12 January 21
Neglecting the Financial Health of RSN
I love this project. I love the community that we serve. Many of us have been together for over a decade. When I say that we are not getting a "reasonable" degree of support, and that the organization is suffering because of it. Take that seriously.
These fundraising drives have to be shorter in duration. Two weeks out of every month tied up in fundraising is damaging to everything we want for the project and is counterproductive to the mission. We have to address that.
Please stop what you are doing and help end this fundraising drive TODAY!
Our sincere thanks to you.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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11 January 21
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Michael Moore | The 7 Critical Truths About the Capitol Attack
Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
Moore writes: "This attack on the Capitol was an Inside Job in which some Republican members of Congress and their staffs assisted the mob in getting into and through the Capitol building."
HE 7 CRITICAL TRUTHS:
1. This attack on the Capitol was an Inside Job in which some Republican members of Congress and their staffs assisted the mob in getting into and through the Capitol building.
2. Various elements of law enforcement also assisted in the attack, as did rogue cops and current and ex-military from around the country. Current members of the NYPD and the Seattle police force have been identified in footage as part of the mob. Reports say they’ve also identified active duty troops partipating in the attack - plus a police chief and a sheriff - as members of the mob. The guy inside the House chamber carrying the large number of police-grade handcuff zip-ties is a retired Lt. Colonel.
3. Trump was the ringleader and the inciter - and when cries of help were made to him to send in the National Guard to protect the Capitol and our elected representatives, Trump refused.
4. This attack was a dry run for more violent attacks the terrorists are planning to launch before the Inauguration.
5. Why did members of Congress tell their staffs to stay home on Wednesday “for their own safety?” Everyone knew there would be trouble. Yet, stunningly, 1,900 Capitol Police were told to stay home on Wednesday. Only 400 reported to work. It was designed for them to be overrun.
6. Of the very few terrorists who have now been arrested, not one of them has been charged with domestic terrorism. “Trespassing” is the most common charge.
7. White supremacists were everywhere in the mob. Some wore T-shirts proclaiming, “6 Million Was Not Enough.” Our military and police departments across the country have been infiltrated by white supremacists and hard-core racists. Defunding them will defang them. Everyone knows had that mob been Black, they’d all be dead. We need to start over with a whole new concept of criminal justice, and new anti-racist peacekeeping officers.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Ken Cedeno/Reuters)
Filed Impeachment Resolution Cites Trump's 'Incitement' of Capitol Insurrection
Brian Naylor, NPR
Naylor writes: "Democrats in the House of Representatives have introduced a single article of impeachment against President Trump, charging him with "incitement of insurrection" over Wednesday's violence at the U.S. Capitol."
READ MORE
Spencer Sunshine and QAnon activist Jake Angeli. (image: Daily Beast/Getty Images)
I've Been Tracking the Far Right for Years. Then Lin Wood 'Exposed' Me as the QAnon Shaman
Spencer Sunshine, The Daily Beast
Sunshine writes: "When the insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, I was sitting in my Brooklyn apartment in my pajamas, following live Twitter feeds. At some point I started getting messages that someone was accusing me of being a prominent QAnon activist who'd been photographed at the riot."
It’s a story about how purely anti-Semitic conspiracies get toned down and then circulated more broadly, while retaining the same storyline and targeting the same individuals.
As someone who’s written about the far right for years and had been the subject of their conspiracy theories before, I shrugged it off.
Then I started getting more messages. This time from old friends—classmates from college, even ex-girlfriends—to see if I was OK. It slowly dawned on me that the tweeter was not a run-of-the-mill unhinged person but a famous unhinged person: Trumpist attorney Lin Wood, who worked on the Kraken lawsuit and had over a million followers. Threats naturally followed, and Wood’s tweet was reported in TheNew York Times as part of a story debunking the false claims that antifa had secretly stoked the right-wing violence.
Wood’s Twitter was quickly suspended, but not before the post had, at least the last time I took a screenshot, 28,000 retweets and 47,000 likes. For days, right-wing social media and blogs have, repeating Wood’s claim, declared that I am actually the QAnon activist Jake Angeli. Nicknamed “Q Shaman,” he is known for his distinctive outfit—including Halloween-ey plastic horns and face paint—and high-octane rants against a supposedly satanic, pedophilic “deep state.” Angeli has arm and chest tattoos, while I have none, and he’s more than a decade younger than me, as evidenced by comparing my bulging middle-aged midsection to his muscular physique. While Angeli, who was arrested on Saturday, had loudly complained that he was being smeared as “antifa,” rather than getting his due as a Q stalwart who took the dais in victory, none of that was enough to staunch the talk about my supposed role in this conspiracy.
