{Originally posted to the Washington Free Beacon}
The Trump administration disclosed that Iran is behind the construction of several underground tunnels leading into Israel that Hezbollah militants and other terror forces have been using to conduct attacks, according to multiple U.S. officials who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon and communicated fears that Tehran is preparing to lead a “massive regional war.”
The public identification of Iran isn’t likely to surprise international observers, but signals aggressive moves by the Trump administration to tie Iran to the rise of terrorism not just in Israel, but across the Middle East, where Iranian-backed militants continue to strike U.S. interests and allies.
The Obama administration, in contrast to Trump, was careful to avoid singling out Iran as the chief force for terrorism against Israel and U.S. allies in the region in hopes of appeasing the hardline regime as it sought to ink the landmark nuclear pact that Trump abandoned earlier this year.
Senior U.S. officials familiar with Israel’s discovery of these new tunnels—a tactic long used by Hezbollah and Hamas to conduct cross-border raids against Israeli civilians and military personnel—say they mark a massive escalation by Iran’s terror proxies.
The Israeli military conducted operations to destroy the tunnels earlier this week, shortly after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a one-on-one meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Brussels.
The timing of Israel’s military operations signal a deep coordination with the Trump administration, which told the Free Beacon the United States will stand side-by-side with the Jewish state as it works to thwart Iran’s terror enterprise.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) said the tunnels show Iran used money from sanctions lifted under the Obama administration for military purposes.
“Senator Cruz has been tracking the Israeli campaign against these attack tunnels closely, and every day brings new disturbing revelations,” said a spokesperson for Cruz. “It’s now clear that Iran used its windfall from the Obama Iran nuclear deal to arm Hezbollah for an all-out war against Israel, and that the United States must do more to undo the damage of that deal. Sen. Cruz has also been unequivocal that our Israeli allies have an absolute right to defend themselves, especially against threats and violations of their sovereignty like these attack tunnels.”
The United States remains “very troubled” by the discovery of these tunnels in Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon that led into Israel across its northern border.
“This is another example of Iran’s revolutionary foreign policy that is expansionist and destabilizing for the Middle East when Iranian backed Hezbollah is digging tunnels into another country beneath their borders,” said Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s top Iran envoy.
The Trump administration fully supports “Israel in its military operation to address these tunnels,” according to Hook.
The terror tunnels are just a single piece of Iran’s increasingly provocative military intervention across the Middle East, including in Syria and Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition is battling Iranian-backed rebels.
In just the past several weeks, Iran has test-fired nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missiles—capable of reaching both Israel and Europe—and also continued to harass U.S. naval assets in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane.
Iran has been threatening to block the shipping route, prompting fierce warnings from the Trump administration.
“Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Hook disclosed. “The Islamic Republic of Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. will continue to work with its partners” to ensure the route remains open and free of Iranian attacks.
U.S. officials fear these recent moves by Iran are a preview of its preparations for a “massive regional war.”
“The Israelis have clearly been planning this for months, which means that Hezbollah must have been working on these tunnels for years before they were detected and Israel planned its response,” said one senior U.S. official who works on Israel issues but was not authorized to speak on the record about the tense situation.
“When you add what Hamas has been doing in the Gaza Strip, and what Iran itself has been doing from Syria, there’s no escaping the conclusion that Iran has been waging a low level war against Israel while preparing for a massive regional war,” the source warned.
Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the tunnels have likely been in the works for some time, and hint at preparation for larger Hezbollah operations against Israel.
Hezbollah is believed to have at least 120,000 missiles stockpiled and they are becoming “much more precise” with Iran’s aid, according to Amidror, who briefed reporters on the situation during a conference call organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or JINSA.
Fears are mounting in Israel that “big numbers” of Hezbollah militants and Iranian-backed fighters could use this type of tunnel to launch a full-scale incursion into Israel, including possible plots to besiege Israeli border towns, Amidror said.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is seeking to thwart Iran’s military operations by choking the regime’s sources of income. New U.S. sanctions appear to have further constrained Iran’s economy, which already had been teetering on the brink of collapse amid popular protests against the hardline regime.
