17 May 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The ex-president gaslights and diminishes his victims, and was given a platform by CNN. We can ensure he isn’t elected again
Triggers are cues that signal potential threats around us. As survivors, we are constantly on alert as we swim in these volatile misogynist waters, knowing a wave can come any minute to swallow us whole, or at the very least remind us that although we may have one-off victories we are still swimming in their rigged and violent sea. And this is particularly true each time a sister survivor bravely goes on trial, willingly stands up and publicly tells the truth, sheds her anonymity for the greater good, faces an onslaught of hate, and inevitably has her privacy, being and body reinvaded.
E Jean Carroll’s case against Donald Trump was a true victory, led by a brave, graceful, brilliant survivor of integrity and eloquence, tirelessly fought for by dedicated advocates and lawyers. Before we had time to celebrate, the triggers began.
Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, proudly bragging that it was a rape trial case and the jury rejected it. Trump was not branded as a rapist. Triggered because even now in 2023 we still have to settle for sexual abuse or battery or whatever names have been devised by patriarchal institutions to make what is soul-destroying seem not so bad or at the least, not what it is. Donald Trump stuck his fingers and penis inside E Jean Carroll against her will and both are rape.
Corey Rayburn Yung, a law professor, says: “the word rape carries extra connotations in our culture, and the jurors might have been gun-shy about applying it regardless of the specific standard there. So there’s a lot of stigma in many directions around the word rape and perhaps this jury, pragmatically recognizing that, agreed that Trump’s responsible, agreed on the dollar amount, but they didn’t want to force the issue on the word rape.”
Triggered by all the ways we obfuscate and muddle and distance and normalize what really happens to women’s bodies when they are grabbed, invaded, penetrated or defiled. And how this makes survivors feel unspeakable insanity, sorrow and rage.
Triggered that laws created by men have never served women or sexual abuse, have never reckoned with or been determined by the nature of rape and what it does to a woman’s mind and memory, or the language she speaks in describing it. See Prima Facie now playing on Broadway.
Triggered that CNN didn’t think a minute about what it would mean to E Jean Carroll or the millions of survivors to see a predator given such a platform the day after we finally had a rare victory, and then be forced to watch as Trump instigated his audience to mock and belittle E Jean Carroll the day after he was charged with defamation. Perhaps CNN is not aware that one out of three women in the world have experienced what E Jean Carroll has experienced and this was insulting, irresponsible and outrageous.
Triggered that a predator was offered a platform to address millions of people when his accuser who won her trial against him only had a small courtroom to plead her case.
Triggered that Trump, just like so many powerful rapists and predators, continues to gaslight his victims, refuses to admit or seemingly understand what sexual abuse and rape is or what it does to its victims.
Triggered that the audience at CNN was laughing with Trump as he made fun of E Jean Carroll which triggered memories of men and women cheering and laughing with Trump as he mocked Christine Blasey Ford in the Kavanaugh hearings. Which triggered more rage thinking that our supreme court includes justices accused of sexual abuse and those appointed by one.
Triggered that afterwards at the CNN town hall with Republican voters in New Hampshire, when Gary Tuchman asked a voter, Karen Olson, how she felt about Trump being found liable for sexual abuse by a jury of his peers. She said: “I didn’t really care ... All of these situations where people are coming out 20, 30 years later, I don’t listen to it.” This must have triggered thousands of women who weren’t believed by their own mothers, or teachers or employers.
Triggered because the lack of accountability, the platforming of a known self-admitted and now charged predator, white supremacist, treasonous, twice-impeached president was more important for ratings and money than protecting women, Black people and democracy which triggered a deja vu of being back in 2016 when the media essentially gave Donald Trump an estimated $5bn in free media (more than any other Republican or Democratic candidate combined) which was what inevitably gave him the presidency.
I recently was exposed to a new term, “glimmering”, which was coined by Deb Dana, a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in complex trauma. “‘Glimmers’ refers to small moments when our biology is in a place of connection or regulation, which cues our nervous system to feel safe or calm.” Glimmers are the opposite of triggers.
One woman standing up, speaking the truth glimmers the brave in each of us. She opens the space for another world where women might do more than dream of being safe and free.
Glimmering happens when you call rape rape. When you speak the language that matches the crime. It happens when you put rapists on trial and not their victims, when you silence predators and exile them rather than giving them mega-media platforms.
