#the issue with China is that there are many smaller seafaring nations that might have hindered their navy but I thought they were like.

[gwyoi]

Was watching a video on geopolitics in d&d and the person I was watching cited that China never had a very strong naval presence and I’m like did I learn wrong……? I thought they used to/still do (but more with shipping goods out now I guess) ? am I baka.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Many in US still face COVID-19 financial loss (AP) Roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they’re still feeling the financial impact of the loss of a job or income within their household as the economic recovery remains uneven one year into the coronavirus pandemic. A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research provides further evidence that the pandemic has been devastating for some Americans, while leaving others virtually unscathed or even in better shape, at least when it comes to their finances. The outcome often depended on the type of job a person had and their income level before the pandemic. The pandemic has particularly hurt Black and Latino households, as well as younger Americans, some of whom are now going through the second major economic crisis of their adult lives. The poll shows that about half of Americans say they have experienced at least one form of household income loss during the pandemic, including 25% who have experienced a household layoff and 31% who say someone in the household was scheduled for fewer hours. Overall, 44% said their household experienced income loss from the pandemic that is still having an impact on their finances. The poll’s findings reflect what some economists have called a “K-shaped recovery,” where there have been divergent fortunes among Americans. Those with office jobs were able to transition to working from home while those who worked in hard-hit industries such as entertainment, dining, travel and other industries have continued to struggle.

Los Angeles Schools Remain Closed and Families Wonder: How Much Longer? (NYT) It has been almost a year since the coronavirus pandemic virtually emptied public schools in Los Angeles and sent students home to take classes from their bedrooms. Families in the Los Angeles Unified School District are coming to terms with a bittersweet truth: With the spring term scheduled to end on June 11, only a sliver of their pandemic school year is likely to take place face-to-face. District officials say a deal with its powerful teachers’ union to resume in-person learning seems close, and might happen this week. But the superintendent, Austin Beutner, has estimated that, even with an agreement in place, it will take at least until mid-April just to welcome back elementary and special needs students. Older students would be phased in over the next couple of weeks. Of the nation’s 10 largest school systems, Los Angeles is the only one that has yet to resume in-person teaching for significant numbers of students.

US offers residency to Venezuelans and will review sanctions (AP) The Biden administration said Monday it is offering temporary legal residency to several hundred thousand Venezuelans who fled their country’s economic collapse and will review U.S. sanctions intended to isolate the South American nation. President Joe Biden’s administration announced it would grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans already in the United States, allowing an estimated 320,000 people to apply to legally live and work in the country for 18 months. Trump resisted repeated calls from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, primarily from South Florida, to grant temporary protected status to Venezuelans though he issued an order deferring deportation for a smaller number on his final day in office. The Trump administration also significantly tightened U.S. economic sanctions on Venezuela, most notably on its crucial oil sector, to try and force President Nicolas Maduro to give up power after an election in 2018 that the United States and other countries believe was fraudulent. A senior Biden administration official portrayed that as a failed strategy. “The United States is in no rush to lift sanctions,” the official said, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss the policy. “But we need to recognize here that unilateral sanctions over the last four years have not succeeded in achieving an electoral outcome in the country.”

Brazil justice annuls Lula’s sentences, enabling 2022 run (AP) A Supreme Court justice on Monday annulled all convictions against former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a ruling that potentially would allow him to run again for the presidency next year. The decision also laid bare the country’s political divisions, with leftists celebrating their 75-year-old leader’s return to the political arena as conservatives said the rulings were tantamount to impunity. Da Silva’s lawyers issued a statement welcoming the decision, saying it “is aligned with everything we have said for more than five years in these suits.” But Brazilian media reported that the country’s prosecutor-general Augusto Aras, an ally of conservative President Jair Bolsonaro, is preparing to appeal the decision.

Indian activist’s arrest spotlights crackdown on dissent (AP) To her friends, Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old Indian climate activist, was most concerned about her future in a world of rising temperatures. But her life changed last month when she became a household name in India, dominating headlines after police charged her with sedition, a colonial-era law that carries a sentence up to life in prison. Her alleged crime: sharing an online handbook meant to raise support for months-long farmer protests on Twitter. “If highlighting farmers’ protest globally is sedition, I am better (off) in jail,” she said in court two weeks ago. Going after activists isn’t new in India, but Ravi’s saga has stoked fear and anxiety. Observers say what happened to Ravi—a young, middle class, urban woman—hit home for a lot of Indians, who suddenly feared they could be jailed for sharing something on social media. The incident has raised questions over India’s democracy, with critics decrying it as the latest attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to mute dissent and criminalize it. “They targeted someone not usually targeted by the Hindu right-wing—a young girl from South India, who doesn’t have a Muslim name and is not linked to left-wing student politics,” said prominent historian Ramachandra Guha. “The message they wanted to send is that they can go after anyone.”

