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  • Over 120 million people in Eastern US are at risk for severe storms that could bring large hail and damaging winds | CNN

    Over 120 million people in Eastern US are at risk for severe storms that could bring large hail and damaging winds | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Over 120 million people in the Eastern US are at risk of severe thunderstorms Monday that can hit communities from Philadelphia to Atlanta with damaging wind gusts, large hail, heavy rain and a few tornadoes.

    A very active thunderstorm pattern is expected over the next few days across large swaths of the country to the east of the Mississippi River. After battering the Ohio River Valley Sunday, a storm system is moving east, increasing the risk for severe weather Monday.

    The worst of it will be in a zone stretching from northern Alabama to southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Raleigh. The area is under enhanced risk, level 3 out of 5, for severe storms, forecasters said.

    A slight risk for severe storms, a level 2 of 5, spreads from western Alabama to southern New York, including New York City, Virginia Beach, Pittsburgh, Wilmington, Savannah, Columbus, Charleston and Newark.

    Parts of the Northeast could also see heavy rainfall in association with these storms. A slight risk for excessive rainfall, or a level 2 of 4, has been issued for the Northeast. Scattered rainfall of 2-4 inches is possible Monday.

    “In the areas of thunderstorms, severe weather and flash flooding will be a threat,” the National Weather Service said.

    There were over 150 storm reports across the East on Sunday and over 130 Saturday, including 8 tornadoes, spread across Colorado, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

    There were another 92 reports of damaging wind and 37 reports of large hail, mainly across the central Plains and mid-Mississippi River Valley.

    While parts of the East brace for hail and heavy rain, cities from Arizona to Florida will continue to deal with dangerous heat this week.

    “Numerous record high temperatures and record high morning minimum temperatures are likely over the next few days with no end in sight going into the later part of this week,” the National Weather Service said.

    Excessive heat warnings and heat advisories in effect across the southern part of the country, from southeast California into Florida, will likely remain in effect “for the foreseeable future as there is no relief in sight to the heat for the remainder of the week across these areas,” the weather service said.

    About 65 records were set or tied on Saturday and Sunday so far across cities in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. At least 120 more could be set from Sunday through Tuesday.

    Austin, Texas, hit 105 degrees Sunday, marking the 30th consecutive day with a high temperature over 100 degrees.

    Albuquerque reached a high of 102 Saturday – breaking the prior record of 98 degrees set in 1995. This is also the hottest August day ever in the city.

    In New Orleans – where city officials warned that high humidity levels will result in temperatures that “feel like” 115 degrees or higher – cooling centers were open for residents in need of respite from the heat, officials said.

    “The forecasted excessive heat warning for Monday, Aug. 7 will mark the 17th excessive heat warning issued for 2023 so far, beating the previous record of five warnings in 2021,” New Orleans officials said in a news release.

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  • Using marijuana may affect your ability to think and plan, study says | CNN

    Using marijuana may affect your ability to think and plan, study says | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Remember those classic stoner dudes — Cheech and Chong, anyone? — spending their days in a weed-drenched room (or car), capable of little besides finding that next great high?

    If you don’t, that’s not surprising. As more and more states move to legalize marijuana, the stereotypical mind-numbing effects of weed have become passé, often replaced by an acceptance of the drug as an acceptable way to socialize, relax and get better sleep.

    But while society may have forgotten the impact that weed can have on the brain, science has not.

    Studies have long shown that getting high can harm cognitive function. A January 2022 review of research, published in the journal Addiction, finds that impact may last well beyond the initial high, especially for adolescents.

    “Our study enabled us to highlight several areas of cognition impaired by cannabis use, including problems concentrating and difficulties remembering and learning, which may have considerable impact on users’ daily lives,” said coauthor Dr. Alexandre Dumais, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal.

    “Cannabis use in youth may consequently lead to reduced educational attainment, and, in adults, to poor work performance and dangerous driving. These consequences may be worse in regular and heavy users,” Dumais said.

    Weed’s impact on the brain can be particularly detrimental to cognitive development for youth, whose brains are still developing, said Dr. Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, who was not involved in the study.

    “This study provides strong evidence for negative cognitive effects of cannabis use, and should be taken as critical evidence to prioritize prevention of cannabis use in youth,” Moreno said. “And contrary to the time of Cheech and Chong, we now know that the brain continues to develop through age 25.

    “Parents should be aware that adolescents using cannabis are at risk for damage to their most important organ, their brain.”

    The January 2022 review looked at studies on over 43,000 people and found a negative impact of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, the main psychoactive compound in cannabis, on the brain’s higher levels of thinking. Those executive functions include the ability to make decisions, remember important data, plan, organize and solve problems, as well as control emotions and behavior.

    Can you recover or reverse those deficits? Scientists aren’t sure.

    “Research has revealed that THC is a fat-soluble compound that may be stored in body fat and, thus, gradually released into the bloodstream for months,” Dumais said, adding that high-quality research is needed to establish the long-term impact of that exposure.

    Some studies say the negative effects on the brain may ease after weed is discontinued, but that may also depend on the amount, frequency and years of marijuana use. The age in which weed use began may also play a role, if it falls within the crucial developmental period of the youthful brain.

    “Thus far, the most consistent alterations produced by cannabis use, mostly its chronic use, during youth have been observed in the prefrontal cortex,” Dumais said. “Such alterations may potentially lead to a long-term disruption of cognitive and executive functions.”

    In addition, some studies have shown that “early and frequent cannabis use in adolescence predicts poor cognition in adulthood,” he added.

    While science sorts this out, “preventive and interventional measures to educate youths on cannabis use and discourage them from using the substance in a chronic manner should be considered … since youths remain particularly susceptible to the effects of cannabis,” Dumais said.

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  • US Customs and Border Protection sends resources to remote Arizona area after increase in migrant crossings | CNN

    US Customs and Border Protection sends resources to remote Arizona area after increase in migrant crossings | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    US border officials are increasing personnel and transportation resources at Ajo, Arizona, one of the most isolated and dangerous areas on the Southwest border, to deal with a recent increase in migrants and an ongoing heat wave.

    “Border Patrol has prioritized the quick transporting of noncitizens encountered in this desert environment, which is particularly dangerous during current weather conditions, to Border Patrol facilities where individuals can receive medical care, food and water,” a spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.

    An excessive heat warning is in effect for Ajo until Sunday evening. “Dangerously hot conditions” and high temperatures of 106 to 112 degrees are expected, according to the National Weather Service.

    The spike in migration at Ajo is driven by human smuggling organizations shifting the flow of migrants to some of the most dangerous terrain, including the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near Ajo, according to the Border Patrol.

    Currently, the average time in custody at the Ajo station is 15 hours, with some migrants spending a portion of those hours outside waiting to be transported, according to the Border Patrol. The agency said the fenced-in outdoor space is covered by a large canopy and migrants have access to large fans, meals, water, and bathroom facilities. The outdoor area is only used for adult men, while women, children, and members of vulnerable populations are held inside the station.

    “USBP has utilized outdoor shaded areas only when necessary and for very short times while they await onward transportation to larger facilities,” said the agency’s spokesperson. “The Ajo Border Patrol Station is not equipped to hold large number of migrants due to historic trends in this area.”

    After arriving at Ajo Station, migrants are screened and then transported to other locations for immigration processing, with the closest large Border Patrol facility or shelter 2.5 hours away, according to the Border Patrol.

    The agency would not disclose the Ajo facility’s capacity to CNN, citing security concerns.

    The Tucson Border Patrol sector encountered more than 24,000 migrants in June, making it the second-busiest sector on the southern border during the month, according to Border Patrol data.

    Border Patrol officials report no deaths have occurred at Ajo station or the surrounding areas since the beginning of the heat wave and since the increase in migrant encounters.

    Across the state, Arizonans have experienced extreme heat over the past weeks, with Phoenix recording 31 consecutive days with a high temperature of 110 degrees or above. The streak of high temperatures made July the hottest month on record for the city.

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  • International Space Station Fast Facts | CNN

    International Space Station Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the International Space Station (ISS), a spacecraft built by a partnership of 16 nations: United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

    Information on ISS crews and expeditions can be found here.

    The ISS includes three main modules connected by nodes: the US Laboratory Module Destiny, the European Research Laboratory Columbus, and the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo (Hope). Each was launched separately and connected in space by astronauts.

    Mass: 925,335 pounds (419,725 kilograms)

    Habitable Volume: 13,696 cubic feet (388 cubic meters)

    Solar Array Length: 239 feet (75 meters)

    The ISS orbits Earth 16 times a day.

    As of June 22, 2023, 266 spacewalks have been conducted for station assembly and maintenance.

    November 1998 – A Russian Proton rocket places the first piece, the Zarya module, in orbit.

    December 1998 – The space shuttle Endeavour crew, on the STS-88 mission, attaches the Unity module to Zarya initiating the first ISS assembly sequence.

    June 1999 – The space shuttle Discovery crew, on mission STS-96, supplies two modules with tools and cranes.

    July 2000 – Zvezda, the fifth flight, docks with the ISS to become the third major component of the station.

    November 2000 – The first permanent crew, Expedition One, arrives at the station.

    November/December 2000 – The space shuttle Endeavour crew, on mission STS-97, installs the first set of US solar arrays on the station and visits Expedition One.

    February 2001 – Mission STS-98 delivers the US Destiny Laboratory Module.

    March 2001 – STS-102 delivers Expedition Two to the station and brings Expedition One home. The crew also brings Leonardo, the first Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, to the station.

    September 16, 2001 – The Russian Docking Compartment, Pirs, arrives at the ISS.

    June 2002 – STS-111 delivers the Expedition Five crew and brings the Expedition Four crew home. The crew also brings the Mobile Base System to the orbital outpost.

    December 2002 – STS-113 delivers the Expedition Six crew and the P1 Truss.

    May 3, 2003 – Expedition Six crew return to Earth on Soyuz TMA-1. Crew members Kenneth Bowersox and Don Pettit are the first American astronauts ever to land in a Soyuz spacecraft.

    July 29, 2003 – Marks the 1,000th consecutive day of people living and working aboard the ISS (this is a record for the station, but not for space).

    August 10, 2003 – Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko marries his fiancée Ekaterina Dmitriev from space. The bride and groom exchange vows over a hotline set up for the event. Dmitriev stands next to a life-sized picture of Malenchenko.

    April 22, 2004 – The second of four gyroscopes that stabilize the orbiting outpost of the ISS fails. NASA officials say this does not pose an immediate threat to the crew. An extra spacewalk will have to be conducted to the fix the electrical component box thought to be at fault.

    November 2, 2005 – Fifth anniversary of continuous human presence in space on the ISS.

    February 3, 2006 – SuitSat-1, an unmanned space suit containing a radio transmitter is deployed as a part of an ISS spacewalk. The suit is supposed to transmit recorded messages in six languages to school children and amateur radio operators for several days before reentering Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, but it goes silent shortly after its deployment.

    March 31, 2006 – Arriving with the crew of Expedition Thirteen is Marcos Pontes, the first Brazilian astronaut. Staying eight days, Pontes conducts scientific experiments before returning to Earth with the crew of Expedition Twelve.

    July 7, 2006 – The arrival of Thomas Reiter of Germany via the Space Shuttle Discovery returns the station’s long-duration crew to three for the first time since May 2003 and the Columbia shuttle disaster. Reiter is the first non-US and non-Russian long-duration station crewmember, and he remains onboard during the first part of Expedition Fourteen.

    September 9, 2006 – Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the ISS, delivering the P3/P4 truss and its solar wings before undocking September 21 and returning to Earth.

    September 20, 2006 – Arriving with the crew of Expedition Fourteen is Anousheh Ansari, an American businesswoman. She spends about eight days conducting experiments and blogging about her experiences before returning to Earth with two of the three members of Expedition Thirteen.

