series of folk songs produced in reaction to the trial, from PBS' American Experience, includes:[116]"Bryan's Last Fight""Can't Make a Monkey of Me""Monkey Business""Monkey Out of Me""The John Scopes Trial""There Ain't No Bugs""Monkey Biz-Ness (Down in Tennessee)" by the International Novelty Orchestra with Billy Murray is a 1925 comedy song about the Scopes Monkey Trial.[117]Bruce Springsteen performed a song called "Part Man, Part Monkey" during his 1988 Tunnel of Love Express Tour, and recorded a version of it in 1990 that was first released as a 1992 B-side and was later released on the 1998 multi-volume Tracks collection. The song references the Scopes trial ("They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States / For teaching that man descended from the apes") but says that the trial could have been avoided by merely looking at how men behave around women ("They coulda settled that case without a fuss or fight / If they'd seen me chasing you, sugar, through the jungle last night / They'da called in that jury and a one two three, said / Part man, part monkey, definitely").[118]Non-fiction [ edit ] It was not until the 1960s that the Scopes trial began to be mentioned in the history textbooks which were used in American high schools and colleges, they usually portrayed it as an example of the conflict between fundamentalists and modernists, and it was frequently mentioned in the sections of those same textbooks which also described the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South.[119]See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] ^ This quote, and indeed this speech, was delivered by Darrow's co-counsel, Dudley Field Malone. Contemporary author Anna Marcet Haldeman specifically states, in "Impressions of the Scopes Trial" (1925), "Never, for instance, would Darrow be betrayed, even by his own eloquence, into saying as did Malone: 'There is never a duel with the truth. ' "[31] References [ edit ] Citations [ edit ] ^ "Tennessee Anti-evolution Statute'--UMKC School of Law". umkc.edu. Archived from the original on May 20, 2009. ^ Mark Paxton (2013). Media Perspectives on Intelligent Design and Evolution. ABC-CLIO. p. 105. ISBN 9780313380648. ^ Charles Alan Israel (2004). Before Scopes: Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870''1925. U of Georgia Press. p. 161. ISBN 9780820326450. ^ Cotkin, George (2004) [1992]. Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880''1900. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 7''14. ISBN 978-0-7425-3746-0 . Retrieved October 5, 2013 . ^ Ferenc M. Szasz, "William B. Riley and the Fight against Teaching of Evolution in Minnesota." Minnesota History 1969 41(5): 201''216. ^ Balmer, Randall (2007). Thy Kingdom Come . Basic Books. ISBN 9780465005192. p.111 ^ Larson 1997, p. 59 ^ Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: And America's Continuing Debate over Science And Religion (2006) ^ a b See Supreme Court of Tennessee John Thomas Scopes v. The State Archived January 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, at end of opinion filed January 17, 1927. The court did not address the question of how the assessment of the minimum possible statutory fine, when the defendant had been duly convicted, could possibly work any prejudice against the defendant. ^ "A Monkey on Tennessee's Back: The Scopes Trial in Dayton". Tennessee State Library and Archives. Archived from the original on April 9, 2009 . Retrieved November 13, 2011 . ^ a b An introduction to the John Scopes (Monkey) Trial Archived January 14, 2011, at the Wayback Machine by Douglas Linder. UMKC Law. Retrieved April 15, 2007. ^ Larson 1997, p. 108 "Scopes had urged the students to testify against him, and coached them in their answers." ^ Larson 1997, p. 89,107 ^ Larson 1997, p. 108 ^ The New York Times May 26, 1925: pp. 1, 16 ^ Larson 1997, p. 107 ^ "Scopes Trial". Scholarly Community Encyclopedia. November 15, 2022 . Retrieved February 25, 2024 . ^ Larson 1997, p. 101 ^ a b "The Scopes Trial". Bryan College . Retrieved January 18, 2019 . ^ "Scopes Monkey Trial". BOOK OF DAYS TALES. July 21, 2015 . Retrieved February 28, 2018 . ^ "Evolution in Tennessee". Outlook 140 (July 29, 1925), pp. 443''44. ^ Scopes, John Thomas (1971), The world's most famous court trial, State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes; complete stenographic report of the court test of the Tennessee anti-evolution act at Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, including speeches and arguments of attorneys, New York: Da Capo Press, pp. 174''78, ISBN 978-1-886363-31-1 ^ "Digital History". www.digitalhistory.uh.edu . Retrieved October 5, 2022 . ^ Scopes, John Thomas (1971), The world's most famous court trial, State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes; complete stenographic report of the court test of the Tennessee anti-evolution act at Dayton, July 10 to 21, 1925, including speeches and arguments of attorneys, New York: Da Capo Press, p. 304, ISBN 978-1-886363-31-1 ^ Arthur Garfield Hays, Let Freedom Ring (New York: Liveright, 1937), pp. 71''72; Charles Francis Potter, The Preacher and I (New York: Crown, 1951), pp. 275''76. ^ Kirtley F. Mather, "Creation and Evolution", in Science Ponders Religion, ed. Harlow Shapley (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960), pp. 32''45. ^ p. 299 ^ pp. 302''03 ^ "Evolution Battle Rages out of Court" . The New York Times. July 22, 1925. p. 2. . ^ Scopes 1967: pp. 59''60 ^ "Faith of Our Fathers". Beliefnet. ^ World's Most Famous Court Trial, p. 313 ^ Kazin, M. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. Anchor Press (2007), p. 134. ISBN 0385720564 ^ Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105, 1927 ^ The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution was not, at the time of the Scopes decision in the 1920s, deemed applicable to the states. Thus, Scopes' constitutional defense on establishment of religion grounds rested'--and had to rest'--solely on the state constitution, as there was no federal Establishment Clause protection available to him. See Court's opinion Archived January 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. See generally Incorporation doctrine and Everson v. Board of Education (a seminal U.S. Supreme Court opinion finally applying the Establishment Clause against states in 1947). ^ "Education: Bizarre". Time. January 24, 1927. ISSN 0040-781X . Retrieved January 14, 2023 . ^ The New York Times January 16, 1927: 1, 28. ^ "Butler Act Repeal '' Tennessee House Bill No. 48 (1967)". todayinsci.com. ^ a b David Goetz, "The Monkey Trial". Christian History 1997 16(3): pp. 10''18. 0891-9666 ^ a b Shapiro, Adam R. (2014). Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools. University of Chicago Press. pp. 4''5. ^ Trollinger, William V. (1991). God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism. OL 1888673M. ^ Laats, Adam (2011). "Monkeys, Bibles, and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Atlanta's School Battles in the Scopes Era". Georgia Historical Quarterly. 95 (3): 335''355. JSTOR 41304304. ^ Halliburton, R. Jr. "The Adoption of Arkansas' Anti-Evolution Law". Arkansas Historical Quarterly. 23 (Autumn 1964): 280. doi:10.2307/40038058. ^ a b Curtis, Christopher K. (1986). "Mississippi's Anti-Evolution Law of 1926". Journal of Mississippi History. 48 (1): 15''29. ^ Kee, Howard Clark; Emily Albu; Carter Lindberg; J. William Frost; Dana L. Robert (1998). Christianity: A Social and Cultural History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 484. ISBN 0-13-578071-3. ^ Balmer, Randall (August 10, 2021). Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ISBN 9781467462907 '' via Google Books. ^ Webb, George E. (1991). "The Evolution Controversy in Arizona and California: From the 1920s to the 1980s". Journal of the Southwest. 33 (2): 133''150, 0894''8410. JSTOR 40169811. ^ a b c d e f Grabiner, J.V. & Miller, P.D., Effects of the Scopes Trial, Science, New Series, Vol. 185, No. 4154 (September 6, 1974), pp. 832''837 ^ a b c d Moore, Randy, The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 60, No. 8 (Oct. 1998), pp. 568''577 ^ George Gaylord Simpson, Evolution and Education, Science February 7, 1975: Vol. 187, Issue 4175, pp. 389 ^ Ella Thea Smith and the Lost History of American High School Biology Textbooks, Ronald P. Ladouceur, Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2008, pp. 435''471 ^ Larson 2004, p. 211 ^ a b Larson 2004, pp. 212''213 ^ a b c d Larson 2004, p. 213 ^ Harrison, S. L. (1994). "The Scopes 'Monkey Trial' Revisited: Mencken and the Editorial Art of Edmund Duffy". Journal of American Culture. 17 (4): 55''63. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.1994.t01-1-00055.x. ^ Larson 2004, p. 217 ^ "Scopes Trial Museum". Tennessee History for Kids. Archived from the original on January 20, 2022 . Retrieved November 13, 2008 . ^ National Park Service (April 2007). "National Historic Landmarks Survey: List of National Historic Landmarks by State". ^ "National Register of Historic Places Database and Research Page". National Register Information System. National Park Service. Archived from the original on December 18, 2016 . Retrieved May 15, 2007 . ^ "Gallery: Monkey Trial". American Experience. PBS. A gallery of cartoons produced in reaction to the trial, from PBS' American Experience. ^ E.S. Martin, Life 86 (July 16, 1925): p. 16. ^ "Life Lines", Life 85 (June 18, 1925): 10; 85 (June 25, 1925): 6, 86 (July 2, 1925): 8; 86 (July 9, 1925): 6; 86 (July 30, 1925): 6; "Life's Encyclopedia", Life 85 (July 25, 1925): 23; Kile Croak, "My School in Tennessee", Life 86 (July 2, 1925); 4; Arthur Guiterman, "Notes for a Tennessee Primer", Life 86 (July 16, 1925): 5; "Topics in Brief", Literary Digest, for 86 (July 4, 1925): 18; 86 (July 11, 1925): 15; 86 (July 18, 1925): 15; 86 (July 25, 1925): 15, 86 (August 1, 1925): 17; 86 (August 8, 1925): 13. ^ "Tennessee Goes Fundamentalist", New Republic 42 (April 29, 1925): pp. 258''60; Howard K. Hollister, "In Dayton, Tennessee", Nation 121 (July 8, 1925): pp. 61''62; Dixon Merritt, "Smoldering Fires", Outlook 140 (July 22, 1925): pp. 421''22. ^ Martin, Life 86 (July 16, 1925): p. 16. ^ "The Great Trial", Time 6 (July 20, 1926): p. 17. ^ Life 86 (July 9, 1925): p. 7. ^ Mencken, H.L. (January 12, 1982). "Scopes: Infidel". The New York Times. p. A15. ISSN 0362-4331. ProQuest 122109461 . Retrieved October 24, 2021 . ^ Mencken, H.L., "Sickening Doubts About Value of Publicity", The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 9, 1925. ^ Edgar Kemler, The Irreverent Mr. Mencken (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), pp. 175''90. For excerpts from Mencken's reports see William Manchester, Sage of Baltimore: The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken (New York: Andrew-Melrose, 1952) pp. 143''45, and D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. Jerry R. Tompkins (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1965) pp. 35''51. ^ H.L. Mencken, Heathen Days, 1890''1936 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943) pp. 231''34; Michael Williams, "Sunday in Dayton", Commonweal 2 (July 29, 1925): pp. 285''88. ^ "In Memoriam: W.J.B." was first printed in The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925; rpt. by Mencken in the American Mercury 5 (October 1925) pp. 158''60 in his Prejudices (Fifth Series), pp. 64''74; and in https://archive.org/details/mencken017105mbp Cooke, Alistair, The Vintage Mencken, Vintage Books, pp. 161''167. ^ Mencken, Heathen Days, pp. 280''87. ^ "Mencken Epithets Rouse Dayton's Ire", The New York Times, July 17, 1925, 3. ^ "Battle Now Over, Mencken Sees; Genesis Triumphant and Ready for New Jousts", H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 18, 1925, http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck04.htm#SCOPES9 Archived November 18, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, URL accessed April 27, 2008. ^ Notes on Inherit the Wind UMKC Law School. Retrieved April 15, 2007. ^ "Inherit the Wind: The Playwrights' Note". xroads.virginia.edu. ^ "Inherit the Wind, Drama for Students". Gale Group. January 1, 1998. Archived from the original on June 10, 2014 . Retrieved August 31, 2012 . ^ a b Riley, Karen L.; Brown, Jennifer A.; Braswell, Ray (January 1, 2007). "Historical Truth and Film: Inherit the Wind as an Appraisal of the American Teacher". American Educational History Journal. Archived from the original on November 5, 2013 . Retrieved August 31, 2012 . ^ "Inherit the Wind". virginia.edu. ^ Benen, Steve (July 1, 2000). "Inherit the Myth?". Church and State. ^ Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 85, 86. ^ "Evolution of a Scholar". Pepperdine Law. Archived from the original on December 15, 2012 . Retrieved September 2, 2012 . ^ Larson 1997, p. 240 ^ "Inherit the controversy". Archived from the original on November 13, 2014 . Retrieved September 2, 2012 . ^ The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial: Details. 2006. ISBN 9781580813525. OCLC 77554199. ^ Goodchild, Peter (2006). The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial. L.A. Theatre Works. ISBN 9781580813525. ^ "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial: AudioFile Review". AudioFile Magazine. Portland, ME. December 2006. ^ "BBC Radio 4'--Saturday Drama, the Great Tennessee Monkey Trial". ^ 'Inherit the Wind' opens at the Springer Opera House Ledger-Enquirer ^ Play based on Scopes trial ending 20-year run Wate.com ^ Play based on Scopes trial ending 20-year run TimesNews.net ^ Scopes trial film begins July 14 Archived October 20, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Times Free Press ^ Associated Press. College plans own version of movie on evolution trial. Times Daily, July 7, 2007, p48 ^ "Synopsis > Alleged" . Retrieved May 1, 2012 . ^ "Comedy Central: Drunk History: Clip". ^ "Nothing to See Here". Bryan Blaskie . Retrieved October 29, 2018 . ^ "Gallery: Monkey Trial". American Experience. PBS. ^ "Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial". RonaldKidd.com. Archived from the original on January 30, 2020 . Retrieved January 30, 2020 . ^ AudioFile Magazine. "The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial: Description". audiobooksync.com. Archived from the original on March 1, 2016 . Retrieved January 30, 2020 . ^ "Monkey Music". American Experience. PBS. ^ The International Novelty Orchestra with Billy Murray. "Monkey Biz-Ness (Down In Tennessee 1925)". Internet Archive (public domain ed.). Mr. Fab (June 21, 2013). "Silly 78s: International Novelty Orchestra with Billy Murray "Monkey Biz-ness (Down in Tennessee)" [GOTTA have some Billy Murray in any survey of 78s- he was the early 20th century's biggest recording star, and certainly one of the most prolific]". Music For Maniacs. ^ "Part Man, Part Monkey". The Killing Floor. ^ Lawrance Bernabo and Celeste Michelle Condit (1990). "Two Stories of the Scopes Trial: Legal and Journalistic Articulations of the Legitimacy of Science and Religion" in Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law, edited by Robert Hariman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, pp. 82''83. Bibliography [ edit ] de Camp, L. Sprague (1968), The Great Monkey Trial, Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-04625-1 Clark, Constance Areson (2000), "Evolution for John Doe: Pictures, The Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate", Journal of American History, 87 (4): 1275''1303, doi:10.2307/2674729, ISSN 0021-8723, JSTOR 2674729, PMID 17120375 Conkin, Paul K. (1998), When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals, p. 185, ISBN 978-0-8476-9063-3 Edwards, Mark (2000), "Rethinking the Failure of Fundamentalist Political Antievolutionism after 1925", Fides et Historia, 32 (2): 89''106, ISSN 0884-5379, PMID 17120377 Folsom, Burton W. Jr. (1988), "The Scopes Trial Reconsidered", Continuity (12): 103''127, ISSN 0277-1446 Gatewood, Willard B. Jr., ed. (1969), Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, & Evolution Harding, Susan (1991), "Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other", Social Research, 58 (2): 373''393 Grabiner, J. V. & Miller, P. D. (September 6, 1974) "Effects of the Scopes Trial", Science, New Series, Vol. 185, No. 4154, pp. 832''837Ladouceur, Ronald P. (2008) "Ella Thea Smith and the Lost History of American High School Biology Textbooks", Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 435''471Larson, Edward J. (1997), Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, BasicBooks, ISBN 978-0-465-07509-6 Larson, Edward J. (2004), Evolution, Modern Library, ISBN 978-0-679-64288-6 Lienesch, Michael (2007), In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement, University of North Carolina Press, pp. 350pp, ISBN 978-0-8078-3096-3 Menefee, Samuel Pyeatt (2001), "Reaping the Whirlwind: A Scopes Trial Bibliography", Regent University Law Review, 13 (2): 571''595 Moran, Jeffrey P. (2002), The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford/St. Martin's, pp. 240pp, ISBN 978-0-312-24919-9 Moran, Jeffrey P. (2004), "The Scopes Trial and Southern Fundamentalism in Black and White: Race, Region, and Religion", Journal of Southern History, 70 (1): 95''120, doi:10.2307/27648313, JSTOR 27648313 Shapiro, Adam R. Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013) excerpt and text searchSmout, Kary Doyle (1998), The Creation/Evolution Controversy: A Battle for Cultural Power, pp. 210 pp, ISBN 978-0-275-96262-3 Scopes, John T.; Presley, James (June 1967), Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes, Henry Holt & Company, ISBN 978-0-03-060340-2 Simpson, George Gaylord (February 7, 1975) "Evolution and Education", Science Vol. 187, Issue 4175, pp. 389Tompkins, Jerry R. (1968), D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, Louisiana State University Press, OCLC 411836 Further reading [ edit ] Cline, Austin. "Atheism: Scopes Monkey Trial". About.com. Archived from the original on December 25, 2018 . Retrieved April 15, 2007 . Ginger, Ray. Six Days or Forever?: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. London: OUP, 1974 [1958].Haldeman-Julius, Marcet. "Impressions of the Scopes Trial". Haldeman-Julius Monthly, vol. 2.4 (Sept. 1925), pp. 323''347 (excerpt'--included in Clarence Darrow's Two Great Trials (1927). Haldeman-Julius was an eye-witness and a friend of Darrow's.]McKay, Casey Scott (2013). "Tactics, Strategies, & Battles'--Oh My!: Perseverance of the Perpetual Problem Pertaining to Preaching to Public School Pupils & Why it Persists". University of Massachusetts Law Review. 8 (2): 442''464. Article 3.Mencken, H.L. A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Hoboken: Melville House, 2006."Monkey Trial". American Experience. PBS. Scopes, John Thomas and William Jennings Bryan. The World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case: A Complete Stenographic Report of the Famous Court Test. Cincinnati: National Book Co., ca. 1925.Shapiro, Adam R. Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools. Chicago: UCP, 2013.Shapiro, Adam R. "'Scopes Wasn't the First': Nebraska's 1924 Anti-Evolution Trial". Nebraska History, vol. 94 (Fall 2013), pp. 110''119.The Church Case between Prof. Johannes du Plessis and the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 27, 1930 '' 1931, regarding the biblical chapter of Genesis and evolution, was a similar event. The Church lost its case. OCLC 85987149External links [ edit ] Original materials from and news coverage of the trial:

Complete trial transcripts and other court documents at University of Minnesota Law LibraryThe World's Most Famous Court TrialMencken's complete columns on the Scopes Trial at the Internet ArchivePapers of Warner B. Ragsdale, a reporter covering the trial.Readings (audio) of H.L. Mencken's reports of the trial from The Baltimore Evening Sun Archived December 22, 2017, at the Wayback MachineScopes Trial Home Page by Douglas Linder. University of Missouri at Kansas City Law SchoolBryan, William Jennings (1925). "Text of the Closing Statement of William Jennings Bryan at the trial of John Scopes". csudh.edu. Dayton, Tennessee. Archived from the original on July 13, 2017 . Retrieved July 14, 2006 . Marks, Jonathan. "Transcript of Bryan's cross-examination". University of North Carolina. Charlotte, NC. Archived from the original on June 14, 2007. "Unpublished Photographs from 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes "Monkey Trial" ". Smithsonian Archives. Human Timeline (Interactive)'--Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History (August 2016).Scopes Trial, digital collection, Tennessee Virtual Archive.

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Sun, 07 Apr 2024 13:24

Geoengineering Test Quietly Launches Salt Crystals into Atmosphere

A solar geoengineering experiment in San Francisco could lead to brighter clouds that reflect sunlight. The risks are numerous

By Corbin Hiar & E&E News

An aerial view of a layer of stratocumulus clouds.

SubstanceP/Getty Images

CLIMATEWIRE | The nation's first outdoor test to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover launched Tuesday from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.

The experiment, which organizers didn't widely announce to avoid public backlash, marks the acceleration of a contentious field of research known as solar radiation modification. The concept involves shooting substances such as aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

The move led by researchers at the University of Washington has renewed questions about how to effectively and ethically study promising climate technologies that could also harm communities and ecosystems in unexpected ways. The experiment is spraying microscopic salt particles into the air, and the secrecy surrounding its timing caught even some experts off guard.

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"Since this experiment was kept under wraps until the test started, we are eager to see how public engagement is being planned and who will be involved," said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include developing countries in decisions about solar modification, also known as geoengineering.

"While it complies with all current regulatory requirements, there is a clear need to reexamine what a strong regulatory framework must look like in a world where [solar radiation modification] experimentation is happening," she added.

The Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement, or CAARE, project is using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of sea salt particles into the sky in an effort to increase the density '-- and reflective capacity '-- of marine clouds. The experiment is taking place, when conditions permit, atop the USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum in Alameda, California, and will run through the end of May, according to a weather modification form the team filed with federal regulators.

The project comes as global heat continues to obliterate monthly and yearly temperature records and amid growing interest in solar radiation modification from Silicon Valley funders and some environmental groups. It also follows the termination of a Harvard University experiment last month that planned to inject reflective aerosols into the stratosphere near Sweden before it was canceled after encountering opposition from Indigenous groups.

Solar radiation modification is controversial because widespread use of technologies like marine cloud brightening could alter weather patterns in unclear ways and potentially limit the productivity of fisheries and farms. It also wouldn't address the main cause of climate change '-- the use of fossil fuels '-- and could lead to a catastrophic spike in global temperatures if major geoengineering activities were discontinued before greenhouse gases decrease to manageable levels.

The University of Washington and SilverLining, a geoengineering research advocacy group involved in the CAARE project, declined interview requests. The mayor of Alameda, where the experiment is being conducted, didn't respond to emailed questions about the project.

The secrecy surrounding the landmark experiment seems to have been by design, according to The New York Times, which, along with a local newspaper, was granted exclusive access to cover the initial firing of the spray cannons.

"The idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday's test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them," the Times reported. The White House also distanced itself from the experiment, which is being conducted with the cooperation of a Smithsonian-affiliated museum.

The project team has touted its transparency, noting that visitors to the USS Hornet, which now serves as a floating museum, will be able to view the experiment.

"The world needs to rapidly advance its understanding of the effects of aerosol particles on climate,'' Kelly Wanser, the executive director of SilverLining, said in a press release. "With a deep commitment to open science and a culture of humility, the University of Washington has developed an approach that integrates science with societal engagement, and can help society in essential steps toward advancing science, developing regulations, promoting equitable and effective decision-making, and building shared understanding in these areas."

The CAARE project is part of a larger coastal study that the University of Washington consortium is planning to pursue. The second phase of that effort would take place on a pier around a mile offshore in a coastal environment, according to a study description the school released Monday.

While a peer review of that proposal was generally positive, the scientists also flagged some transparency shortcomings.

"One reviewer noted that it would help to have more information on the site location," said a Washington-University-commissioned report. "Is there local resistance or concerns (whether founded or unfounded) around issues like local air quality, etc.? How many options exist, and how do different options affect the field study plan?"

The study plan also made no mention of its potential ecological impacts, a key consideration recommended by a 2022 Biden administration marine cloud brightening workshop. That's a significant oversight, according to Greg Goldsmith, the associate dean for research and development at Chapman University.

"History has shown us that when we insert ourselves into modification of nature, there are always very serious unintended consequences," said Goldsmith, who studies the implications of climate change for plant structure and function. "And therefore, it would be prudent to listen to what history has shown and look for consequences."

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

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Sun, 07 Apr 2024 12:48

This story, of what the moments after a nuclear missile launch could look like, is based on facts sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisers, cabinet members, nuclear weapons engineers, scientists, soldiers, airmen, special operators, Secret Service, emergency management experts, intelligence analysts, civil servants and others who have worked on these macabre scenarios over decades.

As the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the US government, the scenario postulated here takes the reader up to the razor's edge of what can legally be known. Declassified documents, obfuscated for decades, fill in the details with terrifying clarity.

Because the Pentagon is a top target for a strike by America's nuclear-armed enemies, in the scenario that follows, Washington DC gets hit first with a one megaton thermo-nuclear bomb. 'A ''Bolt out of the Blue'' attack against DC is what everyone in DC fears most,' says Andrew Weber, former assistant secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programmes. 'Bolt out of the Blue' is how US Nuclear Command and Control refers to an 'unwarned large [nuclear] attack'.

Newly-declassified documents reveal chilling details of what would happen to DC in the event of a surprise nuclear attack targeting the Pentagon, pictured. It's 27,000 employees would die instantly

A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend

The Lincoln Memorial, pictured, would burst with the heat of the Pentagon blast a mile away

So too would the nearby Jefferson Memorial, whose famed white marble pillars would crumble to dust

This strike on DC initiates the beginning of an Armageddon-like nuclear war that will almost certainly follow. 'There is no such thing as a small nuclear war,' is an oft repeated phrase in Washington.

A nuclear strike on the Pentagon is just the beginning of a scenario the finality of which will be the end of civilisation as we know it.

This is the reality of the world in which we live. The nuclear war scenario proposed in this book could happen tomorrow. Or later today. 'The world could end in the next couple of hours,' warns General Robert Kehler, the former commander of the United States Strategic Command.

A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the centre the Sun.

DC's subway, known as the Metro, would become a furnace a few seconds after the blast - with all oxygen sucked out of its tunnels - and passengers who avoided burning to death suffocating instead

In the first fraction of a milli-second after the bomb strikes the Pentagon outside Washington DC, there is light. Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour.

Within a few seconds the fireball has increased to a diameter of a little more than a mile, its heat so intense that concrete explodes, metal melts or evaporates, stone shatters and people instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.

The five-storey, five-sided structure of the Pentagon, and everything inside its 6.5 million sq ft of office space, explodes into superheated dust, all the walls shattering with the near-simultaneous arrival of a shockwave. All 27,000 employees perish instantly.

Not a single thing in the fireball remains. Nothing. Ground zero is zeroed.

Travelling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything flammable several miles in every direction.

Curtains, paper, books, wood fences, clothing and dry leaves explode into flames and become kindling for a great firestorm that begins to consume a 100 or more square mile area that, prior to this flash of light, was the beating heart of American governance and home to six million people.

The declassified documents also predict a horrific death for 35,000 people watching a game at Nationals Park, with their clothes set to burn to their bodies and their top layer of skin singed off, leaving only bloody dermis exposed

Several hundred feet north-west of the Pentagon, all 639 acres of Arlington national cemetery ''including the 400,000 sets of bones and gravestones honouring the war dead, the 3,800 buried African-American freed people, the visitors paying respects on this late winter afternoon, the groundskeepers mowing lawns, the arborists tending trees, the tour guides touring, the white-gloved members of the Old Guard keeping watch over the Tomb of the Unknowns '' they are all instantly transformed into charred human figurines. Into soot.

Those incinerated are spared the horror that begins to be inflicted on the one to two million people gravely injured but not yet dead.

Across the Potomac river a mile to the north-east, the marble walls and columns of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials superheat, split, burst apart and disintegrate. The steel and stone bridges and highways connecting these historic monuments to the surrounding environs heave and collapse.

To the south, across Interstate 395, the spacious glass-walled Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, with its abundance of stores filled with high-end clothing brands, household goods, restaurants and offices, food courts and the adjacent Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City hotel, are all obliterated. Ceiling joists, two-by-fours, escalators, chandeliers, rugs, furniture, mannequins, dogs, squirrels, people '' all burst into flames. It has been three seconds since the initial blast.