The broader conspiracy about antifa somehow being behind the violence quickly spread, with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) even repeating it on the House floor when lawmakers returned there on the evening of the invasion. (The FBI later debunked the claim.) And although the secret antifa provocateurs were usually unnamed, insofar as they were named I appeared to be the main culprit.
So how did I come to be the face—or, rather, the name behind somebody else’s face—of a right-wing campaign to deny crimes committed by other right-wingers? What unfolds is a decade-long tale of an ever-morphing conspiracy theory about me, originally forged in the crucible of neo-Nazi anti-Semitism and developed by a variety of small-time far-right figures before a Trumpist grifter injected it onto a national stage. And it’s also a story about how purely anti-Semitic conspiracies get toned down and then circulated more broadly, while retaining the same storyline and targeting the same individuals.
As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories are often based in a kernel of truth. That kernel began for me with a talk I gave in 2010 on behalf of the now-infamous Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon. They had been struggling to expel several anti-Semites who were in left-wing spaces, including a well-known local progressive activist-turned-Holocaust denier. My talk outlined the contours of anti-Semitism and included examples of it being found on the left. Maybe 30 people attended, but it was recorded and put online.
Some fascists pay attention to the left, in hope of making alliances or cross-recruiting members, or simply to know and target their enemies. A New Yorker named Eric Striker—who, in one of the many ironies of this story, is apparently Latino—became obsessed with my talk. He called me an “influential Jew Antifa ideologue” on a 2015 Twitter thread in conversation with two key figures in the emerging alt-right: the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin and “Ricky Vaughn.” (The latter’s Twitter account was found by an MIT election study to be more influential during the 2016 election than those of the Democratic Party or NBC News.)
It was a little ridiculous, but nothing compared to what was to come.
I had been getting other attention from the rapidly growing far right. Older racists like David Duke took swipes at me. My coverage of the Oregon militia movement in 2016 was widely attacked. On the webpage of the Three Percenters’ founder, one memorable comment called for me to be hung from a tree with ATF agents.
Another small-time New York far-right conspiracy theorist picked the story up, proclaiming on a podcast that I was the “leader of antifa.” But it was after the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that the conspiracy was lit on fire. I was in the counter-demonstration and the car attack. Afterward the neo-Nazis and their sympathizers on 4chan and 8chan decided, perhaps egged on by Striker and the recent podcast, that I was the antifa leader. In fact, I soon became known as the “international leader of antifa”—since Jews are always thought of as international conspirators. (In fact, only part of my family is Jewish, but anti-Semites typically follow the “one drop of blood” rule.)
Death threats flooded my social media accounts, spreading to anyone I was affiliated with. I removed comments on my public Facebook, only to have fascists go after people who had “liked” my posts—forcing me to take the whole account down. There was a concerted effort on 4chan to dox me. Hours of Charlottesville footage was sorted through to find pictures of me standing around at different parts of the protest. Finally someone made a hit list of hundreds of “antifa” at Charlottesville. I was No. 3.
Needless to say, things were tense for a while. Living in New York City, legally carrying a gun was not an option. I was broke and strained to pay for things like cabs to limit my public exposure. (For a brief moment, cresting off the sudden popularity of the so-called alt-right, especially right around Charlottesville, there were about a half-dozen fascist groups in New York City.) I looked behind my back a lot. I made sure never to announce where I was going, and only did public talks with security guards present.
I foolishly went on assignment for Colorlines to cover another far-right rally the next month, the Mother of All Rallies in Washington, D.C. Since there was a dueling Juggalo rally at the same time, I thought that, between the police and the clown-faced anti-racists, there wouldn’t be a problem. I was wrong. The other rally was far away and no police were present. Another conspiracy theorist—who I call the Fraudster—saw me and started shouting that I was “antifa.” (The Fraudster did 10 years for a phishing scam and has filed hundreds of frivolous lawsuits.) This was revealing because it showed that he had been spending copious amounts of time in neo-Nazi discussion circles; he was taking their talking points about Jewish targets and laundering them into this own, seemingly non-Nazi, conspiracies. I was soon surrounded by a group of Proud Boys and would probably have been beaten had I lost my composure. (Compared to what happens at protests now, 2017 seems like halcyon days.) A video of this was put on YouTube.
