“Russia controls 4 percent of global cobalt production, for example, and 11 percent of nickel production. Following the sanctions package dropped on Russia, cobalt’s price increased from $74,000 per ton to $82,000 per ton and has now more than doubled since the start of 2021. Nickel’s price, meanwhile, has zoomed since the beginning of March, rising from $25,000 per ton on March 1 to a high above $45,000 briefly before settling at $32,000. Since 2019, the price of nickel has nearly tripled.
Shortages and price rises in those commodities will stymie any transition from carbon-emitting combustion engines to electric cars, since the average electric car battery contains 80 pounds of nickel and 15 to 30 pounds of cobalt. Increased gas prices due to a Russian oil collapse would not necessarily increase the adoption of green energy programs because electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines all use nickel and cobalt to varying degrees. The rising costs of nickel and other inputs will very likely cause electric vehicle batteries, which were growing rapidly less expensive over the last decade, to stop getting more affordable until at least 2024.
Reduced access to Russian commodities will drive up the cost of renewables and electric vehicles as gas prices also increase. It’s easier to increase oil production than it is to increase nickel or cobalt production; America has at least 35 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and OPEC can increase oil production whenever it wants. Pumping more oil is a faster and less arduous process than building a new nickel mine.
But the U.S. has another available source of nickel and cobalt that could be counted on when countries on the other side of the world have production difficulties due to war or internal strife, and it’s a scant 90 nautical miles off the coast of Florida.
Unfortunately, this source happens to be Cuba, and American companies have been forbidden by law to do business with Cuba for most of the last 60 years.”
“Late last year, Laura Wing-Kamoosi visited her 79-year-old father at the hospital in northern Michigan. To her surprise, a worker asked her to remove her N95 and replace it with a surgical mask. She declined, layering the surgical mask atop her N95 instead.
She saw no staff wear N95s, among the best respiratory protection available, while they treated her father for a tear in his aorta and other medical issues, she told POLITICO. One doctor wore his surgical mask under his nose, she said. Her father, who was hospitalized for about a month, contracted Covid-19 during his stay, and while he survived, the virus slowed his recovery.
The hospital, Munson Healthcare, said it requests visitors wear the surgical masks it provides to ensure people are using quality masks and that it allows visitors to layer one over their own. The hospital is following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and for many public health advocates, that’s exactly the problem.
They fear that surgical masks put the most vulnerable people at higher risk of catching Covid-19. N95s, which seal tighter to the face, offer better protection against the airborne virus, studies show. For more than a year, many have called on the Biden administration to change its guidance to offer more protection inside hospitals, even as mitigation measures have been dialed back and case counts decline.
And yet, patients across the country say they are often told to replace their N95s with surgical masks as they enter hospitals.”
“In 2018, the Trump administration issued an emergency order that would make it easier to prosecute people for selling so-called fentanyl analogues, drugs that share the same chemical structure of the powerful synthetic painkiller that has helped to fuel the nation’s opioid epidemic. Even as the Trump administration began embracing criminal justice reforms and opioid treatment elsewhere, the temporary order was part of a wider law-and-order crack down on new variations of the substance that had been flourishing in illegal drug markets.
The move was small, but significant. With little fanfare and debate, it gave federal prosecutors across the country sweeping new authority to charge people for federal drug crimes, triggering onerous mandatory minimums without the usual scientific process to determine whether the novel new drugs people peddled were even dangerous.
Yet, it wasn’t just a Trump phenomenon: On Thursday, Congress reauthorized the fentanyl copycat order for the sixth time — and the fifth time since Joe Biden’s inauguration — with broad bipartisan support, extending it to the end of this year. Instead of opposing the stricter enforcement, Biden favors making the order permanent — a move civil rights groups, public health researchers, criminal justice reform experts and other critics argue would further embolden federal law enforcement authorities and disproportionately affect low-income defendants of color. Opponents say it would usher in a remarkable change in drug law, one that criminalizes thousands of substances, some that haven’t even yet been developed, and set a precedent that could eventually extend to other drug categories.”
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“Federal authorities usually go through a multistep checklist to classify, or schedule, an individual drug into a certain category, which then determines how easily it can be researched and whether it merits criminal penalties. Some fentanyl analogues have already been individually tested and scheduled. But the 2018 order puts fentanyl copycats, which can include thousands of substances, into the government’s strictest drug control category — Schedule I, which also includes heroin, marijuana, LSD and ecstasy — without that scientific review. This represents the first time an entire category of drugs has been scheduled based on chemical structure alone.
In some cases, those fentanyl analogues can be more powerful than fentanyl, which is in the slightly less restrictive Schedule II category. But in other cases, analogues can be harmless or even potentially therapeutic. The FDA has testified that at least one new, potential overdose-reversal agent has fallen victim to the class-wide scheduling order.
Prosecutions for fentanyl-related substances soared during the Trump administration as the substance became more ubiquitous. The number of people prosecuted for and convicted of fentanyl-analogue crimes was nearly non-existent in 2016, but grew to 233 in 2019, according to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Nearly 70 percent of those prosecutions targeted Black and Hispanic people, many of them street dealers rather than major drug kingpins, according to the government data.”
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“some defense lawyers worry the impact might be bigger than the data show. Based on her conversations with defense lawyers and independent research, Patricia Richman — national sentencing resource counsel at the Federal Public and Community Defenders, which represents indigent clients in federal cases — argues that many more people are likely being charged under the emergency order. Federal authorities have yet to release updated data on how the law has been used since 2020.”