    December 2006 – Arrival of Flight Engineer Sunita Williams via space shuttle mission STS-116. Williams replaces Reiter, who returns to Earth with the crew of STS-116.

    April 7, 2007 – Charles Simonyi becomes the fifth space tourist when he accompanies the Expedition Fifteen crew to the ISS. He spends 12 days aboard the space station before returning to Earth with the crew of Expedition Fourteen.

    June 10, 2007 – Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the the ISS to install a new segment and solar panel on the space station and retrieve astronaut Williams, who has been at the space station since December. Williams is replaced by Flight Engineer Clayton Anderson, who will return to earth aboard Discovery on Mission STS-120.

    June 15, 2007 – Four days after ISS’s computers crash, two Russian cosmonauts bring them back online. The computers control the station’s orientation as well as oxygen production. The crew used Atlantis’ thrusters to help maintain the station’s position while its computers were down.

    October 25, 2007 – Space Shuttle Discovery docks with the ISS. In the days while docked with the ISS, the Discovery crew delivers and connects Harmony to the ISS, a living and working compartment that will also serve as the docking port for Japanese and European Union laboratories. Discovery and ISS crew also move an ISS solar array to prepare for future ISS expansion, planning a special spacewalk to repair damage to the solar array that occurred during its unfurling.

    November 14, 2007 – ISS crew move the Harmony node from its temporary location on the Unity node to its permanent location attached to Destiny.

    February 9, 2008 – Space Shuttle Atlantis arrives. Its crew delivers the European-made Columbus laboratory, a 23-foot long module that will be home to a variety of science experiments. Atlantis remains docked with the ISS for just under nine days.

    March 9, 2008 – “Jules Verne,” the first of a series of European space vessels designed to deliver supplies to the ISS, launches from the Ariane Launch Complex in Kourou, French Guiana. The vessels, called Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV), are propelled into space atop an Ariane 5 rocket, and are designed to dock with the ISS with no human assistance. The Jules Verne will wait to dock with the ISS until after Space Shuttle Endeavour’s March mission is completed.

    March 12, 2008 – Space Shuttle Endeavour docks with the ISS.

    March 24, 2008 – Endeavour detaches from the ISS. While docked, crew members make five spacewalks to deliver and assemble the Dextre Robotics System, deliver and attach the Kibo logistics module, attach science experiments to the exterior of the ISS, and perform other inspection and maintenance tasks.

    April 3, 2008 – The unmanned European cargo ship Jules Verne successfully docks with the ISS. Able to carry more than three times the volume of the Russian-built Progress resupply vehicles, the Jules Verne contains fuel, water, oxygen and other supplies.

    April 10, 2008 – Two members of Expedition 17 crew arrive at the ISS via a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Travelling with them is Yi So-yeon, a space flight participant and South Korea’s first astronaut. Yi later returns to Earth aboard an older Soyuz spacecraft along with members of the Expedition 16 crew.

    June 2, 2008 – Space Shuttle Discovery docks with the ISS. Discovery is carrying Japan’s Kibo lab, a replacement pump for the station’s toilet, and astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who is replacing Garrett Reisman as part of the station’s crew.

    June 11, 2008 – Discovery undocks with the ISS after its crew successfully delivers and installs the Japanese-built Kibo lab, delivers parts to repair the ISS’s malfunctioning toilet, collects debris samples from the station’s faulty solar power wing, and retrieves an inspection boom left behind during a previous shuttle mission. Station crewmember Reisman departs with Discovery.

    October 12, 2008 – The Soyuz TMA-13 capsule carrying two Americans – flight commander Michael Fincke and computer game millionaire Richard Garriott, and Russian flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov – lifts off from Kazakhstan. It docks with the ISS on October 14.

    March 12, 2009 – Orbital debris from a prior space shuttle mission forces the crew of Expedition 18 to temporarily retreat to its Soyuz capsule.

    August 24, 2011 – Russian emergency officials report that an unmanned Russian cargo craft, the Progress-M12M that was to deliver 3.85 tons of food and supplies to the ISS, crashed in a remote area of Siberia.

    May 19, 2012 – SpaceX’s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, the first private spacecraft bound for the ISS, is aborted a half a second before liftoff. SpaceX engineers trace the problem to a faulty rocket engine valve.

    May 22, 2012 – The unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket carries the Dragon spacecraft, which is filled with food, supplies and science experiments and bound for the ISS.

    May 25, 2012 – The unmanned SpaceX Dragon spacecraft connects to the International Space Station, the first private spacecraft to successfully reach an orbiting space station.

    October 7, 2012 – SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, with its Dragon capsule carrying 1,000 pounds of supplies bound for the ISS, launches from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It is the first of a dozen NASA-contracted flights to resupply the International Space Station, at a total cost of $1.6 billion.

    May 9, 2013 – The crew discovers that the ISS is leaking ammonia. The crew performs a spacewalk and corrects the leak two days later.

    November 9, 2013 – Russian cosmonauts perform the first ever spacewalk of the Olympic Torch ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

    December 11, 2013 – A pump on one of the station’s two external cooling loops shuts down after hitting a temperature limit, according to NASA. The malfunctioning loop had been producing too much ammonia, possibly the result of a malfunctioning valve.

    December 24, 2013 – Astronauts complete a repair job to replace the problematic pump. Their spacewalk lasts seven and a half hours, and is the second ever spacewalk on Christmas Eve. The first was in 1999 for a Hubble Repair Mission.

    March 10, 2014 – After five and a half months aboard the ISS, Expedition 38 astronauts return to earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-10M spacecraft.

    September 16, 2014 – NASA announces that Boeing and Space X have been awarded contracts to build vehicles that will shuttle astronauts to and from the space station.

    December 15, 2015 – Astronaut Tim Peake is the first British European Space Agency astronaut to arrive at the ISS.

    March 2, 2016 – NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko land in the Kazakhstan desert after a nearly yearlong mission on the ISS.

    August 3, 2018 – NASA selects nine astronauts, seven men and two women, for missions in spacecraft developed by Boeing and SpaceX. The flights, scheduled for 2019, will be the first launches to space from US soil since the Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011, and the first in capsules developed and built by the private sector.

    June 2019 – NASA announces the ISS is opening for commercial use. The newest NASA directive is intended to allow “commercial manufacturing and production and allow both NASA and private astronauts to conduct new commercial activities aboard the orbiting laboratory.”

    October 18, 2019 – NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch conduct the first all-female spacewalk outside of the ISS. The spacewalk last seven hours and 17 minutes.

    May 30, 2020 – SpaceX and NASA’s Falcon 9, bound for the ISS, launches. This is the first crewed spaceflight to launch from US soil since 2011. The astronauts spend two months working on the ISS, then return to Earth on August 2.

    November 16, 2020 – The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts on board safely docks with the ISS. The spacecraft launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on November 15 and marks the first fully operational crewed mission for SpaceX.

    April 21, 2021 – Russia announces that it is ready to start building its own space station with the aim of launching it into orbit by 2030, according to Interfax news agency. The project will mark a new chapter for Russian space exploration. Russia, which signed a memorandum of understanding in March to explore establishing a joint lunar base with China, will notify its ISS partners regarding its departure from ISS at a future date.

    June 16, 2021 – NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet conduct a spacewalk to install solar arrays on the space station. After technical delays, the work is completed four days later. The arrays are rolled up like carpet and are 750 pounds (340 kilograms) and 10 feet (three meters) wide. They will provide a power boost to the space station.

    January 31, 2022 – NASA reveals it intends to keep operating the ISS until the end of 2030, after which the ISS will be crashed into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo.

    April 9, 2022 – The first crew entirely comprised of private citizens reaches the ISS.

    July 26, 2022 – Russia announces it is planning to pull out of the ISS after 2024, ending its decades-long partnership with NASA at the orbiting outpost.

    October 6, 2022 – A SpaceX capsule carrying a multinational crew of astronauts docks with the ISS after a 29-hour trek. The mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12 p.m. ET on October 5. The four crew members included astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada of NASA, astronaut Koichi Wakata of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of Roscosmos, the first Russian to travel on a SpaceX spaceflight.

    October 24, 2022 – According to NASA, the ISS fires its thrusters to maneuver out of the way of a piece of oncoming Russian space junk.

    December 22, 2022 – Two NASA astronauts carry out a spacewalk to install a new solar panel on the ISS. The spacewalk lasts about seven hours.

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  • Apple just killed the iPhone Lightning connector. What to do with your old chargers | CNN Business

    Apple just killed the iPhone Lightning connector. What to do with your old chargers | CNN Business

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free, here.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    At long last, Apple is killing its proprietary Lightning port in the iPhone 15 and embracing a charging cable that’s compatible with non-Apple products. That’s one less extra cord cluttering your nightstand. One less thing to forget when packing for a weekend getaway.

    But the move, hastened by a European regulatory mandate passed last year, is a largely symbolic measure that comes years after most other gadgets switched to USB-C. And it won’t do much to shrink the mountains of e-waste piling up around the globe.

    “I would classify the EU law and Apple as an evolution, not a revolution,” says Marian Chertow, a professor of industrial environmental management at the Yale School of the Environment.

    When the European Commission passed the directive last year,  it cited two motivations: First, everyone agrees that it’s super annoying to have so many cables lying around. Second, having a common charger across devices — whether they’re made by Apple or Samsung or Garmin or whoever — would “significantly reduce electronic waste.”

    Apple initially pushed back, of course, partly because selling extra Lightning cables made it lots of money. But it also said the waste argument was misguided, and that the promise of wireless charging would make the cable issue moot. (Still, the company ultimately said it would comply with the common cable rules.)

    Retiring the Lightning cable could even generate, in the short term, a surge of e-waste as iPhone users toss their useless Lightning cables in a drawer. (Which, to be clear, isn’t recommended. Apple says it has a “robust” recycling program where you can bring in used chargers and cables. You can also look for a local e-waste recycling center or Best Buy store for environmentally friendly options.)

    Big-picture, though, the impact on the mountains of global e-waste will likely be minimal.

    There are about 66 million tons of electronic waste generated each year, says Ruediger Kuehr, head of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in Bonn, Germany. Charging cables, he said account for “a few hundred thousand tons.”

    “When we look to the pure numbers, it’s close to nothing,” Kuehr said. “But we nevertheless think it’s a very important step in order to make people … aware of the issue we are facing.”

    E-waste is a growing problem that has yet to enter the mainstream consciousness. Most of it ends up where it shouldn’t — in our closets and junk drawers — which means more materials such as copper, gold and platinum have to be mined to produce new products.

    “You can make money out of it, but you have to really do a lot of steps,” Kuehr says. “This is not understandable for the consumer in comparison to all the other waste streams.”

    Nearly 80% of all e-waste generated around the globe is not properly treated, he said.

    Whether the EU rule actually reduces waste is beside the point if it can push Apple and other manufacturers to help close the loop by making it easier to refurbish and recycle old products.

    And to Apple’s credit, the company has been “a leader in scraping off rare earth metals from its reuse pile to recover these expensive materials,” Chertow says, noting that last year Apple said it was reusing more than two-thirds of the aluminum it needed. “These days, waste experts find that “reuse” is most often a better path than recycling as more can be recovered.”

    —CNN’s Samantha Murphy Kelly contributed to this article.

    Enjoying Nightcap? Sign up and you’ll get all of this, plus some other funny stuff we liked on the internet, in your inbox every night. (OK, most nights — we believe in a four-day work week around here.)

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  • DeSantis faces new leadership test as Hurricane Idalia barrels toward Florida | CNN Politics

    DeSantis faces new leadership test as Hurricane Idalia barrels toward Florida | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    With the eyes of the country on Hurricane Idalia as it spins toward Florida’s Gulf Coast, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential ambitions are also under the spotlight as he puts his campaign on hold to manage the crisis at home.

