These 5 Teeth Habits Cause a Surprising Amount of Damage, Dentists Say – The New York Times

By Jancee Dunn

June 21, 2024

“A few years ago, I booked an emergency visit with my dentist for a cracked molar.

When he asked me how it happened, I told him I had been eating popcorn and crunched on some of the unpopped kernels, which I find weirdly satisfying.

He sighed. I was not the first popcorn-loving patient he had seen with a broken tooth, he said. Please, he added wearily, don’t do that anymore.

Like me, there are probably a few things you’re doing — some that you might even think are harmless — that can land you in a dentist’s chair. So I asked experts to share some of the habits that were keeping them in business. Here are four more.

Chewing ice

Several dentists told me that ice, like popcorn, is a frequent tooth-breaker.

Chewing ice “is notorious” for causing small chips in tooth enamel, the outer layer of your teeth, said Dr. Diana Nguyen, chief of clinical general dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Those chips can develop into larger cracks, she added, that might eventually require treatments like root canals and crowns to fix — or even surgical removal of the tooth.

Dentists would prefer you didn’t chew pens, either, which can “cause repeated trauma to your teeth,” added Dr. Natasha Flake, president of the American Association of Endodontists. “I even treated a patient recently who fractured their front tooth while trying to take a cap off of a marker.”

Sipping energy drinks

Dentists also hate energy drinks, which a small study found can be more damaging to your teeth than cola, because they often have higher levels of acid that can erode your enamel.

“Those things are brutal,” said Dr. Eugena Stephan, associate dean for clinical affairs at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine. “And people will sip on them all day, which is the worst, because they’re bathing their teeth in acid and sugar.”

So don’t nurse energy drinks, soda or coffee, which all contain acid, said Dr. Carlos González-Cabezas, a professor and academic dean of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Try to finish them in five or 10 minutes, he said, and if you can drink water afterward, or rinse with it, even better.

But don’t brush right away. While it might sound logical to do so after eating or drinking something acidic, it can actualy damage the enamel, according to the American Dental Association. It’s better to wait an hour, then brush.

That way your saliva, which is protective, can reharden your tooth enamel and neutralize the acidity in your mouth.

Vaping

Smoking is one of the worst things you can do for your oral health. But there is a “widespread misconception” that vaping is safer, Dr. Nguyen said. One reason, she suggested, is that there are fewer studies on the newer habit.

But when you vape, you’re still inhaling nicotine, Dr. Nguyen said, as well as other chemicals. Nicotine has been shown to cause an increase in bacteria and plaque in your mouth, and a 2020 study found that subjects who vaped had less healthy oral microbiomes than people who never smoked.

Using fluoride-free toothpaste

It irks Dr. González-Cabezas to see people on social media and elsewhere rejecting the use of fluoride. Using toothpaste without fluoride, he said, “increases your rates for dental decay, big time.”

Fluoride stimulates new mineral formation, making your enamel stronger, and inhibits bacteria that can cause cavities. Avoiding it, he frequently tells patients, “puts you back to the same era where your grandparents were, or your great-grandparents, in which dental decay was rampant, and people had dentures where they were relatively young.”

If you are going to use a fluoride-free toothpaste, Dr. Gonzáles-Cabezas added, “you have to be extremely disciplined with your diet and with your hygiene, which most people are not.”

A final note

Make sure to brush your teeth before your dental visit, said Dr. Stephan.

“It’s not a big deal, but it’s just kind of a nice thing to do,” she said. “Sometimes I get tempted to be like, ‘Oh, I can see what you had for lunch,’ but I don’t say it.”

But she’s thinking it. She will spot some tuna fish lodged between patients’ molars, Dr. Stephan said, “or I can see a piece of lettuce.”

“I mean, I’d rather see their teeth,” she said.”  end of dental section

Earth’s Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes We’re Only Starting to Understand – by Ferris Jabr – The New York Times

By Ferris Jabr

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer at the magazine and the author of “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life,” from which this article is adapted.

• June 24, 2024

“In the middle of North America, there is a portal to the deep recesses of Earth’s rocky interior. The portal’s mouth — a furrowed pit about half a mile wide — spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, expos­ing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz and shimmering con­stellations of gold. Beneath the pit, some 370 miles of tunnels twist through solid rock, extending more than 1.5 miles below the surface. For 126 years, this site in Lead, S.D., housed the Homestake Mine, the deepest and most productive gold mine on the continent.

