Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, April 28, 2015.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: I'm Into Something Good by Heman's Hermits
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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A Tale of Two Articles |
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Obama on the Baltimore Riots: It's About Decades of Inequality
By AJ Vicens
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Standing side by side with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan at the White House on Tuesday, President Barack Obama made some of his most detailed and forceful comments yet about economic inequality and police behavior during recent protests around the country. He told reporters that while there was no excuse for the violence that erupted in Baltimore last night, the unrest could be tied to decades of civil rights issues, income inequality, and a lack of opportunity. Here's an excerpt:
This is not new. This has been going on for decades. And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, we also know if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty, they've got parents, often because of substance abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education, and themselves can't do right by their kids, if it's more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead than that they go to college . . . if we think that we're just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without, as a nation, and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we're not going to solve this problem, and we'll go through this same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities, and the occasional riots in the streets and everybody will feign concern until it goes away and we just go about our business as usual.
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Obama condemns rioting Baltimore youth
By (Al Jazeera)
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US President Barack Obama has condemned a group of youth for their "counterproductive" riot in the city of Baltimore, but stressed the need for "soul searching" in the country.
Obama said on Tuesday that the Baltimore youth that started rioting hours after the funeral of a young black man who died after suffering a severe spinal injury while in police custody had "no excuse" for violence.
"They aren't protesting, they aren't making a statement, they're stealing," said Obama. "It is counterproductive."
He said those in the city who stole from businesses and burned buildings and cars should be treated as criminals.
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Gray's family, who were hoping to organise a peace march later this week, condemned the violence, and said the problem of police brutality was not solely caused by police.
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Top News |
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Nearly half of top pension funds gambling on climate change
By Karl Mathiesen
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Almost half the world’s top pension funds are taking an ill-advised gamble on climate change, according to a financial thinktank.
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Financial experts, including the president of the World Bank and the governor of the Bank of England, have warned that fossil fuel assets are risky investments because their reserves of coal, oil and gas cannot be burned if the world is to avoid the most extreme impacts of climate change.
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“They’re betting around 20-1 that either the fossil fuel company influence will last forever or that their fund managers will bail them out of a crisis – but that didn’t work too well during the last systemic crisis did it?” he said.
Funds the AODP termed as “laggards” were those that received a D or X rating. These included the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, both of which are the subject of a Guardian campaign requesting that they divest from fossil fuel companies. It also included some of the world’s biggest pension and sovereign wealth funds.
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Ben Caldecott, the director of the stranded assets programme at Oxford University’s Smith School said recent reviews of the law, by economist John Kay and the Law Commission, clearly showed asset owners must account for fossil fuel risk.
“In my view that settled it. Clearly fiduciaries can take account of these issues and actually if they don’t take account of material environment-related risks, whether it’s climate change or other factors, then they could be in breach of their fiduciary duties. So ignoring it is not an option,” he said.
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BP profit hit by oil price fall
By (BBC)
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Oil giant BP has reported a sharp fall in profit for the three months to the end of March as the dramatic fall in oil prices takes its toll.
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A big rise in revenue from BP's refining business made up the bulk of its profits.
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"Upstream result was significantly affected by lower oil and gas prices as well as weaker gas marketing and trading and $375m costs associated with the cancellation of contracts for two deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico," BP said.
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BP maintained the quarterly dividend at 10 cents per share to be paid on 19 June.
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BP said on Tuesday that it had taken another $332m charge linked to the Deepwater Horizon accident, bringing the total to $43.8bn (£28.7bn).
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International |
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China's Great Wall of Trees Is Helping Reverse Deforestation
By Bryan Lufkin
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Even in today’s post-Fern Gully world, 36 football fields’ worth of of forests are destroyed every minute. But China’s monster, 32 million-acre army of trees is a step in the planet-saving direction.
According to a recent study in Nature Climate Change from researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia, humans have planted enough vegetation since 2003 to consume four billion tons of carbon worldwide, thanks largely in part to China.
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But China’s “Great Green Wall” project has been the biggest boost. It’s an initiative to cover a span of 2,800 miles in northern China with greenery to halt the ever-expanding Gobi desert. Planting the mondo forest began in 1978, and the aim is to hit a billion trees by 2050. (China releases the most GHG emissions in the world, followed by the U.S. and then the E.U.)
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As for fighting climate change? We can channel our inner Johnny Appleseeds all we want, but ditching dependence on gross fossil fuels needs to be top priority.