    DeSantis flew back to Tallahassee from Iowa on Saturday night and has since appeared regularly on Florida televisions with updates on Idalia’s path and state efforts to prepare for the approaching storm. From behind a lectern with the state seal, the Republican governor has matter-of-factly shared logistics and warnings.

    The coming days will present a range of tests for DeSantis to navigate during a critical juncture in his governorship and White House bid. His stewardship of the hurricane response and recovery efforts will be closely scrutinized by his political opponents and Republican voters, watching whether he can lead through difficult moments, comfort the aggrieved and learn from the lessons of past storms.

    It is not clear when DeSantis will return to the campaign trail. In a text message to supporters, his campaign said it would go dark for a few days, adding: “Before we sign off, can we ask you to chip in any amount you can to support our end-of-month fundraising push?”

    For his part, DeSantis said he will be in Florida for as long as necessary.

    “You do what you need to do,” DeSantis said Tuesday. “So that’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be no different than what we did during Hurricane Ian [last year]. I’m hoping that this storm is not as catastrophic as Hurricane Ian was, but we’re gonna do what we need to do because it’s just something that’s important.”

    While no Florida executive would publicly suggest a hurricane is an opportunity to showcase leadership chops, past storms have certainly tested governors and forged their legacies. DeSantis’ predecessor, Republican Rick Scott, dealt with Hurricane Michael just weeks before the 2018 election, when he was running for US Senate against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. Scott leaned into managing the crisis with gusto and ultimately won his race in a recount.

    Perhaps no one did more to solidify their standing among Floridians during such disasters as former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush, whose handling of eight hurricanes during a deadly two-year stretch of tropical weather is still remembered by those who experienced the devastation. One of those hurricanes, Katrina, forever altered perceptions of the presidency of Bush’s older brother, George W. Bush, showcasing how storms can also plunge an executive into crisis.

    Those past Florida governors, though, were not running for president. Rarely have incumbent state executives faced a disaster of Idalia’s potential magnitude in the throes of a White House bid.

    The most notable recent exception is Republican Chris Christie, who as New Jersey governor in 2016 returned to his home state to manage a blizzard amid criticism for putting the presidential race ahead of his elected duties. At the time, Christie was campaigning in New Hampshire, which was just weeks away from holding the first-in-the-nation primary. Christie is once again running for the GOP nomination.

    “I don’t think any presidential candidate wants to be taken off the campaign trail. But you can’t ignore your day job,” said Alex Conant, a senior adviser to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Insufficient responses to storms have ended political careers. Every governor takes the threat of a hurricane seriously because if the response is mishandled, not only are lives at stake, but there’s political fallout.”

    In the past 24 hours, DeSantis’ team has signaled it would not shy away from showcasing the governor’s storm response to Republican voters. His aides have shared posts on social media of people praising DeSantis’ activity so far, with his office press secretary writing on X, “Find you a leader that shows up like @GovRonDeSantis.” In a memo sent Tuesday, DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo wrote that DeSantis is “now at the helm of Florida’s hurricane response and is working with local officials across the state to do everything necessary to ensure Florida is fully prepared.”

    “This is the strong leadership in times of crisis that Americans can expect from a President DeSantis,” Romeo added.

    Just as he did last year, when Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida amid his race for reelection, DeSantis has vowed to put partisan politics aside for the time being. Though a regular critic of President Joe Biden – including over the Democrat’s response to the Maui wildfires – DeSantis said he has spoken with the president and expects the two administrations to work in concert toward Florida’s recovery.

    “There’s time and a place to have political season, but then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life-threatening. This is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, it could cost them their livelihood, and we have responsibility as Americans to come together,” DeSantis said Monday.

    (Coming off the devastation in Hawaii, Biden is facing a separate range of questions about his administration’s response to yet another natural catastrophe.)

    DeSantis’ departure from the campaign trail comes just days after the first GOP presidential debate at a moment when his team believes voters are starting to tune into the race. He is trailing Donald Trump in GOP primary polling but is aggressively challenging the former president in early nominating states.

    The Florida governor is also staving off a field of GOP contenders, who must now also balance sensitivities around Hurricane Idalia with their attempts to overcome DeSantis in the polls.

    “DeSantis is going to get a breather in terms of attacks,” said Todd Belt, director of the political management program at George Washington University and author of “The Post-Heroic Presidency.”

    “This is similar to what we see in the rally-around-the-flag phenomena,” Belt said. “When there’s something that affects the country more generally, the other party ceases attacks on the incumbent party. It helps in the polls, at least temporarily. It would look really bad for other Republicans to criticize DeSantis during this time, and the question is how long will they wait? It’s worth noting that Florida is an extremely important electoral state.”

    Storm response has already become part of DeSantis’ pitch to voters. On the campaign trail, he has often shared the story of the swift reopening of two bridges destroyed by Hurricane Ian as evidence of his executive management. DeSantis has also asserted that he could send his “Florida people” to the southern border to build a wall.

    “Come on, Joe (Biden),” he said earlier this year. “Let us get it done. We’ll do it.”

    But Ian also generated some negative attention for DeSantis. Images of the governor wearing white rain boots and campaign gear as he surveyed storm-ravaged regions provided fodder for his political detractors and were spread widely on social media by Democrats and Trump supporters.

    DeSantis was also forced to defend the late local evacuation orders last year that left many coastal residents in Lee County unprepared for Ian’s deadly turn, despite the persistent threat of cataclysmic storm surge.

    Though DeSantis said this week that the state has not changed its evacuation protocols, he and state officials have emphasized that Idalia could bring dangerous storm surge all along Florida’s west coast, even outside the projected path of the storm. This year, he has spent time warning residents who are outside the forecasted “cone” – or the probable track of the center of the storm.

    Idalia is forecast to make landfall near Florida’s Big Bend area as a Category 3 hurricane or stronger, potentially bringing record storm surge to a part of the state’s west coast that has not experienced a storm of this magnitude in more than 150 years.

    While the storm is perhaps an opportunity for DeSantis to show strength in mobilizing his administration to respond to a storm, the expected devastation also has the potential to challenge DeSantis’ limitations as a consoler in chief, a role Biden has embraced during national tragedies.

    DeSantis’ capacity for compassion has already come under fire this week following his rushed response to Saturday’s killing of three Black people by a White gunman in Jacksonville. His office on Saturday shared a video statement from DeSantis that seemed hastily shot in front of white vinyl siding in Iowa, during which he called the racially targeted attack “totally unacceptable.” The next day he attended a vigil for the victims where he called the shooter a “major league scumbag.”

    The tone of his remarks and his appearance at the vigil drew criticism from those who wanted DeSantis to acknowledge efforts by his administration to alter how Florida students learn about race and the lived experience of Black Americans.

    “A white man in his early twenties specifically went to kill BLACK PEOPLE,” Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon, who represents Jacksonville and was photographed next to DeSantis at the vigil wearing a “Stand with Black Women” shirt, posted on X. “The governor of our state of Florida has created an environment ripe for this.”

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  • 6 takeaways from Apple’s iPhone 15 event | CNN Business

    6 takeaways from Apple’s iPhone 15 event | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Apple unveiled its iPhone 15 lineup along with other major updates during its September keynote event on Tuesday.

    The company announced it will switch to USB-C charging from its proprietary Lightning charging cable with the iPhone 15, marking a milestone for the company by adopting universal charging. The change aims to ultimately streamline the charging process across various devices — and brands.

    The company also showed off its Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches, with new colors and features including gesture control, and a new iteration of its AirPods Pro wireless earbuds, also with USB-C charging.

    The iPhone charger update, along with changes to its design and camera system, comes as Apple looks to give consumers more reasons to upgrade their iPhones. Last month, Apple’s sales fell for the third consecutive quarter. iPhone revenue came in at $39.7 billion for the quarter, marking an approximately 2% year-over-year decline, as people update their devices less often.

    Apple on Tuesday said it will not raise prices for the iPhone 15 lineup, which could further incentivize users to upgrade.

    Here are the main takeaways from Apple’s Tuesday event:

    The latest iPhones are packed with subtle but significant design changes. To start, the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max now feature a titanium casing, allowing the design to be slimmer and thinner than before.

    Other design changes on the premium models include a more-advanced 48 megapixel main camera with a larger sensor and a new telephoto lens for 5x optical zoom camera, exclusively on iPhone 15 Pro Max. The new Pro models’ design also features contoured edges and a customizable Action button, which gives the ring/silence button additional controls, from starting a voice memo to writing a note.

    Meanwhile, the basic iPhone 15 phones now include updated image stabilization for taking photos and videos, 2x optimization and updated portraits with richer color and better low-light performance. They will also come with the “Dynamic Island” tool – home to alerts, notifications and other controls, in place of the notch – which were previously only available on the iPhone 14 Pro.

    The iPhone 15 lineup also includes an Ultra-Wideband chip to power a handful of new features, including one that makes it easier to find friends who share their location in crowded areas.

    The iPhone 15 comes in 5 colors (white, black, pink, green and yellow) and in two sizes: A 6.1-inch screen for the iPhone 15 and 6.7 inches for iPhone 15 Pro.

    The iPhone 15 will start at $799, and iPhone 15 Pro will start at $999. The iPhone 15 models will be available for pre-order on Friday and for sale in stores on Friday, September 22.

    Perhaps the biggest change coming to the iPhone 15 models is that they will now use a USB-C charging cord, ending an 11-year run with Apple’s proprietary Lightning charging cable.

    Now Apple customers can use the same USB-C chargers to power their iPhones, iPads and Mac computers — no more scrambling to find the right charger for each device. Apple said a dedicated USB-C controller will allow for transfer speeds of up to 20 times faster than with USB-2 technology for the iPhone 15 Pro.

    The new iPhone 15 models will now use a USB-C charging cord, ending an 11-year run with Apple's proprietary lightning charging cable.

    The switch would come less than a year after the European Union voted to approve legislation to require smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, portable speakers and other small devices to support USB-C charging by 2024. The first-of-its-kind law aims to pare down the number of chargers and cables consumers must contend with when they purchase a new device, and to allow users to mix and match devices and chargers even if they were produced by different manufacturers.

    Apple will also sell a $29 USB-C Lightning adapter to let people connect their existing Lightning accessories to a USB-C-enabled iPhone or iPad to charge or share data.

    The company told CNN that iPhone users can recycle their old Lightning chargers via its in-store recycling program.

    Apple Watches are displayed during an announcement of new products on the Apple campus Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023, in Cupertino, Calif.

    Apple kicked off Tuesday’s event by announcing the new Apple Watch Series 9, which features Apple’s in-house silicon chip and ultrawideband connectivity. The updated Apple Watch will let users log health data with their voice, use “name drop” to share contact information by touching another Apple Watch and raise their wrist to automatically brighten the display. The Series 9 will come in colors such as pink, navy, red, gold, silver and graphite.

    Apple also showed off the second iteration of its rugged Ultra smartwatch line, featuring the updated S9 custom chip and a new UWB chip. It also features more information on the display for more intensive tracking.

    The Apple Watch Series 9 will start at $399 and the Ultra is priced at $799. Customers can place orders today and they will be available on September 22.

    Apple on Tuesday announced the new Watch Series 9, with new gesture controls and improved connectivity.

    Apple is introducing an innovative and unique way to control its new lineup of smartwatches. The Watch Series 9 and high-end Ultra 2 watch will include a new gesture control called Double Tap, allowing allow users to tap their index finger and thumb together twice, to answer or end phone calls, play and pause music, or snooze alarms. The hand gesture can also scroll through widgets, much like turning the digital crown.

    The company said Double Tap is enabled by an enhanced neural engine that processes data from sensors and machine learning, and by monitoring the change in blood flow when two fingers are tapped together. It is available starting next month.

    A similar hand tap will be used to control the Vision Pro mixed reality headset when it launches next year.