There is a baseball game going on two-and-a-half miles due west at Nationals Park. The clothes on the majority of the 35,000 people watching the game catch fire. Those who don't quickly burn to death suffer intense, third-degree burns. Their bodies are stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath.

Third-degree burns require immediate specialised care and often limb amputation to prevent death. In Nationals Park there might be a few thousand who somehow survive '' they were inside buying food or using the bathrooms '' and they now desperately need a burn treatment centre. But there are only ten specialised burn beds in the entire Washington metropolitan area, at the MedStar Washington Hospital's Burn Centre in central DC. And because this facility is about five miles north-east of the Pentagon, it no longer functions, if it even exists.

Within seconds, the thermal radiation has deeply burned the skin on roughly one million people, and 90 per cent of them will die.

A nuclear World War III is guaranteed to leave, at minimum, two billion dead

Most won't make it more than a few steps from where they're standing when the bomb detonates. They become what civil defence experts referred to in the 1950s, when these grim calculations first came to be, as 'Dead When Found'.

At Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, a 1,000-acre military facility across the Potomac to the south-east, there are another 17,000 victims, including almost everyone working at the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters, the White House Communications Agency headquarters, the US Coast Guard Station Washington, the Marine One helicopter hangar and scores of other heavily guarded federal facilities that cater to the nation's security. At the National Defense University, a majority of the 4,000 students are dead or dying.

With no shortness of tragic irony, this university (funded by the Pentagon and founded on America's 200th birthday) is where officers go to learn military tactics to achieve US national security dominance around the world.

This university is not the only military-themed higher learning institution obliterated in the nuclear first strike. The Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, the Inter-American Defense College, the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, all immediately cease to exist.

In the horrific scenario, 17,000 people would be incinerated at Joint Base Anacostia - including many members of the military tasked with protecting the United States from such an attack

Humans created the nuclear weapon in the 20th Century to save the world from evil, and now, in the 21st Century, the nuclear weapon is about to destroy it. The science behind the bomb is profound. Embedded in the thermonuclear flash of light are two pulses of thermal radiation. The first pulse lasts a fraction of a second, after which comes the second pulse, which lasts several seconds and causes human skin to ignite and burn.

The light pulses are silent. What follows is a thunderous roar.

The intense heat generated by this nuclear explosion creates a high pressure wave that moves out from its centre point like a tsunami, a giant wall of highly compressed air travelling faster than the speed of sound. It mows people down, hurls others into the air, bursts lungs and eardrums, sucks bodies up and spits them out.

'In general, large buildings are destroyed by the change in air pressure, while people and objects such as trees and utility poles are destroyed by the wind,' notes an archivist who compiles these morbid statistics for the Atomic Archive.

All of Washington DC becomes one mega-inferno

As the nuclear fireball grows, this shock front delivers catastrophic destruction, bulldozing everything in its path for three miles. The air behind the blast wave accelerates, creating winds that reach several hundred miles-per-hour '' extraordinary speeds that are difficult to fathom.

In 2012 Hurricane Sandy, which caused £55 billion worth of damage and killed 233 people from the Caribbean to Canada, had maximum sustained winds of roughly 80mph. The highest wind speed recorded on Earth is 253mph, at a remote weather station in Australia.

That which is not crushed by the blast is torn apart by this whipping wind. Objects as small as computers and cement blocks, and as large as 18-wheeler trucks and double-decker tour buses, become airborne like tennis balls.

The nuclear fireball that has consumed everything in the initial 1.1-mile radius now rises up from the earth at a rate of 250 to 350 feet per second.

Thirty-five seconds pass.

The formation of the iconic mushroom cloud begins, its massive cap and stem, made up of incinerated people and civilisation's debris, transmutes from a red, to a brown, to an orange hue.

Next comes the deadly reverse suction effect, with objects '' cars, people, light poles, street signs, parking meters '' getting sucked back into the centre of the burning inferno and consumed by flame.

Sixty seconds pass.

The mushroom cap and stem, now greyish white, rises up five then ten miles from ground zero. The cap grows too, stretching out 20, 30 miles across, billowing and blowing further out.

Eventually it reaches the troposphere, higher than commercial flights. Radioactive particles then spew across everything below as fallout, raining back down on the Earth.

A nuclear bomb produces 'a witch's brew of radioactive products, which are also entrained in the cloud', the astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned decades ago.

More than a million people are dead or dying and fewer than two minutes have passed since detonation. Now the inferno begins.

This is different than the initial fireball. It is a mega-fire beyond measure. Gas lines explode one after the next, acting like giant flamethrowers spewing steady streams of fire. Tanks containing flammable materials burst open. Chemical factories explode. Pilot lights on water heaters and furnaces act like torch lighters, setting anything not already burning alight. Collapsed buildings become giant ovens.

Open gaps in floors and roofs behave like chimneys. Carbon dioxide from the firestorm sinks down and settles into the metro's subway tunnels, asphyxiating passengers in their seats. People seeking shelter in basements and other spaces below ground vomit, convulse, become comatose and die. Anyone above ground who is looking directly at the blast '' in some cases as far as 13 miles away '' is blinded.

Fifteen miles out from the Pentagon, cars and buses crash into one another. Asphalt streets turn to liquid from intense heat, trapping survivors as if caught in molten lava or quicksand. Hurricane-force winds fuel hundreds of fires into thousands of fires, into millions.

Ten miles out, hot burning ash and flaming wind-borne debris ignite new fires, conflating one after another. All of Washington DC becomes one mega-inferno.

Eight, maybe nine minutes pass.

Ten and 12 miles out from ground zero, survivors shuffle in shock like the almost dead. Unsure of what just happened, desperate to escape. Tens of thousands of people here have ruptured lungs. Crows, sparrows and pigeons overhead catch fire and drop from the sky, as if it is raining birds.

There is no electricity. No phone service. No 911. The electromagnetic pulse of the bomb obliterates all radio, internet and TV.

Cars with electric ignition systems cannot restart. Water stations can't pump water.

Saturated with lethal levels of radiation, the entire area is a no-go zone. Not for days will the rare survivors realise that help is not coming.

Those who somehow manage to escape death from the blast, shockwave and firestorm, suddenly realise an insidious truth about nuclear war '' that they are entirely on their own.

Former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Craig Fugate says their only hope for survival is to figure out how to 'self-survive'. That begins a 'fight for food, water...' How, and why, do US defence scientists know such hideous things, and with exacting precision?

How does the US government know so many nuclear effects-related facts, while the general public remains blind?

The answer is as grotesque as the questions themselves because, for all these years, since the end of the Second World War, the US government has been preparing for, and rehearsing plans for, a General Nuclear War.

A nuclear World War III that is guaranteed to leave, at minimum, two billion dead.

(C) Annie Jacobsen, 2024

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Sun, 07 Apr 2024 12:45

Japan, Australia, and the Philippines have joined with Washington for a joint military drill in waters claimed by Beijing

The US and three of its allies have announced a joint military exercise in disputed waters of the South China Sea, potentially ratcheting up tensions with Beijing as they seek to demonstrate their commitment to ''safeguarding the international order.''

The US-led group will hold a ''maritime cooperation activity,'' its first in a series of joint drills, on Sunday, according to a statement issued by defense chiefs of the four countries. The exercise will include naval and air forces and will be staged in waters claimed by both China and the Philippines.

''Every country should be free to conduct lawful air and maritime operations,'' US defense chief Lloyd Austin said in the statement. ''These activities with our allies Australia, Japan, and the Philippines underscore our shared commitment to ensuring that all countries are free to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows. Our operations together support peace and stability at the heart of our shared vision for a free and open region.''

The announcement comes after the US and Chinese militaries held talks in Hawaii earlier this week '' their first such meeting since 2021 '' to discuss safety measures to avoid dangerous incidents when their forces are operating in close proximity. The Chinese Defense Ministry emphasized that it ''firmly opposes any actions that endanger its sovereignty under the guise of freedom and navigation and overflight.''

Sunday's joint drill in the South China Sea is apparently just such an exercise, as its stated purpose is to ''uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight.'' Austin and the other three defense chiefs said: ''We stand with all nations in safeguarding the international order based on the rule of law that is the foundation for a peaceful and stable Indo-Pacific region.'' They reaffirmed that their countries view a 2016 international arbitration ruling against China as a ''final and legally binding decision on the parties to the dispute.''

That ruling, issued by a tribunal in The Hague, found that China's so-called ''nine-dash line'' '' encompassing about 90% of the South China Sea '' was invalid under international law. Chinese officials refused to accept the panel's decision and claimed that it had no jurisdiction over the issue. Beijing has cautioned against joint US military drills that might interfere in its territorial dispute and underme its security interests.

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Sat, 06 Apr 2024 19:25

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Joya Patiha, a 43-year-old Indonesian transgender woman, first started to notice that changing weather patterns in the mountain-ringed city of Bandung were affecting her income as a sex worker a decade ago.

The rainy season was lasting longer across the West Java province, winds were stronger and in some particularly bad years Patiha lost up to 80% of her earnings.

Trans women like Patiha are among the most affected by extreme weather linked to climate change, as well as suffering disproportionately when disasters strike.

''No one is coming out during the longer rainy season,'' said Patiha. ''It is very hard to make money during that unpredictable weather.''

Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and trans women, who tend to face more stigma and marginalisation than trans men or other LGBTQ+ Indonesians, are also among those hardest hit by extreme weather.

That's because many trans women, like Patiha, are shut out of the formal economy and survive as buskers and sex workers, occupations that rely on them being able to solicit clients outdoors.

Sherly Wijayanto, a 28-year-old trans woman from the capital Jakarta, worked as a busker for around seven years until the increasingly volatile weather made her seek other options.

''I no longer want to endure the heat and rain on the streets,'' said Wijayanto, who joined trans-led arts group Sanggar Seroja, where she now sings with the theatre company and runs the social media channel.

As well as seeking to adapt their precarious livelihoods to the new climate reality, these women and the groups that support them are also seeking to raise awareness of the challenges posed by extreme weather in a nation composed of more than 17,000 islands.

Despite gender-fluid communities being historically accepted in Indonesia, a rising tide of conservative Islam in the world's largest Muslim-majority country has fuelled anti-LGBTQ+ persecution.

An aerial view of houses that were destoryed by a landslide after heavy rains in Bandung, West Java, on March 4, 2024 (AFP via Getty Images)LGBTQ+ individuals are sometimes blamed for problems related to climate change, according to Arif Budi Darmawan, a researcher at the Bandung-based Resilience Development Initiative.

''Those outside the binary category are often labelled with the category 'deviant', (and) associated with the causes of environmental problems and disasters,'' said Darmawan, who has researched how climate change affects trans Indonesians.

These kinds of attitudes have seen LGBTQ+ people excluded from plans meant to support Indonesians dealing with the effects of climate change, he said.

The Indonesian government has a five-year plan setting out its development objectives and how it will manage the impacts of climate change and although this includes provisions for vulnerable groups, trans people are not listed among them.

''Women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are mentioned, but there is no provision for sexual and gender minorities,'' Darmawan said. The lack of government recognition of their precarity means trans people have few social safety nets, he added.

''Climate change makes the vulnerable even more vulnerable.''

Some trans women are seeking to find their own solutions. To raise awareness about climate change, Sanggar Seroja puts on movie nights and fashion shows, and hosts discussions with other queer communities.

The group also surveyed 80 members of the trans community in Jakarta to find out how climate change affected incomes, frequency of illness, and changes in spending from 2021 to 2022.

Nearly 93% of respondents saw decreased income during the rainy season, and 72% had increased expenses.

The group's coordinator Rikky, who asked that his first name only be used, said unpredictable weather also led to ''illness, debt, stress, conflicts with local residents, and heightened levels of violence''.

Like singer Wijayanto, Patiha has sought alternative opportunities. In 2021, she joined an entrepreneurship programme with Bandung-based NGO Yayasan Srikandi Pasundan, which focuses on empowering transgender women.

The NGO offered guidance on starting a small business, mentoring and support with concrete tasks like marketing products.

Patiha launched a cake-making business that same year, employing three trans friends when orders stacked up. She also started making and selling her own perfume last December.

Now, she is free from the income-sapping vagaries of the rain clouds and strong winds.

''My small business is not impacted by the unpredictable weather as I promote it through social media and e-commerce,'' Patiha said.

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Sat, 06 Apr 2024 19:11

The world's tallest prison standing at 300-foot is being built in Chinatown, New York City, sending residents into an uproar.

The 40-floor tower which will house 1,000 prisoners will be located on the grounds of the former Manhattan Detention Complex.

Known to locals as The Tombs, the old prison will be demolished in order to make way for the ''jail scraper''.

The destruction of the detention complex has caused major disruption for nearby residents, with heavy dust and loud noise creating chaos.

Those in favour of the new jail say it is necessary in order to shut down Rikers

Flickr

Jan Lee, a co-founder of Neighbours United Below Canal, a nonprofit group representing local leaders and businesses, told the outlet: ''We are the dumping ground.''

He believes that many restaurants and businesses will not survive the construction of the jail.

Lee said that no housing initiatives have been launched in Chinatown, despite numerous homeless shelters going up in the neighbourhood.

The Manhattan Detention Centre, which was built in the Egyptian Revival style over two centuries ago, was closed in November 2020.

A sketch of the impacted area showing its proximity to key community buildings

Neighbours United Below Canal

According to contractors, the demolition is likely to be completed by the end of next year.

The Tombs are located on Rikers Island, a 413-acre prison island in the East River in the Bronx. It is known for inmate violence at the centre and rising detainee deaths.

Five years ago, the council announced $8.3billion (£6.5billion) plans to build four new jails in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx to replace the island.

Those in favour of the new jail say it is necessary in order to shut down Rikers.

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Archived Version

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 18:50

By Brandon Smith

I have said it many times in the past but I think it bears repeating once again: If you want to understand why world events happen the way they do, you must understand the goals and influence of globalist institutions. You must accept the fact that these people create most of the national and international disasters you and I have to deal with on a regular basis and oftentimes they create these disasters deliberately.

Yes, I know, there are plenty of skeptics out there that think all geopolitics and crisis events are random or a product of bureaucratic stupidity; and those people are wrong. They have no idea what they're talking about because they're basing this conclusion on assumptions rather than facts and research. Make no mistake, there's a good reason why it feels like the whole world has gone crazy all at once.

The primary purpose of the globalists is to erase national borders and homogenize all countries and cultures under one economic and governmental system. They have openly admitted to this plan on numerous occasions. One of the most revealing quotes on the agenda comes from Clinton Administration Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, who stated in Time magazine that:

''In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority'... National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all.''

He adds in the same article a lesser known quote:

'''...The free world formed multilateral financial institutions that depend on member states' willingness to give up a degree of sovereignty. The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regulates how much duty a nation can charge on imports. These organizations can be seen as the protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united world.''

The people who push for this agenda are generally members of a number of globalist organizations, from the Council on Foreign Relations to the Tavistock Institute to the World Economic Forum to the IMF or World Bank, not to mention the Bank for International Settlements and the Council For Inclusive Capitalism. However, these think-tank groups are only part of the bigger picture. They are supported by some of the largest banking and investment corporations in the world, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, HSBC, Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.

If you want to know why mass illegal immigration is a growing crisis at this time and why the current government has been actively trying to enforce an open border police in the US, simply look into the financial aspects of pro-illegal immigration lobbying groups and think tanks pushing open borders messaging into the mainstream. You will find many of these banks and investment funds connected to them in one way or another.

For example, the list of companies backing the Governor of New York's plan to subsidize illegal aliens entering the state is very revealing. If they're allowed to continue offering incentives to illegals then those people will continue trying to come to the US; this isn't complicated. The conspiracy is out in the open.

Admitting To The Agenda, Then Painting It As A Positive

For the first few years of Joe Biden's presidency, he and his cohorts attempted to deny there was any mass illegal migration problem at all. However, when media coverage (mostly independent) began to expose the enormous caravans of illegals overwhelming border towns like El Paso, Texas, he was forced to acknowledge that the crisis was in fact a crisis.

But, if you thought that forcing Biden to admit to the migrant disaster was going to force him to do something about it, you were sorely mistaken. The reason mass immigration exists right now is exactly because the Biden Administration and globalist institutions are offering free handouts to ''asylum seekers.'' All they have to do to stop the rising tide of illegals is to stop offering them free stuff. Clearly, the political elites have no intention of doing this.

Instead, government officials, think-tanks and the media have decided that since they're now pressed to admit that mass immigration and open borders are real, they're going to spin the crisis as if it's actually a good thing for America.

In a narrative similar to the one used by EU officials to justify their support of the invasion of Islamic fundamentalists from 2014 onward, American elites claim that western nations are ''desperate for a younger population'' which can fill the ''needs of the labor market.'' They claim than mass migrations into the west are ''good for the economy.''

This was also the primary message of a World Economic Forum conference on migration and labor held in March. The globalist organization discussed how open borders and mass immigration could be framed as a ''positive'' in terms of economic advantages. And the talking points derived from WEF events always find their way into the corporate media. The main takeaway? Protectionism (of national borders) is bad and countries that engage in it will be at an economic disadvantage.

Since last month there's been a hailstorm of establishment media articles and news reports suggesting that mass immigration will boost GDP and make America stronger. These assertions are all built on a single line from a single report from the Congressional Budget Office which states:

''In our projections, the deficit is also smaller than it was last year because economic output is greater, partly as a result of more people working. The labor force in 2033 (EDITOR'S NOTE: Do they mean 2023?) is larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net immigration. As a result of those changes in the labor force, we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise. We are continuing to assess the implications of immigration for revenues and spending.''

Bloomberg recently published an article boasting that this line from the CBO report shows that the rising fears among Americans over illegal immigration are unfounded. They question why the migrant crisis is a top issue going into the 2024 elections and cite a number of major banking institutions that have adjusted their US fiscal outlook into the positive because of the CBO's data point and higher immigration. Bloomberg quotes the HSBC:

''Immigration is not just a highly charged social and political issue, it is also a big macroeconomic one,'' Janet Henry, global chief economist at HSBC Holdings Plc, wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. No advanced economy is benefiting from immigration quite like the U.S., and ''the impact of migration has been an important part of the U.S. growth story over the past two years.''

Firstly, let's clarify something in terms of the CBO's theory '' The US deficit has fallen in direct correlation to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. It's more expensive to borrow for everyone, including the government, which makes it more expensive to spend. Because of far higher interest payments the US is now adding over $1 Trillion every 100 days to the national debt. That's unprecedented.

Any spending cuts can be directly attributed to higher interest rates, NOT immigration. The CBO mentions this fact very quickly in the same report, without elaborating on why they think immigrants add value. But let's consider the GDP claim for a moment; why would the CBO expect higher immigration to add $7 trillion to the GDP in the next ten years?

Illegal Immigrants Are A Net Negative '' We Don't Need Them

They say it's about more people working, but what about more people taking welfare and other subsidies? Neither the CBO (nor the media) make any distinction between legal migrants and illegal migrants when it comes to economic effects.

Legal migrants usually have careers, business plans, skill sets and their own money coming into the US. Most illegals have nothing '' Little education, no substantial skill sets, no money and no plan other than to get free handouts wherever possible. We have seen the proof of this in places like New York and Washington DC, where a tiny percentage of migrants bused into the cities have absolutely crushed their welfare infrastructure.

It's estimated that the net lifetime cost of each illegal immigrant for the American taxpayer is over $68,000. While some illegals do end up paying taxes, their overall cost is far higher than the amount they pay in.

The jobs market has been inflated by trillions in Federal Reserve stimulus and most of the jobs created are low wage retail and service positions that will disappear in a couple years anyway. The CBO notes in the same report that unemployment is set to increase in 2024, but the media overlooked that little tidbit of information.

Migrants are not needed to keep the labor market going. In fact, as jobs numbers inevitably plummet due to higher interest rates illegals will only add to jobless levels and poverty levels in the US, further dragging the economy down.

Not to mention, the American housing market has suffered an oppressive spike in prices, with home costs and rents in many places doubling. This is caused in part by the millions of migrants entering the country each year looking for housing and getting help from US government programs to secure that housing. Get rid of the illegals and I guarantee rent costs will go down quickly.

Almost all of the projected GDP gain from illegal immigrants comes from their wages which go into their pockets (the same wages they send back to their families in their home countries). There is no direct GDP gain from illegals in terms of benefits to the overall economy. That said, the CBO may also be accounting for another factor which many Americans are unaware of '' Government spending being added to GDP.

As I've noted in the past, a large portion of GDP calculated by state governments and the federal government comes from spending. The more the government spends the higher GDP climbs. It doesn't matter if that money was wasted, it is still counted as rising economic activity.

So, if the US is adding 2-3 million illegals per year to the population and the government is spending thousands in tax dollars per year on each illegal through various subsidies, that will amount to billions per year in extra GDP. And the more they allow illegals to enter the country unchecked the more GDP can grow exponentially. Is that good for the economy? No. It's going to destroy the economy and we are already seeing the effects, but the government and the media can spin it to look like it's a positive.

The head of the CBO is a Republican but he's also a former member of the IMF, so it's not surprising he would paint mass immigration as a positive. The globalists want to end national sovereignty and the fastest way to do that is to create open border conditions, kill domestic economies, erase western culture and then swoop in with a ''global solution'' after the dust settles. This is the plan; to destabilize the US economic system, not save it. And, illegal immigrants are a useful tool for that end game.

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Archived Version

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 18:19

Bailouts for people, not for banksThe Covid-19 pandemic has caused millions of people across Europe to lose their jobs and slashed their incomes. The European Central Bank (ECB) has prioritised multinational companies over ordinary people in their response to the crisis. Helicopter money '-- direct cash transfers from the ECB to Eurozone citizens '--'‹ would help build a post-coronavirus economy which puts regular people first.

The coronavirus crisis could trigger an unprecedented recession across Europe. Millions of people have been made unemployed and are being forced into severe debt. The poorest amongst us are becoming even poorer.

Governments and central banks have a duty to respond quickly to any economic crisis, in order to guarantee that the economy does not spiral down into a disastrous long-lasting recession or depression.

It's time for helicopter moneyIf the ECB implemented helicopter money now, we could stop Covid-19 causing a severe and long-lasting recession. But the bank is currently rolling out a programme of quantitative easing (QE) instead, providing no-strings-attached funding to banks and companies in a way that exacerbates already high levels of inequality across Europe.

Instead of pumping more money into financial markets, as the ECB is doing with quantitative easing, the bank should deploy helicopter money. It is a policy by which the central bank creates money and sends it directly to members of the public, in the form of unilateral transfers, which do not have to be paid back.

By sending '‚¬1,000 to every adult in the Eurozone, the ECB would provide exactly the kind of powerful boost needed to kickstart the economy once the Covid-19 public health crisis is over.

Direct money transfers like this are an immediate and equitable way of boosting private spending when our economy needs it most '-- without increasing the public and private debt burden. Helicopter money would also negate the need for EU policymakers to subject European countries to another round of misguided austerity after the coronavirus crisis has receded.

The medical emergency may be abating, but the economic emergency is ongoing. Hesitating to act now will dramatically worsen the recession we've already been thrown into by the coronavirus.

The European Central Bank must seize the initiative and provide helicopter money to the public immediately, and build a people-centred recovery from Covid-19.

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Archived Version

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 16:38

The US government is spending $1million of American taxpayer money to fund experiments on dangerous bird flu viruses in collaboration with Chinese scientists.

The research involves infecting ducks and geese with different strains of viruses to make them more infectious, and study the viruses' potential to 'jump into mammalian hosts,' according to research documents.

It is being funded through the US Department of Agriculture and collaborating studies will take place at sites in Georgia, Beijing and Edinburgh in Scotland.

It comes despite similar research being restricted in 2022 and growing concerns that dubious Chinese studies may have started the Covid pandemic.

The White Coat Waste Project obtained the above photo and claims it shows animal experimenters inside the USDA lab that is working with Chinese scientists on bird flu research

The above shows a caged chicken that the The White Coat Waste Project claims is from inside the USDA lab that is working with Chinese government scientists on bird flu research

The above shows a caged chicken that the The White Coat Waste Project claims is from inside the USDA lab that is working with Chinese government scientists on bird flu research

The documents were obtained by the campaign group, The White Coat Waste Project, and shared with DailyMail.com.

The papers show funding for the avian virus research began in April 2021 and it is slated to continue through March 2026.

The USDA told this website the project was applied for in 2019 and approved in 2020.

The specific viruses the researchers will work with include H5NX, H7N9 and H9N2, WCW reported.

A 2023 study described H5NX viruses as 'highly pathogenic' with the ability to cause neurological complications in humans.

The H7N9 strain first infected humans and animals in China in March 2013 and the World Health Organization said it is of concern 'because most patients have become severely ill.'

The H9N2 strain has been found in dove in China and while it has a lower pathogenicity than the other strains, it can still infect humans.

The main collaborators on the project are USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute - a Wuhan lab partner.

Additionally, one of the researchers collaborating on the project is Wenju Liu, who is affiliated with the WIV - which is believed to have sparked the Covid pandemic - and a member of the board of a scientific journal, working with Zheng-Li Shi, who is known as the 'bat lady' for her extensive work on bat coronaviruses.

Different aspects of the research are slated to take place in multiple locations, including poultry research centers in Athens, Georgia, at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh and at the Chinese academy in Beijing.

Allan Rodriguez, a spokesperson with the USDA, told DailyMail.com the $100million funding awarded to the research 'is only being committed to the specific components carried out by our own team located in Athens, Georgia, and is not any way contributing to research taking place in the UK or China.'

Republican Sen Joni Ernst of Iowa wrote a letter Thursday to Tom Vilsack, secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, seeking more information about the department's ongoing funding of the research

One of the researchers collaborating on the project is Wenju Liu, who is affiliated with the WIV and a member of the board of a scientific journal, working with Zheng-Li Shi, who is known as the 'bat lady' for her extensive work on bat coronaviruses

Sen Ernst's letter stated the USDA research will involve infecting ducks and geese with bird flu viruses in gain-of-function experiments to make the diseases more transmissible and infectious

The specific viruses the researchers will work with include H5NX, H7N9 and H9N2, WCW reported

Between 2015 and 2023, at least seven US entities supplied NIH grant money to labs in China performing animal experiments, totaling $3,306,061

Shi Zhengli - dubbed the 'Bat Lady' or 'Bat Woman' for her work on bat coronaviruses - is pictured in a Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. She hunted down dozens of deadly Covid-like viruses in bat caves and studied them at the WIV

Justin Goodman, senior vice president of the WCW, said in a statement to DailyMail.com: 'It's reckless and indefensible for... bureaucrats to bankroll dangerous avian flu gain-of-function studies involving virus experimenters from the notorious Wuhan animal lab that likely caused COVID and its CCP-run parent organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

'Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to foot the bill for animal experiments with foreign adversaries that soup up viruses and can cause pandemics or create bioweapons.'

Following the publication of the documents by WCW, Republican Sen Joni Ernst of Iowa wrote a letter Thursday to Tom Vilsack, secretary of the USDA, seeking more information about the department's ongoing funding of the research.

The letter read: 'I was troubled to learn from the non-profit group White Coat Waste Project that USDA is supporting experiments involving a "highly pathogenic avian influenza virus" that poses a "risk to both animals and humans."'

Sen Ernst wrote a letter to the USDA stating she was 'troubled' by the agency's research

Sen Ernst said in a statement to DailyMail.com: 'The health and safety of Americans are too important to just wing it, and Biden's USDA should have had more apprehension before sending any taxpayer dollars to collaborate with [China] on risky avian flu research.

'They should know by now to suspect "fowl" play when it comes to researchers who have ties to the dangerous Wuhan Lab, and simply switching from bats to birds causes concern that they are creating more pathogens of pandemic potential.