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Nepal earthquake: How India and China vie for influence
By Soutik Biswas
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India lost no time in sending aircraft to Kathmandu carrying disaster response forces, medical teams, food, medicines and rescue equipment. China promptly flew in rescue teams, sniffer dogs, medical equipment, tents, blankets and generators. Leaders of both the countries - Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping - were also quick to convey their condolences. "For many people of our country, Nepalis are our own people," said Mr Modi in his monthly radio show on Sunday.
. . . Delhi is geographically, linguistically and culturally much closer to Nepal than China. The anti-India rhetoric softens when political parties come to power. "India has been a political player in Nepal as much as any Nepali political party," says Michael Hutt, professor of Nepali and Himalayan studies at the University of London.
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China's influence in the region appears to be growing rapidly. Last year China overtook India as Nepal's biggest foreign investor, investing heavily, among other things, in roads, power plants, transport and infrastructure. Trade between the two countries is on an upswing. Beijing has not minced words in telling Kathmandu that it needs to tamp down on pro-Tibet activists on its soil. A 2013 Human Rights Watch report said Nepal "forcibly" returns to China many Tibetans arrested at the border in contravention of rules. One report said Taiwan had been asked not to participate in the quake relief effort, although it is not clear whether China had anything to do with it. "Nepal has also become smarter and learnt to leverage both the Asian giants to its benefits," says Mr Pant.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Wake-up call from Baltimore: We can no longer ignore our inner cities
By Greg Hanscom
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It had been 40 years since James Earl Ray shot Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a Memphis motel, sending African Americans raging through the streets of urban America. In Baltimore, protesters smashed windows and set businesses ablaze. National Guard troops marched into the city to calm the unrest.
It was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the end for neighborhoods like Oliver. Those who could afford to leave, did so. Homes fell into the hands of speculators and slumlords. Derelict houses became havens for the crack cocaine epidemic, as well as lead, roaches, and rats that sickened neighborhood children. Young people, especially young men, cycled in and out of the criminal justice system.
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The story has echoes of Michael Brown, who was accosted by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., last summer for walking in the street, an encounter that ended with Brown being shot and killed. This, in the same 12-month period when we’ve watched a New York City cop strangle Eric Garner and an officer in South Carolina shoot Walter Scott in the back as he fled the officer after a traffic stop.
And of course, these are just glimpses at an epidemic of police violence against African Americans (a Baltimore Sun special report found that the city paid out $5.7 million from 2011 to 2014 over lawsuits claiming that officers had brutalized citizens), and a system that holds down people of color, turning inner cities into repressive police states. They’ve blown up in the national consciousness because they’ve been caught on video — and because our cities are tinderboxes of pent-up anger and frustration, like logged-over forests just waiting to ignite.
If there’s a silver lining to the recent publicity it is this: It has forced us to reckon with the damage we’ve done.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
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Despite the group's competent musicianship, some subsequent singles employed session musicians – including Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Vic Flick and Bobby Graham – with contributions from the band, although the role of session players on Herman's Hermits records has been exaggerated in the rock media and in liner notes on their ABKCO Records Retrospective (which does not credit the Hermits' playing). Mickie Most used session musicians on many records he produced — this was industry practice at the time and continues today. Even such respected groups as The Yardbirds were required by Most to use session musicians (except Jimmy Page) on their Most-produced recordings. Continuing acrimony between former members of Herman's Hermits has increased the amount of misinformation about the group's role on their records; the late Derek Leckenby, in particular, was a skilled guitarist. Mickie Most commented on the VH1 My Generation: Herman's Hermits episode that the Hermits "played on a lot of their records, and some they didn't." The group played on all their US and UK No.1 hits ("I'm into Something Good", "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" and "I'm Henry VIII, I Am"), on most of their Top Ten US singles, on a number of other singles and most album cuts. According to Peter Noone, Leckenby played the muted lead on "This Door Swings Both Ways". The riff in "Silhouettes" has been variously credited to Jimmy Page, Big Jim Sullivan and Vic Flick; however, according to Keith Hopwood and Karl Green, Leckenby replaced Flick in the studio and played the signature riff under Most's direction.[10] According to Hopwood, Green and Noone, Jimmy Page played on the single "Wonderful World" (although Big Jim Sullivan lists the song as part of a session he played); both may have added to the backing track. Several writers have claimed that session players played on "I'm into Something Good"; according to the surviving band members, the song was recorded on a two-track recorder, with only a piano player in addition to the Hermits.
