University of California

Elon Musk Takes Twitter, and Tech Deals, to Another Level

Forget about the endless drama, the bots, the abrupt reversals, the spectacle, the alleged risk to the Republic and all we hold dear. Here is the most important thing about Elon Musk’s buying Twitter: The moguls have been unleashed.

In the old days, when a tech tycoon wanted to buy something big, he needed a company to do it. Steve Case used AOL to buy Time Warner. Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods for Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus and on and on. These were corporate deals done for the bottom line, even if they might never have happened without a famous and forceful proprietor.

Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which finally became a reality on Thursday, six months after he agreed to the deal, is different. It is an individual buying something for himself that 240 million people around the world use regularly. While he has other investors, Mr. Musk will have absolute control over the fate of the short-message social media platform.

It’s a difficult deal to evaluate even in an industry built on deals, because this one is so unusual. It came about whimsically, impulsively. But, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, where billions are casually offered for fledging operations — and even by the wallet of Mr. Musk, on most days the richest man in the world — $44 billion is quite a chunk of change.

the midterm elections’ most prominent campaign contributor, pumping tens of millions of dollars into right-wing congressional candidates. Two of his former employees are the Republican nominees for senator in Ohio and Arizona.

Richard Walker, a professor emeritus of economic geography at the University of California, Berkeley and a historian of Silicon Valley, sees a shift in the locus of power.

“In this new Gilded Age, we’re being battered by billionaires rather than the corporations that were the face of the 20th century,” he said. “And the tech titans are leading the way.”

bought The Washington Post for $250 million. Marc Benioff of Salesforce owns Time magazine. Pierre Omidyar of eBay developed a homegrown media empire.

Deals have been a feature of Silicon Valley as long as there has been a Silicon Valley. Often they fail, especially when the acquisition was made for technology that either quickly grew outdated or never really worked at all. At least one venerable company, Hewlett-Packard, followed that strategy and has practically faded away.

$70 billion-plus acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which is pending, has garnered a fraction of the attention despite being No. 2.

said in April after sealing the deal. “I don’t care about the economics at all.”

He cared a little more when the subsequent plunge in the stock market meant that he was overpaying by a significant amount. Analysts estimated that Twitter was worth not $44 billion but $30 billion, or maybe even less. For a few months, Mr. Musk tried to get out of the deal.

This had the paradoxical effect of bringing the transaction down to earth for spectators. Who among us has not failed to do due diligence on a new venture — a job, a house, even a relationship — and then realized that it was going to cost so much more than we had thought? Mr. Musk’s buying Twitter, and then his refusal to buy Twitter, and then his being forced to buy Twitter after all — and everything playing out on Twitter — was weirdly relatable.

Inescapable, too. The apex, or perhaps the nadir, came this month when Mr. Musk introduced a perfume called Burnt Hair, described on its website as “the Essence of Repugnant Desire.”

“Please buy my perfume, so I can buy Twitter,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Oct. 12, garnering nearly 600,000 likes. This worked, apparently; the perfume is now marked “sold out” on its site. Did 30,000 people really pay $100 each for a bottle? Will this perfume actually be produced and sold? (It’s not supposed to be released until next year.) It’s hard to tell where the joke stops, which is perhaps the point.

Evan Spiegel.

“What was unique about Twitter was that no one actually controlled it,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed Partners. “And now one person will own it in its entirety.”

He is relatively hopeful, however, that Mr. Musk will improve the site, somehow. That, in turn, will have its own consequences.

“If it turns into a massive home run,” Mr. Greenfield said, “you’ll see other billionaires try to do the same thing.”

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Strong Dollar Is Good for the US but Bad for the World

The Federal Reserve’s determination to crush inflation at home by raising interest rates is inflicting profound pain in other countries — pushing up prices, ballooning the size of debt payments and increasing the risk of a deep recession.

Those interest rate increases are pumping up the value of the dollar — the go-to currency for much of the world’s trade and transactions — and causing economic turmoil in both rich and poor nations. In Britain and across much of the European continent, the dollar’s acceleration is helping feed stinging inflation.

