23 August 20
Dire Situation in Northern California
Dearest Readers:
While publisher Marc Ash is one of the people affected by the wildfires, there are hundreds of wildfires in California right now. These fires are affecting tens of thousands of acres in Sonoma County and are 0% contained. Shelter sites are reaching capacity and people are living in tents inside the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. Please lend your financial support to Reader Supported News during this difficult time.
Angela Watters, Managing Editor of Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
22 August 20
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Andy Borowitz | Trump Fails Cognitive Test When Asked to Remember Steve Bannon
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump's stellar reputation for mental acuity took a hit on Thursday when he failed a cognitive test in which he was asked to remember Steve Bannon."
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William Barr. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
William Barr Told Murdoch to 'Muzzle' Trump Critic at Fox News, New Book Says
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to 'muzzle' Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network."
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Voters in North Carolina received absentee ballot request forms that had Donald Trump's face on them. (photo: Twitter)
Is This a Joke?' North Carolina Voters Are Being Mailed Absentee Ballot Request Forms With Trump's Face on Them
Sophia Ankel, Business Insider
Ankel writes: "Voters in North Carolina are receiving absentee ballot request forms that feature President Trump's face on them even though the president has continuously criticized mail-in voting in the run-up to the November election."
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David Rodriguez, a DACA recipient from Venezuela, received a rejection letter from one company after revealing his immigration status. (photo: Maria Alejandra Cardona/NYT)
Immigrant 'Dreamers' in Search of a Job Are Being Turned Away
Miriam Jordan, The New York Times
Jordan writes: "Nattily dressed in a sports coat and slacks, David Rodriguez took a seat in the front row to hear a presentation about an internship opportunity at Procter & Gamble, the consumer giant."
What he heard excited him, said Mr. Rodriguez, a Venezuelan immigrant who was studying business at Florida International University. The company valued diversity. It aimed to hire interns as full-time employees after they graduated. But when he applied, one question on the form stumped him: “Are you currently a U.S. citizen or national, OR an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, OR a refugee, OR an individual granted asylum?”
He was none of these things. He informed the company that he was a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, under which he and thousands of other young immigrants have permission to work legally in the country.
The New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Ben Hider/NYSE Euronext)
Banks Have Made $18 Billion From 'Paycheck Protection Program' Processing Fees Alone
Colleen Boyle, In These Times
Boyle writes: "Whether or not a single job or company is saved through the CARES Act's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), lenders will be paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money."
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Colonel Assimi Goita confirmed his position as the president of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People. (photo: Annie Risemberg/AFP)
Mali Coup Leader Was Trained by US Military
Danielle Paquette, The Washington Post
Paquette writes: "The military officer who declared himself in charge of Mali after leading a coup that ousted the West African nation's president this week received training from the United States, the Pentagon said Friday."
Col. Assimi Goita, who emerged Thursday as the head of the junta in power, worked for years with U.S. Special Operations forces focused on fighting extremism in West Africa. He spoke regularly with U.S. troops and attended U.S.-led training exercises, said officers from both countries, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Goita, who also received training from Germany and France, according to the officers, headed Mali’s special forces unit in the country’s restive central region, where fighters linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have established a stronghold that has alarmed global leaders.
“By making this intervention, we have put Mali first,” Goita said in a broadcast Thursday alongside top government officials. “Mali is in a sociopolitical and security crisis. There is no more room for mistakes.”
Goita participated in U.S. Africa Command training exercises in West Africa known as Flintlock and attended a Joint Special Operations University bilateral seminar at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, according to the Defense Department.
“The act of mutiny in Mali is strongly condemned and inconsistent with U.S. military training and education,” said Marine Corps Lt. Col. Anton T. Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesman.
The Malian military will receive no more support from the United States until further review, he added.
It is not unusual for senior officers in the Malian military — a force of roughly 12,000 meant to protect a population of about 20 million — to receive training from the United States and other foreign allies.
“Malian officers are usually involved in several foreign trainings — meaning they may leave for Russia, go to France and then end up part of Flintlock,” the U.S. training exercises, said Marc-André Boisvert, a former U.N. expert who has spent years researching Mali’s military.
Helping the nation’s troops fight rapidly spreading extremism is critical for regional stability, U.S. military officials said. Al-Qaeda and Islamic State loyalists have cooperated in West Africa in pushes to dominate the countryside in Mali, a country nearly twice the size of Texas.
“What we’ve seen is not just random acts of violence under a terrorist banner but a deliberate campaign that is trying to bring these various groups under a common cause,” Brig. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, head of the U.S. military’s Special Operations arm in Africa, told The Washington Post in February. “That larger effort then poses a threat to the United States.”
The coup came after months of protests in the capital, Bamako, which brought tens of thousands of Malians into the streets to demand the resignation of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta.
Video showed people cheering as mutinous soldiers stormed Bamako on Tuesday and took the 75-year-old Keïta, along with several of his top officers, into their custody.