Victims of Myanmar’s Army Speak (NYT) The soldiers from Myanmar’s army knocked on U Thein Aung’s door one morning last April as he was having tea with friends, and demanded that all of them accompany the platoon to another village. When they reached a dangerous stretch in the mountains of Rakhine State, the men were ordered to walk 100 feet ahead. One stepped on a land mine and was blown to pieces. Metal fragments struck Mr. Thein Aung in his arm and his left eye. “They threatened to kill us if we refused to go with them,” said Mr. Thein Aung, 65, who lost the eye. “It is very clear that they used us as human land mine detectors.” The military and its brutal practices are an omnipresent fear in Myanmar, one that has intensified since the generals seized full power in a coup last month. As security forces gun down peaceful protesters on city streets, the violence that is commonplace in the countryside serves as a grisly reminder of the military’s long legacy of atrocities. During decades of military rule, an army dominated by the Bamar majority operated with impunity against ethnic minorities, killing civilians and torching villages.

New option for quarantine in Thailand (Foreign Policy) Wealthy visitors to Thailand now have the option of spending their 14-day mandatory quarantine on a yacht as part of a new program to boost tourism to the country. Prospective seafarers will be equipped with an electronic wristband that will track the wearer’s vital signs as well as GPS coordinates—even when at sea. Thailand’s tourism minister proposed a separate plan last week to allow tourists to spend their quarantine period in the country’s beach resorts. The need for unique approaches is particularly acute in the southeast Asian nation: Only 6.7 million foreign tourists visited Thailand in 2020, following a record 39.8 million tourists in 2019.

China launches COVID-19 vaccination certificates for cross-border travel (Reuters) China has launched a digital COVID-19 vaccination certificate for its citizens planning cross-border travels, joining other countries issuing similar documents as they seek ways to reopen their economies. As vaccines are globally being rolled out, a few countries, including Bahrain, have already introduced certificates identifying vaccinated people and the European Union agreed to develop vaccine passports under pressure from tourism-dependent southern countries. The certificate issued by China would have details about the holder’s COVID-19 vaccination information and coronavirus test results, the Department of Consular Affairs under China’s foreign ministry said on its website.

Lebanon’s collapse piles strain on army, security forces (Reuters) Discontent is brewing in the ranks of Lebanon’s security forces over a currency crash wiping out most of the value of their salaries as unrest and crime surge. In unusually outspoken comments, army chief General Joseph Aoun said his warnings that the pressure on soldiers’ earnings and morale could lead to an “implosion” had fallen on deaf ears. Lebanon’s pound has crashed 85 percent since late 2019 in a financial meltdown that poses the biggest threat to stability since the 1975-1990 civil war. “Soldiers are going hungry like the people,” he said on Monday, berating politicians without naming names. The basic monthly salary of a soldier or policeman, which used to amount to around $800, is worth under $120 today. Budget cuts pushed the military to cut meat from its meals last year. In what was seen as a sign of the times, the French embassy donated food parcels last month to the Lebanese army, which has long been backed by Western nations.

Barred from marrying by the rabbis, Israelis find a pandemic workaround—in Utah (Washington Post) For generations, the iron grip of Orthodox rabbis on Israeli family law has meant that mixed couples, gay couples or even couples in which one partner is not deemed Jewish enough have been denied the right to marry within the country’s borders. To circumvent the rabbis, thousands of Israelis jetted off each year to nearby countries like Cyprus or Greece for weddings that the government later recognized as civil unions. But when the pandemic closed even that window, it also opened another: Zoom weddings, administered 7,000 miles away—in Utah. At least 150 Israeli couples have already tied the virtual knot through this technological loophole, spurring a new battle in a national culture war that has long pitted Israel’s non-Orthodox Jewish majority against the politically entrenched Orthodox Jewish minority. Aware of the threat to their outsize influence, ultra-Orthodox politicians who control the Interior Ministry have already moved to dismiss the Zoom weddings, which both sides agree have the potential to forge a legacy that would far outlive the pandemic. Under an Ottoman-era law extended by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, marriage in Israel is governed by the state’s religious authorities. For Jews, it is the chief rabbinate that is tasked with validating the bride and groom as Jewish, meaning that they must prove descent from an uninterrupted line of Jewish mothers. “This is a revolutionary and historical step,” said Uri Regev, a rabbi, lawyer and president of Hiddush, a religious equality organization based in Jerusalem. “For the first time, there will be access, for a minimal cost for Israelis, who won’t need to travel overseas, who can legally and quickly get married or at least obtain a registration of marriage through this new avenue.”

