New York City during power outage
Credit: David Dee/Getty
Infrastructure is everything you don’t think about. The roads you drive on. The rigs and refineries that turn fossil fuel into the gas that makes your car go. The electricity that powers the streetlights and lamps that guide your way. All these technologies vanish into the oblivion of normalcy.
Until they break. Then everyone notices.
That’s what happened Saturday night in New York City when a power outage struck Midtown Manhattan, from Hell’s Kitchen north to Lincoln Center and from Fifth Avenue west to the Hudson River. The blackout darkened the huge, electric billboards of Times Square, forced Broadway shows to cancel performances, and even disabled some subway lines.
According to reports, the outage was caused by a transformer fire within the affected region. Power was fully restored by early the following morning. It was not the first or the most severe blackout to hit the Big Apple—another took out the whole city on the same date in 1977, and yet another struck in the […]
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said one member of Congress, “needs to do more—not less—to ensure nuclear reactor safety.”
After months of experts raising alarm over the nuclear power industry pressuring U.S. regulators to roll back safety policies, staffers at the federal agency that monitors reactors sparked concerns Tuesday with official recommendations that include scaling back required inspections to save money.
According to The Associated Press, which first reported on NRC staffers’ suggestions:
The recommendations, made public Tuesday, include reducing the time and scope of some annual inspections at the nation’s 90-plus nuclear power plants. Some other inspections would be cut from every two years to every three years.
Some of the staff’s recommendations would require a vote by the commission, which has a […]
Harare, Zimbabewe
Credit: Pixabay
More than two million residents around Zimbabwe’s capital have no access to running water, as drought and breakdowns push the city system to collapse.
The situation is bad, period’, says spokesman for Harare council, as suburbs go weeks without water and cases of typhoid are reported.
Just 50% of 4.5 million people in Harare and four satellite towns currently have access to the municipal water supply, the city authority told Climate Home News.
“There is a rotational water supply within the five towns,” Harare city council corporate communications manager Michael Chideme said. “Some people are getting water five days a week especially in the western suburbs, but the northern suburbs are going for weeks without a drop in their taps.”
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Chideme said people were either depending on water merchants, open wells, streams or several council-drilled boreholes. “The situation is bad, period!”
Dr Jean-Marie Kileshye from WaterNet warned Harare’s water was highly polluted: “Water-borne diseases linked to these boreholes are on the rise, but […]
A group of American veterans
Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty
In spite of his confused account of U.S. history, his partisan snipes, and his dictatorial posturing, Donald Trump’s parading and speechifying in Washington on July 4 attempted to glom onto one of the last consensus issues in a broken American culture: We love to support our troops. “We celebrate our history, our people, and the heroes who proudly defend our flag—the brave men and women of the United States military,” Trump told a crowd of mostly VIPs at the Lincoln Memorial.
The “Long War” that began on September 11, 2001, added to veterans’ already-outsize role in the American narrative. Worship of military service has become an indispensable cog in every politician’s and corporation’s endearment strategy. But on the actual subject of war, almost no one in mainstream politics is actually listening to “the troops.”
That’s the main takeaway from the Pew Research Center’s latest rolling poll of U.S. veterans, published Thursday, in which solid majorities of former troops said the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
