Day: July 9, 2024

Death Valley, Calif. — Hundreds of Europeans touring the American West and adventurers from around the U.S. are still being drawn to Death Valley National Park, even though the desolate region known as one of the Earth’s hottest places is being punished by a dangerous heat wave blamed for a motorcyclist’s death over the weekend.

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French, Spanish, English and Swiss tourists left their air-conditioned rental cars and motorhomes Monday to take photographs of the barren landscape so different than the snow-capped mountains and rolling green hills they know back home. American adventurers liked the novelty of it, even as officials at the park in California warned visitors to stay safe.

“I was excited it was going to be this hot,” said Drew Belt, a resident of Tupelo, Mississippi, who wanted to stop in Death Valley as the place boasting the lowest elevation in the U.S. on his way to climb California’s Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Kind of like walking on Mars.”

Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds cautioned visitors in a statement that “high heat like this can pose real threats to your health.”

The searing heat wave gripping large parts of the United States also led to record daily high temperatures in Oregon, where it is suspected to have caused six deaths, the state medical examiner’s office said Tuesday. More than 161 million people around the U.S. were under heat alerts, especially in Western states.

Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records over the weekend and are expected to keep doing so into the week.

The early U.S. heat wave came as the global temperature in June was record warm for the 13th straight month and marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, the European climate service Copernicus said. Most of this heat, trapped by human-caused climate change, is from long-term warming from greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists say.

An excessive heat warning was in place for much of Washington and Oregon on Tuesday, with the potential for temperatures to reach up to 110 F (43.3 C) in areas, posing a major risk for heat-related illness, the National Weather Service said.

Temperatures in parts of Idaho, including Boise, were expected to reach over 100 F (37.7 C) on Tuesday.

A serious heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 killed an estimated 600 people across Oregon, Washington and western Canada. Air conditioning is not common in much of the Pacific Northwest, a region unaccustomed to such heat.

In eastern California’s sizzling desert, a high of 128 F (53.3 C) was recorded over the weekend at Death Valley National Park, where a visitor, who was not identified, died Saturday from heat exposure. Another person was hospitalized.

They were among six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area in scorching weather, the park said in a statement. The other four were treated at the scene. Emergency medical helicopters were unable to respond because the aircraft cannot generally fly safely over 120 F (48.8 C), officials said.

Death Valley is considered one of the most extreme environments in the world. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 F (56.67 C) in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130 F (54.4 C), recorded there in July 2021.

“It’s impressive,” Thomas Mrzliek of Basel, Switzerland, said of the triple digit heat. “It like a wave that hits when you get out of the car, but it’s a very dry heat. So it’s not as in Europe.”

Across the desert in Nevada, Las Vegas already had hit 103 F (39.4 C) by 9:30 a.m. Tuesday and was likely to approach 120 F (48.8 C) again by day’s end.

“Intense heatwave will continue to set records through the end of the week before moderating as increasing monsoonal moisture returns to the area,” the National Weather Service in Las Vegas said.

In Arizona, the average temperatures for the first eight days of July have been the hottest on record for Phoenix and Yuma, said the National Weather Service in Phoenix. It said both cities will remain at about 10 degrees above normal over the next few days, with highs mostly between 112 F (44.4 C) and 120 F (48.8 C).

Extreme heat and a longstanding drought in the West has also dried out vegetation that can fuel wildfires.

In California, firefighters were on the lines of at least 18 wildfires Tuesday, including a 41-square-mile (106-square-kilometer) blaze in the mountains of Santa Barbara County. The Lake Fire was only 12% contained, and forecasters warned of a “volatile combination” of high heat, low humidity and northwest winds developing late in the day.

“The main priority is to prevent the fire from moving toward communities to the south,” the fire status report said.

A small but smoky blaze, dubbed the Royal Fire, burned through more than 150 acres (60 hectares) of forest west of Lake Tahoe and sent ash raining down on the tourist town of Truckee, California. There was no containment Monday night.

Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around usually temperate Tahoe area, with the weather service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains.” At Sand Harbor State Park, the record high of 92 F (33.3 C) set on Sunday smashed the old record of 88 F (31.1 C) set in 2014. For the third straight day, the town of South Lake Tahoe, California, hit a high of 91 F (32.7 C), beating the previous record of 89 F (31.6 C) set in 2017.

And for the first time in records dating to 1888, Reno reached 105 F (40.5 C) for the third consecutive day. A short time later on Monday, the city set a record high of 106 F (41.1 C), leap-frogging the previous mark of 104 F (40 C) set in 2017.

“It’s definitely hotter than we are used to,” Nevada State Parks spokesperson Tyler Kerver said.