Next, a frothing fascist named Daniel McMahon (who used aliases like Pale Horse and Jack Corbin) picked up the ball. He was sitting in his rich parents’ home in Florida and armed to the teeth; his own mother told authorities she was afraid her son might become a mass shooter. I had apparently gotten on his radar during the Oregon events, but now he became obsessed with me. Known for his prolific and wanton threats, he declared me his “#1 enemy.” Other comments included that I was “the most evil Jew in the USA,” “down right pure evil,” and that I was “a global Antifa leader. He is also a kike.” (One of my favorite comments on his posts was that my “eyes speak of an emptiness aside from a consuming hatred. Like a beast that needs to be put down.”)
It was sort of funny, except it wasn’t. In October 2018, Robert Bowers walked into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and murdered 11 worshipers. The social media account he interacted with the most was McMahon’s. Considering McMahon’s fixation on me, I’ve wondered if Bowers had considered assassinating me. Although much too little and much too late, McMahon was arrested in September 2019 for sending racist threats to a Black city council candidate in Charlottesville as well as stalking a woman in Florida. He eventually got three and a half years and is currently in prison. After his arrest, I mostly dropped off the fascist radar. This did not upset me.
Leading up to the Capitol protest, rumors circulated on the far right, as they had several times before, that antifa boogeymen were going to infiltrate this protest disguised as MAGAs. In the week before, the Fraudster decided to recycle the footage he had taken of me before, telling people to watch out for me at the D.C. rally. A YouTube video of me at the 2017 event popped up from a small account; by its own description, it is a ban-violator on its ninth rendition. There were also a few tweets. I didn’t think much of this; it was just another conspiracy theorist desperately recycling the bottom scrapings of his content barrel.
But little sparks can start fires. According to the Fraudster, Wood “probably” took the (already false) claims from the Fraudster’s Facebook account. Wood used the claim I was going to be in D.C. undercover to finger me as the antifa double agent directing events. I don’t know why Wood backstabbed Angeli by claiming he was an antifa agent. Perhaps Wood thought Angeli’s horns were discrediting the Trumpists’ big moment in the spotlight.
There are two lessons here, about anti-Semitism and social media. The first is that ideas cooked up by neo-Nazis can get “washed out” by removing references to Jews directly or to obvious codewords, like “Zionist bankers” or “Rothschilds.” But the initial targets who are often Jewish (or labeled as such) are kept, and the whole storyline remains intact. So whereas Nazis and other anti-Semites hold that the “Jews control the left and undermine the virtuous nation,” now “antifa is manipulating protests to discredit the patriots trying to save the nation.” I doubt that very many of the thousands of Trumpists who think I’m Angeli are motivated by anti-Semitism. But once you see the development of the conspiracy theory about me, without the anti-Semitism I would never have become a cut-rate George Soros.
Second, the amazingly quick explosion of these narratives show how short the trip is from the margins to the mainstream for wild conspiracy claims. What is one day a neo-Nazi narrative can the next be something that you see on your aunt’s Facebook post. All it took was one deranged lawyer with a Twitter account to convince millions of people that some guy wearing pajamas in Brooklyn is the secret mastermind behind an unfolding national disgrace.
I’m a bit curious about what the next permutation of the conspiracy theory about me will bring. But to be honest, I’m a bit nervous, too.
A pedestrian wearing a face mask walks past a stand with the Evening Standard newspapers in central London as England enters a third lockdown, Jan. 8. (photo: Tolga Akmen/Getty Images)
An Extra-Contagious Coronavirus Variant Is in the US - but No One Knows How Widespread It Is
Stephanie M. Lee, BuzzFeed
Lee writes: "A new, highly contagious version of the coronavirus has arrived in the United States, but scientists have no way to track how widespread it is."
“Our healthcare infrastructure is already at a breaking point,” one expert said. “The introduction of a more transmissible strain might be enough to tip us over.”
The new variant, known as B.1.1.7, was first detected in the United Kingdom and, as of Friday, has cropped up in at least 45 other countries. That includes the US, where it has been reported in dozens of cases across at least eight states: California, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, and New York.
This version of the virus does not appear to cause infections that are more severe or deadly, and the vaccines now slowly being distributed are still believed to be capable of fending it off.
But a much more contagious mutant could exponentially drive up the number of infections and cause greater numbers of hospitalizations and deaths at a time when out-of-control caseloads are already pushing ICUs across the country beyond capacity.
“Our healthcare infrastructure is already at a breaking point,” Charles Chiu, a laboratory medicine and infectious diseases expert at the University of California, San Francisco, told BuzzFeed News. “The introduction of a more transmissible strain might be enough to tip us over.”
