Andy Borowitz | Bloomberg to Spend Ten Billion Dollars to Buy Entirely Different Personality

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20 February 20

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Andy Borowitz | Bloomberg to Spend Ten Billion Dollars to Buy Entirely Different Personality

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Shortly after the Democratic Presidential debate on Wednesday night, aides to Michael Bloomberg announced that he would spend ten billion dollars to buy an entirely new personality."
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Roger Stone, former campaign adviser to U.S. president Donald Trump, arrives for the continuation of his criminal trial on charges of lying to Congress. (photo: Yara Nardi/Reuters)

Trump Adviser Roger Stone Sentenced to Three Years and Four Months in Prison
Sarah N. Lynch and Jan Wolfe, Reuters
Excerpt: "A federal judge on Thursday sentenced President Donald Trump's long-time adviser Roger Stone to three years and four months in prison for charges that include lying to lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election."
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John Bolton with Susan Rice at the event at Vanderbilt University on Wednesday night. (photo: Mark Humphrey/AP)

Susan Rice Tells John Bolton to His Face: Your Failure to Testify Was 'Shameful'
Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK
Gabbatt writes: "Former national security adviser John Bolton faced a roasting from one of his predecessors on Wednesday night, in his second public appearance since the conclusion of Donald Trump's impeachment trial."
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Practical Bernie Sanders voted for Obamacare, but he didn't give up on his long-term goal of universal health care. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty)

Mark Weisbrot | Bernie Sanders Isn't a Radical - He's a Pragmatist Who Fights to Un-Rig the System
Mark Weisbrot, MarketWatch
Weisbrot writes: "As Bernie Sanders continues to increase his standing in the Democratic primary, and his opponents in both parties feel the pain, there is an effort to paint him as an extremist of some sort. Someone who might even lose to Trump because of this alleged 'radicalism.'"
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Democratic presidential candidates, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate on Feb. 19, in Las Vegas. (photo: John Locher)

Bloomberg's NYPD Spied on Me for Being Muslim. He Has Never Apologized.
Asad Dandia, The Washington Post
Dandia writes: "Blitzing social media and TV with over $230 million of ads, former mayor Mike Bloomberg has crafted an image of himself as the candidate who can transcend America's polarized politics to defeat Donald Trump in November."

EXCERPT:

Bloomberg’s surveillance of Muslims extended beyond New York into Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey and elsewhere. The program was so secretive and intrusive that Cory Booker, then the mayor of Newark, was not informed of it. Thousands of informants infiltrated Muslim sacred spaces, restaurants, cafes, student associations, businesses and other social settings to spy on and entrap ordinary people. The clandestine nature of this surveillance did not make it harmless: It caused significant, documented harm to Muslim communities: it dampened organizing, reduced religious practice and caused people to self-censor their political speech. It engendered social mistrust and fear among Muslims, and also between our communities and law enforcement.

In 2013, I joined a class-action lawsuit against NYPD’s discriminatory surveillance of Muslims, led by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and CUNY’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) project. The NYPD acknowledged in court that the Demographics Unit at the heart of this spying program, did not generate a single terrorism lead or produce any investigations. The lawsuit dragged on for years, and along the way, communities had to process the enormous mental and emotional trauma — the kind of damage that’s the hardest to quantify on paper. We finally reached a settlement in 2017, scoring some significant policy changes, which included prohibiting investigations in which race, religion, or ethnicity is a substantial or motivating factor; requiring articulable and factual information before the police can launch a preliminary investigation into political or religious activity; putting an end to open-ended investigations; and installing a civilian representative within the department.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, has remained unapologetic. In 2012, he even defended the surveillance, saying that the police had a duty to “keep this country safe.”

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Ateeqa says her son was arrested when he had left his home in a Maisuma locality of Srinagar to buy medicine. (photo: Masrat Zahra/Al Jazeera)

200 Days of Kashmir Siege: A Mother's Wait for Her Jailed Son
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Ateeqa Begum has made several rounds of the courts since her son, Faisal Aslam Mir, was detained on August 6 last year, a day after India revoked Kashmir's autonomy."

