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Flooding in Central Asia and southern Russia kills scores and forces tens of thousands to evacuate to higher ground

April 18, 2024

Flooding in Central Asia and southern Russia kills scores and forces tens of thousands to evacuate to higher ground

Unusually heavy seasonal rains have left a vast swath of southern Russia and Central Asia reeling from floods, with dozens of people dead in Afghanistan and Pakistan and tens of thousands forced to flee their homes in Kazakhstan and Russia.

Authorities say the flooding — the atypical intensity of which scientists blame on human-driven climate change — is likely to get worse, with more rain predicted and already swollen rivers bursting their banks.

Scores killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Lightning and heavy rains killed at least 36 people in Pakistan, mostly farmers, over three days, emergency response officials said Monday, as a state of emergency was declared in the southwest of the country. Most of the deaths were blamed on farmers being struck by lightning and torrential rain collapsing houses, The Associated Press quoted regional disaster management spokesperson Arfan Kathia as saying Monday. He noted that more rain was expected over the coming week.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a televised address that he’d ordered authorities to rush aid to the affected regions, where swollen rivers and flash floods have also severely damaged roads.

PAKISTAN-WEATHER
Onlookers gaze towards municipal workers using heavy machinery to level the ground after damage due to floodwaters following heavy rains on the outskirts of Quetta on April 15, 2024.BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GETTY

In neighboring Afghanistan, the country’s Taliban rulers said Sunday that heavy flooding from seasonal rains had killed at least 33 people and left more than two dozen others injured over three days. Abdullah Janan Saiq, the spokesman for the government’s disaster management agency, said the flash floods hit the capital, Kabul, and several other provinces.

He said more than 600 homes were damaged or destroyed completely, with hundreds of acres of farmland destroyed and many farm animals killed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How agriculture hastens species extinction

January 3, 2023

How agriculture hastens species extinction

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley reports on something scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction. There have been five great die-offs in the history of our planet, when at least 75 percent of the known species disappear. The last mass extinction was 66 million years ago, when an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Now scientists think humans are hastening another mass annihilation of plants and animals. Among the causes this time are pollution, habitat destruction, over-exploitation of resources, and climate change.

Mexican ecologist Gerardo Ceballos is among the world’s leading scientists on extinction. He laid out for us how dire the situation has become over the last century.

Gerardo Ceballos: There is only 2 percent of the big fishes that were in the oceans 50 years ago. Only 2 percent are living. We have lost around 70 percent of all the animals that were in the– in the planet. All the big animals, all the mammals, bird, 70 percent are gone since 1918. In Southeast Asia, you know, we have lost 90 percent of the tropical forest of Southeast Asia since 2000. So, our impact is so massive that we are becoming this meteorite that is impact the planet. The difference with the previous mass extinction is that they took tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand, even millions of years to happen. In this particular case, this is happening so fast, now in just two, three decades — even the species that are not affected directly by the extinction crisis won’t have enough time to evolve and survive this impact that we’re doing.

Every two years, the World Wildlife Fund produces a document called the “living planet report.” It’s a biennial report card that details the health of planet earth’s wildlife, showing the average decline of species populations since they were first monitored in 1970.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

How Media Narratives Became More Important Than Facts

May 4, 2019

A cameraman in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Oct. 19, 2016. (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

A cameraman in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Oct. 19, 2016. (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

How Media Narratives Became More Important Than Facts

Commentary

The day that I told CBS News I wished to leave my job as investigative correspondent ahead of my contract, I didn’t give a reason. I didn’t see the point because the problem wasn’t fixable.

Nor was it isolated to CBS News.

My own take is that—as our industry has changed in ways that have become undeniable to most—I was a bit of the canary in the coal mine. By that, I mean I believe I was among the first to really pay attention to the increasingly effective operations to shape and censor news—the movements to establish narratives rather than follow facts—and to see the growing influence of smear operations, political interests, and corporate interests on the news.

It’s not that I’m smarter than my peers, and I’m surely far less smart than many, but my particular brand of off-narrative reporting happened to draw the intense attention of the smear operators and propagandists, so I began to study it.

A case in point: the smear that was promulgated when I left CBS. It was often incorrectly reported that I told CBS management I was quitting due to liberal media bias. That false story turned out to be convenient for both political sides, and largely survives today. It simply wasn’t rooted in fact. And I don’t recall reporters even asking me whether it was true. Once a few articles reported that it was, others simply copied the claim and adopted it as if established fact, eventually without attribution. Now there would be no point in trying to clarify it. After all, Wikipedia says it’s true. No going back from that.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“I’m Committing Professional Suicide”: CBS Star Reporter Admits “Mostly Liberal” Journalists Are Now “Political Activists”

February 19, 2019

“I’m Committing Professional Suicide”: CBS Star Reporter Admits “Mostly Liberal” Journalists Are Now “Political Activists”

CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan has broken ranks and admitted that journalists have lost their objectivity and become “political activists.” 

