Friday: Democratic party supporters, including Robert De Niro, targeted as US pipe bomb attacks spread. Plus: Craig Laundy on the leadership spill
Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 26 October.
More prominent US Democratic party figures have been sent pipe bombs in the mail, including actor Robert De Niro and former vice president Joe Biden, the FBI has confirmed, taking the total number of bombs sent to 10. Although the president, Donald Trump, initially condemned the attacks, he has now used the wave of unrest to lash out at the media. The media, he said, have “a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories”. Later, Trump tweeted: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting… Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
Authorities have said the 10 pipe bombs were sent to prominent critics of Trump, and have spread terror in the US less than two weeks before the midterm elections. Follow live updates here, where investigators are now focusing their attentions on Florida.
“The minute my teammates knew Malcolm was gone, they left.” Liberal MP Craig Laundy opens up to Katharine Murphy about being on the winning, and more recently losing, side of leadership spills. He also talks about his unorthodox journey from the private sector and the way he now sees the TV commentariat whip politicians into a frenzy out of proportion with the reality outside Canberra. Laundy talks about the reality of contemporary political life in the hope of explaining the inexplicable, possibly to himself, and certainly to voters watching from the outside; and he wants to talk about it while he’s still in the job in the hope of starting a conversation about how things could change. Listen to the podcast of the interview here.
The eldest son of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi has left Saudi Arabia as the Saudi public prosecutor’s office suggested for the first time that the writer’s killing was premeditated. Salah Khashoggi’s ashen face struck a chord with millions worldwide earlier this week after he was summoned to receive condolences from the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman – the man many believe ordered the assassination of his father. Saudi Arabia’s shifting story has been met with scepticism by Ankara and much of the rest of the international community. The new admission raises further questions as to who in the Saudi establishment had the authority to order an international assassination operation.
A woman who suffered anaphylaxis and was put into an induced coma after routine surgery in a Melbourne hospital alleges staff gave her medicines they had been told would lead to an allergic reaction. More than two and a half years after the woman attended the Royal Women’s hospital, she says she is still suffering from health problems and struggling to receive answers from medical authorities. She has said pre-operative consent forms listing her medical allergies were dismissed and ignored by doctors. She also alleged that one of her medical forms was changed to state that she had consented to the use of drugs she had listed on multiple forms as ones she had reactions to. The chief executive of the Royal Women’s hospital, Dr Sue Matthews, said the incident was investigated at the time and through review processes.
Labor senator Pat Dodson has described a government audit of deaths in custody reform as “pretty abysmal”, saying the lack of progress on reducing the Indigenous incarceration rate was “totally unsatisfactory”. The government tabled the review on Thursday, after the Senate moved an order to produce the document, in response to reporting by Guardian Australia’s Deaths Inside project. It found that only 64% of the 339 recommendations of the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody had been fully implemented, almost 30 years after its final report, but that a further 30% had been mostly or partially implemented. “If I was minister for Indigenous affairs, I wouldn’t be happy with that as a report card,” Dodson told Guardian Australia.
It often gets forgotten amid the noise and glare of professional sport, but for the vast majority of people the appeal of sport has little to do with winning. Few understand this better than Curtis McGrath, who first embraced sport as a means of rehabilitation after nearly losing his life in Afghanistan in 2012.
The route of the 2019 Tour de France has been unveiled and will feature 30 categorised climbs and five mountain finishes in what the organisers are promising will be “the highest Tour in history” – three of the mountain-top finishes will be above 2,000 metres and there will be back-to-back Alpine stages to take in Col d’Izoard, the Col du Galibier and the 2,770 metre-high Col d’Iseran – the highest paved road in Europe.
The Magic Pudding’s author Norman Lindsay might seem an unlikely person to pen a treasured book for children. The government censor repeatedly banned his work for obscenity, and his bohemian lifestyle was the source of much consternation. Yet the Magic Pudding has endured to celebrate a century in print this year. A longtime fan of Lindsay’s work, Jeff Sparrow reflects on the Pudding’s delightfully nasty characters and its enjoyment of the simple pleasures – eating, singing and fighting.
Anne Summers draws on over 40 years of feminist anger to explore her recent feelings as she watched the Brett Kavanaugh hearings about historical allegations of sexual abuse. In an essay that brings in her own experience with assault, harassment and the recent subversion of the #MeToo movement, Summers examines the nuanced difference between impotent rage and useful anger.
Brigid Delaney once went two weeks without eating – she was fasting. There were a lot of gross side effects but she also grappled with the question of why we use daft measures as opposed to good science to try to change how our body looks or how we feel about it. “I remember going out to buy teabags (I was allowed to drink black tea) and instead following a man home who was carrying a box of pizza,” writes Delaney. “God it smelt good. I went right up to his door.”
Trump is notoriously lax with his personal cellphone security, and the New York Times have published a report detailing how the Russians and the Chinese have been listening to the president’s personal iPhone calls to gain an insight into his thinking. Trump has denied the security breach and called the article “fake news”.