'Here's my warning: the Biden administration should be walking on eggshells until they cut off every cent going to our adversaries. We cannot allow what happened in Wuhan to happen again.'

Despite the senators concerns, the USDA spokesperson told this website it is 'common for international researchers to conduct independent research that's connected to the same end goal' and that the research does not qualify as gain-of-function.

He added: 'Any time Senator Ernst has a question for USDA about our research or our commitment to helping America's farmers mitigate animal diseases like highly pathogenic avian influenza, she should reach out to us directly before putting misinformation in a press release or public letter... and despite the senator's assertions, this is not gain-of-function research.

'Because animal diseases present a global threat, it is common for international researchers to conduct independent research that's connected to the same end goal '' but what Senator Ernst lays out in her letter is far off base from what's actually transpiring, and on top of that is based on approval decisions that predate this Administration.'

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Archived Version

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 16:06

Search Engine Land >> PPC >> Advertisers sue Meta for allegedly inflating ad viewership in $7 billion lawsuit

The advertisers claim they were unfairly charged inflated premiums to serve ads on Facebook and Instagram.Nicola Agius on March 29, 2024 at 11:34 am | Reading time: 2 minutes

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Facebook and Instagram advertisers filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta for $7 billion in San Francisco.

They claim that the social media giant exaggerated ad viewership figures by up to 400%, leading them to pay inflated premiums for ad placements on its platforms.

Potential Reach metric. The advertisers suing Meta allege that the Potential Reach metric used by the company to determine advertising costs relies on the total number of social media accounts rather than individual users. They argue that this approach is problematic because it could include bot and fake accounts, resulting in advertisers paying more money for their ads to be served to bots.

What Meta is saying. Meta denied the allegations, explaining that the price advertisers are charged is based on performance metrics '' not the Potential Reach metric as claimed in the lawsuit. A Meta spokesperson told AdWeek:

''These allegations are baseless, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.''What the advertisers are saying. Geoffrey Graber, partner at Cohen Milstein and lead counsel representing the advertisers, said:

''We look forward to continuing to litigate this case on behalf of Meta's advertising customers and to presenting the evidence to a jury that Meta knew about its inflated Potential Reach and refused to fix the issue due to revenue concerns.''Why we care. The lawsuit represents millions of advertisers who may have overpaid to serve their ads on Instagram and Facebook. Should this case proceed to trial, more affected advertisers could potentially come forward to claim compensation.

Legal details. Former Meta advertisers DZ Reserve and Cain Maxwell initiated the case in 2018. Following the filing of the complaint, DZ Reserve ceased operations with Meta and it is not know if Maxwell's business is still operational.. Fast-forward to 2024 the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the company could pursue legal action against Meta for monetary damages.

Next steps. The case will either go to trial or will be resolved through a settlement involving financial compensation for the plaintiffs.

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About the author

Nicola Agius is Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land after joining in 2023. She covers paid media, retail media and more. Prior to this, she was SEO Director at Jungle Creations (2020-2023), overseeing the company's editorial strategy for multiple websites. She has over 15 years of experience in journalism and has previously worked at OK! Magazine (2010-2014), Mail Online (2014-2015), Mirror (2015-2017), Digital Spy (2017-2018) and The Sun (2018-2020). She also previously teamed up with SEO agency Blue Array to co-author Amazon bestselling book Mastering In-House SEO.

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Archived Version

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 14:35

What to KnowThe mystery of shaking on Roosevelt Island was solved after the USGS reported a magnitude 1.7 earthquake in Astoria, Queens.New York has experienced over 550 recorded quakes since the 1700s, according to the NESEC.Quakes occur along fault lines or are fractures in Earth's crust and are inevitably happening every day around the world.New York City dwellers were abruptly awoken at the crack of dawn on Tuesday by an escalating, rumbling vibration that sirened a rush of police cars and fire trucks.

What sounded the alarms for a possible explosion turned into a minor earthquake, a seemingly foreign experience to New Yorkers, but what turns out to be nature running its course.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported a magnitude 1.7 earthquake occurred at 5:45 a.m. Tuesday near Astoria, Queens.

911 operators received calls from Roosevelt Island and Astoria leading to a large firefighting effort, involving 60 fire and medical personnel. The situation was resolved within an hour.

Earthquakes are a result of pressure released in the form of seismic waves from fault lines, or fractures in the Earth's crust. Fault lines are caused by the sliding of the planet's outer shell, or tectonic plates, which are always moving, but at times, get stressed and undergo friction resulting in an energy release, or quake.

The truth is that this phenomenon is happening all the time around the world. The National Earthquake Information Center pinpoints approximately 20,000 earthquakes internationally each year and about 55 per day.

Jeffrey Park, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University, explains what is behind these occurrences.

"The planet that we live on is constantly moving, although very slowly. The Earth has a large mantle that connects all the way from the surface down to the liquid iron core, and that convection is driving motions at the surface that lead to earthquakes wherever the rocks are sufficiently brittle," Park told NBC New York.

Large earthquakes occur at fault zones, or areas of fracture in the Earth's crust, where the rock will break. Most dangerous fault areas are on the West Coast, including California and Washington state.

The USGS states there are 16 major earthquakes in any given year with a range between magnitude 7 and 8. The government's agency records show over the past five decades that the long-term average number of major earthquakes has exceeded about a dozen times.

Residents in Maryland also felt the ground shake on Tuesday after the USGS reported a magnitude 2.3 quake in the city of Rockville. Last Friday, Japan experienced a devastating magnitude 7.6 earthquake leaving nearly 250 people missing.

New York state has experienced over 550 quakes, most in the Adirondack Mountain and western regions, since the record began in the 1700s, based on the Northeast States Emergency Consortium.

Earthquakes have no seasonality and can occur at any time, but mornings and evenings are more likely to see a strike notes the USGS.

Dr. Antonios Marsellos, an associate professor in the Department of Geology, Environment, and Sustainability at Hofstra University, explained that even though New York is sitting on a specific type of plate, earthquakes do happen.

"An earthquake is based on tectonic plates, and New York is sitting on a 'lazy' plate, which is good, meaning we do not have so many earthquakes, but there are other things that happen -- too much rain or drought," said Dr. Marsellos to News 4.

Long periods of flooding can cause water levels to rise leading to possible landslides. Those slides can "lubricate" faults and may account for a higher frequency of quakes, explained Dr. Marsellos.

Dr. Park indicated the continuous rise in sea levels can increase the amount of pressure exerted on the Earth's shelves and coastlines, resulting in mostly scattered and infrequent quakes with long lead times.

The positive takeaway is that experts say there is no need to be alarmed and no elevated quake is expected any time soon.

"I wouldn't worry about it too much. The East Coast has been geologically stable for millions of years," said Dr. Stephen Holler, an associate professor of Physics at Fordham University.

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Thu, 04 Apr 2024 22:37

In a twist that would have made novelist Tom Clancy proud, several news outlets and social media users took a deep dive into fiction this April 1st, falling for an April Fool's prank that the U.S. Navy had discovered the ''Holy Grail of naval warfare,'' and the development of cutting-edge stealth submarine technology.

Naval News , a reputable source for maritime news, published a seemingly groundbreaking article claiming the U.S. Navy was outfitting its Virginia class submarines with a revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic drive, or ''caterpillar drive,'' that ''promises to make the submarine virtually undetectable.''

''Submarines use stealth to dominate the seas, presenting an illusive yet deadly threat,'' the Naval News article reads. ''Now U.S. Navy submarines will take stealth to a new level. American submarines will now be fitted with magnetohydrodynamic drive.''

Unfortunately, several niche media sites that later circulated the story didn't realize they were sharing a concept straight from fiction. Specifically, Tom Clancy's Cold War thriller '' The Hunt for the Red October ,'' where a stealth submarine equipped with a magnetohydrodynamic drive is a crucial plot element.

The prank showcased the fine line between fact and fiction and served as a stark reminder of the importance of critical media consumption in the digital age.

In fairness, given the nature of today's technological progress, which frequently resembles science fiction, it's understandable why some could be misled by Naval News's seemingly credible announcement. Equally, the idea of magnetohydrodynamic drive is more than just the stuff of imagination.

A Magnetohydrodynamic drive (MHD) is a conceptual method of propulsion that uses only electric and magnetic fields to accelerate a liquid or gas propellant using the principles of magnetohydrodynamics.

In recent years, engineers have been exploring the potential of plasma propulsion engines using magnetohydrodynamics for space exploration. The goal is that a magnetohydrodynamic drive would offer a more continuous propulsion system than traditional chemical rockets.

Furthermore, since the 1960s , scientists and military researchers have been studying the use of magnetohydrodynamic drives for submarine propulsion. This technology leverages the magnetic properties of water to move the submarine forward, thereby eliminating the need for moving parts, such as traditional propellers.

Another kernel of truth from the Naval News article is that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently attempting to develop a workable magnetohydrodynamic drive under its '' Principles of Undersea Magnetohydrodynamic Pumps '' or ''PUMP'' program.

However, the concept remains largely theoretical, and the leap from experimentation to an operational caterpillar drive , especially in the context of creating a ''stealth submarine,'' is a significant one.

The idea of a completely stealth submarine, undetectable by enemy forces, has been a coveted goal for global navies and could justifiably be considered the ''Holy Grail of naval warfare.''

The concept of a magnetohydrodynamic-drive stealth submarine was popularized in the 1990 film adaptation of Tom Clancey's literary spy thriller '' The Hunt for the Red October .'' In the film, the Soviet Typhoon-class ballistic missile sub the ''Red October'' is outfitted with a ''caterpillar drive,'' which renders it undetectable to passive sonar.

Due to its lack of moving parts, a magnetohydrodynamic-driven submarine would theoretically significantly reduce noise levels, a key advantage in underwater stealth. However, a magnetohydrodynamic drive wouldn't make the vessel completely silent, nor would it result in a fully stealth submarine.

The electric currents required to generate the magnetic fields for a magnetohydrodynamic-driven submarine would produce detectable gasses and noise. The magnetic fields produced by the MHD would likewise create a distinct magnetic signature that could be easily traced by modern anti-submarine warfare (ASW) technology.

Moreover, contemporary anti-submarine warfare has evolved to include a range of detection techniques beyond just listening for the sounds a submarine makes. Today, leading sub-detection methods include measuring temperature gradients in the water, variations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by a sub's large metal hull, thermal imaging, chemical sensors, and airborne LIDAR that can identify changes in water depth or disturbances.

As part of its initiative to field '' Non-Traditional Airborne Anti-Submarine Warfare '' technology, the U.S. Navy is suspected of possessing a highly classified system that uses synthetic aperture radar to identify the wake caused by a submarine passing through water that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye.

In short, a magnetohydrodynamic drive would not suddenly render a sub ''stealth,'' as The Hunt for the Red October or Navel New's prank article implies.

Nevertheless, this didn't stop a handful of publications from spreading the fictitious word about the Navy's supposed leap in stealth submarine technology.

One of the outlets that aggregated the story was Marine Insight. ''World's No. 1 complete maritime information website,'' the '' About '' page reads on Marine Insight's website. ''Since 2010, Marine Insight has been informing and educating people around the world about the maritime industry.''

Marine Insight has since removed the article about the fictitious magnetohydrodynamic drive. However, the headline ''U.S. Navy Unveils World's First Submarine Equipped With Silent Caterpillar Drive'' still populates under the site in Google News.

A YouTube channel called '' Military Defense News '' published a nearly three-minute video of a computer voice program reading the article, complete with still images of U.S. submarines and dramatic background music.

A Ukrainian news site, GaGadget , even added details not contained in the original article. ''The submarine's appearance and characteristics are currently being kept secret, but it is known that the propulsion system is located inside the hull, which means there is no traditional propeller,'' GaGadget's Mykhailo Stoliar wrote.

The fictitious article was mainly shared by social media-only ''news'' sites, with varying follower counts ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of followers.

Aside from the article's publication date, April 1st, some seemingly overlooked clues should have called to question claims of the U.S. Navy subs being outfitted with new stealth propulsion drives. Most prominently, editors posted, ''Important update on this article: April Fool's'' at the beginning of the article.

Less obvious, the article notes that the Virginia-class attack submarine, the USS Montana (SSN-794), was expected to conduct sea trials with the new caterpillar drive on the Penobscot River in Maine. In Clancey's fictional spy thriller, Soviet sub-captain Marko Ramius stealthily navigates the Red October to the Penobscot River to defect to the United States.

It's important to note that the fictitious story caught traction primarily among smaller, niche publications rather than mainstream media. The incident underscores the critical need for media consumers to question and verify the sources of their information, particularly in an era where fly-by-night ''news'' outlets can easily and rapidly spread sensational claims thanks to social media.

Ultimately, Naval News's April Fool's joke served as a humorous reminder of the enduring allure of stealth technology in naval warfare and the importance of skepticism and due diligence in news consumption.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com

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Thu, 04 Apr 2024 22:35

China recently discovered the world's largest metamorphic rock oilfield in the Bohai Sea, according to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation on February 25. Located about 170 kilometers away from Tianjin Municipality, the Bohai 26-6 oilfield stores a record-breaking amount of oil and gas, with newly proved oil and gas reserves exceeding 40 million cubic meters. The cumulative proven reserves of the field surpass 200 million cubic meters.

The encouraging discovery is a result of China's progress in independent oil and gas exploration technologies. More than 80 wells drilled by several well-known international oil companies in nearby regions previously failed to make significant discoveries.

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Archived Version

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 22:07

She never saw it coming.

Rasa Barzdukas was grabbing a snack between her classes at the Pratt Institute around 2:45 p.m. when she saw ''a very scary, monstery face'' coming toward her.

''I was leaving the bodega, and I just got hit. Right in the face. Never seen the guy before, didn't really look at him. It was just out of nowhere,'' she said.

The 19-year-old got up and started walking to school but was more dazed than she initially realized, she said.

''I was just in shock, but I tried to shake it off,'' Rasa Barzdukas told The Post. ''I didn't really understand the severity of it. I didn't know what was going on.''

Video of the daytime slogging shows a man who barely broke stride as he walked up to Barzdukas outside a Clinton Hill deli Wednesday and socked her in the face. The punch sent Barzdukas flying backward onto the sidewalk along Myrtle Ave. as her assailant calmly walked away.

The attack is reminiscent of the so-called ''knockout game'' in which unruly teens tried to slug strangers unconscious with a single punch, while others taped the incidents. In 2013, a Hoboken homeless man was killed by three teens playing the sick sport.

The Los Angeles native was bruised in the attack, cops said, but she's taking it like a hardened Brooklynite.

''I told my mom, I had my New York moment,'' she said.

Police are still searching for Barzdukas' attacker. Cops say he has dreadlocks and is approximately 20 years old. He was wearing a Gap hooded sweatshirt at the time of the attack.

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Archived Version

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 22:03

Social media videos in which women describe being punched by a stranger in seemingly random attacks in Manhattan have sparked concerns about women's safety this week. The alleged victims, women in their 20s and 30s, detailed broadly similar attacks in posts on TikTok and Instagram.

One man has been arrested so far in one of the alleged attacks, which are reaching a vast audience beyond New York thanks to algorithmically driven social feeds.

Reports of the first incidents began appearing on social media March 17. At least half a dozen women have posted videos to social media saying they were attacked; at least two have filed police reports. The New York Police Department has arrested a 40-year-old Brooklyn man and charged him with one of the assaults. ''You guys, I was literally just walking, and a man came up and punched me in the face,'' Halley Kate Mcgookin, a New York-based fashion influencer, said in a March 25 video posted to TikTok that has since been viewed 49 million times.

Mcgookin, who did not respond to The Washington Post's request for comment, said on TikTok she filed a police report that day. A spokesperson for the NYPD confirmed a report had been filed that matched Mcgookin's complaint, but did not identify the victim by name.

Commenters on Mcgookin's post began tagging other women who had reported similar attacks, including Olivia Brand, a New York woman who described being punched by a stranger in video posted on March 17.

''I literally just got punched by some man on the sidewalk,'' Brand said in the video. ''He goes, 'sorry,' and then punches me in the head.''

''What the hell is happening?'' said Brand, who could not be reached for comment.

Mikayla Toninato, a 27-year-old student at the Parsons School of Design, saw Mcgookin's video and replied ''@Halley i quite literally feel your pain this was so insane.'' Toninato in a video said she was leaving class and while looking down at her phone when ''out of nowhere, a man came up and hit me in the face.''

Toninato, who did not respond to an email requesting comment, said in her video that when she told her friends what just happened, they sent her Mcgookin's video.

Sarah Harvard, who was attacked March 19, didn't post about her experience at first, assuming it was an isolated incident.

The 30-year-old comedian was headed toward the Delancey St. F train on the Lower East Side before a comedy show that night when she was suddenly punched in the back of the head.

''I was walking, no AirPods, not looking at my phone, and it took me by surprise,'' Harvard told The Post. She recalled immediately thinking she had just experienced a needle spiking attack or that she had been stabbed. She turned behind her and didn't see anyone. When she turned back around, she saw a man, tall, clad in denim and with bleached dreadlocks, running away in the direction she had been walking.

''I told friends, but I made jokes about it,'' Harvard said once she arrived to her show. But backstage, as she poured a glass of water, Harvard's producer noticed her hands were shaking.

''I thought, all right, it'll probably never happen again. It's a one-time thing,'' Harvard said. It wasn't until she started seeing videos about other attacks that she took her experience to Instagram and Twitter in a text-based format. Harvard filed a police report on March 27.

At least two other women, online content creator Selena Pikanab and model Karina Dunford, posted videos describing similar incidents. A seventh woman, only identified by her TikTok handle, posted a video describing a similar attack before making her account private.

What are police and authorities saying?

New York Police arrested a suspect in Mcgookin's alleged attack this week. They did not respond to direct questions about how many reports of strangers punching women they've received in recent weeks or whether they believe the incidents are connected.

''The N.Y.P.D. is aware of a viral video circulating on social media depicting a woman who was randomly assaulted in an unprovoked attack. The individual has been arrested and charged,'' the department said in a statement Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the NYPD told The Post an investigation is ''ongoing'' but confirmed that on March 25, a 23-year-old woman reported she was in the Chelsea neighborhood around 10:20 a.m. when ''an unknown individual hit her in the head.'' Police said the victim fell to the ground, suffered injuries to the left side of her face and later sought medical treatment. The incident matches the encounter Mcgookin described in a video, which she said was posted immediately after the attack.

New York University's Department of Campus Safety sent an alert to students on Wednesday acknowledging concerns about the recent reports of women being attacked but said there were no records of reports from NYU students or staff being involved.

New York police on Wednesday arrested 40-year-old Skiboky Stora of Brooklyn and charged him with misdemeanor assault in connection to the incident Mcgookin reported to police two days earlier. Stora, who pleaded not guilty at his Thursday arraignment, remained in custody Friday on $10,000 bail, according to jail records.

Jeffrey Linehan, a public defender assigned to Stora's case, declined to comment.

Stora is a perennial local political candidate who in the past three years has launched unsuccessful long-shot bids for governor, mayor and city council member, according to public records. His social media history is dotted with frequent posts of him posing shirtless in front of a Donald Trump flag or instances of him filming and harassing women on the street or the subway.

Stora has previous arrests for harassment and assault, according to court records.

What role does social media play?

While overall crime is down in the city, New Yorkers have experienced upticks in certain areas, including misdemeanor assaults and felony assaults, which increased 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively, compared to the same time last year, according New York City crime data.

But awareness of attacks that appear to be localized to Lower Manhattan has mushroomed across social media in the past week, largely thanks to TikTok's unique algorithm. Collectively, the initial TikTok videos of women describing their alleged attacks have been viewed more than 70 million times '-- a sum that doesn't account for the creators' follow-up videos and videos about the attacks that other content creators cite, known on TikTok as stitching.

''I think [TikTok] is pretty integral to how it happened,'' said Kate Lindsey, who founded the internet and culture newsletter Embedded.

TikTok's algorithm picks up videos users are interested in and curates similar ones into a moment, scooping up related videos even if they are months or years old. Lindsey suspects the story topic was further boosted by the fact that one of the victims is an established influencer who already had more than 1.2 million followers '-- and she shared several additional follow-up videos after her attack.

''That the algorithm really concentrates around a trending topic can really overblow it; it can feel a lot more relevant than it is,'' Lindsey said. ''If you scroll a feed and see this is all anyone is talking about, you could be forgiven for stepping outside and thinking this is something you need to worry about.''

Harvard, the comedian who described being attacked last week, said the attention has been overwhelming and predicted it would have been even worse had she posted a video to TikTok rather than a text post to Instagram.

While she said her and the other victims' attacks are both real and frightening, Harvard has been dismayed with how the narratives around them have been hijacked into one-dimensional arguments. She has observed that what should be a discussion about public safety is often drowned out by racist comments about the suspects or people both doubting and blaming the women for being attacked.

Harvard said she shared her experience in hopes of warning other women in New York and sourcing information that could help the police, whose performance thus far she called disappointing. But the insults, threats and conspiracies she's received have made her wary of social media's power to influence.

''I sometimes wish I had never spoke up,'' she said.

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Archived Version

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 20:12

Bandages from some of the most well-reputed brands, including Band-Aid and Curad, contain dangerous levels of forever chemicals, a shock report shows.

Testing by a leading watchdog found the chemical fluorine in over two dozen different bandages that can be found in millions of medicine cabinets across the country.

PFAS chemicals are sometimes used to make adhesives, and investigators believe they are products of the normal manufacturing process. Fluorine, which is also used to make rocket fuel, can lead to skin burns and eye damage, but it is most dangerous when inhaled.

Dr Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former head of the National Toxicology Program who co-led the lab testing, said the fact that risky chemicals come in direct contact with open wounds was 'troubling'.

PFAS chemicals can easily enter the bloodstream after a person drinks water or eats food laced with them. Once in the bloodstream, PFAS can lodge themselves within healthy tissue where it can begin to damage the immune system, the liver, the kidneys, and other organs.

Four types of bandages from household staple Band-Aid contained over 180 parts per million organic fluorine, a crucial component of PFAS forever chemicals

Thinx Underwear and other period products were found to contain tens to over 100 parts per million of the compound

Environmental health watchdogs had 40 bandages from 18 different brands tested for fluorine, and detectable levels were found in 26 of them.

Consumer watchdog blog Mamavation and Environmental Health News used an EPA-certified lab to look for PFAS chemicals in the absorbent pads and adhesive flaps of bandages sold at major retailers, including CVS, Walmart, Rite Aid, Target, and Amazon.

The bandages that contain high levels of fluorine above 100 parts per million include brands Band-Aid, Care Science, Curad, CVS Health, Equate, First Honey, Rite Aid brand, Solimo (Amazon brand), and Up & Up, Target's brand.

Dr Birnbaum said: 'Because bandages are placed upon open wounds, it's troubling to learn that they may be also exposing children and adults to PFAS.

'It's obvious from the data that PFAS are not needed for wound care, so it's important that the industry remove their presence to protect the public from PFAS and opt instead for PFAS-free materials.'

PFAS substances contain bonds between carbon and fluorine atoms, creating one very resilient chemical that can remain in the environment for years or even decades.

The chemicals are everywhere, most commonly in water and stain-repellent products, as well as nonstick cookware.

Teflon, the kitchen staple nonstick coating is made with a fluorocarbon called polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE).

PFAS have also been detected in tap water and human blood. A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) found PFAS in the blood of 97 percent of Americans.

According to Mamavation, the PFAS in bandages are likely used for their water- and grease-resistant properties.

PFAS is a common contaminant in many household items from cookware to hamburger wrappers. It can remain in the environment as well as human tissue for years, even decades, before being cleared out

Separately, PFAS has also been found in popular menstruation products, including those typically used by teen girls.

Jessian Choy, who worked in San Francisco's Department of the Environment, chose to lab test her preferred brand Thinx period briefs and BTWN Shorty underwear.

The testing was conducted in 2020 by Dr Graham Peaslee, who discovered PFAS chemicals in fast food wrappers in 2017, at the University of Notre Dame.

The 'organic' products had high levels of PFAS. Thinx had 3,264 parts per million (ppm), and the BTWN for teens had 2,053 ppm.

They also had tens to hundreds of parts per million of copper on the inside of the crotch, and zinc on both sides.

The investigation garnered bad publicity for Thinx, which would later settle a class-action lawsuit for around $5 million. The company refuted the findings and insisted to Dr Peaslee that their products did not contain PFAS.

Dr Peaslee told The Hill: 'They called me back and said, ''Well, this thing's getting out of hand, can you just issue a statement saying they're safe to wear?'' And I was like, ''I'm sorry, did you not listen to a word I said yesterday? I wouldn't put my damn daughter in these things.'''

Period underwear are far from the only menstrual products laden with PFAS. A separate series of lab analyses in 2020 and 2022 by Mamavation and Environmental Health News looked at 46 different sanitary pads, panty liners, and incontinence pads for evidence of PFAS.

Fluorine was detected in 22 of them, or 48 percent.

Dr Birnbaum said: 'Dermal exposure to PFAS from your menstrual products can be a big problem. Because vaginal skin is so vascular, we can anticipate the internal exposure could be a bit worse.'

The effects of skin exposure to PFAS chemicals are not well understood, though exposure to fluorine can cause severe skin irritation.

Pete Myers, Chief Scientist at Environmental Health Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, told Mamavation: 'While it's not possible today to answer the question of how much can be absorbed through the skin, we do know that any possible exposure should be avoided. PFAS should not be found in consumer items, period!'

Bandages with PFAS Band-Aid Flexible Fabric Comfortable Protection Bandages (older sample that was likely 7-8 years old and not available in stores anymore) '-- 188 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pad

Band-Aid OURTONE Flexible Fabric BR45 Bandages '-- 262 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pad

Band-Aid OURTONE Flexible Fabric BR55 Bandages '-- 250 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pad.

Band-Aid OURTONE Flexible Fabric BR65 Bandages '-- 260 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pads and 374 ppm on the sticky flaps.

Care Science Antibacterial Flexible Fabric Adhesive Bandages '-- 328 ppm organic fluorine on the sticky flaps

Curad Assorted Bandaids 4-Sided Seal '-- 140 ppm organic fluorine on the sticky flaps

CVS Health C60 Flexible Fabric Antibacterial Bandages '-- 201 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pad

CVS Health C70 Flexible Fabric Sterile Bandages '-- 124 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pad and 272 ppm on the sticky flaps

CVS Health C80 Flexible Fabric Antibacterial Bandages '-- 128 ppm organic fluorine in absorbent pad

Equate (Walmart) Flexible Fabric Bandages Antibacterial '-- 118 ppm organic fluorine on absorbent pad and 165 ppm on the sticky flaps.

Equate (Walmart) SKIN TONE Antibacterial Bandages Flexible Fabric (darkest shade) '-- 197 ppm organic fluorine on the absorbent pad and 251 ppm on the sticky flaps

Equate (Walmart) SKIN TONE Antibacterial Bandages Flexible Fabric (medium to dark shade) '-- 112 ppm organic fluorine on the absorbent pad

Equate (Walmart) SKIN TONE Antibacterial Bandages Flexible Fabric (medium to light shade) '-- 120 ppm organic fluorine on the absorbent pad

First Honey Manuka Bandages '-- 157 ppm organic fluorine on the sticky flaps

Rite Aid First Aid Advanced Antibacterial Fabric Adhesive Bandages '-- 101 ppm organic fluorine on the absorbent pad and 181 parts per million (ppm) in the sticky flaps.

Solimo (Amazon Brand) Flexible Fabric Adhesive Bandages '-- 104 ppm organic fluorine on the sticky flaps

UP & UP (Target) Flexible Fabric Bandages '-- 256 ppm organic fluorine on the absorbent pad and 253 parts per million (ppm) on the sticky flaps.

