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Wyden investigation of fish contamination is an important step

January 18, 2023 Published by

I am pretty accustomed to reading headlines detailing the latest health issues plaguing our freshwater fish. It comes with the territory as an ecotoxicologist working on the health of North America’s relatively abundant, but certainly not infinite, freshwater supplies.

The recent announcement that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), along with other state and federal lawmakers, is calling for an investigation into the toxic contamination of salmon across the Pacific Northwest, however, caught my eye. It fits into a broader question of salmon health that has had my community buzzing for the last couple of years.

Rather surprisingly, it all starts with automobiles.

It’s no secret that Americans love cars. In fact, in 2022, there were 290.8 million registered vehicles in the United States alone, 19 percent of the world’s total. That’s almost one car per person. And while we are always balancing the benefits and conveniences that automobiles afford us with the potential impacts on the environment, it seems as though there was one effect from a chemical we didn’t even know existed, of which we had not even been unaware. Until recently.

The science is pretty complicated but allow me to summarize.

Rubber tires used on cars contain chemicals used to make them stronger and help them withstand the road and the elements. It’s just like a preservative that lengthens the shelf life of a food product in the grocery store, but for tires.

As these protectants breaks down (due to the elements), one of them forms a newly discovered chemical called 6PPD-quinone which can then be washed away into freshwater lakes, rivers etc., with some deadly consequences for the wildlife that resides within.

This can include impacts on freshwater fish species on which many communities depend, such as rainbow and brook trout and, of course, coho salmon, whose recent mass die offs on the west coast had been puzzling researchers for a while.

This matters for many reasons. Coho salmon are popular among recreational fishers, but they are also an environmentally important species within aquatic ecosystems, so a change in their populations could have knock-on effects on the whole food web. 

But the problem is we just don’t have the evidence to prove that either way. The research so far has looked at the impact of 6PPD-quinone on individual species, but not on a freshwater ecosystem as a whole.

When tire run off leaches into a river or a lake, and kills off coho salmon, what does that do to the populations within the lake on which the coho salmon prey? And then what does that mean to the populations in the lake overall? And the water chemistry? And so and so forth.

Our freshwater ecosystems are intricate and complex, and one change in population can have a multitude of domino effects that we may not even anticipate. 

This is why we need more research, on this relatively understudied chemical, ideally in a real-life setting that can reveal the myriad of impacts that cascade through the system.

And while Oregon Wyden’s call for an investigation is very necessary and welcome, it is only once we have a complete picture of what tire run-off is doing to our fresh water, that we can make informed decisions on policy that will protect the health of one of our most importance resources for generations to come.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Gil is International Institute for Sustainable Development Research Scientist for Experimental Lakes Area

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Peloton Has a New Hope In Its Turnaround Battle

January 18, 2023 Published by

Tech layoffs were big news in the fourth quarter, with more than 97,000 jobs being axed in 2022, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. 

That is a 649% increase from the 13,000 tech jobs that were cut in 2021. 

But the flip side of the equation is that 72% of laid off tech employees found new jobs within three months, according to an analysis by Revelio Labs, Business Insider reported. 


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Iconic American Brand Goes Green in a Surprising Way

January 18, 2023 Published by

The fashion industry is a well-known culprit when it comes to industry effects on Mother Nature. An incredible amount of our clothing — 85% to be exact — eventually makes its way to landfills in our own backyards and across the world only to be dumped in foreign landfills. Our old outfits are most often left to be buried in piles of trash. And all that trash contributes to the emissions of harmful methane gas. Add to that the environmental effects of sewing, dying, packaging, and shipping, and you’ve got a lot of varied factors that have real-world consequences for our planet and its inhabitants. 


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U.S. Space Force chief: Russia’s missteps in Ukraine serve as a cautionary tale

January 18, 2023 Published by

Saltzman said he wants to make sure the Space Force is not caught unprepared

WASHINGTON — Before they attacked Ukraine, Russia’s armed forces were viewed as one of the most powerful in the world. But the conflict exposed that as a myth.

The lesson for the U.S. Space Force is that whenever it has to fight the next conflict, it can’t be caught unprepared, said Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, U.S. chief of space operations. 

The U.S. military has the world’s most advanced satellites and hardware but space forces for decades have operated in a relatively benign environment, Saltzman noted, and have not trained for a potential conflict where satellites could become military targets.

“An observation from Ukraine is you’ve got on paper, a very capable Russian military, but they didn’t necessarily have the training, they didn’t necessarily have the operational concepts for multi-domain operations,” Saltzman said on a Space Force Association webcast that aired Jan. 12.