In 1965 and 1966, the group rivalled The Beatles on the US charts (though not nearly as successful in their native UK) and was the top-selling pop act in the US in 1965. On The Beatles Anthology video, there is a brief interview with a young girl in the audience attending The Beatles' second appearance at Shea Stadium. When asked why The Beatles did not sell out the venue this time, she replied that they were not as popular any more and that she preferred Herman's Hermits. Karl Green has noted that he preferred harder rock, but was grateful for the hand he was dealt. Although the band's singles were written by some of the top songwriters of the day, Noone, Leckenby, Hopwood and Green contributed songs such as "My Reservation's Been Confirmed", "Take Love, Get Love", "Marcel's", "For Love", "Tell Me Baby", "Busy Line", Moon Shine Man", "I Know Why" and "Gaslight Street". "I Know Why" enjoyed a limited "A"-side release.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Spike in Air Conditioning Spews More Heat-Trapping Gases
By Gayathri Vaidyanathan and ClimateWire
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A significant portion of the world's emissions of heat-trapping gases emitted by air conditioners, refrigeration and other applications comes from the developing world, finds a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In addition, developed nations are making mistakes when reporting emissions of the gases, called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the study finds.
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Developed nations accounted for about 60 percent of the 2012 emissions. The rest came from the developing world, the study finds, and these emissions are growing at a fast clip.
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Almost all Chinese-owned air conditioners by 2005 and sales in other parts of the world have skyrocketed, according to a presentation given at the Bangkok talks by Nihar Shah, a senior scientific engineering associate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The trend is detrimental to the climate not only because of HFC impacts—air conditioners also significantly draw electricity. Shah estimated that as people install home air conditioners in poorer nations, the units would consume half or more of the new solar and wind capacity nations install by 2020.
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Big Coal’s big scam: scar the land for proft, then let others pay to clean up
By George Monbiot
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When British Coal was privatised by John Major’s government, in 1994, the company that took over in south Wales, Celtic Energy, was granted a 10-year exemption from paying a restoration bond in return for a slightly higher price for the assets. That higher price disappeared into national accounts, doubtless to fund one of Major’s tax cuts for the rich.
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Villages and towns find themselves perched on the edge of sheer drops, overlooking running black sores sometimes hundreds of metres wide. At Margam, for example, the pit is about a mile and a quarter across and, according to the latest estimate I’ve seen, the water gathering there is 88 metres deep. In East Ayrshire, in Scotland, 22 giant voids have been abandoned by their operators. Restoration work would cost £161m, but just £28m has been set aside. As the local MP explained: “Unstable head walls and extremely deep water bodies with vertical drop-offs make for dangerous playgrounds.”
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And why are we digging coal anyway, when we cannot afford to burn it? Climate breakdown is the greatest unfunded liability of all, for which future generations will have to pay. Yet in 2013, the latest year figures are available for, the amount of coal for which companies in Britain have permission to dig rose from 12m tonnes to 24m. Eight new opencast pits were approved in that year, and just three rejected. In which parallel universe is this compatible with the commitment to limit climate change?
Last week, lost in the election turmoil, the Welsh Senedd did something remarkable. It voted, by 30 votes to zero, for a moratorium on opencast coalmining. With the Welsh ban on fracking, this could have meant that Wales was the first nation on earth to keep its fossil fuels in the ground. But the Welsh government refused to accept the decision, using the restoration argument. Past crimes are used to justify new ones.
Fire and forget: that’s the psychopathic business model we confront, and the forgetting is assisted by the press and political leaders. To them, the victims are non-people, the ruined landscapes non-places. All that counts is the money.
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Science and Health |
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Tyson says: No more antibiotics for our chickens
By Nathanael Johnson
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Tyson Foods, the largest processor of meat and poultry in the United States, announced today that it would significantly curtail the use of antibiotics in its U.S. meat chickens by the end of September 2017. Specifically, it will eliminate all those antibiotics which are medically important to humans.
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So the U.S. may be at the tipping point for antibiotic use in poultry, but the rest of the world isn’t, yet. Still, the fact that big corporations are pulling this off in the U.S. quashes the argument that it simply can’t be done. Sure, eliminating human antibiotics takes work, but I suspect that once Tyson figures it out in the U.S., it will try it in its overseas operations as well.
Then there’s the question of whether it’s enough to eliminate just the antibiotics that are medically important to humans. There is a (highly unlikely) chain of events by which microbes resistant to veterinary antibiotics could cause problems for humans. That’s something to think about, but it’s a completely different order of risk: Using medically important antibiotics in agriculture is like driving without a seatbelt; using veterinary antibiotics is like driving without a helmet.