The Greens will introduce a motion calling for a federal anti-corruption body, the ABC reports, in a move that could test the Coalition’s control as it prepares to lead a minority government.
Australian super savings are heading for their worst performance in seven years, the Australian reports, with super shares dropping $50bn in one day. And in her weekly column at the Conversation, Michelle Grattan delves into the political legacy of Australia’s most recent prime ministers and wonders if Scott Morrison will be remembered “as the fireman who arrived late armed only with leaky buckets to confront a building ablaze and collapsing”.
Scott Morrison will host a national drought summit in Canberra today with the coordinator general for drought, Stephen Day, and the special envoy for drought assistance and recovery, Barnaby Joyce. The government has promised a $4bn future drought fund.
Gaming event Pax Australia kicks off in Melbourne at 9am today and runs across the weekend, featuring competitions and demonstrations of the latest games.
Never has a gloomy loner been so much loved. It won't cheer him up, but let's wish him happy birthday anyway
You may not know it, but today is Eeyore's birthday. And if there's one thing that upsets Eeyore more than anything, it's people forgetting his birthday. Traditionally Eeyore might receive a popped balloon from Piglet, or an empty honey jar from Pooh. But since AA Milne's gloomy donkey turns 140 today – which is Very Old Indeed – I think we should surprise him by celebrating his status as a truly great literary character.
The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are part of the fabric of our lives. We grow up reading them, then we read them to our children. But while each character is loveable, Eeyore seems to have a special place in our hearts. We are drawn helplessly towards him; we recognise something deeply human in his gloomy outlook. His sadness is our sadness. He's an Everyman; an Every-donkey.
In literary terms, Eeyore is the archetypal outsider. The other animals – Pooh, Piglet, Owl and the rest – dwell happily within Hundred Acre Wood, knocking on each others' doors, having tea and embarking on adventures. But not Eeyore. He lives on the other side of the stream in his Gloomy Place – marked on the map as "Rather Boggy and Sad". Rather than venture out to see others, he waits for them to pass through his field, which doesn't happen often. "I have my friends," he notes ruefully. "Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said 'Bother!' The Social Round. Always something going on."
So what does Eeyore spend most of his time doing? Like all great outsiders, he Thinks – and he takes great pains to distinguish himself from the other animals for this. ("They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake..."). There he is in his lonely corner of the forest, sometimes thinking sadly to himself, "Why?", and sometimes "Wherefore?" – and sometimes not quite knowing what he's thinking at all. While the other animals amble contentedly through their daily lives, Eeyore wrestles with these questions alone.
The tragedy is that all this thinking doesn't make Eeyore happy. As Benjamin Hoff has argued in his marvellous book The Tao of Pooh, Eeyore can't enjoy life because his mind is clouded with thoughts that cut him off from the world around him – which, in the case of Hundred Acre Wood, is a beautiful one. He can't live the simple, spontaneous and joyful life of Pooh – a Bear of Very Little Brain, maybe, but the happiest character in the wood because of it.
I think it's partly because, as well as being the most depressing individual in the Pooh books, he is also the funniest. Melancholy often teeters on the brink of absurdity, and Eeyore regularly falls over the edge. Take the classic scene in The House at Pooh Corner when Eeyore tumbles into the stream after the irrepressible Tigger bounces up behind him and takes him by surprise. The image of Eeyore, floating around in circles with his feet in the air, trying to maintain his sombre demeanour, is desperately funny and sad.
And then there's his truly glorious sarcasm (of which there are too many instances to catalogue here), whose hilarity is heightened further by the way that it sails straight over the other characters' heads.
But the key thing that makes Eeyore a great character is that essential literary ingredient: conflict. Eeyore is profoundly conflicted. He craves love – indeed, he's always lamenting his outsider status – but he struggles to give and receive it. When it's offered to him, he puts out his hoof and waves it away. There are many occasions when Pooh and Piglet, who love Eeyore unconditionally, pay him a visit only to be greeted with a barrage of sarcasm. Nowhere is this more poignantly displayed than the scene in The House at Pooh Corner where Piglet realises that Eeyore has never had a bunch of violets picked for him. When he finds Eeyore to deliver the bunch, however, he gets shooed away. "Tomorrow," says Eeyore. "Or the next day."
It's this conflict that humanises Eeyore, and makes his plight a sympathetic one. Despite his unyielding misery – or perhaps because of it – we all love Eeyore, so let's celebrate his birthday. I'm sure it would make him happy: eyes down, tail swishing, mumbling through a mouthful of thistles... "Thanks for noticing me."
Burnley survived a late penalty appeal in Istanbul as they drew 0-0 with Basaksehir in the third qualifying round of the Europa League.
Joe Hart was booked but impressed on his debut after signing from Manchester City while Basaksehir were unlucky not to get a chance from the spot to take a lead into next Thursday’s second leg after the ball appeared to strike Jeff Hendrick’s arm during the closing stages.