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Stern reported from Reno, Nevada. AP journalists Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon; Anita Snow in Phoenix; Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles; Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska; and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nevada, contributed to this report.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who recruited her former boyfriend to kill her mother after years of being forced to pretend she was gravely ill, announced Tuesday that she is pregnant and hopes to give her child everything she lacked growing up.

Blanchard said in a YouTube video that the baby is due in January, which will be just a little over a year after she was freed from a women’s prison northeast of Kansas City, Missouri.

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“I just want to be a good mother for my child,” she said, her voice catching. “I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.”

Blanchard’s case sparked national tabloid interest after reports emerged that her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was slain in 2015, had essentially kept her daughter prisoner, forcing her to use a wheelchair and feeding tube.

Dee Dee Blanchard duped doctors into doing unnecessary procedures by telling them that her daughter’s medical records had been lost in Hurricane Katrina, Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s attorney said.

The attorney said the mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychological disorder in which parents or caregivers seek sympathy through the exaggerated or made-up illnesses of their children.

The mother-daughter duo received charitable donations, and even a home near Springfield, Missouri, from Habitat for Humanity.

When Gypsy Rose Blanchard turned 23, she supplied a knife to her then-boyfriend, and hid in a bathroom while he repeatedly stabbed her mother, according to the probable cause statement. Then Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn, whom she met on a Christian dating website, made their way by bus to Godejohn’s home in Wisconsin, where they were arrested.

Godejohn is serving a life sentence in Missouri. Prosecutors cut Blanchard a deal because of the abuse she had endured. Ultimately she found a way to forgive her mother and herself, she said soon after her release while promoting the Lifetime docuseries, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” and her own e-book, “Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom.”

Earlier coverage includes the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” and the 2019 Hulu miniseries “The Act.”

Blanchard said in the new video that she knows some people think she isn’t ready to be a mother, that it is too soon. But she was dismissive, saying no one is ever truly ready for parenthood.

“It’s an amazing feeling when your whole world shifts and suddenly it’s not about you,” she said. “It’s not about anything other than this tiny little life that’s inside you that you are now in charge of protecting. And that little tiny life is a baby, a little tiny human that’s yours and that you have to make sure that you protect, you love, you take care of. And all of the things that I wish I could have had when I was little.”

She said the baby’s father is Ken Urker, a prison pen pal who proposed when Blanchard was incarcerated. They later broke up, and she instead married Ryan Scott Anderson, a special education teacher from Lake Charles, Louisiana. Soon after her release from prison, however, Blanchard and Anderson split, and now she is back with Urker. Blanchard said the pregnancy wasn’t planned but both she and Urker are excited and committed to creating a family together.

“I couldn’t be happier,” she said, while acknowledging that the relationship is unconventional. “Everything that has ever happened to me in my life suddenly doesn’t matter because it all led me to be who I am today and it all led me to this moment right here, right now. And that’s a blessing.”

Lima, Peru — Twenty two years ago, an avalanche buried American climber William Stampfl as he made his way up one of the highest peaks in the Andes mountains.

His family knew there was little hope of finding him alive, or even of retrieving his corpse from the thick fields of snow and the freezing ice sheets that cover the 6,700-meter (22,000-foot) tall Huascaran peak.

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But in June, Stampfl’s daughter got a call from a stranger, who said he had come across the climber’s frozen, and mostly intact body, as he made his own ascent up Huascaran.

“It’s been a shock” said Jennifer Stampfl, 53. “When you get that phone call that he’s been found your heart just sinks. You don’t know how exactly to feel at first.”

On Tuesday, police in Peru said they had recovered Stampfl’s body from the mountain where he was buried by the avalanche in 2002, when the 58-year-old was climbing with two friends who were also killed.

A group of policemen and mountain guides put Stampfl’s body on a stretcher, covered it in an orange tarp, and slowly took it down the icy mountain. The body was found at an altitude of 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), about a nine-hour hike from one of the camps where climbers stop when they tackle Huascaran’s steep summit.

Jennifer Stampfl said the family plans to move the body to a funeral home in Peru’s capital, Lima, where it can be cremated and his ashes repatriated.

“For 22 years, we just kind of put in our mind: ’This is the way it is. Dad’s part of the mountain, and he’s never coming home,’” she said.

Police said Stampfl’s body and clothing were preserved by the ice and freezing temperatures. His driver’s license was found inside a hip pouch. It says he was a resident of Chino in California’s San Bernardino County.

The effort to retrieve Stampfl’s remains began last week, after an American climber came upon the frozen body while making his way to the Huascaran summit. The climber opened the pouch and read the name on the driver’s license. He called Stampfl’s relatives, who then got in touch with local mountain guides.

A team of 13 mountaineers participated in the recovery operation — five officers from an elite police unit and eight mountain guides who work for Grupo Alpamayo, a local tour operator that takes climbers to Huascaran and other peaks in the Andes.