On Monday, the British pound touched a record low against the dollar as investors balked at a government tax cut and spending plan. And China, which tightly controls its currency, fixed the renminbi at its lowest level in two years while taking steps to manage its decline.

Somalia, where the risk of starvation already lurks, the strong dollar is pushing up the price of imported food, fuel and medicine. The strong dollar is nudging debt-ridden Argentina, Egypt and Kenya closer to default and threatening to discourage foreign investment in emerging markets like India and South Korea.

the International Monetary Fund.

Japanese yen has reached a decades-long high. The euro, used by 19 nations across Europe, reached 1-to-1 parity with the dollar in June for the first time since 2002. The dollar is clobbering other currencies as well, including the Brazilian real, the South Korean won and the Tunisian dinar.

the economic outlook in the United States, however cloudy, is still better than in most other regions.

loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.

A fragile currency can sometimes work as “a buffering mechanism,” causing nations to import less and export more, Mr. Prasad said. But today, many “are not seeing the benefits of stronger growth.”

Still, they must pay more for essential imports like oil, wheat or pharmaceuticals as well as for loan bills due from billion-dollar debts.

debt crisis in Latin America in the 1980s.

The situation is particularly fraught because so many countries ran up above-average debts to deal with the fallout from the pandemic. And now they are facing renewed pressure to offer public support as food and energy prices soar.

Indonesia this month, thousands of protesters, angry over a 30 percent price increase on subsidized fuel, clashed with the police. In Tunisia, a shortage of subsidized food items like sugar, coffee, flour and eggs has shuttered cafes and emptied market shelves.

New research on the impact of a strong dollar on emerging nations found that it drags down economic progress across the board.

“You can see these very pronounced negative effects of a stronger dollar,” said Maurice Obstfeld, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the study.

central banks feel pressure to raise interest rates to bolster their currencies and prevent import prices from skyrocketing. Last week, Argentina, the Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Britain and Norway raised interest rates.

World Bank warned this month that simultaneous interest rate increases are pushing the world toward a recession and developing nations toward a string of financial crises that would inflict “lasting harm.”

Clearly, the Fed’s mandate is to look after the American economy, but some economists and foreign policymakers argue it should pay more attention to the fallout its decisions have on the rest of the world.

In 1998, Alan Greenspan, a five-term Fed chair, argued that “it is just not credible that the United States can remain an oasis of prosperity unaffected by a world that is experiencing greatly increased stress.”

The United States is now facing a slowing economy, but the essential dilemma is the same.

“Central banks have purely domestic mandates,” said Mr. Obstfeld, the U.C. Berkeley economist, but financial and trade globalization have made economies more interdependent than they have ever been and so closer cooperation is needed. “I don’t think central banks can have the luxury of not thinking about what’s happening abroad.”

Flávia Milhorance contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

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Storms Expected To Continue Flooding Southern States For Days

From Arizona to New Mexico deserts and Louisiana swamps, a high pressure system is dumping rain in the South, triggering mass flooding.

Across massive swaths of the South, heavy rains are prompting flooding and flash flooding.

From the high deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to the swamps of Louisiana, storms are dumping inches of rain, on ground in no shape to absorb all that water.

“We’re going for periods of a long time without rainfall, and then bang — we’ll get periods of very intense rainfall and flooding,” said David Feldman, professor of urban planning and public policy at the University of California Irvine.

In Utah, a hiker was swept away after walking into the narrows of Zion National Park and apparently getting caught in a flash flood. A spokesman said the park received reports of multiple people being “swept off their feet” in a flash flood.

In Phoenix, Arizona, residents spent the weekend sandbagging their homes. And in Dallas, Texas, Brittany Taylor waded through her brand new apartment to find ruined belongings.

The rains are expected to last for days as a high pressure system parks over the northern states, pushing storms into the South and Southwest.

“Monsoon rains are important, a very important part of the ecosystem in the American Southwest,” said Brad Rippey, USDA meteorologist. “However, they tend not to greatly boost soil moisture or reservoir storage.”

It’s just a taste of what’s coming.

Scientists already know a destabilizing atmosphere because of climate change means more widespread, intense flooding.