The African Union, the United Nations and France swiftly lambasted the rebellion, urging the coup leaders to release Keïta, whose term was due to end in 2023.
“A politically stable Mali is paramount and crucial to the stability of the subregion,” Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari tweeted Thursday.
The protesters, led by an influential imam, Mahmoud Dicko, accused Keïta of corruption, mismanaging the crumbling economy and allowing extremists to spread in the countryside. The embattled leader resigned on state television Wednesday, saying he wanted to avoid more bloodshed.
Mali’s new rulers, who call themselves the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, said they aim to build a civilian-led transition government and hold a new election.
Goita, the junta’s leader, is a commander of the country’s Autonomous Special Forces Battalion, which is one of the first lines of defense against the extremists.
He had expressed frustration to colleagues about the rising violence in Mali, according to a former U.S. military officer who worked closely with him, sending out videos of torched villages on WhatsApp.
Goita, who is in his early 40s, spent most of his military career in the areas rife with extremists — the northern deserts and the central garrison towns. His spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The number of deaths from terrorism in the country, as well as in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, have skyrocketed in recent years, according to the United Nations, surpassing 4,000 in 2019.
Hundreds of Malian soldiers have died in the fight. They have also faced accusations of killing innocent villagers in the search for extremists, according to Human Rights Watch.
The leader of Mali’s last coup in 2012 — Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo — also received military guidance from the United States, including professional military education and basic officer training.
Several soldiers involved in the current uprising are likely to have received training from the United States, said Peter Pham, the U.S. special envoy to Africa’s Sahel region.
“This is not surprising to anyone since we have had a long-standing partnership with Mali going back decades with their armed forces,” he said of the training history.
The United States has opened an investigation into the matter, Pham said, adding that until the review concludes, “let me categorically say there is no further training or support for the Malian armed forces — full stop.”
A firefighting aircraft drops flame retardant on the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in California. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Firefighters 'Running on Fumes,' Begging for Equipment, Manpower Amid Firestorms
What Makes California's Current Major Wildfires So Unusual
Umair Irfan, Vox
Irfan writes: "A stunning, sudden surge of wildfires is burning through California, threatening towns and sending choking smoke over major cities and across much of the United States. It's creating an epic compounding disaster whose ingredients have been brewing for years."
Dry lightning, extreme heat, and Covid-19 are all shaping California’s efforts to contain massive, deadly blazes.
stunning, sudden surge of wildfires is burning through California, threatening towns and sending choking smoke over major cities and across much of the United States. It’s creating an epic compounding disaster whose ingredients have been brewing for years.
Fire officials have grouped some of the smaller fires in an area into complexes to coordinate their response. The largest of these is the SCU Lightning Complex. It’s burned 229,000 acres as of Friday morning across parts of the southern San Francisco Bay Area, including Santa Clara and Alameda counties. The SCU Lightning Complex is now 10 percent contained, but officials expect “critical rates of spread” as winds pick up.
To the north, the LNU Lighting Complex near Napa has killed at least four people, burned more than 219,000 acres, and destroyed or damaged 600 structures. Thousands were forced to evacuate. The fire was 7 percent contained as of Friday morning, and officials anticipate the flames will spread further.
These are just two of dozens of large fires currently raging across the Golden State. Together, all these fires have burned close to 600,000 acres in California in just under a week.
It’s not just the size of the fires that’s so concerning; some of the blazes are in coastal areas that don’t burn very often, threatening the state’s iconic redwoods.
The blazes were ignited by a massive dry lightning storm earlier this week over many parts of the state but concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“We had close to 11,000 strikes in a matter of three days,” said Brice Bennett, a spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). “With an already-warm weather pattern and very, very dry conditions here in California, with those lightning strikes coming through, over 367 new fires were started.”
Smoke, soot, and ash from the fires also shrouded Northern California in the dirtiest air in the world at several points during the week.
Wildfires are nothing new for Californians, and many are wearily growing accustomed to the heat, smoke, and evacuations as fires reignite in areas torched in the recent past. But this week’s blazes stand out for their scale, timing, locations, and intensity, even among recent record-breaking fire seasons.
And the wildfires are just one of several harrowing disasters afflicting California right now. The state has been scorched by a record-breaking heat wave, with several days in a row of temperatures reaching triple digits in some places, even at night. Temperatures in Death Valley topped 130 degrees Fahrenheit. That heat led to rolling blackouts as utilities struggled to meet cooling demand.
All the while, the Covid-19 pandemic is raging throughout the state, with the number of new cases increasing over the past two weeks and making the already difficult task of controlling wildfires even harder.
Here are the factors that have fueled the recent fires and are now complicating the efforts to control them.
Extreme heat, strange storms, and climate change set the stage for California’s fires
The lightning storm around the San Francisco Bay Area that sparked many of the current California fires was a rare event.
“The last time we had something like this was over a decade ago, actually,” said Bennett. The fact that lightning started these fires is also noteworthy. The vast majority of wildfires in California are ignited from human sources — powerlines, arson, neglected campfires, and so on.
