city:houston

  • La Nasa a été piratée par un mini-ordinateur à 35 dollars
    http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/la-nasa-a-ete-piratee-par-un-mini-ordinateur-a-35-dollars-20190624

    Un hacker a infiltré le réseau informatique d’un centre de la Nasa l’an dernier, forçant l’agence spatiale américaine à déconnecter temporairement des systèmes de contrôle des vols spatiaux du centre affecté.

    L’attaque a commencé en avril 2018 et s’est poursuivie pendant près d’un an dans les réseaux du mythique Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) à Pasadena en Californie, a révélé l’inspecteur général de la Nasa dans un rapport publié le 18 juin.

    L’assaillant a utilisé pour son méfait un mini-ordinateur coûtant 35 dollars et baptisé Raspberry Pi, de la taille d’une carte de crédit et qui se branche sur les télévisions. Il est surtout utilisé par des enfants des pays en développement pour apprendre à coder. Le Raspberry Pi en question s’était connecté sans autorisation au système du JPL.
    Environ 500 mégaoctets de données ont été dérobés, selon le rapport.

    Le vol inclut deux fichiers confidentiels dont un contenant des données scientifiques obtenues par le rover Curiosity qui se trouve sur Mars. Un autre concernait des données couvertes par la loi de contrôle à l’export de technologies pouvant être utilisées militairement.

    « De façon plus importante, l’assaillant a réussi à s’introduire dans deux des trois réseaux principaux du JPL », révèle le rapport.
    Cette faille a fait craindre à la Nasa que le hacker puisse passer du centre de Californie à d’autres centres ailleurs dans le pays, notamment le centre spatial Johnson à Houston, où se trouve la salle de contrôle pour la Station spatiale internationale et les vols habités américains.

    Finalement, « Houston » s’est déconnecté du portail du JPL afin d’éviter toute contamination. En mars, le centre ne s’était toujours pas pleinement reconnecté.

    • Comme Benjamin S. @vincib, j’ai tiqué sur la phrase « Il [le RP pas cher à 35 USD] est surtout utilisé par des enfants des pays en développement pour apprendre à coder ». D’abord mon petit-fils l’utilise chez Codecodecodec à Paris pour apprendre à coder, et puis dans les PED les enfants et les jeunes qui ont accès à la pratique du code sont privilégiés, et donc ils codent sur du matos normal.

  • Aux États-Unis, extension du domaine de la #surveillance des élèves
    http://www.internetactu.net/a-lire-ailleurs/aux-etats-unis-extension-du-domaine-de-la-surveillance-des-eleves

    La peur des fusillades dans les écoles aux États-Unis fait prendre à la société américaine des décisions absurdes, estime le journaliste Benjamin Herold (@BenjaminBHerold) dans une longue enquête pour Education Week (@educationweek). Surveiller les #réseaux_sociaux pour prévenir les fusillades ? Dans une des banlieues de Houston au Texas, le district (...)

    #A_lire_ailleurs #Enjeux #Services #Education_et_formation #Territoires

  • The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Americans From Top Cancer Research - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-13/the-u-s-is-purging-chinese-americans-from-top-cancer-research

    In January, Wu, an award-winning epidemiologist and naturalized American citizen , quietly stepped down as director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center after a three-month investigation into her professional ties in China. Her resignation, and the departures in recent months of three other top Chinese American scientists from Houston-based MD Anderson, stem from a Trump administration drive to counter Chinese influence at U.S. research institutions.

    #Chine #Etats-unis #air_du_temps #régression

  • Twelve Empty Supertankers Reveal Truths About Today’s Oil Market - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-21/twelve-empty-supertankers-reveal-truths-about-today-s-oil-market

    They are slowly plowing their way across thousands of miles of ocean toward America’s Gulf of Mexico coastline. As they do, twelve empty supertankers are also revealing a few truths about today’s global oil market.

    In normal times, the vessels would be filled with heavy, high sulfur Middle East oil for delivery to refineries in places like Houston or New Orleans. Not now though. They are sailing cargo-less, a practice that vessel owners normally try to avoid because ships earn money by making deliveries.

    The 12 vessels are making voyages of as much as 21,000 miles direct from Asia, all the way around South Africa, holding nothing but seawater for stability because Middle East producers are restricting supplies. Still, America’s booming volumes of light crude must still be exported, and there aren’t enough supertankers in the Atlantic Ocean for the job. So they’re coming empty.

    What’s driving this is a U.S. oil market that’s looking relatively bearish with domestic production estimates trending higher, and persistent crude oil builds we have seen for the last few weeks,” said Warren Patterson, head of commodities strategy at ING Bank NV in Amsterdam. “At the same time, OPEC cuts are supporting international grades like Brent, creating an export incentive.

    The U.S. both exports and imports large amounts of crude because the variety it pumps — especially newer supplies from shale formations — is very different from the type that’s found in the Middle East. OPEC members are likely cutting heavier grades while American exports are predominantly lighter, Patterson said.

    • Trois jours plus tard, Bloomberg remet une couche…

      des supertankers traversent l’Atlantique chargés d’eau de mer (sur ballast, quoi…)

      Rise of Shale Oil and OPEC Cuts Leave Supertankers Empty - Bloomberg
      https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-24/rise-of-shale-oil-and-opec-cuts-leave-supertankers-empty

      Supertankers hauling seawater across the Atlantic? That’s just one of the odder results of the U.S. shale boom.

      Crude oil has always flowed backwards and forwards across the world’s oceans. A typical voyage by one of the global fleet of around 750 of the giant ships currently in service might see it haul Middle Eastern exports across the Atlantic to a refinery on the U.S. Gulf coast, then pick up a cargo from Venezuela for delivery to China or India, before returning to the Persian Gulf.

      Vessels only earn money when they’re full, so being able to haul cargoes in both directions across the seas makes a great deal of sense for ship owners. But soaring U.S. production, OPEC output cuts and sanctions on Iran and Venezuela are turning the global crude oil trade on its head.
      […]
      Add to this a pickup in the flow of oil out of the Caribbean – Venezuela is shipping more of its crude east now that U.S. sanctions prevent it from targeting its traditional buyers on the Gulf coast.

  • A Brief Numerical Overview of the #texas #startup Ecosystem
    https://hackernoon.com/a-brief-numerical-overview-of-the-texas-startup-ecosystem-7ae90e12a149?s

    © AltalogyAt Altalogy, we deliver software development services for two Houston-based clients. A few weeks ago, I was discussing the pros and cons of Houston startup ecosystem with Dommonic Nelson, Clever Box Company Founder.The following point was made“When it comes to startups and tech in Texas, Austin outperforms Houston by order of magnitude”.I was a bit surprised by that fact and decided to see how other cities in Texas compare. As a source of information, I selected Angel List. I’m fully aware of the bias that some companies may not be present there though.The comparison includes 4 Largest Cities — Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin.Disclaimer: I live in Central Europe 7 hours time zone away from Texas, and the only time I’ve seen the Lone Star State myself was from an aircraft (...)

    #texas-startup-ecosystem #texas-startup #startup-life

  • Le silence sur la pédophilie est un « pêché collectif » pour le patron des évêques de France
    https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/02/17/le-silence-sur-la-pedophilie-est-un-peche-collectif-pour-le-patron-des-evequ

    « Nous devons travailler tous ensemble contre la pédophilie. La hiérarchie (religieuse, ndlr) n’est pas la seule coupable. Dans certaines familles, des parents très chrétiens ont empêché leur enfant de parler. C’est un péché collectif."

    « Il y a quelque chose de systémique dans la négligence, le poids et la défense des institutions par rapport aux personnes victimes », dit-il, assurant que l’Église doit prendre ses responsabilités. « On ne peut plus rejeter la faute, dire que ce sont les médias ou le monde extérieur qui en voudraient à l’Église », ajoute Mgr Pontier.

    Mais on peu dire que c’est "des parents très chrétiens qui ont empêché leur enfant de parler" et que la faute est collective et non la responsabilité d’évêques, nous dit l’évêque.

    Le péché est collectif et surtout la faute des parents très chrétiens, par contre les violeurs d’enfants et leurs évêques qui organisent la récidive et l’impunité et les déplaces pour pouvoir bénéficié de la prescription sont présumés innocents.

    « Si des actes ont été commis qui auraient traumatisé profondément quelqu’un, ce serait bien sûr choquant. Je connais bien Mgr Ventura, et pour le moment je le présume innocent », dit Mgr Pontier.

    –----

    Accusé d’abus sexuels, l’ex-cardinal McCarrick défroqué par le Vatican, une première

    https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/02/16/l-ex-cardinal-mccarrick-accuse-d-abus-sexuels-defroque-par-le-vatican_542429

    C’est la première fois dans la longue histoire de l’Eglise catholique qu’un cardinal est défroqué pour des motifs d’abus sexuels.

    Le pape a reconnu comme définitive une sentence en ce sens de la Congrégation pour la doctrine de la foi, institution du Vatican qui veille au respect du dogme catholique, a précisé le Saint-Siège. L’ancien cardinal a été reconnu coupable d’avoir enfreint l’un des commandements divins « avec la circonstance aggravante de l’abus de pouvoir », selon ce texte. Le pape François a envoyé un « signal clair » sur le fait que les abus sexuels ne seraient plus tolérés au sein de l’Eglise catholique, a réagi samedi le président de la conférence des évêques américains.

    Toujours cette manière sournoise de ne pas nommer les agressions sexuelles correctement. Une agression sexuelle n’est pas un ABUS, un abus c’est quant on use avec excès de son droit . Utilisé cette expression "abus sexuels" et "abus de pouvoir" ca indique que les prêtres ont le droit au sexe des gosses, mais qu’ils ont été seulement un peu excessif avec leur usage du sexe des enfants.

    « Aucun évêque, aussi influent soit-il, n’est au-dessus de la loi de l’Eglise », a ajouté le cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archevêque de Galveston-Houston.

    Ce qui sous-entend qu’ils sont au dessus des lois humaines.

