“At issue is whether it’s fair to use century-old rules, created during an era of relative abundance, to ration water from the rapidly shriveling river now that the West is on the precipice of climate disaster. With California and its six neighbors locked in a dispute over two competing approaches to divvying up the cuts in water deliveries, whatever the administration decides will almost certainly end up in court.”
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“The current feud centers on California, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and Arizona, a newfound swing state that has proven crucial to the party’s control of the White House and Senate.
The 1,450-mile long Colorado River made much of the West inhabitable, and now supplies water to 40 million Americans from Wyoming to the border with Mexico, as well as an enormously productive agricultural industry. But climate change has shriveled its flows by 20 percent over the past two decades, and for each additional degree of warming, scientists predict the river will shrink another 9 percent.
Water levels at the system’s two main reservoirs are falling so fast, the Interior Department has said that water users must cut consumption by as much as a third of the river’s flows or risk a collapse that could cripple their ability to deliver water out of those dams. That would also cut off hydropower production that is crucial to the stability of the Western grid.
The states broadly agree that the vast majority of those immediate cuts must be made by the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, whose decades of overuse have accelerated the crisis. But the fight is over whether California, which holds strong legal rights to the lion’s share of the Lower Basin’s water, should have to share in those reductions.”
“First, out of more than 100 units, the governor has identified three or four that may sound sketchy to people unfamiliar with the topic. But the focus on this handful of examples creates a highly selective and distorted view of the curriculum.
Second, he describes the class as “history,” when in fact it is an interdisciplinary curriculum that exposes students to college-level subject matter they almost certainly don’t encounter in standard U.S. and world history classes.
Third, and most importantly, the curriculum makes a lot more sense if you consider its topline objective: arming students with a range of analytical and critical thinking skills. If you believe that the purpose of a quality education is to prepare kids to thrive in the real world, the AP African American Studies is a win. The subject matter is rigorous, and the texts and other source material are challenging. Isn’t that exactly what a twenty-first century education should look like?”
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“While it is certainly true that Florida students already study some fundamentals of Black history, they are unlikely to learn about African linguistic diversity or how to parse maps of the Songhai Empire in their U.S. or world history courses. They may read excerpts by former enslaved people like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, but probably won’t encounter Olaudah Equiano’s captivity narrative, analyze the intersection of European and African art or locate connections between Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and visual artists like James Van Der Zee and Aaron Douglas. We can fairly intuit that they won’t encounter writing by Black feminists like Nikki Giovanni or parse Molefi Kete Asante’s work on Afrocentricity.
This is no knock against Florida’s public schools. According to its mission statement, the AP curriculum “enables willing and academically prepared students to pursue college-level studies.” By design, the curriculum operates a level or two above a standard high school program.”
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” The first unit, “Origins of the African Diaspora,” offers a bright tapestry of subjects around African culture, history, linguistics, art and economics, as well as the process behind — and experience of — enslavement (including the role of Black Africans in that tragedy). It would require a feat of political gymnastics to find issue with units on “Exploring Africa’s Geographic Diversity,” “Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Bantu Dispersals” or “Visualizing Early Africa.”
The second unit, “Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance,” is also standard fare, with topics that include “African Explorers in the Americas,” “Origins and Overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” “Fleeing Enslavement” and “Black Women’s Rights & Education.”
And so it goes with the third unit, “The Practice of Freedom,” which covers such topics as Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the early civil rights movement. Notwithstanding the current vogue for banning literature in schools — a troubling development that is hardly specific to Florida — it would take a particularly narrow mind to find fault with modules on “Everyday Life in Literature,” “The Rise and Fall of Harlem” or “Music and the Black National Experience.”
It’s unit four, “Movements and Debates,” that opens the door more than just a crack to conservative criticism, though most of the unit continues the curriculum’s chronological arc, exploring subjects like civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, student protests, Black women’s history, music and religion and faith. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary.
To be sure, many culture warriors will object to topics and texts that strike most people as unproblematic. Voices like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Ta-Nehisi Coates and bell hooks offend the sensibilities of some white Americans. They push the boundaries of the conversation about race in ways that challenge ideas about “American exceptionalism,” progress and national innocence. Similarly, raw representations of white violence against Black persons, families and institutions — be they historical texts, paintings, songs or sociological tracts — make a lot of conservatives uncomfortable. They complain that broaching these subjects teaches white children to feel implicated by the actions of earlier generations. This concern assumes that students are especially brittle and incapable of dealing with the subject matter.
But the back half of unit four also contains topics that may cause some parents — and not just conservatives — to raise an eyebrow: “Intersectionality and Activism,” “Black Queer Studies,” “‘Postracial’ Racism and Colorblindness,” “Incarceration and Abolition,” “Movements for Black Lives” and “The Reparations Movement.” These topics drive at extremely polarizing political debates, including what if anything the country owes its Black citizens, whether the criminal justice system is fair and unbiased and the meaning of sexuality. Even outside an AP course, these are fraught topics.