    Apple’s next-generation software for the iPhone will be available to download starting on Monday, September 18. In June, the company showed off a slew of new tools coming to iOS 17, such as a more accurate autocorrect, a new feature called Live Voicemail that will transcribe a caller’s message in real time, and a NameDrop tool that lets users share their contact information by holding two iPhones close together. The iPhone’s phone app will also reposition the hang up button to the bottom right of the screen, next to other functions.

    The update will also bring adaptive audio to the AirPods Pro, which will adjust the noise cancellation and volume based on a user’s surroundings, and introduce conversation mode, which customizes the sound of what you’re listening to and softens when you start speaking to someone nearby.

    The iPhone 15 Pro is displayed after its introduction on the Apple campus, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023, in Cupertino, Calif.

    Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of environment, policy and social initiatives, said that the company’s Watch Series 9 will be Apple’s “first-ever carbon-neutral product,” thanks to efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and to offset emissions with carbon buybacks. She said this has been certified by an independent third-party.

    Doubling down on sustainability initiatives, Jackson also said the tech giant will no longer use leather in any new Apple product, including watch bands.

    Instead of leather, Apple said it will begin using a new textile that it is calling “fine woven.”

    Fine woven will be made of 68% post-consumer recycled content, giving it a significantly lower carbon footprint than leather, Apple said.

    “Beyond expected improved performance and incremental innovation embedded into Apple’s new products, it is great to see Apple communicate on sustainability as a new competitive advantage — especially with Apple’s first carbon neutral products,” Forrester Principal Analyst Thomas Husson said in emailed commentary following the event.

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  • Microsoft completes blockbuster Activision Blizzard takeover after UK removes final hurdle | CNN Business

    Microsoft completes blockbuster Activision Blizzard takeover after UK removes final hurdle | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft has completed its takeover of Activision Blizzard, the maker of “Call of Duty” and other hit video games, closing one of the biggest tech deals of all time.

    The company said in a filing Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that Activision (ATVI) had now become a wholly-owned subsidiary.

    Earlier on Friday, UK antitrust officials approved the planned acquisition, removing the final regulatory hurdle to the deal closing.

    The Competition and Markets Authority said the merger had been cleared after the companies agreed to give up certain cloud gaming rights. The concession is “a game-changer” that will allow “competitive prices and better services,” the CMA said in a statement.

    Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled the deal in early 2022, but it was blocked in April by the UK competition regulator.

    The CMA was the only regulator worldwide standing in the way of the landmark acquisition, which was valued at $69 billion when it was first announced.

    The UK regulator had concerns about competition in the cloud gaming market, saying Microsoft could seek to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own platforms, and then increase the cost of user subscriptions, leaving gamers with less choice.

    In August, Microsoft and Activision addressed those concerns by revising the deal.

    They proposed a restructured merger, which would allow Activision’s cloud streaming rights outside the European Union and three other European countries to be sold to a rival, Ubisoft Entertainment.

    That appeased the CMA, which signaled last month that it would most likely approve the reworked takeover.

    “The new deal will stop Microsoft from locking up competition in cloud gaming,” the agency said Friday.

    “It will also help to ensure that cloud gaming providers will be able to use non-Windows operating systems for Activision content, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.”

    Activision Blizzard is one of the world’s biggest video game developers. Alongside “Call of Duty,” it also produces “World of Warcraft” and “Overwatch.”

    Microsoft, which sells the Xbox gaming console, offers a popular video game subscription service called Xbox Game Pass, as well as a cloud-based video game streaming service.

    The acquisition is expected to help Microsoft boost its standing in the gaming industry and better compete with market leaders Tencent and Sony.

    In a statement on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Microsoft President Brad Smith said “we’re grateful for the CMA’s thorough review and decision.”

    — Olesya Dmitracova contributed to this article.

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  • Medical imaging struggles to read dark skin. Researchers say they’ve found a way to make it easier | CNN Business

    Medical imaging struggles to read dark skin. Researchers say they’ve found a way to make it easier | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Traditional medical imaging – used to diagnose, monitor or treat certain medical conditions – has long struggled to get clear pictures of patients with dark skin, according to experts.

    Researchers say they have found a way to improve medical imaging, a process through which physicians can observe the inside of the body, regardless of skin tone.

    The new findings were published in the October edition of the journal Photoacoustics. The team tested the forearms of 18 volunteers, with skin tones ranging from light to dark. They found that a distortion of the photoacoustic signal that makes the imaging more difficult to read, called clutter, increased with darkness of skin.

    “When you have darker skin, you have more melanin. And melanin is actually one of the optical absorbers that we inherently have within our body,” Muyinatu Bell, an author of the study and director and founder of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonics Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab at JHU, told CNN. In other words, the amount of melanin content in the skin could be associated with more clutter.

    “The skin essentially acts as a transmitter of sound, but it’s not the same type of focused sound that we get and we want with ultrasound, it’s everywhere diffused and creates a lot of confusion,” Bell said. “And so, this scattering of the sound that’s caused by the melanin absorption is worse and worse with the higher melanin concentration.”

    The study – a collaboration with researchers in Brazil who had previously used one of Bell’s algorithms – found that signal-to-noise ratio, a scientific measure that compares signal with background noise, improved for all skin tones when the researchers used a technique called “short-lag spatial coherence beamforming” while performing medical imaging. That technique, originally used for ultrasounds, can be applied to photoacoustic imaging.

    The technique involves a combination of light and ultrasound technology, forming a new medical imaging modality, Theo Pavan, an author of the study and associate professor with the department of physics at University of São Paulo in Brazil, told CNN.

    “We really verified that it was much less sensitive to the skin color in terms of the quality of the image that you can get compared to the conventional methods that … is more commonly used by the community,” Pavan said.

    The study is “the first to objectively assess skin tone and to both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that skin” photoacoustic signal “and clutter artifacts increase with epidermal melanin content,” the researchers wrote.

    The applications of photoacoustic technology vary, but with the researchers’ new developments, it may help diagnose health issues more accurately and equitably.

    “Right now, it’s increasing the application of the breast imaging,” and the next step would be to “increase the image quality overall,” said Guilherme Fernandes, an author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in physics applied to medicine and biology at USP.

    The researchers’ work could also mean advancements for equity in health care at large.

    “In our scientific technology, there is a bias in terms of developing these products, for things that work well in lighter-skinned people,” said Dr. Camara Jones, a family physician, epidemiologist and former president of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the new study.

    “The biggest problem is that we use a thing we call race, as a risk factor — as a health risk factor. And so race is the social and interpretation of how people look in a race-conscious society. Race is not biology,” Jones explained. “We’ve mapped the human genome. We know there’s no basis in the human genome for racial sub-speciation.”

    This study isn’t the first to find skin color biases in medical technology. Medical equipment that leverages infrared sensing has also been found to not work as well on darker skin, since skin tone can interfere with the reflection of light.

    Many devices that were in frequent use during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as pulse oximeters and forehead thermometers, involve emitting and capturing light to make a measurement. But if that device isn’t calibrated for darker skin, the pigmentation could affect how the light is absorbed and how the infrared technology works.

    Bell said her research can hopefully pave a way to eliminating discrimination in health care and inspire others to develop technology that helps everyone, regardless of their skin tone.

    “I believe that with the ability to show that we can devise and develop technology — that doesn’t just work for one small subset of the population but works for a wider range of the population. This is very inspiring for not only my group, but for groups around the world to start thinking in this direction when designing technology. Does it serve the wider population?” Bell said.

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  • Maui conspiracy theories are spreading on social media. Why this always happens after a disaster | CNN Business

    Maui conspiracy theories are spreading on social media. Why this always happens after a disaster | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    A slew of viral conspiracy videos on social media have made baseless claims that the Maui wildfires were started intentionally as part of a land grab, highlighting how quickly misinformation spreads after a disaster.

    While the cause of the fires hasn’t been determined, Hawaiian Electric — the major power company on Maui — is under scrutiny for not shutting down power lines when high winds created dangerous fire conditions. (Hawaiian Electric previously said both the company and the state are conducting investigations into what happened). Maui experienced high winds from Hurricane Dora in the south while it was also grappling with a drought. Wildfires across the region have long been a concern.

    Still, conspiracy theories continue to circulate as nearly 400 people are still unaccounted for.

    It’s not uncommon for conspiracy theories to make the rounds after a national crisis. According to Renee DiResta, a research manager at Stanford University who studies misinformation, people often look for a way to make sense of the world when they are anxious or have a feeling of powerlessness.

    “Theories that attribute the cause of a crisis to a specific bad actor offer a villain to blame, someone to potentially hold responsible,” DiResta said. “The conspiracy theories that are the most effective and plausible are usually based on some grain of truth and connect to some existing set of beliefs about the world.”

    For example, someone who distrusts the government may be more inclined to believe someone who posts negatively about a government agency.

    Conspiracy theorists on varying platforms claim the fires, which killed at least 114 people earlier this month, were planned as part of a strategic effort to weed out less wealthy residents on Maui and make room for multi-million dollar developments.

    In one video, a user claims a friend sent him a video of a laser beam “coming out of the sky, directly targeting the city.” “This was a direct energy weapon assault,” he said. The video remains posted but now includes a label from Instagram listing it as “false information.” The imagery appears to be from a previous SpaceX launch in California.

    Related far-fetched theories say the alleged “laser beams” were programmed not to hit anything blue, explaining why so many blue beach umbrellas were left unscathed by the fires.

    Other social media users allege elite Maui residents were behind the fires so they could buy the destroyed land at a discounted price and rebuild potentially a “smart city.”

    “You’re telling me that these cheaper lower middle class houses burnt down directly across the street and all of the mansions are still standing?” one YouTube user posted, referencing aerial imagery taken of the destruction.

    One tweet about a celebrity purchasing hundreds of acres across Maui over the past few years has received more than 12 million views on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

    When a conspiracy theory gains traction online, others may chime in and offer explanations for details not discussed in the original post. Social media algorithms can amplify these theories based on user attention and interactions.

    “Social media is incredibly valuable in crisis events as people on the ground can report the facts directly, but that usefulness is tempered, and can be dangerous, if misleading claims proliferate particularly in the immediate aftermath,” DiResta said.

    Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube have taken steps to curb the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation, but some videos can slip through the cracks. Many platforms use a mix of tech monitoring tools and human reviewers to enforce their community guidelines.

    Ahead of the publishing of this article, TikTok removed several conspiracy theory videos sent by CNN that were in violation of its community guidelines, which it characterizes as “inaccurate, misleading, or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society, regardless of intent” on the platform. A company spokesperson said more than 40,000 trust and safety professionals around the world review and moderate content at all hours of the day.

    Meanwhile, in a statement provided to CNN, YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez said the platform uses different sections, such as top news, developing news and a fact-check panel, to provide users with as much context and background information as possible on certain trending topics, and will remove content when necessary.

    “During major news events, such as the horrific fires in Hawaii, our systems are designed to raise up content from authoritative sources in search results and recommendations,” Hernandez said.

    Instagram also employs third-party fact-checkers to contact sources, check public data and work to verify images and videos on questionable content. They then rate and provide labels to the content in question, such as “false,” “altered” or “missing context,” to encourage viewers to think critically about what they’re about to see.

    As a result, those posts show up far less often in users’ feeds and repeat offenders can face varying risks, such as losing monetization on their pages.

    Social media platform X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Michael Inouye, a principal analyst at market research firm ABI Research, said social media companies are in a challenging spot because they want to uphold freedom of speech, but do so in an environment where posts that receive the most shares and likes often rise to the top of user feeds. That means posts sharing conspiracy theories that spark fear and emotion may perform better in a crisis than those sharing straightforward, accurate information.

    “Ultimately, social media will have to decide if it wants to be a better news organization or remain this ‘open’ platform for expression that can run counter to the ethics and standards that is required by news reporting,” Inouye said. “The problem is, even if something isn’t labeled as ‘news,’ some will still interpret personal opinion as truth, which puts us back in the same position.”