Death toll from explosions in Equatorial Guinea rises to 98 (Reuters) The death toll from a series of explosions at a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea rose by dozens to at least 98 killed after more bodies were recovered, the government said Tuesday. The blasts on Sunday in the Mondong Nkuantoma neighborhood of the coastal city of Bata also wounded at least 615 people, authorities said. The government said that 316 of the injured have been discharged and 299 remain in care in various hospitals in the city. Investigations have shown the fire may have begun when a farmer set fire to his plot to prepare it for food production and a breeze spread the flames to the nearby barracks where the high-caliber ammunition was stored.

From a prolonged pandemic, a rethink of life’s milestones? (AP) Wedding anniversaries for Elizabeth O’Connor Cole and her husband, Michael, usually involve a dinner reservation for two at a fancy restaurant. Not this time around. As the pandemic raged last May, the Chicago mom of four unearthed her boxed wedding gown, recreated their reception menu, and pulled out her wedding china and silver after enlisting another of her kids to DJ their first-dance song, “At Last,” for a romantic turn around the living room. And the priest who married them offered a special blessing on Zoom with friends and family joining in. “Spontaneous and a bit chaotic,” O’Connor Cole pronounced the celebration. “Still, it was probably the most meaningful and fun anniversary we’ve had.” When the crisis finally resolves, will our new ways of marking births and deaths, weddings and anniversaries have any lasting impact? Or will freshly felt sentiments born of pandemic invention be fleeting? Some predict their pandemic celebrations have set a new course. Others still mourn the way their traditions used to be.

[dp3-ejb]

Well, first, you would probably notice that the old saying is correct: there are still plenty of fish in the sea. Numbers may be dwindling, but more than 22,000 fish species swim around in the earth’s waters, and they’re joined by nearly double that amount of crustaceans – lobsters, barnacles, krill, that sort of thing. You could tot up about two million whales, as well as 18 types of seal and 17 types of penguin. You would find that the sea-turtle family has seven distinct members, while manatees have just three. You would count a lot of things, in short, but there is one outstanding component that doesn’t belong there. Littered throughout the ocean, found in all shapes and all sizes, would be 5.25 trillion pieces of discarded plastic. And that is a problem.It’s all our fault, of course. According to conservative estimates, humans dump eight million tons of waste plastic into the earth’s water system every year – the equivalent of five full shopping bags per foot of the world’s coastline. Once it’s in there, some will end up back on our shores, turning pristine beaches into hazardous tips after just one high tide. Some of it sinks straight to the seabed, but the majority stays afloat, hostage to the currents, and gets slowly dragged into one of five major ocean gyres (vast, swirling vortexes of water and wind found in the north and south of the Pacific and Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean) around the world. Large items – a jerry can, say, or a fishing net – can remain intact for decades, bobbing around, occasionally trapping animals, before eventually suffering the same fate as all plastic: succumbing to the conditions and crumbling into tiny pieces. These microplastics are chemical pollutants, but they’re also bite-sized. Fish, seabirds and other marine life mistake them for food, swallow them, and repeat that until it kills them.

It’s thought that of the 1.5 million Layson albatrosses on Midway Atoll in the Pacific, almost all have plastic in their digestive systems, killing a third of their chicks. Far away in Melbourne Beach, Florida, in 2011 scientists picked up a green turtle with gastrointestinal complaints. When coerced, the turtle defecated 74 foreign objects – including balls of tar, four types of latex balloons, various different types of plastic and a bit of carpet.

There has never been an obvious solution to all this. For the 70 years or so that plastic has been a fixture in consumer society, oceanographers and environmentalists around the world have been well aware of the process, but against an escalating issue of such unfathomable scope, any efforts to tackle it have proven utterly futile. Beach clean-ups are laudable but they don’t achieve much, while sending boats on seafaring litter picks would take millennia to pick up the rubbish, even if the flow of new plastic were halted today. Without a realistic option, then, many in the scientific community are resigned to the position that ridding the ocean of rubbish is at best impossible, at worst a naïve waste of time, energy and money.

