Scientists blaming warm "blob"

A Saudi soldier fires a mortar towards Houthi movement position, at the Saudi border with Yemen April 21, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer

By Mohammed Ghobari Mohammed Mukhashef

CAIRO/ADEN (Reuters) - Saudi-led coalition warplanes bombed Yemen on Wednesday despite an announcement by Riyadh that it was ending its campaign of air strikes, while renewed fighting erupted on the ground between rebels and forces loyal to the exiled president.

The hostilities illustrated how tough it will be to find a political solution to a war stirring animosities between rival Gulf powers Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Tuesday's announcement by Riyadh that it would end almost a month of air strikes against the Iranian-allied Houthis drew positive responses from both the White House and Tehran.

But hours later, air strikes and ground fighting resumed and the International Red Cross described the humanitarian situation as "catastrophic". The rebel Houthi movement said it wanted a return to United Nations peace talks, but only after a complete halt to air strikes.

Houthi fighters meanwhile captured an army base loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in the city of Taiz. A Saudi air strike hit the headquarters shortly afterwards, residents said. Coalition planes later hit rebel positions in southern Yemen with 12 more air strikes, residents said.

Also in southern Yemen, pro-Hadi militiamen fought against the Houthis and their army allies loyal to powerful ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and residents in the port of Aden reported tank shelling and automatic gunfire.

Yemen's south has been a bulwark of resistance against the Houthi advance and locals expressed dismay at the end to Saudi strikes, which had supported their forces.

"The decision was strange and totally unexpected. Our fighters had made gains but needed more Saudi air support, now we hear the Houthis and Saleh's people are advancing in many places," said Aden resident Saleh Salem Ba Aqeel.

DIALOGUE

Saudi Arabia's military intervention in Yemen shows that the Sunni monarchy will stand up to Iran and that Arab states can protect their interests without U.S. leadership, the kingdom's ambassador to Britain, Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf, told Reuters in an interview.

Saudi Arabia's announcement that it would end its campaign cast doubt over its next moves against its Houthi enemies, whose seizure of swathes of Yemen in recent months stirred Saudi fears that Iran is acquiring decisive influence in a country Riyadh sees as its backyard.

A Gulf official told Reuters that the new phase would see a downscaling of military activity by the Saudi-led coalition with no further bombing of fixed military targets.

On the political front, the official said, there was movement toward a dialogue, and that both Saleh's followers and the Houthis should have a voice in the discussions.

Saleh welcomed the Saudi announcement and called for talks, while the Houthis have yet to react beyond calling for mass protests against the Saudi "aggression" for Thursday.

A Yemeni official told Reuters that the warring parties were discussing a seven-point peace plan offered by neighboring Oman, which has stayed neutral in the conflict, involving the reinstatement of Hadi's government and a Houthi withdrawal from leading cities - previously non-starters for the group.

The White House on Wednesday said Yemen remained unstable and much more work needed to be done in the region on a diplomatic solution, despite the declared halt to the Saudi-led bombing.

"RESTORING HOPE"

Saudi Arabia said a new phase called "Operation Restoring Hope" would now begin in which political, diplomatic and military action would be combined but the main focus would be on the political process and aid efforts.

The conflict has created severe shortages of food and other supplies by closing sea and airports. The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that 944 people were reported killed and 3,487 wounded in Yemen in the month up to Friday.

The United States said on Monday an aircraft carrier and guided-missile cruiser had gone to waters off Yemen to join seven other U.S. warships already in the area.

The Pentagon said the ships were there to ensure freedom of navigation through the area, which is vital to oil shipping and controls approaches to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

It said the ships were also watching a flotilla of Iranian cargo vessels that had approached Yemen. The U.N. Security Council has imposed an arms embargo on the Houthis, and the Saudi navy has imposed a naval and air blockade around the country that it says it will maintain in the coming phase.

President Barack Obama warned Iran on Tuesday not to send weapons to Yemen that could be used to threaten shipping traffic in the region.

Iran called for all sides in Yemen's conflict to start negotiations, saying long-term peace was possible.

"History has demonstrated that military intervention is not a proper response to these crises and will instead exacerbate the situation," Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said at an Asian-African conference in Jakarta.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have accused Shi'ite Iran of arming the Houthis, a claim Iran denies.

"Fear of Iran is part of a Saudi-American plan to bury Yemen's revolution which rejected their hegemony," top Houthi leader Saleh al-Sammad told Reuters. "There are no Iranian weapons here."

(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashef, Mohammed Ghobari, Maha El Dahan, Amena Bakr, Sami Aboudi and Angus McDowall; Writing by Noah Browning; Editing by William Maclean and Giles Elgood)

Money spent cleaning up BP’s mess skipped those who needed it most

When reporting on the BP oil disaster five years ago, I discovered that people of color and humble income were often left out of the frenzy of economic activity generated by the emergency response and recovery efforts.