Sometimes leaders focus on the weapon systems “and miss the fact that if you don’t have trained personnel, operational concepts and the tactics to execute with the weapon systems against the thinking adversary, that you only have half the equation,” he said. 

“The Russians didn’t have C2 [command and control] structures and sustainment capability. And they’re coming up a little short,” Saltzman said. In the Space Force, “we have to make sure that not only do we have the systems to do the mission, but that our operators have the training, the experience, and we have validated tactics that actually enable those capabilities.”

To train for space warfare, operators will require a mix of live and virtual training ranges, he said.  Space Force units will need to practice electronic warfare, operations against GPS jamming and how to maneuver satellites. Most of the current training infrastructure was inherited from the Air Force and the Space Force has to invest in updated capabilities.

“We have to build the infrastructure and the processes and procedures to make sure [Space Force guardians] have got what they need, whether it’s a test and training infrastructure, simulators that can replicate adversary threats and the interactions you would get with multiple units working together to solve operational challenges,” he said. “All of that needs to take place before we get into an actual conflict so that our operators are fully ready. And that’s really the priority that I’m going after.”

For example, he said, guardians will have to practice tactics to “control the space domain so that we can do what we want to do with our space assets, achieve the effects that we want to achieve, while denying the adversary the ability to use their space capabilities” to target U.S. forces.

“So we have to have the operational concepts for how we are going to do that. What are those techniques, procedures, and then you have to practice it … What I want to do is make sure we have the skills and the experience on day one of the conflict.”

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TikTok still irresistible? 5 steps to ratchet up your family’s privacy now

January 18, 2023 Published by

Despite how powerfully good it can be for those who engage in its entertaining videos and learn new tips, TikTok is increasing a growing threat to our privacy and security.

TikTok has gained a leading position in the social media platform world. All the cool kids use TikTok. And most don’t bat an eye while laughing at, liking, and sharing one video after another.

It’s addictive, informative and fun for millions. TikTok, even more than other social networks, comes at an enormous trade-off to your privacy and security because of how and what it gathers about your life. The threat posed by TikTok is so extreme that some countries have banned it altogether. It’s not uncommon for parents who work at big tech companies to forbid the use of TikTok by their own children.

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That’s not slowing its growth. So, how do tame this beast of all its bad traits?

Sure, the safest thing to do is never download or delete TikTok right away, but that’s not going to fly with most people who are deciding to throw caution to the wind.

Follow me here, because I think we can strike a balance and make everyone in the family happy while getting a lot smarter about what TikTok is doing behind the scenes with our lives. There’s one obvious wake-up call I ask of every parent.

IPHONE OWNERS URGED TO CHECK SETTINGS TO PREVENT THIEVES FROM MAKING CHANGES

TikTok can track your personal information. Here's how to be careful.

TikTok can track your personal information. Here’s how to be careful.
(Fox News)

Ask this one question

Am I okay with the government of communist China having access to my child’s intimate personal details, knowing what gets their attention, and always tracking their whereabouts?

That’s not all TikTok is harvesting of your family’s security and privacy. They are stealthily scraping bits and pieces of your life to serve up videos it’s learned you’ll watch and to turn you into a juicy ad target. That part is the obvious trade-off we expect in a data mining financial model that is standard for every major big tech media company.

The Chinese government can access your data from TikTok

The concerning part unique to TikTok is that it is owned by a parent company ByteDance whose home is in mainland China. And in that country, the government laws require ByteDance to give access to its data for any reason whatsoever and without any sort of court order or warrant. TikTok maintains that it is operated independently of ByteDance but data moving from its U.S. servers to mainland China has already been identified.

So what, right? TikTok collects a massive array of data that it then processes through a machine algorithm to master aspects of your life in extraordinary detail. TikTok is known to record the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, everything in all your messages, what you watch and for how long, biometric information including your face and voice prints, whom you know and how you interact with them.

TikTok knows more about you than you ever imagined

Sophisticated algorithms driving social media networks like TikTok can identify what topics and emotional tones capture your attention most easily.

All this crafting of your communications and interactions makes for an easy target for TikTok to steer in one direction or another knowing what you will react to like a puppet. It may sound like science fiction, but it is the very reason why many Silicon Valley executives do not allow their own children on TikTok and several other social media platforms.

HOW TO DICTATE TEXT TO YOUR PHONE AND COMPUTER THE EASY WAY

How to limit TikTok from prying into your privacy and security

Let’s narrow the exposure we are handing over to TikTok by changing a few basic settings. Follow these steps with everyone in the family who uses TikTok. Then, share these tips with anyone you love who could benefit from getting a bit of leverage over TikTok. 