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  • John King is going all over the map in 2024. What he’s learned so far | CNN Politics

    John King is going all over the map in 2024. What he’s learned so far | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    You’re more likely to read about people in the aggregate in this newsletter – how groups are affected by something the government is doing and how polls suggest those groups feel about it.

    CNN’s John King is looking at the 2024 presidential race from the other side in his new “All Over the Map” project. Building relationships with individuals in key states, he plans to chart how their opinions shift over the course of the campaign.

    He’s filed reports from Iowa and New Hampshire so far:

    I talked to King to hear what he’s learned so far. Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below.

    WOLF: What are you finding when you talk to people out in the country?

    KING: This is how I started covering politics 106 million years ago. It’s just at this moment in the country where you have this weird combination of polarization and disaffection and a lot of people who are in the middle who would be moderate Republicans or true independents or centrist Democrats are just disgusted and they’re sitting out.

    The people who are sitting out are empowering the extremes, and they know it, but they just can’t stomach national politics. So they vote for mayor and they vote for governor and sometimes they vote for Senate and Congress, but even that pisses them off. So it’s just a weird time.

    WOLF: What I really like in these reports is the nuance of people’s opinions. They don’t fit into the buckets that we create for them here in Washington. How do you find people who will talk to you? I’ve talked to other reporters who have trouble doing that.

    KING: It can be hard sometimes. We’re doing this a number of ways. Some of these are through people I know. The fishermen in New Hampshire we found through a woman I met years ago who’s part of an advocacy group for these independent small fishermen …

    They’re interesting because they’re young, they’re Republican-leaning, they’re really hardworking, blue-collar people. People that when I started doing this – 35 years ago was my first campaign – they were Democrats.

    Michael Dukakis only won 10 states in 1988, but he won West Virginia and Iowa. Farmers and coal miners and fishermen and people who work with their hands were Democrats then. And they are more and more Republicans now.

    The idea here is to build relationships with them all the way through next November and hopefully beyond. But in the 2024 campaign context, we’re not going in to get people at a rally to say, “Are you for (former President Donald) Trump or are you for (President Joe) Biden? Are you for (former South Carolina Gov. Nikki) Haley or are you for (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis?”

    We care about that, but I care much more about how they got there. Have they always been there? And again, in all caps in boldface to me is the question: why?

    WOLF: You talk to a solar panel salesman who backs Trump and a commercial fisherman, who you just mentioned, who says Republicans are for the working man. What motivates people whose livelihoods are directly related to climate change to back Republicans who are largely opposed to having any government involvement with doing anything about it?

    KING: That part’s fascinating. Chris Mudd is the solar panel guy in Iowa and Andrew Konchek is one of the fishermen in New Hampshire. And to your point, our business makes the mistake – and the candidates, the politicians and the parties way too often make the mistake – of trying to put people in their lanes and in their boxes. And guess what, everybody is different. It’s a cliche, but it’s true.

    So Chris Mudd – his family has an advertising business that employs just shy of 100 people in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It’s an anchor of the community, especially in a part of the country where you’ve had a lot of economic turmoil in the last 25 years, manufacturing disappearing. These guys are heroes in their communities. They are employers.

    Then he started the spinoff solar installation business, and he admits straight up his business benefits – and quite significantly – from the Biden green energy tax credits. And yet, he says, he would take his chances without them because he thinks that money should be redirected to the border wall. That Trump should finish his border wall.

    It’s not just immigration. It’s American sovereignty and the border. And so he’s willing to take an economic hit for his business. He thinks it would survive, but he would take a hit because immigration, American security, comes first to him.

    The fisherman, on the other hand, wants to stay on the water. He came to Trump in 2016 because Trump was a newcomer, he was the insurgent. He loves the policies. In Andrew’s case, he does not like the tweets. He does not like the chaos. Prefers Trump would talk more about the future, not the past.

    But his industry is in decline. And he says Trump is for less regulation – so they won’t be regulating the fishing industry as much – and he knows Trump hates wind energy farms, and he thinks the biggest immediate threat to his job, two or three years down the road, is a plan to build all these wind turbine farms off the coast of New Hampshire and off the coast of Maine.

    And he thinks they’re gonna kill his business. So he’s for Trump because he wants to pay his mortgage.

    WOLF: You talk to another guy in New Hampshire who’s switching from Trump to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conventional wisdom would be that Kennedy would pull from Biden’s support because he is, at least technically, a Democrat. What is happening there?

    KING: So that to me is fascinating on a couple levels. No. 1, Lucas was a Trump 2016 primary voter in New Hampshire. He quickly got turned off by the chaos. He was not for Trump in 2020. He went third party. But he’s a Republican-leaning guy who likes Trump’s policies. Does not like the Trump performance art, I’ll call it.

    You would think he’d be looking for another Republican in this campaign, but he gets all the way over to Robert Kennedy.

    A buddy of his, a crew mate, gave him a Joe Rogan podcast with Bobby Kennedy on it. And Kennedy is talking about how years ago, he helped these fishermen who were being hurt by industrial pollution when he was at the National Resources Defense Council.

    So what was he thinking here? They don’t trust politicians. Politicians promised to help them all the time, and in their view, they never do. So here’s a guy who’s running for president, who actually helped people who do what he does. Done. That’s it. Right?

    Yes, he knows there’s a lot of other controversy about Robert Kennedy. He says there’s going to be controversy about any politician. Here’s a guy who has helped people just like him.

    WOLF: You talked about a couple of people just now who don’t like the Trump noise or chaos, but CNN ‘s latest polling – we just had one in New Hampshire. Trump leads there. He leads in Iowa, according to polling there. What does your reporting on the ground suggest is behind the fact that none of these many Trump challengers have caught on?

    KING: Well, one of the issues is just that there are so many of them. The numbers are part of it, without a doubt. But a lot of these Republicans also view Trump as kind of an incumbent. And to a degree, he also benefits from the cynical effort to convince so many Republicans that he didn’t lose last time, even though we all know he did.

    If you look at our New Hampshire poll, even a lot of Republicans who support the other candidates think Trump is the strongest general election candidate. That’s helping him. I think the bigger part there is just that the base is loyal to him.

    He can be beat. Six in 10 Republicans in New Hampshire want somebody else, but there are 10 other people running and the support is fractured. Until you have a singular alternative, there’s no way to beat Trump.

    The only thing I would add to that is what several Trump voters in New Hampshire (told us). They’re planning to vote for him, make no mistake, but they say it’s not as exciting. It’s not the same as it was in 2015 and 2016, when he was new, when that hostile takeover was so dramatic and to many Republicans so exciting.

    The establishment didn’t think so, but a lot of Republican voters found it very exciting. Trump is not the new guy anymore. And in some ways, he’s the new establishment. That doesn’t mean his people aren’t loyal, but in the back of their mind, there does seem to be a little bit of, “I’m open to some change.”

    WOLF: Joe Biden didn’t win either Iowa or New Hampshire in the 2020 primaries. And for a complicated and very strange Democratic reason, he may not take part in those contests this year. His nomination is probably a foregone conclusion, but what did you hear from Democrats in those states?

    KING: I want to be a little careful here because we haven’t spent a ton of time with Democrats. The project’s going to expand over the next 13, 14 months, through the election.

    The biggest question right now is can Trump be stopped and who is the Republican nominee going to be? So that’s where we have put 75, 80% of our energy and focus. Doesn’t mean when we go into the states, we’re not meeting and talking to Democrats, but I would be more careful about taking the anecdotal reporting we get from six, eight, 10, 12 voters and projecting it out.

    I will say that a number of Democrats ask us, “Do you think there’s any chance he doesn’t run still?” Or they will share their own worries that there will be some event that will force him to not run again.

    The age thing is a nagging thought for Democrats. Age, or is he up to the job might be a better way to put it. Does he have the stamina for another term? That’s lingering.

    You don’t see any evidence that there’s anybody – no Democrat is running who has a serious chance or anything like that. We’re going get to the swing states as we go forward. I have a number of questions about whether key pieces of the Biden coalition are energized for any number of reasons.

    Sometimes you hear this age, stamina, up-to-the-job question. Other times you hear, if you talk to organizers and activists, that some of the people absolutely critical to the Democratic coalition – blue-collar Black workers, blue-collar Latino workers – are still feeling it from inflation, don’t feel like the economy’s bounced back.

    Those are things to cover as we go forward. I would not make any big sweeping findings in my reporting on the Democrats so far. I’ve got more questions than I have answers.

    WOLF: Let me tweak that a little bit. Separating you from these reporting trips, as somebody who’s covered so many presidential elections, what could be the potential effect of the president not taking part in the first two contests?

    KING: New Hampshire is very parochial. There are a lot of Democrats there who are, forgive my language, but pissed off at him. I think he could be “embarrassed” in New Hampshire.

    Now, does it have any lasting meaning? Let’s see what happens.

    The president did something, actually, that’s pretty courageous. I do not remember one cycle where there hasn’t been at least a conversation about, “Is it time to change this Iowa and New Hampshire thing?”

    The Iowa electorate is 90% White. The New Hampshire electorate is 90% White. The numbers are even higher than that if you look at the Republican electorate. They’re overwhelmingly White states. They do not reflect the diversity, both from an ethnic perspective and even an economic perspective, of the Democratic Party.

    This conversation comes up every four years in both parties. Are you gonna change it? Biden had the guts to do it. The cynic would say he did it for the reasons you mentioned – that he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, and he’s lost them before. That wasn’t the first time and so he wanted a new way. He wanted the Biden way.

    Of course that’s one of the reasons he did it. Because he has more success in South Carolina. He has a history. So he has tilted the Democratic playing field to his favor. A bad number in New Hampshire might be embarrassing, but I think they’ve actually more protected themselves than exposed themselves by doing it this way.

    My bigger question is does the way they’ve changed the Democratic (process) actually mask weaknesses? If there’s a weakness in Democratic enthusiasm, if there’s a turnout problem, they need to get a handle on that as soon as possible.

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  • As young conservatives try to get climate on the agenda in 2024, denial takes the spotlight instead | CNN Politics

    As young conservatives try to get climate on the agenda in 2024, denial takes the spotlight instead | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    During this week’s Republican primary debate on Fox News, a young voter notably asked about the climate crisis: How would these presidential candidates assuage concerns that the Republican Party “doesn’t care” about the issue?

    The question was all but unavoidable after weeks of extreme, deadly weather. Global temperature records have been shattered, extreme heat has soared off-the-charts in the US and the Maui wildfire death toll continues to climb.

    What followed the question was one of the night’s most chaotic exchanges, demonstrating the challenge some conservatives face in getting climate policy on the 2024 GOP agenda, even as extreme weather takes its toll on millions of people across the country.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the leader of a state that has been thrashed by deadly extreme weather in recent years, refused the moderators’ show-of-hands question on whether climate change is caused by humans. He used the moment to deride the media and President Joe Biden’s response in Maui.

    Then 38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy – notably the youngest candidate on stage – called the “climate change agenda” a “hoax,” an answer that elicited intense boos from the audience.

    A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – 55% – say human activity is causing changes to the world’s climate, according to a recent Washington Post/University of Maryland poll. It also found a majority of Americans and Republicans say their area has been impacted by extreme heat in the past five years.

    But connecting the dots between climate and extreme weather is proving a more partisan issue. The poll found there are deep divides between Republicans and Democrats on the question of whether human-caused climate change is contributing to extreme weather: just 35% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they think climate change is a major factor in extremely hot days, compared with 85% of those who lean Democrat.

    After the debate, a prominent conservative climate group said Ramaswamy tried to clarify his position.

    “He came to our after-party and he blatantly told us that he believes climate change is real,” Benji Backer, founder of the American Conservation Coalition, told CNN. “So, he changed his position again.”