One need not agree with DeSantis that the AP course is a study in indoctrination to wonder: Why would you teach these topics to 17-year-olds? Are they not in fact … “woke?”
The answer to this last question is a resounding: Yes! Also: So what?”
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“They’re complicated works of sociology and philosophy. They’re highly contested polemics. We read them to sharpen our capacity for analysis and argument. Contra Gov. DeSantis, being assigned a text is not an exercise in indoctrination.
How do I know this? Because reading Friedrich Nietzsche in college did not turn me into a nihilist any more than reading Albert Camus made me an existentialist. I read Ross Douthat’s New York Times column regularly, and yet I have neither changed my party affiliation to Republican nor converted to Catholicism.
We expose students to knotty, complicated and controversial ideas because it helps them sharpen the five critical skill sets that the College Board identified in the course prospectus.
If a student takes the AP course on African American Studies and is ultimately able to develop an empirical, well-constructed, knock-down argument against reparations or prison reform, that’s as much of a win as the opposite outcome. I might not like where the student landed, but the curriculum did its job.
That’s the idea behind the AP’s course in African American Studies: use a topic that captures the interest of a large number of students to introduce them to a range of interdisciplinary methodologies and teach them to analyze and make sense of our very complicated world.”
“The U.S. cannot adequately address its national security challenges related to China, which are increasingly driven by technology, without the help of a potentially surprising partner: the Department of Commerce.
Unfortunately, the department itself lacks the critical support needed for these efforts. Most crucial: Commerce needs its own intelligence agency.”
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“The cases that come before CFIUS are privileged and not publicly disclosed. But I can say this: The most challenging ones usually revolved around issues of advanced or dual-use technology, an area in which the Department of Commerce plays a critical role given its international trade and export control responsibilities.
Today, the Department of Commerce is an agency unexpectedly on the frontlines of vital U.S. national and economic security challenges, most prominently demonstrated by its leading role on ensuring critical access to semiconductors, and as evidenced by the CHIPS Act and recent rules promulgated by the department to protect against even knowledge transfers between the United States and China.
But these efforts are certain to be a beginning for Commerce, not an end. And a dedicated in-house intel agency can better identify emerging threats and challenges from China that Commerce needs to tackle, including potential spyware and other intrusions embedded in foreign technology. For instance, in late November, the U.S. issued a ban on new Huawei and ZTE equipment — along with that of three other Chinese companies — for fear it would be used to spy on Americans. Last month, Congress proposed limiting U.S. exposure to Chinese 5G leaders, including Huawei, by restricting their access to U.S. banks, adding them to Treasury’s Specifically Designated Nationals List.
In fact, Commerce’s current position is not unlike that of the Treasury Department’s in 2004.
That year — as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act — Congress established the current iteration of Treasury’s intelligence agency, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and formally made it part of the broader intel community. Since then, OIA has played a critical role for almost two decades combating terrorist financing, helping support sanctions efforts and providing financial intelligence to Treasury policymakers.
OIA’s successes would simply not have been possible without it being a full, integrated member of the intelligence community. Indeed, its assessments often find their way to the White House and to other senior policymakers across town, even as its primary focus is supporting the Treasury Department.
In the same way, the Commerce Department cannot be expected to play a more fulsome role in U.S. national security if its leaders are not fully informed of the strategic goals and illicit tactical efforts of U.S. adversaries. To meet that expectation, requires the launch of a new, 19th intel agency to be housed at the department.”
“Jérôme Piodi, a French Eurocrat who has spent more than a decade in public administration in the European Parliament and in related Parisian ministries, said the key factor in making progress in Europe is a common understanding of complex ideas. “Until very recently, access to instantaneous translation of speech and ideas was reserved to a certain kind of elite — the kind who could spend money to pay translators,” Piodi said.
Europe has more than 200 native languages and mutually incomprehensible dialects. All of its 24 official languages are highly developed, each with its own media, textbooks, movies and language academies. These languages, and their use in schools, workplaces and families, define a country’s identity.
But we’re now living, for the first time, in an era where everyone in Europe — from politicians to cab drivers — can understand one another. It’s true that previously, diplomats could communicate through translators and, typically, in English. Now, ordinary Europeans can understand one another, instantly and accurately, and because of the compulsive lure of social media — and Twitter’s decision to automatically translate every tweet — Europeans can and do talk to each other all day long. Talking to Ukrainians, and hearing directly from them, has hardened public support for sanctions and weapons transfers in the EU, despite Russian threats and soaring energy prices. Eurobarometer polling shows that 74 percent of EU citizens back the bloc’s support for Kyiv.”