TikTok tracks much of your personal information. There is a way to change the settings to help keep your privacy.

TikTok tracks much of your personal information. There is a way to change the settings to help keep your privacy.
(Fox News)

#1 Disable sharing your contacts with TikTok

How to turn off access to Your Contacts and Facebook Friends

  1. Launch TikTok app
  2. Go to your profile on the bottom right, then tap the three-line menu in the top right corner
  3. Tap Settings and Privacy > Privacy >Sync Contacts and Facebook Friends
  4. Turn toggles off to gray to block access to contacts and Facebook Friends

#2 Turn off ad targeting

How to disable personalized Ad Targeting

  1. Launch TikTok app
  2. Go to your profile on the bottom right, then tap the three-line menu in the top right corner
  3. Tap Settings and Privacy
  4. Scroll down to Ads and click that row
  5. Under Your Ads Settings, toggle Using Off-TikTok activity for ad targeting to gray

#3 Keep your profile anonymous

How to make your account private

  1. Launch TikTok app
  2. Go to your profile on the bottom right, then tap the three-line menu in the top right corner
  3. Tap Settings and Privacy > Privacy > toggle on Private Account to on position so that it is blue
  4. Toggle off Activity Status

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR FACEBOOK PASSWORD

TikTok collects much of your personal information. There is a way to keep your TikTok profile anonymous.

TikTok collects much of your personal information. There is a way to keep your TikTok profile anonymous.
(Fox News)

#4 Limit how people can find you

How to turn off Suggest Your Account to Others

  1. Launch TikTok app
  2. Go to your profile on the bottom right, then tap the three-line menu in the top right corner
  3. Tap Settings and Privacy > Privacy >  Suggest Your Account to Others > turn off all 4 options

#5 Hide what you ‘like’

How to prevent TikTok from sharing your ‘likes’

  1. Launch TikTok app
  2. Go to your profile on the bottom right, then tap the three-line menu in the top right corner
  3. Tap Settings and Privacy > Privacy > tap Following List in the Interactions list and set to Only Me

WHATSAPP ENDING SUPPORT ON SOME DEVICES

The one thing everyone on TikTok should do for their safety

Download what TikTok knows about you by requesting your data

  1. Launch TikTok app
  2. Go to your profile on the bottom right, then tap the three-line menu in the top right corner
  3. Tap Settings and Privacy > Account > tap Download Your Data

It typically takes a few days to receive the link to your TikTok data to download. Be on the lookout for the TikTok link containing your data report since you only have 4 days before the link expires.

Send me a note if you aren’t as shocked as I was when I saw what TikTok had recorded of my life. That’s one of the reasons I deleted TikTok for good.

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Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

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CDC needs a reset requiring support from the federal level, new think tank report finds

January 18, 2023 Published by



CNN
 — 

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in “a moment of peril” and a “strong, effective, and more accountable” agency is an urgent matter of national security, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ (CSIS) Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security.

“This report argues that a significant reset of the CDC is necessary – and possible – if carried out through building actionable recommendations across branches of government and across party lines,” Katherine Bliss, a senior fellow at CSIS, a Washington think tank, said during an event on Tuesday marking the report’s release. The event included CSIS experts, elected officials and public health experts, including past leaders of the CDC.

Reshaping the CDC will need to be a joint effort with the agency’s leaders and the federal government, the report says. It outlines a number of recommendations for the CDC to regain the public’s trust and to become more flexible and accountable, Bliss said.

According to the report, the CDC needs to strengthen its global work in order to detect and prepare for new epidemic threats, improve its data collection process, and it needs to be able to move money in its budget to respond to crises.

“The big picture here is, we all see the need for a reset of the agency. Some of the reset has to be structural, some of it needs to be activity that only Congress can really manage and that has to do with how the budget is structured, the size and scope of the budget and the flexibilities or lack thereof,” said Julie Gerberding, who was the CDC director from 2002 to 2009, and is co-chair of the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security. “And some of it has to do with, I think, modernization – really looking at how the CDC can take advantage of data science and the opportunities to build better data systems, more interoperable data systems and really complete the trajectory that they’ve already started with the data modernization act.”

In August, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walenksy laid out plans to overhaul the agency and create a “public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness” after a sweeping review of the agency’s structures and systems.

She said she would ask Congress to grant the agency new powers, including mandating that jurisdictions share their data and for new flexibilities in the agency’s funding, which would allow the CDC to better respond to public health emergencies.

Walensky and other CDC senior leaders met with the CSIS commission’s working group to help explain what they learned from their own internal review, Gerberding said.

CNN has reached out to the CDC for comment about the report.