EXCERPTS:

Thursday marks 200 days since the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a crippling security and communications lockdown in the Muslim-majority region, with thousands of Kashmiris locked up as part of the crackdown.

Mir, 22, is among hundreds of people in Indian-administered Kashmir detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA), which has been dubbed "draconian" by Amnesty International. Many of the detainees have been moved to jails across India.

Ateeqa says her son was arrested when he left his home in the Maisuma locality of Srinagar, the region's main city, to buy medicine.

"He was my whole world and his absence is driving me mad," she says.

"The government is humiliating our children and not letting them live."

The removal of Article 370, which granted Kashmir a measure of autonomy, was revoked by the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had campaigned to strip the region's special status.

Kashmiri activists fear that the abrogation of Article 370 changed the geographical realities in Kashmir by removing a seven-decades-old law that had protected the demography of the region.

A report by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society says that 412 people have been booked under PSA from August 5 to December 31 last year.

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A coral and fish community at the Great Barrier Reef, northeast of Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia, on Aug. 28, 2018. (photo: Francois Gohier/Getty)

Coral Reefs Could Be Completely Lost to the Climate Crisis by 2100, New Study Finds
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "Researchers released a sobering study this week showing that all of the world's coral reefs may be lost to the climate crisis by 2100."

The bleak outlook means that restoration efforts will face Herculean challenges, according to the research presented by researchers at this week's Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020 in San Diego, California.

Rising sea temperatures, acidic water and pollution are proving too much for the reefs to handle. About 70 to 90 percent of the world's existing coral reefs are predicted to disappear in the next two decades, according to scientists from the University of Hawaii Manoa, as CNN reported.

"By 2100, it's looking quite grim," said Renee Setter, a biogeographer at the University of Hawaii Manoa in a statement.

While pollution poses a large threat to many ocean creatures, corals seem most at risk from emissions, according to the researchers.

"Trying to clean up the beaches is great and trying to combat pollution is fantastic. We need to continue those efforts," Setter said in a statement. "But at the end of the day, fighting climate change is really what we need to be advocating for in order to protect corals and avoid compounded stressors."

To make their predictions, the scientists mimicked future ocean conditions like sea surface temperature, wave energy, acidity, pollution and overfishing in areas where corals are today. Looking at those models, the scientists found that most parts of the ocean will not sustain habitats for corals by 2045, and almost no suitable habitats will exist by 2100, according to CBS News.

"Honestly, most sites are out," said Setter in the statement.

Coral reefs nurture about 25 percent of marine life and support local economies worldwide. As CBS News noted, the new research is disheartening for efforts to restore corals by growing them in labs and then putting them back into the ocean. While those efforts have had a 60 percent success rate, the research suggests that lab-grown corals will not stand up to warming oceans and increased acidification.

Corals are extremely sensitive to ocean temperatures. When the temperature rises just a couple of degrees, corals experience mass bleaching, where coral turns white as it sheds the algae it relies on not only for survival, but also for its magnificent colors, as CBS News reported. Bleaching does not kill the coral, but it does weaken them, making them vulnerable to disease.

Scientists are predicting a mass bleaching within the next couple of weeks in Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The reef, which is nearly the length of Italy, is undergoing heat stress right now, with patches starting to bleach. While a major widespread bleaching has not occurred yet, scientists have warned that it is likely if high ocean temperatures around the reef do not drop in the next two weeks, as The Guardian reported.

Already, temperatures across two-thirds of the reef are about two to three degrees Celsius above normal, with typical peak temperatures still one month away.

"We are down to the wire," said professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, according to The Guardian.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has placed the Great Barrier Reef on Alert Level 1 for the next week, meaning significant bleaching is likely, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company.

"Unfortunately we are a whisker away from bleaching disaster yet again because of global warming-driven marine heatwaves," said Shani Tager from the Australian Marine Conservation Society to the Australian Broadcasting Company.

"As underwater heatwaves threaten once again to cook our corals, our politicians must move beyond half-baked plans to tackle global warming."

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