In August 2010, four months into the cleanup, I looked at the contracts doled out by the U.S. government for services including charter transportation, hazmat training, legal consultation, scientific studies, housing, food, tech, and equipment. According to the Federal Procurement Data System, which is updated weekly, just 3.5 percent of the dollars spent by the government on the recovery went to small disadvantaged businesses.

Of 410 vendors, only five were African-American owned. Nine were Latino-owned. This, despite the fact that the Gulf states had (and still have) the highest concentrations of African Americans and black-owned businesses in the country, and some of the fastest rising Latino populations.

Today, five years later, the numbers from the procurement data system show that things didn’t much improve. The U.S. government has spent $600 million on the Gulf oil disaster recovery — some of which came from BP, but not all of it. As of this week, the number of small disadvantaged businesses with contracts has only reached just above 5 percent. Of the roughly 1,478 companies that have received contracts since the beginning, just 140 are owned by minorities. Only 20 are black-owned and 30 are Hispanic-owned. Despite the sizable Native-American population across most of Louisiana’s coast, only 16 Native-American businesses won contracts. We’re talking between 1 and 2 percent for every racial category.

The BP disaster is no aberration. For Hurricane Katrina, less than 8 percent of contracts went to small disadvantaged businesses. And it’s not just the Gulf Coast where people of color are getting the short end. The U.S. government has spent over $2.1 billion in procurement for Hurricane Sandy. Only about 8 percent of those contracts have gone to small disadvantaged business, and only 3.5 percent for women-owned businesses.

How many minority-owned businesses actually provide these services? That’s a fair question. But bear in mind that vendors from across the nation got Gulf disaster recovery dollars. The biggest one-time sum, for $47 million, was a non-competitive bid contract awarded to a vendor based in Massachusetts.

A lot of small boaters, fishers, and oil workers were put to work in the emergency phase of the oil clean-up. Employed through the Vessels of Opportunity program, these workers used their own boats, many of them their own gear, and their native expertise and knowledge of working Gulf waters to help get the oil out. But once the Vessels program closed down after the worst of it was sopped up, many of those workers had to rely on the thorny, tangled up claims and litigation process to recuperate their losses.

Many of these were Vietnamese and Native-American fishers, African-American oystermen, and just-above-profit-margin independent businessmen clearly at a disadvantage compared to the larger charter boat operators cleaning up in contracts across the coast. Those vulnerable populations, who lost the most in the disaster, deserved a larger portion of the recovery benefits. And who better to make that happen than the federal government, which is required to look out for the most vulnerable in ways that a huge multinational company like BP is not?

It’s the least the U.S. government could do, given that BP seems to have left a lot of those disadvantaged businessmen and fishermen still aching for fair compensation. Yesterday, a coalition of Gulf residents and activists accompanied a group of Vietnamese fishers to BP’s U.S. headquarters in Houston in hopes that BP officials would meet with them. BP refused.

The company also rejected a petition of close to 120,000 signatures from people irked with the company’s efforts to seek tax write-offs for the funds it has spent on the recovery. The Gulf Restoration Network says that as much of 80 percent of BP’s expenditures are tax eligible, which, if true, means that the government is essentially helping to subsidize the company’s penalties. Translation: BP gets to recover, while those most devastated by its disaster remain economically damaged.

With more disasters certain to come due to fossil-fueled climate change, we need to keep an eye on who profits from the recovery efforts. Otherwise, the populations that tend to suffer the most will be left out even from the efforts to put their communities back together.

(Grist)

Why are so many catastrophes hitting U.S. food production? This week, we have learned that more than 7 million turkeys and chickens have already been killed as the result of a devastating bird flu outbreak here in the United States. This particular strain of the bird flu has already spread to the states of Minnesota, Iowa, California, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin, and scientists are mystified as to why it is moving so rapidly. But what we do know is that this flu has the potential to kill an entire flock of chickens or turkeys in just 48 hours. This pandemic is quickly becoming a major national crisis all by itself, but when you combine this with all of the other disasters hitting our food supply, a very troubling picture emerges. Could it be possible that the U.S. food supply is cursed?

Before we talk about the bird flu some more, let’s first review some of the other ways that our food supply is under assault.

-Due to the worst drought in the recorded history of the state, much of California is turning back into a desert. And considering the fact that California produces nearly half of all the fresh produce grown in the entire nation, that is a very frightening thing. Prices for many fruits and vegetables have already gone up substantially in our grocery stores.

-The multi-year drought in the southwest United States has also had a crippling impact on many ranchers. At this point, the size of the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest that it has been since the 1950s, and the price of beef has doubled since the last recession.

-Over the past couple of years, porcine epidemic diarrhea wiped out approximately 10 percent of the entire pig population in the United States. This particular plague seems to have subsided at least for now, but scientists tell us that it could come back strong at any moment.

-As my friend Mac Slavo wrote about the other day, the sardine population off the west coast has declined by 91 percent since 2007. This is having a devastating affect on the food chain in the Pacific Ocean.