Our greatest glimmering will be making sure we never elect a charged predator to be our president again.
Let the glimmering begin.
READ MORE 
Biden and McCarthy in Washington on March 17. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
In recent days, the parameters of a deal to raise the debt ceiling have come into view. The White House is reportedly prepared to make two big concessions. First, it is willing to cap discretionary spending at roughly its 2022 level for the next two years. This would constitute a roughly 13 percent cut to federal outlays, with adverse implications for myriad government programs and services. Second, it is ready to claw back billions of dollars in unspent pandemic aid.
But this isn’t enough for the GOP. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has insisted that any agreement to raise the debt limit must include new work requirements for social-welfare programs. And on Sunday, Biden indicated an openness to meeting this demand, telling reporters, “I voted for tougher aid programs. That’s in the law now, but for Medicaid it’s a different story. And so I’m waiting to hear what their exact proposal is.”
Biden’s meaning was plain: The president will not acquiesce to work requirements for health-insurance coverage but is more open to the GOP’s proposals for limiting eligibility for food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
It is worth taking a moment to underscore the perversity of this situation. Times of divided government necessarily require bipartisan compromise; even without a debt-limit fight, Democrats would need to secure Republican cooperation to keep the government funded this fall. Yet, as Jonathan Chait explains, Biden and McCarthy are not haggling over a normal bipartisan deal. In an ordinary negotiation between two parties that each enjoy a democratic mandate, both sides make concessions to the other’s agendas: If Democrats must acquiesce to social-spending cuts, Republicans would then reciprocate by accommodating some liberal priority, such as progressive tax increases.
But McCarthy isn’t interested in horse trading. He’s interested in extortion. Republicans are not offering a single concession to the Democratic agenda. They are merely offering not to plunge the U.S. into a financial crisis by blocking the Treasury from financing spending that Congress has already ordered. The GOP’s sole leverage in this negotiation is its reputation for nihilism. If it could be presumed that Democrats and Republicans were equally opposed to deliberately making Americans poorer, then the GOP would not be in a position to make any unilateral demands. Republicans’ being manifestly willing to sabotage the economy for partisan gain should be a scandal for the party. Yet much of the press is intent on portraying the GOP’s indifference to its most basic obligations to the public as a banal political reality that Democrats are duty bound to accept.
In this context, Biden’s inclination to pay the GOP’s ransom is understandable but misguided. Yes, all of the executive branch’s unilateral options for disarming the debt ceiling are freighted with risk, particularly in a context in which conservatives control the Supreme Court. But rewarding Republican extortion means harming various Democratic constituencies in the first instance and ensuring further debt-ceiling crises in the long run.
In any event, Democrats and the press should be clear-eyed about what Republicans are doing when they press for new work requirements on Medicaid, food stamps, and TANF. The ostensible purpose of these policies is to liberate the poor from dependence on welfare while increasing labor-force participation, but all available evidence indicates that the GOP’s proposals would yield negligible impacts on employment at the cost of cutting off health care and food aid to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of working, low-income Americans because of missed paperwork and bureaucratic errors.
If work requirements do not actually serve their official purpose, they are highly effective at their actual one. The Republican Party does not want all working, low-income Americans to enjoy public health insurance and nutritional aid. Their aim is not merely to strip welfare from the idle poor but to slash social-welfare spending in general. They are quite explicit about this intention.
Work requirements allow them to make progress on this objective precisely because such rules reliably deny benefits to the working Americans who comprise the vast majority of prime-age social-welfare recipients. What’s more, the policy enables the GOP to slash aid to such beneficiaries in a politically palatable way.
The House GOP’s most egregious proposal is to append work requirements to Medicaid. On a theoretical level, it is difficult to see why denying someone access to basic medical care would render them more capable of contributing to the economy. The idea that many Americans are choosing not to work because they can get a check-up for free is quite strange. A comfortable material existence plainly requires many, many things beyond health insurance.
And the empirical case for Medicaid work requirements is even weaker than the theoretical one. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 93 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries ages 19 to 64 are either working, attending school, caregiving, or suffering from a disabling ailment. As for that remaining 7 percent: Giving people access to health-care coverage makes them more likely to obtain and maintain employment. Thus, Medicaid is itself a work-promoting policy.