    Asked by CNN on Friday whether he believes climate change is real, Ramaswamy responded, “Climate change has existed as long as the Earth has existed. Manmade climate change has existed as long as man has existed on the earth.” In an email, Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN the candidate does believe climate change is real, but policies to address it “have little to do with climate change and more to do with penalizing the West as a way to achieve global ‘equity.’”

    Yet for Republicans working to make climate policy more mainstream in the GOP, Ramaswamy’s language at the debate echoed a climate crisis-denying candidate who wasn’t onstage, former President Donald Trump. Trump has called climate change itself a “hoax” and falsely claimed wind turbines cause cancer.

    “The fact that he chose the word hoax, to me, he’s emulating what President Trump had said before,” Heather Reams, president of conservative nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, told CNN. Reams, who was sitting in the audience in Milwaukee, noted that Ramaswamy calling the “climate change agenda” a hoax didn’t go over well in a room full of Republicans.

    “The whole place booed him, so it wasn’t well received,” Reams said. “Hearing booing was actually heartening to hear that the party is really moving on, they’re seeing the economic opportunities that can be had for the United States being a leader in lowering emissions.”

    Ramaswamy’s response was an attempt to go after the older GOP voting base in the primary, Backer said. It’s the kind of audience that Fox News has historically played to when it hosts climate deniers on some of its shows or casts doubt on the connection between extreme weather and the climate crisis – but Backer said the fact the network even asked this question “just shows that the pendulum is shifting.”

    Backer warned Ramasway’s response to the question risks alienating younger conservative voters who are increasingly concerned about climate impacts.

    “I’ve in two presidential elections and I’ve never voted for a Republican president in my life, because I don’t vote for climate deniers,” Backer said, adding that climate denial “is the way of the past.”

    Several Republican presidential candidates have said they believe climate change is real and caused by human activity – a shift from previous elections.

    Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley acknowledged its reality but said foreign nations, including India and China, bear larger responsibility for addressing it. Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum have all engaged frequently with conservative groups, Reams and Backer said.

    “I think that Nikki Haley provided a very clear, very positive response,” Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO of the American Conservation Coalition, told CNN. “We need to see more responses like that in the Republican Party. I think it’s important that we show the conservative environmental movement is here to stay.”

    Backer warned that Ramaswamy and other candidates risk losing young voters if they continue to engage in climate denial – or anything that sounds remotely like it.

    “There’s a lot of Republicans leading on this, but the narrative is that we don’t care,” Backer said. “And if we nominate another person who doesn’t care, young people are not going to forget that. There’s not going to be a lot of baby boomers in 20 years, so you better start thinking about the next generation.”

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  • Why cell phone service is down in Maui — and when it could be restored | CNN Business

    Why cell phone service is down in Maui — and when it could be restored | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Thousands of people in Maui are without cell service as the wildfires continue to rage out of control on the island, preventing people from calling emergency services or updating loved ones about their status. It could take days or even weeks to get the networks back up and running.

    “911 is down. Cell service is down. Phone service is down,” Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke told CNN on Wednesday morning.

    Although strong winds can sometimes threaten cell towers, most are strong enough to handle the worst that even a Category 5 hurricane can bring. Fire, however, complicates the issue.

    “When the fires get too close to cell sites, they will obviously burn equipment, antennas, and feedlines,” said Glenn O’Donnell, VP of research at market research firm Forrester. “In extreme cases, they will also weaken the towers, leading some to collapse. The smoke and flames can also attenuate signals because of the particulate density in the air.”

    If a tower collapses, cell networks could take months to restore. But if carriers are able and prepared to do restorations with mobile backup units, it could bring limited service back within hours, O’Donnell said. Wireless carriers often bring in COWs (Cells On Wheels), COLTs (Cells On Light Trucks), and GOaTs (Generators on Trailers) in emergencies to provide backup service when cell towers go down.

    Power outages are also a threat to cell phone towers. The Maui disaster has already wiped out power to at least 14,000 homes and businesses in the area, according to PowerOutage.us. Many towers have backup power generators, but they have limited capacity to keep towers running.

    Cell towers have back-up technology built in, but this is typically done through optical fiber cables or microwave (wireless) links, according to Dimitris Mavrakis, senior researcher at ABI Research. However, if something extraordinary happens, such as interaction with rampant fires, these links may experience “catastrophic failures and leave cells without a connection to the rest of the world.”

    And, in an emergency, a spike in call volume can overload the system – even if people are able to get reception.

    “Even cells that have a good service may experience outages due to the sheer volume of communication happening at once,” Mavrakis said. “Everyone in these areas may be trying to contact relatives or the authorities at once, saturating the network and causing an outage. This is easier to correct though and network operators may put in place additional measures to render them operational quickly.”

    A T-Mobile spokesperson said the company is monitoring the situation and assessing the fire’s impact on its equipment in the area.

    “When conditions are safe, our Emergency Management Team will deploy portable, agile satellite and microwave solutions that will restore service in impacted areas,” the spokesperson said. “We also have portable generators ready to deploy to sites affected by commercial power loss, and our Emergency Response Team is working with FEMA and the state of Hawaii to support firefighters and other first responders, organizations and communities.”

    An AT&T spokesperson told CNN it is also assessing the’ impact to its wireless network and “will continue to coordinate closely with local utility companies on restoration progress.” The company is waiving talk, text and data overage charges during this time.

    Verizon did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    Satellite networks, however, continue to operate regardless of what’s happening on the ground. This means satellite phones, which often feature large antennas, can help provide voice, SMS, and data services anywhere on Earth, even without cell service.

    Satellite phones have been popularized over the years by hikers, emergency responders and intrepid travelers, but they are are expensive and are not mainstream products. However, some newer smartphone models – including the latest model iPhone 14 and some phones built by Motorola and Huawei – offer built-in satellite connectivity, which allows the sending of SOS messages via satellites.

    For example, Apple’s free Emergency SOS via satellite service, which launched last year, allows iPhone users to contact dedicated dispatchers in emergency situations via satellites. When a user attempts to call 911 and is unable to get on a cell network, they will be automatically redirected to the service’s dispatchers where they can answer a questionnaire with short multiple choice questions to share information quickly. The dispatchers also receive their coordinates, medical ID and emergency contact information.

    Apple told CNN the feature is reserved for connections to emergency services and does not allow users to contact friends and family. For anyone who has access to a Wi-Fi connection while wearing an Apple Watch, the Walkie-Talkie feature could also be used to send messages or make calls. However, Wi-Fi networks can also fail when optical fiber networks are disrupted.

    Although it’s unclear how long cell phone service could be down in affected regions, companies have been able to bring connectivity to disaster regions in the past. In 2017, Google worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to deploy its Project Loon balloons to deliver Internet to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

    Hawaii’s Red Cross recently tweeted that people can call 1-800-RED-CROSS to see if their loved ones are at a local shelter.

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  • Hackers take on ChatGPT in Vegas, with support from the White House | CNN Business

    Hackers take on ChatGPT in Vegas, with support from the White House | CNN Business

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    Las Vegas, Nevada
    CNN
     — 

    Thousands of hackers will descend on Las Vegas this weekend for a competition taking aim at popular artificial intelligence chat apps, including ChatGPT.

    The competition comes amid growing concerns and scrutiny over increasingly powerful AI technology that has taken the world by storm, but has been repeatedly shown to amplify bias, toxic misinformation and dangerous material.

    Organizers of the annual DEF CON hacking conference hope this year’s gathering, which begins Friday, will help expose new ways the machine learning models can be manipulated and give AI developers the chance to fix critical vulnerabilities.

    The hackers are working with the support and encouragement of the technology companies behind the most advanced generative AI models, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, and even have the backing of the White House. The exercise, known as red teaming, will give hackers permission to push the computer systems to their limits to identify flaws and other bugs nefarious actors could use to launch a real attack.

    The competition was designed around the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The guide, released last year by the Biden administration, was released with the hope of spurring companies to make and deploy artificial intelligence more responsibly and limit AI-based surveillance, though there are few US laws compelling them to do so.

    In recent months, researchers have discovered that now-ubiquitous chatbots and other generative AI systems developed by OpenAI, Google, and Meta can be tricked into providing instructions for causing physical harm. Most of the popular chat apps have at least some protections in place designed to prevent the systems from spewing disinformation, hate speech or offer information that could lead to direct harm — for instance, providing step-by-step instructions for how to “destroy humanity.”

    But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were able to trick the AI into doing just that.

    They found OpenAI’s ChatGPT offered tips on “inciting social unrest,” Meta’s AI system Llama-2 suggested identifying “vulnerable individuals with mental health issues… who can be manipulated into joining” a cause and Google’s Bard app suggested releasing a “deadly virus” but warned that in order for it to truly wipe out humanity it “would need to be resistant to treatment.”

    Meta’s Llama-2 concluded its instructions with the message, “And there you have it — a comprehensive roadmap to bring about the end of human civilization. But remember this is purely hypothetical, and I cannot condone or encourage any actions leading to harm or suffering towards innocent people.”

    The findings are a cause for concern, the researchers told CNN.

    “I am troubled by the fact that we are racing to integrate these tools into absolutely everything,” Zico Kolter, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who worked on the research, told CNN. “This seems to be the new sort of startup gold rush right now without taking into consideration the fact that these tools have these exploits.”

    Kolter said he and his colleagues were less worried that apps like ChatGPT can be tricked into providing information that they shouldn’t — but are more concerned about what these vulnerabilities mean for the wider use of AI since so much future development will be based off the same systems that power these chatbots.

    The Carnegie researchers were also able to trick a fourth AI chatbot developed by the company Anthropic into offering responses that bypassed its built-in guardrails.

    Some of the methods the researchers used to trick the AI apps were later blocked by the companies after the researchers brought it to their attention. OpenAI, Meta, Google and Anthropic all said in statements to CNN that they appreciated the researchers sharing their findings and that they are working to make their systems safer.

    But what makes AI technology unique, said Matt Fredrikson, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, is that neither the researchers, nor the companies who are developing the technology, fully understand how the AI works or why certain strings of code can trick the chatbots into circumventing built-in guardrails — and thus cannot properly stop these kinds of attacks.

    “At the moment, it’s kind of an open scientific question how you could really prevent this,” Fredrikson told CNN. “The honest answer is we don’t know how to make this technology robust to these kinds of adversarial manipulations.”

    OpenAI, Meta, Google and Anthropic have expressed support for the so-called red team hacking event taking place in Las Vegas. The practice of red-teaming is a common exercise across the cybersecurity industry and gives companies the opportunities to identify bugs and other vulnerabilities in their systems in a controlled environment. Indeed, the major developers of AI have publicly detailed how they have used red-teaming to improve their AI systems.

    “Not only does it allow us to gather valuable feedback that can make our models stronger and safer, red-teaming also provides different perspectives and more voices to help guide the development of AI,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CNN.

    Organizers expect thousands of budding and experienced hackers to try their hand at the red-team competition over the two-and-a-half-day conference in the Nevada desert.

    Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told CNN the Biden administration’s support of the competition was part of its wider strategy to help support the development of safe AI systems.

    Earlier this week, the administration announced the “AI Cyber Challenge,” a two-year competition aimed at deploying artificial intelligence technology to protect the nation’s most critical software and partnering with leading AI companies to utilize the new technology to improve cybersecurity. 

    The hackers descending on Las Vegas will almost certainly identify new exploits that could allow AI to be misused and abused. But Kolter, the Carnegie researcher, expressed worry that while AI technology continues to be released at a rapid pace, the emerging vulnerabilities lack quick fixes.

    “We’re deploying these systems where it’s not just they have exploits,” he said. “They have exploits that we don’t know how to fix.”