But now climatologists at UCLA have found an increasing risk of a California megastorm — one that would deluge cities and towns over the course of a month and test the state’s dams and runoff instrastructures.

The odds are already one in 50 every year, and getting worse as the amount of greenhouse gas humans put into the atmosphere increases.

That means dealing with this is just part of the new reality.

Source: newsy.com

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How Pharmacy Work Stopped Being So Great

If any group of workers might have expected their pay to rise last year, it would arguably have been pharmacists. With many drugstores dispensing coronavirus tests and vaccines while filling hundreds of prescriptions each day, working as a pharmacist became a sleep-deprived, lunch-skipping frenzy — one in which ornery customers did not hesitate to vent their frustrations over the inevitable backups and bottlenecks.

“I was stressed all day long about giving immunizations,” said Amanda Poole, who left her job as a pharmacist at a CVS in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in June. “I’d look at patients and say to them, ‘I’d love to fill your prescriptions today, but there’s no way I can.’”

Yet pay for pharmacists, who typically spend six or seven years after high school working toward their professional degree, fell nearly 5 percent last year after adjusting for inflation. Dr. Poole said her pay, about $65 per hour, did not increase in more than four years — first at an independent pharmacy, then at CVS.

data collected by a team of economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

The gap is part of a long-term trend made worse by a slowdown in pay gains for middle- and upper-middle-income workers in the 2000s. “If you’re going to a hedge fund or investment bank or a tech company, you’ve done enormously well,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. Typical college graduates, he said, “have not done that great.”

The stagnation appears to have moved up the income ladder in the last few years, even touching those in the top 10 percent.

In some cases, the explanation may be a temporary factor, like inflation. But pharmacists illustrate how slow wage growth can point to a longer-term shift that renders once sought-after jobs less rewarding financially and emotionally.

wages in the profession surged as the country faced a pharmacist shortage driven by an aging population and a rise in chronic conditions.

typically take two or three years of college-level prerequisites before earning a four-year professional degree.)

But by the 2010s, the market for pharmacists was cooling thanks to some of the same factors that have weighed on other middle-class professions. Large chains such as Walgreens and CVS were buying up competitors and adjacent businesses like health insurers.

Consolidation among benefit managers gave them more leverage over pharmacies to drive prices lower. (CVS merged with a large benefits manager in 2007.)

Big drugstore chains often responded by trying to rein in labor costs, according to William Doucette, a professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Iowa. Several pharmacists who worked at Walgreens and CVS said the formulas their companies used to allocate labor resulted in low levels of staffing that were extremely difficult to increase.

According to documents provided by a former CVS pharmacist, managers are motivated by bonuses to stay within these aggressive targets. CVS said it made staffing decisions to ensure “the safe and accurate filling of prescriptions.”

More Business, Fewer Hands

The day that Dr. Poole began seriously reconsidering her CVS job in Tuscaloosa came in May 2021 when, nearly eight months pregnant, she fainted at work.

The loss of consciousness was nothing serious in itself — she and the baby were unharmed, and an adjustment to her blood-pressure medication solved the problem. Much more alarming to her was what the episode said about working conditions: Despite the additional responsibilities of the pandemic, like coronavirus vaccines and catering to Covid-19 patients, there was no co-worker around to notice that she had hit the deck.

contract signed in March by a union of Chicago-area Walgreens pharmacists reflected a similar approach. It provided maximum base pay of $64.50 per hour, the same as the previous contract, but lowered the starting wage from $58 per hour to $49.55 per hour by September. (Like many retail pharmacists, the union members also receive bonuses.)

CVS and Walgreens said they had made hiring pharmacists a priority during the pandemic — CVS said it employed nearly 6 percent more pharmacists today than it did in early 2020; Walgreens declined to provide a figure. CVS said its compensation was “very competitive” for pharmacists, and Walgreens cited “ongoing phased wage increases”; both chains have offered signing bonuses to recruit pharmacists. The Chicago union said Walgreens had recently offered to raise pay for about one-quarter of its lowest-paid members.