    #catholicisme #culture_du_viol #culte_du_viol

  • États-Unis : Une start-up facture 8000 $ le litre de sang des jeunes pour le vendre à des clients fortunés [Vidéos]
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/sciencess/15567-etats-unis-une-start-up-facture-8000-le-litre-de-sang-des-jeunes-po

    Ça se confirme, et c’est même devenu un business.... Mais ça, c’est le sommet de l’iceberg ne loupez pas la vidéo au milieu de l’article sur le plasma humain.... Ces financiers me donne envie de gerber... Quand à la croix rouge on les avait déjà épinglés....

    Une société basée en Floride tente de lutter contre le processus de vieillissement en prélevant le sang d’enfants et en le transfusant à des patients âgés de 30 ans et plus, dans le cadre d’une nouvelle lubie douteuse qui déferle sur les États-Unis.

    Ambrosia, fondée en 2016 par Jesse Karmazin, diplômé de la Stanford Medical School, a déjà ouvert des centres de transfusion dans cinq villes des États-Unis : Los Angeles, Tampa, Omaha, Houston et San Francisco. Leurs traitements aux allures macabres commencent à seulement 8000 dollars pour un (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_scientifiques #Sciences

  • Trolls russe : après les fake news, découvrez les hate news
    https://www.ladn.eu/media-mutants/fakes-news-hate-news-trolls-russe

    Souffler sur les braises

    Il est très compliqué de prouver formellement que cette vidéo est un pur fake. Mais son mode opératoire - du choix de son sujet jusqu’à sa diffusion - répond à celui de l’Internet Resarch Agency, un organisme basé à Saint-Pétersbourg. Créé en 2013 par un business man proche de Vladimir Poutine, Yevgeny Prigozhin, il s’agit d’une véritable usine à trolls dont l’objectif est d’inonder le Web de fake news. Pointée du doigt par l’enquête du procureur spécial Robert Mueller sur l’ingérence russe dans l’élection américaine, l’Internet Resarch Agency serait responsable, entre autres rumeurs, de celles affirmant qu’Hillary Clinton célébrait des messes satanistes ou gérait des réseaux pédophiles.

    Pour alimenter les sujets qui fâchent, l’Internet Resarch Agency s’immisce dans des milliers de groupes Facebook aux opinions radicalement opposées. Ainsi en mai 2016, en pleine campagne présidentielle américaine, l’agence a réussi à monter, devant une mosquée de la ville de Houston, une manifestation de suprémacistes blancs et, au même moment, une contre-manifestation de musulmans. Les deux groupes se sont opposés sur le terrain sans que, ni les uns ni les autres, ne comprennent que les organisateurs étaient installés derrière des écrans en Russie. L’Internet Resarch Agency sévit également sur Twitter. Elle contrôle des centaines de bots postant plusieurs millions de tweets hargneux. Son objectif n’est pas directement idéologique : il ne s’agit pas de valoriser telle ou telle opinion – les féministes ou les masculinistes, les suprémacistes blancs ou les musulmans. Non, l’objectif de l’agence est de faire monter les tensions entre ces communautés afin de nourrir un climat de haine entre elles.

    L’idée reste la même : alimenter plusieurs groupes antagonistes pour attiser les conflits entre eux. La première étape consiste à inonder l’opinion publique de fake news pour rendre indémêlable le vrai du faux, et obtenir que les débats se concentrent sur cet inextricable imbroglio plutôt que de se concentrer sur de vrais problèmes. « La plus grande crainte des régimes autocratiques, c’est que la société civile se coordonne en tant que contre-pouvoir, poursuit Guy-Philippe Goldstein. Pour garder le contrôle, ils veulent donc diviser la société, en diffusant la haine notamment. »

    #Fake_news #Désinformation #Russie

  • Software Development #bootcamp Survival Guide
    https://hackernoon.com/software-development-bootcamp-survival-guide-636d725ac253?source=rss----

    Teaching Web DevelopmentAfter training 100s of developers at multiple bootcamps, I believe it is my responsibility to share my learnings on what makes an excellent student and what steps you can take to survive and thrive in an intensive software development bootcamp.Before I dive into the main content here is a little background. I teach web development bootcamp in Houston for DigitalCrafts. The length of the bootcamp is 16 weeks. The students at bootcamp come from different backgrounds. Some students just graduated college while others have been working in different fields for few years. Needless to say most of the students have little or no prior #programming experience.PreparationAfter you have applied and got into a bootcamp don’t just sit and wait for the bootcamp to start. Use (...)

    #technology #software-development #codingbootcamp

  • In racist, anti-immigrant diatribe, Trump declares, “I am a nationalist” - World Socialist Web Sitehttps://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/24/trum-o24.html

    In racist, anti-immigrant diatribe, Trump declares, “I am a nationalist”
    By Barry Grey
    24 October 2018

    President Donald Trump delivered a fascistic anti-immigrant diatribe at a campaign appearance in Houston on Monday for incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

    Amid xenophobic slurs against the thousands of impoverished Central American workers in the caravan making its way through Mexico to the US border, and against immigrants in general, Trump denounced the Democratic Party as “globalists” and declared, “I am a nationalist.”

    To chants of “USA! USA!” from the crowd of 18,000 supporters packed into the Toyota Center sports palladium, he urged his audience to “use that word [nationalist].”

    #trump #racisme #xénophobie #nationalisme #extrême-droite #états-unis

  • #Etats-Unis : l’ouverture d’une « maison close » de #robots refusée à Houston - Sud Ouest.fr
    https://www.sudouest.fr/2018/10/04/etats-unis-l-ouverture-d-une-maison-close-de-robots-refusee-a-houston-54492

    KinkySdollS, une entreprise canadienne basée à Toronto, comptait s’étendre à Houston. Elle commercialise des poupées sexuelles qui, selon elle, sont dotées d’intelligence artificielle leur permettant d’interagir avec des hommes « à la recherche de compagnie », précise-t-elle sur son site.

    Les clients auraient eu la possibilité d’essayer ces poupées avant de les acheter, à un prix tournant autour de 3 000 dollars, en fonction des accessoires dont elles sont dotées.

    Bref, « une maison close de robots », ont conclu les médias locaux, même si le propriétaire de KinkySdollS s’est défendu de tout proxénétisme.

  • Toux, fièvre, vomissements… une étrange épidémie dans un avion Emirates reliant Dubaï à New York
    https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/transports/avion/toux-fievre-vomissements-une-etrange-epidemie-dans-un-avion-emirates-re


    Foto : Cortesía
    Alerta bacteriológica en Nueva York : Avión aterriza con 100 pasajeros enfermos

    À leur arrivée à New York, mercredi, plus 500 passagers d’un A380 de la compagnie Emirates ont été examinés. Une centaine d’entre eux présentaient de la fièvre, de la toux et certains étaient pris de nausées. Dix personnes ont été hospitalisées.

    Dix personnes hospitalisées, plus de 100 passagers se plaignant de toux et de fièvre. Le rappeur Vanilla Ice, parmi les 521 personnes bloquées sur le tarmac à New York : l’aéroport John F. Kennedy, s’est mobilisé mercredi face à une alerte santé d’une rare ampleur, probablement due à un épisode grippal.

    L’alerte a été donnée vers 09 h du matin (13 h GMT) à l’atterrissage du vol EK203 de la compagnie Emirates en provenance de Dubaï, assuré par un A380 avec 521 personnes à bord.

    Toux, fièvre et vomissements
    « On nous a informés qu’un grand nombre de passagers étaient malades : 106 présentaient des symptômes allant de la toux à de la fièvre et des vomissements », a expliqué Oxiris Barbot, responsable des services de santé de New York.

    L’appareil a alors été conduit « à distance » des terminaux, et des équipes médicales, dont des spécialistes de l’agence fédérale des Centres de contrôle et de prévention des maladies (CDC), sont montées à bord pour examiner les 521 passagers.

    Parmi eux, le rappeur Vanilla Ice, qui a informé ses fans qu’il était assis à l’étage supérieur de l’A380. « C’est dingue. Apparemment il y a plus de 100 personnes malades à l’étage inférieur, je suis content d’être en haut », a-t-il notamment tweeté.

    • Du coup, on en inspecte d’autres…
      #EK203 (au cas où…)

      These flights have been quarantined and evaluated over sick passengers | Deseret News (article du 9/09/2018)
      https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900030842/these-flights-have-been-quarantined-and-evaluated-over-sick-passengers.

      Several flights across the country have been quarantined and evaluated over the past few days after some passengers showed signs of sickness.

      On Wednesday, a flight from Dubai to John F. Kennedy Airport was quarantined after at least 19 passengers suffered from a confirmed case of the flu, according to ABC News.

      The CDC quarantined the Emirates aircraft, which held 520 passengers. The CDC evaluated 100 passengers, who said they suffered from coughs, headaches, sore throats and fevers, ABC News reported.

      At least 10 people were hospitalized as a “precaution.” The rest were cleared.

      Given the symptoms that we are seeing in the patients and given the history that they present, it looks like this is probably influenza,” acting New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said. “But again, until we have our final results late tonight we won’t be able to give a final determination on what the underlying cause is of this illness.

      Similarly, Southwest Airlines passengers on four flights between Dallas, Houston and Harlingen, Texas, may have been exposed to #measles, the airline company told KTRK-TV.

      The airline said it contacted customers who traveled on the plane two weeks ago to see if anyone onboard had the highly contagious virus.

      The Houston Health Department is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to speak with the passengers.

      The department told KTRK that the passenger who had the virus did not visit the airport after their flight. They stayed in a waiting room for an hour after the flight.

      And, as The Verg_e reported, two more international flights were evaluated after passengers were caught coughing and showing signs of sickness.

      Both flights were from American Airlines, flying from Munich and Paris to Philadelphia International airport. About 12 people on each flight felt sick, according to a statement from the airport.

      The airport said “_all passengers on the two flights — totaling about 250 plus crew — were held for a medical review and the CDC was notified.

      Allen Parmet, an aerospace medicine expert, told The Verge, “It’s actually pretty common to have somebody coughing in a plane.

      If it turns out to be the flu, this could be an early forecast of the flu season ahead. And the CDC has some tips for keeping the virus from spreading: get vaccinated, and stay home when you’re sick, if you can,” according to The Verge.