The working group also took issue with the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters, saying it limits access to policymakers.

Gerberding said a bigger presence in Washington, D.C., is important.

“If you want to play, you gotta be in the game and the game is not played in Atlanta, unless, you know, you’re a fan of the baseball team there,” she said.

But ultimately, the working group said, the CDC has faced a lot of pressure and challenges over the last three years during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I do really want to emphasize that while there is substantial opportunity here for evolution, modernization and performance improvement at the CDC, it has also done a lot of things well and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that in the midst of a pandemic there were many other public health activities going on. CDC teams were deployed all over the United States and internationally to assist with local response efforts. The CDC Foundation stepped up and engaged some 3,000 or more people to help the workforce shortages and so forth,” Gerberding said. “So there were a lot of very positive things that happened and we need to make sure that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater here when we’re looking at the really critical things that need to be fixed, but also to appreciate and respect what our public health system has been able to accomplish for the past three years.”

“There’s a lot of incredible talent, passion and capability at the CDC and, you know, I’ve seen them do miracles,” she added.

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Fugees' Pras Michel plans subpoenas for Obama and Trump

January 18, 2023 Published by

Former Justice Department attorney George Higginbotham, former Republican National Committee deputy fundraising chair Elliott Broidy, and California businesswoman Nickie Lum Davis have already pleaded guilty in connection with the investigation into the influence-peddling effort. However, before leaving office, Trump granted Broidy a full pardon.

Kenner did not elaborate on what testimony Trump or Obama could offer about the effort, but said the value of their accounts should be evident to prosecutors. “I believe it’s all relevant,” Kenner said.

“The government is not intending to call any former presidents,” Justice Department lawyer John Keller told Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly during the half-hour-long court session Tuesday. However, Keller said the government does plan to call two high level officials from the Trump White House: former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and one of his deputies, Ricky Waddell. Neither is expected to resist testifying, Keller said.

Kollar-Kotelly expressed concern that efforts to draw the former presidents and other high-profile individuals into the case could complicate plans for Michel’s long-delayed jury trial to go forward in March. The judge was adamant Tuesday that, even if the former presidents seek to quash the subpoenas for their testimony, the trial will begin as scheduled on March 27.

“I do not have any time to push this case back, so you’re going on the dates you’ve got,” said Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

Michel — who has pleaded not guilty in the case — has been free pending trial, but his legal troubles appear to have contributed to a decision to cancel an international reunion tour last year for the American hip-hop group best known for the songs “Ready or Not” and “Killing Me Softly.”

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Arizona says developers don't have enough groundwater to build in desert west of Phoenix

January 18, 2023 Published by

home is being built in in Rio Verde Foothills, Arizona, U.S. on January 7, 2023.

The Washington Post | Getty Images

Developers planning to build homes in the desert west of Phoenix don’t have enough groundwater supplies to move forward with their plans, a state modeling report found. 

Plans to construct homes west of the White Tank Mountains will require alternative sources of water to proceed as the state grapples with a historic megadrought and water shortages, according to the report.

Water sources are dwindling across the Western United States and mounting restrictions on the Colorado River are affecting all sectors of the economy, including homebuilding. But amid a nationwide housing shortage, developers are bombarding Arizona with plans to build homes even as water shortages worsen.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources reported that the Lower Hassayampa sub-basin that encompasses the far West Valley of Phoenix is projected to have a total unmet demand of 4.4 million acre-feet of water over a 100-year period. The department therefore can’t move to approve the development of subdivisions solely dependent on groundwater.

“We must talk about the challenge of our time: Arizona’s decades-long drought, over usage of the Colorado River, and the combined ramifications on our water supply, our forests, and our communities,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said in a statement last week. 

Developers in the Phoenix area are required to get state certificates proving that they have 100 years’ worth of water supplies in the ground over which they’re building before they’re approved to construct any properties. 

The megadrought has generated the driest two decades in the West in at least 1,200 years, and human-caused climate change has helped to fuel the conditions. Arizona has experienced cuts to its Colorado River water allocation and now must curb 21% of its water usage from the river, or roughly 592,000 acre-feet each year, an amount that would supply more than 2 million Arizona households annually. 

Despite warnings that there isn’t enough water to sustain growth in development, some Arizona developers have argued that they can work around diminishing water supplies, saying new homes will have low flow fixtures, drip irrigation, desert landscaping and other drought-friendly measures. More than two dozen housing developments are in the works around Phoenix.

