If You Don't Believe In Global Warming-Have A Look At Greenland Now

DAY IN REVIEW

OMG, the Water's Warm! NASA Study Solves Glacier PuzzleA new NASA study explains why the Tracy and Heilprin glaciers, which flow side by side into Inglefield Gulf in northwest Greenland, are melting at radically different rates. Using ocean data from NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign, the study documents a plume of warm water flowing up Tracy's underwater face, and a much colder plume in front of Heilprin. Scientists have assumed plumes like these exist for glaciers all around Greenland, but this is the first time their effects have been measured. The finding highlights the critical role of oceans in glacial ice loss and their importance for understanding future sea level rise. A paper on the research was published June 21 in the journal Oceanography. Tracy and Heilprin were first observed by explorers in 1892 and have been measured sporadically ever since. Even though the adjoining glaciers experience the same weather and ocean conditions, Heilprin has retreated upstream less than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in 125 years, while Tracy has retreated more than 9.5 miles (15 kilometers). That means Tracy is losing ice almost four times faster than its next-door neighbor. This is the kind of puzzle OMG was designed to explain. The five-year campaign is quantifying ice loss from all glaciers that drain the Greenland Ice Sheet with an airborne survey of ocean and ice conditions around the entire coastline, collecting data through 2020. OMG is making additional boat-based measurements in areas where the seafloor topography and depths are inadequately known. About a decade ago, NASA's Operation IceBridge used ice-penetrating radar to document a major difference between the glaciers: Tracy is seated on bedrock at a depth of about 2,000 feet (610 meters) below the ocean surface, while Heilprin extends only 1,100 feet (350 meters) beneath the waves. Scientists would expect this difference to affect the melt rates, because the top ocean layer around Greenland is colder than the deep water, which has traveled north from the midlatitudes in ocean currents. The warm water layer starts about 660 feet (200 meters) down from the surface, and the deeper the water, the warmer it is. Naturally, a deeper glacier would be exposed to more of this warm water than a shallower glacier would. When OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, looked for more data to quantify the difference between Tracy and Heilprin, "I couldn't find any previous observations of ocean temperature and salinity in the fjord at all," he said. There was also no map of the seafloor in the gulf. OMG sent a research boat into the Inglefield Gulf in the summer of 2016 to fill in the data gap. The boat's soundings of ocean temperature and salinity showed a river of meltwater draining out from under Tracy. Because freshwater is more buoyant than the surrounding seawater, as soon as the water escapes from under the glacier, it swirls upward along the glacier's icy face. The turbulent flow pulls in surrounding subsurface water, which is warm for a polar ocean at about 33 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius). As it gains volume, the plume spreads like smoke rising from a smokestack. "Most of the melting happens as the water rises up Tracy's face," Willis said. "It eats away at a huge chunk of the glacier." Heilprin also has a plume, but its shallower depth limits the plume's damage in two ways: the plume has a shorter distance to rise and gathers less seawater; and the shallow seawater it pulls in has a temperature of only about 31 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 0.5 degree Celsius). As a result, even though Heilprin is a bigger glacier and more water drains from underneath it than from Tracy, its plume is smaller and colder. The study produced another surprise by first mapping a ridge, called a sill, only about 820 feet (250 meters) below the ocean surface in front of Tracy, and then proving that this sill did not keep warm water from the ocean depths away from the glacier. "In fact, quite a lot of warm water comes in from offshore, mixes with the shallower layers and comes over the sill," Willis said. Tracy's destructive plume is evidence of that.

Canada Is Going To Legalize Marijuana For Recreational Use

CANADA

A New Leaf

Canadian tourist T-shirts could well swap the traditional maple leaf for another icon following a Senate vote Tuesday making Canada the world’s first wealthy nation to fully legalize marijuana.

With it already approved by the House of Commons, the Senate approval means Bill C-45, otherwise known as the Cannabis Act, will soon become law. The measure legalizes marijuana possession, home growing, and sales for adults, with some remaining criminal penalties for things like selling to minors.

The move could also have dramatic implications for US drug policy, Vox reported.