      #grippe #flu #influenza
      #rougeole

      les consignes du CDC :
      #se_faire_vacciner
      #rester_chez_soi
      #ne_pas_tousser_dans_l'avion (bon, ça c’est de moi…)

    • C’est un coup des musulmans du pèlerinage #Hajj

      Health Scares At Two U.S. Airports Linked To Pilgrims Arriving From Muslim Hajj In Mecca
      https://www.inquisitr.com/5064809/health-scares-at-two-us-airports-linked-to-pilgrims-arriving-from-muslim-

      U.S. health officials revealed on Friday that major health scares at two U.S. airports involving inbound flights are tied to pilgrims returning from Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims take at least once in their lifetime, and which ended in late August.

      Health officials on Wednesday sent an emergency response team to the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York after more than 100 Emirates passengers from Dubai showed flu-like symptoms.

      In an interview with Reuters, Martin Cetron, director for the division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that 11 of the nearly 549 passengers evaluated at the airport were sent to a local hospital for further testing.

      Ten were tested for respiratory pathogen in an attempt to rule out serious infections that may pose health threats to the public.

      Our most critical issue was to rule several respiratory illnesses of urgent public health significance,” Cetron said.

      Two tested positive for a virulent type of the influenza A virus. One of the two was found gravely ill with pneumonia and also infected with another respiratory virus. Another passenger was positive for the cold virus.

      Seven crew members of the flight who were not at the pilgrimage tested negative for respiratory infections that could be of public health concern.
       
      Another health scare happened at the Philadelphia International Airport the next day. Medical teams had to screen passengers who boarded two American Airlines flights from Europe when 12 passengers showed flu-like symptoms. One of the sick passengers visited Mecca for the Muslim pilgrimage.

      Of the 11 passengers taken to the hospital for evaluation, 10 had respiratory symptoms and one exhibited signs of food poisoning. The 10 patients were also tested for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, but none was positive. MERS is a highly contagious viral respiratory illness first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

      The incident prompted a medical review of 250 passengers from the two flights. Authorities said that this was done as a precautionary measure.

      While airport operations were not affected, out of an abundance of caution, officials performed medical evaluations and assessments,” the Philadelphia International Airport said on Twitter.

      CDC spokesman Benjamin Haynes said that CDC and public health officers worked with emergency medical service personnel and officials from the Customs and Border Protection to evaluate the sick passengers.

      Twelve were found to have coughs and sore throats, and one tested positive for flu. The CDC said that this is not unusual since flu is a year-round virus.

      #MERS-CoV (ça faisait longtemps, tiens !)

  • C++ User Group Meetings in July
    http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2

    Here is the monthly overview on upcoming C++ User Group meetings for July 2018:

    C++ User Group meetings in July 2018 by Jens Weller

    From the article:

    The monthly overview on upcoming User Group meetings! There are 6 new C++ User Groups: Houston, Prague, Cluj, New York, Braunschweig, Midrand...

    #News,_Events,

  • Immigrant children forcibly injected with drugs, lawsuit claims
    https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-20/immigrant-children-forcibly-injected-drugs-lawsuit-claims

    President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy is creating a zombie army of children forcibly injected with medications that make them dizzy, listless, obese and even incapacitated, according to legal filings that show immigrant children in US custody subdued with powerful psychiatric drugs.

    The Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel, Texas, has been paid $26 million since 2013 by the federal government to house migrant children. The company that operates the facility south of Houston has a history of problems, including deaths of children in its custody and allegations children were systematically drugged with psychotropic medications.
    Credit: Pu Ying Huang/The Texas Tribune

  • C++ User Group Meetings in June
    http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2

    Lots of User Groups are meeting in June, Meeting C++ has posted an detailed overview:

    C++ User Group Meetings in June 2018 by Jens Weller

    From the article:

    The monthly overview of upcoming C++ User Group meetings. Join a C++ User Group near you, or learn how to start your own! There are 4 new C++ User Groups: Houston, Prague, Cluj, New York.

    #News,Articles&_Books,

  • How One Houston Suburb Ended Up in a Reservoir - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-harvey-flooding-reservoir.html

    Three days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in August, rising storm water inside Barker Reservoir inundated a vast majority of the 721 homes in Canyon Gate.

    Because Barker is normally a dry, green space, most homeowners in the neighborhood had no clue that their properties were inside an area susceptible to flooding during extreme storms.

    In response to major floods that devastated Houston, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built Barker in the 1940s to protect the downtown area.

    Barker was designed to hold 19,330 acres of flooded land — almost half the size of Washington, D.C. But the government acquired about 12,000 acres of that footprint and left the rest as private property.

    For years, this swath of prairie land remained untouched. But as the Houston area began to grow rapidly in the 1980s, developers started transforming the private land into residential neighborhoods like Canyon Gate, which is a gated community.

    No one wanted to tell the developers that you can’t develop because it’s in a reservoir,” said Charles Irvine, a lead lawyer in a class-action lawsuit against the federal government. “Everyone knew, but nobody wanted to do anything.
    […]
    A Fort Bend County planning map from 1997 warned that Canyon Gate was “_adjacent to the Barker Reservoir” and “subject to extended controlled inundation.

    But few homeowners knew about it, and most, like Ms. Micu, had not acquired flood insurance before Hurricane Harvey because Canyon Gate lies outside the 100-year floodplain — an area that has a one in 100 chance of flooding in a single year.

    #crue_centennale #écrêtement_de_crue
    #belle_histoire (avec infographies dynamiques)

  • Et comme ça met en cause la «  sécurité nationale  », les 14 Mds $ pour protéger l’industrie chimique (privée) doivent nécessairement être publics…

    Gulf Coast Needs $14 Billion Storm Barrier, Chemical Makers Say - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-05/gulf-coast-needs-14-billion-storm-barrier-chemical-makers-say

    Chemical companies are pressing federal officials to spend billions of dollars on a coastal flood control system near Houston to protect petrochemical plants, oil refineries and shipping infrastructure from the next hurricane.

    The coastal spine, as the project is called, is among the most important infrastructure investments needed to mitigate damage from major storms, Bob Patel, chief executive officer of LyondellBasell Industries NV, said Monday at an industry conference to discuss lessons learned from Hurricane Harvey.

    The proposed system of seawalls, levies and flood gates in the Galveston, Texas, area would cost an estimated $14 billion, and would be designed to reduce flood damage similar to that seen by Hurricane Ike’s storm surge in 2008.

  • Separating children and parents at the border is cruel and unnecessary

    The Trump administration has shown that it’s willing — eager, actually — to go to great lengths to limit illegal immigration into the United States, from building a multi-billion-dollar border wall with Mexico to escalated roundups that grab those living here without permission even if they have no criminal record and are longtime, productive members of their communities. Now the administration’s cold-hearted approach to enforcement has crossed the line into abject inhumanity: the forced separation of children from parents as they fight for legal permission to remain in the country.

    How widespread is the practice? That’s unclear. The Department of Homeland Security declined comment because it is being sued over the practice. It ignored a request for statistics on how many children it has separated from their parents, an unsurprising lack of transparency from an administration that faces an unprecedented number of lawsuits over its failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests for government — read: public — records. But immigrant rights activists say they have noticed a jump, and in December, a coalition of groups filed a complaint with Homeland Security over the practice.
    When parents and children cross the border and tell border patrol agents they would like to apply for asylum, they often are taken into custody while their request is considered. Under the Obama administration, the families were usually released to the care of a relative or organization, or held in a family detention center. But under President Trump, the parents — usually mothers traveling without their spouses — who sneak across the border then turn themselves in are increasing being charged with the misdemeanor crime of entering the country illegally, advocates say. And since that is a criminal charge, not a civil violation of immigration codes, the children are spirited away to a youth detention center with no explanation. Sometimes, parents and children are inexplicably separated even when no charges are lodged. Activists believe the government is splitting families to send a message of deterrence: Dare to seek asylum at the border and we’ll take your child.

    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-immigrants-border-asylum-ice-201802305-story.html
    #frontières #unité_familiale #séparation #enfants #enfance #parents #asile #migrations #réfugiés #USA #Etats-Unis #détention_administrative #rétention #dissuasion

    • Familias rotas, familias vaciadas

      Es delgada y pequeña. No rebasa el 1.60. La habitación en la que duerme —en el segundo piso del albergue para veteranos deportados que creó Héctor Barajas— tiene una cama con un oso de peluche que ella misma confeccionó y una mesa para cuatro personas. La sonrisa que a veces asoma en su rostro nunca llega a sus ojos, oscuros y con marcadas ojeras. Se llama Yolanda Varona y tiene prohibido, de por vida, entrar a Estados Unidos, el país donde trabajó 16 años y donde viven sus dos hijos y tres nietos.


      https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/d2c0ac01-e2e8-464f-9d4e-266920f634fc/familias-rotas-familias-vaciadas

    • Taking Migrant Children From Parents Is Illegal, U.N. Tells U.S.

      The Trump administration’s practice of separating children from migrant families entering the United States violates their rights and international law, the United Nations human rights office said on Tuesday, urging an immediate halt to the practice.

      The administration angrily rejected what it called an ignorant attack by the United Nations human rights office and accused the global organization of hypocrisy.

      The human rights office said it appeared that, as The New York Times revealed in April, United States authorities had separated several hundred children, including toddlers, from their parents or others claiming to be their family members, under a policy of criminally prosecuting undocumented people crossing the border.

      That practice “amounts to arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of the child,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, based in Geneva, told reporters.

      Last month, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings, saying that it would significantly increase criminal prosecutions of migrants. Officials acknowledged that putting more adults in jail would mean separating more children from their families.

      “The U.S. should immediately halt this practice of separating families and stop criminalizing what should at most be an administrative offense — that of irregular entry or stay in the U.S.,” Ms. Shamdasani said.

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      The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, clearly showed American irritation with the accusation in a statement released a few hours later.

      “Once again, the United Nations shows its hypocrisy by calling out the United States while it ignores the reprehensible human rights records of several members of its own Human Rights Council,” Ms. Haley said. “While the High Commissioner’s office ignorantly attacks the United States with words, the United States leads the world with its actions, like providing more humanitarian assistance to global conflicts than any other nation.”