8,000,000 tons of plastic enters the oceans every year (approximately)

91% of plastic is never recycled

450 years is the time it takes for a plastic bottle to decompose

2050 is the date projected for when the amount of plastics in the ocean will equal the amount of fish

6,400 microplastics are inadvertently swallowed by the average European shellfish consumer each year

It’s thought that nearly every piece of plastic ever created is still in existence somewhere, in some form. A global study released last month revealed that 91 per cent is never recycled, and 79 per cent goes into landfills or the natural environment. Single-use plastic, like water bottles, takes 450 years to break down. The same is true of a lot of the waste spewed out from factories in countries like China, of fishing detritus, and of the tiny microbeads found in cosmetic products, which Environment Secretary Michael Gove has only just appeared to notice. Given we produced more plastic in the last decade than in the last century, that’s a lot to accumulate: a lot of Barbie dolls, a lot of prosthetic hips, a lot of Jaffa Cakes wrappers, a lot of Henry vacuum cleaners. At this rate, in fact, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea within 33 years.

Slat is not anti-plastic, because it’s quite difficult to take that stance and continue as a functioning human. Sitting on a white faux-leather sofa (plastic), drumming on a coffee table made of waste plastic, pointing at designs on a laptop (plastic) and occasionally fiddling with his phone (plastic), he admits it has changed the world for the better, as well as for the worse.

As a priority, Slat’s solution has always focused on the big bits, for the simple reason that they will become dangerous microplastics, and they’re easier to collect. In fact, The Ocean Cleanup’s donors – who have included ordinary crowdfunders, high-profile business leaders such as Peter Thiel, and the Dutch government – are putting their money into a project not hugely dissimilar to his original high-school design, which he has kept as simple as possible, because ‘the number of problems only gets bigger as you make something more complicated’.

As early as next year, The Ocean Cleanup will float 62-mile-long solid curved barriers (made from thermoplastic and high-density polyethylene, both of which are environmentally friendly) in the sea at strategic points, beginning with the worst of them all, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Incidentally, that isn’t a patch at all. In reality it’s more of a fog: loose, heterogeneous and constantly moving, which is another reason why it’s nigh on impossible to pursue the rubbish with boats and nets.From a bird’s-eye view, the barriers will look like giant fallen eyelashes; and from a fish’s-eye view there will be a gap, under a short screen, where sea life can pass through unimpeded. That leaves all large plastic near the surface caught – though anything down to 1cm in size is the intended target – and corralled into a reservoir in the middle. A boat will then come to pick up the collected plastic every three months or so, before taking it back to land, where the idea is to recycle it and sell it to fund the project’s continuation. Eventually, barriers will be deployed in all the gyres, and potentially adapted for river mouths or wherever they’re needed.It’s a simple concept, and one that hinges on the notion we’re better off using the natural currents to send us the plastic. It has evolved gradually, too.

‘Over half the cost of the project would be anchoring it, and an intern proposed we might not need to fix it to the seabed. The current gets a lot slower as you get deeper in the sea, and we found that if you cut the barriers loose and use floating anchors, they start to act like the plastic, moving to the area where the most waste is, so you can collect 10 times more than if it were fixed,’ Slat says, excitedly.

Some have very specific doubts about how the Ocean Cleanup model will work, particularly since it relies on there being a demand for the recycled waste once it’s back on dry land

‘The problem only gets worse over time. If you don’t clean up the big pieces of plastic in the ocean now, which is 97 per cent of all of the plastic, then it will turn into microplastics. That’s the ticking time bomb. I agree that the majority of money should be for prevention, but human nature is notoriously slow to change, and someone has to do this.’

He isn’t finished. ‘Look at climate change. That’s a bigger problem than plastic, but we can’t all focus on that and forget about plastic – that isn’t how the world works. We can divide our attention across different things, using clean-up to strengthen prevention. It’s the broken-window effect: people litter where there’s already litter. We have to start somewhere.’

The issue is getting more and more attention, in part thanks to A Plastic Ocean, a Netflix documentary released last year, and various campaigns are jostling for space. Some are very specific. Strawless Ocean has taken on the daunting task of tackling the staggering fact that Americans use and throw away 500 million drinking straws every day, most of which end up in the sea. Others are smaller in scope but quietly effective – the excellently named Surfers Against Sewage(SAS) focuses on beach cleaning and educational days in the UK; and The 5 Gyres Institute aims to raise awareness of the global problem, receiving special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council in the process.

The Ocean Cleanup had originally hoped to get something in the water by 2020, but after hitting investment targets early, Slat announced at a conference in May that the project will officially begin within the next 12 months, with a full-scale model heading to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch some time in 2018.