While nine US states have also legalized marijuana for recreational use and 29 have allowed medicinal use, Canada’s federal legalization of the drug could potentially undermine three major international drug policy treaties, long fudged on the side of the Americans by saying federal laws still outlaw the drug, Vox wrote. Uruguay fully legalized marijuana in 2013.

Meanwhile, the British government said it would review the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes but rejected suggestions by a former foreign secretary regarding legalizing recreational use, the BBC reported.

One Of Our Most Beloved Restaurants In The San Francisco Bay Area Is Closing

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Patrons-grieve-end-of-popular-Richmond-12999531.php?t=530743c05a

The Last Men Killed In Vietnam

The Last Men Killed In Vietnam

I have been honored to have Chris Alexander as a wonderful and beloved friend for 54 years. There are not enough good words to describe him.

After all these years, I discovered something new about him. He took the US Air Force test for pilot at Tulane's Air Force ROTC. He scored high and was encouraged to become a US Air Force fighter pilot,Chris graciously turned down this offer.(In my case I took the test for US Navy aviator and failed.)

This got me thinking. Truly the last man killed in Vietnam was a US Army major killed by accident after hostilities ceased. (It was a tragic misunderstanding.) In combat the last 2 men killed in Vietnam were flying in a US Air Force F-4 Phantom jet. If Chris had chosen to become an air force pilot after his hypothetical 1971 graduation from Tulane, he would have spent 12-18 months training to fly this mach-2 fighter. He could have very well been flying that F-4 Phantom shot down by the North Vietnamese right at the end of the war.

Elite Gurkhas from Nepal deployed to secure Trump-Kim summit

 ANNABELLE LIANG and KIM-TONG-HYUNG,Associated Press 4 hours ago 

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FILE - In this June 10, 2018, file photo, Gurkha police officers guard the perimeter of the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore ahead of the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (AP Photo/Yong Teck Lim, File)

SINGAPORE (AP) — To protect one of the highest-profile diplomatic events so far this century, Singapore has enlisted the help of its fearsome Nepalese fighters whose large curved knives, according to custom, must "taste blood" whenever they're drawn.

Wearing brown berets and equipped with body armor and assault rifles, the elite Gurkha police officers are a conspicuous part of the enveloping security force Singapore has deployed for Tuesday's summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The meeting, which could prove to be a crucial moment in the global diplomatic push to resolve the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang, has sent the highly manicured city-state into security overdrive. Trump and Kim have brought their own personal security personnel and heavily armored limousines; Kim's bodyguards have been seen running in formation alongside his massive Mercedes.

Selected among young men from impoverished Nepal, Gurkhas have been part of Singapore's police force since 1949. There are reportedly about 1,800 Gurkha officers in Singapore, and they are a regular presence at high-security events. On Monday, they were seen standing guard at the heavily fortified St. Regis Singapore, where Kim arrived Sunday afternoon.

"This is a moment of pride to see the Gurkhas responsible for guarding such an important event," said Krishna Kumar Ale, who served for 37 years in the British army before retiring back home in Nepal. "It shows that we Gurkhas have reached a point where we are trusted with the security of two of the most important people in the world."

In 2015, during the Shangri-la Dialogue, a Singapore summit that includes defense ministers and top security officials from around the world, a Gurkha officer shot and killed a driver after his car breached a series of roadblocks outside the summit's venue. The incident turned out to be drug-related, not an attack.

When asked about the scale of security operations for the summit, Singapore's Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said Sunday that more than 5,000 police had been deployed. The Gurkha Contingent is a special police unit inside the force.

"I think the fact that it had to be put together in two weeks ... added tremendously to the pressure and logistics, the demands. But I think the officers have worked around the clock, we are quietly confident that they have put in place the preparations," he said.

Singapore is not new to hosting high-profile events, including International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group meetings, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations summits in 2007 and 2018.

Gurkhas, whose name derives from the Nepalese hill town of Gorkha, have been deployed in major conflicts and wars since becoming part of the British army in the 19th century. More than 200,000 Gurkhas fought in the two world wars, where they won admiration for their combat skills and bravery, living up to their traditional motto "It's better to die than to be a coward." Gurkhas also fought in the Falklands conflict, the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

The British experienced Gurkhas' fierceness firsthand after suffering heavy losses during their invasion of Nepal. A peace deal signed by the British East India Company in 1815 allowed Britain to recruit troops from Nepal.