In 2006, the Barrick Gold Corporation donated the mine to the state of South Dakota, which converted it into the largest subterranean laboratory in the United States, the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Although the lowest tunnels flooded after mining ceased, it is still possible to descend nearly a mile beneath the planet’s surface. Most of the sci­entists who do so are physicists conducting highly sensitive experi­ments that must be shielded from interfering cosmic rays. But a few biologists also venture into the underground labyrinth, typically seeking its dankest and dirtiest corners — places where obscure creatures extrude metal and transfigure rock.

On a bitingly cold December morning, I followed three young sci­entists and a group of Sanford employees into “the cage” — the bare metal elevator that would take us 4,850 feet into Earth’s crust. We wore neon vests, steel-toed boots and hard hats. Strapped to our belts were per­sonal respirators, which would protect us from carbon monoxide in the event of a fire or explosion. The cage descended swiftly and sur­prisingly smoothly. Our idle chatter and laughter were just audible over the din of unspooling cables and whooshing air. After a controlled plum­met of about 10 minutes, we reached the bottom of the facility.

Our two guides, both former miners, directed us into a pair of small linked rail cars and drove us through a series of narrow tunnels. Within 20 minutes, we had traded the relatively cool and well-ventilated region near the cage for an increasingly hot and muggy corridor. Whereas the surface world was snowy and well below freez­ing, a mile down it was about 90 degrees with nearly 100 percent humidity. Heat seemed to pulse through the rock surrounding us, and the air was thick and cloying; the smell of brimstone seeped into our nostrils. It felt as though we had entered hell’s foyer.

The rail cars stopped. We stepped out and walked a short distance to a large plastic spigot protruding from the rock. A pearly stream of water trickled from the wall near the faucet’s base, forming rivulets and pools. Wafting from the water was hydrogen sulfide — the source of the chamber’s odor. Kneeling, I realized that the water was teeming with a stringy white material similar to the skin of a poached egg. Caitlin Casar, a geobiologist, explained that the white fibers were microbes in the genus Thiothrix, which join together in long filaments and store sulfur in their cells, giving them a ghostly hue. Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust — a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen — yet life was literally gush­ing from rock. This particular ecological hot spot had earned the nick­name Thiothrix Falls.” . . . .

“. . . . . .Many years ago, I learned an astonishing fact that began to change the way I think about life’s relationship to the giant, tempestuous, half-molten rock we call home. What I learned is this: Life on our planet does not simply experience the weather — it creates it. Consider the Amazon rainforest. Every year, the Amazon is drenched in about eight feet of rain. In some parts of the forest, the annual rainfall is closer to 14 feet, more than five times the av­erage yearly precipitation across the contiguous United States. This deluge is partly a consequence of geographic serendipity: Intense equa­torial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean and bordering moun­tains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense. Rainforests happen where it happens to rain.

But that’s only half the story. Within the forest floor, vast sym­biotic networks of plant roots and filamentous fungi pull water from the soil into trunks, stems and leaves. As the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon drink their fill, they release excess moisture, saturating the air with 20 billion tons of water vapor each day. At the same time, plants of all kinds secrete salts and emit bouquets of pungent gaseous compounds. Mushrooms, dainty as paper parasols or squat as door­knobs, exhale plumes of spores. The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen grains and bits of leaves and bark into the atmosphere. The wet breath of the forest — peppered with microscopic life and organic residues — creates conditions that are highly conducive to rain. With so much water vapor in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, clouds quickly form. In a typical year, the Amazon generates around half of its own rainfall.

The Amazon’s rain ritual challenges the way we typically think about life on Earth. Conventional wisdom holds that life is sub­ject to its environment. If Earth did not orbit a star of the right size and age, if it were too close or too far from that star, if it did not have a stable atmosphere, liquid water and a magnetic field that deflects harmful cosmic rays, it would be lifeless. Life evolved on Earth be­cause Earth is suitable for life. Since Darwin, prevailing scientific para­digms have likewise emphasized that the ever-shifting demands of the environment largely dictate how life evolves: Species best able to cope with changes to their particular habitats leave behind the most descen­dants, whereas those that fail to adapt die out.

Yet this truth has an underappreciated twin: Life changes its environ­ment, too. In the mid-20th century, when ecology established itself as a formal discipline, this fact began to gain wider recognition in Western science. Even so, the focus was on relatively small and local changes: a beaver constructing a dam, for instance, or earthworms churning a patch of soil. The notion that living creatures of all kinds might modify their environments in much more significant ways — that microbes, fungi, plants and animals can change the topography and climate of a continent or even the entire planet — was rarely given seri­ous consideration.