In the UK, where the variant is believed to be widespread, cases are skyrocketing. Fears that severely ill patients would overwhelm the healthcare system spurred Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose strict lockdown measures this week. The mayor of London on Friday declared a “major incident” in the city, where 1 in 30 residents are infected with COVID-19 and more than 7,000 people are hospitalized with it, up 35% from the previous peak of the pandemic in April. As of late December, the variant accounted for an estimated 60% of cases.
While only a handful of cases have been confirmed in the US so far, scientists say that all signs point to the variant already spreading within communities.
Chiu’s lab detected some of the first cases of the new variant in California, where at least 30 cases have been found so far. Based on testing done by him and others, he believes that the B.1.1.7 variant is still rare for now. But there is no way of knowing with certainty how prevalent it is or will be, he and other experts say. Unlike the UK and other countries, the US does not have a robust, centralized surveillance system for identifying genetic variants of the virus.
“This reminds me of the early situation with testing in the US, where we didn't know where the virus was because we weren’t looking,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.
Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called the new variant “a really big deal” and the country’s lack of genomic surveillance “a huge failing of our public health system.”
“Hopefully this will be a wake-up call,” he told reporters Tuesday.
That leaves the country flying in the dark not just to the B.1.1.7 variant, but other possibly dangerous ones as well. Another mutated version of the virus, first detected in South Africa in mid-December, shares genetic similarities with the one found in the UK and is also believed to be more transmissible. It has not been spotted in the US yet.
Meanwhile, the US recorded 4,000 COVID-19 deaths on Thursday, its highest single-day count so far, which brought its total death toll to more than 365,000. And the slow distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, currently millions of doses behind federal targets, means that the number of people infected with the virus — more than 21 million so far — will continue to climb.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the pandemic continues to remain out of control,” Chiu said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see this strain eventually become the predominant strain if it is more transmissible, which appears to be the case.”
Where the B.1.1.7 variant originated is unclear, but it was first detected in the UK in September.
On Dec. 29, the US reported its first confirmed case — a Colorado National Guard member — followed by a second probable case who was a colleague.
Cases have since been reported in Florida, California, New York, Georgia, Texas, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. California’s 30-plus cases include two residents of a household in San Bernardino County, one of whom came into contact with a symptomatic person traveling from the UK. The Pennsylvanian had “known international exposure,” according to the state health department. Of the two cases reported Thursday in Connecticut, which were not related to each other, one had recently traveled to Ireland and the other to New York.
But so far, most of the people infected with the variant in the US have not had any known travel history. That “really suggests that it’s already entrenched in the community,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security.
Mutations are a natural byproduct of the coronavirus replicating and spreading. These errors in the genetic code usually don’t change how the virus functions. But sometimes the changes can give it an evolutionary advantage, enabling it to outcompete other variants in circulation.
The B.1.1.7 variant has about two dozen changes, including 17 mutations, an unusually high number. Some of them are in the now-infamous spike protein that enables the coronavirus to bind to and infect human cells.
It’s not clear yet which of these mutations make the variant more contagious or how. This version could be better at entering cells, or as some research suggests, it could yield very high viral loads that make it easier for people to infect others. To find out, scientists will need to conduct studies in cell and animal models.
On Friday, the FDA warned of the possibility that some of these mutations could cause coronavirus tests to inaccurately report negative results. At least two diagnostic tests on the market, according to the agency, look at genetic targets that are now altered by the B.1.1.7 variant, although those are not the tests’ only targets.
The good news: the variant is similar enough to previous versions of SARS-CoV-2 that scientists are confident it will still be recognized by the immune systems of people who have gotten vaccinated or have recovered from infections.
That’s because people typically mount broad immune responses that target more parts of the virus than a single region of the spike protein, said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Even if there is a change in one particular region, there are still other antibodies we develop as part of our antibody response that would be able to recognize other parts of the protein as well,” he said.
Even if a mutated version of the virus in the future is sufficiently different, vaccines can also be adjusted to protect against different strains. As Rasmussen pointed out: “Before people start freaking out, they should keep in mind we deal with this every single year with influenza.”
As for just how much more contagious this variant is than previous ones, a modeling study out of London in December estimated it is roughly 56% more transmissible. Supposing that a person infected with the original SARS-CoV-2 virus would ordinarily infect around one additional person on average, individuals carrying the new variant could instead spread it to around 1.5 people. The cumulative effect of this is significant: If each infection leads to 1.5 new cases per week, then in about two weeks, there would be twice the number of cases as normal.