After Indian independence in 1947, Britain, Nepal and India reached an agreement to transfer four Gurkha regiments to the Indian army. Former British colonies Singapore and Malaysia have also employed Gurkhas for their police and army, respectively.

In Nepal, getting picked to serve as Gurkha soldiers and officers overseas is seen as a ticket out of poverty. According to Nepal's Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen Organization, over 10,000 applicants try out every year for about 260 places in the British army's Gurkha units. Many train for months for the selection process, which includes a grueling "doko" race, which involves carrying 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of sand while running a steep 4.2-kilometer (2.6-mile) uphill course.

Along with their modern weapons, Gurkhas still carry the traditional "kukri," a long curved knife which tradition says must "ragat khaikana" — taste blood — once it is drawn.

"That is no longer the current practice ... mostly," said the Gurkhas Australia website.

___

Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea. AP writer Binaj Gurubacharya in Kathmandu, Nepal, contributed to this report.

Now The Economists Are Predicting The 2018 World Cup Results

https://on.ft.com/2l4mpxg

Donald Trump's Misguided Trade War

I have over 35 years experience in international trade. Here are some things I know well as follows:

1) I lived for 5 years in Brasil. When it comes to international trade, they have a Brasil first policy that Donald Trump would love. Massive import duties are imposed on virtually everything that must be imported to Brasil. The result is very high prices for any sort of consumer electronics, cars, clothes, shoes; the list can go on for pages. More affluent Brasilians leave with empty suitcases and buy most of what they need in other countries. The poor suffer and often cannot even afford the necessities of life.

2) I live relatively near the port of Oakland. Huge container ships full of goods dock at the port. They off load massive amount of goods made primarily in China but also in other Asian countries. The containers containing all of these goods sit empty at the Port of Oakland. The US runs a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world.

3) Germany has just the opposite experience. Massive cargo container ships come from Asian countries to German ports like Hamburg. The Asian goods are off loaded. The containers are filled with very high-quality manufactured goods from Germany that go back to Asia. Germany has a huge trade surplus and the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. Does Germany have "a Germany First" trade policy putting massive import duties on products that come from other countries. No, they just do a better job of being competitive.

4) Donald Trump reads trade statistics that show these trade imbalances and concludes that it is unfair to the USA. These trade statistics do not show the whole picture of international economics. A lot of money comes back to the US from foreign countries that is not recorded in the official trade figures. I could write a book on this. If we did the statistics right, we might find that the US actually has a trade surplus with the rest of the world.

5) A cautionary tale from 1929-1932 is in order here. Most people believe that the stock market crashes of 1929 and onward caused The Great Depression. In those times long ago, only 2% of the US population was invested in the stock market. What actually caused The Great Depression was a series of trade wars with high import duties as Trump is doing now.

From Russia With Love-The New Crimea Bridge

CRIMEA

From Russia with Love

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin opened a $4-billon bridge linking mainland Russia with the annexed Crimean peninsula in a polished television event typical of the newly re-elected president’s trademark machismo.

With Russian oligarchs in tow, a jeans-clad Putin climbed into a truck cab and revved up the engine while talking to construction workers at the Russian end of the 12-mile-long expanse, the Washington Post reported.

A massive infrastructure project thrice proposed and thrice failed by Putin’s predecessors, the bridge, which finished ahead of schedule, showed that “even the most ambitious plans can be realized when they are implemented by him,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists before the event.

It also showed that Putin is far from done exerting his influence over Ukraine.

Though largely neglected nowadays, fighting continues in Eastern Ukraine against pro-Russian separatist forces and the Ukrainian government.

The conflict began in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, a move condemned by Kiev and the rest of the West as an illegal land grab under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians.

Hefty sanctions were issued against Russia, a move that affected the livelihoods of Crimea’s some two million residents due to blockades and limited access to mainland Russia, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The bridge, which can support some 40,000 passenger vehicles per day and 14 million tons of freight per year, will open to commercial traffic in the coming months, making access from Russia easier, wrote AFP.