The “laboratories of democracy” provide more concrete evidence for the folly of Medicaid work requirements. In 2018, Arkansas imposed work requirements on its Medicaid beneficiaries, and the policy accomplished none of its ostensible objectives. Not only did the requirements fail to increase employment, but they actually cost the state and federal government $26.1 million in the short term because of the administrative burdens of implementing the new requirements. Meanwhile, nearly 16,000 low-income Arkansans lost their health coverage. Only 1,232 of those individuals were actually nonworking. In other words: Roughly 92 percent of those who lost health insurance owing to Medicaid’s work requirements did so because of paperwork problems, not because they were neglecting to contribute to the economy.
This result was not hard to anticipate. Arkansas’s rules initially required Medicaid recipients to submit documentation of their work on a complex website that required both access to the internet and skill at navigating it. The website also shut down between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. each day. And if Medicaid enrollees failed to complete their submission by the fifth day of every month, they lost their coverage.
If Republicans’ support for work requirements were genuinely motivated by a concern that Medicaid disincentivizes work, then Arkansas’s experiment would have led the party to abandon the policy. But if the GOP actually wanted to deny health insurance to the working poor — both out of an ideological hostility to social welfare and a desire to free up fiscal space for cutting taxes on the wealthy in the long term — then you would expect them to deem Arkansas a success story and push to take its policy national. They have, of course, done the latter.
Biden has thus far sworn off meddling with Medicaid. But the work requirements he has signaled openness to are similarly ill conceived. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, already has strict work requirements and time limits for Americans under 50. The House GOP’s proposal would extend these requirements to those between the ages of 50 and 55.
This is a solution in search of a problem. The labor-force participation rate among workers ages 25 to 54 is currently at its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. And even if Americans in their early 50s were shirking work en masse, there is no evidence that appending work requirements to SNAP would significantly increase their workforce participation. Research from the Urban Institute shows the past imposition of work requirements and time limits did not meaningfully increase beneficiaries’ earnings or employment. Work requirements do reliably deny SNAP benefits to working Americans, however. Projections suggest that McCarthy’s proposal would cut off food aid to hundreds of thousands of people, a total far larger than the number of nonworking, able-bodied SNAP recipients between 50 and 55.
TANF, meanwhile, is already a highly restrictive program whose chief beneficiaries are children. McCarthy’s plan would force states to strengthen work-documentation requirements and, thus, administrative burdens for accessing aid. Already, those burdens are so formidable that 26 percent of Americans eligible for TANF do not receive it.
There is little reason to believe that denying anti-poverty funds to the parents of young children will improve their employment prospects. Meanwhile, research indicates that providing direct cash assistance to needy families increases the future labor-force participation of their children.
One final illustration of the GOP’s bad faith can be found in the work-promoting welfare reforms the party isn’t considering. For example, as the Center for American Progress notes, there is one way in which SNAP presently does discourage work: Currently, a SNAP recipient who participates in a workforce-training program that offers a stipend or financial support risks suffering a reduction in food aid or loss of eligibility altogether. This gives some SNAP recipients a short-term financial incentive to forgo such training programs. Congress could eliminate this perverse incentive by exempting income earned during training from SNAP eligibility calculations. This would make the program more supportive of work. But it would also increase its fiscal cost. Since the GOP’s actual concern is for reducing spending on the poor, not improving their employment outcomes, it has no interest in the training issue.
All this said, work requirements serve their actual purpose perfectly well. Cutting aid to the indigent to sustainably fund tax cuts for the rich is an extremely unpopular economic program. In a 2019 Pew poll, only 17 percent of Americans endorsed cutting “assistance to the needy.”
But work requirements reframe the debate over soaking the poor. Rather than presenting a trade-off between helping the needy and pampering the wealthy, work requirements appear to aid the industrious at the indolent’s expense. That is a broadly popular proposition in the United States: In 2018, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 70 percent of Americans supported Medicaid work requirements.
Thus, by increasing the administrative obstacles to accessing social-welfare programs, work requirements enable the GOP to enact broad social-welfare cuts in a politically palatable way.
Republicans want the public to believe they are pushing for work-promoting social-welfare policies through ordinary bipartisan negotiations. What they are actually doing is threatening to deliberately induce an economic crisis unless Biden helps them cut off aid to hundreds of thousands of hardworking low-income Americans.
In an ideal world, Biden would call this bluff, aided by an unblinkered and widely trusted press. In our decidedly suboptimal world, however, he appears poised to shake down the poor to pay the GOP’s ransom.