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“Google Translate isn’t the complete explanation for the newfound European unity, of course, but it’s an underappreciated part of the story.
“It’s had a huge effect on people and their ability to share ideas on social media,” Piodi says. “Twitter is a small window on the world; Google Translate made the window bigger.””
“The big Russian winter offensive that Ukrainians have been warning about has been underway for about two weeks.
This is partially if not largely the Wagner Group doing this — the Russian mercenary organization that recruited extensively from Russian prisons last summer and fall. They’re using these former prisoners on the front lines in the central Donbas in human-wave attacks. They’re poorly trained, poorly armed, and poorly led — if they’re led at all — and they’re pushed forward to the Ukrainian lines. And the Ukrainians are mowing these guys down.
Wagner is using these human-wave attacks to find the stronger and weaker points in the Ukrainian lines. Then the Russian army — again, the Wagner group, mostly — is sending in better-trained, better-equipped, and better-led Wagner forces to exploit the weaker areas.
It’s working — but very slowly and at an incredibly high cost. Russian casualty figures are around 5,000 a week. Those casualty figures can’t be sustainable over the long term. It seems like these human-wave attacks are the first stage of the big Russian winter offensive.
The Russians are gaining tens to hundreds of meters a day along the front line in the central part of the Donbas region, but I don’t see that it could lead to a major breakthrough, and I don’t see that it’s sustainable over the long term.”
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“The Russians are gaining territory along the lines around the city of Bakhmut, which has been in the news a lot because it has become a focal point for both sides. Strategically, it’s neither negligible nor significant. It allows access to larger cities farther west in the Donbas, such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, which are more important.
Bakhmut has huge symbolic significance for both sides. The Russians have been unable to take it for several months, and both sides have pushed more and more forces into the area. Ukraine is determined to hold it, just to deny the Russians the PR victory of saying that they captured it.”
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“The Russian economy has proven to be a little more sanctions-proof and resilient than a lot of people expected.
The sanctions impacted the military most on the very high-end semiconductor chips required for precision weapons. Before the sanctions, Russia had been able to get these chips. But those sanctions appear to be airtight. No one but Taiwan, the Netherlands, and the US can make those chips.
As the Russians draw down their stocks of precision long-range missiles, they’re not able to replenish them. They could use lower-end semiconductors, but then the weapon is not as precise. For months, the Russians have been using S300 surface-to-air missiles in surface-to-surface mode, which means they’re using missiles meant to knock down airplanes to attack ground targets because they’re running out of precision surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.”
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“One of the most interesting things about this war is we have a better understanding of the state of the Russian military now than we do of the state of the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainians have been very tight-lipped with their operational security. They tell us only what we need to know to help them. We don’t have a good understanding of their casualty rates.”
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“The Ukrainian military is battered, but its morale is unbroken, and its leadership is still mostly alive and very effective. They captured much Russian equipment early in the war; they don’t have a problem with the amount of equipment. Western equipment, then, has been important to Ukraine not in terms of numbers but in raising their capabilities.
Ukraine is in a better position with equipment than Russia — and will be in a better position as Western equipment continues to arrive.”
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“Russia is expending a lot of energy and resources — and losing a lot of capability in this grinding, attritional offensive underway now. I think they should let Russia continue to expend energy, capability, and resources in ways that don’t do the Ukrainian military a whole lot of damage in operational or strategic capability.
The Ukrainians may end up having to abandon Bakhmut. They’ll fall back to their defensive line around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. They’re well dug in there. Their military headquarters were there before the war. They’ve been fighting there since 2014; they know the area very well.
It’s going to be months before the capabilities that the West is offering are integrated into the Ukrainian forces. Their moment of peak capability will come in the mid to late summer, which is a good time for an offensive. The Russians may expend so many resources that they’ll be incapable of further decisive offensive operations right when the Ukrainians reach the peak of their capability.”
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“The most likely scenario is the Russian offensive will continue in a similar fashion to these last two weeks. It may gain more ground, but I don’t see a massive breakthrough where Ukrainian lines dissolve and the Russians drive deep into central Ukraine. I don’t think they have the capacity to do it.
The attritional offensive will stall out, and then you’re likely to see a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer or early fall that won’t have the capability to end the war. Unless the Russian army dissolves and leaves the battlefield, I don’t think the Ukrainians have the capability to end the war by regaining all Ukrainian territory inside its internationally recognized borders.”
“There is one key factor explaining why imports to the EU from Russia haven’t fallen further: energy — and its price. During the five years that preceded the war, energy-related products represented two-thirds of all imports from Russia, in monetary terms.
European countries needed to find alternative providers before they could stop buying from Moscow — and even when they reduced their energy purchases, soaring prices meant that cash flows to Russia did not decrease proportionally.”