      Without addressing the specifics of the accusation, Ms. Haley said: “Neither the United Nations nor anyone else will dictate how the United States upholds its borders.”
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      The administration has characterized its policy as being about illegal immigration, though many of the detained migrants — including those in families that are split apart — enter at official border crossings and request asylum, which is not an illegal entry. It has also said that some adults falsely claim to be the parents of accompanying children, a genuine problem, and that it has to sort out their claims.

      On Twitter, President Trump has appeared to agree that breaking up families was wrong, but blamed Democrats for the approach, saying that their “bad legislation” had caused it. In fact, no law requires separating children from families, and the practice was put in place by his administration just months ago.

      The Times found in April that over six months, about 700 children had been taken from people claiming to be their parents.

      The American Civil Liberties Union says that since then, the pace of separations has accelerated sharply. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the group’s immigrant rights project, said that in the past five weeks, close to 1,000 children may have been taken from their families.

      Last year, as Homeland Security secretary, John F. Kelly raised the idea of separating children from their families when they entered the country as a way to deter movement across the Mexican border.

      Homeland Security officials have since denied that they separate families as part of a policy of deterrence, but have also faced sharp criticism from President Trump for failing to do more to curb the numbers of migrants crossing the border.

      For the United Nations, it was a matter of great concern that in the United States “migration control appears to have been prioritized over the effective care and protection of migrant children,” Ms. Shamdasani said.

      The United States is the only country in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, she noted, but the practice of separating and detaining children breached its obligations under other international human rights conventions it has joined.

      “Children should never be detained for reasons related to their own or their parents’ migration status. Detention is never in the best interests of the child and always constitutes a child rights violation,” she said, calling on the authorities to adopt noncustodial alternatives.

      The A.C.L.U. has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in San Diego, calling for a halt to the practice and for reunification of families.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/world/americas/us-un-migrant-children-families.html

    • U.S. policy of separating refugees from children is illegal, horrific

      Somewhere in #Texas, a 3-year-old is crying into her pillow. She left all her toys behind when she fled Guatemala. And on this day the U.S. government took her mother away.

      When we read about the U.S. administration’s new policy of trying to stop people from crossing its borders by taking away their children, we too had trouble sleeping.


      https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2018/06/05/us-policy-of-separating-refugees-from-children-is-illegal-horrific.html

    • What’s Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated ?

      An expert on helping parents navigate the asylum process describes what she’s seeing on the ground.

      Everyone involved in U.S. immigration along the border has a unique perspective on the new “zero tolerance” policies—most notably, the increasing number of migrant parents who are separated from their children. Some workers are charged with taking the children away from their parents and sending them into the care of Health and Human Services. Some are contracted to find housing for the children and get them food. Some volunteers try to help the kids navigate the system. Some, like Anne Chandler, assist the parents. As executive director of the Houston office of the nonprofit Tahirih Justice Center, which focuses on helping immigrant women and children, she has been traveling to the border and to detention centers, listening to the parents’ stories. We asked her to talk with us about what she has been hearing in recent weeks.

      This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

      Texas Monthly: First, can you give us an overview of your organization?

      Anne Chandler: We run the Children’s Border Project, and we work with hundreds of kids that have been released from ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] care. We are not a legal service provider that does work when they’re in the shelters. To date, most of our work with that issue of family separation has been working with the parents in the days when they are being separated: when they’re in the federal courthouse being convicted; partnering with the federal public defenders; and then in the adult detention center, as they have no idea how to communicate or speak to their children or get them back before being deported.

      TM: Can you take me through what you’ve been seeing?

      AC: The short of it is, we will take sample sizes of numbers and individuals we’re seeing that are being prosecuted for criminal entry. The majority of those are free to return to the home country. Vast majority. We can’t quite know exactly because our sample size is between one hundred and two hundred individuals. But 90 percent of those who are being convicted are having their children separated from them. The 10 percent that aren’t are some mothers who are going with their children to the detention centers in Karnes and Dilley. But, for the most part, the ones that I’ve been working with are the ones that are actually being prosecuted for criminal entry, which is a pretty new thing for our country—to take first-time asylum seekers who are here seeking safe refuge, to turn around and charge them with a criminal offense. Those parents are finding themselves in adult detention centers and in a process known as expedited removal, where many are being deported. And their children, on the other hand, are put in a completely different legal structure. They are categorized as unaccompanied children and thus are being put in place in a federal agency not with the Department of Homeland Security but with Health and Human Services. And Health and Human Services has this complicated structure in place where they’re not viewed as a long-term foster care system—that’s for very limited numbers—but their general mandate is to safeguard these children in temporary shelters and then find family members with whom they can be placed. So they start with parents, and then they go to grandparents, and then they go to other immediate family members, and then they go to acquaintances, people who’ve known the children, and they’re in that system, but they can’t be released to their parents because their parents are behind bars. And we may see more parents that get out of jail because they pass a “credible fear” interview, which is the screening done by the asylum office to see who should be deported quickly, within days or weeks of arrival, and who should stay here and have an opportunity to present their asylum case before an immigration judge of the Department of Justice. So we have a lot of individuals who are in that credible fear process right now, but in Houston, once you have a credible fear interview (which will sometimes take two to three weeks to even set up), those results aren’t coming out for four to six weeks. Meanwhile, these parents are just kind of languishing in these detention centers because of the zero-tolerance policy. There’s no individual adjudication of whether the parents should be put on some form of alternative detention program so that they can be in a position to be reunited with their kid.

      TM: So, just so I make sure I understand: the parents come in and say, “We’re persecuted” or give some reason for asylum. They come in. And then their child or children are taken away and they’re in lockup for at least six weeks away from the kids and often don’t know where the kids are. Is that what’s happening under zero tolerance?

      AC: So the idea of zero tolerance under the stated policy is that we don’t care why you’re afraid. We don’t care if it’s religion, political, gangs, anything. For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you. That’s the policy. They’re not 100 percent able to implement that because of a lot of reasons, including just having enough judges on the border. And bed space. There’s a big logistical problem because this is a new policy. So the way they get to that policy of taking the kids away and keeping the adults in detention centers and the kids in a different federal facility is based on the legal rationale that we’re going to convict you, and since we’re going to convict you, you’re going to be in the custody of the U.S. Marshals, and when that happens, we’re taking your kid away. So they’re not able to convict everybody of illegal entry right now just because there aren’t enough judges on the border right now to hear the number of cases that come over, and then they say if you have religious persecution or political persecution or persecution on something that our asylum definition recognizes, you can fight that case behind bars at an immigration detention center. And those cases take two, three, four, five, six months. And what happens to your child isn’t really our concern. That is, you have made the choice to bring your child over illegally. And this is what’s going to happen.

      TM: Even if they crossed at a legal entry point?

      AC: Very few people come to the bridge. Border Patrol is saying the bridge is closed. When I was last out in McAllen, people were stacked on the bridge, sleeping there for three, four, ten nights. They’ve now cleared those individuals from sleeping on the bridge, but there are hundreds of accounts of asylum seekers, when they go to the bridge, who are told, “I’m sorry, we’re full today. We can’t process your case.” So the families go illegally on a raft—I don’t want to say illegally; they cross without a visa on a raft. Many of them then look for Border Patrol to turn themselves in, because they know they’re going to ask for asylum. And under this government theory—you know, in the past, we’ve had international treaties, right? Statutes which codified the right of asylum seekers to ask for asylum. Right? Article 31 of the Refugee Convention clearly says that it is improper for any state to use criminal laws that could deter asylum seekers as long as that asylum seeker is asking for asylum within a reasonable amount of time. But our administration is kind of ignoring this longstanding international and national jurisprudence of basic beliefs to make this distinction that, if you come to a bridge, we’re not going to prosecute you, but if you come over the river and then find immigration or are caught by immigration, we’re prosecuting you.

      TM: So if you cross any other way besides the bridge, we’re prosecuting you. But . . . you can’t cross the bridge.

      AC: That’s right. I’ve talked to tons of people. There are organizations like Al Otro Lado that document border turn-backs. And there’s an effort to accompany asylum seekers so that Customs and Border Patrol can’t say, “We’re closed.” Everybody we’ve talked to who’s been prosecuted or separated has crossed the river without a visa.

      TM: You said you were down there recently?

      AC: Monday, June 4.

      TM: What was happening on the bridge at that point?

      AC: I talked to a lot of people who were there Saturdays and Sundays, a lot of church groups that are going, bringing those individuals umbrellas because they were in the sun. It’s morning shade, and then the sun—you know, it’s like 100 degrees on the cement. It’s really, really hot. So there were groups bringing diapers and water bottles and umbrellas and electric fans, and now everyone’s freaked out because they’re gone! What did they do with them? Did they process them all? Yet we know they’re saying you’re turned back. When I was in McAllen, the individuals that day who visited people on the bridge had been there four days. We’re talking infants; there were people breastfeeding on the bridge.

      TM: Are the infants taken as well?

      AC: Every border zone is different. We definitely saw a pattern in McAllen. We talked to 63 parents who had lost their children that day in the court. Of those, the children seemed to be all five and older. What we know from the shelters and working with people is that, yes, there are kids that are very young, that are breastfeeding babies and under three in the shelters, separated from their parents. But I’m just saying, in my experience, all those kids and all the parents’ stories were five and up.

      TM: Can you talk about how you’ve seen the process change over the past few months?

      AC: The zero-tolerance policy really started with Jeff Sessions’s announcement in May. One could argue that this was the original policy that we started seeing in the executive orders. One was called “border security and immigration enforcement.” And a lot of the principles underlying zero tolerance are found here. The idea is that we’re going to prosecute people.

      TM: And the policy of separating kids from parents went into effect when?