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Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:13

Join the fight and contribute to our war chest

Ditch the ads for $5 per month or $49 per year

There's this meme that's been cracking everyone up online. It jokes that AI isn't some next-level tech marvel. Instead, picture this: 5,000 people in India, just sitting around, answering all our queries. It's a funny take on the whole AI scene and pokes fun at the idea that maybe, just maybe, the big players like Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the government are pulling one over on us. And there's this TikTok video that nails the humor perfectly.

@hotvickkrishnaHow ChatGPT works #comedy #skit #chatgpt

'¬ original sound '' hotvickkrishna

This meme, as hilarious as it is, turns out to be not so far from the truth, and those who chuckled at the idea might just be onto something. You've probably heard about those Amazon Go stores, right? The ones that promised a futuristic shopping experience where you could just grab what you need and walk out, no checkout required'--all thanks to what was touted as cutting-edge AI technology. Well, plot twist: as Amazon starts to cancel this ''technology,'' it turns out it wasn't the AI doing the heavy lifting after all. Instead, it was actually a team of low-paid Indians, one thousand strong, sitting somewhere, monitoring what shoppers were adding to their baskets. So much for high-tech AI shopping, eh?!

Knowing what we know now, let's take a moment to revisit that glossy marketing campaign Amazon rolled out for their so-called ''high-tech'' Go stores.

Can you believe this? A meme has once again come to life!

Amazon's Just Walk Out technology which was pitched as a magical AI technology was actually 1,000 contractors in India acting as virtual cashiers identifying what people put in their carts and tracking their purchases.

It will be replaced by shopping carts with scanners. pic.twitter.com/hjbSIVlqht

'-- Dare Obasanjo🐠(@Carnage4Life) April 3, 2024

Here's a closeup of the images:

Here's the actual article from Gizmodo:

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with ''Just Walk Out'' technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company's senior vice president of grocery stores says they're moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Could it be that in Amazon's playbook, AI really means ''Anonymous Indians''? That would be the cherry on top of this funny meme turn of events. The whole ''Just Walk Out'' tech being what appears to be a mirage doesn't really come as a shocker anymore. Time and again, we've seen our so-called elites and experts reveal themselves to be not that brilliant. But this revelation is not just a facepalm moment for Amazon'--it's a red flag waving high regarding their future. After all, this is a company that's supposed to be at the forefront of tech innovation.

JOIN THE FIGHT '-- DITCH THE ADS '-- READ THE NEWSFEED '-- FOLLOW ON X '-- GAB '-- GETTR '-- TRUTH SOCIAL

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Thu, 04 Apr 2024 15:20

Home insurance rates are rising, influenced by climate catastrophes and inflation, leaving homeowners uncertain about future expenses. The average annual rate increased by 19.8% between 2021 and 2023, from $1,984 to $2,377.

Insurify projects a 6% increase in 2024, placing rates at $2,522 by the end of the year. Early weather forecasts predict a devastating hurricane season, which would cause further rate increases in 2025.

To identify the states most affected by rising rates, Insurify's data science team analyzed homeowners insurance costs in every state and projected rate increases based on historical pricing and local factors.

An Insurify survey of American homeowners reveals how rising insurance costs affected their finances and attitudes toward homeownership. With costs projected to rise an additional 6% in 2024, experts weigh in on the best ways to navigate rate hikes.

Key TakeawaysFlorida homeowners pay the most for home insurance, with an average annual rate of $10,996 in 2023. Insurify predicts costs will increase an additional 7% in 2024 to $11,759.

Louisiana pays the second-highest home insurance rate, at $6,354 annually. The state will see the greatest increase in 2024, with a projected 23% hike, bringing the average rate to $7,809.

Six of the 10 most expensive cities for homeowners insurance are in Florida.

Sixty percent of homeowners don't carry separate flood insurance, and 13% erroneously believed their standard home insurance policy included it.

Gen X is the least likely to think climate change has affected their home values, with 70% saying it hasn't in an Insurify survey. Millennials are most likely to say it has (32%), and Gen Z is the most unsure, with 17% saying they don't know if it has.

How much home insurance costs by state in 2024

Home insurance costs vary widely by state. Vermont residents pay the least, with an average annual rate of $918 compared to $10,996 in Florida. Here's how much homeowners pay across the country.

State Average Annual Rate (2023) Projected Annual Rate (2024) Projected Change in 2024 United States$2,377$2,5226%Alabama$3,939$4,2819%Alaska$1,116$1,1170%Arizona$1,961$2,1087%Arkansas$3,368$3,6629%California$1,782$1,9218%Colorado$4,072$4,3677%Connecticut$1,764$1,9279%Delaware$1,207$1,2655%Florida$10,996$11,7597%Georgia$2,426$2,4913%Hawaii$1,150$1,2014%Idaho$1,636$1,7185%Illinois$2,050$2,24510%Indiana$1,866$2,0017%Iowa$2,120$2,2787%Kansas$3,437$3,6667%Kentucky$2,476$2,6728%Louisiana$6,354$7,80923%Maine$1,322$1,57119%Maryland$1,670$1,7827%Massachusetts$1,863$2,0017%Michigan$1,840$2,09514%Minnesota$2,332$2,5248%Mississippi$4,312$4,4824%Missouri$2,706$2,6970%Montana$1,778$1,99712%Nebraska$3,962$4,2928%Nevada$1,224$1,3369%New Hampshire$1,225$1,2593%New Jersey$1,267$1,3234%New Mexico$3,362$3,5546%New York$2,257$2,4046%North Carolina$2,110$2,32710%North Dakota$2,519$2,5170%Ohio$1,342$1,4055%Oklahoma$5,444$5,7115%Oregon$1,232$1,2874%Pennsylvania$1,306$1,3685%Rhode Island$2,036$2,1516%South Carolina$3,082$3,41011%South Dakota$2,562$2,488-3%Tennessee$2,470$2,6357%Texas$4,456$4,4370%Utah$1,369$1,54113%Vermont$918$9776%Virginia$1,600$1,7399%Washington$1,437$1,4320%Washington, D.C.$1,203$1,2766%West Virginia$1,392$1,3980%Wisconsin$1,462$1,5748%Wyoming$2,159$2,1861%These states have the highest home insurance rates in 2024

The states with the highest home insurance costs are prone to severe weather events. Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi are vulnerable to hurricanes. Texas, Colorado, and Nebraska face a growing wildfire risk. Nebraska, Texas, and Kansas are at high risk for tornadoes, being located in an area nicknamed Tornado Alley.

State Average Annual Rate (2023) Projected Average Annual Rate (2024) Difference in State vs. U.S. Average (2023) Florida$10,996$11,759+$8,619Louisiana$6,354$7,809+$3,977Oklahoma$5,444$5,711+$3,067Texas$4,456$4,437+$2,079Mississippi$4,312$4,482+$1,935Colorado$4,072$4,367+$1,695Nebraska$3,962$4,292+$1,585Alabama$3,939$4,281+$1,562Kansas$3,437$3,666+$1,060Arkansas$3,368$3,662+$991Homeowners insurance rates are rising fastest in these states

Insurify's data science team projects home insurance rates will increase 6% across the country in 2024, but homeowners in some states are feeling the burden of rising costs more than others.

State Average Annual Rate (2023) Projected Average Annual Rate (2024) Projected Increase (2024) % of Insurers With Rate Increases Louisiana$6,354$7,80923%24%Maine$1,322$1,57119%27%Michigan$1,840$2,09514%48%Utah$1,369$1,54113%38%Montana$1,778$1,99712%31%South Carolina$3,082$3,41011%35%North Carolina$2,110$2,32710%19%Illinois$2,050$2,24510%45%Connecticut$1,764$1,9279%50%Nevada$1,224$1,3369%46%In Louisiana, where rates are nearly three times the national average, home insurance costs could rise an additional 23% in 2024, pushing the average premium above $7,800.

Severe weather risks have long influenced rates in Louisiana, but the effects of climate change are catching up to states with historically lower-than-average rates, like Maine. The Maine Climate Council projects a 1.5-foot relative sea level rise (SLR) by 2050. Coastal storm impacts will increase 10 times in frequency with just one foot of SLR.

North Carolina and South Carolina homes see similar destruction from hurricanes, severe storms, and flooding. Multiple coastal counties in both states are at a ''Relatively High'' risk of natural disasters, according to FEMA's National Risk Index. Western states, including Utah, Montana, and Nevada, face a growing wildfire risk.

Rising building repair costs also contributed to rate increases. Connecticut saw year-over-year residential reconstruction costs increase by 4.1%, according to Verisk's Q1 2024 360Value Quarterly Reconstruction Cost Analysis. Rebuild costs in Michigan and Illinois went up more, with yearly increases between 5.6% and 6.4%.

Florida home insurance rates skyrocketed to $11K per yearThe average home insurance rate in Florida was $10,996 in 2023. Insurify's data science team predicts an additional 7% increase this year, making the projected average rate $11,759 by the end of 2024.

Nine in 10 (91%) Florida residents are concerned with current homeowners insurance rates, and 59% believe their personal finances are worse than a year ago, according to a November 2023 poll by independent polling company Cygnal.

''Everybody is concerned about it,'' said D(C)sir(C)e vila, a South Florida REALTOR® who works in Broward County and the surrounding areas. ''Because of all the storms and hurricanes and weather events that happen here in South Florida, we've just seen, over the past years, homeowners insurance go up a lot.''

Costly natural disasters drive up rates and make it difficult for insurers to maintain profitability in Florida, but multiple factors fuel the state's insurance industry crisis.

Florida's home insurance crisisThe insurance crisis in Florida has escalated over the past several years. More than a dozen home insurance companies have declared insolvency since 2019. Farmers Insurance stopped covering Florida, and major insurers have non-renewed policies for high-risk homes.

Hurricane Ian further propelled the insurer exodus, causing $112.9 billion in damage '-- $109.5 billion in Florida. The 2022 hurricane was the third costliest to hit the U.S. and the most destructive in Florida's history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

When insurers can't cover the cost of natural disasters, reinsurance steps in. Reinsurance, essentially insurance for insurers, is a significant factor in the Florida home insurance crisis.

''Insurers rely on reinsurance coverage to cede some exposure to losses,'' said Betsy Stella, vice president of carrier management and operations at Insurify. ''Reinsurance coverage has become difficult to secure in Florida, and reinsurance rates have skyrocketed. Reinsurers are subject to the same factors that impact underlying coverages: an increased number and severity of natural disasters, inflationary pressures, and labor and materials shortages.''

Insurance fraud and legal system abuse also contribute to high rates in Florida, an Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) brief reported. The state's residents make 9% of all homeowners insurance claims in the U.S. but account for 79% of lawsuits over claims filed, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR).

The Florida legislature has introduced measures combatting two major factors behind the insurance crisis '-- legal system abuse and misuse of assignment of benefits (AOB). Some new legislation, including Senate Bill 7052, increases consumer protections.

Recent proposals have suggested tying home insurance balances to unpaid mortgages, allowing homeowners to buy insurance policies that match the unpaid mortgage principal rather than the home's replacement cost value. Nearly 64% of American homeowners in the Insurify survey said they would consider it for lower rates.

While the idea could lower premiums, homeowners would be vulnerable to life-changing financial losses. For instance, if someone insures a $300,000 home for a remaining principal of $150,000, they take on the risk of being unable to rebuild the home if a natural disaster causes more than $150,000 in damage.

How Florida's last-resort insurer became the first (or only) choiceDespite recent reforms, finding private homeowners insurance is so difficult in Florida that the state-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp. is now the largest insurer in the state.

''Citizens used to be the insurance company of last resort. But there are so few insurance companies that insure in Florida, and they have so many requirements that when they do, it almost makes the cost of having them as your insurer insane,'' said vila.

State legislators recently approved a bill expanding Citizens to homes valued at more than $700,000, but not all homeowners are eligible. The state-run insurer can drop policyholders who find comparable coverage from a private insurer as long as the new premium isn't more than 20% higher than renewing with Citizens.

Under another proposed bipartisan solution, Citizens would cover hurricane damages, rather than private for-profit insurers. The model resembles the federally subsidized National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) or the California Earthquake Authority.

Citizens president and CEO Tim Cerio warned that taking on Florida's hurricane risk could make it challenging to acquire reinsurance. The state-run insurer's operating loss was more than $2.4 million in 2022 '-- a loss increase of nearly $2.3 million compared to 2021. Hurricanes Ian, Irma, Sally, and Eta contributed most significantly to the loss, according to an independent audit.

vila, who ''had to fight, and fight, and fight'' to get Citizens to cover her mother's roof repair in 2005, is skeptical of expanding Citizens as a long-term solution. She hasn't seen improvements in the insurance industry from legislative changes, either.

''Legislators are supposed to protect the consumer, but where are they?'' said vila. ''I kind of feel like they're not doing anything, and it's just making it prohibitive to live here.''

Cities with the most expensive homeowners insurance in 2024

Six of the 10 most expensive cities for homeowners insurance are on the South Florida coast, and all have average annual rates above $11,000. Five of the six Florida cities have a ''Very High'' risk of natural hazards, according to FEMA's National Risk Index.

Outliers may skew steep rates in South Florida's coastal cities, with large, expensive properties pushing up the average, says vila. But it's not unusual for the middle-income homebuyers she works with to have annual premiums of about $5,000 to $6,000 in Broward County.

''When adding that to a mortgage payment, that's an additional $500 a month. And it could be less, or it could be more,'' said vila. ''If your house has a newer roof, impact windows, or impact doors, the insurance company will give you a discount.''

The Louisiana and Mississippi cities among the 10 most expensive for home insurance are also near the water and mostly have ''Relatively High'' FEMA risk ratings.

City Average Annual Premium (2023) Projected Annual Premium (2024) FEMA Risk Rating Hialeah, FL$17,606$18,252Very HighMiami, FL$16,717$16,886Very HighFort Lauderdale, FL$15,484$16,112Very HighHollywood, FL$13,834$14,115Very HighWest Palm Beach, FL$13,123$13,501Very HighPort Saint Lucie, FL$11,897$12,199Relatively HighKenner, LA$10,204$11,108Relatively HighNew Orleans, LA$9,780$10,687Relatively HighOcean Springs, MS$9,428$9,355Relatively HighThibodaux, LA$7,763$8,603Relatively ModerateSevere weather is driving home insurance rate hikes

Climate change increases the frequency and intensity of severe weather events, causing costly damages and reducing insurance affordability, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Texas experienced $400 billion in damages and ranked fourth for home insurance costs in 2023. While Florida experienced less damage '-- at $390 billion '-- it has the most expensive premiums. Louisiana is also of note, with the second-highest rates and the third-highest cost of damages, at $310 billion.

Wildfires are a growing concern, especially in Texas and the Western United States. Damage from wildfires costs the U.S. an estimated $147.5 billion annually, according to a 2023 congressional report.

But without the financial backing of reinsurance, more insurers may leave wildfire-prone states. Under the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, a state-run high-risk pool that provides fire insurance, California's reinsurance cost was 60% higher than the maximum approved premium in 2023, a First Street Foundation report found.

As insurers halted new business in unprofitable, high-risk areas, the number of available home insurance policies decreased by 35% in 2023. Customers who renewed policies with the same insurer saw an average rate increase of 23.7% in 2023 compared to 10% to 12% in previous years, according to Matic.

The forecasting company Weather Bell predicted a ''hurricane season from hell,'' projecting six to eight major hurricanes (out of 14 to 16 total hurricanes) to touch down in the U.S. in 2024.

''A 'hurricane season from hell' could pile crisis upon crisis,'' said Stella. ''The financial solvency of all insurance companies will be tested. Perhaps especially newer providers who have stepped into the market recently. Citizens [Florida's insurer of last resort], too, will be tested.''

Policyholders won't see rate changes immediately, according to Stella. Insurance companies reassess rates based on anticipated payouts, file for increases, and get the necessary approval from state regulators before raising premiums. Since most homeowners policies have a 12-month term, policyholders may not see price hikes for as many as 18 to 24 months.

''Storms don't need to make national headlines to wreak havoc on a home,'' said Dr. Ian Giammanco, managing director of standards and data analytics for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). The IBHS Research Center focuses on improving building standards and fortifying homes against severe weather and natural catastrophes.

''In 2023, the U.S. had more than 1,750 reports of 2-inch or larger hail and 19 severe thunderstorm outbreaks, compared to only two landfalling tropical cyclones. These severe convective storms resulted in record-breaking insured losses in excess of $50 billion, with hail damage accounting for a large percentage,'' said Giammanco. ''Fort Collins, Colorado, remains the only city in the United States with a hail provision in its building code.''

One-fourth of U.S. homeowners say climate change hurts their home valueThe majority of American homeowners (60%) say they don't feel climate change has affected the value of their homes '-- but 25% say they do.

Among homeowners who have filed a claim, 40% say climate change has affected their home's value. Gen Z (29%) and Millennials (32%) are also more likely than Gen X (14%) to say it has. Generational differences could be due to participants' overall views on climate change.

Americans between ages 18 and 29 are most likely to say human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, contribute to climate change a great deal, a 2023 Pew Research survey found. The number drops from 59% between ages 18 and 29 to 49% between ages 30 and 48, and 38% of those aged 50 and older.

As more Gen Z homebuyers enter the housing market, areas with high climate resiliency may become more desirable than states more affected by climate change.

Has Climate Change Affected Home Value? Overall Gen Z Millennials Gen X Yes25%29%32%14%No60%55%53%70%Not Sure15%17%15%15%*Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number, so the sum of all answers may not equal 100%.

Most skip flood insurance, and 22% of Gen Z doesn't know how it worksFlooding frequency has increased dramatically across the U.S. coastline as sea levels rise, according to the EPA. Damages from flooding events across the country totaled $7 billion in 2023, NOAA data shows.

But standard homeowners insurance doesn't pay for flood damage, and most homeowners aren't covered.

Water or flood damage (20%) was the most common reason homeowners filed a claim, but 60% said they don't carry separate flood insurance in a February 2024 Insurify survey. An additional 13% said they thought their regular home insurance would cover floods.

Gen Z homeowners are more likely than other generations to believe their home insurance covers floods (22%). But they're also the most likely to have flood insurance, with 32% carrying a separate policy compared to 30% of millennials and 18% of Gen X.

''Covering water damage on a traditional home policy can be confusing,'' said Buddy Parkhurst, a licensed insurance agent at Insurify.

''Damages from outside waters coming into the home will only be covered by a flood policy. If it's wind-driven rain damage, this will be covered on your home policy. Water damages that are covered automatically typically include a burst pipe from freezing or an appliance malfunction like your water heater, washer, or dishwasher.''

In other cases, including hidden water damage from pipes in the walls or backup from your sump or sewer, your insurer may require an additional endorsement on your policy, says Parkhurst. ''Even foundation water damage can be endorsed.''

As flood frequency increases, homeowners without coverage are more vulnerable to unexpected financial losses. Homeowners can purchase flood insurance through the FEMA-managed NFIP or a private company.

Rate hikes: Gen X is angry, millennials are just grateful to have insurance, and Gen Z is nervousHomeowners have different reactions to rate increases depending on their age. Gen Z was most likely to report feeling nervous about the future due to rising home insurance rates.

Millennials, many of whom graduated from high school or college during the Great Recession in 2008, were most likely to say they were just happy to have insurance in response to rising rates.

Nearly 33% of Gen X, on the other hand, are angry that they have to pay more. Gen X write-in survey responses included concerns that state insurance oversight may not function as intended and feeling frustrated about high rates while finding it difficult to get insurers to cover claims.

How homeowners can prepare for an uncertain futureMany homeowners are financially strained, with 21% reporting they can't afford their current mortgage rate for long and 9% saying they can't afford it now. Rising insurance costs add to the burden. States with a high risk of natural disasters, like Florida and Louisiana, see the steepest rate increases and face a narrowing home insurance market.

Homeowners can prepare for potential damage by checking flood and wildfire zone maps from FEMA and the National Weather Service. In wildfire zones, installing home-hardening features can mitigate wildfire damage. Dual-pane windows with a tempered glass layer can withstand fire-induced breakage, and non-flammable sidings like stucco or fiber cement reduce damage.

In hurricane-prone areas, approved impact windows or hurricane shutters can protect against flying debris. Homeowners can also adhere to the IBHS-recommended FORTIFIED Roof standard '-- construction and re-roofing requirements that prevent damage '-- and choose a garage door rated for wind speeds above 130 mph, says Giammanco.

''FORTIFIED Roof was specifically designed to prevent damage that commonly occurs during high winds, hurricanes, hailstorms, severe thunderstorms, and even tornadoes up to EF-2. '... An IBHS study of tornado damage found less than 10% of homes had roof structural damage when the garage door remained intact.''

Storm-resistant features are an up-front investment, but some insurers offer discounts for these upgrades. These features can also attract buyers when homeowners are ready to sell, says vila. ''[Homebuyers] do like that because putting them in takes permits, time, and money. So if they can buy a house with it already in, it's a big plus.''

Finding affordable home insurance in disaster-prone states can be difficult, but many homeowners find a lower rate by comparing quotes from multiple insurers. As climate catastrophes affect more of the U.S., homeowners could have fewer insurance options in the future. ''It's possible that the highest-risk areas will become uninsurable,'' said Stella. ''However, where there's demand, typically a supplier will appear. The question will be, at what cost?''

MethodologyInsurify data scientists turned to their real-time database of insurance quotes from partner carriers, as well as aggregated rate filings from Quadrant Information Services, to determine the state of home insurance in 2024.

Unless otherwise stated, rates in this report represent the average annual cost of an HO-3 insurance policy for homeowners with good credit and zero claims within the past five years covering a single-family, frame house with the following coverage limits: $300,000 dwelling, $300,000 liability, $25,000 personal property, $30,000 loss of use, and a $1,000 deductible.

Insurify gathered Quadrant rates in representative ZIP codes in the 10 largest cities in every state. Statewide costs reflect the average rate for homeowners across these ZIP codes.

The 2024 prices reflect rates as of Feb. 15, 2024. To project how much the average homeowner will pay in insurance by the end of 2024, Insurify data scientists first analyzed how often and by how much insurance companies implemented rate increases throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024. They then used this information to project rate change frequency and magnitude in every state through the end of the year.

Survey results come from an Insurify survey of more than 700 homeowners with active home insurance policies conducted in February 2024. In this survey, Gen Z included ages 22''27, millennials accounted for ages 28''43, and Gen X spanned ages 44''59.

Cassie Sheets Data Journalist

Cassie Sheets has more than nine years of experience creating compelling content for clients, brands, and local news sites. She started her career at Movoto Real Estate, where she transformed dry data into interesting insights for potential homebuyers. She's since covered a wide range of topics, from pop culture news to home and garden trends.Before joining Insurify, Cassie wrote engaging landing pages and blog posts for medical practices at MyAdvice. Now, she uses her knack for diving into the latest data and pulling out key details to empower insurance buyers.

Cassie holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. In her free time, you can find her exploring the city with her dog, trying not to fall over in yoga classes, and petting cats at the shelter.

Tanveen Vohra Manager of Content and Communications

Property and casualty insurance specialist

4+ years creating insurance content

Tanveen manages Insurify's data insights, annual home and auto insurance reports, and media communications. She's regularly featured in media interviews on insurance topics.

Data reviewed by Andrew Huang Vice President, Performance Marketing Andrew Huang Vice President, Performance Marketing

Chartered financial analyst

12+ years in data analysis and marketing

Andrew applies his vast knowledge of analytics and insurance industry trends to help inform Insurify's content and marketing efforts.

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Wed, 03 Apr 2024 20:27

Royal Purchase '' Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the New Owner of Highgrove House, Previously Owned by King Charles. Highgrove House, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire, served as the country residence of King Charles III even after he assumed his new role as Britain's reigning monarch.

It was purchased in 1980 by the then Prince Charles from Maurice Macmillan, son of the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. During his first marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales, the family would spend weekends in Gloucestershire with Princes William and Harry, before returning to Kensington Palace.

Highgrove House, Sold to Ukraine's Zelensky for £20 MillionIn 2024, King Charles III sold his residence, having owned it for 44 years. What is _at first glance surprising_ is that the new owner of the royal estate is Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine.

Charles has been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion. In February 2023, The King held an audience with Volodymyr Zelensky at Buckingham Palace. Charles III issued a strongly-worded message of support for Ukraine, in a statement marking the second anniversary of Russia's invasion in February 2024. The unusually direct message seems to be a rallying call to keep up international assistance for Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine has been close to the King's heart. It may explain the nature of an unusual sale of the King's property to Volodymyr Zelensky '' whom Charles III probably sees as a defender of democracy.

Although there is no official statement from Buckingham Palace on the Highgrove house sale yet, there are many details that indicate the sale was completed in late February '' early March of 2024.

Grant Harold, the King's former butlerGrant Harrold, the King's former butler, who worked for Charles III at Highgrove from 2004 to 2011, believes the final details of the deal were negotiated during Mrs Zelenska's visit to the UK on 29th February. He mentioned, ''Prince William could have gifted the house to his father. So, the King was within his rights to sell the property.'' Prince William inherited Highgrove House after Charles assumed his new role as Britain's reigning monarch.

According to Grant Harrold, another detail indicating Highgrove House now has a new owner is that at least 6 Highgrove staff members received redundancy notices on 21st March. Olena Zelenska and Queen Consort Camilla

The royal family has always maintained a fine line between balancing private matters with disclosure to the public they serve. The lack of clarity surrounding the King's health and him stepping back from public-facing duties during treatment, followed by a prolonged absence of information about Kate Middleton's health '' all this shows the royals' shroud of secrecy is stronger than ever.

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It is unclear how much Highgrove House was sold for to Volodymyr Zelensky. Its price in 1980 (£800,000) is the equivalent of about £4.7 million to £8 million today. But the actual price is supposed to be much higher '' around £20 million.

It remains unclear why the President of Ukraine decided to purchase the royal residence and how he managed to persuade the King to sell it. Perhaps Olena Zelenska's ''affinity'' with Queen Camilla helped to negotiate the deal. The source of funds for this purchase also remains unknown.

The UK has pledged almost £12 billion in overall support to Ukraine since February 2022. On 12th January 2024, the Government announced a further £2.5 billion of funding for 2024/2025.

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Wed, 03 Apr 2024 18:04

A physically healthy, 28-year-old Dutch woman has decided to legally end her life due to her struggles with crippling depression, autism and borderline personality disorder, according to a report.

Zoraya ter Beek, who lives in a small village in the Netherlands near the German border, is scheduled to be euthanized in May '-- despite being in love with her 40-year-old boyfriend and living with two cats.

Ter Beek, who once aspired to be a psychiatrist, has been dealing with mental health struggles throughout her life.

Zoraya ter Beek, 28, will die by assisted suicide in May. RTL NieuwsShe said she decided to be euthanized after her doctors told her, ''There's nothing more we can do for you. It's never gonna get any better,'' according to the Free Press.

''I was always very clear that if it doesn't get better, I can't do this anymore,'' ter Beek said.

She is just one of the growing number of people in the West who have decided to die rather than continue living in pain that, unlike a terminal illness, could be treated.

More people are deciding to end their lives while suffering from a slew of other mental health problems like depression or anxiety amplified by economic uncertainty, climate change, social media and other issues, the Free Press reported.

Ter Beek said she will be administered the life-ending drug on her couch with her boyfriend by her side. RTL Nieuws''I'm seeing euthanasia as some sort of acceptable option brought to the table by physicians, by psychiatrists, when previously it was the ultimate last resort,'' Stef Groenewoud, a health care ethicist at Theological University Kampen, in the Netherlands, told the outlet.

''I see the phenomenon especially in people with psychiatric diseases, and especially young people with psychiatric disorders, where the health care professional seems to give up on them more easily than before,'' she added.

Ter Beek plans to be cremated after she's euthanized on the couch in her living room.

''No music,'' she said.