In recent decades, however, the sci­entific understanding of life’s relationship to the planet has been un­dergoing a major reformation. Contrary to longstanding maxims, life has been a formidable geological force throughout Earth’s history, often matching or surpassing the power of glaciers, earthquakes and volcanoes. Over the past several billion years, all manner of life forms, from microbes to mammoths, have trans­formed the continents, ocean and atmosphere, turning a lump of or­biting rock into the world as we’ve known it. Living creatures are not simply products of inexorable evolutionary processes in their particu­lar habitats; they are orchestrators of their environments and partici­pants in their own evolution. We and other living creatures are more than inhabitants of Earth. We are Earth: an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles. The evidence for this new paradigm is all around us, although much of it has been discovered only recently and has yet to permeate public consciousness to the same degree as, say, selfish genes or the microbiome.

The history of life on Earth is the his­tory of life’s remaking Earth. Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffus­ing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which pro­tected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radia­tion. Today plants and other photosynthetic organisms appear to help maintain a level of atmospheric oxygen high enough to support complex life but not so high that Earth would erupt in flames at the slightest spark. Marine plankton drive chemical cycles on which all other life depends and emit gases that increase cloud cover, modifying global climate. Kelp forests, coral reefs and shellfish store huge amounts of carbon, buffer ocean acidity, improve water quality and defend shorelines from se­vere weather. Animals as diverse as elephants, prairie dogs and termites continually reconstruct the planet’s crust, facilitating the flow of water, air and nutrients and improving the prospects of millions of species. And micro-organisms, like those I observed deep within Earth’s crust, are now thought to be important players in many geological pro­cesses.

As I studied the interdependence of Earth and life, I continually returned to an ancient and controversial idea: that Earth itself is alive. It was not until the late 20th century that the idea of a living planet found one of its most popular and enduring expressions in Western science, the Gaia hypothesis. Conceived by the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock in the 1960s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the animate and inanimate elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.” . . . . .

A.I. Is Getting Better Fast. Can You Tell What’s Real Now? – The New York Times

“A.I. Is Getting Better Fast. Can You Tell What’s Real Now?

By Stuart A. Thompson

June 21, 2024

“Artificial intelligence tools can create lifelike faces and realistic photographs — and they are getting better all the time. The phony images now appear regularly on social media, with many users seeming to believe that the images are real. But there are still some telltale signs that an image was made by A.I.

Can you tell the difference? Take our quiz.

1. Is this celebrity photoshoot real or A.I.?

A.I.

Not A.I.

Oops, not quite. This is a real image. This image shows some stars of the “Justice League” movies — Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill and Jason Mamoa. It’s a genuine image but it may look slightly unusual because it was either cropped or compressed after it was reposted several times on social media. The original image is below.

. . . . . .

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT Comment:

Reading the comments is instructive. The reporting is excellent. Thank you. At 60% I did much worse than expected, but this was my introducdtion into what to look for. I seems that the only logical thing is to ban all AI generated images that are not specifically for scienctific or military matters. All AI generated images shoud be required to be labelled cleary as AIG, possibly in all four corners and one or three in the middle, top, center, bottom. Penalites for using unlabeled AIG should be severe. The public should not have to doubt every photo it sees. Otherwise, won’t this be dozens of more nails into the coffin of democracies? InconvenientNews.net

DL: I hope every reader can access this article in the NYT, take the test, and read the comments. You shoud be allowed 10 articles at the NYT per month as a non-subscriber.

If you have no views left, try to put your browser into incognito mode to access this article.

Nearly 30% of birds in U.S., Canada have vanished since 1970 | Cornell Chronicle, 2019

By Gustave Axelson

September 19, 2019

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“If you were alive in 1970, more than 1 in 4 birds in the U.S. and Canada have disappeared within your lifetime.

According to research published Sept. 19 by the journal Science, the total breeding bird population in the continental U.S. and Canada has dropped by 29 percent since that year.

“We were astounded by this result … the loss of billions of birds,” said the study’s lead author, Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a leader of research and planning on joint initiatives by the Lab and the American Bird Conservancy.

, Click to open gallery view

Credit:Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Research published Sept. 19 online by the journal Science shows a massive loss of nearly 3 billion birds in the continental breeding adult bird population for the United States and Canada over the past 50 years.