Rangers have the upper hand following a 3-1 win over Maribor at Ibrox. Alfredo Morelos struck from close range for the home side in the sixth minute before Mitja Viler brought parity and an away goal; but James Tavernier’s penalty and a late, scruffy Lassana Coulibaly effort ensured Steven Gerrard’s side take a two-goal cushion to Slovenia.
The Welsh Premier League champions, The New Saints, face a tall order in Denmark after going down 2-0 to Midtjylland while Cork City also need to overturn a 2-0 deficit after losing at Turners Cross to Rosenborg.
The Norwegian side entered the Europa League qualifying draw after being knocked out of the Champions League qualifying stages by Celtic last week.
Two former IRPT leaders and 12 others imprisoned over failed coup, as rights group say charges are politically motivated
The sentences complete the virtual elimination of the main opposition force capable of challenging Emomali Rahmon, pictured, who has been in power since 1992. Photograph: S Sabawoon/AP
Two former leaders of a banned Islamist party have been jailed for life in Tajikistan on charges of being behind an attempted coup last year, in a case criticised by human rights groups as politically motivated.
The central Asian state, formerly part of the Soviet Union, borders Afghanistan and is seen in Russia and the West as a conduit for drug traffickers and militants. Russia, which supported President Emomali Rahmon in a civil war in the 1990s, maintains a military base there.
The sentences passed by Tajikistan’s supreme court completed the virtual elimination of the main opposition force capable of challenging Rahmon, who has been in power since 1992, and follow a May referendum that could allow him to rule for life.
The court has also sentenced 11 other members of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) to between 14 and 28 years in prison. Zarafo Rakhmoni, the only woman among the defendants, was sentenced to two years on the same charges.
The US-based organisation Human Rights Watch said the trial was part of a “severe crackdown on political opposition”.
Tajikistan banned the IRPT last September after accusing it of being linked to a failed coup earlier that month led by a general, Abdukhalim Nazarzoda, who was killed along with 37 of his supporters in clashes with government forces.
The IRPT chairman, Mukhiddin Kabiri, who has left Tajikistan and spoke to Reuters before the verdict was announced, said the charges were trumped-up and part of a broad campaign aimed at eliminating the party.
“What is happening in the country will play into the hands of radicals and more and more youths, having lost all trust in the government, will join the ranks of extremist groups,” he said.
“Perhaps this is what the Tajik government wants in order to draw the international community to its side against the background of growing extremist tendencies.”
The IRPT was a successor to the Islamist wing of an opposition bloc that fought Rahmon’s government in the civil war. The crackdown on the party marked a decisive break from the power-sharing agreement that ended the war.
Paul Magnette, head of the Belgian region of Wallonia, refuses to sign off on Ceta and says a visit from Justin Trudeau would seem like ‘a confrontation’
Belgium’s head of government for Wallonia, Paul Magnette, attends a meeting on Ceta in Namur, Belgium, on Tuesday. Photograph: Nicolas Lambert/AFP/Getty Images
The head of the Belgian region of Wallonia is still refusing to sign off on a EU-Canada trade accord and asked that a visit by the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, be delayed.
Paul Magnette, the head of government of Wallonia, spoke a day after he received an ultimatum of Friday to allow Belgium’s federal government to endorse the huge trade deal, known as Ceta.
“We cannot sign by Friday. That is not reasonable,” a combative Magnette told RTBF radio after EU ministers asked he reverse course in time for a discussion on trade by European leaders set for Friday.
“I think that it is reasonable to delay indefinitely the meeting [with Trudeau set for 27 October] because it’s better to avoid what would seem like a confrontation,” Magnette added.
But in a sign that a breakthrough might be in the making, a spokesman for Magnette said the Canadian trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, met the regional leader in the Walloon capital of Namur on Wednesday.
Magnette was then set to meet the EU trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, and Belgium’s pro-Ceta foreign minister, Didier Reynders, in Brussels later in the day.
Magnette warned the commission, which handles EU trade talks, that his demands could only be met by reopening negotiations with Canada that were formally concluded two years ago.
“The treaty is already unravelling,” Magnette said, citing concessions agreed with Germany, which was allowed on Tuesday to kill the deal if the German constitutional court should later decide against it.
While Magnette cited progress in his talks with the EU, he said differences remained too wide on a contested investor protection system that has become a hot-button issue for the anti-Ceta movement.
The EU fears that the delay of Ceta would be fatal to the deal and send a bad signal to the world that it is difficult to reach trade accords with Europe.
“I still believe that we can find a way forward and we can get it through,” said the European commission vice-president Jyrki Katainen at a news briefing.
Magnette has drawn big support from opponents to Ceta, including Greenpeace and Foodwatch, that see the Canada deal as a Trojan horse for a far more ambitious trade accord between the EU and US, known as TTIP.