      AC: They would articulate it in various ways with different officials, but as immigration attorneys, starting in October, were like, “Oh my goodness. They are telling us these are all criminal lawbreakers and they’re going to have their children taken away.” We didn’t know what it would mean. And so we saw about six hundred children who were taken away from October to May, then we saw an explosion of the numbers in May. It ramped up. The Office of Refugee Resettlement taking in all these kids says that they are our children, that they are unaccompanied. It’s a fabrication. They’re not unaccompanied children. They are children that came with their parents, and the idea that we’re creating this crisis—it’s a manufactured crisis where we’re going to let children suffer to somehow allow this draconian approach with families seeking shelter and safe refuge.

      TM: So what is the process for separation?

      AC: There is no one process. Judging from the mothers and fathers I’ve spoken to and those my staff has spoken to, there are several different processes. Sometimes they will tell the parent, “We’re taking your child away.” And when the parent asks, “When will we get them back?” they say, “We can’t tell you that.” Sometimes the officers will say, “because you’re going to be prosecuted” or “because you’re not welcome in this country” or “because we’re separating them,” without giving them a clear justification. In other cases, we see no communication that the parent knows that their child is to be taken away. Instead, the officers say, “I’m going to take your child to get bathed.” That’s one we see again and again. “Your child needs to come with me for a bath.” The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing your child again.” Sometimes mothers—I was talking to one mother, and she said, “Don’t take my child away,” and the child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, “Can I at least have five minutes to console her?” They said no. In another case, the father said, “Can I comfort my child? Can I hold him for a few minutes?” The officer said, “You must let them go, and if you don’t let them go, I will write you up for an altercation, which will mean that you are the one that had the additional charges charged against you.” So, threats. So the father just let the child go. So it’s a lot of variations. But sometimes deceit and sometimes direct, just “I’m taking your child away.” Parents are not getting any information on what their rights are to communicate to get their child before they are deported, what reunification may look like. We spoke to nine parents on this Monday, which was the 11th, and these were adults in detention centers outside of Houston. They had been separated from their child between May 23 and May 25, and as of June 11, not one of them had been able to talk to their child or knew a phone number that functioned from the detention center director. None of them had direct information from immigration on where their child was located. The one number they were given by some government official from the Department of Homeland Security was a 1-800 number. But from the phones inside the detention center, they can’t make those calls. We know there are more parents who are being deported without their child, without any process or information on how to get their child back.

      TM: And so it’s entirely possible that children will be left in the country without any relatives?

      AC: Could be, yeah.

      TM: And if the child is, say, five years old . . .?

      AC: The child is going through deportation proceedings, so the likelihood that that child is going to be deported is pretty high.

      TM: How do they know where to deport the child to, or who the parents are?

      AC: How does that child navigate their deportation case without their parent around?

      TM: Because a five-year-old doesn’t necessarily know his parents’ information.

      AC: In the shelters, they can’t even find the parents because the kids are just crying inconsolably. They often don’t know the full legal name of their parents or their date of birth. They’re not in a position to share a trauma story like what caused the migration. These kids and parents had no idea. None of the parents I talked to were expecting to be separated as they faced the process of asking for asylum.

      TM: I would think that there would be something in place where, when the child is taken, they’d be given a wristband or something with their information on it?

      AC: I think the Department of Homeland Security gives the kids an alien number. They also give the parents an alien number and probably have that information. The issue is that the Department of Homeland Security is not the one caring for the children. Jurisdiction of that child has moved over to Health and Human Services, and the Health and Human Services staff has to figure out, where is this parent? And that’s not easy. Sometimes the parents are deported. Kids are in New York and Miami, and we’ve got parents being sent to Tacoma, Washington, and California. Talk about a mess. And nobody has a right to an attorney here. These kids don’t get a paid advocate or an ad litem or a friend of the court. They don’t get a paid attorney to represent them. Some find that, because there are programs. But it’s not a right. It’s not universal.

      TM: What agency is in charge of physically separating the children and the adults?

      AC: The Department of Homeland Security. We saw the separation take place while they were in the care and custody of Customs and Border Protection. That’s where it was happening, at a center called the Ursula, which the immigrants called La Perrera, because it looked like a dog pound, a dog cage. It’s a chain-link fence area, long running areas that remind Central Americans of the way people treat dogs.

      TM: So the Department of Homeland Security does the separation and then they immediately pass the kids to HHS?

      AC: I don’t have a bird’s-eye view of this, besides interviewing parents. Parents don’t know. All they know is that the kid hasn’t come back to their little room in CBP. Right? We know from talking to advocates and attorneys who have access to the shelters that they think that these kids leave in buses to shelters run by the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement Department of Unaccompanied Children Services—which, on any given day there’s like three thousand kids in the Harlingen-Brownsville area. We know there are eight, soon to be nine, facilities in Houston. And they’re going to open up this place in Tornillo, along the border by El Paso. And they’re opening up places in Miami. They’re past capacity. This is a cyclical time, where rates of migration increase. So now you’re creating two populations. One is your traditional unaccompanied kids who are just coming because their life is at risk right now in El Salvador and Honduras and parts of Guatemala, and they come with incredible trauma, complex stories, and need a lot of resources, and so they navigate this immigration system. And now we have this new population, which is totally different: the young kids who don’t hold their stories and aren’t here to self-navigate the system and are crying out for their parents. There are attorneys that get money to go in and give rights presentations to let the teenagers know what they can ask for in court, what’s happening with their cases, and now the attorneys are having a hard time doing that because right next to them, in the other room, they’ve got kids crying and wailing, asking for their mom and dad. The attorneys can’t give these kids information. They’re just trying to learn grounding exercises.

      TM: Do you know if siblings are allowed to stay together?

      AC: We don’t know. I dealt with one father who knew that siblings were not at the same location from talking to his family member. He believes they’re separated. But I have no idea. Can’t answer that question.

      TM: Is there another nonprofit similar to yours that handles kids more than adults?

      AC: Yes: in Houston it’s Catholic Charities. We know in Houston they are going to open up shelters specific for the tender-age kids, which is defined as kids under twelve. And that’s going to be by Minute Maid Stadium. And that facility is also going to have some traditional demographic of pregnant teenagers. But it’s going to be a young kid—and young kids are, almost by definition, separated. Kids usually do not migrate on their own at that age.

      TM: That’s usually teens?

      AC: Teens. Population is thirteen to seventeen, with many more fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-olds than thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. They’re riding on top of trains. You know, the journey is very dangerous. Usually that’s the age where the gangs start taking the girls and saying “you’re going to be my sex slave”–type of stuff. I’ve heard that it’s going to be run by a nonprofit. ORR does not hold the shelters directly. They contract with nonprofits whose job it is to provide essential food, mental health care, caseworkers to try to figure out who they’re going to be released to, and all those functions to nonprofits, and I think the nonprofit in charge of this one is Southwest Key.

      TM: So how long do the kids stay in the facility?

      AC: It used to be, on average, thirty days. But that’s going up now. There are many reasons for that: one, these facilities and ORR are not used to working with this demographic of young children. Two, DHS is sharing information with ORR on the background of those families that are taking these children, and we’ve seen raids where they’re going to where the children are and looking for individuals in those households who are undocumented. So there is reticence and fear of getting these children if there’s someone in the household who is not a citizen.

      TM: So if I’m understanding correctly, a relative can say, “Well, I can pick that kid up; that’s my niece.” She comes and picks up the child. And then DHS will follow them home? Is that what you’re saying?

      AC: No. The kid would go to the aunt’s house, but let’s just imagine that she is here on a visa, a student visa, but the aunt falls out of visa status and is undocumented and her information, her address, is at the top of DHS’s files. So we’ve seen this happen a lot: a month or two weeks after kids have been released, DHS goes to those foster homes and arrests people and puts people in jail and deports them.

      TM: And then I guess they start all over again trying to find a home for those kids?

      AC: Right.

      TM: What is explained to the kids about the proceedings, and who explains it to them?

      AC: The Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement goes through an organization called the Vera Institute of Justice that then contracts with nonprofit organizations who hire attorneys and other specialized bilingual staff to go into these shelters and give what they call legal orientation programs for children, and they do group orientation. Sometimes they speak to the kids individually and try to explain to them, “This is the process here; and you’re going to have to go see an immigration judge; and these are your rights before a judge; you won’t have an attorney for your case, but you can hire one. If you’re afraid to go back to your country, you have to tell the judge.” That type of stuff.

      TM: And if the child is five, and alone, doesn’t have older siblings or cousins—

      AC: Or three or four. They’re young in our Houston detention centers. And that’s where these attorneys are frustrated—they can’t be attorneys. How do they talk and try to console and communicate with a five-year-old who is just focused on “I want my mom or dad,” right?

      TM: Are the kids whose parents are applying for asylum processed differently from kids whose parents are not applying for asylum?

      AC: I don’t know. These are questions we ask DHS, but we don’t know the answers.

      TM: Why don’t you get an answer?

      AC: I don’t know. To me, if you’re going to justify this in some way under the law, the idea that these parents don’t have the ability to obtain very simple answers—what are my rights and when can I be reunited with my kid before I’m deported without them?—is horrible. And has to go far below anything we, as a civil society of law, should find acceptable. The fact that I, as an attorney specializing in this area, cannot go to a detention center and tell a mother or father what the legal procedure is for them to get their child or to reunite with their child, even if they want to go home?

      And my answer is, “I don’t think you can.” In my experience, they’re not releasing these children to the parents as they’re deported. To put a structure like that in place and the chaos in the system for “deterrence” and then carry out so much pain on the backs of some already incredibly traumatized mothers and fathers who have already experienced sometimes just horrific violence is unacceptable.

      https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/whats-really-happening-asylum-seeking-families-separated

      Mise en exergue d’un passage :

      The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing your child again.”

    • Why the US is separating migrant children from their parents

      US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has defended the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, a measure that has faced increasing criticism.

      The “zero-tolerance” policy he announced last month sees adults who try to cross the border, many planning to seek asylum, being placed in custody and facing criminal prosecution for illegal entry.

      As a result, hundreds of minors are now being housed in detention centres, and kept away from their parents.
      What is happening?

      Over a recent six-week period, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border, figures released on Friday said.

      Mr Sessions said those entering the US irregularly would be criminally prosecuted, a change to a long-standing policy of charging most of those crossing for the first time with a misdemeanour offence.