READ MORE 
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures as he addresses a speech during his campaign rally in the Sultangazi district of Istanbul, May 12, 2023. (photo: Ozan Kose/AFP)
The Turkish government detained a team of Spanish elected officials and civil society leaders on hand to monitor election day activity in a Kurdish city.
The delegation had not been granted official observer accreditation by the Erdogan government, but were formally invited by the HDP, the leading Kurdish party and a key member of the opposition coalition.
The election held on Sunday was the closest contest Erdogan has faced in the two decades he has been in power. Immediately, the opposition coalition, led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, charged election irregularities, zeroing in on what Kilicdaroglu said was an extremely large number of objections to ballot boxes in Istanbul and Ankara — urban areas where the opposition dominated. “You are blocking the will of Turkey,” Kilicdaroglu said.
Erdogan fell short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff, officially winning more than 49.5 percent of the vote with fewer than 100,000 overseas ballots remaining to be tallied. A runoff will be held on May 28. Sinan Ogan, whose 5 percent of the vote forced the runoff by keeping both candidates under 50 percent, also made allegations of vote-counting manipulation by the government.
The Spanish observers included members of the left-leaning Podemos party; EH Bildu, a Basque nationalist coalition; and a senator from Esquerra Republicana, a Catalonian leftist party. The observers were in the Kurdish-majority city of Siirt when they were arrested and taken to a police station on Sunday, the day of the election. Officers then went to the hotel where the observers were staying and arrested the remaining members of the delegation, who joined their comrades in detention at the police station. They were held until Monday morning and released on the condition they leave the country, escorted to the airport and flown back to Spain on Monday and Tuesday.
Ismael Cortés, a national congressional deputy with Podemos, and Miriam Ojeda, a representative of the International Secretariat of Podemos, were among those detained. Spain and Turkey are both members of NATO.
“The situation of the retention and expulsion as a delegation that we have experienced is just one example of the greater context of repression and persecution of the opposition that has been experienced for years in Turkey and that has the Kurdish people as a special objective,” said Cortés. “We are concerned about the situation of the members and supporters of the YSP and HDP party and the respect for their fundamental, civil, and political rights.”
The observers also said in a statement to The Intercept that several members of the Kurdish YSP party were also arrested. Their fate is not known, and the Erdogan government did not respond to requests for comment. “This new and intolerable example of repression demonstrates the authoritarian drift of the regime of Erdogan, which undermines the democratic principles and fundamental rights of the Turkish citizenry and, especially, of the peoples present in this territory, such as the Kurdish,” the observers said in the statement.
Polls taken ahead of the election had the opposition ahead of Erdogan, sometimes by as much as 5 or 6 percentage points, leaving observers stunned at Erdogan beating the opposition by at least 4 points in the first round. Selim Koru, an analyst at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey and a critic of Erdogan, said that he doesn’t believe most of the vote-counting claims being made by the opposition will hold up. “The big thing is that most people in the opposition space came to trust the polls. Most of the evidence really favored the opposition,” he said. “But polling these days has a problem detecting right-wing bias. Something similar happened in the U.S. in 2016. We thought the pollsters took that into account, but I guess they didn’t.”
Ahead of the election, Erdogan’s government pressured Twitter to censor opposition voices and critical journalists — a request to which Twitter’s outgoing CEO Elon Musk instantly capitulated. “In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today,” Twitter posted.
Musk acknowledged that the government had threatened to take the site down, as Erdogan did in 2014 when Twitter refused to comply with a similar demand. The previous Twitter leadership, however, took Turkey’s government to court and prevailed in its Supreme Court.
READ MORE 
Volodymyr Zelenskiy with Olaf Scholz during the award ceremony for the Charlemagne prize in Aachen, Germany, 14 May 2023. (photo: Reuters)
Olaf Scholz’s about-turn on military aid policy will be transformative – and shows how German attitudes to the war are shifting
Yet of all Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s meetings with fellow European leaders over the past few days – from Rome to Paris to Chequers today for more hardware and more embraces with Rishi Sunak – his day in Germany may be remembered as the most important. The announcement on the eve of his visit of a doubling of military aid to Ukraine to a total of more than €5bn finally brings Germany in from the cold. The consequences may take months to be seen on the battlefield, but in geo-strategic terms they are immediate.
