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Satellite images from last week show that North Korea is making numerous improvements to the infrastructure at a nuclear research facility, according to a new study.
The images, obtained by North Korea analysis outlet 38 North, come just weeks after President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed an agreement that called for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.
http://thehill.com/policy/international/394326-satellite-images-show-north-korea-upgrading-nuclear-research-facility


The Myth of the Intrapreneur
https://hbr.org/2018/06/the-myth-of-the-intrapreneur


So far I haven't heard NPR discuss the effect of changes on the supreme court on the environment, including climate disruption.
If Trump gets to choose another justice young enough to serve for decades, it will another step towards devastation of our world, possibly leading to the extinction of our species.
I wonder if their big fossil fuel donors would allow that.


Despite the growth of the nation’s overall economy, the study notes that workers who entered the workforce in 1983 made about $283,000 less during their lifetimes—$243,000 less when factoring in employment benefits separate from pay—than workers who entered the workforce in 1967, when using the Consumer Price Index to account for inflation. Meanwhile, the wealthiest workers have benefited from more and more economic gains, increasing the gap between the rich and everyone else.
https://research.umn.edu/inquiry/post/study-shows-middle-class-wages-have-stagnated-over-time


‘The doomsayers were right’: James Hansen’s 30-year-old climate warning rings true today
https://thinkprogress.org/30-years-after-a-brave-scientist-warned-us-about-global-warming-deniers-run-america-20fc66beb133/


People are defecting from the GOP. But not to the Democrats
All the same, the decline in Republican affiliation may affect our understanding of the party. If a lot less people even consider themselves Republicans or Republican-leaning, the lowering levels of support that Donald Trump gets among Republicans and his recent uptick look even worse. The Americans who were Republicans a year or two ago, who have now defected, won't even have their unhappiness picked up in these polls, softening the result.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/14/politics/fewer-republicans-more-independents-no-parties/index.html


Modest reductions in air pollution can prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of infants in sub-Saharan Africa each year, according to a new scientific study that investigated the link between breathable air pollutants and premature deaths in 30 countries across the continent. There is a "robust relationship" between breathable particulate matter and infant mortality in some of the world's poorest countries, according researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Last month, WHO reported that nine out of 10 people worldwide breathe air with high levels of pollutants. It said there are 4.3 million deaths a year due to exposure to outdoor air pollution and 3.8 million deaths each year due to household exposure to smoke from fuels and dirty stoves.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/air-pollution-killing-thousands-of-infants-in-africa-study-says-2018-06-27/


Our personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming. Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas. About five pounds comes from the extraction, production, and delivery of the fuel, while the great bulk of heat-trapping emissions—more than 19 pounds per gallon—comes right out of a car’s tailpipe.
In total, the US transportation sector—which includes cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, and freight—produces nearly thirty percent of all US global warming emissions, more than almost any other sector.
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/car-emissions-and-global-warming#.WzRRUCCQw2w


Agriculture accounts for about 6 percent of total heat-trapping emissions in the United States, and beef production alone accounts for 2.2 percent of the total—roughly the equivalent of the annual emissions of 24 million cars or light trucks, or 33 average-sized coal-fired power plants. So while the emissions contribution of beef production may sound small, it is not an insignificant part of the problem.
The good news is that beef production can also be part of the solution. A February 2011 Union of Concerned Scientists report, Raising the Steaks: Global Warming and Pasture-Raised Beef Production in the United States, looks at ways pasture-based beef producers could lower their climate emissions and take greater advantage of pastures’ capacity to remove heat-trapping carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soil.
https://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/advance-sustainable-agriculture/global-warming-and-beef-production.html#.WzRY5SCQw2w


Prideful of their own higher learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic maverick [Hitler] for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had already amassed vast support.
I thought of one other crucial technique that Zweig identified in Hitler and his ministers: they introduced their most extreme measures gradually—strategically—in order to gauge how each new outrage was received. “Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength, to see whether the world conscience would still digest the dose,” Zweig wrote. “The doses became progressively stronger until all Europe finally perished from them.”
[I suggest reading this whole article.]
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/when-its-too-late-to-stop-fascism-according-to-stefan-zweig


Trump’s Immigration Ban Excludes Countries With Business Ties
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-trump-second-immigration-ban-conflict-of-interest/


Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in South Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.
“The size and scope of these cash purchases are deeply troubling as they can often signal money laundering activity," said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a former federal prosecutor. "There have long been credible allegations of money laundering by the Trump Organization which, if true, would pose a real threat to the United States in the event that Russia were able to leverage evidence of illicit financial transactions against the president."
Some of the buyers appeared to spend above market value — one of the signs, along with a lack of information about where the money comes from and properties sitting empty — that raises suspicion, said Elise Bean, former staff director of a Senate subcommittee that investigated money laundering.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article210477439.html


A Vox analysis of hiring records for seasonal workers at three Trump properties in New York and Florida revealed that only one out of 144 jobs went to a US worker from 2016 to the end of 2017. Foreign guest workers with H-2B visas got the rest.
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/13/16466542/trump-h-2b-guest-workers


ICE has asked for permission to begin routinely destroying 11 kinds of records, including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody. Other records subject to destruction include alternatives to detention programs, regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities, and communications from the public reporting detention abuses. ICE proposed various timelines for the destruction of these records ranging from 20 years for sexual assault and death records to three years for reports about solitary confinement.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-patrol-abuses/ice-plans-start-destroying-records-immigrant


George Will, a longtime political commentator and staunch defender of the conservative movement, chided the Republican Party, citing the party’s support for Donald Trump in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
“Vote against the GOP this November” is the title of his column for June 22, 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vote-against-the-gop-this-november/2018/06/22/a6378306-7575-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ec592345a8bd