But the fires wouldn’t have been so bad were it not also for the extreme heat that’s been baking the state for weeks.
“This is a big, big prolonged heat wave characterized not only by hot daytime temperatures, but also record warm overnight temperatures, and an unusual amount of humidity,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It turns out increased humidity plays a role in why there are so many fires right now.”
A decaying tropical storm earlier this month in the eastern Pacific Ocean sent a plume of moisture over California. Amid the scorching heat, the moisture formed clouds that generated immense amounts of wind, thunder, and lightning, but very little rain. “The humidity was high enough to produce these thunderstorms, but not high enough to produce significant flooding rainfall that would mitigate fire risk,” Swain said.
Much of California’s vegetation was also parched and primed to burn, and concerns that this would be an exceptionally bad fire year started to emerge in February as the state emerged from one of its driest winters on record. This was then followed by an abnormally hot spring. “There were a number of unusually significant early season heat waves this spring both in northern and in southern California,” Swain said.
And California is now experiencing the impacts of climate change, which is manifesting in fires. The weather in California is becoming more volatile. Temperatures are also rising, which is causing the state’s forests, grasslands, and chaparral to dry out even more. Already, the state has suffered millions of dead trees stemming from years of drought and pests like pine beetles. More heat could stress these ecosystems even further.
“It’s not just how hot are the heat waves; it’s how hot is it the rest of the time,” Swain said. “What really matters is the sustained warming and drying over seasons and years.”
Some of California’s current fires are in areas that don’t regularly burn
It’s important to remember that fires are a normal part of the ecology in California, from the coniferous forests in the Sierra Nevada to the chaparral shrubland in the south. Periodic blazes clear out decaying vegetation, restore nutrients to the soil, and help plants germinate.
Humans, however, continue to make California’s wildfires worse at every step. By suppressing naturally occurring fires, fuel has accumulated in forests and shrublands, increasing the danger when fires do ignite. People are also building closer to areas that are prone to burn. That increases the likelihood of starting fires and raises the blazes’ damage toll. People have also introduced invasive plant species like Eucalyptus trees, which have spread throughout California and readily ignite. And burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases that are warming the planet, increasing the amount of vegetation that can burn.
Even with this backdrop, the some of the fires in California stand out because they are raging in places that don’t burn very often.
“I think what’s key to understand is that different parts of California have very different normal fire seasons,” said Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of fire science at the University of California Merced. “And that’s in part because California is such a big state. It has really variable topography and different vegetation or ecosystems across the state.”
Some of the more striking fires right now are in California’s coastal redwood forests. On Thursday, offices buildings at Big Basin Redwoods State Park burned down, and fires damaged some of the park’s stalwart trees. Some redwoods in the park are still smoldering as they burn from the inside.
Because coastal forests are under the influence of marine weather systems, they are much cooler and retain more moisture than the pine forests of the Sierra Nevada and other inland areas. The coastal forests do burn periodically and are home to many species that have adapted to fire, but they rarely ignite during the summer.
That they’re on fire now is remarkable, a product of high atmospheric pressure over the area that allowed heat to accumulate and overwhelm the cooling effect from the ocean. “Those coastal areas are incredibly dry, incredibly hot relative to normal, and that arid and hot condition had this potential to have really explosive fires,” Kolden said.
Covid-19 is adding a wallop to California’s fires
The Covid-19 pandemic has rattled every part of society, and firefighting efforts are not immune. “It has definitely has affected our response, primarily in our inmate fire crews,” Bennett said.
California often relies on prison labor to bolster its firefighting efforts, with almost 200 inmate fire crews. Inmates are paid between $2 and $5 a day, plus $1 per hour when fighting a fire. But with severe Covid-19 prison outbreaks in the state, some inmates were released to relieve overcrowding. Others were hampered by infections, and many remain under quarantine. The number of available inmate fire crews has been nearly halved.
Anticipating a severe fire season, state officials did line up an additional 800 seasonal firefighters, but they have to take additional precautions. Fire crews are essentially staying in small bubbles, where they live and work with just each other, to help limit coronavirus transmission.
At base camps where fire crews rest and refuel, officials have designated more space for workers to maintain social distance.
The state is also facing a budget crunch, with the economic slowdown because of pandemic. That’s led some fire prevention maintenance measures — like clearing dry grass away from roads and buildings — to languish.
As for the Californians fleeing the fires, Covid-19 has made it harder to coordinate evacuations and shelters. The declining air quality from the wildfires is also a threat to people with Covid-19, since exposure to air pollution can damage airways and make people more susceptible to respiratory infection. And extreme heat also worsens the public health impact of Covid-19 as people spend more time in enclosed spaces together to avoid the heat.
And the current round of blazes may take weeks to extinguish, raising the concern that stiff autumn winds — the Santa Ana winds in the south and the Diablo winds in the north — may spread the flames again.
California is facing yet more high temperatures through the weekend and forecasters warn that more dry lightning may be in store.
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