Zelenskiy knows that he has perhaps only six to eight months for his counteroffensive to make sufficient inroads to force Russia out of the areas it seized in 2022 and, better still, out of lands it annexed in 2014. Doing this would also demonstrate to the west the effectiveness of the support given so far. He knows that if he cannot finish the job this year, he will have to continue into next year in even more difficult circumstances.
He sees the Chinese, the French and others showboating diplomacy not necessarily on Ukraine’s terms. At the same time he is aware that public opinion in several countries is wavering. Most of all, he sees the lumbering figure of Donald Trump coming into view. Even the prospect of a return to the White House of a man who cannot say which side he supports provides succour to Vladimir Putin and the forces on the far right and far left in Europe who put the vague notion of “peace” ahead of international law, self-determination and human rights.
That is why the debate in Europe, and Germany in particular, is so important. Germans are told to pull their weight but not to throw their weight about. They pride themselves on Vergangenheitsbewältigung, their coming to terms with their past. Yet in recent years among some sections of society, particularly Scholz’s Social Democrats, one wrong lesson was learned. These “salon pacifists” reinterpreted the phrase “never again” to mean never again going to war, rather than never confronting tyranny. The terrible invasion of Iraq reinforced that view.
Ukraine has now shattered that, inserting a concept alien to several generations of “the good war”. But it has required two heaves to get there. The first was the Zeitenwende, the speech Scholz gave three days after Putin’s invasion in which he declared a new approach to hard power and an extra €100bn to be spent on reinforcing Germany’s ailing armed forces.
Having broken the mould so dramatically, the German chancellor returned to type, second-guessing each step, fearful of a backlash from his party. Relations became so toxic that the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was prevented by the Ukrainians at the last moment from visiting Kyiv. Zelenskiy feted all-comers but froze out the Germans, who complained they were not getting the credit for being one of the largest donors of military aid, amounting to more than €2bn. The problem was that it was offered grudgingly and delivered slowly.
Tensions reached a high in the autumn over the stalled delivery of German-made Leopard 2 tanks. Not only did Scholz refuse to send them, but he also held back re-export licences to Ukraine by other countries of the tanks. He eventually relented, arguing that his position had forced the Americans to release tanks too.
So why this change of heart and is it irrevocable? Several factors in recent months have transformed the relationship between Germany and Ukraine. One is the appointment of Boris Pistorius, the first defence minister in years to get to grips with the transformation required to make Germany the major military player Nato needs it to be. Speaking at a conference last week, one of Germany’s leading diplomats, Thomas Bagger, who will shortly take over as the top official at the foreign ministry, said: “My country is now on a path to correct what in hindsight was its biggest mistake.” Announcing the new €3bn package of measures for Ukraine, Pistorius declared: “Germany will provide all the help it can, for as long as it takes.”
People around Scholz argue that if he had been more gung-ho, he would not have brought the German people with him. Meanwhile, his foreign ministry and now his defence ministry are showing greater mettle, not just towards Russia, but also in navigating the increasingly difficult dilemma about China as a business opportunity and a security threat.
On Sunday evening, Zelenskiy was in the beautiful medieval city of Aachen to receive the Charlemagne prize for services to Europe. Before an audience of luminaries, he spoke not just about the war but about Ukraine’s place in the European Union.
That is why, if – and it remains a huge if – Ukraine prevails and wins the war, its biggest goal will be accession to the EU, and the role of Germany (and France and Poland) will be so pivotal. The UK, sadly, will not be at the table. As for Scholz, every time he was referred to warmly by Zelenskiy in his speech (“my friend Olaf”), the chancellor appeared to fidget with his headphones or tie. He may not be able to do human, but he is the most important human being the Ukrainians will have to do business with.
READ MORE 
The GOP's bloodlust appears to be getting worse. (photo: Libby March/The New York Times)
Among the most troubling aspects of the shooting was the almost jubilant reaction of conservative media to the news that someone had taken the law into his own hands and meted out lethal force. Tucker Carlson praised Rittenhouse as someone who decided “to maintain order when no one else would.” Ann Coulter said she wanted Rittenhouse “as my president.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a candidate, called him an “innocent child,” and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky praised Rittenhouse for his “incredible restraint.”
Rittenhouse went on, after his acquittal, to become a minor conservative celebrity. He met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, got a standing ovation at a Turning Point USA conference and earned the praise of the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who said, “Kyle Rittenhouse did what we should want citizens to do in such a situation: step forward to defend the community against mob violence.”