To explain the wage stagnation of upper-middle-class workers during the pandemic, some economists have suggested that affluent workers are willing to accept lower wage growth for the ability to work from home. Dr. Katz, of Harvard, said the wages of many affluent workers might simply be slower to adjust to inflation than the wages of lower-paid workers.

But Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah, said the fact that upper-middle-class workers were not able to claim a larger share of last year’s exceptionally high corporate profits “speaks to the disempowerment of workers at all levels of status.”

change in state regulations would allow pharmacy technicians to administer shots. “They expected the techs to transition into that role,” Dr. Knolhoff said.

Overall, the industry added more than 20,000 technicians — an increase of about 5 percent — from 2020 to 2021. In that time, prescription volume increased roughly the same percentage, according to data from Barclays.

The effective replacement of higher-paid workers with lower-paid workers has also occurred in other sectors, such as higher education. But at drugstores, where pharmacists must sign off on every prescription, this shift has left little margin for error.

In August 2020, Dr. Wommack, the Walgreens pharmacist in Missouri, got Covid. A colleague covered her first two days out but couldn’t cover the third, at which point the store simply closed because there was no backup plan.

Several pharmacists said they were especially concerned that understaffing had put patients at risk, given the potentially deadly consequences of mix-ups. “It was so mentally taxing,” said Dr. Poole, the Tuscaloosa pharmacist. “Every day, I was like: I hope I don’t kill anyone.”

Asked about safety and staffing, CVS and Walgreens said they had made changes, like automating routine tasks, to help pharmacists focus on the most important aspects of their jobs.

Many pharmacists contacted for this article quit rather than face this persistent dread, often taking lower-paying positions.

Still, none had regrets about the decision to leave. “I was 4,000 pounds lighter the moment I sent my resignation email in,” said Dr. Wommack, who left the company in May 2021 and now works at a small community hospital.

As for the medication she had taken for depression and anxiety while at Walgreens, she said, “Shortly after I stopped working there, I stopped taking those pills.”

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Heavy Rain, Monsoon Winds Wreak Havoc On Southwest States

The monsoon rains that flooded large parts of the southwest are slowly heading east into the drought stricken southern plains.

From severe droughts to flooding, the southwest is getting hammered by a new round of extreme monsoon storms.

“The rushing waters were so loud, you couldn’t hear anything else,” said Juan Piñeda, a Benson, Arizona resident.

Parts of the southwest still recovering from extreme storms in the last few days are once again filling sandbags and bracing for another round.

“It’s likely going to be one of the bigger events this season,” said Rob Howlett, who works at the National Weather Service in Tuscon.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for most of Arizona, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, that is affecting nearly 10 million people.

That will last through Saturday night with 1-2 inches of rain per hour possible.

“The main concern is going to be flash flooding, which, with the heavy rainfall, and falling in a short period of time, that’s going to run off into our streams and washes and also in our streets in the cities,” said Howlett.

The National Weather Service says it’s the remnant of a tropical system that moved across Northern Mexico, which makes it complex to forecast.

“There’s always going to be that uncertainty and potential for more rainfall and there’s potential for less rainfall, there can be a better case scenario,” said Howlett.

First responders are asking people to be smart and stay out of flood waters.

“It may look like the wash is standing water but it’s actually running underneath and we don’t want you driving in those washes,” said Dave Folio, a firefighter with the Scottsdale Fire Department.

The excessive moisture caused a mine in Tombstone, Arizona to cave in this week.

In Southern Utah, monsoon rains are putting increased pressure on this dam without the ability to store the excess moisture. Dry, clay-rich soil can be hydrophobic, which means it doesn’t absorb water well and leads to instant flooding with too much rain in a short amount of time.

David Feldman is a professor of urban planning and public policy at the University of California Irvine, and director of Water UCI.

“We’re going for periods of a long time without rainfall and then bang we’ll get periods of very intense rainfall and flooding,”said Feldman.

The U.S. drought monitor shows a large part of the country is still in trouble, but notes some improvement in Arizona because of heavy rains.

Now the system will move east this weekend with anywhere from three to five inches of rain from Texas to Louisiana that could lead to more flash flooding in those areas.