During an appearance on the Mike Drop podcast with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland, Logan admitted that “the media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.,” adding that it was nearly impossible for viewers to decipher if they were being told the truth at any given time. 

“85% of journalists are registered Democrats,” Logan said. “How do you know you’re being lied to? How do you know you’re being manipulated? How do you know there’s something not right with the coverage? When they simplify it all [and] there’s no grey. It’s all one way. Well, life isn’t like that. If it doesn’t match real life, it’s probably not. Something’s wrong. For example, all the coverage on Trump all the time is negative. … That’s a distortion of the way things go in real life.”

Embedded video

CBS Laura Logan

“There’s no grey. It’s all one way,” said Logan.  ~All coverage of Trump was negative -that’s distortion We abandoned our pretense to be objective

Logan says that the heavy bias has warped people’s ability to know what’s really true. 

“When you turn on your computer, or you walk past the TV, or you see a newspaper headline in the grocery store If they’re all saying the same thing, the weight of that convinces you that it’s true,” said Logan. “You don’t question it, because everyone is saying it.”

She also admitted that journalists today are more or less lobbyists for liberal interests, adding that the weight of the liberal media machine overwhelms “the other side” unless people actively seek outlets such as Breitbart. 

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Americans Really, Really Hate The Government

January 27, 2016

Americans Really, Really Hate The Government

Anger - Public DomainIf there is one thing that Americans can agree on these days, it is the fact that most of us don’t like the government.  CBS News has just released an article entitled “Americans hate the U.S. government more than ever“, and an average of recent surveys calculated by Real Clear Politics found that 63 percent of all Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction and only 28 percent of all Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction.  In just a few days the first real ballots of the 2016 election will be cast in Iowa, and up to this point the big story of this cycle has been the rise of “outsider” candidates that many of the pundits had assumed would never have a legitimate chance.  Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have all been beneficiaries of the overwhelming disgust that the American people feel regarding what has been going on in Washington.

And it isn’t just Barack Obama or members of Congress that Americans are disgusted with.  According to the CBS News article that I referenced above, our satisfaction with various federal agencies has fallen to an eight year low…

A handful of industries are those “love to hate” types of businesses, such as cable-television companies and Internet service providers.

The federal government has joined the ranks of the bottom-of-the-barrel industries, according to a new survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Americans’ satisfaction level in dealing with federal agencies –everything from Treasury to Homeland Security — has fallen for a third consecutive year, reaching an eight-year low.

So if we are all so fed up with the way that things are running, it should be easy to fix right?

Unfortunately, things are not so simple.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

California Lake Mysteriously Runs Dry Overnight, Thousands Of Fish Dead

September 26, 2015

California Lake Mysteriously Runs Dry Overnight, Thousands Of Fish Dead

Perhaps it is because the world has grown habituated to its unique set of “liquidity” problems, but California’s record, and ongoing, drought has not been receiving much media coverage in recent weeks. Perhaps it should be, because according to a report by CBS Sacramento, the mystery that recently surrounded the water levels at Lake Mead andLake Powell, has spilled over to a water reservoir in Northern California.

As CBS reports, the Mountain Meadows reservoir also known as Walker Lake, a popular fishing hole just west of Susanville, ran dry literally overnight, killing thousands of fish and leaving residents looking for answers.

The unprecedented emptying of the lake has stunned locals: residents say people were fishing on the lake last Saturday, but it drained like a bathtub overnight.

The reservoir before:

and after:


“Everywhere that you see that’s wet, there was water,” said resident Eddie Bauer. Bauer has lived near this lake his entire life. This is the first time he’s ever seen it run dry. He and other residents want answers.

Pacific Gas & Electric Company owns the rights to the water and uses it for hydroelectric power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Former CBS Reporter Accuses Government of Secretly Planting Classified Docs on Her Computer | Liberty Blitzkrieg

October 28, 2014

Former CBS Reporter Accuses Government of Secretly Planting Classified Docs on Her Computer | Liberty Blitzkrieg.

Attkisson speculated on how the Nixon controversy would have been handled in a world filled with today’s television and social media obsessions.

“Nixon would basically refuse to turn over tapes to Congress, his aides would refuse to testify to Congress or would take the Fifth or would lie to Congress with fair amount of impunity,” she said. “Woodward and Bernstein would be controversialized on social media by special and political interests. … Then at the end Nixon would go on a popular late-night comedy show, during which time he would humorously refer to his attackers as people who were political witch-hunters who believed in Area 51-type conspiracy theories.”

– From the Huffington Post article: Sharyl Attkisson Says Journalists Have ‘Gone Backwards’ Since Watergate Scandal

In case you forgot, Sharyl Attkisson is the former CBS News reporter who resigned from the network in March after expressing frustration that her stories covering the Obama Administration’s role in the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals were being spiked due to a desire to protect the President.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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