Eric Raul Albino, director of Grupo Alpamayo, said he was hired by Stampfl’s family to retrieve the body.

Lenin Alvardo, one of the police officers who participated in the recovery operation, said Stampfl’s clothes were still mostly intact. The hip pouch with his driving license also contained a pair of sunglasses, a camera, a voice recorder and two decomposing $20 bills. A gold wedding ring was still on the left hand.

“I’ve never seen anything like that” Alvarado said.

Huascaran is Peru’s highest peak. Hundreds of climbers visit the mountain each year with local guides, and it typically takes them about a week to reach the summit.

However, climate change has affected Huascaran and the surrounding peaks higher than 5,000 meters, known as the Cordillera Blanca. According to official figures, the Cordillera Blanca has lost 27% of its ice sheet over the past five decades.

Stampfl was with friends Matthew Richardson and Steve Erskine in trying to climb Huascaran in 2002. They had travelled the world to climb challenging mountains and had reached the peaks of Kilimanjaro, Rainier, Shasta and Denali, according to a Los Angeles Times report at the time.

Erskine’s body was found shortly after the avalanche, but Richardson’s corpse is still missing.

Jennifer Stampfl said a plaque in memory of the three friends was placed at the summit of Mount Baldy in Southern California, where the trio trained for their expeditions. She said they may return to the site with her father’s remains.

Stampfl was a civil engineer, who carefully planned his mountaineering expeditions, his daughter said. He was also very humble and did not like to draw attention to himself.

“The fact that he is in the news, it is so not my dad” Stampfl said.

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Taxin reported from Santa Ana, California.

If many Democratic lawmakers have been going through stages of grief over President Joe Biden’s candidacy since his disastrous debate, on Tuesday most seem to have reached the stage of acceptance.

A consensus appeared to emerge in pivotal House and Senate meetings Tuesday that Biden is likely to remain at the top of the ticket despite lingering concerns and internal divisions, according to several Democrats who attended the sessions. Only one additional Democrat called on Biden to abandon his reelection campaign following the meetings, indicating a subtle but significant shift in the caucus towards his continued candidacy.

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“We have to recognize that the President is the nominee until he says something differently,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and Biden campaign surrogate, tells TIME. “Biden has made a decision to stay in, so we have to do what we can to win [in November].”

Echoes Rep. Ilhan Omar, a progressive Minnesota Democrat: “I don’t live in a delusional world. The President is going to be our nominee and we will have his back.”

As House lawmakers trickled out of a morning meeting at the Democratic National Committee, which was described by several attendees as a “family conversation,” several Democrats publicly—if cautiously—reaffirmed their support for Biden. Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat who had privately advocated for Biden to step aside just days ago, emphasized the need for unity moving forward. “He’s going to be our nominee, and we all have to support him,” Nadler told reporters, reflecting a sentiment shared by many within the party’s ranks.

Despite the outward show of solidarity, the meetings underscored deep-seated divisions within the Democratic Party, particularly in the aftermath of Biden’s lackluster debate performance. Concerns about Biden’s electability against former President Donald Trump have prompted frank discussions among party members, some of whom have openly questioned his ability to lead the party to victory in November. But after Biden vowed to stay in the race in a letter to congressional Democrats on Monday, the meetings left members without a clear path forward. “House Democrats are not even in the same book, let alone on the same page,” Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, told reporters. The status quo—for Biden to remain as the nominee—appeared to gain reluctant acceptance, even as some members urged the President to make more public appearances and prove he’s up to the job.

Read More: The Democrats’ Problem

“We need to make sure that our candidate for President can campaign with the vigor that all of [our] candidates have, if not more,” says Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett, a Democrat. “I need to be able to see that [Biden] is ready to go out there and campaign day and night vigorously and passionately, certainly in the battleground states and in states all across the country.”

Tuesday’s meetings certainly won’t be the last opportunities for Democrats to discuss the problem. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, told reporters that the caucus meeting was an opportunity for members to express their concerns openly. “Those discussions will continue throughout the week as we work towards a common goal,” Jeffries said, hinting at ongoing efforts to bridge internal divides and rally support behind Biden. 

While a handful of House Democrats have publicly or privately voiced reservations about Biden’s candidacy, influential voices within the party, including the Congressional Black Caucus and prominent Democratic lawmakers including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, have reaffirmed their support for Biden.

But despite the prevailing mood of resignation towards Biden’s candidacy, concerns persist about his age and perceived cognitive decline—factors that have fueled speculation about his ability to campaign effectively against Trump. On Tuesday evening, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey called on Biden not to run for re-election, becoming the 7th House Democrat to publicly do so—joining Reps. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, Mike Quigley of Illinois, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Angela Craig of Minnesota, and Adam Smith of Washington.