That’s why the variant’s arrival is stoking heated debates over whether vaccine doses should be cut in half or delayed in order to get them to people faster. Despite scant data about how effective a single dose would be, some scientists argue that it is better to have some protection rather than none at all. Others, including top FDA officials, fear that deviating from the authorized dosing schedule could wreak further havoc.
The UK has adopted a stretched-out vaccine schedule as an emergency response to the surge. As part of the stringent national lockdown, the country has also taken the drastic step of also closing schools and universities.
In the US, where new cases and deaths are at record highs, a more contagious virus will mean more stress on a healthcare system already struggling to treat patients. In Southern California, available ICU capacity has bottomed out at 0% and first responders in Los Angeles are being instructed not to transport patients unlikely to survive.
“If we don’t change our control measures, once it becomes common it will accelerate transmission considerably,” Lipsitch said.
Scientists could know a lot more about how widespread the variant is in the US — if they were given the resources to look.
Early research indicates that the variant is strongly correlated with a change in one of the virus’s genes, the S gene. Spotting this change in a patient’s viral sample appears to be a useful cue to then genetically sequence it and root out more cases.
Rapid and widespread sequencing is what enabled the UK to quickly detect this and other variants. In March, the government invested 20 million pounds into forming the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (or COG-UK) — a coordinated national program that analyzes samples from hospitals and other testing sites across the country and tracks genetic changes in the virus.
It has sequenced about 10% of all UK infections to date, and can process 5,000 samples a week, according to Joshua Quick, a University of Birmingham researcher affiliated with the group. “Having rapid genome sequencing capacity increases the chance of detecting existing or new variants or making interventions such as quarantining cases of the variant,” he said by email.
By comparison, the US has sequenced less than 1% of its cases — about 51,000 of 17 million, according to a CDC report in late December. Lipsitch said the UK is “five years or so ahead of us in terms of genomic surveillance and really knowing the genetics of the pathogens and circulating in their country.”
The US’s closest equivalent to COG-UK is SPHERES, a CDC-led patchwork of laboratories across health agencies, universities, and sequencing centers.
Russ Corbett-Detig, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that the scientists involved are highly collaborative and share methods and datasets. But he and some other researchers say that unlike the UK consortium, it does not have a clear mandate. “What we desperately need is more sequencing in the US,” Corbett-Detig said.
SPHERES “doesn’t really have the infrastructure or the resources or the funding that’s needed to do widespread national surveillance,” said Chiu, whose UCSF lab is also part of the consortium, adding that it costs his lab about $200 to sequence each sample, not including labor.
“We literally need money,” he said. “My lab, we have the capacity of doing 300 genomes a week, basically. If we had more resources, we could end up doing thousands of genomes.”
The CDC did not return requests for comment. Its website says that it is launching a strain surveillance program that, when fully implemented this month, will have each state send the CDC at least 10 samples biweekly for sequencing. On Wednesday, the California sequencing companies Illumina and Helix announced that they would collaborate with the agency to increase national genomic surveillance and track the emergence of the B.1.1.7 variant.
Meanwhile, some states and cities are taking it upon themselves to heighten their monitoring efforts. California’s public health department is asking healthcare providers to submit samples for sequencing from COVID-19-positive people who are likely suspects. But regional monitoring is often limited. In Los Angeles, which reported nearly 12,000 new cases on Wednesday alone, health officials said they are sequencing just 30 to 35 samples every few days. New York’s state public health laboratory is ramping up its sequencing efforts and has analyzed more than 870 samples in the last two weeks, a representative said. For the past week, New York has been reporting an average of more than 14,000 cases a day.
Until the US can develop a better system to monitor for variants, scientists say it’s a good sign that the same public health measures can still protect people. The virus still spreads through airborne droplets and smaller aerosol particles, and to a lesser extent, physical contact with infected surfaces.
So the efforts to reduce transmission remain the same: social distancing, masking, cooperating with contact tracing, staying home as much as possible, avoiding indoor gatherings, hand-washing, and getting vaccinated as soon as possible.
But in the face of an even more threatening adversary, Americans will need to take the risks much more seriously than they have so far.
“People need to understand this is no longer a theoretical concern,” Rasmussen said. “This is an imminent concern.”
Donald Trump supporters. (photo: Damon Winter/NYT)
The Enormous Advantage That the Electoral College Gives Republicans, in One Chart
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "In 2019, a team of economic researchers from the University of Texas released a shocking finding."
