The World

Meet Safari Park’s Southern White Rhino calf

Edward, a 13-day-old southern white rhino calf at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, got his first chance to experience a true mud wallow this morning today, under the watchful eye of his mom, Victoria. Rhino keepers decided to create a wallow for the youngster to provide him the opportunity to experience an instinctive behavior for rhinos. Keepers scooped up mud from the area around…


UCSD study links climate change to wildfires

A new study by researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and colleagues combs through the many factors that can promote wildfire, and concludes that in many, though not all, cases, warming climate is the decisive driver. The study, led by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, finds in particular that the huge summer forest fires that have raked Northern…


UCSD Report: El Nino costs state big bucks

Considering it’s been long known that El Niño conditions often bring about flooding precipitation to California, a ripe field for study would be a thorough study of the damage wreaked. And who knows catastrophic damages better than insurers? Their specialized knowledge prompted a pair of San Diego researchers to compare 40 years of insurance data against climate and water data to quantify the effect of…


Earthquake risk is underappreciated danger

On July 4 and 5, two major earthquakes, followed by several thousand smaller ones, struck Southern California. Their size and the damage they caused captured attention around the country. What tends to get much less notice from the public is what can be done to prevent catastrophic damage from big quakes. Had the epicenter of these latest large California earthquakes been closer to downtown Los…


National food waste cut goals not being met

While 1-in-8 Americans are considered to be “food insecure,” an estimated 40 percent of the nation’s supply of fruits, vegetables, dairy and meat goes to waste, discarded by farmers, retailers, restaurant owners and households. Three federal agencies have agreed to work together to cut that food waste in half by 2030. But a recent government oversight report found that the agencies – the Environmental Protection…


Don’t go to Brawley if you’re looking for work

With all the talk of how great the economy is and how anybody who wants a job can get a job, San Diego County’s neighbor to the east is suffering from sky-high unemployment numbers. To visit California’s Imperial Valley is to enter a sleepy place worlds away from the glamorous boom towns of California’s coast. Pickups outnumber BMWs. Vast farms irrigated by the Colorado River…


Duncan Hunter admits to killing Iraqi civilians

Duncan Hunter, the California congressman who’s been telling America that accused and convicted US war crimers deserve to be pardoned by Donald Trump, explained in a podcast interview that it’s ridiculous to charge a Navy SEAL with war crimes just for killing civilians, because honestly, who doesn’t kill some civilians now and then? In the interview published by Barstool Sports’s military podcast “Zero Blog Thirty,”…


Hunter wants this war criminal pardoned

Which war criminal will Donald Trump pardon next? Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Vapeville) thinks it should be this pig, Eddie Gallagher. Trump issued a full pardon earlier this week to Michael Behenna. A military court convicted the former Army lieutenant in 2009 for killing an Iraqi prisoner. Behenna claimed he shot Ali Mansur Mohamed, who was naked at the time, in self-defense. Who’s up next for…


Turn out the lights at Stone Brewing Berlin

Today, Tuesday April 30, 2019, marks the end of the much ballyhooed Stone Brewing Berlin campaign. After six years of planning and three years of operation, Stone Brewing yields its grounds at Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens Berlin to Brewdog, a Scottish craft beer company. In 2010, according to Reid Ramsey, founder of Beer Street Journal, Stone’s co-founder walked thorough the gasworks property and…


Bringing the Mexico border closer to home

Many if not most Americans have never crossed the U.S. border with Mexico by land or spent any time in that region. This unfamiliarity can make it easy for politicians to distort what’s going on there and hard for immigration advocates and social movements to muster support for their primary goal: making U.S. policies toward undocumented people and asylum-seekers more humane. What can advocates for…