      As the adults are being charged with a crime, the children that come with them are being separated and deemed unaccompanied minors.

      Advocates of separations point out that hundreds of children are taken from parents who commit crimes in the US on a daily basis.

      As such, they are placed in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to a relative, foster home or a shelter - officials at those places are said to be already running out of space to house them.

      In recent days, a former Walmart in Texas has been converted into a detention centre for immigrant children.

      Officials have also announced plans to erect tent cities to hold hundreds more children in the Texas desert where temperatures regularly reach 40C (105F).

      Local lawmaker Jose Rodriguez described the plan as “totally inhumane” and “outrageous”, adding: “It should be condemned by anyone who has a moral sense of responsibility.”

      US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials estimate that around 1,500 people are arrested each day for illegally crossing the border.

      In the first two weeks of the “zero-tolerance” new approach, 658 minors - including many babies and toddlers - were separated from the adults that came with them, according to the CBP.

      The practice, however, was apparently happening way before that, with reports saying more than 700 families had been affected between October and April.

      Not only the families crossing irregularly are being targeted, activists who work at the border say, but also those presenting themselves at a port of entry.

      “This is really extreme, it’s nothing like we have seen before,” said Michelle Brané, director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a New York-based non-governmental organisation that is helping some of these people.

      In many of the cases, the families have already been reunited, after the parent was released from detention. However, there are reports of people being kept apart for weeks and even months.

      Family separations had been reported in previous administrations but campaigners say the numbers then were very small.
      Whose fault is it?

      Mr Trump has blamed Democrats for the policy, saying “we have to break up the families” because of a law that “Democrats gave us”.

      It is unclear what law he is referring to, but no law has been passed by the US Congress that mandates that migrant families be separated.

      Fact-checkers say that the only thing that has changed is the Justice Department’s decision to criminally prosecute parents for a first-time border crossing offence. Because their children are not charged with a crime, they are not permitted to be jailed together.

      Under a 1997 court decision known as the Flores settlement, children who come to the US alone are required to be released to their parents, an adult relative, or other caretaker.

      If those options are all exhausted, then the government must find the “least restrictive” setting for the child “without unnecessary delay”.

      The case initially applied to unaccompanied child arrivals, but a 2016 court decision expanded it to include children brought with their parents.

      According to the New York Times, the government has three options under the Flores settlement - release whole families together, pass a law to allow for families to be detained together, or break up families.

      It is worth noting that Mr Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly - who previously served as the head of Homeland Security - said in 2017 that the White House was considering separating families as a means of deterring parents from trying to cross the border.
      What do the figures show?

      The number of families trying to enter the US overland without documentation is on the rise. For the fourth consecutive month in May, there was an increase in the number of people caught crossing the border irregularly - in comparison with the same month of 2017, the rise was of 160%.

      “The trends are clear: this must end,” Mr Sessions said last month.

      It is not clear, though, if the tougher measures will stop the migrants. Most are fleeing violence and poverty in Central American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and staying, for many, could mean a death sentence.

      Human rights groups, campaigners and Democrats have sharply criticised the separations, warning of the long-term trauma on the children. Meanwhile the UN Human Rights Office called on the US to “immediately halt” them.

      But Mr Sessions has defended the measure, saying the separations were “not our goal” but it was not always possible to keep parents and children together.
      What is the policy in other countries?

      No other country has a policy of separating families who intend to seek asylum, activists say.

      In the European Union, which faced its worst migrant crisis in decades three years ago, most asylum seekers are held in reception centres while their requests are processed - under the bloc’s Dublin Regulation, people must be registered in their first country of arrival.

      Measures may vary in different member states but families are mostly kept together.

      Even in Australia, which has some of the world’s most restrictive policies, including the detention of asylum seekers who arrive by boat in controversial offshore centres, there is no policy to separate parents from their children upon arrival.

      Meanwhile, Canada has a deal with the US that allows it to deny asylum requests from those going north. It has tried to stem the number of migrants crossing outside border posts after a surge of Haitians and Nigerians coming from its neighbour. However, there were no reports of families being forcibly separated.

      “What the US is doing now, there is no equivalent,” said Michael Flynn, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, a non-profit group focused on the rights of detained immigrants. “There’s nothing like this anywhere”.

      Republicans in the House of Representatives have unveiled legislation to keep families together but it is unlikely to win the support of its own party or the White House.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44503514?platform=hootsuite

    • Les récits de la détresse d’enfants de migrants créent l’émoi aux Etats-Unis

      Plus de 2000 enfants ont été séparés de leurs parents depuis l’entrée en vigueur en avril de la politique de « tolérance zéro » en matière d’immigration illégale aux Etats-Unis. Ces jours, plusieurs témoignages ont ému dans le pays.

      http://www.rts.ch/info/monde/9658887-les-recits-de-la-detresse-d-enfants-de-migrants-creent-l-emoi-aux-etats-

    • Etats-Unis : quand la sécurité des frontières rime avec torture d’enfants mineurs

      Au Texas, dans un centre de détention, un enregistrement audio d’enfants migrants âgés entre 4 à 10 ans pleurant et appelant leurs parents alors qu’ils viennent d’être séparés d’eux, vient de faire surface.

      Cet enregistrement a fuité de l’intérieur, remis à l’avocate Jennifer Harbury qui l’a transféré au média d’investigation américain ProPublica. L’enregistrement a été placé sur les images filmées dans ce centre. Il soulève l’indignation des américains et du monde entier. Elles sont une torture pour nous, spectateurs impuissants de la barbarie d’un homme, Donald Trump et de son administration.

      Le rythme des séparations s’est beaucoup accéléré depuis début mai, lorsque le ministre de la Justice Jeff Sessions a annoncé que tous les migrants passant illégalement la frontière seraient arrêtés, qu’ils soient accompagnés de mineurs ou pas. Du 5 mai au 9 juin 2018 quelque 2’342 enfants ont été séparés de leurs parents placés en détention, accusés d’avoir traversé illégalement la frontière. C’est le résultat d’une politique sécuritaire dite de “tolérance zéro” qui criminalise ces entrées même lorsqu’elles sont justifiées par le dépôt d’une demande d’asile aux Etats-Unis. Un protocol empêche la détention d’enfants avec leurs parents. Ils sont alors placés dans des centres fermés qui ressemblent tout autant à des prisons adaptées.

      https://blogs.letemps.ch/jasmine-caye/2018/06/19/etats-unis-quand-la-securite-des-frontieres-rime-avec-torture-denfants

    • Aux États-Unis, le traumatisme durable des enfants migrants

      Trump a beau avoir mis fin à la séparation forcée des familles à la frontière, plus de 2 000 enfants migrants seraient encore éparpillés dans le pays. Le processus de regroupement des familles s’annonce long et douloureux.


      https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/aux-etats-unis-le-traumatisme-durable-des-enfants-migrants
      #caricature #dessin_de_presse

    • The Government Has Taken At Least 1,100 Children From Their Parents Since Family Separations Officially Ended

      “You can’t imagine the pain,” Dennis said. “If you’re not a dad, you don’t know what it’s like.” I reached Dennis by phone in a small town in the Copán Department of Honduras, where he lives with his wife and three children. For five months this year, the family was fractured across borders. Sonia, age 11, had been separated from Dennis after they crossed into the United States and turned themselves in to the Border Patrol to ask for asylum. Dennis was deported from Texas, and Sonia sent to a shelter in New York.

      The U.S. government is still taking children from their parents after they cross the border. Since the supposed end of family separation — in the summer of 2018, after a federal judge’s injunction and President Donald Trump’s executive order reversing the deeply controversial policy — more than 1,100 children have been taken from their parents, according to the government’s own data. There may be more, since that data has been plagued by bad record keeping and inconsistencies. The government alleges that separations now only happen when a parent has a criminal history or is unfit to care for a child, but an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the current policy still violates the rights of children and families. Border Patrol agents, untrained in child welfare, make decisions that some parents are unfit to stay with their children based solely on brief interactions with them while they are held in custody.

      Dennis picks coffee during the harvest season and works other basic jobs when he can, but he struggles to put food on the table and pay for his kids’ school supplies. In April, unable to find steady work in the coffee fields and receiving regular threats from a creditor, he headed north, hoping to find safety and opportunity in the United States. “We were barely eating. I couldn’t give my kids a life,” Dennis told me. (He preferred that I only use first names for him and his family due to safety concerns.) Thinking that his two boys — ages 2 1/2 and 7 — were too young to travel, Dennis took Sonia and together they left Honduras. They trekked through Guatemala and Mexico by bus, train, and on foot. They were robbed once, terrified the whole way, and had to beg for food. They slept wherever they could — sometimes in the woods, along the tracks, or, when they could scrounge enough money together, in migrant flophouses.

      After about a month of travel, Dennis and Sonia crossed the Rio Grande in a small raft outside of McAllen, Texas, on the morning of May 17. They walked for hours before they turned themselves in to a Border Patrol agent and were taken to a processing center, where they were locked up in one of the freezing-cold temporary holding centers known as hieleras, or iceboxes. Only a few hours later, a Border Patrol agent took Dennis and Sonia and locked them in separate rooms. It was the last time he would see his daughter for five months.

      For the next 11 days, Dennis remained in the hielera, asking repeatedly to see his daughter. Border Patrol officers tried to get him to sign papers that were in English, which he couldn’t read. He refused. “You can’t see her,” a Border Patrol agent told him about his daughter. The agent said that she was fine, but wouldn’t tell him where she was. Border Patrol transferred Dennis to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Port Isabel, Texas. They told him that because of a previous deportation and a felony — a 10-year-old charge for using false work authorization papers — he was ineligible for asylum. For the next 30 days of his detention, he knew nothing of his daughter or her whereabouts. Finally, an agent called him over and told him that she was on the phone. The call was brief. They both cried. He told her to be strong. He told her that they were going to send him away. Two weeks later, without talking to his daughter again, he was deported back to Honduras. “I’m a man, but I cried. I cried,” he told me. “Oh, it was so hard.”