A doctor will first give her a sedative, followed by a drug that will stop her heart. Her boyfriend will be at her side until the end.

''The doctor really takes her time. It is not that they walk in and say, 'Lay down, please!' Most of the time it is first a cup of coffee to settle the nerves and create a soft atmosphere,'' she said.

''Then she asks if I am ready. I will take my place on the couch. She will once again ask if I am sure, and she will start up the procedure and wish me a good journey. Or, in my case, a nice nap, because I hate it if people say, 'Safe journey.' I'm not going anywhere.''

There will not be a funeral. Ter Beek, who does not have much family, said her boyfriend will scatter her ashes in ''a nice spot in the woods'' that they have picked out.

''I'm a little afraid of dying, because it's the ultimate unknown,'' she said.

''We don't really know what's next '-- or is there nothing? That's the scary part.''

The Netherlands became the first country in the world to make assisted suicide legal in 2001.

Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2001. AFP via Getty ImagesSince then, it's become an increasingly popular option.

In 2022, there were 8,720 euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands '-- representing roughly 5% of all the country's deaths and up from 4% from the year prior, according to Dutch media.

In February, the 93-year-old former Dutch Prime Minister Dries van Agt and his wife died hand in hand by euthanasia.

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Critics of suicide legalization say that people like Ter Beek have been encouraged to kill themselves by the law, with many likening the suicide surge to a contagion, according to the Free Press.

Ter Beek blasted the Free Press article on Twitter Tuesday and announced that she would be leaving social media ahead of her death.

''It was an honor for me to provide insights to people who were open to learning something,'' she posted.

If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or are experiencing a mental health crisis and live in New York City, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. If you live outside the five boroughs, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.

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Archived Version

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 18:01

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with ''Just Walk Out'' technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company's senior vice president of grocery stores says they're moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.

Top 5 Shopping Tips for Amazon Prime Day

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

On Wednesday, GeekWire reported that Amazon Web Services is cutting a few hundred jobs in its Physical Stores Technology team, according to internal emails. The layoffs will allegedly impact portions of Amazon's identity and checkout teams.

Instead of Just Walk Out, Amazon is moving towards Dash Carts , a scanner and screen that's embedded in your shopping cart, allowing you to checkout as you shop. These offer a more reliable solution than Just Walk Out. Amazon Fresh stores will also feature self check out counters from now on, for people who aren't Amazon members.

''We're rolling out Amazon Dash Cart, our smart-shopping carts,'' said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. Amazon confirmed this feature is replacing its Just Walk Out technology in existing stores.

Just Walk Out was first introduced in 2016 , presenting Amazon's biggest and boldest innovation in grocery shopping. The technology seemed incredible, but there were some stumbles. It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.

According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022 . This widely missed Amazon's internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

''The primary role of our Machine Learning data associates is to annotate video images, which is necessary for continuously improving the underlying machine learning model powering,'' said an Amazon spokesperson to Gizmodo. However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate ''a small minority'' of shopping visits when AI can't determine a purchase.

Amazon Fresh, the e-commerce giant's grocery store first launched in 2007, has just over 40 locations around the United States. The company also owns Whole Foods, and many of Amazon Fresh's experiments are seen as precursors for the large chain.

The company is reportedly keeping Just Walk Out technology in a small number of Fresh stores in the United Kingdom, and some of its Amazon Go convenience stores. Amazon has also implemented Just Walk Out technology at several ballparks around the country. These locations will keep the technology going.

Amazon is trying to further break into the grocery space to grow into another billion-dollar market. Though it owns Whole Foods, the e-commerce giant still doesn't compete with food goliaths like Walmart, Costco, and Kroger. Amazon's push away from expensive tests like Just Walk Out may be a sign the company is looking to further expand its presence as a supermarket.

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Wed, 03 Apr 2024 17:54

An airplane lands at the Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut, Lebanon, July 1, 2020. (Photo by Bilal Jawich/Xinhua via Getty Images)

BEIRUT '-- With ever-present fears that Israel could launch a ground invasion against Hezbollah in Lebanon, data suggests instances of GPS jamming in the nation have spread markedly in recent weeks, sparking at diplomatic protest by Beirut over the threat to civil aviation.

The jamming, experts told Breaking Defense, is likely related to Israel's effort to disrupt Hezbollah attacks on nothern Israel.

''Many bombs, drones, and other weapons use GNSS [global navigation satellite systems] for guidance these days, which makes them much more accurate and easier to manufacture than trying to build accurate INS [inertial navigation systems],'' said Brian Weeden, head of program planning at the Secure World Foundation. ''So interfering with GNSS signals is seen as a prudent defensive move.''

The head of global and emerging risks at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, Jean Marc Rickli, agreed that especially when it comes to the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles, ''one of the best ways to counter them is to jam their communication systems by cutting the link between them and the operator or the GPS [Global Positioning System] signal.''

GPS, the US-developed GNSS system, is the most prevelant worldwide; a handful of systems developed by other nations are also in use.

While Israel has reportedly aggressively jammed its adversaries in the region since the outbreak of the most recent conflict in October, the website GPSJam.org, which maps purported GNSS interference based on publicly broadcasted aircraft data, appears to show an geographical increase in interference over Lebanon in recent weeks. As of publication there appears to be interference covering most of the southern half of the country.

A timeline appears to show broadening GPS jamming over Lebanon since the beginning of 2024. (Maps from GPSJam.org, Breaking Defense timeline)

The interference was so bad that last week a Turkish airlines flight reportedly was unable to land in Beirut and was forced to return to its origin in Turkey. (It's also apparently interfering with dating apps in Lebanon and Beirut.)

That incident came days after the Lebanese government announced its intention to file a complaint at the United Nations accusing Israel of disrupting civil aviation navigation systems.

''Lebanon plans to urgently present its complaint to the UN Security Council regarding Israel's interference with navigation systems and civil aviation safety since the onset of the Gaza conflict,'' the Lebanese foreign ministry said last month.

Lebanon is hardly alone, however, as Weeden noted there's been a marked rise in GNSS jamming related to other ongoing modern conflicts.

''We are seeing it happen also in the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, and also increasingly out of conflict as well,'' he said. ''At one point in January 2024, there was significant GNSS jamming or spoofing affecting civil aviation in eight different countries or regions. And unfortunately, because the rest of society has become so reliant on GNSS, this jamming and spoofing is having widespread impacts.''

Alternative Navigation SystemsWeeden said that when planes encounter GNSS interference, there are still ways for pilots to navigate safely to their destination.

''Several [systems] use radio signals in various ways to provide fixed navigational reference points, while others provide dedicated services at airports to aid in landings. Many aircraft also still have inertial navigation systems (INS), which are mechanical devices that are set before takeoff and can maintain a position somewhat during flight,'' he explained.

Inertial navigation systems keep track of position, speed, altitude and other data without the need to use radio signals or GPS.

Deputy director of aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies CSIS, Clayton Swope, said that there is another aircraft navigation backup: Very High-Frequency Omnidirectional Range Station or VOR, a radio-based navigation system.

''VOR is viewed as a backup to GPS for aircraft navigation. But VOR stations are being decommissioned, since they are expensive to operate,'' Swope told Breaking Defense. ''Overall, the idea is to build in a lot of redundancies, so that if one navigation system is disrupted, there are other backup ways to get the airplane safely to its destination.''

But Weeden said modern aviation has come to increasingly default to using GNSS, making it more dangerous to rely on other systems.

''Over the last 20 years or so is that the ubiquity of GNSS, and especially GPS, has led to increased reliance on it for navigation and a deprioritization of the other technologies. Many still exist, but they aren't used or trained on as often,'' Weeden said. ''There's also some evidence to suggest that a corrupt GNSS position can corrupt these other backups, which is a very bad situation.''

And it's a problem that's unlikely to disappear any time soon, as Israel and Hezbollah trade aerial attacks daily.

''While there are backup navigational technologies, efforts to undermine GPS '... pose public safety risks,'' Swope said. ''Aircraft can still operate without GPS, but efforts to interfere with GPS could erode trust and confidence in the data, calling into question whether it can be viewed as a reliable navigation source in all places around the world.''

EDITOR'S NOTE 4/2/2024 at 12:55pm ET: This report has been updated to clarify the geographical spread of the jamming based on a Breaking Defense analysis of data from GPSJam.org and to include a gif of the purported interference over time.

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Tue, 02 Apr 2024 19:44

Google Podcasts is dead. It has been dying for months, since Google announced last fall that it was killing its dedicated podcast app in order to focus all its podcasting efforts on YouTube Music. This is a bad idea and a big downgrade, and I'd be more mad if only I were more surprised.

The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I've come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world's information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists, eventually launches a competitor out of some other part of the company, obviously begins to deprecate it and shift focus to the new competitor, and then, years later, finally shuts it down for real. The Google Graveyard is full of apps like Reader, Duo, Inbox, Allo, Wallet, and countless others that have been through The Google Cycle, and it feels just as bad every time.

Google says it's simply responding to the market and that YouTube is a much more popular place for people to find podcasts than Google Podcasts. There is certainly evidence to support that: in its shutdown notice in September, Google cited a statistic from Edison Research that said about 23 percent of podcast listeners in the US say YouTube is their primary podcast platform, compared to 4 percent for Google Podcasts.

What's most frustrating in this case, though, is that Google had an opportunity to do something genuinely great in podcasts. Podcast discovery is a problem, and so is finding information buried inside hours of audio. What Google should have done was find ways to actually connect its services. When you discover a podcast you love in YouTube Shorts, it should have offered you a one-tap way to subscribe to that podcast in Google Podcasts. It should have made transcripts searchable in Google so you can find the moments and insights you're looking for right in the audio.

Google had an opportunity to do something genuinely great in podcasts

Google could have owned that whole experience, helping turn a bunch of casual scrollers into listening obsessives '-- and maybe figured out how to monetize it for everyone. But that would involve the kind of cross-platform, coordinated work that you can't really expect from the company behind Google's Many Competing Messaging Apps and Convoluted Reminders Systems. Google has been working on podcasts in various shapes and forms since 2016 and has never even come close to putting all the pieces together.

There's a very simple, short-sighted logic at work in the move to YouTube Music. YouTube is a video platform; video ads make YouTube lots of money; Google Podcasts doesn't have video ads. So you can imagine the meeting where someone's like if we can get everyone to watch podcasts on YouTube, they'll watch more videos, and we can show more ads! Plus, YouTube Music is a subscription app, and nobody's going to pay $10 a month for a podcast app. There's a much straighter line from podcasts to money on YouTube than there is on YouTube Podcasts.

To Google, I say: that's your fault, and also I don't care. There are plenty of creators out there who would happily work in a YouTube-like advertising revenue system for audio, but Google never bothered to build one. Podcast apps are also not that expensive to maintain; some of the best ones are run by a single person. It's one thing to sunset a bad or unpopular app, but Google is killing a good and well-liked one because it's easier to show you its existing ad inventory somewhere else.

Even allowing for all the moneygrubbing, the main problem is that Google Podcasts is a drastically better podcast app than anything coming out of YouTube. The main YouTube app, forget it; you can't play things in the background unless you have Premium, which immediately makes it useless for podcasts, so I don't even have to complain about the confusing intermingling of audio podcasts, video podcasts, non-podcast videos, and everything else.

Within YouTube Music, podcast support has improved over the last six months or so, but the app still massively favors music. The app itself tells you everything you need to know: ''Podcasts'' is just a filter at the top, next to ''Energize'' and ''Commute.'' My podcast queue is currently the 15th row of the homescreen on my app, right below ''Trending community playlists'' and ''Forgotten favorites.'' That's all fine! It's called YouTube Music! It's a good music app, and that's enough. Music deserves its own real estate in the audio / video universe, and so do podcasts.

Music deserves its own real estate in the audio / video universe, and so do podcasts

One way to look at the Google Graveyard is as a bunch of products Google launched that didn't succeed and thus died. Another way to look at it is as a long history of Google's inability to make its products make sense. Google has muddled its way through a dozen messaging apps; built several competing VR and AR platforms; killed a bunch of well-liked brands trying to make the smart home happen; and so many more. In every case, there's a compelling reason for Google to get involved, to try and organize and make accessible some new corner of our technological lives. And over and over, Google has shown it just can't finish the job.

YouTube Music is the shiny new thing right now, but I wouldn't bet a dime that the app will even be around in five years. History says it won't. Luckily, there are plenty of good podcast apps out there, like Pocket Casts, Overcast, Antennapod, and even Apple Podcasts. I'd even half-heartedly recommend Spotify or Pandora, which at least aren't going away anytime soon. But if you're a Google Podcasts user, should you use YouTube Music for podcasts? No, you shouldn't. Because Google has made it clear over and over and over again that it can and will be distracted by shiny new things. The stuff you love will get worse, and it'll die. Get out of the Google Cycle wherever you can.

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Tue, 02 Apr 2024 17:01

The operation took place in January but details of the arrests and the tactics used have only just emerged

Spanish police have broken up a drug trafficking ring that used elite Ukrainian helicopter pilots to fly drugs across the Strait of Gibraltar in daring low-level night flights.

Guardia Civil officers arrested two Ukrainians as they attempted to escape after they landed a helicopter in a field near Chiclana de la Frontera in southern Spain.

The operation took place in January but details of the arrests and the drug trafficking ring's tactics have only just emerged.

One pilot has been identified as Vitor Blaha, a former Ukrainian police colonel, who is accused of piloting the helicopter, which was carrying just under 800 kilograms of cannabis resin.

A third man, a Moroccan national resident in Spain, died near the location where the helicopter landed after crashing his car as he attempted to flee.

One pilot has been identified as Vitor Blaha, a former Ukrainian police colonel, who is accused of piloting the helicopter Credit : iStock EditorialA total of nine arrests were made in the operation, including two men the Guardia Civil described as expert pilots. As well as the helicopter containing drugs, a French-made Alouette III, a similar aircraft was also seized in a nearby location.

Among those arrested are believed to be mechanics who maintain the helicopters using parts brought in from former Soviet Union countries.

The gang's smuggling route involved flying across the Strait to northern Morocco, where the drugs were loaded.

The pilots would then return to Spain at night, travelling at a height of no more than 30 metres above sea level without using the helicopter's lights and with navigation systems turned off to avoid electronic detection.

According to investigators, a helicopter such as the one Mr Blaha was piloting that night is ''virtually undetectable because it flies so low that the mountains cause the waves received by Spanish radars to be lost''.

''Those on board during these flights are taking a great risk,'' the investigators added.

The fee charged by a pilot such as Mr Blaha is believed to be around '‚¬150,000 per flight.

The gang's smuggling route involved flying across the Strait to northern Morocco, where the drugs were loaded Credit : Moment RFThe operation started when the Guardia Civil became aware of a helicopter leaving an unspecified location in Cdiz province to fly south. The officers coordinated with Moroccan police to track the aircraft and as it returned northward into Spanish airspace, where a Guardia Civil helicopter took up pursuit and coordinated with officers on the ground to intercept the suspects once they had landed.

Around 30 bundles of hashish were stored in a space behind the pilot where the rear seats had been removed.

A cargo of 800 kilograms of hashish could have a street value in Spain of around '‚¬4 million. The Guardia Civil said in a statement that the cost of buying a helicopter such as those used by the gang is around '‚¬900,000.

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Tue, 02 Apr 2024 16:39

The White House is on red alert for bird flu after health officials revealed a Texan dairy farmer caught a deadly bird flu strain from a cow.

The patient is only the second-ever American to be diagnosed with H5N1, but the virus is spreading among cattle in multiple US states after jumping from birds.

Officials at the CDC announced the case today but claimed the threat to the public remains low, insisting that early analyses suggested it had not mutated in a way that would allow it to infect people more easily.

But Senior White House officials are said to be 'closely monitoring the situation' after Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden's chief of staff, was briefed last week before the announcement.

Former health officials said they were not comforted by the assurances made by the government - highlighting how the Trump Administration played down fears about Covid in the early days of the pandemic.

Person in Texas infected with bird flu (cattle, stock image)

Tests revealed that an unknown number of cows have tested positive for bird flu Type A H5N1 in Texas, Kansas and New Mexico. Iowa is currently 'monitoring the situation' as it is also a dairy-heavy state. It comes after a goat in Minnesota tested positive last week. Bird flu has also been found in foxes, bobcats, striped skunks, raccoons and coyotes since the 2022 outbreak

Officials are now receiving regular updates from HHS and USDA, according to Politico.

Ashish Jha, who led the Biden administration's Covid-19 response, likened the cow-to-human case to 'Russian roulette'.

He added: 'You play that game long enough and one of these times it will become fit to spread among humans.'

When viruses jump between different animals, it increases the chance of a major mutation occurring that allows it to spread more easily in its new population.

This is the first time this strain of bird flu has been detected in cows, which may indicate it is getting better at transmitting across species.

Not only is there concern about the health impact, officials are said to be privately concerned about the effect on farmers and supply chains.

There are currently H5N1 outbreaks in cows in Texas, Idaho, Michigan and New Mexico.

Millions of chicken and other poultry around the world have been culled to halt outbreaks around the world during the over two years H5N1 has been spreading.

The Texas patient, who has not been named, was working on a dairy farm in the state and had contact with cows infected with the virus.

The individual is suffering from mild eye inflammation, their only symptom, and has already been isolated and treated with an antiviral for flu.

'Initial testing has not found changes to the virus that would make it more transmissible to humans,' the CDC, FDA and USDA said in a joint press release.

'While cases among humans in direct contact with infected animals are possible, this indicates that the current risk to the public remains low.'

The three government agencies claimed there is 'no concern about the safety of the commercial milk supply' because of pasteurization, which involving heating milk to kill harmful germs.

They add that milk from sickly animals is also diverted and destroyed to ensure it never enters the human supply chain.

But Rick Bright, who led the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority during the early days of Covid, remains skeptical.

'They would have to do a lot of testing before I would drink milk from one of these farms at this point,' Bright told Politico.

Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat for New Jersey, said the case was 'very concerning'.

He added: 'Another example of the pandemic risk from factory farms.'

The Texan was infected with H5N1 bird flu '-- which has led to tens of millions of chickens being slaughtered in the US over the last two years.

It has already been detected among mammals including seals '-- where it has decimated colonies '-- and farm animals such as goats, with this latest infection a sign the virus is creeping closer to causing an outbreak among people.

Experts say that the longer a virus is around in mammals undetected, the more chance it has to acquire a mutation that allows it to infect people more easily.

The CDC urged doctors to be mindful of potential cases among patients.

The agency added in a statement: 'P eople with close or prolonged, unprotected exposures to infected birds or other animals (including livestock), or to environments contaminated by infected birds or other animals, are at greater risk of infection.'

Dr Bill Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, told DailyMail.com that on rare occasions bird flu viruses can infect other animals and humans.

'This happens periodically with humans, but you rarely get human-to-human transmission,' he said.

'The genetic part of the virus that would allow it to transmit readily from human-to-human is still missing.'

Like all flus, the virus is spread primarily through droplets in the air which are breathed in or get into a person's mouth, eyes or nose

The case comes after a person was hospitalized with swine flu in Pennsylvania last month '-- in the first case of the year '-- after being infected with the H1N2 strain that commonly spreads among pigs.

And after an inmate who was working on a poultry farm tested positive for H5N1 bird flu in 2022, in a case that also caused alarm among experts.

The individual has since recovered, with his only symptoms reported as 'fatigue for a few days'. They did not pass on the virus to others.

Dairy farm workers were already on high alert for bird flu after infections were reported in herds across Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

There are also reports of the virus affecting dairy cows in New Mexico while Iowa '-- which has a large dairy industry '-- is monitoring the situation.

Farmers first noticed cows falling ill three weeks ago with symptoms of lethargy and loss of appetite, and then producing less milk. Milk and nasal swabs then tested positive for the virus.

Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said: 'We hadn't seen anything like it before. It was kind of like they had a cold.'

USDA officials believe the cattle were infected by wild birds suffering from the virus, which could have happened via exposure to the bird's feces or oral secretions.

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Tue, 02 Apr 2024 16:01

KnightBrook Insurance CompanyEst. 1934

Primary insurerKBRA Rating A-AM Best Rating, B++, FSC XI (Excellent)Learn more

KnightBrook Insurance Company (KBIC) is an insurance company domiciled in the State of Delaware and an admitted insurance carrier authorized to transact insurance in all states of the United States, except New York, and the District of Columbia.

Coverages may include Casualty, Property, Commercial Auto, Credit, Inland Marine, General Liability, Homeowners, Private Passenger Auto, and Surety Bonds. Not all products are available in every state.

KBIC is rated A- with a stable outlook by A.M. Best Company, AM Best #03140NAIC ID number 13722NAIC Group # 1316For Reporting Claims & Claims Questions please call or email us at 888-333-8198 or kmisclaims@knightcompany.comPlease have your policy number available or reference it in any correspondence

To request loss runs, email us at: lossruns@knightcompany.comFor all other (Non-Claims) related business please call Customer Service at: 1-888-333-8198.

To get a Personal Auto quote please call: 833-966-8366

Registered OfficeBrandywine Village1807 North Market StreetWilmington, Delaware 19802-4810

Onward Insurance ServicesPO Box 2940Agoura Hills, CA 91376833-966-8366

Guilderland Reinsurance CompanyEst. 1854

Primary insurerKBRA Rating A-Learn more

Guilderland Reinsurance Company (GRC) is an insurance company domiciled in the State of New York and an admitted insurance carrier authorized to transact insurance in the State of New York. Presently, GRC is not writing new business, but has submitted an application for reactivation.

Coverages may include other liability

Knight Specialty Insurance CompanyEst. 2013

Primary insurerKBRA Rating A-AM Best Rating, B++, FSC XI (Excellent)Learn more

Knight Specialty Insurance Company (KSIC) is an insurance company domiciled in the State of Delaware and is a Delaware domestic surplus lines insurer operating on a surplus lines basis in all states of the United States and the District of Columbia. Surplus lines coverage can only be placed by or through a licensed surplus lines broker.

Coverages may include Casualty, Property, Commercial Auto, Credit, Inland Marine, General Liability, Homeowners, Private Passenger Auto, and Surety Bonds Not all products are available in every state.

KSIC is rated A- with a stable outlook by A.M. Best Company, AM Best #022046NAIC ID number 15366NAIC Group # 1316

For Reporting Claims & Claims Question please call or email us at: 888-333-8198 or kmisclaims@knightcompany.comPlease have your policy number available or reference it in any correspondence.

To request loss runs, email us at: lossruns@knightcompany.comFor all other (Non-Claims) related business please call Customer Service at: 1-888-333-8198.

Registered OfficeBrandywine Village1807 North Market StreetWilmington, Delaware 19802-4810

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Tue, 02 Apr 2024 15:58

In short: Cash mover Armaguard is at risk of insolvency due to the declining use of cash. The nation's leading financial institutions have been holding urgent talks about how to ensure communities aren't left stranded without access to bank notes. What's next? A draft plan for how to prop up Armaguard and find alternative means of moving money in case it becomes insolvent is expected by the end of March.The big four banks are on the verge of intervening in the business of transporting money to avoid a crisis in getting cash to banks, businesses and customers.

Armaguard Australia is struggling to stay afloat despite a merger with its biggest rival mid-last year because the plummeting use of cash is making it unprofitable to deliver it around the country.

A proposal for an emergency intervention is expected within weeks following urgent talks involving the Australian Banking Association, Armaguard, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Treasury and businesses with large-scale cash handling, such as Australia Post, supermarkets and major retailers.

The ABC understands the banking sector will offer to pour money into Armaguard to prop up its operations as a short-term fix.

The proposal is also expected to ask for conditions imposed on Armaguard when it merged with Prosegur to be eased, to allow it to raise prices and reduce the number of places it distributes notes to.

The talks are also canvassing back-up options in case Armaguard becomes insolvent, which could cause a crisis in distributing cash, particularly to regional and remote areas.

Talks are confidential due to legal issues, but a proposal for the emergency intervention is expected to be finalised by the end of March. New measures may require separate ACCC approval.

Cash was king, now the mobile wallet reignsArmaguard's issues are borne of a conundrum: the use of cash is plummeting, but everyone in the country still needs access to it.

In 2010, more than 60 per cent of people's purchases were made with cash. Now, it's 13 per cent and declining rapidly. Purchases via debit '' whether with a physical card or a mobile wallet '' are now the leading payment choice, followed by credit.

The COVID pandemic accelerated Australians' transition to a cashless economy, as has the growth in mobile wallets. Over four years to 2022, the value of transactions using mobile wallets has risen from $750 million to $93 billion.

But almost all Australians still use cash occasionally, and those who use cash a lot are more likely to be older and have lower incomes.

Surveys from the Reserve Bank show that one in four Australians say they would experience genuine hardship or major inconvenience if they couldn't access cash.

The financial sector is also concerned that a disruption to the distribution of cash could encourage hoarding of notes and coins, or worse, a rush to access cash.

In planning for the possibility that Armaguard becomes insolvent, the involvement of Australia Post and major supermarkets has been canvassed given their significant roles in handling cash.

In regional and remote communities where there are no bank branches, Australia Post is already paying for cash to be flown into town.

"In the town of Coober Pedy '... it is about $4,000 a week that we're spending flying cash in to make sure that town has a provision of cash," Australia Post CEO Paul Graham recently told a Senate committee.

"That's not what we were set up to do.

Australia Post spends thousands each week transporting cash to the remote SA town of Coober Pedy.( ABC )

"The banks need to be cognisant of their community responsibility and work with us to ensure that communities that do have a need for cash '-- and it will be some time before that need extinguishes '-- have those services available."

Getting cash from the printing press to your pocketThe RBA prints bank notes, which the four major banks (Commonwealth, ANZ, Westpac and NAB) purchase. Smaller banks, major retailers and other businesses like Australia Post then purchase notes from the big four.

A "cash-in-transit" business physically moves the money from the RBA's note printing facilities to the banks (and from the banks to the other note buyers) via armoured vehicles with specialised security guards.

Notes printed by the Reserve Bank are distributed to the major banks, and then on to other retailers.( Supplied: Note Printing Australia )

There are only three companies in Australia that are approved to operate "wholesale" cash-in-transit businesses, with Armaguard commanding 90 per cent of the market.

Smaller amounts of cash are also moved around the country to get to bank branches, shops, ATMs and ticket machines. More companies this "retail" cash-in-transit service, but Armaguard still does 85 per cent of this work.

One company with all the cashArmaguard's monopoly control over the movement of cash was reluctantly accepted by the ACCC.

In June 2023, it approved a merger between Armaguard and the only other major wholesale cash-in-transit company, the Spanish-owned Prosegur, to avoid the high probability that one of them would shut down and leave businesses stranded.

The merger was approved on the condition that Armaguard continue to transport cash to all the locations that had previously been served by both companies and not hike up prices.

But a mere four months after the merger, Armaguard advised that its wholesale cash-in-transit business (moving money from the RBA to the big four banks), was unsustainable.

Armaguard was contacted by the ABC, but a company spokesman said legal restrictions prevented the company from commenting.

Armaguard competitor Next Payments has also suggested more retailers be able to buy directly from the RBA, which would bring more competition into the sector.

"[Australia's] issues started many years ago when the RBA passed control of the cash supply to the four major banks, who, in turn, passed it to Prosegur and Armaguard. The banks then negotiated hard with two cash-in-transit providers and the disastrous consequence was two loss-making '... businesses," Next Payment told the competition watchdog.

Posted 12 Mar 202412 Mar 2024Tue 12 Mar 2024 at 6:55pm, updated 13 Mar 202413 Mar 2024Wed 13 Mar 2024 at 5:32am

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Mon, 01 Apr 2024 17:35

No matter their chosen career track, all US diplomats have to complete at least one consular tour at the entry-level (in the first four years). Political officers often don't work in a full-time political position until their second or third tour.