“Russell has previously been described by federal officials as a founder of a Neo-Nazi group known as the Atomwaffen. In 2018, he was sentenced to five years in prison on explosives charges. Russell was released in August 2021, federal Bureau of Prisons records show.
According to a criminal complaint charging the pair with conspiracy to destroy an energy facility, Clendaniel told an FBI confidential informant about plans to attack five substations in an effort to cause widespread blackouts. That “would completely destroy this whole city,” Clendaniel allegedly said.
Extremists, cybercriminals and vandals have intensified attacks on the power grid in recent years, with such incidents reaching a decade-long peak last year.
However, Sobocinski said the FBI isn’t aware of any links between the pair and other plans to attack electrical infrastructure.”
“The experts I’ve spoken with over the past few years generally agree that nurses are tremendously undervalued given the importance of their work in delivering quality health care. Research has found repeatedly that more nursing staff leads to patients reporting a better experience in the hospital and better health outcomes.
But the problem is, given the way health care in the US is typically paid for, hiring more nurses and making their work environment better doesn’t necessarily make good economic sense for these hospitals.”
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“Nurses point to exorbitant executive compensation (which soared nationwide during the pandemic) and multimillion-dollar real estate deals to explain their decision to strike. They have a point: Hospitals behaving on pure altruism would spend more on clinical staff without their nurses needing to go on strike to force their hand.”
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“Slashing executive pay (Montefiore’s CEO makes $6 million a year) can only pay for so many new nursing positions. Canceling a $38 million land deal in White Plains would make more money available, but when revenue depends on the number of services that a hospital system provides, buying land and building new facilities does make fiscal sense.”
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“Under the fee-for-service model that still dominates American health care, where every physician service can be billed by the hospital where they work, hospitals have every incentive to expand their services but little incentive to hire more nurses to support that work. From a hospital’s accounting perspective, nurses are entirely a cost. They do not generate any revenue directly, even though they are necessary to providing quality medical care.”
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““What we forget is when hospitals put profits over patients, they are operating well within the system of economic carrots and sticks that we created for them, and within the system we created, hospitals are acting completely rationally as any other economic agent would,” Olga Yakusheva, a health care economist at the University of Michigan, said. “There is no economic incentive, right now, for hospitals to invest in adequate nurse staffing, pay nurses well, or provide a good working environment for nurses.”
Until the US gives hospitals good financial reasons to invest in their nursing staffs, these labor disputes are going to occur again and again. As much as we want our health system to be focused on quality health care, in America, health care is a business.
Good health care and profitable health care are not always the same thing. The failure to value nursing in the way we pay for medical services, which laid the groundwork for NYC’s nurses strike, is a stark example of that.”
“One-third or so of species in the US are threatened with extinction, according to the Nature Conservancy. Think about that: One in three species could disappear for good. That includes things like owls, salamanders, fish, and plants, each of which contributes some function to ecosystems that we depend on.
Thankfully, there’s such a thing as conservation, and in the US, much of it is done by state wildlife agencies. Fish and game departments have a range of programs to monitor and manage species that include reintroducing locally extinct animals and setting regulations for hunting and fishing.
heir work, however, faces a couple of big problems.
The first is that states don’t have enough money. Roughly 80 percent of funding for state-led conservation comes from selling hunting and fishing licenses, in addition to federal excise taxes on related gear, such as guns and ammo. These activities aren’t as popular as they once were. “That results in less conservation work getting done,” Andrew Rypel, a freshwater ecologist at the University of California Davis, told Vox in August.
Another challenge is that states spend virtually all the money they do raise on managing animals that people like to hunt or fish, such as elk and trout. “At the state level, there’s been almost zero focus on non-game fish and wildlife,” Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, said in August. That leaves out many species — including, say, kinds of freshwater mussels — that play incredibly important roles in our ecosystems.
RAWA could be a fix. The bill would provide state wildlife agencies a total of $1.3 billion a year by 2026, based on the state’s size, human population, and the number of federally threatened species. RAWA also includes nearly $100 million for the nation’s Native American tribes, who own or help manage nearly 140 million acres of land in the US (equal to about 7 percent of the continental US).
One feature of RAWA that makes it so useful, according to environmental advocates, is that it requires states to protect animals that are imperiled, whether or not they’re targeted by hunters and fishers. “That’s funding that doesn’t exist right now,” Rohlf said.”
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“After RAWA passed the House last summer, lawmakers turned to the bill’s tallest hurdle: the “pay-for,” a.k.a. how to cover the cost of the legislation, without having to raise the deficit.
Negotiations carried on throughout the fall, and legislators put forward a number of different proposals. In the final weeks of the congressional term, it looked as though the government would pay for RAWA by closing a tax loophole related to cryptocurrency, as E&E News’s Emma Dumain reported.
Ultimately, lawmakers couldn’t agree on the details. That’s why RAWA got cut from the omnibus bill.”