Source: newsy.com

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More Monkeypox Vaccines Will Be Made Available Ahead Of Pride Events

By Maura Sirianni
August 19, 2022

The U.S. is setting aside an extra 50,000 doses of monkeypox vaccines, specifically for large-scale pride events.

As monkeypox cases surge across the U.S., pressure is mounting on the White House and the CDC to distribute more vaccines. But in many cities, there is still a major shortage.

“States don’t really know when vaccines are coming; it’s kind of a day-to-day thing,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease expert at University of California San Francisco.

The Biden administration is now dividing up what were previously full doses in order to stretch the limited stockpile. Health care providers are also being encouraged to inject the vaccine just below the skin to stretch doses up to five times.

“Seeing a lot of people with sickness and suffering really makes me feel sad because, again, it’s something we have the tools to do, and it really shows us the importance of a system and a well-oiled machine,” Dr. Chin-Hong said.

It’s a distribution hurdle: With the COVID vaccines, the CDC’s detailed “VTrckS” system allows states to track and reorder vaccine supplies, but with monkeypox, the government is repurposing a shot originally designed for smallpox.

According to CDC data, the U.S. has the most infections of any country — nearly 14,000. About 98% of those cases are men, and about 93% were men who reported recent sexual contact with other men.

Officials announced an extra 50,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine are being set aside and shipped to various cities ahead of upcoming pride celebrations.

“This is a two-dose vaccine series, and receiving the vaccine at these events will not provide protection at the event itself,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC director. “We recognize that there are going to be some people who have traveled to large scale events and that they’re going to have to receive dose one of their vaccine at the event, and then they won’t necessarily receive dose two at their local jurisdiction, and we anticipate that.”

Health officials say the number of doses sent to each location will be based on event size and the number of health workers available to administer shots, as well as the number of attendees considered “high risk” for catching or spreading the disease.

For those living in major cities and are able to travel, one health expert says taking a drive 20 or 30 minutes outside the city may create more luck finding doses in less crowded areas.

In the meantime, the White House says it will continue to stretch a limited supply.

Source: newsy.com

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California Not Counting Methane Leaks From Idle Wells

By Associated Press
July 31, 2022

A scientist says the lack of data calls into question California’s ability to meet its ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.

California claims to know how much climate-warming gas is going into the air from within its borders. It’s the law: California limits climate pollution and each year the limits get stricter.

The state has also been a major oil and gas producer for more than a century, and authorities are well aware some 35,000 old, inactive oil and gas wells perforate the landscape.

Yet officials with the agency responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions say they don’t include methane that leaks from these idle wells in their inventory of the state’s emissions.

Ira Leifer, a University of California Santa Barbara scientist said the lack of data on emissions pouring or seeping out of idle wells calls into question the state’s ability to meet its ambitious goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

Residents and environmentalists from across the state have been voicing concern about the possibility of leaking idle or abandoned wells for years, but the concerns were heightened in May and June when 21 idle wells were discovered to be leaking methane in or near two Bakersfield neighborhoods. They say that the leaking wells are “an urgent public health issue,” because when a well is leaking methane, other gases often escape too.

Leifer said these “ridealong” gases were his biggest concern with the wells.

“Those other gases have significant health impacts,” Leifer said, yet we know even less about their quantities than we do about the methane.

In July, residents who live in the communities nearest the leaking wells protested at the California Geologic Management Division’s field offices, calling for better oversight.

“It’s clear that they are willing to ignore this public health emergency. Our communities are done waiting. CalGEM needs to do their job,” Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in a statement.

Robert Howarth, a Cornell University methane researcher, agreed with Leifer that the amount of methane emissions from leaking wells isn’t well known and that it’s not a major source of emissions when compared with methane emissions from across the oil and gas industry.

Still, he said, “it’s adding something very clearly, and we shouldn’t be allowing it to happen.”

A ton of methane is 83 times worse for the climate than a ton of carbon dioxide, when compared over twenty years.

A 2020 study said emissions from idle wells are “more substantial” than from plugged wells in California, but recommended more data collection on inactive wells at the major oil and gas fields throughout the state.

Robert Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist and co-author on that study, said they found high emissions from some of the idle wells they measured in the study.