Both deals threaten environmental and consumer protection and offer big benefits to multinationals, the groups say.
Any houses in the way are simply more fuel. Preheated to 500C932F by the 100ft flames of the advancing blaze, homes don’t so much catch on fire as explode into flames. In a dense neighborhood, many homes may do this simultaneously. The speed of ignition shocks people – citizens and firefighters alike – but it is only the beginning.
Because the temperatures achievable in an urban wildfire are comparable to those in a crucible, virtually everything is consumed as fuel. What doesn’t burn, melts: steel car chassis warp and bend while lesser metals – aluminum engine blocks, magnesium wheels – will liquify.
In turn, the ferocious heat generates its own wind that can drive sparks and embers hundreds of meters ahead of the fire. Conflagrations of this magnitude are virtually unstoppable. Ordinary house fires often leave structures somewhat intact; things can be salvaged. But no one is prepared for the damage caused by a wildfire when it overruns their town – not the scale of it, nor its capacity to wipe out everything they have worked for.
In late July, nearly half of the 92,000 residents of Redding, California, were forced to evacuate. More than 1,600 homes, businesses and other structures burned in the Carr fire, due to sparks thrown by a trailer wheel with a flat tire. But the cause hardly matters; it was 45C113F that day, and the land was primed for fire.
Seven people were killed, three of them firefighters, but when survivors tell of their escapes, it seems a miracle there weren’t many more. A local dentist, surprised by the flames in the gated community of Stanford Hills, fled for her life through the woods. Disoriented, with no idea where to go, she and her husband followed the animals – deer, rabbits and squirrels – as they fled downhill, toward the Sacramento river. Several of her neighbors were rescued by helicopter.
Another neighbor, a retired homicide detective named Steve Bustillos, was preparing to evacuate when he noted an ominous, breath-like quality to the rising wind. It was the fire drawing oxygen into itself – so powerfully that it made the seals in his house whistle. When Bustillos stepped outside he saw the air rippling, “like when you open an oven door”.
A moment later, the air itself appeared to burst into flames. Trees and houses followed, igniting spontaneously in the superheated air. Bustillos escaped in his pickup, but the fire caught him on Buenaventura boulevard, a kilometre from his home. His pickup was heavy – over three tonnes – but it was moved off the road. After the passenger window blew out and the truck caught fire, Bustillos managed to exit the vehicle and take refuge under a nearby bulldozer.
Somehow, he survived and is recovering well, though he looked for a time as if he had been rolled in red-hot gravel. In the truck were all of his and his wife’s valuables – guns, jewelry, passports and cash. His loaded pistols were firing as the truck burned; nothing was salvageable. Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura, where a bulldozer operator was also killed, concluded that wind speeds were somewhere between 220 and 270km per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 1400C2552F” – the melting point of steel.
In other words, what Bustillos endured was equivalent to an EF3 tornado, combined with a blast furnace.
Carrie and Steve Bustillos stand near the spot where Steve narrowly survived the fire whirl as he was evacuating his home in the Carr Fire. He abandoned his truck after it caught fire, took cover under a bulldozer and survived with minor injuries.
"We all know someone who lost a home” is not a phrase you used to hear very often, but in the North American west, it has grown much more common over the past decade. The communities where you hear this are growing, too – small cities, entire neighborhoods.
In Redding, many residents returned to ruins and in them there are patterns. The showers often survive, standing alone, a morbid joke now, while washer-dryer sets stare out like blank eyes in a roofless skull. The charred shells of stoves, air conditioners, freezers and refrigerators are warped out of shape, or collapsed. Fire damage has its own palette; it runs from bone-white through taupe to charcoal black, the rest of the spectrum burned away.
Ash covers everything – the memories, the histories, smells, recipes and comforts, reduced now to the barest elements: carbon, stone and steel, all cloaked in smoke and suffused with the acrid reek of burning. This tableau repeated itself more than a thousand times around Redding – a thousand families standing on the sidewalk, wondering where their houses went.
Everyone who loses a home is struck by how much is gone, and also by what remains: a carpet preserved by leaking water from a ruptured water pipe; books, ghost-white with every page intact, until you touch them and they collapse in a cloud of ash.
A home is a kind of memory palace and there is an existential cruelty in the razing of it. To burn them down by the hundreds and thousands, as wildfires are doing now in the western US and Canada, is a brutal affront to the order we live by, to the habitats that give our lives meaning. Their loss shocks the heart like a sudden death. Left behind are juxtapositions so surreal and disorienting that to describe them sounds like the mutterings of an insane person: garbage can puddle; melted guns on a platter; cars bleeding aluminum; pile of tire wire. Is this really where I lived, where I raised my children? Where did their beds go? Their bedrooms?
The photos, the evidence – all of it is gone. In their place, a void, the shadow of a burned tree where the kitchen table was, pools of once-familiar things gone molten, settled now into new forms, rigid and unrecognizable.
