FEMA Director Brock Long
President Donald Trump’s emergency management director said he’s pushing for an overhaul of disaster relief so that states, cities and homeowners bear more of the costs, and less of the risk falls on the federal government.
Brock Long, who was confirmed in June as the administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for homes that keep flooding, and the threshold for triggering federal public assistance after a disaster might be too low. He also expressed support for an Obama administration idea to make local governments pay more when a hurricane or flood hits.
“I don’t think the taxpayer should reward risk going forward,” Long said in an interview in his office at FEMA’s headquarters in Washington. “We have to find ways to comprehensively become more resilient.”
While some of these changes will require action from Congress, the imprimatur of FEMA’s administrator could give them a boost as lawmakers face a deadline at the end of the September to rewrite the federal flood insurance program. Even without […]
Best friends
Credit: Reuters/Alexandre Meneghini
Parents often think teenagers are overly obsessed with their best friends. They should let them be.
New research published in the journal Child Development shows that teens aged 15 and 16 who had a close friend, rather than a bigger peer group featuring less intense relationships, reported higher levels of self-worth and lower levels of social anxiety and depression at 25 compared with their peers who were more broadly popular as teens.
Prior research has shown that friendship is important in adolescence—it predicts everything from stronger psychological health and better stress responses to improved academic motivation and success during adolescence.
Rachel K. Narr, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia who led the study, wanted to dig deeper into teenage friendships: which kinds matter the most when it comes to positive outcomes later in life? And how long do those effects last?
“My hunch was that close friendships compared to broader friendship groups and popularity may not function the same way,” […]
When I first wrote about the growing popularity of Eastern Orthodox Christianity among those on the far-right for Religion Dispatches in November of last year, I was regularly told that Matthew Heimbach’s excommunication from the Orthodox Church was the end of the problem. They told me that in making connections between the so-called alt-right and Orthodoxy I was overreacting.
But last week, there was Heimbach, at the center of those organizing the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville—and marching, as Inga Leonova writes at Fordham’s Public Orthodoxy, while “waving ‘Orthodoxy or Death’ banners.”
The events of the past week make it shockingly clear that with reference to the growing threat of white nationalist groups, overreacting may not be the problem. I feel this especially because I spent the week before the events in Charlottesville researching the converts whom Orthodox Christianity and white supremacy share.
My guide into this world was Tim (who asked that I not use his real name). Tim inquired on Facebook if I had written the article referenced above and I said yes, expecting the same apologia I had received before. Instead, I was introduced to dossier of evidence that suggests that the “nationalist problem” is far from contained and […]
The tablet could have been used in surveying, and in calculating how to construct temples, palaces and pyramids.
Credit: UNSW/Andrew Kelly
At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.
The 3,700-year-old broken clay tablet survives in the collections of Columbia University, and scientists now believe they have cracked its secrets.
The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney believe that the four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform – wedge shaped indentations made in the wet clay – represent the world’s oldest and most accurate working trigonometric table, a working tool which could have been used in surveying, and in calculating […]
A frightening new poll has found that 9 percent of Americans believe it’s “acceptable” to hold white supremacists or neo-Nazi views — the equivalent of nearly 30 million people.
The survey, which was conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, showed that of those 9 percent, a third “strongly agreed” with the statement, “Do you think it’s acceptable or unacceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views?”
Overall, 10 percent of respondents described themselves as supporters of the “alt-right” movement, an attempted rebranding of the white supremacist movement, while 41 percent said they had no opinion on the matter. The survey found that 42 percent thought that Trump had put white supremacists and neo-Nazis “on equal standing with those who opposed them”.
The poll, which was conducted in the wake of the protests in Charlottesville, also showed that 56 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s response to the violence that took place that weekend, while 28 percent approved.
The Unite the Right rally in Virginia brought a slew of international condemnation, but there had been a steady uptick in far-right violence even before Charlottesville.
In February, 51-year-old Kansas resident Adam Purinton allegedly killed Indian tech engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla; Purinton had allegedly used racial […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