Rising Risks: Building through the great western drought

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New Stock Listings Open Door to American Investment in the Israeli Occupation

January 18, 2023 Published by

In early December, the New York Stock Exchange signed a memorandum of understanding to begin dual listing securities with its Israeli counterpart, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, potentially accelerating U.S. investment in companies tied to illegal West Bank settlements.

The move could allow American investors increased access to companies like the construction firm Ashtrom, which is currently listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and on a 2020 United Nations human rights office database of over 100 companies tied to the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. To be included in that list, a company had to be engaged in supplying equipment used to destroy Palestinian assets including farmland and property; supplying transportation, utilities, or other support for existing settlements; or aiding in financial backing for settlement expansion or maintenance. Ashtrom, in addition to operating quarries in the West Bank, has helped construct housing in illegal West Bank settlements and prisons and military installments in the occupied territories.

Dozens of companies in sectors including telecom, construction, and renewable energy are listed in both the U.N. database and the Tel Aviv exchange. That includes some of Israel’s largest banks and the massive energy and infrastructure conglomerate Delek, one of Israel’s largest companies.

Beyond dual listing, the memorandum signed between the two exchanges also lists the potential development of exchange-traded fund, indexes, and environmental, social, and corporate governance, or ESG products. The potential creation of ESG products is especially notable given that ESG funds, while offering groupings of socially responsible products, have also been used to greenwash companies with a track record of various abuses. At the same time, impact investing groups, like JLens, have gone on the offensive to attack ESG funds incorporating Israeli human rights abuses into their modeling.

While the vast majority of companies in the 2020 database are Israeli, a handful of U.S. companies made it onto the list, including Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Expedia, and General Mills. These companies are already listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The memorandum will likely open U.S. investors’ access to Israeli companies also doing business in illegal settlements and bolster Tel Aviv listings through the institutional support and size of the New York exchange.

NYSE President Lynn Martin said in a press release that “our exploration of dual listings will provide investors with potential exposure to listed companies and economic activity in both markets. The importance of our global capital markets has never been greater, and we look forward to demonstrating what two great exchanges can accomplish when they work together.”

Dual listing is not a departure from standard financial sector norms. Tel Aviv has entered into similar agreements with exchanges like Toronto prior to the New York memorandum.

“The narrow framing of this is that it’s the perfect headline for those of us who would worry about a blending of the Israeli far-right and American-style finance capitalism,” Robert Hockett, a professor of financial and international economic law at Cornell, told The Intercept. “The New York exchange is the largest of them all,” Hockett said, “and is the most heavily traded exchange and is in that sense the largest capital market, so any firm in Tel Aviv will get a lot more access than it previously had.”

Despite the Biden administration’s official stance against illegal settlement expansion, as the U.N. was set to add more companies to its database last month, the United States began lobbying the human rights office to drop its bid to expand the list. Two American diplomatic officials, including Michèle Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, told an Israeli ambassador they were pressuring the U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk not to add more companies to the U.N. database.

At the same time that the New York and Tel Aviv exchanges announced their collaboration, a coalition of far-right Israeli extremists seized power in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Fomented by Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperation to regain power amid ongoing corruption investigations, the new coalition of cabinet ministers has already engaged in egregious provocations against Palestinians and laid bare its intent to fully annex the West Bank.

Language from the coalition deal states that Jews “have a natural right over the Land of Israel,” and that “in light of our belief in the aforementioned right, the prime minister will lead the formulation and advancement of policies within the framework of applying sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” Israel’s incoming tourism minister has vowed to accelerate annexation and Jewish tourism to the West Bank, describing Palestine as “our local Tuscany.”

The possible creation of ESG products referenced in the dual listing announcement also follows intense lobbying to ignore Israeli human rights abuses in scoring social impact of investments. In October, the financial services giant Morningstar bent to overwhelming pressure from powerful American Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Women’s Zionist Organization of America to remove Israeli human rights abuses committed against Palestinians from its methodology. A leader of ESG analytics, Morningstar and its subsidiary Sustainalytics committed to removing its Human Rights Radar service, no longer using the U.N. Human Rights Council as a source for its analysis, and abandoning terms relating to Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The ESG products that could emerge out of the dual listing memorandum hold the potential to mirror the principles of JLens, an investment advising fund now owned by the Anti-Defamation League that led the charge against Morningstar, leveling accusations of antisemitism.

“Dual listing serves the interests of Israeli companies and of the State of Israel by allowing companies to maintain a strong link to Israel and ecosystem it offers while benefiting from the upsides of listing on the world’s largest exchange,” Ittai Ben-Zeev, CEO of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, said in a press release. Ben-Zeev was previously executive vice president and head of Capital Markets at Bank Leumi, which is listed in the U.N. database of financial institutions supporting illegal West Bank settlements.

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