      Sonia was in New York in an Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, shelter, where she was living with a number of other children. In Honduras, after Dennis’s deportation, the rest of the family waited in agony for nearly 5 months, until October 9, when Sonia was released and then flown home. “My wife,” Dennis said, “she didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. You can’t imagine the suffering. And, don’t forget,” he reminded me, “she had two other kids to raise.”

      In 2018, much of the world looked on aghast as U.S. immigration agents separated thousands of children from their parents in an unprecedented anti-immigrant crackdown. In one notorious instance captured on audio, Border Patrol agents laughed and joked at desperate children crying for their parents. The separations, part of a series of policy changes to limit total immigration and effectively shutter refugee and asylum programs, stemmed from the so-called zero-tolerance policy that began in El Paso in 2017 and was rolled out border-wide in the spring of 2018. The administration had announced that it would seek to prosecute all people who illegally crossed the border (despite the fact that, according to U.S. law, it is not illegal for an asylum-seeker to cross the border), but it later emerged that the government had specifically targeted families. A strict zero tolerance policy — prosecuting every individual who was apprehended — was always beyond capacity. The focus on families was part of a distinct effort by the Department of Homeland Security and the White House to try and dissuade — by subjecting parents and children to the terror of separation — more people from coming to the United States.

      After widespread uproar and international condemnation, Trump issued an executive order to halt the separations on June 20, 2018. Six days later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued an injunction, demanding the reunification of parents with their children within 30 days. For children under the age of 5, the deadline was 14 days. For some, however, it was too late. Parents had already lost custody, been deported, or even lost track of their children. Even for those who were reunified, trauma had set in. In 2018, the number of publicly known separations was 2,800. In fact, as the government revealed this October after pressure from the ACLU lawsuit, that original count was over 1,500 children short. Furthermore, the government has admitted that more than 1,100 additional families have been separated since the executive order and injunction — bringing the total number of children impacted to at least 5,446. That number may still be an undercount and will continue to rise if immigration officials’ current practices continue.

      The grounds for the ongoing separations — the 1,100 new cases — stem from a carve-out in Sabraw’s injunction: that children should not be separated “absent a determination that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.” That language, the ACLU and others allege in an ongoing lawsuit, is being interpreted too broadly by the government, resulting in unwarranted separations. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has been litigating against the government on behalf of a class of separated families, called the ongoing separation policy “as shocking as it is unlawful.”

      The reason that Dennis and Sonia were separated, for example, goes back to 2008, when Dennis’s wife was pregnant with Sonia, and Dennis came to the U.S. to find work and support his family. He made it to Minnesota and was loaned false papers to get a job, but he was quickly picked up and charged with forgery. He spent three months in a federal prison before being deported. Eleven years later, that conviction led to Sonia being taken from him. “You could call any child expert from anywhere in the country, and they would tell you that these parents are not a danger to the child,” Gelernt said in a September 20 hearing. “The government is simply saying, ‘We are going to take away children because the court said we could.’”

      In a brief filed to the court in July, ACLU attorneys pointed out cases in which children were taken from their parents for “the most minor or nonviolent criminal history.” The reasons for separation cited in those cases included marijuana possession convictions, a 27-year-old drug possession charge, and a charge of “malicious destruction of property value” over a total of $5. An 8-month-old was separated from his father for a “fictitious or fraudulent statement.” A mother who broke her leg at the border had her 5-year-old taken from her while she was in emergency surgery, and ORR did not release the child for 79 days.

      In an example of a dubious determination made by the Border Patrol of a father being “unfit” to care for his 1-year-old daughter, an agent separated the two because the father left his daughter in a wet diaper while she was sleeping. She had been sick and, after caring for her and taking her to the hospital on two separate occasions for a high fever, the father “wanted to let her sleep instead of waking her to change her diaper,” according to the ACLU brief. Nonetheless, a female guard took his daughter from his arms, criticized him for not changing the diaper, and even called him a bad father. The government’s own documents show that the father has no other criminal history.

      In another instance, a 3-year-old girl was separated from her father due to Customs and Border Protection’s allegation that he was not actually her parent. Although the father’s name does not appear on the child’s birth certificate, he presented other documentation showing parentage and requested a DNA test as proof. Officials ignored his request and separated the family. After an attorney intervened, the family took a DNA test and confirmed paternity. Meanwhile, the daughter was sexually abused while in ORR care and, according to the brief, “appears to be severely regressing in development.”

      CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

      The ACLU’s brief received some coverage this summer, but many of the most egregious stories it collected went unmentioned. Overall, even as the separations have continued, media attention has flagged. From a high of 2,000 stories a month in the summer of 2018, this fall has seen an average of only 50 to 100 stories a month that mention family separation, according to an analysis by Pamela Mejia, head of research at Berkeley Media Studies Group. Mejia told me that the issue had “reached a saturation point” for many people: “The overwhelming number of stories that generate outrage has made it harder to keep anything in the headlines.”

      At first, the child victims of the government’s actions were easy to empathize with. There was no “crime frame,” as Mejia put it, to explain away the children’s suffering, in contrast to the way that immigration is often covered. Whether denominating migrants as “illegals,” seeing them as “hordes” or “invaders,” or using a broad brush to associate them with crime or terrorism, politicians and the media alike often wield anti-immigrant or dehumanizing language when discussing immigration. Young children, however, are something different. The broad consensus in 2018 was that the family separation policy was an outrageous and unnecessary cruelty.

      But, despite the outrage, the policy continued and now there’s a sense of “futility that this is going to keep happening,” Mejia said. Gelernt likewise attributed the lack of ongoing coverage to “media burnout,” noting especially that there are more than 200 kids under the age of 5 who have been separated from their families. It’s hard to cover so many heartrending stories, Gelernt said. And now, simply, “People think it’s over.”

      But it’s not. Sabraw, the southern California judge who issued the injunction in 2018, is expected to rule soon on the ACLU’s challenge to the continued separations. But even if he again orders the government to reunify families, or narrows immigration officials’ latitude in carrying out separations, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government can, or will, comply. CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, has already proven negligent in keeping track of the separated children — calling families who had undergone separation, for example, “deleted family units.” Some children still remain unaccounted for.

      “At this point, no government official can plausibly claim that they are unaware of the damage these separations are doing to the children,” Gelernt told me, “yet they continue to do it.”

      In late November, back in Copán, Sonia graduated from sixth grade. One of her favorite things to do, Dennis told me, is to draw with her younger brothers. She is also teaching the older of the two boys to read, practicing his letters with him. She’ll go into seventh grade soon, but her father worries about her growing up in what he described as a gang-ridden town. Honduras has one of the highest incidence rates of violence against women in the world. He also doesn’t know how he’ll be able to pay for her high school. “I know it’s desperate,” he said, “but I’m thinking of heading north again. I can’t see how else to do it.”

      Sonia doesn’t talk much about her time separated from her family, but Dennis notices that she’s changed, and he and his wife are worried: “She told me she didn’t feel good. She was just crying at first [while in the ORR facility]; that’s all she did.” Now when she goes quiet sometimes, her parents wonder if she’s still affected by the trauma. As Dennis contemplated aloud another potential trip north in search of personal and financial security, he reflected, “I just ask that we have enough food to eat every day. I just want my family to be safe.”

      https://theintercept.com/2019/12/09/family-separation-policy-lawsuit

  • Pro-Con : “Is U.S. foreign policy largely responsible for Venezuela’s crumbling economy ?” | Tri-City Herald
    http://www.tri-cityherald.com/opinion/editorials/article197928714.html

    The Venezuelan government’s most valuable non-financial asset abroad is CITGO, a Houston-based corporation. It is obvious that the U.S. has ample financial power with which to harm Venezuelans if it is liberated from any moral or legal constraints by the U.S. media’s coverage of Venezuela.

    That’s exactly what has happened. One now is more likely to find articles and op-eds in the U.S. media defending Saudi Arabia’s monstrous dictatorship than Venezuela’s democracy.

    Years before President Donald Trump explicitly — and illegally — outlawed #Venezuela from borrowing or selling assets through the U.S. financial system, President Barack Obama ludicrously declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to the “national security” of the United States.

    Obama’s belligerence, given U.S. financial clout, would scare away rational investors and deter loans — therefore increasing the stress on an economy already in crisis.

    Trump, who has even threatened Venezuela with military assault, has simply unmasked the malevolence of U.S. policy entirely. His illegal financial embargo makes it nearly impossible for Venezuela to restructure its debt, an essential part of an economic recovery; and deprives more Venezuelans of food and life-saving medicines.

    Since at least 2002, it has always been about putting U.S. allies in power in Venezuela regardless how many innocent people are hurt in the process.

    #Etats-Unis

  • Deepwater discoveries signal life in offshore sector - Houston Chronicle
    http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Deepwater-discoveries-signal-life-in-offshore-12541700.php

    Some of the world’s biggest oil companies announced this week that they’ve made major deepwater discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea, signaling that the moribund offshore energy sector is coming back to life as rising oil prices and lower development costs hold the promise of new profits.

    Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and the French company Total revealed their discoveries within a 24-hour period Tuesday and Wednesday, shifting attention from the Permian Basin in West Texas, which has become the center of the industry’s rebound from the last oil bust. This new activity offshore could provide a much needed boost to the explorers, drillers and equipment makers that employ tens of thousands of people in the Houston area.
    […]
    Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil major, said Wednesday that it struck a potentially major oil payload while drilling to 23,000 feet in the Gulf of Mexico about 200 miles south of Houston. Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil company, owns a 40 percent stake in the well, dubbed the “Whale.”

    The discovery is near an area where Shell already has developed wells, about 10 miles from its massive Perdido platform, which is moored at 8,000 feet underwater.

  • The Spark - The Latest Editorial : Climate Change Bombs the World
    https://the-spark.net

    The country has been hit by extreme weather yet again.

    For two weeks, extreme cold swept over the eastern United States, from Minnesota with temperatures of 30 below zero, all the way down to Florida, where “frozen iguanas” were falling out of trees. This long cold snap culminated in a “bomb cyclone,” a winter storm that moved up the east coast, hitting Georgia with freezing rain and South Carolina with half a foot of snow before dumping several feet of snow on New England.