Larry and Willie Hartman lost their uninsured home that they built in the Carr Fire, in Redding, Calif. Their home was in the path of the unusual fire whirl, with wind speeds of more than 140mph, that swept through their community. They pledged to rebuild.
A scorched landscape near Keswick Estates in Redding, Calif. Power transmitters like these were torn out of the earth from a powerful fire whirl that swept through the area.
Two miles north of Redding, on a broad, forested slope that feels almost rural save for the steady crackle of high tension wires overhead, Willie Hartman stands ankle-deep in the ruins of her home. Hartman is a slight but sturdy grandmother with white hair and a sad-eyed kindness and, a month on, while her granddaughter plays around her, she is still coming to terms with the fire that has unmade everything as far as the eye can see. Behind her, what used to be a metal porch railing droops like a Dali clock. Spotting a charred skeleton of furniture, she murmurs: “The lawn chair’s in the house.”
So is the mailbox. Nothing is where it should be anymore, or even what it should be because the Hartman family, along with hundreds of others in the thickly wooded hill country north of downtown, were subject to something far more intense than ordinary wildfire.
Hartman’s living room, which no longer exists, once had a picture window of double-paned glass, but it melted. You can see it now outside, a vitrified river flowing downhill toward her daughters’ homes, each of them burned to the foundations, many of their contents borne away on the incinerating wind that spun out of the Carr fire and into their neighborhood shortly before 8pm on 26 July.
Sarah Joseph, 73, lives a kilometre to the north-west, in the Keswick estates neighborhood of modest, mostly single-story homes. Many of the residents here were sure the 30 metre-wide Sacramento river would stop the fire’s advance. Joseph had to gather herself before describing what crossed the river on that 38C100F evening. “It looked like a tornado,” she said, “but with fire.” It arrived so quickly that she had only minutes to gather up her cat, some photos and a change of clothes before fleeing for her life.
There are videos and they are terrifying: surging up out of a cluster of burning neighborhoods is a whirling vortex 300 metres across, seething with smoke and fire. In the annals of firefighting, there is no direct comparable. No one has ever seen anything this big, this explosive, or this destructive rise up out of the forest and enter a town. During its brief existence of approximately 30 minutes, the incendiary cyclone sent jets of flame hundreds of metres into the sky, obliterated everything in its path, and generated such ferocious thermal energy that its smoke plume punched into the stratosphere.
The damage at ground zero, a 300-metre wide, kilometre-long swathe of scoured earth, annihilated homes and blasted forest running just south of the Hartman family compound, is hard to comprehend. There, a pair of 40-metre tall steel transmission towers have been torn from their concrete moorings and hurled to the ground where they still lie, crumpled like dead giraffes.
All the houses nearby are gone, stripped to the foundations. In the surviving branches of blackened trees, where plastic bags would ordinarily flutter, 3-metre pieces of sheet metal have been twisted like silk scarves. A 4-ton shipping container was torn to pieces and hurled across the landscape. The same thing happened to trucks and cars; one was wrapped around a tree.
Really Hartman, 6, explores areas of her family's property destroyed by the Carr Fire in Redding, Calif. on August 28, 2018.
Larry Hartman, Willie’s husband of 47 years, is a large, congenial man with a hydraulic handshake and a gift for problem-solving. Finding himself with a dozen bear-hunting dogs that needed regular exercise, he devised a mechanical carousel with twelve chain leashes that now lies upside down in a heap of unrelated wreckage. When I asked him what he would have imagined happened here if he hadn’t witnessed it himself, he regards the utter ruination all around him, the spaces where outbuildings and other landmarks of his life no longer are, and says, “A bomb. Like Hiroshima.”
When you compare photos of the hypocenter of that nuclear blast with the excoriated ground just south of the Hartmans’ property, they are hard to tell apart. One of the Hartmans’ daughters, Christel, used to hunt bears with her father and she inherited his formidable handshake. Christel recorded video of their evacuation on her phone, and it shows a fire surging over the hill, which is how many California wildfires arrive, but this fire is higher than the transmission lines.
You can see the towers’ latticed silhouettes ghosting in and out of the flaming wall. War of the Worlds comes to mind. “It made a roaring sound,” said Christel, “like a man.” She demonstrates for me and then says: “Only 10 times that.” Across Quartz Mine Road, a few hundred metres from the Hartman compound, an elderly woman and her two great grandchildren were burned alive in their trailer.
Captain Dusty Gyves, a 20-year veteran with Cal Fire, California’s 130-year-old state firefighting agency, was shocked by what he saw four hundred metres south-west of the Hartmans’. After being lifted into the air, a two-ton pickup truck was subjected to forces so extraordinarily violent that it looked, said Gyves, “like it had been through a car crusher”. And then incinerated.
