Extra, Extra
Surf’s Up: “Sea surface temperatures just hit a record high in a 2.4-million square mile region of the deep Pacific Ocean known as Niño 3.4, the key area scientists are tracking to measure the rapidly strengthening El Niño.” ‘Perfect storm’: El Niño goes off the charts. We’re already seeing flooding from high tides in my neck of the woods. And it’s even worse in SoCal. “In the coming days, sea levels off Southern California are expected to begin rising by half a foot or more and then stay elevated for months, as an enormous pulse of wave energy generated by El Niño travels up the coast, lifting the water as it goes.” A Kelvin Wave Is Heading Toward the California Coast, Bringing Trouble.
+ Telling Tales Out of School: “Outside a high school in Seine-St.-Denis, a working-class suburb north of Paris, a crowd of about 100 students milled in the street on Thursday afternoon, their shouts echoing through the towering apartment buildings. They were protesting overcrowded classrooms, crumbling facilities, and absent teachers.” Blockades, Fireworks and Tear Gas: Young Protesters Are Rattling France. And, fires, fury and hundreds of arrests as France gripped by student protests.
+ Traffick Jam: “Criminal gangs lure immigrants to Russia and Belarus on commercial flights and then send them to the border, Latvian officials said, with the backing of those countries. Officials said that the Russian and Belarusian governments sometimes even offered chartered flights to Moscow or Minsk for migrants and then provided transport to the forested frontiers bordering Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and elsewhere.” NYT (Gift Article) on how Putin uses immigration as a weapon. A Front Line at the Border: How Russia Uses Migrants as Weapons Against Europe.
+ The Upside: Steven Rattner in the NYT (Gift Article): Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I.
+ Help Unwanted: U.S. added 29,000 jobs in September, missing forecasts by a wide margin.
+ Sauce Loss: “My mom grew up during the civil-rights movement in Shelby, Mississippi, a farming town that is now dead, and soon after she married my father, they moved 20 miles north to Clarksdale, a farming town that is now dying. She’s 79. The headlines she reads these days feel like dispatches from a time she thought would never return. Like a lot of progressive southerners, she’s had to watch the thing she counted on most, the flawed yet moral core of the United States, turn to ashes in the last years of her life. Sometimes the big losses are too much to process, and little things, such as losing a familiar taste, become mourners’ benches. (Also, those sandwiches were really good.) She asked me, her reporter son, to find out what had happened.” Wright Thompson in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Requiem for a Condiment.