A typical first job for an entry-level political officer consists of following the news, reporting to Washington DC, and making contacts with government officials at the appropriate levels of government ministries. They also meet with civil society organizations and interest groups who work on political, human rights, and socioeconomic issues.

No matter the size of the embassy, entry-level political officers usually supervises one or more locally hired specialists, who are crucial for getting new diplomats up to speed. They maintain the ''archives,'' briefs officers on all relevant topics, and connect them with important contacts in each area.

New officers also serve as note takers for more senior embassy staff and, when there are visitors from Washington DC, as control officers. When a President or Secretary of State happens to visit the country, there's always a spectacular amount of work involved. Diplomats may play relatively minor roles during official visits, making sure there are enough vehicles to transport the delegation, or arranging translators. Nonetheless, these inputs crucial for the overall success of diplomacy.

Four or five years into the job, political officers reach the ''mid-level'', which means they get more responsibility and management tasks, although their core work doesn't change much until they become (deputy) political counselor in a diplomatic mission. At that point, they're in all monitoring and reporting, external (political) contacts, messaging, and lobbying.

Once they're at the mid-level of the Foreign Service, political officers typically serve one or more tours back home, where they work as country or regional specialists, or advisors to office director at the State Department. Once they reach a certain level, they may become office directors themselves, and the most talented and ambitious may be invited to serve as Assistant Secretary.

The higher up you get as a political officer, the more you become a direct advisor to the ambassador and, when Washington pays attention to your country, to the State Department at large. Because the political counselor has a lot of ''face time'' with the ambassador it is said '' and the numbers I found seem to partially confirm this '' that political officers become ambassadors more than any other career track in the Foreign Service, typically after working some 20+ years.

Political officers of all ranks meet regularly with key political people and other influencers in society, but most of their days are still spent inside the embassy walls, where they manage the political section, coordinate with other agencies, and draft foreign policy recommendations for Washington DC.

How easy and pleasant political work is depends a lot on the relationship between countries and'--more specifically'--governments. The US, for example, is historically close to European countries, which makes it easier for diplomats to speak with their counterparts frankly and find common ground on a variety of issues.

On the other side of the spectrum are countries that historically have a complicated relationship with the US, like s vdsc v ome countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia where challenges stem from cultural barriers, lack of shared interests, difference in political systems and ideologies, and/or rivalries regarding political and military influence in the region or the global stage.

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Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:12

Statement of Activities Year ended December 31, 2022, Audited, in thousands.

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Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:11

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Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:10

The translators of the King James Bible, first printed in 1611, operated under a ''set of rules [...] contrived to curb individual proclivities and to ensure the translation's scholarly and nonpartisan character.''

Their translation made English more accessible than former versions, but also ''the new version was more faithful to the original languages of the Bible and more scholarly than any of its predecessors.''

The Queen James Bible, however, was created with an openly declared bias in mind: to appeal to a homosexual audience.

What is the Queen James BibleJoe Carter lays out a summary of the QJV. This revision of the King James Bible ''edits out all references to homosexuality in order to [...] prevent homophobic misinterpretation of God's Word.''

The editors named it the Queen James Bible because King James I was known to have had male lovers. The editors also argue that homosexuality was not mentioned in any original texts and first appeared in the Revised Standard Version of 1946.

Carter explains that the QJV does not remove verses in their entirety. Eight verses were revised because they indicate that homosexual behavior is a sin.

The verse Carter cites is Romans 1:27, which, in the KJV reads ''and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.''

The ESV translation reads as ''and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.''

In contrast, the QJV reads, ''Men with men working that which is pagan and unseemly. For this cause God gave the idolators up unto vile affections, receiving in themselves that recompense of their error, which was meet.'' Other verses, which were revised include Leviticus 18:22 and Jude 1:7.

What is the Purpose and Difference Between QJV and KJVThe King James Version closely follows the Greek. Differences between the original and the QJV interpretation include ''leaving the natural use of woman'' vs. ''that which is pagan and unseemly;'' and ''men with men working that which is unseemly'' vs. ''idolators.'' The Greek refers to men with men as ''the shame.''

Paul wrote, ''Leaving the natural use of woman;'' he makes no reference to idolators or paganism in Romans 1:27. The Queen James Version tries to place the sinful act within a specific context of pagan worship as though homosexual activity is condoned as long as it does not contain a pagan component.

But faithful translators of the Bible adjust language as it changes; they do not change the meaning. Each time a new translation is written, a team of editors goes directly to the original texts, not to a version created by a previous set of translators.

The meaning of Romans 1:27 et al. has carried the same meaning since the time it was first written, nearly 2,000 years ago.

The Word 'Homosexuality'Charles Morris responded to the argument that since the word ''homosexuality'' is not present in Scripture, God never condemned it. On the contrary, ''Jesus upheld and amplified the pattern for human sexuality outlined in Genesis 1-2.'' Sex is a gift between husband and wife, and ''marriage is between a man and a woman. [...] Jesus was not neutral on this.''

So, while ''homosexuality'' is a modern word, the idea is ancient, and God has always promoted his gift of sex in the context of marriage between and man and a woman. He specifically made a woman for Adam. She was more than a child-bearer; Eve was his helper and his equal.

To suggest that something is not condemned or promoted because it is not stated does not work as an argument for or against a position regarding the Lord's definition of what is a sin or what pleases God.

That would mean God's Word is not relevant today because many of the specifics of our modern lives are absent from between the pages of Scripture.

Cocaine and the word ''addiction'' are not mentioned, yet we know that addiction is sinful. While many therapists disagree on its nature (sin issue or disease), the painful outworkings of addiction are sinful (theft, violence, negligence of loved ones, idolatry).

Addiction is a form of idolatry, which is definitely a repeated theme in Scripture. Violence, emotional negligence, and theft all feature as well.

We do not need to rewrite the Bible to depict God's answer to addiction in order to understand that the Lord hates it while offering mercy to sinners who confess and repent.

Satan's Longest Running ConTim Keller, talking about Satan's question ''did God really say,'' explored the serpent's mocking tone. Satan isn't asking if God said this or that; ''he's saying it's ridiculous. It's laughable. [...] 'Was he such an idiot, such a jerk, to say that? Did he really say that?' [...] He's trying to get Adam and Eve to laugh at it. He's trying to change their attitudes toward it.''

When Bible translators try to put themselves inside God's mind and ask themselves ''did God really say that?'' they are snubbing his authority. They take the serpent's tone, suggesting that God's words can't be true; that would be ridiculous.

Moreover, the argument that a Queen James Bible more accurately represents the sexual proclivities of King James I is irrelevant '-- this is not the monarch's Bible but a translation of God's inspired Word.

Everyone participating in a Bible translation project is a sinner; their objective is not to declare their truth but God's unchanging truth.

Common Sin and Common GroundBut it would be foolish to suggest that only the editors of the Queen James Bible are elevating themselves to the status of prophets, conveying a new Word from God.

At least one can say they are open about what they are doing, while many Christians are guilty of using Scripture as a defense for homophobic behavior, the sort of abuse, which leads the LGBTQ+ community to feel they need to create a Bible of their own.

Jesus, quoted in Matthew 5:21-22, stated that if we hate someone, we are subject to the same judgment as murder. He equated anger and hatred with murder. Every day, members of the LGBTQ+ community face discrimination, hatred, even violence.

While marriage outside of the marital, heterosexual framework is a sin in God's eyes, so are hatred and violence towards people with whom one disagrees on the basis that God condemns a certain sin.

Christians must speak up against sin from a posture of love while standing with and for one another. One way we can stand up for our LGBTQ+ friends is by saying that the Bible is for them, just as it is for everyone who loves Jesus.

An encouragement one can take from the QJV is that members of the LGBTQ+ community still want to embrace Jesus; they want to find a safe place within his commands and his community.

God does not change. He is reliable. Each person was made in his image, and each person's worth comes from Christ alone, not from sexual identity or sexual partnership.

The Word of God Is Living and ActiveScripture is our promise and our treasure, and protecting that Word is essential to keeping the faith. If it is found wanting in one area, the whole thing falls apart for all who would profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Christians will not always agree on the meaning of what is in front of them, but it is important that each Christian is reading an accurate translation of what God has seen fit to share with us.

The complete authority of Scripture as it stands is not always easy or convenient for the reader, but Christians can find comfort in knowing that the Lord does not change his mind about anything, including his love for all those who believe in Christ alone for salvation.

For further reading:

Are There Bible Translations Christians Should Avoid?

What Does the Bible Say about Homosexuality?

How Are We Created in the Image of God?

Photo Credit: (C)iStock/Getty Images Plus/ADragan

Candice Lucey is a freelance writer from British Columbia, Canada, where she lives with her family. Find out more about her here.

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Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:04

The Catholic archbishop of Washington, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, called President Joe Biden a ''cafeteria Catholic'' Sunday on CBS News for appearing to pick and choose aspects of the faith that are ''attractive'' to him.

Gregory appeared on ''Face the Nation'' to discuss Biden's relatability with American Catholics as the president has previously referred to himself as a devout Catholic. CBS News host Ed O'Keefe questioned the archbishop on his thoughts, to which Gregory stated that while Biden's faith appears ''very sincere,'' he ''picks and chooses'' dimensions to highlight. (RELATED: Biden Proclaims Easter Sunday To Be 'Transgender Day Of Visibility')

''In the case of the president, do you get a sense that his regular attendance and adherence to the faith resonates with American Catholics?'' O'Keefe questioned.

''I would say that he's very sincere about his faith, but like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts. There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a 'cafeteria Catholic' '-- you choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging,'' Gregory added.

''Or as Thomas Aquinas would say, you allow your conscience to guide you,'' stated Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Ret. Reverend Mariann Budde.

''Is there something on the menu he's not ordering, in your view? So to speak,'' O'Keefe pressed.

''I would say there are things, especially in terms of life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore or he uses the current situation as a political pawn rather than saying, look, my church believes this,'' Gregory stated.

Biden received backlash online Saturday after the White House released a press statement for ''transgender day of visibility'' annually occurring on March 31 which happened to be the same day as Easter Sunday this year. The White House banned religious Easter eggs for their annual Easter Egg Roll, saying that the egg designs from children cannot feature any ''religious symbols'' and instead were requested to draw ''a snapshot of their life '-- a favorite activity, scenery in your state, your military family, a day-in-your life, etc.''

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Mon, 01 Apr 2024 12:04

Updates Who's Running for President? Trump's V.P. Contenders Election F.A.Q. Senate Races to Watch U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic Long known for his improvised and volatile stage performances, former President Donald J. Trump now tends to finish his rallies on a solemn note.

Soft, reflective music fills the venue as a hush falls over the crowd. Mr. Trump's tone turns reverent and somber, prompting some supporters to bow their heads or close their eyes. Others raise open palms in the air or murmur as if in prayer.

In this moment, Mr. Trump's audience is his congregation, and the former president their pastor as he delivers a roughly 15-minute finale that evokes an evangelical altar call, the emotional tradition that concludes some Christian services in which attendees come forward to commit to their savior.

''The great silent majority is rising like never before and under our leadership,'' he recites from a teleprompter in a typical version of the script. ''We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.''

The meditative ritual might appear incongruent with the raucous epicenter of the nation's conservative movement, but Mr. Trump's political creed stands as one of the starkest examples of his effort to transform the Republican Party into a kind of Church of Trump. His insistence on absolute devotion and fealty can be seen at every level of the party, from Congress to the Republican National Committee to rank-and-file voters.

Mr. Trump's ability to turn his supporters' passion into piety is crucial to understanding how he remains the undisputed Republican leader despite guiding his party to repeated political failures and while facing dozens of felony charges in four criminal cases. His success at portraying those prosecutions as persecutions '-- and warning, without merit, that his followers could be targeted next '-- has fueled enthusiasm for his candidacy and placed him, once again, in a position to capture the White House.

Video Donald Trump has been ending many of his rally speeches with theatrical sermons complete with a cinematic music track, solidifying his growing deification among his supporters. Credit Credit... Erik Ljung for The New York Times 'He's definitely been chosen by God'Mr. Trump has long defied conventional wisdom as an unlikely but irrefutable evangelical hero.

He has been married three times, has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, has been convicted of business fraud and has never showed much interest in church services. Last week, days before Easter, he posted on his social media platform an infomercial-style video hawking a $60 Bible that comes with copies of some of the nation's founding documents and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood's song ''God Bless the U.S.A.''

But while Mr. Trump is eager to maintain the support of evangelical voters and portray his presidential campaign as a battle for the nation's soul, he has mostly been careful not to speak directly in messianic terms.

''This country has a savior, and it's not me '-- that's someone much higher up than me,'' Mr. Trump said in 2021 from the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Dallas, whose congregation exceeds 14,000 people.

Still, he and his allies have inched closer to the Christ comparison.

Last year, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and a close Trump ally, said both the former president and Jesus had been arrested by ''radical, corrupt governments.'' On Saturday, Mr. Trump shared an article on social media with the headline ''The Crucifixion of Donald Trump.''

Image Mr. Trump has mostly been careful not to speak directly in messianic terms. Credit... Kenny Holston/The New York Times He is also the latest in a long line of Republican presidents and presidential candidates who have prioritized evangelical voters. But many conservative Christian voters believe Mr. Trump outstripped his predecessors in delivering for them, pointing especially to the conservative majority he installed on the Supreme Court that overturned federal abortion rights.

Mr. Trump won an overwhelming majority of evangelical voters in his first two presidential races, but few '-- even among his rally crowds '-- explicitly compare him to Jesus.

Instead, the Trumpian flock is more likely to describe him as a modern version of Old Testament heroes like Cyrus or David, morally flawed figures handpicked by God to lead profound missions aimed at achieving overdue justice or resisting existential evil.

''He's definitely been chosen by God,'' said Marie Zere, a commercial real estate broker from Long Island who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in February outside Washington, D.C. ''He's still surviving even though all these people are coming after him, and I don't know how else to explain that other than divine intervention.''

For some of Mr. Trump's supporters, the political attacks and legal peril he faces are nothing short of biblical.

''They've crucified him worse than Jesus,'' said Andriana Howard, 67, who works as a restaurant food runner in Conway, S.C.

Image An attendee waiting for Mr. Trump to arrive at a religious gathering in Washington in September. Many conservative Christian voters believe Mr. Trump outstripped his Republican predecessors in delivering for them. Credit... Kenny Holston/The New York Times A political weapon and vulnerabilityMr. Trump's solid and devoted core of voters has formed one of the most durable forces in American politics, giving him a clear advantage over President Biden when it comes to inspiring supporters.

Forty-eight percent of Republican primary voters are enthusiastic about Mr. Trump becoming the Republican nominee, and 32 percent are satisfied but not enthusiastic with that outcome, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. Just 23 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about Mr. Biden as their nominee, and 43 percent were satisfied but not enthusiastic.

The intensity of the most committed Trump backers has also factored into the former president's campaign decisions, according to two people familiar with internal deliberations. His team's ability to bank on voters who will cast a ballot with little additional prompting means that some of the cash that would otherwise be spent on turnout operations can be invested in field staff, television ads or other ways to help Mr. Trump.

But Democrats see an advantage, too. Much of Mr. Biden's support comes from voters deeply opposed to Mr. Trump, and the president's advisers see an opportunity to spook moderate swing voters into supporting Mr. Biden by casting Mr. Trump's movement as a cultlike creation bent on restricting abortion rights and undermining democracy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Democratic ally of Mr. Biden, pointed to an increasingly aggressive online presence from the president's re-election campaign, which has sought to portray Mr. Trump as prone to religious extremism.

''There's a huge opportunity here,'' Mr. Newsom said in an interview. ''Trump is so easily defined, and he reinforces that definition over and over and over again. And Biden has a campaign that can weaponize that now.''

Image Supporters praying during a Trump rally in Warren, Mich., in 2022. Even more than in his past campaigns, Mr. Trump is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity. Credit... Brittany Greeson for The New York Times 'Does he really care about evangelicals? I don't know.'Mr. Trump's braiding of politics and religion is hardly a new phenomenon. Christianity has long exerted a strong influence on American government, with most voters identifying as Christians even as the country grows more secular. According to Gallup, 68 percent of adults said they were Christian in 2022, down from 91 percent in 1948.

But as the former president tries to establish himself as the one, true Republican leader, religious overtones have pervaded his third presidential campaign.

Benevolently phrased fund-raising emails in his name promise unconditional love amid solicitations for contributions of as little as $5.

Even more than in his past campaigns, he is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity, telling a convention of Christian broadcasters that ''just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord.''

On his social media platform in recent months, Mr. Trump has shared a courtroom-style sketch of himself sitting next to Jesus and a video that repeatedly proclaims, ''God gave us Trump'' to lead the country.

The apparent effectiveness of such tactics has made Mr. Trump the nation's first major politician to successfully separate character from policy for religious voters, said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah University, an evangelical school in Pennsylvania.

''Trump has split the atom between character and policy,'' Mr. Fea said. ''He did it because he's really the first one to listen to their grievances and take them seriously. Does he really care about evangelicals? I don't know. But he's built a message to appeal directly to them.''

Image Mr. Trump's supporters tend to describe him as a modern version of Old Testament heroes like Cyrus or David, morally flawed figures handpicked by God to lead righteous missions. Credit... Dustin Chambers for The New York Times Support from local pastorsTrump rallies have always been something of a cross between a rock concert and a tent revival. When Mr. Trump first started winding down his rallies with the ambient strains, many connected them to similar theme music from the QAnon conspiracy movement, but the campaign distanced itself from that notion.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement: ''President Trump has used the end of his speeches to draw a clear contrast to the last four years of Joe Biden's disastrous presidency and lay out his vision to get America back on track.''

But the shift has helped turn Mr. Trump's rallies into a more aesthetically churchlike experience.

A Trump rally in Las Vegas in January opened with a prayer from Jesus Marquez, an elder at a local church, who cited Scripture to declare that God wanted Mr. Trump to return to the White House.

''God is on our side '-- he's on the side of this movement,'' said Mr. Marquez, who founded the American Christian Caucus, a grass-roots group.

And at a rally in South Carolina in February, Greg Rodermond, a pastor at Crossroads Community Church, prayed for God to intervene against Mr. Trump's political opponents, arguing that they were ''trying to steal, kill and destroy our America.''

''Father, we have gathered here today in unity for our nation to see it restored back to its greatness,'' Mr. Rodermond continued, ''and, God, we believe that you have chosen Donald Trump as an instrument in your hands for this purpose.''

But some Christian conservatives are loath to join their brethren in clearing a direct path from the ornate doors of Mar-a-Lago to the pearly gates of Heaven.

Russell Moore, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention's public-policy arm, said Mr. Trump's rallies had veered into ''dangerous territory'' with the altar-call closing and opening prayers from preachers describing Mr. Trump as heaven-sent.

''Claiming godlike authority or an endorsement from God for a political candidate means that person cannot be questioned or opposed without also opposing God,'' Mr. Moore said. ''That's a violation of the commandment to not take the Lord's name in vain.''

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In 2022, I was on a rooftop overlooking a runway surrounded by olive trees in the south of Spain. An aircraft hovered in the sky and zipped off into the distance.

It was my first up-close encounter with an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle, popularly known as flying cars or air taxis. As the name suggests, these aircrafts are all electric and take off and land vertically, rather than requiring a long runway, as do commercial planes.

Proponents of the aircrafts see them as viable alternatives to travel in urban environments or between nearby cities.

There are dozens of companies that are making eVTOLs globally, from China to the U.S. and Europe. One of them is Lilium, whose jet I am referencing. Earlier this year, I visited the company's headquarters in Munich, Germany, to see what progress has been made since 2022. The company has begun manufacturing its jet.

The eVTOL market could be worth $1 trillion by 2040, according to JPMorgan, and several firms are trying to take the lead.

In the latest episode of CNBC Tech's "Beyond the Valley" podcast '-- which you can listen to above '-- Tom Chitty and I explore the world of eVTOLs, from regulation to consumer acceptance, and look ahead to when these vehicles might take off in a big way.

You can subscribe to "Beyond the Valley" by clicking the links below to your chosen platform:

Apple Podcast

Google Podcasts

Spotify

Here is a transcript of the episode of "Beyond the Valley" released on Mar. 27, 2024. It has been edited for clarity.

Tom Chitty: If you commute to work in a city, chances are you spend part of that journey on a train of some sort traveling through a vast network of tunnels. You may be on one right now. That's because in the last 100 years, much of the infrastructure for city transport has developed underground, but the ways we get around our urban areas may soon change with innovators looking not just above ground, but up in the sky. I'm looking forward to this episode because I don't know where we're at, where the landscape for, you're gonna say the word

Arjun Kharpal: eVTOLs. What does that mean?

Tom Chitty: I don't know. I don't love it.

Arjun Kharpal: I just generally am not a fan of acronyms on the whole.

Tom Chitty: Who comes up with acronyms? Who's the, you know, who's responsible?

Arjun Kharpal: Well, they just put the words together and then you know, whatever letter they start with.

Tom Chitty: Also nightmare to type out because it's lowercase E, for anyone that doesn't know and then it's capital letters for everything else.

Arjun Kharpal: Electric vertical takeoff and landing. Electric. Vertical, that's the V. Takeoff '-- "T", "O". Landing. That's the "L". That's eVTOL. That's what it stands for. An eVTOL aircraft. Do you wanna hear a fun plane story before we we start this episode? I've got a lot. Do you want to hear the funnest one? When I was on holiday recently, I took a plane ride. It was a 12 hour plane ride. And it was a plane ride from hell is how I describe it. So you know, we get onto the plane. And there's already an hour and a half delay. And then the the pilot over the tannoy says, oh, we've got another 20 minutes delay. We've just found somebody vaping in the bathroom, which of course is illegal. So plane hasn't taken off, three people kicked off the flight. You know, I'm sat with my friends. And there's a large group of men about 20 of them sort of surrounding us. And they'd gotten to the the flight quite inebriated and got progressively more inebriated and they were sort of walking up and down the aisles. There was a fight in between their own group.

Tom Chitty: Physical fight?

Arjun Kharpal: Almost turned physical. You know, there was squaring up, almost. I go to the back of the plane and ask for a bottle of water, and a gin and tonic. That was my nightcap. Well, it was the afternoon but I was ready for sleep so I could adjust to the times where I was going. They said no, we've shut the entire bar for the plane because of this rowdy group of of people. Anyways, I get back to my seat, I noticed this group of people had opened the duty free bottle of alcohol, again, something you're not supposed to do, bag needs to remain sealed until your destination. So again, progressively more inebriated. Second fight broke out. I'd also learned from the flight attendant that someone had lit up a cigarette in the bathroom. Again, illegal. One of their group was head butting a chair, threw up. Then one of his mates started a fight with one of the flight attendants. Anyways, all settled down. And eventually, we landed, and the pilot announces oh, we're going to we're going to just stop here for a minute for the regular check from the local authorities. The regular chair of course, there's a regular check. There's not. Nine police.

Tom Chitty: Nine arrests?

Arjun Kharpal: No, no nine police came onboard. There were roughly 13 people taken off that flight.

Tom Chitty: Essentially being arrested.

Arjun Kharpal: They were arrested. Yeah, they went peacefully. I mean, you would.

Tom Chitty: Probably in hangover mode.

Arjun Kharpal: They were definitely in hangover mode. Anyways, that was my vacation. I'd love to hear if our listeners have had any kind of experiences like that.

Tom Chitty: Maybe you were on the flight as well. If you do want to tell us your trips from hell, then you can email in beyondthevalley@cnbc.com and we'd love to hear from you.

Arjun Kharpal: Thankfully, these eVTOLs aren't big enough to have a group of 20 people going on a bachelor party

Tom Chitty: Before we get into the main topic for today. Let's do Arjun's stat of the week.

Arjun Kharpal: $35.8 billion.

Tom Chitty: $35.8 billion. Okay. Arjun, we've explained the acronym eVTOL stands for but give us a little bit, a brief overview of what exactly we're talking when we say eVTOL.

Arjun Kharpal: So these are these are electric aircraft, basically, often maybe with space for two-to-six passengers. And they don't take off and land like aeroplanes, they take off and land as the name suggests, vertically, which obviously is great for space. It's very similar to a helicopter, what a helicopter does, though the technology is a bit different. So no runways, and that's effectively what they are. They're passenger aircraft, run on electric and designed I think for sort of within cities, but also in between cities, too. So we're not talking about long distance, you know, 12 hour flights like I took, but it's more shorter distance, kind of flights, perhaps in between cities in the same country, or even within a city itself.

Tom Chitty: Why not call them flying cars?

Arjun Kharpal: I call them flying cars. But you know, the industry likes to reject such populist terms, I think. They are flying cars, they're flying cars,

Tom Chitty: These vehicles aren't necessarily actually cars with wheels, either, because I know that you've done you've got a program coming up soon about eVTOL. And there is one car, which is actually a car that turns into a flying.

Arjun Kharpal: So there's also that concept. One of the interesting things, as we'll talk about, and if you watch that episode, you'll see is there's so many different designs and concepts right now for what one of these vehicles should look like, both from a design point of view, but also from a technology point of view, what kind of system are you using, to propel the aircraft. So I think you'll see some of those car designs look like cars, maybe even in the future, there'll be a sort of hybrid, can drive on the road, wings come out, and off it goes situation. But a lot of them now are looking kind of like a hybrid between, you know, a drone, as you know it, one of those remote control drones, but on a much larger scale crossed with kind of an aircraft.

Tom Chitty: There's four of them. And there's hundreds of different designs for eVTOL. But there's four major ones. Take us through them.

Arjun Kharpal: I'll give you a handful of them. Multicopter is one of them, a type of design where you'll see almost like helicopter propellers, but a number of them across the aircraft. So they're great for takeoff and landing much like a like a helicopter vertically. But they're really not efficient at long distances. So that's one style. You've got the lift and cruise design. This combines his multicopter approach with more of a sort of traditional aircraft approach. Again, good for the up and down. But also good for longer distances. You've got this, what's known as a ducted vector thrust. And one of the companies that uses this kind of system is Lilium, which, you know, talk about visiting the sites a couple of times over the past couple of years. They use multiple individually controlled electric ducted fans that push the vehicle upwards, basically.

Tom Chitty: Like a hover?

Arjun Kharpal: It's great for hovering, they're quieter, they can fly long distances, they can take off and land vertically. So I mean, those are some of the sort of main, there's many, many more kinds of technologies, as well. The tilt rotor is another one, which has, as the name suggests, these sort of rotors, these almost propellers that are on a tilt to help it kind of go forward and back as well. And up and down. So there's all these different systems.

Tom Chitty: Some of those designs are actually already in use for I think military helicopters.There might be some listeners, including myself, who might be thinking, a vehicle, flying vehicle, which takes us short distances, I think there might be one in existence, it's called a helicopter. So why do we need these when we have helicopters already?

Arjun Kharpal: I think there's a number of reasons. One, the safety record of helicopters has been called into question a number of times, you know, versus aeroplanes. The fact that they're not electric. And you know, we're trying to move towards a greener and more sustainable world. So that's another thing in favor of this. Helicopters are noisy, very noisy, versus some of these these aircraft, but also, the price point of helicopters, they're inaccessible, mainly to, to you and I. You know, we can't just sort of rock up. And the way that a lot of these companies are positioning these these, these sort of eVTOL is they'll run a kind of Uber system, almost a sort of ride hailing system, obviously, they're not going to come to your house, but you'll go to and we can talk about that, what might be known as this sort of micro airport or a vertiport, you'll go there. But effectively, you can book an app. And the idea is there's going to be a fleet of these run by an operator. And they should generally be quite affordable to run.

Tom Chitty: But premium, still comparative to. So like your Uber Lux but maybe a step up from that.