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“Meanwhile, the opioid crisis has worsened: Drug overdose deaths have reached record levels, topping more than 100,000 in the 12 months ending in September 2021 with death rates among Black people catching up to rates among white people. By June of last year, synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl and related substances, accounted for 65 percent of all drug overdose deaths, representing a massive increase from just a few years earlier.”
“Global average temperatures have already risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius, roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, leaving perilously little room for meeting the targets of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The accord set a goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius/3.6 degrees Farenheit compared to average temperatures before the industrial revolution in the 1800s. The agreement also set a more ambitious target of staying below 1.5°C/2.7°F.
Global warming has already raised global sea levels by 9 inches. It has left a distinct mark on extreme weather too, worsening heat waves, storm surges, and rainfall. Scientists can even quantify how much human-linked emissions of heat-trapping gases have made these events worse.”
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“The natural world is passing some of the hard limits of what it can handle from climate change right now, leading to irreversible changes like extinction of species. “Ecosystems already reaching or surpassing hard adaptation limits include some warm water coral reefs, some coastal wetlands, some rainforests, and some polar and mountain ecosystems,” according to the report. Humans who are dependent on these ecosystems are deeply affected as well.”
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“Sea level rise is forcing residents of small islands to permanently evacuate. At least five islands in the Pacific Ocean have been lost to higher water levels. Rising temperatures are changing rainfall patterns and melting snowpacks, limiting freshwater for drinking and agriculture. This is driving migrations around the world.”
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“As bad as the situation is right now, climate change can still get much worse. Rising temperatures mean that many more areas of the world, spanning some of the most populated regions, will experience times when it’s too hot to survive.”
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“More than 150 million people currently live on land that will be below the high-tide line by 2050.”
“When the Cold War ended in the ’90s, the United States possessed unrivaled economic and military power. Scholar Francis Fukuyama claimed the “End of History” and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted the centrality of American exceptionalism in her coinage, “the indispensable nation.”
Some argue that that unipolar moment was overstated. “Look, the Americans suffered from hubris after the end of the Soviet Union,” said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who has written widely about American power. “The unipolar moment, I think, was always illusory.”
At the end of the Cold War, the US did continue to hold itself out as the guarantor of security. “The United States appointed itself as responsible for peace, security, and democracy in Europe,” Stephen Wertheim, a historian of US foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In response to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the United States, through NATO, took military action against Serbia. The intervention was relatively limited, and the outcome of it was a successful projection of US might.
But that unilateral moment, real or imagined, was short-lived.
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were not what challenged that global supremacy, argues Wertheim. Rather, it was the 20 disastrous years of overreach in America’s response. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the limits of US power.”
“The historical pattern is clear, and ominous for Joe Biden and Democrats this year: The president’s party usually does poorly in midterm elections.”
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“Some theories focus on lower turnout among the president’s supporters. Others emphasize the public’s tendency to sour on an incumbent president. They may both be correct to some extent.
Other theories focus on why some presidents tend to do worse than others in midterms. Maybe the results are mainly about presidential approval these days. Or maybe they’re about the economy or, more specifically, real personal income growth. Some national crises, like 9/11, are associated with unexpectedly strong midterm performances for the president’s party — but others are associated with blowout defeats.
None of these signs are looking great for President Biden right now. His approval rating is the second-lowest of any president’s at this point in their presidency since modern polling came into use. The economy is booming by some metrics, but inflation is at a 40-year high and eating into voters’ spending power. The country is still in the midst of the pandemic, but Biden hasn’t unified the country around his leadership.
There’s no one weird trick that can guarantee midterm success, or one theory to perfectly explain every midterm result. But there are several that, considered together, go a long way toward helping explain why this so often happens — and what November’s midterms might herald for Biden.”
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“The trend predates World War II, so it’s not about recent developments. It happens in states (the governor’s party usually loses seats in off-year legislature elections), so it’s not just about the presidency. It’s not just an American phenomenon, either. “It also occurs internationally in systems where there is a chief executive election separate from a midterm,””
https://www.vox.com/22936455/travel-nurses-health-care-covid
“While the exodus of about 2.7 million Ukrainians from their war-torn country has focused the world on a burgeoning humanitarian crisis, the descent of Russia into new depths of authoritarianism has many Russians despairing of their future. That has created a flight — though much smaller than in Ukraine”
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“Some who have fled are bloggers, journalists or activists who feared arrest under Russia’s draconian new law criminalizing what the state deems “false information” about the war.
Others are musicians and artists who see no future for their crafts in Russia. And there are workers in tech, law and other industries who saw the prospect of comfortable, middle-class lives — let alone any possibility for moral acceptance of their government — dissipate overnight.
They left behind jobs and family and money stuck in Russian bank accounts that they can no longer access. They fear being tarred as Russians abroad as the West isolates the country for its deadly invasion, and they reel over the loss of a positive Russian identity.
“They didn’t just take away our future,” Polina Borodina, a Moscow playwright, said of her government’s war in Ukraine. “They took away our past.”
The speed and scale of the flight reflect the tectonic shift the invasion touched off inside Russia. For all of President Vladimir Putin’s repression, Russia until last month remained a place with extensive travel connections to the rest of the world, a mostly uncensored internet giving a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Slices of Western middle-class life — Ikea, Starbucks, affordable foreign cars — were widely available.
But when they woke up Feb. 24, many Russians knew that all that was over. Dmitry Aleshkovsky, a journalist who spent years promoting Russia’s emerging culture of charitable giving, got in his car the next day and drove to Latvia.”