A firefighter named Jeremy Stoke was inside that truck and there is a memorial to him now on Buenaventura, where he was wrenched from this world. There are flowers, a flag, a nightstick and a humorous portrait of Stoke holding a pistol, along with dozens of ballcaps, T-shirts and shoulder patches representing police and fire departments from all over California. Among the offerings is a handwritten note saying: “Rest easy, brother. We will take it from here.”
Sarah Joseph said she is moving to Oregon after the Carr Fire destroyed her home in Lake Keswick Estates in Redding, Calif.
Wildfire scientists bridle at the term “fire tornado”; they prefer “fire whirl”, but “fire whirl” seems inadequate to describe something that built its own weather system seven miles high. In 1978, meteorologist David Goens devised a classification system that placed fire whirls of this magnitude in the “fire storm” category, along with the caveat that: “This is a rare phenomenon and hopefully one that is so unlikely in the forest environment that it can be disregarded.”
For one, the addition of a new verb to the wildfire lexicon. “Natural fire never did this,” explained Gyves. “It shouldn’t moonscape.” But now it does. It is alarming to consider that this annihilating energy arrived out of thin air, born of fire and fanned by an increasingly common combination of triple-digit heat, single-digit humidity, high fuel loads, dying trees and the battling winds that swirl daily through the mountains and valleys all over California and the greater west.
That this phenomenon may represent something new under the sun has become a subject of earnest debate among fire scientists and meteorologists. The only other event that comes close is a full-blown tornado that occurred in conjunction with the notorious Canberra bushfires of 2003. With the exception of the Hamburg firestorm, ignited when Allied bombers dropped thousands of tons of incendiaries on that German city in 1943, there is no record of a “pyronado” of this magnitude occurring anywhere on earth.
Painfully clear is the fact that there is no way for firefighters to combat these all-consuming fires – with or without a tornado in their midst. Water has little effect on a high intensity wildfire. Among the structures burned near Redding was a fire station. As one Cal Fire representative said of the Carr fire’s ferocious early days: “It shifted from a firefighting effort to a life-saving effort.”
There was a time not so long ago, when a fire like this one, which forced the evacuation of 40,000 people and burned nearly 1,000 sq km across two counties, might have been a monstrous anomaly, but now, says Jonathan Cox, a Cal Fire battalion chief: “The anomalies are becoming more frequent and more deadly.”
Police tape is tied to a tree near where firefighter Jeremy Stoke was killed during a fire whirl in Carr Fire in Redding, Calif. According the the National Weather Service, winds exceeded 143 mph.
A scene from where a fire whirl swept through during the Carr Fire in Redding, Calif. According the the National Weather Service, winds exceeded 143 mph.
Eight of the most destructive wildfires in California’s fire-prone history have occurred in the past three years. But as destructive as others have been – the 2017 Tubbs fire with 44 lives lost and 5,600 structures destroyed; this year’s Mendocino Complex fire, the largest ever – none of them has unleashed the apocalyptic mayhem visited upon the Hartmans and their neighbors.
Once restricted to weapons of mass destruction and exceptionally intense forest fires in remote settings, the tornado-sized firestorm is no longer as unlikely as it was in the 1970s. In 2014, another huge one was observed in dense forest, just 40 miles east of Redding. As the climate changes, fires no longer cool down at night as they once did; instead, they simply grow bigger and more powerful. Meanwhile, human settlement continues to push deeper into the forest where kilotons of unburned energy waits for any spark at all.
But most people traumatized by wildfire aren’t thinking about that. They are thinking about getting their lives back. The Hartmans had no insurance, but Larry is optimistic: “If I have my way,” he says, “there’ll be a new house here in a year.”
Sarah Joseph was insured, but she is finished with Redding, a place she has witnessed growing steadily warmer. “I’ve walked out on everything two or three times in my life,” she said. “I can do it again.” There is a town in Oregon and she is taking her younger brother. That town is as vulnerable to wildfire as Redding; so are most towns now, from Mexico to Alaska, but that is not what concerns her.
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New features in this edition include: an improved romanisation system, an English-Korean vocabulary, a grammatical index and a new page design
Koreanis the official language of both North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 80 million Korean speakers, with large groups in various Post-Soviet states, as well as in other diaspora populations in China, Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and more recently, the Philippines.
The genealogical classification of the Korean language is debated. Many linguists place it in the Altaic language family, but some consider it to be a language isolate. It is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like the Japanese and Vietnamese languages, Korean language was influenced by the Chinese language in the form of Sino-Korean words. Native Korean words account for about 35% of the Korean vocabulary, while about 60% of the Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words. The remaining 5% comes from loan words from other languages, 90% of which are from English. The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North and South Korea. In North Korea and Yanbian in China, the language is most often called Chosŏnmal , or more formally, Chosŏnŏ. In the Republic of Korea, the language is most often called Hangukmal , or more formally, Hangugeo or Gugeo . It is sometimes colloquially called Urimal ("our language"; in one word in South Korea, with a space in North Korea).On the other hand, Korean people in the former USSR, who refer to themselves as Koryo-saram call the language Goryeomal .