Rosenberg led a research team of scientists from seven institutions from the U.S. and Canada in the analysis of 529 bird species. The team analyzed the most robust synthesis of long-term-monitoring population surveys ever assembled for a group of wildlife species; it also analyzed radar imagery.

Rosenberg said the results of this study point to something bigger than birds.

“It’s a strong signal that our human-altered landscapes are losing their ability to support birdlife,” he said. “And that is an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.”

All told, the U.S. and Canadian continental avifauna population is down by 2.9 billion breeding adult birds, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by more than 50 percent, or another 700 million birds.

Credit:American Bird Conservancy

The decline of birds signals a broader crisis in the natural world. Our quality of life – the water we drink, the food we eat, and the beauty of natural landscapes that we enjoy – all depend on keeping our planet healthy.

Habitat loss, said the authors, is likely to be the driving factor in these declines.

“These numbers are staggering,” said Arvind Panjabi, study co-author and avian conservation scientist at the Colorado-based Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

So-called common birds – the species many people see every day – represent the greatest losses of birdlife in the study. More than 90 percent of the losses come from 12 avian families, including sparrows, blackbirds, warblers and finches. The losses include favorite species seen at bird feeders, such as dark-eyed juncos (little gray snowbirds that show up in backyards in winter, down by 160 million) and white-throated sparrows (down by 90 million).

Meadowlarks are down from coast to coast – a 70 million decline for Eastern meadowlark, and 60 million for Western meadowlark. The continental red-winged blackbird population has declined by 92 million birds.”

Source: Nearly 30% of birds in U.S., Canada have vanished since 1970 | Cornell Chronicle

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Why Netanyahu Doesn’t Take Biden Seriously – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion columnist, reporting from Tel Aviv.

“A few months ago, President Biden seemed so fed up as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel ignored his calls for restraint in Gaza that he finally sounded tough.

In March, Biden was asked if his calls for Israel not to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah marked a “red line,” meaning that an invasion would lead to serious consequences.

“It is a red line,” Biden said, “but I’m never gonna leave Israel.”

What that added up to wasn’t clear, perhaps not even to Biden. But as someone who generally admires Biden’s foreign policy, I wanted to think that the president meant that an Israeli invasion of Rafah would lead to a suspension of transfers of offensive weapons, but no interruption of defensive weapons such as protections against incoming missiles.

Then in April, Biden called Netanyahu and seemed again to draw a line that was at least pink. He urged an immediate cease-fire and, according to the White House announcement, “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.”

The statement continued, “U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”

In May, Biden once more seemed to establish a red line. “If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons” used against cities, he told CNN.

All this seemed to signal Biden’s belated willingness to stand up to Netanyahu and avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Rafah. After being widely urged to do more for Gazans — even by his wife — Biden seemed to condition assistance so as to push Israel to flood the territory with aid, avoid an invasion of Rafah, stop killing aid workers and move toward a cease-fire.

In the period since that stern April phone call, Biden has again allowed Netanyahu to walk all over him.

Israel did invade Rafah. The supply of food reaching people in southern Gaza dropped. At least an additional 15 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. And Israel has continued reckless bombings like the one that ignited a tent camp in Rafah, killing dozens.

Now that Biden’s red and pink lines have been ignored, what is the president planning next? The administration is moving ahead with an $18 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets to Israel; I’ve no objection to the sale in principle, but the timing sends an awful signal that there are no consequences for ignoring Biden.

“What Biden has shown Netanyahu over and over is that he will wag his finger but he won’t enforce the finger-wagging,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former administration official who is the president of Refugees International.

This war began when Israel suffered a horrendous terrorist attack, and it had every right to strike Hamas — but not to level entire neighborhoods or to starve civilians. Biden has enabled Netanyahu and protected him at the United Nations even as a U.N. commission found Israel responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Biden seems to have believed initially that he could best influence and restrain Netanyahu by holding him close. And in fairness, this approach worked to some degree: Israel did not invade Lebanon last fall, as it was considering, and its invasion of Rafah seemed more measured than its invasion of other Gaza cities. It has also allowed more food into northern Gaza, aid workers say.

But the bottom line is that Biden’s Gaza policy has helped Netanyahu stay in power without, in my view, advancing Israel’s long-term security interests. The war has made a mockery of Biden’s arguments that the United States backs the “rules-based international order” and has thus undermined our position in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in a remarkable show of ingratitude to a president who has been his lifeline, Netanyahu used an English-language video to criticize the Biden administration for being insufficiently supportive and is preparing to sidestep the White House and speak to Congress.