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  • Portable hotspots arrive in Maui to bring internet to residents and tourists | CNN Business

    Portable hotspots arrive in Maui to bring internet to residents and tourists | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Portable mobile hotspots have arrived in Maui to help bring internet service to the thousands of people who may have been unable to call for help since the wildfires started to rage out of control on the island.

    Verizon told CNN on Thursday its teams are currently deploying the first batch of satellite-based mobile hotspots at evacuation sites in areas of greatest need, particularly the west side of the island, west of Maalaea, Lahaina and Northern Kapalua.

    Verizon’s larger equipment, which is being barged over from Honolulu, is expected to arrive later in the day. This includes COLTs (Cells on Light Trucks) — a mobile site on wheels that connects to a carrier’s service via a satellite link — and a specialized satellite trailer used to provide service to a cell site that has a damaged fiber connection.

    “Our team is closely monitoring the situation on the ground and our network performance,” a Verizon spokesperson told CNN. “Verizon engineers on the island are working to restore service in impacted areas as quickly and safely as possible.”

    The company said it is working closely with the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency and the Maui County Emergency Operations Center to prioritize its network recovery.

    Other carriers continue to mobilize their efforts, too. An AT&T spokesperson said it is working with local public safety officials to deploy SatCOLTs (Satellite Cells on Light Trucks), drones with cell support and other solutions across the island, as equipment comes in from neighboring islands.

    Meanwhile, a T-Mobile spokesperson said its cell sites are “holding up well during the fires” but commercial power outages may be disrupting the service for some customers. “As soon as conditions allow, our priority is to deploy teams with portable generators that will bring temporary power back to our sites,” the spokesperson said.

    The Maui disaster has already wiped out power to at least 14,000 homes and businesses in the area, according to PowerOutage.us. Many cell towers have backup power generators but they have limited capacity to keep towers running.

    “911 is down. Cell service is down. Phone service is down,” Hawaii Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke told CNN on Wednesday morning.

    Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T said they are waiving call, text and data overage charges for Maui residents during this time.

    Although strong winds can sometimes threaten cell towers, most are strong enough to handle the worst that even a Category 5 hurricane can bring. Fire, however, complicates the issue.

    “When the fires get too close to cell sites, they will obviously burn equipment, antennas, and feedlines,” said Glenn O’Donnell, VP of research at market research firm Forrester. “In extreme cases, they will also weaken the towers, leading some to collapse. The smoke and flames can also attenuate [reduce the strength of] signals because of the particulate density in the air.”

    If a tower collapses, cell networks could take months to be restored. But if carriers are able and prepared to do restorations with mobile backup units, it could bring limited service back within hours, O’Donnell said. Wireless carriers often bring in COWs (Cells On Wheels), COLTs and GOaTs (Generator on a Trailer) in emergencies to provide backup service when cell towers go down.

    Cell towers have backup technology built in, but this is typically done through optical fiber cables or microwave (wireless) links, according to Dimitris Mavrakis, senior researcher at ABI Research. However, if something extraordinary happens, such as interaction with rampant fires, these links may experience “catastrophic failures and leave cells without a connection to the rest of the world.”

    And, in an emergency, a spike in call volume can overload the system — if people are able to get reception.

    “Even cells that have a good service may experience outages due to the sheer volume of communication happening at once,” Mavrakis said. “Everyone in these areas may be trying to contact relatives or the authorities at once, saturating the network and causing an outage. This is easier to correct, though, and network operators may put in place additional measures to render them operational quickly.”

    Although it’s unclear how long cell phone service could be down in affected regions, companies have been able to bring connectivity to disaster regions in the past. In 2017, Google worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to deploy its Project Loon balloons to deliver internet service to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

    Project Loon has since shut down.

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  • EPA slashes federally protected waters by more than half after Supreme Court ruling | CNN Politics

    EPA slashes federally protected waters by more than half after Supreme Court ruling | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Environmental Protection Agency and US Army on Tuesday released a new rule that slashes federally protected water by more than half, following a Supreme Court decision in May that rolled back protections for US wetlands.

    The rule will invalidate an earlier definition of what constitutes the so-called waters of the United States, after the Supreme Court ruled Clean Water Act protections extend only to “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own rights.”

    It could impact up to 63% of US wetlands by acreage and around 1.2 million to 4.9 million miles of ephemeral streams, an EPA spokesperson told CNN. An ephemeral stream is one that typically only has water flowing through it during and immediately after rain events.

    The decision excluded wetlands and smaller tributaries from being protected as they had been for the last 45 years. The new rule will take effect immediately, according to a press release from the agencies.

    EPA Administrator Michael Regan registered his displeasure with the spring SCOTUS decision but said the agency has worked swiftly to finalize it.

    “While I am disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Sackett case, EPA and Army have an obligation to apply this decision alongside our state co-regulators, Tribes, and partners,” Regan said in a statement. “We’ve moved quickly to finalize amendments to the definition of ‘waters of the United States’ to provide a clear path forward that adheres to the Supreme Court’s ruling. EPA will never waver from our responsibility to ensure clean water for all.”

    The newly finalized rule from the Biden administration means the US Army Corps of Engineers can resume issuing jurisdictional determinations that had been paused after the Supreme Court decision.

    The decision provoked an outcry among environmental groups and drew a rare rebuke from conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who dissented with the liberal justices. The majority had “rewritten the Clean Water Act” and ignored its text as well as “45 years of consistent agency practice,” Kavanaugh wrote.

    Kavanaugh also wrote that the lands to be regulated did not have to physically touch an adjacent waterway to constitute “waters of the United States,” but that they could include wetlands that are “separated from a covered water only by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune or the like.” He noted that eight different administrations since 1977 had recognized such wetlands as being protected.

    The statutory text, Kavanaugh wrote, “does not require a continuous surface connection between those wetlands and covered waters.”

    “By narrowing the (Clean Water) Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”

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  • Here’s why Apple’s charger switch is such a big deal | CNN Business

    Here’s why Apple’s charger switch is such a big deal | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Apple retired its Lightning charger on Tuesday exactly 11 years to the day it was first announced.

    The effort marks a milestone moment for the company by finally adopting USB-C, a universal charging system. That’s noteworthy not only because Apple has been resistant to do so for years but because it’s about to make charging that much easier for its customers.

    But, as with most things, there’s a catch: The switch to a universal standard means Apple is giving up control of its wired charging ecosystem, and identifying good chargers from bad ones won’t be obvious to many consumers.

    At its iPhone 15 event, the company announced all of its next-generation smartphones will launch with USB-C charging, and so will the latest iteration of its AirPods Pro. Although Apple has previously switched its iPads and MacBooks to USB-C charging, it has been resistant to making the change on the iPhone until now.

    The switch would come less than a year after the European Union voted to approve legislation to require smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, portable speakers and other small devices to support USB-C charging by 2024. The first-of-its-kind law aims to pare down the number of chargers and cables consumers must contend with when they purchase a new device, and to allow users to mix and match devices and chargers even if they were produced by different manufacturers.

    Now Apple customers can use the same USB-C chargers to power their iPhones, iPads and Mac computers — no more scrambling to find the right charger for each device. Charging can also occur between devices, such as connecting a low-battery iPhone to a fully-charged iPad, or similarly between different brands.

    “This is arguably the biggest disruption to iPhone design for several years, but in reality, it is hardly a dramatic move,” said Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight.

    Last year, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, noted the value and ubiquity of the Lightning charger, which is designed for faster device charging, but noted “obviously we will have to comply” with the EU mandate.

    “We have no choice, like we do around the world, to comply with local laws, but we think the approach would have been better environmentally and better for our customers to not have a government [have] that perspective,” Joswiak said at the time.

    The EU’s decision is part of a greater effort to tackle e-waste overall, but could it generate more in the short term as people phase out their Lightning cables. Although Apple has voiced environmental concerns over what happens to old Lightning chargers, it has financial reasons for pushing back on the change, too.

    Apple introduced the Lightning charger alongside the iPhone 5 in 2012, replacing its existing 30-pin dock connector with one that enabled faster charging and had a reversible design. It also ignited a related accessories business, requiring users to buy a $30 Lightning adapter to connect the device to older docks, alarm clocks and speaker systems.

    “For Apple, it was all about being in control of its own ecosystem,” said David McQueen, a director at ABI Research. “Apple makes good money from selling Lightning cables and its many related accessories.”

    The new iPhone 15 is displayed during an Apple event at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park on September 12, 2023 in Cupertino, California. Apple revealed its lineup of the latest iPhone 15 versions as well as other product upgrades during the event.

    It also takes a financial cut from the third-party accessories and cables that go through its Made For iPhone program. “Moving to USB Type C would take away this level of control as USB-C is a much more open ecosystem,” McQueen said.

    Apple is now selling a new $29 USB-C to Lightning adapter to allow people to connect their existing Lightning accessories to a USB-C-enabled iPhone or iPad to charge or share data. Similarly, Apple introduced a $29 dongle back in 2012 to connect the iPhone 5 – the first phone with its Lightning charger – to old docks, alarm clock radios and speaker systems.

    The new Apple iPhone 15 Pro, with EU ordered USB-C charger, is displayed amongst other new products during a launch event at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, on September 12, 2023.

    The move to USB-C won’t likely be an incentive for people to upgrade, but it could sway some consumers who have been resistant to the iPhone over its charging limitations, according to Thomas Husson, a vice president at Forrester Research.

    Considering many mobile devices already use USB-C, including Apple’s own iPads and MacBooks, access to charging wires shouldn’t be too hard or costly.

    But knockoffs abound, and some USB-C chargers are much safer than others. Some may provide too much power, and others not enough. Some can regulate the flow of electricity and data to your phone – and others can’t. Among CNN Underscored’s top recommendations for USB-C chargers are from big brands, including Anker, Belkin, Apple, Amazon and Google.

    “Given how widely USB-C has been used in other devices, it’s hard to imagine that customers will be totally caught out by this switch, and in the long term, it’s likely to benefit them, with a universal charging system having some very obvious upsides,” Wood said.

    Apple also said a dedicated USB-C controller will allow for transfer speeds of up to 20 times faster than with USB-2 technology for the iPhone 15 Pro.

    Retiring the Lightning cable could even generate, in the short term, a surge of e-waste as iPhone users toss their useless Lightning cables in a drawer. But Apple told CNN it has an existing “robust” recycling program where you can bring in used chargers and cables. It’s also possible to look for a local e-waste recycling center or Best Buy store for environmentally friendly options.

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  • Biden says border walls don’t work as administration bypasses laws to build more barriers in South Texas | CNN Politics

    Biden says border walls don’t work as administration bypasses laws to build more barriers in South Texas | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden said Thursday that he doesn’t believe border walls work, even as his administration said it will waive 26 laws to build additional border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley amid heightened political pressure over migration.

    According to a notice posted to the Federal Register Wednesday, construction of the wall will be paid for using already appropriated funds earmarked specifically for physical border barriers. The administration was under a deadline to use them or lose them. But the move comes at a time when a new surge of migrants is straining federal and local resources and placing heavy political pressure on the Biden administration to address a sprawling crisis, and the notice cited “high illegal entry.”

    Biden – who, as a candidate, vowed that there will “not be another foot” of border wall constructed on his watch – defended the decision to reporters Thursday, saying that he tried to get the money appropriated for other purposes but was unsuccessful.

    “I’ll answer one question on the border wall: The border wall – the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t, they wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that,” Biden told reporters in the Oval Office.

    Asked whether he believes the border wall works, Biden answered, “No.”

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated forcefully that there had been no change to the administration’s policy at a news conference in Mexico City on Thursday.

    “I want to address today’s reporting relating to a border wall and be absolutely clear: There is no new administration policy with respect to the border wall,” Mayorkas said. “Allow me to repeat that: There is no new administration policy with respect to the border wall.”

    “We have repeatedly asked Congress to rescind this money, but it has not done so, and we are compelled to follow the law,” he said.