Iran envoy Hook told the Free Beacon that despite protestations from some European governments about the implementation of harsh new U.S. sanctions on Iran last month, European companies have been more than willing to go along with the Trump administration in order to avoid penalties.
“We have seen only full compliance by European corporations” connected to the international financial system, Hook told the Free Beacon. “We just don’t see any daylight between the United States and European companies.”
Asked about European allies, particularly Germany and France, who are plotting methods to skirt the U.S. sanctions, Hook said the United States is uniquely placed to enforce the new sanctions. The Europeans have been told they must choose between business with the United States or Iran.
“The governments who are still in the [nuclear deal], yes, we have a disagreement over the efficacy of the Iran nuclear deal and we think it’s a deficient deal that needs to be replaced by a new and better deal,” Hook said. He added that the Trump administration will “do everything we can to starve the militias Iran funds and” choke off money being sent by Iran to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and a slew of other militant groups.
(jewishpress.com)
"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
Posted: Dec 10, 2018 10:49 AM MST
Updated: Dec 10, 2018 03:13 PM MST
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK (KIFI/KIDK) - The Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park broke decades-old records when it erupted for the 30th time in 2018 Saturday.
Yellowstone National Park reports Saturday's eruption surpasses the all-time record for the number of documented eruptions in a calendar year which was 29 in 1964.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the geyser erupted at 1:07 a.m.
It has been 9 days, 4 hours and 30 minutes since it last erupted. This was the longest interval between eruptions since August. Since then, the geyser had been following a semi-regular pattern of erupting about every five to seven days.
“The heightened activity at Steamboat this year is uncommon but not unprecedented. We have seen similar activity twice previously; once in the early 1960s, and again in the early 1980s. Conversely, the world’s tallest active geyser has also exhibited years of quiescence or no major eruptions, with the longest being the 50-year period between 1911 and 1961,” said Jeff Hungerford, Yellowstone’s park geologist. “We’ll continue to monitor this extraordinary geyser.”
The National Park Service has listed all recorded major eruptions below. Others may have occurred, but were not necessarily seen if there were no observers in Norris Geyser Basin. The intervals range from 4 days to 50 years.
26 (March 15,April 19 & 27,May 4, 13, 19, & 27,June 4, 11, & 15,July 6 & 20;August 4, 22, & 27;September 1, 7, 12, 17, 24, & 29;October 8, 15, 23, and 31;November 7, 15, 21, and 28December 8
This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.
Just a few months ago, climate activists in California were celebrating an impressive victory: New data showed that the state had brought greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels, four years earlier than planned. The win, a cut of emissions to 429.4 million metric tons (the equivalent of taking 12 million cars off the road) was the result of steady decreases in emissions most years.
“California set the toughest emissions targets in the nation, tracked progress and delivered results,” Governor Jerry Brown tweeted. The next step was to cut emissions another 40 percent by 2030 — “a heroic and very ambitious goal.”
But by November, skies across the state were gray. Wildfires were raging, including a blaze which would prove to be the deadliest and most destructive in state history. The conflagrations have set California back: The recent Camp and Woolsey Fires, officials say, have produced emissions equivalent to roughly 5.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than three times the total decrease in emissions in 2015. Recently, the Department of the Interior announced that new data shows the 2018 California wildfire season is estimated to have released emissions equal to about one year of power use.
Of course, wildfires are not new to the West Coast. But the kind of vast, devastating conflagrations seen in California in recent years — this fall’s Camp Fire decimated 153,000 acres in the Butte County area and destroyed almost 14,000 homes — are becoming more common. According to the state’s most recent climate assessment, California could see a 77 percent increase in the average area burned in wildfires by 2100.
All this is bad news for a state committed to decreasing its carbon footprint. But California’s official emissions score will not be affected by the extraordinary amount of carbon released during wildfires this year, because the agency that calculates emissions — the California Air Resources Board — considers wildfires to be a part of the earth’s natural carbon cycle. (The ARB is a regulatory body and, as agency spokesperson Dave Clegern noted, “can only regulate what can be controlled.”)