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Whitening the Arctic Ocean: May restore sea ice, but not climate
By (ScienceDaily)
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Some scientists have suggested that global warming could melt frozen ground in the Arctic, releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, greatly amplifying global warming. It has been proposed that such disastrous climate effects could be offset by technological approaches, broadly called geoengineering. One geoengineering proposal is to artificially whiten the surface of the Arctic Ocean in order to increase the reflection of the Sun's energy into space and restore sea ice in the area.
New research from Carnegie's Ivana Cvijanovic (now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Ken Caldeira, as well as Douglas MacMartin of Caltech, shows that while an incredibly large effort could, in principle, restore vast amounts of sea ice by this method, it would not result in substantial cooling. As a result, it would not be effective in keeping the ground frozen in the Arctic. Their findings are published by Environmental Research Letters.
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"Simply put, our results indicate that whitening the surface of the Arctic Ocean would not be an effective tool for offsetting the effects of climate change caused by atmospheric greenhouse gas," Caldeira said. "Furthermore, it is not clear to me that there is a technologically feasible way of actually doing this, and even if you could do it, the direct negative consequences of reducing the amount of sunlight available to marine ecosystems could be huge."
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Technology |
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Minecraft: Mojang makes female character available to all players
By Stuart Dredge
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Just as Tom was everyone’s first friend on MySpace back in the day, so Steve is everyone’s first character skin in Minecraft. Now he’s getting some competition for that role: a female character named Alex.
From this week, Alex will be a free default skin across all the game’s console versions, in what developer Mojang says is an effort to better represent its audience.
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“The blocky shape gives it a bit of a traditional masculine look, but adding a separate female mesh would just make it worse by having one specific model for female Human Beings and male ones. That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn’t even exist.”
Steve’s unchallenged role as the default skin has not prevented Minecraft from amassing a huge audience that crosses the gender divide, particularly among children, where girls are as fervent Minecraft players as boys.
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It is also likely to spur more debate about whether the range of options could be widened further to, for example, provide options for different races.
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Massive $33,500 2450mm f/8 NASA lens surfaces on eBay
By Dan Bracaglia
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If $180,000 seems a bit steep for the Canon 1200mm f/5.6L lens B&H is currently offering in its used department, then perhaps this $33,500 NASA 2540mm f/8 lens on eBay sounds a bit more reasonable. Just think - it's twice the focal length for a fifth the price!
The Jonel 100 is a mirror lens, and according to the listing, it was originally used by NASA to track rockets, like the Saturn V launches in the mid 60's and early 70's. Apparently, a very similar model was also used to track the Challenger Space Shuttle on the day of its tragic explosion.
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The lens is based on a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope design, which should sound familiar to anyone involved with astronomy. Internally, you’ll find a two element field correctors, which produces a 57x57mm image. The aperture, f/8, is likely fixed.
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Cultural |
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Heartland Institute takes climate foolishness to a Biblical level
By John Abraham
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I just received a notice that made me laugh. The Heartland Institute, one of the groups responsible for misleading the public about climate change, sent out a notice about an upcoming Papal event. The event itself sounds great, it is a workshop on April 28th to address global warming. I have written about the bold action taken by Pope Francis; he is clearly a leader amongst the faith community on this topic which is already having large societal and human health impacts. At the upcoming events, world leaders in science, business, and religion will congregate to work toward solutions to help protect the most vulnerable.
Of course, this is all bad news for those who are trying to sweep the problem of climate change under the rug. That brings us to the Heartland Institute. They are asking their members and readers to tell the Pope that climate change is not a crisis. In an email I received, it is stated that Heartland will be bringing “real scientists to Rome” to dissuade the Pope from taking climate change seriously.
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There are other so-called experts include people such as Paul Chesser who works at the National Legal and Policy Center, Sterling Brunett who is an advisor for the conservative organization ALEC, Marc Morano who spent years working for Rush Limbaugh and was an advisor and speech writer for Senator Inhofe, and James Taylor, who reportedly has degrees in government and law. Perhaps the best known scientist among their list is the famous Willie Soon, who has been in the news lately for working on climate change without properly disclosing funding.
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I teach at a Catholic University. As a professor at such an institution, I am proud that the Pope is living a Catholic mission of caring for those who are being impacted by climate change. It is clear that people of faith around the globe are taking more seriously the impact today’s actions have on future generations. It is hard to imagine a motivation more crucial than that of faith to help us move to rational and just solutions to this common problem.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |