Climate Change & Nutrition | Rudy Do Good? | McCain Haunts Russia

“I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Climate Change & Health Concerns: Researchers Matthew Smith and Samuel Myers of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a new study in Nature Climate Change demonstrating how rising CO2 levels could affect future global health. The authors suggest their research should heighten the attention being paid to this aspect of how climate change is affecting global health, and why reducing CO2 emissions is becoming even more important.

The study, covering 151 countries, concludes that climate change will make hundreds of millions more people nutrient deficient, because food crops grown in a high CO2 atmosphere contain from 3 percent to 17 percent less protein, zinc and iron. Among other problems, zinc deficiencies are linked to difficulty with wound healing, infections and diarrhea; protein deficiencies are linked to stunted growth; and iron deficiencies are tied to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Study results also reveal that the most vulnerable countries are in North Africa, South and South-East Asia, and the Middle East, along with some nations in sub-Saharan Africa. And because quality of diet is linked to income, the poorest in those countries are the ones most at risk. Wealthy countries like the US, France, Australia and parts of south America are not expected to experience much impact.

Additional reads: “Air Pollution Exposure Harms Cognitive Performance, Study Finds: The scientists found both short-term and cumulative effects of air pollution on cognitive performance. Pollution’s impact on verbal test performance became worse as people aged, particularly among men and people with less education.” (NPR)

“Cigarette Butts—Not Plastic Straws—Are The Worst Contaminant of Oceans, According to New Study.” (Fortune)

The Kandinsky Code: Last month special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for cybercrimes committed during the 2016 election. But Russia’s cyberspying has operated longer and is spread so much wider than previously known. The Associated Press found that Russian hackers have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world’s most senior Orthodox Christian figures, highlighting the battle between Moscow and Kiev over the religious future of Ukraine. The hackers’ religious dragnet even extended into the US. (NBC News)

Iran’s Rare Rebuke: On Tuesday Iran’s parliament voted to reject President Hassan Rouhani’s plans to mitigate the ongoing economic damage that has followed the US departure from the nuclear deal, and the reimposition of US sanctions. It was a rare rebuke, the first time in Rouhani’s presidency that he has had to face public questioning from angry lawmakers. (WaPo)

Enough With The 80s Movie Remakes: Russia is planning a massive military drill next month, at a time when tensions are increasing between Moscow and NATO. The Vostok-2018 war games will be the largest military maneuvers since Zapad-81 was held during the Cold War. Chinese and Mongolian units will join in the exercises at military ranges in central and eastern Russia. A spokesman for the Kremlin said the drills are justified in light of “aggressive and unfriendly” attitudes displayed toward his country. Back in 1981, incidentally, the maneuvers involved a pretend attack on NATO. (BBC)

Pope Francis The Ally: Pope Francis responded to a question about what he would tell parents if their child came out as gay. First, pray; then “Don’t condemn. Dialogue. Understand, give the child space so he or she can express themselves,” the pontiff said. Also, do not remain silent, and don’t throw the child out of the house. But he added it might be necessary to seek psychiatric help if a child begins to exhibit “worrisome” traits. Those traits “worrisome” enough to require psychiatric intervention were not spelled out. (NBC News)

McCain Haunts Russia: Russia has long-reviled Senator John McCain. He’s the central protagonist in their favorite conspiracy theory—that Western sanctions against Russia have nothing to do with anything Moscow has done, but are the result of “Russophobia.” In other words, according to them, Russia is innocent of the annexation of Crimea, military incursions into Georgia and eastern Ukraine, the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger jet, meddling in Western elections—it’s all McCain’s fault, because he’s the “chief symbol of Russophobia.” Well, guess what. McCain’s gone. NOW who ya’ gonna blame? (NYT)

Lost In Translation: In the farming community of Ubang, in southern Nigeria, men and women speak different languages. It’s not a Venus/Mars thing—they literally have different words to describe something. An anthropologist who has studied the community explained it this way: “It’s almost like two different lexicons. There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, then there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don’t sound alike, they don’t have the same letters, they are completely different words.” Insert your own joke here. (BBC)

Rudy Do Good?: Rudy Giuliani’s taking his game-playing as Present Trump’s television truth-basher very seriously. Forget all that time Giuliani spent as a federal prosecutor confronting the bad guys, upholding the rule of law. Now he’s an addle-brained, self-contradicting mouthpiece who uses the Art of Befuddling for one reason alone—to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller and get more Americans to believe the Russia investigation is a hoax and a witch-hunt. Giuliani admits it outright: “Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game. So I think we’ve done really well. And my client’s happy.” (WaPo)

People Who Live In Glass Kremlins Shouldn’t Throw Stones: President Trump isn’t sitting idly by and letting Rudy Giuliani have all the fun. He’s renewing his unsupported claims of bias against conservatives on the internet, this time accusing Google of rigging its algorithms to show only “bad” stories when users search for Trump news. Tuesday the president tweeted: “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives.” With no evidence, Trump went on to suggest Google’s actions could be “illegal”, and accused the company of “taking advantage of a lot of people.” (CNN)

– “‘They’re liquidating us’: AT&T continues layoffs and outsourcing despite profits: The communications giant is expecting a windfall of $20bn in savings from Trump’s tax reforms, but has closed 44 call centers since 2011” This still isn’t as bad as when Sprint stole the “Can You Hear Me Now?” guy from Verizon. (Guardian)

– “Agriculture Department Will Pay $4.7 Billion To Farmers Hit In Trade War: The Department of Agriculture will pay $4.7 billion to farmers growing soybeans, cotton and other products hit by tariffs in the Trump administration’s hard-line trade war with China, announcing the first batch of payments from a $12 billion government aid package.” (NPR)

– “Rates of three STDs in US reach record high, CDC says: Rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia have climbed for the fourth consecutive year in the United States…” (CNN)

– “How to be human: the man who was raised by wolves: Abandoned as a child, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja survived alone in the wild for 15 years. But living with people proved to be even more difficult.” (Guardian)

– “Brands Try to Convince New Generations Products Aren’t Just for Their Parents” For when hashtags just aren’t enough. (NYT)

– “Drone Captures First Images of an Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: Officials say images like these can help them learn how to better protect Brazil’s indigenous people.” We look forward to ruining whatever good thing they have going. (Smithsonian)

– “Apple: No, your iPhone isn’t eavesdropping on you” (CNN)

– “Listen, You’ve Gotta Stop Watching Videos With Volume On In Public” A message from the people who brought you, “That Loud Phone Call Could Have Just Been A Text.” (Uproxx)

– “Inviting the Next Financial Crisis: It is infuriating that officials have put the welfare of most Americans at risk to enrich the wealthiest few.” (NYT)

– “Distracted? Work Harder!: Trouble focusing could just mean that your work isn’t complex enough, and that there isn’t enough of it.” (NYT)

– “The Incredible, Rage-Inducing Inside Story of America’s Student Debt Machine: Why is the nation’s flagship loan forgiveness program failing the people it’s supposed to help?” (MotherJones)

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” – Frederick Douglass

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