But the agency is looking into ways to better track carbon emissions from conflagrations. Right now, Clegern says, the ARB uses data including the size of the fire and the kind of fuel burned to estimate its carbon footprint. But, he said, scientists don’t currently have a good way to accurately calculate emissions from disasters like the Camp Fire, which burn residential and commercial properties. While those findings won’t be included in the state’s emissions tally, Clegern said it’s still important to gather the data: “We need to know what goes up in the air when these things happen. Our first mission is to protect public health.”
The increasing size of wildfires in California is driven by several factors linked to climate change, scientists say, including a shift in the jet stream that causes the state to suffer more hot, dry spells. The state’s seven-year drought has weakened forests and left millions of acres highly susceptible to lethal attacks from insects like bark beetle. In recent years, more than 100 million trees are estimated to have died statewide. Dry, dead forests are a fire hazard, and they pose a threat so severe that, in 2015, Governor Brown declared a state of emergency and created a task force to identify areas of particular risk. This January, scientists at the University of California-Berkeley reported that the situation was “compounded by the long-established removal” of naturally occurring, frequent, and low-intensity fires in the state’s forested areas, “a key ecosystem process” in hazardous wildfire prevention.
Aside from preventing deadly conflagrations, protecting forests also means preserving the state’s best tool for regulating carbon emissions. By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon in soil, branches, and tree trunks, forest have historically worked as a “carbon sink” for the state. But research shows that between 2001 and 2010, tree die-off meant California’s forests emitted more carbon than they sequestered.
Wildfires accelerate this process. Conflagrations release carbon into the atmosphere as they burn and, once the smoke has cleared, leave fewer trees to sequester carbon. In the years following a fire, dead trees begin to release their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. And a recent study also showed that forests which burned at high severity suffered worryingly low regeneration rates. In some places, no trees grew back at all.
But the damage doesn’t end there. When a forest is burned for the first time, “between 5 and 20 percent of the carbon goes up,” explained Nic Enstice, regional science coordinator at the state’s Sierra Nevada Conservancy agency. That’s because even a high-severity fire will not incinerate every tree in a forest. But if a second wildfire ravages through an already-burned area, the dead trees are more readily consumed, resulting in even greater carbon release.
The fire season’s growing effect on the state gives scientists all the more reason to study its emissions. “That’s the kind of issue we’re wrestling with now,” Clegern said.
California’s best hope for reaching its ambitious climate goals may lie in technology and rebuilding the state’s dilapidated forests. The state is relying on energy companies like utility giant PG&E to increase purchases of renewable power and invest heavily in burgeoning industries like electric transportation over the next decade. (PG&E, meanwhile, could be on the hook for billions of dollars in fines if an investigation finds the company’s equipment ignited some of California’s recent conflagrations.) Plans are also underway to push harder on forest restoration efforts: In May, the state announced its Forest Carbon Plan, which included a pledge to double the rate of forest rehabilitation to an average 35,000 acres a year by 2020.
“We know that we have to increase the health of our forests pretty significantly over the coming years,” Enstice said.“What we saw in the Camp Fire, the Rim Fire, the King Fire — these are all out of the normal patterns.” (GRIST)
Seventy years ago today, nearly every nation in the world approved a list of fundamental rights entitled to every human being on the planet. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a milestone document signed in the wake of World War II. Now, a new humanitarian crisis is afoot: climate change.
So many of our human rights, such as the right to life, food, health, and anadequate standard of living are adversely affected by climate change. Fromdevastating hurricanes to killer wildfires, climate change exacerbates socioeconomic disparity, gender inequality and other forms of discrimination.
And yet, even among our so-called climate leaders, the link between justice and the environment goes unnamed. As the United Nations climate summit in Katowice (dubbed COP24) enters its second week, some advocates are concerned that the conversation has not been focused enough on human rights. When the Paris Agreement was signed three years ago, parties outlined a vision that recognized nations must respect and protect human rights. This year, the talks arebeing sponsored by coal companies, and the latest draft of the Paris rulebook (which outlines what countries need to do to put the accord into action) omits a human rights reference.
