Day: September 9, 2022

Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor and a pioneering Black journalist remembered for his blunt question at a presidential debate and calmly reporting the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 from Baghdad as it was under attack, has died. He was 82.

He died of pneumonia, unrelated to COVID-19, on Wednesday at a hospital in Washington, according to Tom Johnson, CNN’s former chief executive.

A former CBS and ABC newsman, Shaw took a chance and accepted an offer to become CNN’s chief anchor at its launch in 1980. He later reported before a camera hurriedly set up in a newsroom after the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Regan.

He retired at age 61 in 2001.

As moderator of a 1988 presidential debate between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, he asked the Democrat — a death penalty opponent — whether he would support that penalty for someone found guilty of raping and murdering Dukakis’ wife Kitty.

Dukakis’ coolly technocratic response was widely seen as damaging to his campaign, and Shaw said later he got a flood of hate mail for asking it.

“Since when did a question hurt a politician?” Shaw said in an interview aired by CSPAN in 2001. “It wasn’t the question. It was the answer.”

Shaw memorably reported, with correspondents Peter Arnett and John Holliman, from a hotel room in Baghdad as CNN aired stunning footage of airstrikes and anti-aircraft fire at the beginning of U.S. invasion to liberate Kuwait.

“I’ve never been there,” he said that night, “but this feels like we’re in the center of hell.”

The reports were crucial in establishing CNN when it was the only cable news network and broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC dominated television news. “He put CNN on the map,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and now a professor at George Washington University.

Shaw, who grew up in Chicago wanting to be a journalist and admiring legendary CBS newsmen Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, recognized it as a key moment.

“In all of the years of preparing to being anchor, one of the things I strove for was to be able to control my emotions in the midst of hell breaking out,” Shaw said in a 2014 interview with NPR. “And I personally feel that I passed my stringent test for that in Baghdad.”

Shaw covered the demonstrations in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, signing off as authorities told CNN to stop its telecast. While at ABC, he was one of the first reporters on the scene of the 1978 Jonestown massacre.

On Twitter, CNN’s John King paid tribute to Shaw’s “soft-spoken yet booming voice” and said he was a mentor and role model to many.

“Bernard Shaw exemplified excellence in his life,” Johnson said. “He will be remembered as a fierce advocate of responsible journalism.”

CNN’s current chief executive, Chris Licht, paid tribute to Shaw as a CNN original who made appearances on the network as recently as last year to provide commentary.

So guarded against any appearance of bias that he didn’t vote, Shaw asked tough questions of several politicians. He asked George H.W. Bush’s pick for vice president, Dan Quayle, if “fear of being killed in Vietnam” led to Quayle joining the National Guard in 1969.

As a member of the U.S. Marines, Shaw angled for a meeting with one of his heroes, Cronkite, in Hawaii in 1961.

“He was the most persistent guy I’ve ever met in my life,” the late Cronkite told the Washington Post in 1991. “I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist.”

He got a radio job in Chicago, where an early assignment was covering an appearance by Martin Luther King. Shaw recalled for CNN King telling him, “one day you’re going to make it. Just do some good.”

In retiring at a relatively young age, Shaw acknowledged the toll on his personal life that went with being a successful journalist. Because of all the things he missed with his family while working, he told NPR that “I don’t think it was worth it.”

His funeral will be private, with a public memorial planned for later, Johnson said. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and two children.

Source: Voice of America

Californians tried to weather the extremes of a changing climate Friday, as a punishing heat wave that has helped fuel deadly wildfires had the state teetering on the edge of blackouts for a 10th consecutive day while a tropical storm barreled ashore with the promise of cooler temperatures but also possible flooding.

The abrupt swing in conditions even whipsawed weather junkies.

“This is perhaps the singularly most unusual and extreme weather week in quite some time in California — and that is saying something. Whew,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote on his Western weather blog.

While the rains may be welcome in the drought-plagued state and will bring relief with more normal temperatures, deluges and more brutal heat waves are forecast to become regular fixtures as climate change warms the planet and weather-related disasters become more extreme.

“We’ll see these heat waves continue to get hotter and hotter, longer and longer, more wildfire-plagued,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. “The odds of really intense precipitation are going up. And so that’s why we are worried about flooding associated with this remnant hurricane.”

California is just the latest casualty in a year of sometimes deadly heat waves that began in Pakistan and India this spring and swept across parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including China, Europe and other areas of the U.S.

Climate change also has exacerbated droughts, dried up rivers, made wildfires more intense and — conversely — led to massive flooding around the globe as moisture evaporating from land and water is held in the atmosphere and then redeposited by intense rains.

Scientists are reluctant to attribute any specific weather event, such as Hurricane Kay, now downgraded to a tropical storm as it heads into California, to global warming. But they say heat waves are exactly the type of change that will become more common.

The so-called heat dome that cooked California was stuck in place by an exceptional high-pressure region over Greenland, of all places, that essentially created a meteorological traffic jam, said Paul Ullrich, a professor of regional climate modeling at the University of California, Davis. That prevented the high-pressure system that was forcing hot air over California from moving along.

A marquee outside a former theater in Los Angeles’ Chinatown said: “Satan called. He wants his weather back.”

Record high temperatures

Temperatures hit an all-time high in Sacramento of 46.7 Celsius on Tuesday. Many other locations hit record highs for September, and even more set daily high marks.

