Saturday, January 28th, 2017
Deborah Netburn, Contact Reporter - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: The Trump administration forced the CDC to cancel a long planned climate conference, and Al Gore stepped up and agreed to host it. It was the latest in a series of humiliations Trump and his staff have faced. In a single week, Trump has screwed up our relationship with Mexico, attempted to quash the ability of the people and press to get information from government agencies, only to have to rescind it a day later, and reached a level of lying that has forced the world's governments, and their media to conclude that nothing said by the President of the United States can be taken at face value. The incompetence of this cabal of trolls is unlike anything I have ever seen and we are just at the beginning.
Al Gore will host canceled climate change summit.
Credit: The Hill
An abruptly postponed conference on climate change and its effects on human health is going to take place after all — thanks to Al Gore.
But there’s a caveat: The conference’s original sponsor — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — won’t be involved.
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., told the Washington Post that the former vice president called him up after the news broke of the conference’s postponement and said, “Let’s make this thing happen.”
“It was a no-brainer,” Benjamin told the Post.
The Climate and Health Summit was originally scheduled to be held from Feb. 14-16 in Atlanta.
It wasn’t officially canceled, but in the weeks after Donald Trump was elected president participants received word that the conference would not be happening as scheduled.
The agency never gave a reason for the change in plan. In a statement it said it was “exploring options to reschedule the meeting while considering budget priorities […]
No Comments
Friday, January 27th, 2017
Josh Rogin , Columnist - The Washington Post
Stephan: Diplomacy requires a sense of history, and a capacity for continuity. In an organization such as the State Department it is this corporate memory that helps the ship of state run smioothly. The Trump administration has now crippled itself because the senior management of the department cannot abide a witless rank amateur mucking up relationships which have taken years, or even decades to contsruct. Having known a number of senior State Department men and women I suspect these resignations also were driven by people who had worked with high integrity and were personally outraged, and felt besmirched. They saw that their careful work was being disregarded by an administration that has shown no capacity for competence
Credit: U.S. State Department
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.
Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.
Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the […]
3 Comments
Friday, January 27th, 2017
Laura Bliss, Staff Writer - City Lab
Stephan: There is a growing opposition in California to the carbon future envisaged by the new administration. Jerry Brown has a rather different vision of the future than Donal Trump.
California cars charging
No question about it: The next four years will darken U.S. action on climate change.
In a meeting yesterday with automakers where he promised to roll back environmental regulations, President Donald Trump declared, “I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist.” Here is that extent: The man himself has shown weak signs of backpedaling on his climate denialism. He has appointed a cabinet full of unapologetically pro-oil leaders: The former chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, is the designated Secretary of the State. Scott Pruitt, the climate-denying Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the EPA over emissions-reduction standards and clean-energy targets, is now set to lead that very agency. And this week, the the administration leveled a blanket freeze on all EPA grants and contracts—as well as a media gag.
But momentum behind electric vehicles—one of the most promising avatars of emission-reduction efforts—is building. That’s especially true in California, which is rapidly forging plans to battle the federal administration on most conceivable issues—particularly climate. […]
No Comments
Friday, January 27th, 2017
History News Network, - The Raw Story
Stephan: And here we see the tentacles of the new American Fascism reaching into the pedagogy of the universities. This should seriously alarm you. Because when education is nothing more than propaganda progress stops, and a society rots from the inside. You'd think the lesson of North Korea would make that point clear.
According to Turning Point USA, I am one of two hundred professors, “who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Consequently, by way of its dubious Professor Watchlist, TPUSA contends that its purpose is to inform alumni, parents, and students of, “specific incidents and names of professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”
But TPUSA’s insidious real aim is to intimidate and single out educators. This complements President-elect Donald Trump’s rising number of like registries for their faith, in the case of Muslims, journalists, and employees within the State Department and Department of Energy who advocate, respectively, for the rights of women and the LGBT community as well as the health of our planet.
The creation of lists that target intellectuals and educators echoes loudly in history. One reverberation is described by historian Karl Dietrich Bracher in his classic work The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism (1970). Another is in the movie the Killing Fields (1984) based on New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg’s coverage of Cambodia’s civil […]
3 Comments
Friday, January 27th, 2017
Amy Norton, - US News & World Report/HealthDay Reporter
Stephan: I haven't done anything on the chimera trend in some time, so I read this with considerable interest. There are so many ethical and moral issues about creating cross species human non-homo sapien animals that this line of research is fraught with problems. I am sure you can imagine them. How many human cells does a pig have to have before it becomes a human?
Researchers have successfully used human stem cells to create embryos that are part-human, part-pig.
Credit: iStock
It might sound like science fiction, but researchers have successfully used human stem cells to create embryos that are part-human, part-pig.
Scientists said the long-range goal is to better understand and treat an array of human diseases
The researchers hope to ultimately cultivate human tissue that can be given to patients awaiting transplants.
But that’s a long way off, said Jun Wu, who worked on the research.
“This study is reporting an important first step,” said Wu, a staff scientist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, Calif.
That step, specifically, was to insert human stem cells into pig embryos. Weeks later, some of the embryos showed signs that the human cells were beginning to mature and turn into “tissue precursors.”
Such embryos are known as chimeras, and they are controversial.
In 2015, the U.S. National Institutes of Health declared a moratorium on funding […]
1 Comment