The GOP’s Electoral College advantage grew in 2020, even as Republicans lost the presidency.
n 2019, a team of economic researchers from the University of Texas released a shocking finding. Republicans, they predicted, would win nearly one in six presidential races where the GOP lost the popular vote by three points. Thus, there was a significant likelihood that Republicans would capture the White House even when a clear majority of the public preferred to elect a Democrat.
As it turns out, this 2019 study wasn’t nearly pessimistic enough about the Democratic Party’s chances of prevailing in the Electoral College.
On Sunday, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s leading data analysts, shared a chart showing that the GOP’s advantage in the Electoral College grew significantly between 2016, when Republican Donald Trump became president despite losing the popular vote, and 2020.
The bottom line is that Trump received a four-point boost from the Electoral College in 2020 — or, as Shor puts it, Democrats needed to win 52 percent of the national electorate in order to have an even chance of winning the presidency. (Trump received about a three-point boost from the Electoral College in 2016, when he lost the national popular vote by 2.1 points.)
As recently as 2012, the Electoral College gave a slight advantage to Democrats. As Shor writes, “this big change in bias happened because white voters without a college degree *in large midwestern states* switched their votes en-masse from Obama to Trump in 2016.”
In 2012, President Barack Obama won the national popular vote by just under 4 percentage points. But he overperformed his national margins in midwestern swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Obama won Michigan by nearly 10 points.
In 2020, by contrast, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by a larger margin than Obama’s victory in 2012 — Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But Biden also underperformed his national margin in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Biden won Wisconsin by less than a full percentage point.
Indeed, while Biden won a commanding victory in the national popular vote — his 4.5 percentage point victory is the second-largest margin in a 21st-century presidential contest — Biden barely eked out a victory in the Electoral College.
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.
Palestinians protest against the Arab-Israeli agreements in Gaza City, Sept. 15, 2020. (photo: Xinhua)
Palestine Prepares for Its First Elections in 15 Years
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The Palestinian Central Elections Commission on Sunday started technical meetings over preparations for the first Palestinian general elections after a 15-year hiatus."
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Outbreaks of sea star wasting syndrome have threatened some species with extinction. (photo: Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images)
Warming Oceans May Be Choking Off Oxygen to Starfish, Causing Them to 'Drown'
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "A mysterious wasting disease seen in starfish around the world may be the result of respiratory distress tied to warming oceans, according to a new study."
Warming ocean temperatures are fueling increases in organic material and bacteria that suck up oxygen in these watery habitats.
These environmental changes are likely depleting oxygen in the oceans, scientists said, causing sea stars to “drown.”
In research published online Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, scientists detailed cases of what’s known as sea star wasting syndrome. The disease, which causes the creature’s tissue to decay and eventually fragment, can trigger mass die-offs. Outbreaks recorded over the past seven years have even threatened some species with extinction.
Now, scientists may finally know what’s to blame: Warming ocean temperatures are fueling increases in organic material and bacteria that suck up oxygen in these watery habitats. The resulting low-oxygen environments are preventing starfish from being able to breathe properly, the researchers found.
“As humans, we breathe, we ventilate, we bring air into our lungs and we exhale,” Ian Hewson, a biological oceanographer at Cornell University and one of the authors of the new study, said in a statement. “Sea stars diffuse oxygen over their outer surface through little structures called papulae, or skin gills. If there is not enough oxygen surrounding the papulae, the starfish can’t breathe.”
Hewson and his colleagues discovered that warming conditions can lead to higher-than-usual concentrations of organic material in the ocean, which in turn allows a type of bacteria called copiotrophs to thrive. These microorganisms feed on carbon, and as they consume organic matter, they deplete oxygen in the water.
When sea stars in these environments can’t get enough oxygen, they experience respiratory distress and begin to develop the lesions characteristic of sea star wasting syndrome, according to the study.
“It’s a cascade of problems that starts with changes in the environment,” Hewson said.
Scientists have been eager to find the root cause of sea star wasting syndrome because the disease can lead to large die-offs.
“If you have a dead and rotting starfish next to starfish that are healthy, all of that dead one’s organic matter drifts and fuels the bacteria, creating a hypoxic environment,” Hewson said. “It looks like disease is being transmitted.”
Hewson added that more research is needed to better understand the ecological conditions that contribute to sea star wasting syndrome, which could include expanding studies to look at the broader domino effects.
“We should now include microorganisms that don’t directly cause the pathology, since they may hold a key to affecting sea star health,” he said.
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