In order to get a better idea of how much methane is leaking, the state of California is investing in projects on the ground and in the air. David Clegern, a spokesperson for CARB, said the agency is beginning a project to measure emissions from a sample of properly and improperly abandoned wells to estimate statewide emissions from them.

And in June, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a budget that includes participation in a global effort to slash emissions called the Methane Accountability Project. The state will spend $100 million to use satellites to track large methane leaks in order to help the state identify sources of the gas and cap leaks.

Some research has already been done, too, to find out how much methane is coming from oil and gas facilities. A 2019 Nature study found that 26% of state methane emissions is coming from oil and gas. A new investigation by the Associated Press found methane is billowing from oil and gas equipment in the Permian Basin in Texas and companies under report it.

Howarth said even if methane from idle oil and gas wells isn’t a major pollution source, it should be a priority not just in California, but nationwide, to help the country meet its climate pledges.

“Methane dissipates pretty quickly in the atmosphere,” he said, “so cutting the emissions is really one of the simplest ways we have to slow the rate of global warming and meet that Paris target.”

A new Senate proposal would provide hundreds of millions dollars to plug wells and reduce pollution from them, especially in hard hit communities.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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U.S. Takes Emergency Action To Save Sequoias From Wildfires

The trees, the world’s largest by volume, are under threat like never before.

The U.S. Forest Service announced Friday it’s taking emergency action to save giant sequoias by speeding up projects that could start within weeks to clear underbrush to protect the world’s largest trees from the increasing threat of wildfires.

The move to bypass some environmental review could cut years off the normal approval process required to cut smaller trees in national forests and use intentionally lit low-intensity fires to reduce dense brush that has helped fuel raging wildfires that have killed up to 20% of all large sequoias over the past two years.

“Without urgent action, wildfires could eliminate countless more iconic giant sequoias,” Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement. “This emergency action to reduce fuels before a wildfire occurs will protect unburned giant sequoia groves from the risks of high-severity wildfires.”

The trees, the world’s largest by volume, are under threat like never before. More than a century of aggressive fire suppression has left forests choked with dense vegetation, downed logs and millions of dead trees killed by bark beetles that have fanned raging infernos intensified by drought and exacerbated by climate change.

The forest service’s announcement is among a wide range of efforts underway to save the species found only on the western slope of Sierra Nevada range in central California. Most of about 70 groves are clustered around Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and some extend into and north of Yosemite National Park.

Sequoia National Park, which is run by the Interior Department and not subject to the emergency action, is considering a novel and controversial plan to plant sequoia seedlings where large trees have been wiped out by fire.

The Save Our Sequoias (SOS) Act, which also includes a provision to speed up environmental reviews like the forest service plan, was recently introduced by a bipartisan group of congressmen including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, whose district includes sequoias.

The group applauded Moore’s announcement Friday but said in a statement that more needs to be done to make it easier to thin forests.

“The Forest Service’s action today is an important step forward for Giant Sequoias, but without addressing other barriers to protecting these groves, this emergency will only continue,” the group said. “It’s time to codify this action by establishing a true comprehensive solution to fireproof every grove in California through the SOS Act and save our sequoias.”

Work planned to begin as soon as this summer in 12 groves spread across the Sequoia National Forest and Sierra National Forest in would cost $21 million to remove so-called ladder fuels made up of brush, dead wood and smaller trees that allow fires to spread upward and torch the canopies of the sequoias that can exceed 300 feet in height.

The plan calls for cutting smaller trees and vegetation and using prescribed fires — intentionally lit and monitored by firefighters during damp conditions — to remove the decaying needles, sticks and logs that pile up on the forest floor.

Some environmental groups have criticized forest thinning as an excuse for commercial logging.

Ara Marderosian, executive director of the Sequoia ForestKeeper group, called the announcement a “well-orchestrated PR campaign.”

He said it fails to consider how logging can exacerbate wildfires and could increase carbon emissions that will worsen the climate crisis.

“Fast-tracking thinning fails to consider that roadways and logged areas … allows wind-driven fires because of greater airflow caused by the opening in the canopy, which increases wildfire speed and intensity,” he said.

