A convoy of AFRICOM’s armored vehicles drive to the Uganda People’s Defence Force compound in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Sept. 25, 2017. Photo: Tech. Sgt. Andria Allmond/U.S. Air National Guard
Since U.S. Africa Command began operations in 2008, the number of U.S. military personnel on the African continent has jumped 170 percent, from 2,600 to 7,000. The number of military missions, activities, programs, and exercises there has risen 1,900 percent, from 172 to 3,500. Drone strikes have soared and the number of commandos deployed has increased exponentially along with the size and scope of AFRICOM’s constellation of bases.
The U.S. military has recently conducted 36 named operations and activities in Africa, more than any other region of the world, including the Greater Middle East. Troops scattered across Africa regularly advise, train, and partner with local forces; gather intelligence; conduct surveillance; and carry out airstrikes and ground raids focused on “countering violent extremists on the African continent.”
AFRICOM “disrupts and neutralizes transnational threats” in order to “promote regional security, stability and prosperity,” according to its mission statement. But […]
Credit: The New York Times
At least nine people were killed and 16 more were wounded in a shooting early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, the second American mass shooting in less than 24 hours and the third in a week.
Officers responded to a shooting that began at 1 a.m. on East Fifth Street in the city’s Oregon entertainment district, the Dayton Police Department said. It said on Twitter that officers were “in the immediate vicinity when this shooting began and were able to respond and put an end to it quickly.”
The police said the gunman had also died.
Terrea Little, a spokeswoman at Miami Valley Hospital, confirmed the hospital had received 16 patients from the shooting, but had no information on their conditions.
A new Netflix documentary titled, “The Devil We Know,” tells the story of DuPont’s decades-long cover-up of the harm caused by chemicals used to make its popular non-stick Teflon™ products. The film shows how the chemicals used to make Teflon poisoned people and the environment—not just in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where DuPont had a Teflon plant, but all over the world.
It all began in 1945, when DuPont, renamed DowDuPont following its 2017 merger with Dow Chemical, began manufacturing Teflon, a product best known for its use in non-stick cookware, but also widely used in a variety of other consumer products, including waterproof clothing and furniture, food packaging, self-cleaning ovens, airplanes and cars.
One of the key ingredients in DuPont’s Teflon was C8, a toxic, man-made chemical created by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, better known as 3M, to make Scotchgard. The chemical, also known as PFOS or PFOA, is what gave Teflon its non-stick properties.
Both 3M and DuPont were well aware of the health hazards associated with C8. But that […]
The steady rise in global surface temperatures is largely attributed to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. With rising temperatures, the world’s ice has been melting and sea levels have been rising. As a result, barring major interventions, sooner or later thousands of coastal communities around the world will become uninhabitable.
With the ice in Greenland and Antarctica melting at record rates, scientists currently estimate sea levels could rise 2-7 feet by the end of the century, with some estimates even higher. Antarctica has about 90% of all ice in the world, enough to raise global sea levels by 200 feet, in theory. This kind of catastrophic sea level rise is just one of many potential disaster scenarios caused by climate change.
Change on such a large scale is incremental and can seem quite distant, but any solution to the problem would need to be implemented relatively soon. Already, for many areas in the United States, recurring flooding is inevitable and the problem is imminent.
24/7 Wall St. reviewed data modeled by environmental watchdog group the Union of Concerned […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