We all know that diplomacy involves sticks as well as carrots. If Netanyahu doesn’t take Biden seriously, that’s because Biden mostly speaks softly and carries a big carrot.

After the latest Netanyahu attack on the Biden administration a few days ago, the White House responded that it found the prime minister’s remarks “deeply disappointing.” That sure taught Netanyahu a lesson.

“How much more proof does Biden need that Netanyahu is not a U.S. ally?” asked Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper. It advised Biden that Netanyahu “has taken you for a ride.”

If Biden shows that his red lines are meaningless in Gaza, why should Russia, China or Iran find him credible? If he is too timid to take on an ally dependent on American arms, what reason is there to think he would confront a rival?

The paradox is that Biden has generally had a successful foreign policy, especially in knitting together an alliance in Asia to reduce the risk of war with China. Yet he now finds himself mired in a mess in the Middle East that could well worsen. The war in Gaza may drag on at a lower level for the rest of this year, and Israel is talking of attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon in the coming weeks, triggering a separate war that could be even more catastrophic. Biden is trying to prevent a Lebanon war, but the way he projects weakness to Netanyahu limits his influence.

Look, I recognize that it’s easy to write these critical columns from the sidelines and that it’s much harder to actually navigate real-world policy. The realm of diplomacy always has more problems than solutions, and American politics and Netanyahu’s slipperiness make it all the more complicated. Yet after eight months of unremitting horror in the Middle East, Biden should recognize that his Gaza policy is a moral, practical and political failure that has not helped anyone but Netanyahu.”  -30-

Michael LaRosa, Opinion | How Marco Rubio Could Cost Biden the Election – The New York Times

By Michael LaRosa

Mr. LaRosa is a former special assistant to President Biden and a former press secretary for Jill Biden.

“Pennsylvania has been political ground zero in presidential elections for nearly a quarter-century, and 2024 will be no different. Joe Biden carried his birth state by almost 82,000 votes in 2020 and will need to win it again this year.

As a native Pennsylvanian, I have confidence that he can. But my confidence can be shaken. There is one person on Donald Trump’s reported shortlist of running mates who has the ability to carve a Pennsylvania-shaped slice out of the so-called blue wall of Rust Belt states that Democratic presidential candidates typically need to win: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

That sound you’re hearing is the collective explosion of heads from my friends in the Democratic Party, followed by admonitions that “Latinos do not vote as a monolith.” That’s true: Cuban, Venezuelan, Dominican and Mexican Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, do not vote in unison.

But there is something Latino voters have in common: their Latin American roots and the pride that comes from casting a vote for someone who looks and talks like them. Mr. Rubio would break a significant cultural barrier as the first Latino on a national ticket. We’ve seen how that feeling of cultural and identity pride can marshal voters and transcend ideological and partisan preferences, and it should never be underestimated.

Seldom do running mates play an outsized role in our presidential contests, as most voters focus on the top of the ticket. But Mr. Rubio gives Mr. Trump something no other presidential candidate has offered — the chance for Latinos to vote for one of their own to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Mr. Rubio could help the ticket in Nevada, where he spent a formative chunk of his adolescence and where his parents worked as a maid and a bartender in Las Vegas, or another marginal Biden state with a large Latino population, such as Arizona.” . . . .

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT Comment:

Dear Michael LaRosa,

If most of what you say is true, why are you spelling it out for the Republicans? The top comments shoot many holes through your presentation, and did a great job of lower my blood pressure. I don’t have a nick name for Democrats like you, but you are part of group that fails to recognize the Joe Biden is one of the greatest presidents in the modern era, getting important legislation through a congress many thought was unworkable. I wish I were better at jokes, wit and nicknames, but I’ll offer Goat Killer. Joe Biden is not the greatest of all time yet, but if we survive the climate crisis, which currently, is unlikely, he just might be refered to as one of the greatest American presidents of all time, for setting a new direction with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is really, the Reduce Global Warming Before it is too late act. If Joe Biden takes my advice, and really closes the border to illegal immigration, then he just might win, as the Funky Irishman keeps predicting in these comments, by a landslide. Every morally defensible act, that reduces human overpopulation, will be viewed by historians, if we survive, as great act of accomplishment that allowed our survival. David is writing his second book on the climate crisis. His first, is called “Noah’s New Ark, A Musicalia. Songs and Thoughts on Nature, climate change and the sixth extinction.”

