Michael Caputo, enigmatic Republican political consultant and international PR man who served as campaign manager for Carl Paladino and fills in as radio talk show host on WBEN. This was in his East Aurora office on Tuesday, 19 January 2016. Caputo also served as propagandist with Oliver North for Ronald Reagan’s illegal war on Central America. Photo: Robert Kirkham / Buffalo News

Trump officials celebrated efforts to change CDC reports on coronavirus, emails show – Political appointees also tried to blunt scientific findings they deemed unfavorable to Trump

By Dan Diamond 9 April 2021 (The Washington Post) – Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators. […]

Global monthly mean atmospheric CO2, 1980-2020. These graphs shows the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Graphic: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020 – Carbon dioxide levels now higher than any time in past 3.6 million years – Largest annual methane increase ever recorded

7 April 2021 (NOAA) – Levels of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic response, NOAA announced today. The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2), calculated from measurements collected at NOAA’s remote sampling locations, was […]

Dozens of vehicles are parked with their lights on at an illegal party at Tonto National Park on the night of 3 April 2021. The U.S. Forest Service estimated that more than 5,000 people gathered illegally. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

More than 5,000 people attended an illegal party at the Tonto National Forest in Arizona – “It’s going to be super destructive”

By Kelsie Smith 7 April 2021 (CNN) – More than 5,000 people attended an unauthorized and illegal event at Tonto National Forest near Phoenix on Saturday, leading to multiple violations and one person being emergency evacuated, officials said. Forest protection officers were patrolling near the Lower Sycamore Creek Recreation Area when they discovered thousands of […]

COVID-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in India, 4 April 2021. On 3 April 2021, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare confirmed 93,249 new cases, the highest single-day tally since mid-September 2020. The country’s daily case counts have been rising exponentially since early March 2021. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

India sees “alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” – 47,913 new cases reported in a single day in Maharashtra, “which is more than double its earlier peak”

By Morgan Winsor 5 April 2021 LONDON (ABC News) – India has seen “an alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” in recent weeks, the prime minister’s office said Sunday. More than 12.3 million people in India have been diagnosed with COVID-19 so far and at least 165,101 of them have died, making India one […]

Aerial view of a leak from the Piney Point reservoir in Manatee County, Florida, on 3 April 2021. Photo: NewsNation / MSNBC

“Imminent” collapse of wastewater reservoir in Florida forces evacuations – 20-foot “wall of water” if reservoir breaches – Workers try to prevent “real catastrophic flood situation”

By Raja Razek and Alaa Elassar 4 April 2021 (CNN) – Response teams in Manatee County Florida are trying to prevent a “real catastrophic flood situation” in the Piney Point reservoir area, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday after taking an aerial tour the area. The governor assured the public that the water being discharged to […]

Top 10 accounts by tweets, likes, and retweets in tweets mentioning “vaccines” or “vaccinations” between 9 November 2020 and 9 February 2021. The fact that the Russian Embassy in Mexico received the fifth most likes and retweets is remarkable given that the embassy only posted 46 tweets mentioning vaccines during the studied period. On a per-tweet basis, the embassy’s vaccine-related tweets received the most engagement of any monitored account—roughly 795 likes and 374 retweets per post—far more than state media accounts with 100 times more followers. Likely buoyed by its vaccine messaging, the @embrusiamexico account saw the third largest percent gain in followers (70 percent) among monitored Russian accounts during the studied period. Data: Hamilton 2.0. Graphic: ASD

How Russia, China, and Iran shaped and manipulated coronavirus vaccine narratives

By Bret Schafer, Amber Frankland, Nathan Kohlenberg, and Etienne Soula 6 March 2021 (ASD) – When Vladimir Putin announced last August that Russia had granted regulatory approval for Sputnik V, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it signaled—albeit perhaps prematurely—not only a potential turning point in the fight to end the coronavirus pandemic but also a new phase in […]

Annualized global Bitcoin electricity consumption in TWh, 2016-2021. Graphic: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index / University of Cambridge

Majority of global Bitcoin energy consumption powered by non-renewable energy – Only 39 percent comes from renewables

24 September 2020 (CCAF) – The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at the Cambridge Judge Business School today published the third edition of its Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Studywhich highlights the industry’s efforts to address regulatory concerns over anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT), but cautions that efforts to address issues such […]

Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak, and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals – “We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude”

By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado 27 March 2021 PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (The New York Times) – The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives. But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s […]

Aerial view of illegal gold mining camp on the Uraricoera river, Waikás region, TI Yanomami, in the far north of Brazil, between the states of Amazonas and Roraima, December 2020. Photo: Instituto Socioambiental

Illegal gold rush in the Amazon raises risk to indigenous people – “They are coming in like starved beasts, looking for the wealth of our land”

By Luana Souza 24 March 2021 (Bloomberg News) – Illegal gold and diamond mining is proliferating in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest and threatening South America’s largest group of native people who still live in relative isolation, the Yanomami. Criminal mining groups are encroaching on the indigenous territory that straddles Brazil and Venezuela, polluting rivers, bringing diseases […]

African elephants, Loxodonta africana, during a thunderstorm. Photo: Ronan Donovan / National Geographic

Both African elephant species are now endangered, one critically – “At this point, there can be no doubt that poaching and habitat loss have devastated populations of elephants all across Africa”

By Rachel Nuwer 25 March 2021 (National Geographic) – Elephants have long been thought of as either African or Asian. But there are actually two species of African elephant: The savanna elephant is larger, has curving tusks, and roams the open plains of sub-Saharan Africa. The smaller, darker forest elephant, with straight tusks, lives in the […]

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