Rob York, a professor and cooperative extension specialist at forests operated by the University of California, Berkeley, said the forest service’s plan could be helpful but would require extensive followup.

“To me it represents a triage approach to deal with the urgent threat to giant sequoias,” York said in an email. “The treatments will need to be followed up with frequent prescribed fires in order to truly restore and protect the groves long-term.”

The mighty sequoia, protected by thick bark and with its foliage typically high above the flames, was once considered nearly inflammable.

The trees even thrive with occasional low intensity blazes — like ones Native Americans historically lit or allowed to burn — that clear out trees competing for sunlight and water. The heat from flames opens cones and allows seeds to spread.

But fires in recent years have shown that although the trees can live beyond 3,000 years, they are not immortal and greater action may be needed to protect them.

During a fire last year in Sequoia National Park, firefighters wrapped the most famous trees in protective foil and used flame retardant in the trees’ canopies.

Earlier this month, when fire threatened the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park, firefighters set up sprinklers.

Flames burned into the grove — the first wildfire to do so in more than a century — but there was no major damage. A park forest ecologist credited the controlled burns with protecting the 500 large trees.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

Source: newsy.com

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Retail Workers Increasingly Fear for Their Safety

Assaults at stores have been increasing at a faster pace than the national average. Some workers are tired of fearing for their safety.

June 28, 2022

There was the customer who stomped on the face of a private security guard. Then the one who lit herself on fire inside a store. The person who drank gasoline and the one who brandished an ax. An intoxicated shopper who pelted a worker with soup cans. A shoplifter who punched a night manager twice in the head and then shot him in the chest.

And there was the shooting that killed 10 people, including three workers, at the King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colo., in March 2021. Another shooting left 10 more people dead at a Buffalo grocery store last month.

In her 37 years in the grocery industry, said Kim Cordova, a union president in Colorado, she had never experienced the level of violence that her members face today.

F.B.I. said, more than half the so-called active shooter attacks — in which an individual with a gun is killing or trying to kill people in a busy area — occurred in places of commerce, including stores.

“Violence in and around retail settings is definitely increasing, and it is a concern,” said Jason Straczewski, a vice president of government relations and political affairs at the National Retail Federation.

Tracking retail theft is more difficult because many prosecutors and retailers rarely press charges. Still, some politicians have seized on viral videos of brazen shoplifting to portray left-leaning city leaders as soft on crime. Others have accused the industry of grossly exaggerating losses and warned that the thefts were being used as a pretext to roll back criminal justice reforms.

“These crimes deserve to be taken seriously, but they are also being weaponized ahead of the midterm elections,” said Jonathan Simon, a professor of criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School.

While the political debate swirls about the extent of the crime and its causes, many of the people staffing the stores say retailers have been too permissive of crime, particularly theft. Some employees want more armed security guards who can take an active role in stopping theft, and they want more stores to permanently bar rowdy or violent customers, just as airlines have been taking a hard line with unruly passengers.

Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

Some unions are demanding that retailers make official accommodations for employees who experience anxiety working with the public by finding them store roles where they don’t regularly interact with customers.

it was revealed that the retailers were hounding falsely accused customers.

The industry says it is putting much of its focus on stopping organized rings of thieves who resell stolen items online or on the street. They point to big cases like the recent indictment of dozens of people who are accused of stealing millions of dollars in merchandise from stores like Sephora, Bloomingdale’s and CVS.

But it’s not clear how much of the crime is organized. Matthew Fernandez, 49, who works at a King Soopers in Broomfield, Colo., said he was stunned when he watched a thief walk out with a cart full of makeup, laundry detergent and meat and drive off in a Mercedes-Benz S.U.V.

“The ones you think are going to steal are not the ones doing it,” he said. “From high class to low class, they are all doing it.”

Ms. Barry often gives money to the homeless people who come into her store, so they can buy food. She also knows the financial pressures on people with lower incomes as the cost of living soars.

When people steal, she said, the company can write off the loss. But those losses mean less money for workers.

“That is part of my raise and benefits that is walking out the door,” she said. “That is money we deserve.”

Ella Koeze contributed reporting.

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