The classification of the modern Korean language is uncertain, and due to the lack of any one generally accepted theory, it is sometimes described conservatively as a language isolate.
Since the publication of the article of Ramstedt in 1926, many linguists support the hypothesis that Korean can be classified as an Altaic language, or as a relative of proto-Altaic. Korean is similar to Altaic languages in that they both lack certain grammatical elements, including number, gender, articles, fusional morphology, voice, and relative pronouns (Kim Namkil). Korean especially bears some morphological resemblance to some languages of the Eastern Turkic group, namely Sakha (Yakut). Vinokurova, a scholar of the Sakha language, noted that like in Korean, and unlike in other Turkic languages or a variety of other languages surveyed, adverbs in Sakha are derived from verbs with the help of derivational morphology; however, she did not suggest this implied any relation between the two languages.
It is also considered likely that Korean is related in some way to Japanese, since the two languages have a similar grammatical structure. Genetic relationships have been postulated both directly and indirectly, the latter either through placing both languages in the Altaic family, or by arguing for a relationship between Japanese and the Buyeo languages of Goguryeo and Baekje (see below); the proposed Baekje relationship is supported additionally by phonological similarities such as the general lack of consonant-final sounds, and by cognates such as Baekje mir, Japanese mi- "three". Furthermore, there are known cultural links between Baekje and Japan; historical evidence shows that, in addition to playing a large role in the founding and growth of Yamato Japan, many of the Baekje upper classes, as well as the artisans and merchants, fled to Japan when the kingdom fell (a theory which appeared to be endorsed by Japanese Emperor Akihito in a speech marking his 68th birthday).
Others argue, however, that the similarities are not due to any genetic relationship, but rather to a sprachbund effect. See East Asian languages for morphological features shared among languages of the East Asian sprachbund, and Japanese language classification for further details on the possible relationship.
Of the ancient languages attested in the Korean Peninsula, modern Korean is believed to be a descendent of the languages of Samhan and Silla; it is unknown whether these are related to the Buyeo languages, though many Korean scholars believe they were mutually intelligible, and the collective basis of what in the Goryeo period would merge to become Middle Korean (the language before the changes that the Seven-Year War brought) and eventually Modern Korean. The Jeju dialect preserves some archaic features that can also be found in Middle Korean, whose arae a is retained in the dialect as a distinct vowel.
There are also fringe theories proposing various other relationships; for example, a few linguists such as Homer B. Hulbert have also tried to relate Korean to the Dravidian languages through the similar syntax in both.
Korean has several dialects (called mal [literally "speech"], saturi, or bang-eon in Korean). The standard language (pyojuneo or pyojunmal) of South Korea is based on the dialect of the area around Seoul, and the standard for North Korea is based on the dialect spoken around P'yŏngyang. These dialects are similar, and are in fact all mutually intelligible, perhaps with the exception of the dialect of Jeju Island (see Jeju Dialect). The dialect spoken in Jeju is in fact classified as a different language by some Korean linguists. One of the most notable differences between dialects is the use of stress: speakers of Seoul dialect use stress very little, and standard South Korean has a very flat intonation; on the other hand, speakers of the Gyeongsang dialect have a very pronounced intonation.
It is also worth noting that there is substantial evidence for a history of extensive dialect levelling, or even convergent evolution or intermixture of two or more originally distinct linguistic stocks, within the Korean language and its dialects. Many Korean dialects have basic vocabulary that is etymologically distinct from vocabulary of identical meaning in Standard Korean or other dialects, such as South Jeolla dialect /kur/ vs. Standard Korean /ip/ "mouth" or Gyeongsang dialect / vs. Standard Korean / "garlic chives." This suggests that the Korean Peninsula may have at one time been much more linguistically diverse than it is at present..
There is a very close connection between the dialects of Korean and the regions of Korea, since the boundaries of both are largely determined by mountains and seas.
In her latest book, Joyce Meyer provides a path to release from the overwhelming need for acceptance from the outside world, an acceptance that is unfulfilling and leads only to disappointment. Through an analysis of what makes an "approval addict" and the ways to find release from specific character traits that foster addiction, Joyce provides a supportive voice and a personal understanding of the effect of insecurity in one's life. Her abiding message is that God provides all the affirmation anyone needs and through Him they can attain freedom. Begin the journey toward self-understanding and learn to:
Accept who you are. All of us struggle with our sense of worthiness. Joyce's goal is to help us understand that we are all whole in God, regardless of our flaws.
Address your approval addictions. Understanding the specific character traits that foster addiction, and how our past is often a factor in our behavior, is a major step in overcoming our insecurities.
Break the pattern for the future. Only by taking conscious steps toward accepting ourselves and examining our motives, and by depending on the God who loves us regardless, can we finally begin to break the chains of insecurity and move toward a life free from emotional pain.
God tells us over and over in the Bible that we are loved and we are worthy. Begin now to overcome your approval addiction by taking an honest look at who you are and how you feel about yourself.