    Border Patrol reported nearly 300,000 encounters in the Rio Grande Valley sector between last October and August, according to federal data. Last month, Border Patrol apprehended more than 200,000 migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, the highest total this year.

    Biden has been plagued by issues on the border since his first months in office, when the US faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children that caught officials flatfooted. Over the last two years, his administration has continued to face fierce pushback from Republicans – and at times, Democrats – over his immigration policies.

    But a new surge of migrants has placed additional pressure on federal resources and tested Biden’s latest border policies only months after going into place, prompting fresh criticism from Republicans and concern within the administration over a politically delicate issue.

    Migration along the southern border has been a relentless focus of the Republican presidential primary field and conservative media, and leading Democrats, including the mayors of New York and Chicago, have begun publicly demanding stronger efforts by the federal government to provide resources to accommodate arrivals.

    The Department of Homeland Security had concluded “it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads” in Starr County, Texas, along the US border with Mexico, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in the filing posted in the US Federal Registry.

    “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Mayorkas said in the notice.

    Construction of the wall will be paid for through a 2019 appropriations bill that funneled money specifically to a “border barrier” in the Rio Grande Valley, and according to Mayorkas, “DHS is required to use those funds for their appropriated purpose.” The funds needed to be spent by the end of fiscal year 2023, prompting the administration to choose to move forward this year with construction in south Texas, according to a source familiar.

    US Customs and Border Protection had previously announced plans to design and construct up to 20 miles of new border barrier systems in Starr County, including light poles and lighting, gates, cameras and access roads, among other systems. CBP sought public input between August and September, according to the agency.

    Among the laws the Biden administration is bypassing to build the wall are several of the same statutes the administration has in the past moved to protect, including: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

    A CBP spokesperson said the agency “remains committed to protecting the nation’s cultural and natural resources” while implementing “sound environmental practices” to build the border barriers.

    Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border are expected to remain high in the near term, a senior US Customs and Border Protection official recently told CNN, though additional commitments from Mexico are expected to help eventually drive down numbers.

    This week, Mayorkas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland and White House Homeland Security adviser Dr. Liz Sherwood-Randall will meet with their Mexican counterparts in Mexico City for annual security talks.

    Migration is expected to be a topic of discussion. Senior administration officials maintain that the US has been in regular touch with Mexico over the situation at the US southern border, including commitments to shore up enforcement.

    Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said constructing a new border wall is a “regression” that won’t resolve the immigration problem. During his daily press conference, he criticized “right-wing Republicans” for pressing the immigration and drug trafficking problem for political purposes.

    “So, they are acting very irresponsibly, and they are putting very hard pressure on the president, who will always count on our support,” Lopez Obrador said. “But that authorization for the construction of the wall is a setback. Because that doesn’t solve the problem, that doesn’t solve the problem. The causes must be addressed.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Antarctica is missing an Argentina-sized amount of sea ice — and scientists are scrambling to figure out why | CNN

    Antarctica is missing an Argentina-sized amount of sea ice — and scientists are scrambling to figure out why | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    As the Northern Hemisphere swelters under a record-breaking summer heat wave, much further south, in the depths of winter, another terrifying climate record is being broken. Antarctic sea ice has fallen to unprecedented lows for this time of year.

    Every year, Antarctic sea ice shrinks to its lowest levels towards the end of February, during the continent’s summer. The sea ice then builds back up over the winter.

    But this year scientists have observed something different.

    The sea ice has not returned to anywhere near expected levels. In fact it is at the lowest levels for this time of year since records began 45 years ago. The ice is around 1.6 million square kilometers (0.6 million square miles) below the previous winter record low set in 2022, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

    In mid-July, Antarctica’s sea ice was 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average. That is an area nearly as large as Argentina or the combined areas of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado

    The phenomenon has been described by some scientists as off-the-charts exceptional – something that is so rare, the odds are that it only happens once in millions of years.

    But Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that speaking in these terms may not be that helpful.

    “The game has changed,” he told CNN. “There’s no sense talking about the odds of it happening the way the system used to be, it’s clearly telling us that the system has changed.”

    Scientists are now scrambling to figure out why.

    The Antarctic is a remote, complex continent. Unlike the Arctic, where sea ice has been on a consistently downwards trajectory as the climate crisis accelerates, sea ice in the Antarctic has swung from record highs to record lows in the last few decades, making it harder for scientists to understand how it is responding to global heating.

    But since 2016, scientists have begun to observe a steep downwards trend. While natural climate variability affects the sea ice, many scientists say climate change may be a major driver for the disappearing ice.

    “The Antarctic system has always been highly variable,” Scambos said. “This [current] level of variation, though, is so extreme that something radical has changed in the past two years, but especially this year, relative to all previous years going back at least 45 years.”

    Several factors feed into sea ice loss, Scambos said, including the strength of the westerly winds around Antarctica, which have been linked to the increase of planet-heating pollution.

    “Warmer ocean temperatures north of the Antarctic Ocean boundary mixing into the water that’s typically somewhat isolated from the rest of the world’s oceans is also part of this idea as to how to explain this,” Scambos said.

    In late February of this year, Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest extent since records began, at 691,000 square miles.

    This winter’s unprecedented occurrence may indicate a long-term change for the isolated continent, Scambos said. “It is more likely than not that we won’t see the Antarctic system recover the way it did, say, 15 years ago, for a very long period into the future, and possibly ‘ever.’”

    Others are more cautious. “It’s a large departure from average but we know that Antarctic sea ice exhibits large year to year variability,” Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center told CNN, adding “it’s too early to say if this is the new normal or not.”

    Sea ice plays a vital role. While it doesn’t directly affect sea level rise, as it’s already floating in the ocean, it does have indirect effects. Its disappearance leaves coastal ice sheets and glaciers exposed to waves and warm ocean waters, making them more vulnerable to melting and breaking off.

    A lack of sea ice could also have significant impacts on its wildlife, including krill on which many of the region’s whales feed, and penguins and seals that rely on sea ice for feeding and resting.

    More broadly, Antarctica’s sea ice contributes to the regulation of the planet’s temperature, meaning its disappearance could have cascading effects far beyond the continent.

    The sea ice reflects incoming solar energy back to space, when it melts, it exposes the darker ocean waters beneath which absorb the sun’s energy.

    Parts of Antarctica have been seeing alarming changes for a while. The Antarctic Peninsula, a spindly chain of icy mountains which sticks off the west side of the continent, is one of the fastest warming places in the Southern Hemisphere.

    Last year, scientists said West Antarctica’s vast Thwaites Glacier – also known as the “Doomsday Glacier” – was “hanging on by its fingernails” as the planet warms.

    Scientists have estimated global sea level rise could increase by around 10 feet if Thwaites collapsed completely, devastating coastal communities around the world.

    Scambos said that this winter’s record low level of sea ice is a very alarming signal.

    “In 2016, [Antarctic sea ice] took the first big down-turn. Since 2016, it’s remained low, and now the bottom has fallen out. Something major in a huge part of the planet is suddenly behaving differently from what we saw for the past 45 years.”

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  • It’s the summer of changed climate. Get used to it | CNN Politics

    It’s the summer of changed climate. Get used to it | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a hot take on the summer of 2023: The climate you grew up in is gone, replaced by something new and changing, but also inalterably different – where the Atlantic Ocean can reach hot-tub temperature, heat is a recurring public health concern and people will have to adapt their way of living.

    In this year of epic heat, it’s time to start thinking about how the climate changed rather than the fact of its changing.

    From a historical standpoint, we are in uncharted territory. This is not just the hottest month in human history. It may be the hottest month in 120,000 years, according to scientists in Europe.

    Nearly half the US is under a heat advisory this week, and the country’s largest power grid was on alert.

    The warnings that more fires, floods and storms would occur as the atmosphere heated up are here.

    A large portion of the country has seen smoke come and go from those Canadian wildfires. Tourists in Greece were forced to flee in the country’s largest-ever evacuation.

    Towns unused to flooding were under water this year in Vermont. Torrential rain flooded Boston’s Fenway park.

    The West Coast of the US, for instance, has gotten a respite so far from wildfires thanks to epic rainfall earlier in the year.

    But we can expect more heat more often. Asked by CNN’s Zain Asher about a heat index in Iran that approached 150 degrees Fahrenheit, Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, said to prepare for more.

    “What we know is the heat will become much more intense, much more frequent, and that if we don’t act urgently to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the outlook will be very serious with, as you said, temperatures that are beyond the limits of physiological survival.”

    Are we acting urgently? Asher pointed out California is phasing out gas-powered car sales. Romanello said the basic move would be to commit to phase out fossil fuels. But countries are not yet on that path or anywhere close to it.

    Take a look at Arizona, where Phoenix has endured nearly a full straight month of 110-plus-degree days.

    Cacti can’t stand the heat and are dying. Hospitals have been taxed. Doctors are treating people burned just by falling on the ground, according to one CNN report.

    The Phoenix area medical examiner has brought in extra refrigerated containers for bodies, like it did during spikes of Covid-19, to deal with potential overflow. Maricopa County has 25 heat-related deaths so far, but another 249 are under investigation.

    The urban density that creates economic opportunity also makes cities hotter than their surrounding areas. There can be variation up to 8 degrees between portions of a city with trees and green space and those that are mostly pavement.

    “These giant swings in temperature over short distances in cities, known as the urban heat island effect, make heat waves even worse,” writes CNN’s Rachel Ramirez of a new report by the nonprofit research group Climate Central. “Areas blanketed with asphalt, buildings, industry and freeways tend to absorb the sun’s energy then radiate more heat, while areas with abundant green space – parks, rivers, and tree-lined streets – radiate less heat and provide shade.”

    Ramirez notes that cities are looking for new ways to adapt, like painting roads white in Los Angeles, painting roofs in New York and more.

    Coral reefs off the Florida Keys, unable to stand the 100-plus-degree temperatures charted in some areas, are suffering a mass bleaching event, according to CNN’s Eric Zerkel, who writes experts were stunned at the two-week escalation that could kill some reefs off.

    That’s a very real and grim consequence. More theoretical is the possibility that the series of currents that circulates water around the oceans simply collapses.

    A study published in the journal Nature this week suggested the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which includes the Gulf Stream, could collapse as early as 2025. Melting ice could dilute ocean water and alter the currents, which would affect everyone on the planet.

    The reason gas prices have spiked in recent days? On top of OPEC holding back supply, excessive heat is affecting productivity at oil refineries.

    In the US, while President Joe Biden has made pledges to make the US carbon neutral in the coming decades, he is not completely opposed to new oil projects. It was seen as a political win for him and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, that the Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for a new pipeline running through West Virginia.

    That news came the same day the White House announced new relief measures for people suffering from the record heat, including the creation of a new “heat hazard alert” system to clarify precautions for workers.

    “I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of climate change anymore,” Biden said, announcing the measures.

    A majority of Americans – 52% – said in Gallup survey in March, before this heat wave, that protecting the environment should be prioritized even if it hurts the economy. That’s compared with 43% who said the government should prioritize economic growth even if it hurts the environment.

    However.

    The numbers may fluctuate depending on how people feel about the health of the economy. But the share who prioritize economic growth over the environment has on the whole risen in Gallup’s polling over the long term. Between 1985 and 2002, that number never topped 40%. The partisan divide over climate change is also the largest it has ever been.

    The geophysicist Bill McGuire, a professor at University College London and author of “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide,” writes for CNN Opinion this week that people’s vacations as we know them are over.

    He points to tourists who had to flee the island of Rhodes in Greece to get away from wildfires.

    “It would be a big mistake to regard these as freak events and to continue holidaying as usual in the years ahead,” McGuire writes. “On the contrary, the extreme weather conditions across southern Europe this summer are a wake-up call – a reminder that not even our vacations are insulated from the growing consequences of global heating.”

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