Sébastien Duyck, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law released a statement in response to the silence around human rights at COP24, saying, “Immediate action is necessary to avoid the suffering of millions of people and the collapse of ecosystems, and to be truly effective that action must be rights-based and people-centered. At a time when every human right is threatened by the accelerating climate crisis, it is unacceptable for negotiators to be backsliding on the promises of the Paris Agreement.”
Here at Grist, we agree that covering the environment involves covering human rights as well. Here are some of our top justice stories of 2018:
Extreme heat kills more than a hundred New Yorkers yearly. Here’s how the city’s tackling the problem in a warming world.
Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro wants to open the Amazon rainforest up to new development. But it’s not just one of the world’s largest carbon sinks that’s threatened — the lives of many of Brazil’s indigenous peoples are under siege as well.
This year, undocumented immigrants reeled from hurricanes, fires, and the Trump administration.
Black communities in the United States face a host of structural challenges that impact day-to-day life — from environmental injustice to heightened policing and racial profiling.
It was a punishing summer in California. But it’s worse for those who live in the most polluted areas
Climate change circles are not immune to #MeToo. Homeward Bound was supposed to foster science’s next generation of female leaders. But it finds itself navigating treacherous waters.
(GRIST)
This year has seen a record number of cases of a mysterious paralyzing illness in children, U.S. health officials said Monday.
It's still not clear what's causing the kids to lose the ability to move their face, neck, back, arms or legs. The symptoms tend to occur about a week after the children had a fever and respiratory illness.
No one has died from the rare disease this year, but it was blamed for one death last year and it may have caused others in the past.
What's more, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials say many children have lasting paralysis. And close to half the kids diagnosed with it this year were admitted to hospital intensive care units and hooked up to machines to help them breathe.
The condition has been likened to polio, a dreaded paralyzing illness that once struck tens of thousands of U.S. children a year. Those outbreaks ended after a polio vaccine became available in the 1950s. Investigators of the current outbreak have ruled out polio, finding no evidence of that virus in recent cases.
The current mystery can be traced to 2012, when three cases of limb weakness were seen in California. The first real wave of confirmed illnesses was seen in 2014, when 120 were reported. Another, larger wave occurred in 2016, when there were 149 confirmed cases. So far this year, there have been 158 confirmed cases.
In 2015 and 2017, the counts were far lower, and it's not clear why.
The condition is called acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. Investigators have suspected it is caused by a virus called EV-D68. The 2014 wave coincided with a lot of EV-D68 infections and the virus "remains the leading hypothesis," said Dr. Ruth Lynfield, a member of a 16-person AFM Task Force that the CDC established last month to offer advice to disease detectives.
But there is disagreement about how strong a suspect EV-D68 is. Waves of AFM and that virus haven't coincided in other years, and testing is not finding the virus in every case. CDC officials have been increasingly cautious about saying the virus triggered the illnesses in this outbreak.
Indeed, EV-D68 infections are not new in kids, and many Americans carry antibodies against it.
Why would the virus suddenly be causing these paralyzing illnesses?
"This is a key question that has confounded us," said the CDC's Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who is overseeing the agency's outbreak investigation.
Experts also said it's not clear why cases are surging in two-year cycles.
Another mystery: More than 17 countries have reported scattered AFM cases, but none have seen cyclical surges like the U.S. has.
When there has been a wave in the U.S., cases spiked in September and tailed off significantly by November. Last week, CDC officials said the problem had peaked, but they warned that the number of cases would go up as investigators evaluated — and decided whether to count — illnesses that occurred earlier.
As of Monday, there were 311 illness reports still being evaluated.
This year's confirmed cases are spread among 36 states. The states with the most are Texas, with 21, and Colorado, 15.
But it's not clear if the state tallies truly represent where illnesses have been happening. For example, the numbers in Colorado may be high at least partly because it was in the scene of an attention-grabbing 2014 outbreak, and so doctors there may be doing a better job doing things that can lead to a diagnosis.
For an illness to be counted, the diagnosis must include an MRI scan that shows lesions in the part of the spinal cord that controls muscles.
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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.