Asked what Biden can do to change his mind, Smith, a ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, told TIME that he would vote for Biden if he winds up as the party’s nominee. But he added, “It would have been helpful in the immediate aftermath of the debate to get a doctor to do a full, transparent health check, release that information publicly, have the President come out and do an hour-long press conference and say, ‘Wild things happen, brain fog hit me, bad time, I’m good.’ I think that would have been helpful, but of course they didn’t do that and several days passed.”

Read More: Joe Biden Shows How He Can Regain His Mojo

Others believe Biden’s planned press conference on Thursday at the end of the NATO summit will be pivotal. If he gives a strong performance, it “changes the whole scenario once again,” says Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who supports Biden as the nominee. “People want reassurances that it was just one terrible day.”

The clock is ticking for Democrats to make up their minds, with the convention weeks away. “It has to be done fairly quickly,” says Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, of outreach from White House to key stakeholders, including members of Congress and party leaders. 

Some Democrats are still betting their voters would choose Biden over the alternative—no matter what happens this week. “We’ll vote for a head of cabbage and a chihuahua,” Rep. Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat, says of voters in her state. Asked if she thinks Joe Biden is the best candidate to beat Trump: “I’m not commenting on that. I’m really not.”

CTA, Metra, and Pace ridership has been recovering this year, but there’s still a long way to go to reach pre-COVID-19 …  Streetsblog Chicago

COVID numbers rise during summer months  KAIT

Ribas publishes paper on labor force transitions during COVID  uat vcastapi

Moki Edwin Kindzeka — Lawmakers with the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement passed a law on Tuesday extending their term of office for one year.

The lawmakers were elected in 2020 to serve a five-year term expiring on March 10, 2025. But this week, President Paul Biya asked his government to pass a bill extending terms for all 180 members of Parliament by 12 months — well into 2026.

Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement — also known as CPDM — holds 156 of parliament’s 180 seats.

Government officials say Cameroon’s constitution gives Biya the power to consult the Constitutional Council and ask parliament to vote on extensions and postpone elections whenever circumstances warrant.

Joshua Osih, a lawmaker and president of the opposition Social Democratic Front, disagrees.

Osih said the Social Democratic Front Party he leads strongly condemns as undemocratic the law extending the mandate of parliamentarians, postponing parliamentary elections in Cameroon from February 2025 to February 2026. He said the Cameroon government had five years to prepare for fresh polls in 2025 and should not give the impression that it was taken by surprise.

Opposition and civil society groups say Biya ordered CPDM lawmakers to vote on the bill because it makes it difficult for some main opposition leaders, including Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement Party (CRM), to be a candidate in presidential elections expected in October 2025.

Opposition says win was stolen

Kamto claims he won Cameroon’s October 7 presidential polls and that his victory was stolen by Biya. In 2020, his party did not take part in local council and parliamentary elections claiming that Biya had planned to rig the polls in favor of CPDM.

Cameroonian laws state that a political leader who aspires to be president must be in a political party that has at least a municipal councilor or is represented by a lawmaker in parliament. Kamtos’ CRM party has neither. The CRM said it expected to take part in February’s local and parliamentary elections to be able to endorse Kamto.

Kamto said the law extending the term of parliamentarians, along with a presidential decision postponing local elections, is another ploy by 91-year-old Biya to remain leader for life.

Kamto said he wants to reiterate to the government of Cameroon that his party and followers will not tolerate plans by Biya to stay in power. He said Biya and his government should not continue to take civilians for granted by abusing democratic rights and ruling the country with an iron fist.

Kamto said he will disrupt the elections if his rights are abused but did not say how. The government said joint local council and parliamentary elections will take place in 2026 after presidential elections in 2025.

Kamto said although Cameroon laws make it possible for presidential aspirants who are not endorsed by political parties to run, submitting 300 signatures from influential politicians, including former ministers, traditional rulers and religious leaders, as the law states, is very difficult. He said the leaders are either scared of Biya or are his political partners.

Biya has not said if he will be a candidate. But last March, CPDM supporters marched in the streets urging the world’s oldest leader to run for office in the 2025 presidential election, potentially extending his more than four-decade rule.

They said Biya is the only one who can bring peace and development to Cameroon, but the opposition says Biya must leave office after running Cameroon for decades.

Biya rules with an iron fist and is not ready to relinquish power until he dies, opposition and civil society say. But Biya’s supporters say he is a democrat and has won all elections since Cameroon’s 1990 return of multi-party politics.

If reelected, Biya will rule up to 2032. By then, he will be 98 years old.

A global popular front against fascism emerges — but Trumpism threatens to buck the trend  MSN

President Biden opens NATO conference in Washington amid concerns of his fitness for the job. Democrats continue to be split over whether Biden is up to the task. Millions still without power in Texas following Hurricane Beryl. CBS News Correspondent Jennifer Keiper with tonight’s World News Roundup.

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