Through Joyce Meyer Ministries, she teaches on hundreds of subjects, has authored over seventy books and conducts close to fifteen conferences per year. To date, more than 3 million of her books have been donated around the world, and in 2006 nearly 4.3 million copies were sold. Joyce also has a television and radio program, Enjoying Everyday Life®, that is broadcast worldwide to a potential audience of 3 billion people.
Suffering sexual abuse as a child and the pain of an emotionally abusive first marriage, Joyce discovered the freedom to live victoriously by applying God's Word to her life and in turn desires to help others do the same. From her battle with breast cancer to the struggles of everyday life, she speaks openly and practically about her experiences so others can apply what she has learned to their lives.
Joyce holds an earned PhD in theology from Life Christian University in Tampa, Florida; an honorary doctorate in divinity from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and an honorary doctorate in sacred theology from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. Joyce and her husband, Dave, have been married for over forty years, and they are the parents of four grown children. Dave and Joyce Meyer make their home in St. Louis, Missouri.
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UK epic doom metal band Desolate Pathway are delighted to announce a guest guitarist for their upcoming album: none other than Kostas Salomidis of Greek stalwarts Sorrows Path. The new material comes off the back of last year’s Valley Of The King, which garnered praise from both sides of the pond. Brutiful Metal Radio declared that “Desolate Pathway have done what many bands in this genre fail to do and have made an album that early Candlemass would be proud of.”
Guitarist Vince Hempstead commented: “We would like to announce with honour that Kostas Salomidis from the amazing Greek Doom band Sorrows Path has recorded 2 guest guitar solos for our 2nd album planned for early 2016. Last week, Kostas recorded the guitar solos at Fragile Studios in Athens with producer Vangelis Yalamas, and the results are amazing. A great way to connect with our Greek mythology-based new recordings.”
Although Legal Services Corp. will receive a $10 million bump in funding for fiscal year 2016, Indiana Legal Services will see its appropriation from the national organization decrease.
The $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill passed by Congress Dec. 18 included $385 million for the Legal Services Corp. The funding level is up from fiscal year 2015’s appropriation of $375 million and continues the trend of increasing Congressional support that hit $365 million in FY 2013. That was $25 million more than funding for FY 2012.
The LSC’s support for 134 local nonprofit legal aid organizations across the United States is calculated by the number of people living in poverty. While Indiana’s poverty population jumped by roughly 2 percent from 2011 through 2014 according U.S. Census data, the poverty population of other areas has increased by a higher percentage.
Consequently, Indiana appropriation from the LSC will slip. The Hoosier state’s portion for FY 2016 will be $6.53 million, down from $6.56 million for FY 2015.
“We’re very pleased with the result of the Congressional appropriation process,” Laramore said. “The bipartisan support for legal services allows us to maintain the same size program in 2016 that we had in 2015.”
To keep its programs running at current levels, Indiana Legal Services will be drawing from the $275,000 grant from the Bank of America settlement funds and is anticipating other grants to be forthcoming.
Legal Services Corp. had requested $486.9 million for FY 2016 and the White House recommended $452 million in funding for the organization. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to cut the LSC appropriation by 20 percent to $300 million but a few weeks later, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $385 million for LSC.
“We’re very grateful for the $10 million increase in our Congressional funding,” LSC board chair John Levi said after the omnibus spending bill passed. “The bipartisan for this measure illustrates that Congress recognizes the importance of ensuring that all Americans have equal access to justice.”
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ADHD and ADD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder, are the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorders in children, especially boys, and are characterized by lack of focus, distraction, or difficult-to-control energy. Most pediatricians prescribe drugs like Ritalin to control these behaviors, but abuse and misuse of the drug have caused emergency room visits to increase drastically within the last generation.
These misunderstood children are given drugs to calm them down, and it can result in merely masking the symptoms while the underlying issue is still there. As a behavioral disorder, it results from a nervous system imbalance, since the nervous system controls brain function and all other systems. Chiropractic therapy, however, could be a healthy alternative to drugs since it targets the spine, which is closely connected to the nervous system.
Very little research has been done so far to conclude or suggest any significant changes made in behavioral health in children through chiropractic assessment. However there have been cases in which children diagnosed with ADHD at a very early age have gone through chiropractic therapy and were then removed from prescription drugs because symptoms of the disorder were no longer evident.
More research needs to be done to extract more evidence, but chiropractic itself aims to target whole-body health, including mental state of being, and behavioral disorders could be affected by chiropractic. While there are very few specialized pediatric chiropractors, the field deserves a closer examination by doctors and parents as a potential alternative to high-risk drugs that are more often used in children and do nothing to solve the root cause of the problem itself.
Chiropractic care could be a solution to the root cause of ADD, ADHD and other behavioral problems in children as well as adults by aligning and regulating the nervous system, putting other systems back into balance with long-lasting treatment.
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