The heat that colored weather maps dark red for more than a week in California is only a preview of coming attractions.

Sacramento, the state capital, has about 10 “extreme heat” days per year, and that will double again by the middle of the century. In the 1970s, the city had five, Ullrich said.

“That’s pretty much going to be the story for much of the Central Valley and much of Southern California,” Ullrich said. “This kind of exponential growth in the number of extreme heat days. If you tie those all together, then you end up with heat waves like we’ve experienced.”

For nine days through Thursday, the vast energy network that includes power plants, solar farms and a web of transmission lines strained under record-setting demand driven by air conditioners.

“If we’re going to build a statue to anybody in the West, it will be a Willis Carrier,” said Bill Patzert, retired climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about the inventor of the air conditioner. “Really large areas of Southern California would essentially be unlivable without air conditioning.”

Threat of power outages

Air conditioning puts the biggest strain on power sources during a heat wave, and operators of the electrical grid called for conservation and warned of the threat of power outages as usage hit an all-time high Tuesday, surpassing a record set in 2006.

The state may have averted a repeat of the rolling outages two summers ago by sending a first-ever text alert that blared on 27 million phones, urging Californians to “take action” and turn off nonessential power. Enough turned up thermostats, turned off lights or pulled the plug on appliances to avoid power cuts, though thousands of customers did lose power at various times for other reasons.

The West is in the throes of a 23-year megadrought that has nearly drained reservoirs and put water supplies in jeopardy. That, in turn, led to a sharp decrease in the hydropower that California relies on when power is in peak demand.

“Part of the country that’s getting hit worst is the Southwest and western United States,” Overpeck said. “It is a global poster child for the climate crisis. And this year, this summer, it’s really the Northern Hemisphere [that] has been just an unusually hot and wildfire-plagued hemisphere.”

The extreme heat helped fuel deadly wildfires at both ends of the state as flames fed on grass, brush and timber already “preconditioned to burn” by drought and then pushed over the edge by the heat wave, Overpeck said.

Firefighters struggled to control major wildfires in Southern California and the Sierra Nevada that exploded in growth, forced thousands to evacuate, and produced smoke that could interfere with solar power and further hamper electricity supplies.

Two people were killed in the fire that erupted last Friday in the Northern California community of Weed at the base of Mount Shasta. Two others died trying to flee in their car from a fire in Riverside County that was threatening 18,000 homes.

What remains of the hurricane is expected to bring heavy rains and even flash floods to Southern California from Friday night through Saturday. Strong winds could initially make it difficult and dangerous for firefighters trying to corral blazes, Patzert said.

Heavy downpours could also unleash mudslides on mountainsides charred by recent fires. While several inches of rain could fall, much of it will run off the arid landscape and will not make a dent in the drought.

“It comes at you like a firehose, and you’re trying to fill your champagne glass,” Patzert said. “Everybody’s sort of excited, but on Saturday night, a lot of people will be saying, ‘Yeah, we could have done without that.'”

Source: Voice of America

Severe, long-lasting heatwaves and more frequent wildfires could lead to even worse air quality, an additional “climate penalty” for hundreds of millions of people, World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned on Wednesday.

According to WMO’s annual Air Quality and Climate Bulletin released on Wednesday, an anticipated rise in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves and an associated increase in wildfires this century are likely to worsen air quality, harming human health and ecosystems, Xinhua reported on 7 Sept.

“As the globe warms, wildfires and associated air pollution are expected to increase, even under a low emission scenario. In addition to human health impacts, this will also affect ecosystems as air pollutants settle from the atmosphere to Earth’s surface,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“We have seen this in the heatwaves in Europe and China this year when stable high atmospheric conditions, sunlight and low wind speeds were conducive to high pollution levels,” he added.

“This is a foretaste of the future because we expect a further increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves, which could lead to even worse air quality, a phenomenon known as the ‘climate penalty,'” he said.

The “climate penalty” refers specifically to the climate change amplification effect on ground-level ozone production, which negatively impacts the air that people breathe. The regions with the strongest projected climate penalty, mainly in Asia, are home to roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Climate change could exacerbate surface ozone pollution episodes, leading to detrimental health impacts for hundreds of millions of people.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the probability of catastrophic wildfire events is likely to increase by 40 to 60 percent by the end of this century under a high emission scenario, and by 30 to 50 percent under a low emission scenario.

If greenhouse gas emissions remain high and global temperatures rise by three degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels by the second half of the 21st century, surface ozone levels are expected to increase across heavily polluted areas, particularly in Asia.

While most of the ozone increase will be due to an increase in emissions from fossil fuel combustion, roughly a fifth of this increase will be due to climate change, most likely realized through increased heatwaves, which amplify air pollution episodes.

As a result, heatwaves — which are increasingly common due to climate change — are likely to continue leading to a degradation in air quality, IPCC said.

Source: Lao News Agency

The Traffic Police Department reported on Wednesday that there are 58 people were killed and 732 others injured in road accidents nationwide in August.

The report recorded 798 vehicles damaged in 438 road accidents.

Vientiane saw the highest number of road accidents, followed by Savannakhet and Champasak provinces.

The cost of the damage incurred was estimated at over 5.8 billion kip.

The major causes of road accidents in Laos are speeding, drunk driving, drivers’ suddenly changing direction, and general violation of traffic regulations, according to the report.

Source: Lao News Agency