    Some people (including, of course, Donald Trump) may say that “global warming” can’t be real if such cold weather reaches the American South. In fact, these extreme weather events, even the ones bringing unusually cold weather, can indeed be attributed to human-caused climate change.

    Climatologists explain that while no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, the increase in the frequency of extreme weather events can be. And we’ve seen a very rapid increase in that frequency. Over the course of the last 30 years, the average number of “billion-dollar weather events” in the U.S. had been 5.5 per year. For the past five years, the average jumped up to 10.5. Last year? Fifteen! These events took place all over the country, from drought in the northern Plains states, to raging wildfires in California, to several extremely powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

    There are not only more extreme events, but the events themselves are more extreme. Higher average temperatures mean greater moisture in the air, which translates into heavier rain. Higher temperatures also mean higher sea levels and higher storm surges and more flooding. These changes in temperature and moisture also have an effect on the Jet Stream, making these air currents less stable and more “wobbly” – meaning that cold air can more easily spill down from the Arctic, while warmer air moves north and takes its place. And sure enough, while the Southeast has had record cold temperatures, Alaska has been experiencing record warm weather.

    These changes in the Jet Stream also mean that weather patterns can “stall” in one place for longer – contributing to record rainfall and flooding when Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston, for example, and unbroken drought and more extreme fires in the West.

    While the earth’s climate has changed in the past, getting both warmer and colder than it is now, those changes used to happen over much longer periods of time – thousands or even tens of thousands of years. But today’s changes, brought on by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, have been squeezed into just over 100 years. That’s far more quickly than human societies are used to reacting – especially a society based on the production of profit above all else.

    Changes that rapid demand rapid response and reorganization from a society – both to reverse the problem and to deal with the consequences of those changes. And there ARE things that can be done, right now, to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and start repairing the damage. But this capitalist system, and the people who run it, are not about to jeopardize the profit of their top corporations by completely rearranging how energy is produced, how transportation flows, where people live, how food is produced. It is not even going to rebuild homes and cities to be able to withstand these more extreme events that carry more risk to the general population. If profit will not be made, these corporations, and the governments that represent them, are completely uninterested.

    And ordinary working people, with no other options and nowhere else to go, will be the ones to suffer disproportionally. Just ask the working class people of Houston, of Puerto Rico, of the fire-swept areas of California – and the frozen cities of South Carolina.

    Capitalism is completely unequipped to deal with the climate change that it has brought about. If humanity is to survive – if life as we know it is to continue on this earth – it is up to the working class to sweep capitalism aside.

  • U.S. Firm Ocean Infinity Says it’s Hopeful of Getting #MH370 Search Contract Soon – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/u-s-firm-ocean-infinity-says-its-hopeful-of-getting-mh370-search-contract-


    Ocean Infinity’s vessel Seabed Constructor serves as host for six AUVs to conduct its seabed survey. Photo: Swire Seabed/Ocean Infinity

    U.S.-based seabed exploration firm Ocean Infinity on Wednesday said it was moving a vessel closer to a possible search area for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 as it soon expects to be awarded a contract by Malaysia to resume the search.

    The disappearance of the aircraft en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014 with 239 people aboard ranks among the world’s greatest aviation mysteries. Australia, China and Malaysia ended a fruitless A$200-million ($156.62 million) search in January last year.

    But in October, Malaysia said it was in talks with Ocean Infinity to resume the search on a “no-cure, no-fee” basis, meaning it will only get paid if it finds the plane.

  • Scientists Are Linking Extreme Weather to Man-Made Warming - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-13/scientists-are-linking-this-extreme-weather-to-man-made-warming

    Some of last year’s crazy weather — including extreme heat around the world to unusually warm waters in the Bering Sea — can be blamed on man-made climate change, according to a report from a group of weather researchers.

    Scientists are a careful lot, and while there’s been plenty of others who’ve blamed the changing climate for weather events, this is the first time the American Meteorological Society has definitively linked the two phenomena. The report was published Wednesday as a special supplement to the group’s annual bulletin, and included contributions from researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

    Climate change, driven by carbon emissions from human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution, affected, among other things, the severity of El Nino, coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef and the warmth of the North Pacific Ocean. The report “marks a fundamental change,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, editor-in-chief of the bulletin. “We’re experiencing new weather, because we’ve made a new climate.”

    In a separate study Wednesday, scientists from World Weather Attribution found that human-caused climate change made the record rainfall that fell over Houston during Hurricane Harvey in August 15 percent more intense.

  • Uber fined $8.9 million by Colorado for allowing drivers with felony convictions, other drivers license issues
    http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/20/uber-colorado-fine

    Colorado regulators slapped Uber with an $8.9 million penalty for allowing 57 people with past criminal or motor vehicle offenses to drive for the company, the state’s Public Utilities Commission announced Monday.

    The PUC said the drivers should have been disqualified. They had issues ranging from felony convictions to driving under the influence and reckless driving. In some cases, drivers were working with revoked, suspended or canceled licenses, the state said. A similar investigation of smaller competitor Lyft found no violations.

    “We have determined that Uber had background-check information that should have disqualified these drivers under the law, but they were allowed to drive anyway,” PUC director Doug Dean said in a statement. “These actions put the safety of passengers in extreme jeopardy.”

    Uber spokeswoman Stephanie Sedlak provided this statement on Monday:

    “We recently discovered a process error that was inconsistent with Colorado’s ridesharing regulations and proactively notified the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). This error affected a small number of drivers and we immediately took corrective action. Per Uber safety policies and Colorado state regulations, drivers with access to the Uber app must undergo a nationally accredited third-party background screening. We will continue to work closely with the CPUC to enable access to safe, reliable transportation options for all Coloradans.”

    The PUC’s investigation began after Vail police referred a case to the agency. In that case, which occurred in March, an Uber driver dragged a passenger out of the car and kicked him in the face, according the Vail police report.

    In August, the PUC asked Uber and Lyft for records of all drivers who were accused, arrested or convicted of crimes that would disqualify them from driving for a transportation network company, the term given to ridesharing services under state law.

    “Lyft gave us 15 to 20 (records), but we didn’t find any problems with Lyft,” Dean said.

    Uber handed over 107 records and told the PUC that it had removed those people from its system.

    The PUC cross-checked the Uber drivers with state crime and court databases, finding that many had aliases and other violations. While 63 were found to have issues with their driver’s licenses, the PUC focused on 57 who had additional violations, because of the impact on public safety.

    “What they (Uber) calls proactively reaching out to us was after we had to threaten them with daily civil penalties to get them to provide us with the (records),” said Dean, adding that his prime investigator just told him that some penalized drivers were still on the Uber system. “This is not a data processing error. This is a public safety issue.”

    Uber was welcomed to Colorado in June 2014, when Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Senate Bill 125 to authorize ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft. The PUC was then charged with creating rules to regulate the services, which went into effect on Jan. 30, 2016.

    The rules gave the companies the choice of either fingerprinting drivers or running a private background check on the potential driver’s criminal history and driving history. Drivers also must have a valid driver’s license.

    Drivers are disqualified if they’ve been convicted of a felony in the past five years. But they can never be a driver if they’ve been convicted of serious felonies including felony assault, fraud, unlawful sexual behavior and violent crimes, according to the statute.

    Taxi drivers, by comparison, are subject to fingerprint background checks by the FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

    Elsewhere in the U.S., Uber and Lyft have threatened to leave places that force them to fingerprint drivers — including in Chicago, Maryland and Houston.

    Both companies pulled out of Austin last year after the city added rules to fingerprint drivers. But the Texas house passed a bill in April removing such requirements, and Uber and Lyft returned to the city.

    While Maryland caved in its requirements after Uber threatened to leave, the state banned 4,000 ridesharing drivers in April who did not meet state screening requirements despite passing Uber or Lyft’s background checks.That also happened in Massachusetts, which kicked out 8,200 drivers who had passed company checks. Among them were 51 registered sex offenders.

    Uber and Lyft have pushed for private background checks because they say that fingerprints don’t provide the complete source of criminal history that some expect. In a post about its security process, Uber said that when it comes to fingerprints, there are gaps between FBI and state arrest records, which can result in an incomplete background check. Uber, instead, uses state and local criminal history checks plus court records and the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Sex Offender site.

    Last month, California regulators nixed any fingerprinting requirement as long as Uber and Lyft conduct their own background checks.

    But the Colorado PUC says that by fingerprinting drivers, the ride service would be able to identify drivers with aliases and other identities with felony convictions. The lack of fingerprinting never sat well with Dean, who mentioned his concern in 2014 before Colorado passed the law.

    “They said their private background checks were superior to anything out there,” Dean said. “We can tell you their private background checks were not superior. In some cases, we could not say they even provided a background check.”

    Vail police said that altercations between passengers and drivers are not uncommon. They’re not limited to Uber drivers but include taxi and limo drivers and passengers, said Vail police Detective Sgt. Luke Causey.

    “We’ve had more than one,” Causey said. “Unfortunately, in our winter environment with guests and around bar closing times, we’ve had the driver go after passengers who don’t pay their tab. Sometimes it can go both ways.”

    Uber drivers have made local headlines for bad behavior. In July, a Denver Uber driver pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace after rolling his car on the leg of a city parking attendant at Denver International Airport. Two years ago, a Denver UberX driver was arrested for trying to break into the home of a passenger he’d just dropped off at the airport.

    Monday’s fine is a civil penalty assessment and based on a citation of $2,500 per day for each disqualified driver found to have worked. Among the findings, 12 drivers had felony convictions, 17 had major moving violations, 63 had driver’s license issues and three had interlock driver’s licenses, which is required after a recent drunken driving conviction.

    Uber has 10 days to pay 50 percent of the $8.9 million penalty or request a hearing to contest the violation before an administrative law judge. Afterwards, the PUC will continue making audits to check for compliance. If more violations are found, Uber’s penalty could rise.

    “Uber can fix this tomorrow. The law allows them to have fingerprint background checks. We had found a number of a.k.a.’s and aliases that these drivers were using. That’s the problem with name-based background checks,” Dean said. “We’re very concerned and we hope the company will take steps to correct this.”

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