Stephan: In the middle ages Jews were required by law to live in ghettos that often had high walls around them. In the October 1940 the Nazis began the construction of just such a ghetto in Warsaw.
It strikes me as incredibly ironic and very sad that the Jews of Israel are once again walling themselves in.
METULLA, Israel — Israel began building a wall on Monday along a 1-km (0.6 mile) -stretch of its border with Lebanon, saying the barrier was necessary to boost security for an Israeli frontier town across from a Lebanese village.
An Israeli security fence already runs along the entire border but the military said defenses had to be bolstered with a 5-7 meter-(16-23 feet) high cement wall between the Israeli town of Metulla and the Lebanese village of Kila.
‘(The wall is) intended to prevent firing from the Lebanese side into the Israeli side. In the past year and a half there have been a number of incidents,’ Colonel Amit Fisher, a senior commander on the border, told Israel Radio.
A ceasefire has largely been maintained along the frontier since Israel fought a war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas in 2006. U.N. peacekeepers are stationed in the border area in southern Lebanon.
The Israeli military said the border project had been coordinated with the U.N. force and Lebanese Army.
Israel is also building a security fence in its south, along the border with Egypt’s Sinai desert, citing concerns over militant activity and smuggling.
An Israeli barrier also twists through the occupied West Bank. Israel says the project, begun […]
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Stephan: I have been covering climate change and its effects since 1991 and the one constant through all of this has been the collapse of the timeline. That is things once thought to happen in 500 years, then were predicted to occur in 200, then 50. This is one such effect, and it is a very big deal because the entire food chain of the ocean hinges on acidification and its effects on the nurseries of the sea, the coral reefs.
This will have an enormous impact on the coming food crisis tsunami.
Fifty-six million years ago, a surge of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere raised the acidity of the world’s oceans substantially. Many single-celled organisms, and most likely larger creatures farther up the food chain, went extinct.
The carbon dioxide that humans are pumping into the atmosphere now is causing a similar acidification effect — only 10 times faster.
In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers compared the current rates of ocean change to other major acidification events going back 300 million years, and what they found is shocking: never in that long period did the ocean pH fall as rapidly as it is falling right now (lower pH means higher acidity). Ocean pH has already dropped 0.1 units to 8.1 — it is a logarithmic scale, meaning the drop represents about a 30 percent change in acidity. Within another hundred years, it could drop to 7.8.
At this level, coral, mollusks, and many other creatures will be unlikely to survive. Increased CO2 entering the oceans depletes the carbonate ions that these animals need to make their shells and reefs.
The new study, led by Bärbel Hönisch of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, found that only the event 56 million years ago, known […]
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