Iran has further increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels, according to a confidential report on Monday by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the latest in Tehran’s attempts to steadily exert pressure on the international community.
Iran is seeking to have economic sanctions imposed over the country’s controversial nuclear program lifted in exchange for slowing the program down. The program — as all matters of state in Iran — are under the guidance of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and that likely won’t change in the wake of last week’s helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister.
The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency also comes against the backdrop of heightened tensions in the wider Middle East over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Israel and Iran have carried out direct strikes on each other’s territory for the first time last month.
The fossil fuel coordinated “Citizens for Local Choice” failed to gather enough signatures to appear on Michigan’s November ballot.
This MAGA based initiative was aimed at repealing much needed siting reforms for clean energy, that were passed to protect farmer’s property rights, as well as the critical energy transition in a major industrial state. The “Antis” will keep trying.
For decades, farmers across the state and across the midwest have been been successfully harvesting clean energy – with solar and wind farms, on their land.
Township meetings have been disrupted, and officials have been threatened, driven to resign, or even in some cases, to early death, from stress. Many boards have been bullied into writing “Exclusionary” ordinances that trample on farmer’s property rights.
“A zoning ordinance or zoning decision shall not have the effect of totally prohibiting the establishment of a land use within a local unit of government in the presence of a demonstrated need for that land use within either that local unit of government or the surrounding area within the state,..”
The reason townships have been able to get away with such illegal actions, is because the law has no enforcement mechanism, other than for farmers or developers to pursue an expensive and time consuming lawsuit, which most are loath to do.
UPDATE: yes I knew it was “Phish”. Blame spell check. Sticking to that story.
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[Verse 1] I paused a moment once in time Before the sun began to shine To weigh the choice I had to make And therein lies my first mistake
[Verse 2] My second came just after that To keep the solar discus flat And make the planets scurry around The math required was quite profound
[Instrumental Break]
[Verse 3] And now it’s mountains, streams, and plains Ten thousand creatures, none the same A million little things to solve Or not, I’ll let them all evolve
[Chorus] First came thе light, then came the sound Thеn came the worlds that could never slow down Then came the people with problems and hope That don’t mean a thing, if they just knew the scope First came the light, then came the sound Then came the worlds that could never slow down Then came the people with problems and hope That don’t mean a thing, if they just knew the scope
The first time I went to a meeting at Bushnell Township Hall, in Montcalm County, Michigan, I literally drove by it twice, thinking it was a toolshed. It’s on a concrete slab about 20 by 30 feet, four prefab walls and a roof. No running water, no toilet.
Inside, an odd collection of cast off card tables, and a dozen or two 1940s vintage wooden folding chairs. But when the very ordinary collection of folks on the township board approved a permit for a solar farm recently, I got so choked up I could barely speak, knowing that they had run a gauntlet of threats, harrassment and abuse, while doing the very hard and demanding work of putting together a workable, and desperately needed, solar ordinance for the community.
Ground was broken this week on Fish Creek Solar Park, a 554-acre project running through Bushnell and Evergreen townships.
The DTE project is one of three new solar parks recently approved by the Michigan Public Service Commission and funded by DTE customers who are enrolled in MI Green Power, a voluntary renewable energy program. Once completed, the 132-megawatt solar park will feature nearly 320,000 solar panels and will generate enough clean energy to power about 30,000 Michigan homes on an ongoing basis, according to DTE.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held at the construction site just off Condensery Road east of Sheridan on Wednesday morning. The solar park runs through Bushnell Township on the south side of Condensery Road and Evergreen Township on the north side.
In Interview with Right wing “influencer”, Tucker Carlson expresses “Openness” to moon landing conspiracies
40 years ago, the wealthiest and most powerful industry the world has ever seen commenced a full-on assault against the very idea that rational inquiry and discourse should be our guides in governance and policy. Seeking to corrode citizen’s confidence in scientific expertise, the fossil barons stood up dozens of pseudo-intellectual “think tanks”aimed at undermining scientific and engineering establishments that had been the very engine of American prosperity – that had taken us to the moon. Al Gore used to have a throw-away line in his talks where he jokingly compared climate deniers to moon-landing-conspiracists, which would draw howls from aggrieved right wingers. But now? Such conspiracies are just regular conversation in the MAGA bubble.
The leaders of the fossil fuel industries judged that by seeding doubt in agencies like NASA, NOAA, and others, they could cloud American’s understanding of climate change, and delay the moment when they would be forced to curtail their operations, leaving potentially untold hundreds of trillions in riches in the ground. That corrosive effect has bled over into just about every aspect of life, as Covid revealed to us.
As a vocal advocate of vaccinations for public health, Peter Hotez was no stranger to online harassment and threats. But then the abuse showed up on his doorstep.
It was a Sunday during a brutal Texas heatwave in June 2023 when a man turned up at Hotez’s home, filming himself as he shouted questions at the scientist, who is a paediatrician and virologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Because of the long-running online and real-life abuse he has faced, Hotez now has the Texas Medical Center Police, Houston Police Department and Harris County Sheriff’s Office on speed dial, an agent tasked to him from the FBI and extra security whenever he speaks publicly.
“This is a very powerful adversarial force that is seeking to undermine science, and now it’s not only going after the science. It’s going after the scientists,” he says.
Hotez is an especially well-known scientist, but his experience is far from unique. Every day around the world, scientists are being abused and harassed online. They are being attacked on social media and by e-mail, telephone, letter and in person. And their reputations are being smeared with baseless accusations of misconduct. Sometimes, this escalates to real-world confrontations and attacks. —
Social media has only accelerated that process, and the “reality based community” (in Karl Rove’s cynical phrasing) have been running behind in efforts to counter it. A recent essay in Scientific American outlines some of the slipperiness of the “anti-reality” problem.
“…propagandists further sway the public through an “IKEA effect” whereby false information can be self-assembled from separate parts. Savvy pundits and politicians appropriate or create keywords and phrases—like “woke-ism” and “groomer”—that they tie to false narratives. By widely disseminating the keywords, the storytellers can embed them in search engine results. Researchers have found that the top results for “abortion pill” commonly spread misinformation and disinformation. In other cases, fossil fuel companies have spent heavily on Google ads that resemble search results.
Someone urged to “search for it yourself” is more likely to find a top result that conveniently reconfirms the desired narrative. Tripodi said the DIY “discovery” increases the value of the information seeking—like a chair you assembled on your own—and reinforces the story’s ring of truth.
The extreme heat smothering much of Mexico has already killed dozens of people, but the hottest temperatures are yet to come, officials say.
“In the next 10 to 15 days, the country will experience the highest temperatures ever recorded,” researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) said in a statement earlier this week. They called the heat wave “unprecedented.”
According to the Weather Channel, by early next week, temperatures in Veracruz are expected to soar to 37 C, Tabasco will be 40 C and Mexicali will reach temperatures of 40.5 C.
Howler monkeys, who dropped dead from trees in unlivable heat, are buried in each other’s arms.
We’ve ignored decades of scientific warnings yet, amid global catastrophic consequences, we are still digging our own graves. pic.twitter.com/qVl7B5rR3U
Temperatures in the capital, Mexico City, could reach a record 35 C in the next two weeks, said Jorge Zavala, director of UNAM’s Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Change.
Most of the metropolitan area’s 21 million residents — accustomed to more temperate weather — lack air conditioning. Earlier this month, the capital was one of at least 10 cities in Mexico that registered their hottest day on record.