Arjun Kharpal: Yeah, still slightly premium, but the price point will look to come down and it's looking, you know, I mean, we live in London, right? I'm sure many of our listeners live in other cities where traffic's bad. Traffic is bad. I mean, we're thankful in London to have a very good public transport network, which helps, you know, you can certainly get to a lot of places in the city quicker on a train than you can on in a car, that's for sure or even sometimes walking. But there are many cities where that's not the case public transport isn't there, infrastructure isn't there, cars are heavily relied on, the traffic's bad. You know, think about this. Now you take that out the equation you fly above the traffic. That's another point that is in favor of why people are investing so much in the eVTOL.

Tom Chitty: When you say investing so much. Where are we at when we talk about sort of the market situation, and these early stages of this industry?

Arjun Kharpal: Millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars have been invested. A lot of VC, venture capital money has gone into these companies, just a few of them, you got Lilium, they're based in Germany, you got EHang, they're out of China. They've been around for a while as well. Even Airbus, you know, Airbus, the company that makes the big jets even they're investing in this space, Archer Aviation, Joby, the list goes on. There's a number of names, and a lot of them are the startups have. A lot of the startups have got VC money, backing them, because they feel this is a big area. Now, let's be honest, it's a bit of a gold rush at this point. And not all these companies are going to survive, have viable business models, their technology won't win out. But that's I think the stage we're at right now, there's a lot of investment going in because of the promise of the technology. And we see that in so many areas, right electric vehicles and various other areas. And that's where we're at right now. Infrastructure non existent.

Tom Chitty: Well, that was going to be my next question. But before we get to that, just on the growth element 2021 report from Morgan Stanley predicted the market for eVTOL will be worth $1 trillion by 2040 and $9 trillion by 2050. I mean, that is a lot of money.

Arjun Kharpal: What what makes up that $9 trillion? You've got the companies that are making the aircrafts, and selling those. There's that. And then you've got all the bits around that. Right. What about the you know, you have airlines these days, right? You have all the airlines in the world, and they buy the planes from Airbus and Boeing, right? I think you'll see a similar model you have you have airlines, to some extent, whatever they might look like in the future running these fleets of air mobility vehicles, urban air mobility vehicles, eVTOLs, I think that's how they will work. So you know, they'll charge you, they'll charge a fee, they'll have to buy the hardware, and then there's all the servicing that comes all the companies that service and then you know. What do these things look like in the future?

Tom Chitty: Exactly. I think the designs are still to be determined, or what's the most effective. You talked a little bit about infrastructure. And I'd also like to talk about regulations. Because today, if you wanted to take a helicopter ride over a major city is going to cost you a lot of money. And you don't see it often because it's very difficult to do and the airspace is limited. So something is drastically going to have to change to accommodate, essentially, hundreds of these eVTOL flying around above our heads.

Arjun Kharpal: Yeah, there's no there's no infrastructure. You've alluded to this feature program we've got coming out looking at the future of these, these flying cars, basically in these eVTOLs. As part of that I went to Munich to visit a company called Lilium, went to their headquarters, their production facility is huge. So there's infrastructure there happening, they have this huge, multiple hangars, where they're testing. And so there's infrastructure in the sense of the companies building the product, that's happening. And actually, in 2022, I went to the south of Spain, where they had a testing site. So there's some testing sites around the world happening. One of those, Lilium, is in the south of Spain. You know, EHang, which is a Chinese company that makes these passenger drones. They have a testing site in Guangzhou, where I used to live. That was interesting. I visited that as well. I mean, that was before anything was happening in Europe, they were well ahead of the game, the test flights, all sorts. So that infrastructure is there. The next step is how do you then go from yes, you can build them yes, you can sell them to how do I get from A to B?

Tom Chitty: And where are these things going to land.

Arjun Kharpal: What was fascinating about EHang was they were they were taking these off into the sky from what was effectively a shopping mall.

Tom Chitty: Like a car park, or above a small carpark?

Arjun Kharpal: It was a small area of a shopping mall. There was a strip of restaurants in this outdoor area, there was an office, a big office building and right next door, they were doing test flights. So I think that was great because it showed you actually how little space you need to do it.

Tom Chitty: These things aren't as big. Don't have the necessary the wingspan of a helicopter.

Arjun Kharpal: And I mean, some of them do. Yeah, I think Lilium's was like 14 meters or something, it was huge. But you don't need the runway, right? You don't need a massive strip of land for these things to take off, they just go up, I think what's gonna happen is you're gonna see these, whatever new modern style of helipad, micro airport vertiport, they call them effectively, you know, from one from A to B. So, there might be one, let's say you're in London, there might be one, you know, in the center of the city somewhere, that takes you to I don't know, Heathrow Airport, or one of the big airports, or maybe there's, there's one pad here in London and the other ones in another city, say Birmingham. You know, and that might be, you know, point to point, just as you have a train station point to point, but these things need to be a lot smaller. They're just a little area of land. So the key is going to be what these look like.

Tom Chitty: Just on the regulation front. Yeah. I mean, these companies surely have to sort of have that in the front of their mind, because why would they continue pumping all this money in if someone's never going to allow, you know, hundreds of flying vehicles in the air at any one time? So do we know kind of where we're at, like, the early discussions on that?

Arjun Kharpal: What's been, I think, really interesting about this area is the regulators have been quite on board with it all. Yeah, so I'll go through some of the sort of major jurisdictions that are trying to make big movements of this. You know, China, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, they've actually given a, what they call a type certification, to one of EHang's vehicles. I think it's a two seater passenger vehicle. So they can actually now carry out if they want to commercial operations. Well, yeah. Very interesting, I was telling you about the shopping center experience, takeoff and landing. So the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, they also have a program for certifications, as well. So they've set out clear guidelines, this is what you need, for us to feel comfortable to operate these. So in their view, they've got things like the aircrafts need to pass a certain number of certifications, the pilots need to be certified. And they believe operations can be at scale, at one or more sites by 2028, it's not a long way off. You don't often see regulators sort of give a timeline to kind of say, you know, we want these in operation by then. They're quite forthcoming.

Tom Chitty: Is that because they're trying to just be the leaders in a new tech industry? Well, it's an aerospace industry, but with a lot of tech.

Arjun Kharpal: I think so. I think so partly to be the leaders, but also, with the benefits you can. There's a lot of tech we talk about, do we need it? But actually, this could be quite game changing. Really, if you think about it, think about the way travel time cutting down, better for the environment.

Tom Chitty: You know, I had a conversation once with, I think it was my dad. But anyway, he said, imagine, you know, an alien came from another planet, and looked at our, the way we travel, and they can see us on roads, driving in vehicles going really fast right past each other. And, you know, when there's all this space, and they're going, you're crazy, like, why are you limiting yourself to these roads rather than just going where you want to go? If you think like that, then it kind of makes sense. And how we have been traveling, maybe it's not the best way for us to get around.

Arjun Kharpal: I don't think it's not the best way to get around. I mean, using that airspace, from a practical perspective, I flew one of these aircrafts myself, in virtually reality. So I was there. And I was piloting one of these aircrafts over London. I was like, This is great.

Tom Chitty: So was it just a joystick?

Arjun Kharpal: Yeah, I had my headset on my virtual reality headset. I'm not like an aerospace expert, but it was up and down, go, stop.

Tom Chitty: Stop. Mid-air?

Arjun Kharpal: Hover.

Tom Chitty: Hover?

Arjun Kharpal: Yeah, just just hovering over the River Thames, and looking around and spotted the London Eye. Big Ben. Flew past CNBC's offices. But that's quite nice. I just land on the roof.

Tom Chitty: So it was easy to operate.

Arjun Kharpal: Yeah, I'm sure they've simplified it. But I think actually also it is. Yeah, it's pretty simple.

Tom Chitty: Because that would be my next question is who's going to fly these? You know, obviously, if they're like a taxi sort of operation, then you're gonna get a license, but are you going to need it a helicopter license and a pilot's airplane license?

Arjun Kharpal: I think there'll be special licenses. You know, the the the U.S. aviation administration has already said that there's going to be special pilot''s license. So you need to you need to. So there's gonna be a lot of that. I mean, you know, I don't know how lucrative this is going to be in terms of would you know, a pilot give up their airline job to fly these or or could you and I train?

Tom Chitty: I imagine they'd be super excited that, you know, new forms of employment opening up because pilots seemingly are losing their jobs. And again, we go on to autonomous aircraft because to me having a pilot in there seems redundant, particularly as you know, we move towards a world where planes, commercial planes, it's not unfeasible to think that they could be pilotless

Arjun Kharpal: But the pilots have to be in there right now. And I think that you know that pilotless ... when I was speaking to the CEO of Lilium, on that trip, I said, you know, what about autonomy. He's like, not right now. We need to get these in the sky, we need to prove they're safe. We need to prove the viability of them to the public. Autonomy is down the line, it can be done. But he goes not right off the bat. So I think autonomy is going to be a stretch. I mean, it's the same thing as autonomous cars, right? We're looking at now we've been talking about for ages, but we're no closer to having them out on a mass scale. Well, in China, they are. But we're no closer to really having them out on a mass scale.

Tom Chitty: Because what we've had some incidents.

Arjun Kharpal: Yeah. And while the tech's there, it's that the regulators need to be, this needs to be watertight, even these with the pilots need to be watertight?

Tom Chitty: Well, that I mean, the safety element is going to be is going to be paramount. When we talk about aircraft safety in commercial aircraft, the safety protocols checks are extensive, hence why it's very rare to have an accident on a commercial aircraft, very rare. Private aircraft's are slightly more risky, but still, there are safety checks. But these are happening. You know, that's also why, you know, it costs so much because there's so many people involved in checking every time a plane lands, going over the plane, checking all the settings checking that, you know, everything's in working order. And if eVTOLs are a several flights a day, are we going to have those safety checks happening? And that, again, is going to ramp up the cost. Because you're going to need people to do that, you know, these things are going to need to be on the ground to be them re-checked.

Arjun Kharpal: There's a lot. Yeah, there's all those practical considerations, I think that aren't necessarily being spoken about right now. I think, maybe there'll be less safety checks, than aeroplanes. I'm not sure they're that, you know, large jets have so many different parts to them, right? These almost feel, or at least they're being marketed as you kind of step in, off you go, you know, pretty easy,

Tom Chitty: Because you talk about cars, right? Yeah, you have an engine failure and a car, you pull it over to the side of the road. If you have an engine failure in an eVTOL.

Arjun Kharpal: That's why some of these models are talking about individually controlled fans or propellers

Tom Chitty: So that if one fails?

Arjun Kharpal: They use this term redundancy. So if one fails, you've got backups. And it would take a lot of them to fail to bring the aircraft down. And so there's all of those. I mean, the other thing is, this is one giant computer, basically, flying in the sky. So there does bring that element of risk in into it, you know, computers can fail, but then on the flip side, they can also be monitored remotely. And so there's all of that, too. You know, the safety elements just going to be so key. And will the public go on it?

Tom Chitty: You're leading into it beautifully

Arjun Kharpal: Would you go on it?

Tom Chitty: I think I would, obviously at a price that felt right, but right now it feels like it would be still the preserve of the uber wealthy. So yeah, but if it became something like, you know, that we have a ferry that goes down the River Thames, Uber clipper. Yeah, you know, it's, it's more expensive. It's probably the most expensive public transport you can take. But, you know, you take it once in a while. And it's a nice experience, but it's not outrageous.

Arjun Kharpal: I praised London transport earlier because I think it is very good. Transport around the rest of the country, however, is lacking. I feel like it's so expensive to get a train in the U.K. I wonder, you know, given given that, how much the cost of these this, say I wanted to go from I don't know we get London to another city to maybe Birmingham to Manchester, which actually some of these eVTOLs can do that distance. And that makes sense, right? Because it could be quicker. And you just you just kind of sit in this aircraft for a short amount of time and you're there, rather than sort of going in to like a train station, and then you know, getting on training and all that way. Those journeys these days are really expensive. So I wonder how much sort of an eVTOL would cost in comparison because it could bring some competition to the train operators, because if the train operator is already so expensive, and these eVTOL operators are going to be pricing, you know, on the premium end, but maybe that looks very similar to a train ticket. You'd opt for the eVTOL maybe.

Tom Chitty: But that may be where it's most effective and most practical as well. Because actually, if you think about going to a location within the city to then go to another location, but you've got to get to the vertiport, get on the, you know, you're waiting for a few other people to get into your eVTOL, and then land and, and the checks and whatnot. Actually, it might be quicker just to take the tube. But your to your point, actually, between cities, those are the journeys, which you know, it could be much more.

Arjun Kharpal: I can't imagine the point of them flying around a city like London, for example, or even some of the other European cities where there's public transport networks in place, I can't see the point of it. While I was in virtual reality flying over London, I was thinking like, realistically, there's tall buildings here, there's tall monuments, how are you going to operate something like this at scale across this airspace. Whilst London is like a sprawling, a large city, it's still quite tight. It's still quite packed even up in the sky, there's a lot more skyscrapers going up these days. So I'd be interested to see whether in the future what takes off, is the use really about that longer distance tthat currently we might drive to over three to four hundred miles? Or take a train? Or is it actually within cities? And I feel like, for me, what makes most sense now, and I guess it's going to depend country by country as well on their infrastructure. But for me in the U.K., for sure, it's about it's about those city to city journeys.

Tom Chitty: I know that one analyst called it the mother of all aerospace bubbles, which I think you quote on the program. Is that is that a rare dissenting voice in this? Or are there a lot of people questioning the viability of this?

Arjun Kharpal: I think, the mother of all aerospace bubbles, I think it is true in the sense that there's a lot of companies doing this. And as I mentioned earlier, not all are going to survive, there will be collapses, there will be consolidation, there will be some failures, companies that just don't quite make it who have maybe raised, you know, millions of dollars of money. That is where we're at right now. But that happens all the time with these these cycles, right? We've seen it already in electric vehicles, you know, every company trying to raise money, and some have already collapsed, not quite made it. We see it in AI, right now. Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, forming companies raising money. But that's what happens with tech cycles, when there's some hype around technology, you often see a lot of money invested, you know, venture capitalists and others betting on who's going to win, who's going to win out. But it would be very difficult for all of these companies to survive that have raised money. And so there will be collapses in that sense. But in terms of as we think through the technology, and as we think through the use, I feel like during this discussion, it's become clear that you know, there will be a market for it. But that just needs to be figured out. And there's so many hurdles here. Like, we're talking about certifications being handed out and companies doing test flights and everything. But one issue with this with any aircraft, right, this thing could get grounded to a halt. And then secondly, you know, it's public acceptance, isn't it? Would you get on one? Would you feel safe getting on one, even if, you know, you've got all the safety checks and stuff, are you going to be an early adopter? Are you not? Are you going to wait a few years see how this pans out? There's all of those questions as well. The price point, is this going to be reserved for the super wealthy, all of those things? So I think just to rightfully throw some some sort of balance and skepticism around the growth of eVTOLs, there are a lot of limiting factors and potential that I see that could pop up at any moment that could really slow down the growth of the industry. And so whilst it's very exciting, whilst it would be cool to have I think there's a lot of things that need to be worked out, from infrastructure to safety to regulation to then public acceptance and people saying, you know what, I feel safe enough to jump on one.

Tom Chitty: Before we finish, just wanted to flag the history of flying cars or you know, the 1940s, the 1950s that was sort of amazing the U.S. had their their own secret program trying to develop these, it looked like a flying saucer. So I'm sure the conspiracy theorists were loving that. And also, we can't finish this episode about flying cars and eVTOLs without talking about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the OG. And obviously, you know, a close affinity with Chitty Bang Bang.

Arjun Kharpal: That's your nickname isn't it?

Tom Chitty: Was for a time for a time for a time. I'm trying to bring that back actually. Yeah. That would be nice.

Arjun Kharpal: Nice musical.

Tom Chitty: Yeah. Yeah, it's a classic. Before we finish the episode, we have of course, got to do stat of the week, which is

Arjun Kharpal: 35.8 billion U.S. dollars, Tom.

Tom Chitty: $35.8 billion. The market value of eVTOLs in 2030.

Arjun Kharpal: Close. 2032. eVTOL market size 2032. Well, you're right. You're right, though. You're right. Just take the full credit. You basically got it.

Tom Chitty: Okay, I've got to stat the week for you. How much money do you think it costs to take the 15 minute journey in a private helicopter from Battersea in central London yet to Heathrow airport.

Arjun Kharpal: In pounds?

Tom Chitty: In pounds.To hire a six seater helicopter.

Arjun Kharpal: Six seater helicopter. Battersea to Heathrow, £350.

Tom Chitty: £2000

Arjun Kharpal: No. No. Yes. That is wild. That's almost same price as the underground here. I joke. I jest that was clearly a joke. Yeah, no, that's, that's very surprising.

Tom Chitty: Well, I've really enjoyed that. And I'm sure our listeners have and if you have any questions on eVTOLs, or you just want to give your opinions on this burgeoning industry, then please email us at beyondthevalley@cnbc.com. Thank you, Arjun.

Arjun Kharpal: Thank you, Tom.

Tom Chitty: We'll be back next week for another episode of beyond the valley. Goodbye.

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September 20, 2005: DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, director of the Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, discusses the possibility of an avian flu pandemic with anchor Bill Moyers.

BILL MOYERS: With me now is Dr. Anthony Fauci. He's been with the National Institutes of Health for 30 years now and is presently the director of the Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That means he's the commander in chief of the research to find vaccines that protect us against such major threats as flu and HIV/AIDS. Welcome to ''Wide Angle.''

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Thank you. Good to be here.

BILL MOYERS: What would you like for Americans to know about avian flu?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, Americans need to know that it is a threat, a real threat. It is an unpredictable infection, a pandemic flu, which really means a kind of flu to which the American public or the whole world, the global population has not been exposed to before. It is very different from the seasonal flu.

It has the potential to be a major public health threat, but it is unpredictable. So you have to walk that balance of being prepared for something that may not come this year, may not come next year, but sooner or later knowing the history of how pandemic flus evolve over a period of time, over decades and decades, it will occur. So we need to be prepared.

BILL MOYERS: When you saw the film did you think, ''This could happen here?''

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, I certainly think it can happen here and that's the reason why we really have to be very prepared. What is going on in Asia right now is the right constellation of events that increase the probability of there being a pandemic flu. We can't give you a number''

BILL MOYERS: Right.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: ''and say, ''There's a ten or a 15 or a 20 or an 80 percent chance that there would be a pandemic flu which can spread readily from person to person.'' But the factors that are in place now in Asia that we saw on the film, the literally tens of millions of chickens in countries like Vietnam and Thailand and places like that that are infected. And the jumping of species, where it can jump, albeit inefficiently, from chickens to humans, the way it did in the film, and the very inefficient spread, very rarely, it's only occurred in a couple of cases, of human to human, it's evolving in a way that is making the threat more and more.

BILL MOYERS: What's the difference between'' just to clarify some terms '-- what's the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You can have an epidemic in a state. You can have it in a region. You can have it in a country where the critical level of disease passes a certain threshold and we call that an epidemic threshold. When you're saying pandemic you're talking about that throughout the world. So a pandemic, we have a pandemic of HIV/AIDS now in the world. Virtually every country. A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

BILL MOYERS: I lost a grandfather in the great flu epidemic of 1918. My wife lost a grandfather in that same epidemic. But it's correct to call that an epidemic, not a pandemic?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: No. The 1918 was indeed a pandemic.

BILL MOYERS: Really.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: It was the mother of all pandemic flus, really. It was one of the worst in history.

BILL MOYERS: So could you say if avian flu spreads as the film suggested it might and that you are warning us against, that it could be greater than the epidemic of 1918, the flu epidemic, pandemic?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, let me put it into some perspective. 1918 was a total public health catastrophe. There were 20 to 40-plus million people worldwide infected and a half a million to 750,000 in the United States. We have lesser pandemic flus in 1957 and then again in 1968.

The one in 1957 had 70-plus thousand people died in the United States. In a regular, seasonal year, about 36,000 people die. Had less in 1968. So to have a pandemic flu it doesn't always have to be a catastrophe like in 1918. The problem with a pandemic potential is that it's unpredictable. So we're watching very closely what is going on in Southeast Asia now, and we're hoping that this virus doesn't assume the capability of efficiently and in a sustained manner going from human to human.

If it does and the genetic changes will allow it to do that, we can't predict whether it'll turn into a 1918 type or a 1968 type. But the fact that we can't predict it means we need to be prepared for the worst. So when you hear public health officials very carefully scrutinizing what's going on in Southeast Asia and saying, ''We really better be prepared because the potential of this is enormous.''

BILL MOYERS: What is the worst scenario?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, the worst scenario is that this virus that's circulating right now in Southeast Asia maintains its mortality rate. Right now there have been 112 cases in people with 57 deaths. So that's about a 50 percent mortality.

BILL MOYERS: And that's high?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: That's really high. Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

What would likely would happen is as the virus genetically evolves to become more efficient in spreading from person to person or from chicken to person, it is likely that its virulence or its ability to kill, its mortality, would be less and less. Because viruses evolve in a way to self-propagate themselves. It's to no advantage of a virus to kill almost everybody it infects.

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself. What you need, the right ingredients, is something that spreads very rapidly but has a degree of mortality that's significant enough to cause a lot of deaths. So the worst scenario is that this evolves in two ways. It evolves in a way that it spreads very, very rapidly, and it keeps enough of its virulence to cause a lot of damage.

BILL MOYERS: Sounds like a smart virus.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, you tend to think of microbes as thinking. They don't. They just genetically evolve in a way that selects for their own self-preservation. And that's what you mean when a microbe, in this case a virus, evolves. It's smart when it does that really, really well.

BILL MOYERS: Have you seen the microbe?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Oh yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Of the avian flu?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Oh yeah.

BILL MOYERS: You've actually looked at it.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You look at it in an electron microscope. It looks like a little particle. It's got a little surrounding coat on the outside. It looks in many respects to be unitiated like any virus. They're very, very, very small particles. You know, bacteria you look [at] under a regular microscope. You could actually see them with certain stains. When you have a virus like influenza, you have to look at it under a very special microscope called an electron microscope.

BILL MOYERS: Until the flu vaccine that I take now that I'm at that age, I used to get regularly '-- almost every year I'd come down with the flu.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right.

BILL MOYERS: I would go to bed for three days, take some aspirin and drink lots of liquid and I'd be up and around in three or four days. What's the difference between this flu and that flu?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, the fundamental difference when you say a potentially pandemic flu is one to which the population of the world has never been exposed before. Let me give you some examples. We call this H5N1. Flus are designated by two major proteins, the hemagglutinin which is the H and the neuraminidase which is the N.

And it gets certain numbers. The flu that you and I got exposed to for the last several years happens to be an H3N2. And now I'll tell you how it's different than H5N1. If we have a little bit of a change from last year to this year, or from two years ago to the next year, it has still been H3N2. It's the Fujian strain or the California strain or the Panama strain.

So that when we get infected on a given year, even though we may get infected and sick, we still have some baseline immunity from either previous exposures in previous years or previous vaccinations. So even though we may get infected and we may get sick, our body is primed to ultimately suppress that virus. When you get H5 and N1, the H5N1 no one has ever experienced before.

So when that virus gets to your body, you don't have any prime baseline immunity to come in and suppress it. So it can really do some significant damage in you before your immune system builds itself up enough to ultimately eliminate it. That's the fundamental difference between a pandemic flu that you've never experienced before and a seasonal flu where you experience some modification of that virus.

BILL MOYERS: Right. So it is, if I may use this analogy, it is a smart virus but the body is smart too.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And figures out how to respond and then the virus figures out how to respond to the body's response?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, that's what it does when it changes. Like for example, this season you have a certain type of an H3N2. As it circulates, it starts to do what we call drift. It changes enough that the body doesn't recognize it as exactly something it saw before, which is the fundamental reason why each year almost invariably you have to change your vaccine just a little bit.

BILL MOYERS: Is this an apt analogy to say that we've never had a hurricane like Katrina before? So that when Katrina hit, we had prepared for hurricanes we had experienced but not one like this.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, yeah. And all analogies have their faults''

BILL MOYERS: I know.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: ''but that's a reasonable one; that it's something that the body has not experienced before. The body was waiting for the regular flu. Kind of knows how to handle it seasonally. Then you get a flu that it's never experienced before.

BILL MOYERS: Do we have a vaccine that will work against avian flu?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: We have been testing '-- most recently a vaccine made from an H5N1 that we isolated from an individual in Vietnam, actually. And we made what we call the seed reference virus for this particular vaccine. We contracted with some companies. Made a vaccine for a clinical trial, and we've been able to show that this vaccine, when given to individuals, induces an immune response that would be predictive, that it would protect if the person were exposed. Now the trick is going to be to make enough of it to be able to have available for those who might need it.

BILL MOYERS: How much of it do we have right now?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: We only have a couple of million doses. We need to get up to at least several tens of millions of doses and ultimately '--

BILL MOYERS: 10, 20 million, 30 million?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, no, probably even more than that.

BILL MOYERS: Really?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right now for example on a regular flu season year, just last year we were aiming at vaccinating 100 million people.

BILL MOYERS: Including me?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. This year because of the problem we had with the contamination of some of the stores last year, we probably will get somewhere around 70 or so. You do somewhere between 80 and 100 million people. When you develop a new vaccine like this, you have to balance the capability of making vaccine for the seasonal flu at the same time that you're going to insert a new one in there.

So the ultimate goal is to make enough vaccine for everyone who might need it.

BILL MOYERS: So how long would that take?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, that takes many months. It takes several months to do if you're doing nothing else. And that's the reason why one of the issues that comes up when you talk about pandemic flu is that the vaccine development and production enterprise in this country and worldwide is very fragile.

BILL MOYERS: Why is it? You're saying we don't really have the capacity to produce it fast enough?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Precisely. We don't have that because the vaccine industry is fragile. It is not a big money maker. Flu in this country and worldwide is seasonal. It's unpredictable. It changes each year. The production of a flu vaccine is something that has risk. You require chickens, chicken eggs. You grow in the eggs.

It's not something that if you're a drug company you look at this and you say, ''This is what I really want to do because this is going to make a lot of money.'' As opposed to investing in a blockbuster drug that you know if you hit gold with that, you really do very well. So what we in the federal government need to do, is we need to work with the pharmaceutical companies and help to incentivize them to turn their attention and their resources to being able to have the capability of what we call a surge capacity. Of being able to make 100 or more million doses if we need it within a period of a few months.

BILL MOYERS: Incentivize means capital.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: How much?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, we need to get them to invest and we need to invest with them. We need more plants. We need plants in the United States. We're likely going to be involved in some liability protection for them, some tax incentives for them. We've got to get them more involved in this process of making vaccines.

BILL MOYERS: Have you run the numbers? I mean what let's say you make '--

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: In order to produce hundreds of millions of doses, you're talking about a couple of billion dollars to do that. Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And do you run into this problem the people say, ''Well, you know, it didn't happen so it was a waste of money. They cried wolf '-- in this case bird.''

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Exactly. A big problem.

BILL MOYERS: It is.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: And you have to get past that because if you're concerned about that criticism you'll never be prepared. We're going to assume that the worst will happen in our preparedness, in our vaccine development, in our vaccine production, in developing and stock piling anti-influenza, anti-viral drugs.

If it doesn't happen, you're right. There will be criticism to say, ''See? You invested all that money and nothing happened.'' But you can't take that chance with the health of the American public. You have to make that investment and you have to be ready.

BILL MOYERS: Ready. You know, we were not prepared for 9/11. We were not prepared for the ravages of Katrina. What makes you think we're going to prepare for this?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Because we're on our way to doing that. There's a commitment that certainly the administration '-- the President is committed to getting us prepared for a pandemic flu. He's following it very carefully. Secretary Leavitt of the Department of Health and Human Services, [it] is of highest priority for him in his department. So this is something that at the very highest levels of our government from the White House to the Departments to the Congress are very concerned about this.