READ MORE 
Ecuadorian president Guillermo Lasso, pictured in Quito on May 16, 2023, set off a constitutional clause to dissolve government. (photo: Dolores Ochoa/AP)
The Ecuadorian leader invoked a procedure known as “mutual death,” whereby the opposition-led National Assembly is dissolved and snap elections will be called, according to a decree published on the website of the presidency.
Lasso, who took office in 2021, is accused of interfering in the negotiation of a shipping contract related to the export of oil products. He has denied all allegations and claims they are politically motivated.
Lasso said his order for snap elections was the “best decision to pave the way for hope.”
“This is a new moment for optimism. Let’s build a better future for Ecuador,” he told the nation in an address on Wednesday.
He argued his decision was the way to stop political confrontation in the country, adding that the crisis cost Ecuador millions of dollars.
“This is a democratic decision not only because it’s constitutional, but also it allows you to decide on your future,” Lasso said.
On Sunday, opposition lawmaker Virgilio Saquicela was re-elected as president of the Assembly with 96 votes while Lasso’s coalition holds 25 seats in the legislative chamber, a scenario that could give the opposition a chance to get enough votes to approve the impeachment.
The president’s decision to instate muerte cruzada means his government will remain in office until a new general election takes place in around six months.
But calls for his resignation have grown louder in recent months, as Ecuador’s opposition and influential federation of Indigenous organizations accused Lasso of negligence in a country engulfed by a cost-of-living crisis and high rates of criminal violence.
Will Freeman, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the application of muerte cruzada “would absolutely cause instability.”
“Lasso is too unpopular to benefit from the impression that he’s overriding checks and balances to finally get something done,” he told CNN, before the announcement on Wednesday.
READ MORE 
Temperatures reached 93 degrees in some cities, more than 20 degrees above normal. (photo: Benjamin Massello/Unsplash)
Temperatures reached 93 degrees in some cities, more than 20 degrees above normal.
Monday marked the fourth blistering day of a hot spell that saw temperatures more than 20 degrees higher than typical throughout Oregon and Washington.
In Seattle, the mercury climbed to a searing 86 degrees on Saturday — a record for May 13 — before setting another record of 89 degrees the next day. Portland, Oregon, reached 93 degrees over the weekend, breaking a 50-year benchmark, and scorching temperatures tormented both cities again Monday. Both cities tend to see highs in the mid-60s this time of year. Seattle in particular is mild; May temperatures have broken 90 degrees just six times since 1948.
Canada is feeling the heat, too. At least 17 temperature records fell across British Columbia during the weekend, including in the capital of Victoria, which saw a high of 83 degrees. Lytton, about three hours northeast of Vancouver, clocked 93 degrees on Saturday — the province’s highest temperature.
Experts say the unseasonal temperatures could also affect Alberta, where dozens of wildfires have burned 1 million acres and caused tens of thousands of people to evacuate.
Evidence suggests climate change is making these heat waves more likely. “Many places in the Pacific Northwest from Washington up into British Columbia are going to experience conditions [over the next few days] that are at least five times more likely due to climate change,” Andrew Pershing, a climate scientist with the nonprofit Climate Central, told KUOW radio in Seattle.
Across the U.S., heat waves have become nearly three times as frequent since the 1960s, and the heat wave season has expanded by some 46 days.
The normally temperate Pacific Northwest is particularly susceptible to intense heat. Seattle is the least air conditioned major city in the U.S., with cooling systems installed in just over half of its housing units — compared to nearly 90 percent in New York City. Portland is better equipped but still lags behind other metropolitan areas.
Health officials throughout the region warned residents to stay cool and hydrated — especially vulnerable populations like children, outdoor workers, and people with chronic health conditions. This is particularly important during an early season scorcher, as people haven’t yet had a chance to acclimate to hotter temperatures. Because bodies of water haven’t yet had a chance to warm up either, health officials also warned about the risk of drowning from “cold shock,” a phenomenon that suddenly slows people’s heart rate and blood pressure after jumping into cold water.
Other risks from high heat include headache, muscle cramps, dehydration, and vomiting. Previous heat waves in the Pacific Northwest have claimed dozens or even hundreds of lives, including the massive heat dome of June 2021 that killed more than 800 people across Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. A smaller heat wave in Washington state last year killed at least 10 people and sent more than 500 to emergency rooms.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.