But it’s bound to also ratchet up tensions between Russia and Ukraine as a symbolic move of the permanence of the annexation, researcher Gabriella Gricius wrote for Global Security Review.

Just days after its opening, Ukraine filed a complaint with the International Tribunal about the bridge, claiming that it violated the nation’s sovereignty.

Easier access between Russia and Crimea has also heightened concerns about a demographic shift on the peninsula.

Ukrainian officials say hundreds of thousands of Russians have migrated to Crimea since 2014, while 40,000 Crimeans have registered as displaced persons on mainland Ukraine, RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty reported.

One minority leader in Crimea, where an estimated 65 percent of the population is now Russian, asserted that as many as one million Russians have made their way across the Kerch Strait.

“Forcibly shifting the demographic composition of an occupied territory is a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev said in an interview with the news agency Ukrinform, RFE/RL reported.

In order to show the ills of the Kremlin – and in a plot fit for a James Bond film – the Ukrainian Security Service staged the murder of a Russian journalist in exile in Kiev last week.

He’d fled Russia in 2017 for his critical war reports, and in faking his death, Ukrainian authorities uncovered a Russian state-sponsored plot, the Associated Press reported.

But the machismo, bridge scenes and plot twists aren’t just made for TV, wrote the Economist: Ukraine is showing it’s willing to play Russia’s own game of covert operations and cover-ups in order to get ahead in the conflict.

The question now is how far it all goes

Indonesia: A Horrible Precedent

INDONESIA

‘A Truly Horrible Precedent’

Militants in the Islamic State are celebrating their first Ramadan since their terror organization lost control of most of the territory they seized in Iraq and Syria in recent years.

It’s not a coincidence that the group’s chapters in Indonesia have stepped up their efforts, wrote Greg Barton, a professor of global Islamic politics at Australia’s Deakin University, in the Conversation.

Attacks throughout the archipelago that is home to the world’s largest Muslim population killed at least 26 and injured dozens more in mid-May.

The attacks included bombings at three churches in Surabaya, which the police said were carried out by a “well-liked” couple who used their own four children as suicide bombers on motorcycles. The kids were ages nine to 18.

“Indonesia may have set a truly horrible precedent,” Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, told the South China Morning Post. “It’s a very significant development. It hasn’t happened before in Indonesia or elsewhere that I know of where whole families were involved as suicide bombers.”

Others were less analytical.

“As a parent, I wanted to understand what had compelled this family to erase itself from the earth,” wrote New York Times reporter Hannah Beech. “Every explanation seemed inadequate.”

It was only one of three attacks involving families in May, and almost every day last month saw an attack, an attempted attack or an operation to prevent an attack, wrote Jones in an opinion piece in the New York Times.

But, unlike Syria and Iraq, where civil war and weak governments failed to address the Islamic State’s rise before the group controlled vast tracts of territory and major cities, Indonesia is moving quickly to address the threat.

After the attacks, Indonesian lawmakers passed a controversial anti-terror law that expands the military’s role in internal security, allows authorities to detain suspects for 21 days without charge and for an additional 200 days before a trial, Al Jazeera reported. Anyone caught trafficking in weapons for terrorists faces the death penalty.

And on Sunday, Indonesia proposed cooperation through joint security exercises to fight terrorism in the Indo-Pacific region, the Jakarta Post wrote.

But the police and military have their work cut out for them.

Around 1,000 Indonesians traveled to the Middle East to fight for the Islamic State between 2014 and this year. Around 500 have returned. Islamic State leaders have urged those and others to join the jihad against the Indonesian government, non-Muslims and other targets, the BBC said, adding that around 30 terror cells have likely set up shop in the country.

It’s not clear if a crackdown will change the hearts and minds of those jihadists.

Terror detainees linked to the Islamic State rioted in an Indonesian prison in early May and kept security forces at bay for two days before authorities overpowered the inmates, for example.

Critics of the new anti-terror law abound. But even critics agree that something must be done to counter a dark – and spreading – new threat.