BILL MOYERS: Do we have a pretty good idea of how the flu gets translated from the birds to humans?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. No, it's pretty simple. When the chickens get sick, they get sick in the same way we get sick. They start to get secretions, saliva. They cough and they get a bunch of other things, including neurological abnormalities. But when they're sick and they start coughing, as it were, the spray of their secretions gets on the nose, the mouth, the eyes of the people who were taking care of them. Now it's very inefficiently spread but there are people as we saw '--

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean inefficiently spread?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Inefficiently. In other words, a lot of people are exposed to a lot of sick chickens. And yet a relatively few of them actually get infected. There have only been 112 documented infections with 57 deaths.

BILL MOYERS: Well, that would make me take a deep breath and say relax, wouldn't it?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, you know, except that if the virus mutates and evolves it can pretty easily be able to make that a much more efficient process. Efficient from the chicken to the human and efficient from human to human. As we saw in the film, it was a rarity to have those unfortunate people get infected. Because there are a lot of people who were exposed to infected chickens in Vietnam and in Thailand and in places like that. And yet there have been relatively few people who've gotten an infection. You don't want to take too much solace in that because just a little bit of a change in that virus can make that efficiency go greater.

BILL MOYERS: What do we know about how it gets transmitted, if it gets transmitted, from a human to another human?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Classic influenza transmissibility which is by aerosol spread.

BILL MOYERS: A sneeze?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Exactly. Sneeze or material, saliva or material, from your nose or your mouth. You get it on your hands, you shake hands, you touch someone. They go like that, rub their eye, rub their mouth and that's how influenza every year in a season, you can either sneeze on somebody, which is an aerosol, or you can get it on your hands and contaminate by shaking hands. Which is the reason why during the flu season we say, ''Wash your hands as much as you possibly can.''

BILL MOYERS: Between the threat of terrorism and the threat of Asian flu I'm just going to stay home.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well '--

BILL MOYERS: No, I'm serious.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Unfortunately '--

BILL MOYERS: No, I mean '--

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: '-- you can't do that.

BILL MOYERS: This is such a simple question, I'm almost embarrassed to ask it. But let's say somebody sneezes on me. What are the symptoms I watch for avian flu? I know about the others, the regular flu. I know that I'll start sniffing and I get '--

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: It's similar. First of all you can distinguish it from a standard cold because you will get aches, you will get a high fever, and then you will start to get respiratory symptoms, difficulty breathing, coughing. And to the point '-- if it becomes seriously a pulmonary compromising disease the way we saw in the film '-- you remember when they showed those X-rays of that young man and the young woman? A normal X-ray you see black. That's air. The lungs are healthy. You could see right through it because there's air being moved. When it got white, a little bit on one side of the lung, and then over a period of the next day. Two days later the whole lung whited out.

That means that that virus was replicating very rapidly in the lung and was destroying lung tissue. And the young man, even after he recovered, he was severely compromised because of what the virus did. So the virus gets in '-- you get fever, you get aches, you really feel totally run down and then you start to get symptoms that may be related generally to the pulmonary tree, namely your lungs.

BILL MOYERS: Which means you would start hurting in your lungs?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Difficulty breathing.BILL MOYERS: How would you know that the pandemic has started?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You'll know. What will happen, and we hope it never happens, but if it does, what will happen is that you'll start to see cases like we saw in the film, but not just isolated cases. There will be spread from person to person so that that man in his home, when he was sick, he would give it to his father and his sister and they would give it to their friends. And you start to see major clustering of cases. What we are seeing is isolated cases. When they start clustering and spreading throughout the community, then invariably you've reached the point where the efficiency of the spread is such that it can go throughout the country, throughout the world.

BILL MOYERS: And there's no barrier you can use to encircle that particular '--

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, you can.

BILL MOYERS: '-- geographic location?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: And again, this is a very important point, because it is unlikely that if the virus develops the capability of going more efficiently from person to person or from chicken to person, that's not going to go from really inefficient overnight to being spectacularly efficient. It's going to gradually evolve in its efficiency. That's the way viruses usually do. So it isn't on a Thursday, it's totally inefficient, and all of a sudden on a Friday, it spreads wildly.

When that happens, hopefully we'll have time to do just what you are suggesting. Mainly if there are a couple of cases, a cluster of cases, be it in Vietnam or China, wherever, that you can go in, isolate those cases, treat the patient as well as the contacts of the patient and start vaccinating people in that region. Kind of getting the spark or the initial lighting of a forest fire and trying to put it out.

However, once it starts to spread outside of the community '-- and unfortunately that's a very big risk in this era of jet travel '-- once it gets out of the contained area then it's going to be very, very difficult to put the little fires out. Then that's when you get a pandemic.

BILL MOYERS: You fellows did a really good job, I'm pleased to say, when SARS struck.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: You know, we were all frightened to death from SARS, particularly those of us who know people who were adopting children in China, from China or other parts of Asia at that time. You did such a good job with SARS that many of us sort of take a deep breath and say, ''Well, if they do see these signs, they'll get to it.''

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Be careful. And the reason we have to be careful is that the analogy between SARS and influenza is quite imperfect. Influenza is spread easily by aerosolize. SARS, with some exceptions, is spread by droplet. So that in order for me to infect you if I had SARS, I had to really be coughing and get visible droplets to contaminate you, is the usual way it's spread. With influenza you can get infected from me even before I start to feel sick because there's a period of 24, maybe even 48 hours where I'm incubating the influenza. And just the normal amount of spray that goes back and forth when people talk to each other, you can actually get infected.

BILL MOYERS: When we just talk this close?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. What people don't realize ½ it isn't particularly aesthetically pleasing ½ but when people talk to each other, if you were able to get the right angle of a light, you'd probably see very, very, very fine little droplets go back and forth sometimes. And that's what's called aerosolize. And then even an inadvertent cough that you don't even notice can do it. So it's very easy to spread influenza where it was relatively inefficient to spread the SARS virus. They're really qualitatively quite different.

BILL MOYERS: Alright. How do we think about avian flu in regard to HIV/AIDS?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: They're totally different.

BILL MOYERS: But in terms of the potential victims. I mean how many people have died from HIV/AIDS?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Over 23 million.

BILL MOYERS: So could avian flu kill more people than that?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. They're very different because one, as you know, is a sexually transmitted and blood transmitted disease, and one is a disease that's transmitted by casual contact, just by talking or sneezing or shaking hands.

BILL MOYERS: That is right.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. The potential in the worst case scenario can be devastating, which is the reason why even though there are relatively few cases in Southeast Asia, why we're taking this so seriously. And better err on the side of taking it more seriously than people would think than just ignoring it and then really being in trouble.

BILL MOYERS: But you know we're up against a phenomenon of nature. Birds fly.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: That's another whole story and that is the reason why this is not going to all of a sudden overnight go away. The reason is that it is being propagated by migratory fowl that have flyways that cannot only contaminate one country to another that's proximal to each other, like Cambodia will contaminate Laos. You get chickens in Cambodia, they're infected, ducks fly from Cambodia to Laos or from Cambodia to Thailand or to Vietnam and they cross-contaminate each other because the fowl get infected and they don't necessarily die.

For example, not all ducks get sick when they get H5N1. So they can spread it. But now what we're seeing, is that migratory birds like geese and other birds that get involved in transcontinental flyways, are capable of spreading H5N1. So that's the reason why we saw in the summer of 2005, when we saw what was confined to a few countries in Southeast Asia, we began to see it in China. We began to see it in Siberia, in Russia, in Kazakhstan. So that the contamination gets wider and wider and that's why the people in Europe are concerned that their flocks are going to be contaminated.

BILL MOYERS: Are any of those countries better prepared than we are?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: I don't think so. We're the only ones that are pretty much into a vaccine development. We have a candidate that is inducing a good response. We've contracted for a significant number of doses. We're stockpiling. Other countries are relying maybe a little bit more heavily on drugs, anti-viral drugs, than they are on vaccine. But I don't think there's any country that's better prepared than we are. There are some that are prepared, doing well, but I don't think you could say that this country is clearly more prepared than we are. Not at all.

BILL MOYERS: We're coping now with, of course, the aftermath of Katrina, billions of dollars. Terrible devastation. We're constantly spending money on the combating of terrorism. I mean a lot of people are watching. Where will we be a year from that? A year from this September. Where will we be in the number of vaccines we have available?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: It's not necessarily the number of vaccines but the quantity of vaccine doses that we have.

BILL MOYERS: Alright. Where will we be a year from now? We've got 2.3 million now you say.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. We have two million, which actually with the dosage changes translates into less than that. We hope in the next year to get close to 20 million '-- and then in the next two or three years, even ratchet that up even more.

BILL MOYERS: The success of the Public Health Service is hard to judge because if you do your job well we never know why you needed the money.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Exactly. Exactly. That's something you have to live with. But it's a reality. That your job is successful if nothing happens or if you put out a fire and there's no catastrophe. You're measured by what happens or doesn't happen. It's a failure, theoretically, if you have a disease that got out of control. But sometimes, even the best preparation doesn't necessarily make you immune to that.

BILL MOYERS: After watching the film and talking to you, I don't think I'll sleep tonight. But do you sleep at night knowing this responsibility is on your shoulders?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yes. We separate, you know, an affective emotional response to something that is threatening and frightening to the job you have to do. You've concentrated on the job that you have to do. There are so many unknowns. You can't get fixated on fear and concern. You've got to say, ''I'm going to do everything in my power not only as an individual public health person but as an agency.'' The Public Health Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, other agencies that are involved with this, do the best that you can, even though the threat is considerable and the consequences of a pandemic can be devastating.

BILL MOYERS: Did you, as a public health official, learn anything from Katrina that you can apply to this situation?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah, you always learn lessons when you see things that turn out to be catastrophes. And the situation that we feel very strongly about is that you've got to be prepared for even the completely unexpected. And that's why whenever I talk about pandemic flu I say it's entirely unpredictable. And the Katrina situation was something that just was worse than anyone ever expected.

BILL MOYERS: Now there were warnings you know. People kept saying, ''If it reaches level two it's going to be bad. If it reaches level three½'' Is there a level three in avian flu? Levee three?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. Right. Right. What is the levee of influenza? And the levee of influenza I think, is the issue of getting a vaccine that matches the microbe that's circulating, and being able to produce it in quantities enough that when you do have a clear indication that you're having a pandemic-like spread, that you could scale that up and get the American public protected within a period of a few months.

BILL MOYERS: But there's nothing they can do unless the vaccine is ready.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right. Well.

BILL MOYERS: We're a long way from that.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. And what we're doing, and this is coming from the very highest levels of government, is engaging with the pharmaceutical companies to really put a full-court press on to develop the capabilities so that we will be able to make hundreds of millions of doses within a period of a few months '-- from the time we know we have an issue to go ahead and do it.

BILL MOYERS: So they would have the capacity but not the command yet.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right. The capacity. And then when you turn on that light and push that button, you go and you develop it within a period of a couple of months. We don't have that capacity yet. But we're on our way to trying to get it.

BILL MOYERS: What should I do in this regard? What do you want me to watch out for?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: I just think stay informed and help inform others about tracking this, watching the evolution, if there is an evolution of it, staying well educated on it. And when the time comes to move in the sense of getting people vaccinated, to be amenable to that and to participate in that.

BILL MOYERS: How can people find out more from the National Institutes of Health?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, we and the CDC also '--

BILL MOYERS: Centers for Disease Control.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Yeah. The Centers for Disease Control is a very big player in this, in surveillance and letting the American public know where we stand. It's very easy. They have a wonderful website.

BILL MOYERS: What is it? Do you know?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: It's www.cdc.gov. You click on there and they have an influenza '-- a pandemic flu '-- subcomponent on their website. You get all the information you need.

BILL MOYERS: So the first thing I can do is go to www '--

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: '-- .CDC.gov.

BILL MOYERS: And it'll give me some basic information about it.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: It will give you the fundamental, basic information.

BILL MOYERS: When you saw that film, did you think that what you posted there, what CDC's posted there, is pretty consistent with the reality that's happened?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: But CDC, to their credit, is all over what's going on in Southeast Asia. They have people there on the ground and collaborating. The NIH, my area of responsibility, we have scientists who are working with the Vietnamese, to try and take a very careful monitoring of what we call the molecular evolution of the virus, because remember, in its present state, this virus is inefficient in going from chicken to human, and very inefficient from human to human. You periodically sample the virus to see how it's evolving and you can get a big heads up if it starts to change its molecular confirmation, as it were, its molecular makeup, that might predict that it's now going to be more efficient. So, not only do you have the CDC surveillance as to what's going on there, but you have scientists who are continually sampling the viruses.

BILL MOYERS: If the virus is steadily changing, if every experience it endures creates a new virus in a way, changes its identity, changes its appeal, how can you produce the vaccine?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well that's a very good point and that's the reason why it is not only just isolating a virus and making a vaccine, it's building up the capacity to surge up when you get in your hand what's the real culprit. For example, it may be that the virus that's there right now, even as it changes to become more efficient in its spread, doesn't change so much as to elude or escape protection from the vaccine. But it is entirely conceivable that as it does evolve it will elude or escape protection from the vaccine. But if you're building the capacity to make pandemic flu vaccine, as we are doing, and the virus changes enough and starts spreading from human to human, and you say that's the culprit, that's the one we want to make a vaccine against, you plug that into your system and if you have the surge capacity to really ramp it up, within a period of six months, you could probably get enough vaccine that you need for this country.

BILL MOYERS: So it's not a situation that you could produce 50 million vials and put them in the cold storage and just take them out and use them?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: It might be. It might be, but you got to be ready to move. You've got to be nimble. So we are assuming now, we're going to make a significant amount, not necessarily three hundred million doses. We're going to make a significant amount in partnership with the companies of the vaccine that we already have against the H5N1 that is now circulating in Southeast Asia. As we do that, we're building the capacity so that if and when it changes, we can then take the new virus that's evolved, and plug that into the vaccine manufacturing system to be able to make doses of that vaccine.

BILL MOYERS: You scared the '-- boy I can't say that on public broadcasting'... You scared me, but you also make me feel better because I know that you and your team are on top of this. But I have to come back as a journalist with the reality and say we knew the terrorists were coming. There were plenty of intelligence warnings. I did a broadcast three years ago that anticipated what's happened in Katrina.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right.

BILL MOYERS: Nothing happened. We Americans seem to wait until they strike Pearl Harbor or they strike the World Trade Center or the flu epidemic takes us down.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: We have our eye on this terrorist, and nature can be the worst terrorist. We're watching that virus. It may not be the virus that is the cause of the next pandemic. It may dead end itself or we may have something else a year from now that becomes a pandemic flu. But the one thing that we can promise you and the American public '-- not necessarily there's 100 percent guarantee we'll be able to stop this in its tracks '-- but the one thing we can guarantee is that we have our eye on and we're following it very carefully.

BILL MOYERS: So the best case scenario is that you spend $2-3 billion to produce this vaccine and a sneeze is just a sneeze.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Exactly. Would that we waste, as they say, and '-- and not really waste '-- would it be the best thing that we spend money to have a vaccine for pandemic flu that never happened? That would be a great outcome as far as I'm concerned.

BILL MOYERS: Well, suppose the worst case scenario happens and a pandemic strikes. What would be the total impact, the overall impact on our economy, on our education, on the workplace?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: If we have a pandemic that is truly a pandemic, that is truly a devastating pandemic with tens of millions of people getting sick and hundreds of thousands of people dying, we will have a situation in this country. And again hopefully it will never come to that, and we'll have the countermeasures, the vaccines and the drugs to prevent that. But if that happens, the effect broadly on society is multifaceted and potentially devastating. Because when you have such illness, you can rapidly overcome and supercede the capability of your hospitals and your clinics to be able to take care of patients.

You have an economic issue, not only an economic issue of work lost from people who are sick, but the communications and transportation among countries might be closed down or broken down. Normal healthcare systems will strain under this terribly. So there are so many implications '-- economic, healthcare interactions, global considerations when countries throughout the world also have a devastating impact.

Take a look at what happened with SARS to Canada and SARS in Hong Kong. I mean, just what turned out to be not a lot of deaths and relatively few cases had an enormous negative impact on the economy in Canada, and Toronto particularly, as well as in Hong Kong and in China. So when you have a disease with the potential of the pandemic flu, the consequences go well beyond the purely health issues.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, people died and people got sick, from the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, but the whole infrastructure of the region was totally wiped out.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right.

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that a true pandemic of avian flu could do what happened there in a widespread area?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, what happened there was destruction of existing infrastructure. When you have a pandemic flu it would be more likely to overwhelm the existing infrastructure rather than destroy it, yes.

BILL MOYERS: In your 30 years as a public health physician, have you seen anything as scary as this?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Again, I tend not to describe things as scary, but as really challenging and potentially devastating.

BILL MOYERS: Bigger threat than most?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Well, HIV is a big one. That's something that even though it has a well defined, more limited way of spreading than influenza, which spreads very easily, if you look at the impact of over 20 million people having died already, 40 million people living with HIV, I would think that HIV right now is something that trumps everything.

The potential for a pandemic flu is there and the implications are really fuzzy. Because you don't know whether it can be something like we had in 1968, which serious as it was, it was not a public health catastrophe, or if it's going to be an 1918. Sitting here talking with you, Bill, we can't predict what's going to happen. But since the potential for something very devastating is there, I would say that it's something that I take very, very seriously.

BILL MOYERS: It's scary just thinking that a conversation like this where we're feet apart, or when I shake your hand and say good night that that moment could become a fatal moment.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Respiratory diseases that have the potential to kill are indeed frightening.

BILL MOYERS: Dr. Anthony Fauci, thank you very much for joining us on ''Wide Angle.''

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Good to be here.

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New Havana Syndrome evidence revealed

Havana Syndrome evidence suggests who may be responsible for mysterious brain injuries 26:51 This report is the result of a joint investigation by 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel

A lead U.S. military investigator examining reports of what has become known as Havana Syndrome told 60 Minutes he believes U.S. officials are being attacked by Russia and that the official threshold to prove it was set impossibly high.

Greg Edgreen, a now-retired Army lieutenant colonel who ran the Pentagon investigation into what officials refer to as "anomalous health incidents," said the bar for proof was set so high because the country doesn't want to face some very hard truths, like the existence of possible failures to protect Americans.

"Unfortunately I can't get into specifics, based on the classification," Edgreen said. "But I can tell you at a very early stage, I started to focus on Moscow."

Statements of White House, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence to 60 Minutes A 2023 government report deemed it " very unlikely " that a foreign adversary was behind the mysterious brain injuries suffered by U.S. national security officials, yet more than 100 Americans have symptoms scientists say could be caused by a beam of microwaves or acoustic ultrasound. Victims are frustrated that the government publicly doubts an adversary is targeting Americans. The ongoing, five-year 60 Minutes investigation has now uncovered new evidence pointing toward Russia.

Are we being attacked?White House staff, CIA officers , FBI agents, and military officers and their families are among those who believe they were wounded by a secret weapon firing a high-energy beam of microwaves or ultrasound.

Edgreen said the officers targeted were top performers.

"And consistently there was a Russia nexus," he said. "There was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well."

Greg Edgreen and Scott Pelley 60 Minutes Last year, President Biden attended the NATO summit in Lithuania after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Multiple sources told 60 Minutes that a high-level Department of Defense official was struck during the summit. Edgreen shared what the reported incident meant to him.

"It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don't face this head on, the problem is going to get worse," Edgreen said.

60 Minutes has agreed to withhold the last name of "Carrie," a Havana Syndrome victim who is still an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. Her case also points to Russia.

Havana Syndrome in Vietnam: Possible Russian role in attack on Americans, according to new evidence She said she was home in Florida in 2021 when she was hit by a crippling force.

"And bam, inside my right ear, it was like a dentist drilling on steroids. That feeling when it gets too close to your eardrum? It's like that, times 10," she said.

At the same time, she said, the battery in her phone began to swell until it broke the case. Finally, she passed out on a couch. Because of chest pain, she was checked by a cardiologist, and then returned to duty. For months, she complained to her colleagues of memory issues and problems multitasking.

"My baseline changed," she said. "I was not the same person."

60 Minutes has agreed to withhold the last name of "Carrie," a Havana Syndrome victim who is still an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. 60 Minutes She spoke with the FBI's permission but wasn't allowed to talk about the investigations she was working on when she was hit. 60 Minutes learned from other sources, one of them involved Russian Vitalii Kovalev, who was caught speeding in a Ford Mustang near Key West, Florida in 2020. After a high-speed car chase, a search of the car found notes related to bank accounts along with a device capable of erasing the car's computerized data, including its GPS records. There was also a Russian passport found.

The investigation into KovalevWhat 60 Minutes has learned along with investigative partner Christo Grozev, a journalist for The Insider, an investigative magazine by Russian exiles, suggests that Kovalev was a Russian spy.

Kovalev studied in a military institute, learning about radio electronics, said Grozev, who's renowned for his experience unmasking Russian plots. After two years working in a military institute, Kovalev suddenly became a chef in New York and Washington.

"It is not an easy job to just leave that behind. Once you're in the military, and you've been trained, and the Ministry of Defense has invested in you, you remain at their beck and call for the rest of your life," Grozev said.

The 5-year investigation into Havana Syndrome It's not clear what Kovalev might have been up to, but sources told 60 Minutes that, over months, he spent 80 hours being interviewed by "Carrie," who sources said had investigated several Russian spies for the FBI.

Kovalev received 30 months in jail and, after serving his time, went back to Russia in 2022, ignoring American warnings he was in danger because he'd spent so much time with the FBI. Grozev uncovered a death certificate from last year, which says Kovalev was killed at the front in Ukraine.

"One theory is that he was sent there in order for him to be disposed of," Grozev said.

Christo Grozev is a journalist for The Insider, an investigative magazine by Russian exiles. 60 Minutes Mark Zaid, "Carrie's" attorney who holds a security clearance, has more than two dozen clients suffering symptoms of Havana Syndrome. He said victims include members of the CIA, State Department and FBI.

"The one thread that I know of with the FBI personnel that is common among most, if not all, of my clients other than the family members connected to the employee, was they were all doing something relating to Russia," Zaid said.

Russian intelligence unit 29155If it is Russia, Grozev believes Russian intelligence unit 29155 is involved. Grozev has a long track record of uncovering Russian documents and reveals he found one that may link the 29155 unit to a directed energy weapon.

It's a piece of accounting. A 29155 officer received a bonus for work on "potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons..."

"It's the closest to a receipt you can have for this," Grozev said.

There's also evidence 29155 may have been present in Tbilisi, Georgia when Americans reported incidents there. Grozev believes members of 29155 were there to facilitate, supervise, or possibly personally implement attacks on American officials using an acoustic weapon.

Sources have told 60 Minutes that an investigation centered on Russian Albert Averyanov, whose name appears on travel manifests and phone records alongside known members of 29155. He's also the son of the unit's commander.

Incidents began in Tbilisi the day after a phone call, which was intercepted. Sources said a man on the call asked in Russian: "Is it supposed to have blinking green lights?" and "should I leave it on all night?"

The next day, a U.S. official, their spouse, and their child were hit. That same week, the wife of a Justice Department official, who asked "60 Minutes" to withhold her name over safety concerns, was blindsided by a sound in her laundry room in Tbilisi on Oct. 7, 2021.

"And it just pierced my ears, came in my left side, felt like it came through the window, into my left ear," she said.

She had a piercing headache and projectile vomited.

Afterward, she looked at the security camera and spotted a vehicle outside she didn't recognize. There was also a man nearby. 60 Minutes sent a photo of Averyanov to the woman, who said it "absolutely" looks like the man she spotted outside.

"And when I received this photo, I had a visceral reaction," she said. "It made me feel sick. I cannot absolutely say for certainty that it is this man, but I can tell you that even to this day, looking at him makes me feel that same visceral reaction. And I can absolutely say that this looks like the man that I saw in the street."

Grozev found Averyanov's phone was turned off during the Tbilisi incidents, and sources say there's evidence someone in Tbilisi logged into Averyanov's personal email during this time. Grozev believes this was most likely Averyanov himself'--placing him in the city.

Has there been a cover-up?Despite incidents like the ones in Tbilisi, the official U.S. intelligence assessment released last year found that it was "very unlikely" a foreign adversary is responsible. The report did acknowledge that some intelligence agencies have only "low" or "moderate" confidence in that conclusion.

This month, the National Institutes of Health reported results of brain scans on patients with symptoms. NIH said there's no evidence of physical damage. The medical science of so-called anomalous health incidents remains vigorously debated. For its part, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says the injuries suffered by victims are probably the result of "preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses and environmental factors."

Attorney Mark Zaid 60 Minutes But Zaid, who's representing more than two dozen anomalous health incident clients, said he doesn't believe the entire story is in the U.S. intelligence assessment. Zaid said he knows of classified information that undermines or contradicts what's been said publicly.

"There is, in my view, without a doubt, evidence of a cover up. Now, some of that cover up is not necessarily that, 'oh, we found a weapon,'" Zaid said. "What I've seen more so is, 'we see lines of inquiry that would take us potentially to answers we don't want to have to deal with, so we're not going to explore any of those avenues.'"

As with all spy stories, much is classified and what remains is circumstantial. None of the witnesses 60 Minutes spoke with wanted to come forward, but they all felt compelled to shine a light on what they see as a war of shadows '-- a war America may not be winning.

"If this is what we've seen with the hundreds of cases of anomalous health incidents, I can assure that this has become probably Putin's biggest victory," Grozev said. "In his own mind this has been Russia's biggest victory against the West."

Statements from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the White House, and the FBIIn response to inquiries from 60 Minutes, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred to the Intelligence Community's Annual Threat Assessment commentary on anomalous health incidents. The assessment was released earlier this month and states:

"We continue to closely examine anomalous health incidents (AHIs), particularly in areas we have identified as requiring additional research and analysis. Most IC agencies have concluded that it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs. IC agencies have varying confidence levels because we still have gaps given the challenges collecting on foreign adversaries'--as we do on many issues involving them. As part of its review, the IC identified critical assumptions surrounding the initial AHIs reported in Cuba from 2016 to 2018, which framed the IC's understanding of this phenomenon, but were not borne out by subsequent medical and technical analysis. In light of this and the evidence that points away from a foreign adversary, causal mechanism, or unique syndromes linked to AHIs, IC agencies assess those symptoms reported by U.S. personnel probably were the result of factors that did not involve a foreign adversary. These findings do not call into question the very real experiences and symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported. We continue to prioritize our work on such incidents, allocating resources and expertise across the government, pursuing multiple lines of inquiry and seeking information to fill the gaps we have identified."

In response to questions from 60 Minutes, a White House spokesperson responded:

"At the start of the Biden-Harris Administration and again following the 2023 Intelligence Community assessment, the White House has directed departments and agencies across the federal government to prioritize investigations into the cause of AHIs and to examine reports thoroughly; to ensure that U.S. Government personnel and their families who report AHIs receive the support and timely access to medical care that they need; and to take reports of AHIs seriously and treat personnel with respect and compassion. The Biden-Harris administration continues to emphasize the importance of prioritizing efforts to comprehensively examine the effects and potential causes of AHIs."

In response to questions from 60 Minutes, an FBI spokesperson responded:

"The issue of Anomalous Health Incidents is a top priority for the FBI, as the protection, health and well-being of our employees and colleagues across the federal government is paramount. We will continue to work alongside our partners in the intelligence community as part of the interagency effort to determine how we can best protect our personnel. The FBI takes all U.S. government personnel who report symptoms seriously. In keeping with this practice, the FBI has messaged its workforce on how to respond if they experience an AHI, how to report an incident, and where they can receive medical evaluations for symptoms or persistent effects."

In: Russia FBI Havana Syndrome Scott Pelley Scott Pelley, one of the most experienced and awarded journalists today, has been reporting stories for "60 Minutes" since 2004. The 2023-24 season is his 20th on the broadcast. Scott has won half of all major awards earned by "60 Minutes" during his tenure at the venerable CBS newsmagazine.