-Speaking of the Pacific, a whole host of other sea creatures appear to be dying off in large numbers as well. For much more on this, please see this article.

-Down in Florida, citrus greening disease has hit the citrus industry extremely hard. The price of Florida oranges has approximately doubled over the past 12 years, and crops keep getting even smaller every year…

The big squeeze is on in citrus industry, and it isn’t expected to lessen anytime soon.

Florida growers have yielded far fewer oranges over the past decade due to citrus greening, resulting in less juice in the market and fewer dollars in their pockets.

“Everything starts and ends with citrus greening,” said Fritz Roka, a University of Florida agricultural economist at the Southwest Florida Research & Education Center in Immokalee. “For the next several years, citrus greening will still be the focus of attention.”

-A plague known as the TR4 fungus has hit global banana production in a big way. According to CNBC, this nightmare fungus may eventually completely wipe out the variety of bananas that we commonly eat today…

Banana lovers take note: The world’s supply of the fruit is under attack from a fungus strain that could wipe out the popular variety that Americans eat.

“It’s a very serious situation,” said Randy Ploetz, a professor of plant pathology at the University of Florida who in 1989 originally discovered a strain of Panama disease, called TR4, that may be growing into a serious threat to U.S. supplies of the fruit and Latin American producers.

“There’s nothing at this point that really keeps the fungus from spreading,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

On top of all that, now we have a major bird flu outbreak to deal with.

According to USA Today, 3.8 million hens will be destroyed at one farm in Iowa alone in an attempt to keep this flu from spreading even more…

Poultry producers in several states are bracing for more losses as a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza forced producers to kill millions of chickens and turkeys in the USA in recent weeks.

The fast-moving H5N2 virus was confirmed on Monday at a chicken laying facility in Osceola County, Iowa. Some 3.8 million layer hens at the farm affiliated with Sonstegard Foods Company will be euthanized to try to prevent the spread of the disease, according to the company.

If this bird flu continues to spread in states such as Iowa, we could have a nightmare scenario on our hands. Most people don’t realize this, but almost one out of every five eggs that we eat comes from that state…

Because of avian influenza, the state’s $2 billion commercial egg-laying industry has been on high alert this spring. Iowa, the nation’s largest egg producer, has about 50 million hens and supplies nearly 1 in every 5 eggs consumed in the United States.

“Anybody that has a poultry operation — whether large or small, whether you’ve got hundreds of birds or one bird — this should be a wake-up call,” said Randy Olson, executive director of the Iowa Poultry Association.

Unfortunately, this new outbreak is extremely puzzling to our scientists. At this point, they really don’t know why it is spreading so fast…

The deadly flu virus that has wiped out nearly 5 percent of Minnesota’s turkey industry is a part of a global disease outbreak, but scientists still don’t understand it.

After emerging in Asia, the avian flu spread to poultry farms in the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Germany.

Its quick arrival in North America has alarmed scientists who are trying to unravel the mystery of how these deadly bugs have infected so many turkey farms in such a short period of time.

“It’s been really troubling to understand how in the world this can possibly be happening,” said Carol Cardona, a professor of avian medicine at the University of Minnesota.

Have we ever seen a time when so many major catastrophes have hit our food production all at once?

It appears that this is a “perfect storm” of sorts, and we all get to feel the pain of this onslaught when we visit our local grocery stores.

So are we witnessing a convergence of unrelated coincidences, or could it be possible that there is another explanation?

Feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

(http://endoftheamericandream.com/)

Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's defence ministry on Tuesday inscribed the name of a Palestinian teenager burned alive by his Jewish kidnappers on a memorial wall listing the victims of terror attacks.

The move took place as Israel was to begin marking memorial day for fallen soldiers and the victims of terror attacks, which begins at sundown.

Mohammed Abu Khder, 16, was kidnapped from annexed east Jerusalem on July 2 and his burned body was found hours later in a forest in the western part of the city.

Although a number of Arab names are featured on the wall, it is the first time the name of a Palestinian killed by Jewish Israelis has been listed.

The vast majority of the names are of Jewish Israelis killed in attacks carried out by Palestinian militants.

Abu Khder was allegedly killed by three Jewish extremists in revenge weeks after the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinian militants in the southern West Bank.

View gallery

Israeli soldiers walk past a memorial stone in Hebrew bearing the name of Mohammed Abu Khdeir (3rd n …

Speaking to AFP, his father, Hussein Abu Khder, said he had not been informed of the decision to list his son's name on the memorial.

"I am Palestinian, not Israeli, even if I am a resident of east Jerusalem, and I do not want his name written next to that of Israeli soldiers," he said.

"What I expect of Israel is justice and that my son's killers be jailed for life."

The three suspects are currently on trial at a court in Jerusalem.

Abu Khder's name had already been added to the official list of terror victims in July.

The wall, which bears 2,538 names, is located at the national cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

It is also the location of Israel's main military cemetery and the place where the main remembrance ceremonies will take place on Wednesday.