W.J. Hennigan, Opinion | Nuclear Weapons Testing Has an Unending Legacy – The New York Times

By W.J. Hennigan.   Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.

“ABOUT AN HOUR’S DRIVE from the Las Vegas Strip, deep craters pockmark the desert sand for miles in every direction. It’s here, amid the sunbaked flats, that the United States conducted 928 nuclear tests during the Cold War above and below ground. The site is mostly quiet now, and has been since 1992, when Washington halted America’s testing program.

There are growing fears this could soon change. As tensions deepen in America’s relations with Russia and China, satellite images reveal all three nations are actively expanding their nuclear testing facilities, cutting roads and digging new tunnels at long-dormant proving grounds, including in Nevada.

None of these nations have conducted a full-scale nuclear test since the 1990s. Environmental and health concerns pushed them to move the practice underground in the middle of the last century, before abandoning testing altogether at the end of the Cold War.

Each government insists it will not be the one to reverse the freeze. Russia and China have said little about the recent flurry of construction at their testing sites, but the United States emphasizes it’s merely modernizing infrastructure for subcritical tests, or underground experiments that test components of a weapon but fall short of a nuclear chain reaction.

The possibility of resuming underground nuclear testing has long loomed over the post-Cold War world. But only now do those fears seem worryingly close to being realized amid the growing animosity among the world powers, the construction at testing grounds and the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons.

As this pressure mounts, some experts fear that the United States could act first. Ernest Moniz, a physicist who oversaw the nation’s nuclear complex as energy secretary under President Barack Obama, said there’s increasing interest from members of Congress, the military and U.S. weapons laboratories to begin full-scale explosive tests once again. “Among the major nuclear powers, if there is a resumption of testing, it will be by the United States first,” Mr. Moniz said in a recent interview.” . . . .

Opinion | If Donald Trump Returns, So Will Backroom Lobbyists Like Paul Manafort – The New York Times

By Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins

Brody Mullins is an investigative reporter who covers business, lobbying and campaign finance. Luke Mullins is a journalist who focuses on politics and power in Washington, D.C.

• June 20, 2024

“A few years ago, Paul Manafort was a disgraced political operative living in a windowless cell. If Donald Trump wins in November, Mr. Manafort is likely to re-emerge as one of the most powerful people in Washington.

Because of Mr. Trump’s transactional nature and singular method of wielding power, as president, he would probably empower a small group of lobbyists who could profit from their access. Though no one elected them, these gatekeepers could exercise sweeping influence over U.S. policy on behalf of corporations and foreign governments, at the expense of regular Americans who can’t afford their services.

Rather than drain the swamp, an unleashed President Trump would return the lobbying industry to the smoke-filled rooms of the 1930s, an era unchallenged by the decades of reforms since Watergate.

And Mr. Manafort, whose career has been based on lobbying the same people he helped put in office, would be at the center. “A new Trump administration would be a bonanza for Paul,” says Scott Reed, a Republican political strategist who hired Mr. Manafort to work on Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. “Trump is the Manafort model: access at the highest levels for his clients and friends.” ” . . . .

Opinion | Slavery Didn’t End With Emancipation. It Persists in U.S. Prisons. – The New York Times

By Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli and Aiyuba Thomas

The writers, members of the New York University Prison Education Program Research Lab, are the co-authors of “Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery.”

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

In the North, that so-called Exception Clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.”  . . . .

EPI: World ‘failing to address climate crisis’, with Middle East showing mixed progress, says Yale and Columbia EPI Report

“The world is failing to address the climate crisis as countries veer off track from their goals, although the Middle East appears to be making some progress, according to the latest Environmental Performance Index.

The EPI – released on Monday by Yale University’s Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University‘s Centre for International Earth Science Information Network – provides a data-driven summary of the state of sustainability around the world.

“Mounting evidence highlights the degradation of the planet’s life-supporting systems on which humanity depends,” the report said.

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World needs to protect oceans with same zeal as fight against climate change, event hears

“A world economy that continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels translates into ongoing air and water pollution, acidification of the oceans and rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

The index incorporates 58 indicators to rank 180 countries on their progress at limiting climate change, protecting ecosystem vitality and promoting environmental health.

It noted that despite numerous international agreements, countries are off track from their stated goals of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“Despite record deployment of renewable energy, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising,” the report said.

“As the world enters uncharted climatic territory, there is a heightened risk of crossing irreversible tipping points in the planet’s climate system.””    . . . . .

Source: EPI: World ‘failing to address climate crisis’, with Middle East showing mixed progress