Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 81

Trump Administration seeking to lift teen labor protections: report

AP

The Trump administration is reportedly making plans to rollback youth labor protections, ones that protect teenagers from working longer hours, and in poor work conditions. This is described in a Bloomberg Law report, courtesy of sources within the federal government.

Specifically, according to the report, the administration is eyeing to loosen a handful of specific regulations. One, known as the Hazardous Occupations Orders (HOs), which protects 16 and 17 year-olds from receiving extended training in jobs such as roofing work, and using power-driven machines, that the federal law says is too dangerous for those under the age of 18.

The Department of Labor did not comment to Bloomberg, nor to Salon, on this story.

The sources’ information was corroborated by a summary of a draft regulation Bloomberg Law obtained.

“The Department proposes to safely launch more family-sustaining careers by removing current regulatory restrictions on the amount of time that apprentices and student learners may perform HO-governed work,” the Department of Labor stated in the obtained summary.

As Bloomberg Law explains, there are current exceptions to the Hazardous Occupations Orders, such as those who are part of vocational programs can work in hazardous conditions— but not for more than one hour a day. The initiative is reportedly part of Trump’s larger goal to replace “government red tape with industry-generated standards,” in Bloomberg reporter Ben Penn's words.

“It is also likely to have at least some bipartisan support from Democrats eager to create job opportunities for youth who aren’t on track to attend a four-year university,” he says in the report.

As the report explains, such a move would likely receive harsh criticism from child labor advocates and politicians. The administration however will reportedly try and position this as a mechanism to provide teenagers with more supervised training for hazardous jobs.

Some critics say that’s unlikely.

“When you find 16-year-olds running a meat slicer or a mini grinder or a trash compactor, we know kids are severely injured in those circumstances,” Michael Hancock, who represent workers at the plaintiff firm Cohen Milstein, told Bloomberg Law. “That’s why the laws exist in the first place.”

“Now we’re saying, ‘We’re going to open those hazards up to kids; we hope that the employer is going to follow the law to a T and make sure the kid is being closely supervised,’” Hancock added. “I think that stretches credulity to think that’s how it’s actually going to work.”

Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition, shared similar sentiments with Bloomberg Law.

“When I started doing this kind of work 20 years ago, we were losing 70 kids a year at work, and now we are losing usually 20 or less,” Maki said. “We’ve made substantial progress, and I think that the tightened hazardous occupations rules have played a role in the lowered death tolls for teenage workers. So I would not be in favor of relaxing any of these standards; I think it would be a tragic mistake and would lead to the death of teenage workers.”

Some interviewed in the report were unsurprisingly supportive. In general, the Trump administration has been in favor of diminishing worker protections around the board.

Is your planet too frigid for life? Just add methane

Getty/titoOnz

On Earth, we think of methane as a clean-burning fossil fuel, when confined to a tank; or alternately, a dangerous greenhouse gas when floating freely in the air. Indeed, researchers consider methane to be 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide in its warming potential; frighteningly, our planet has some 10,000 gigatons of methane currently trapped as methane hydrate in ice. This has prompted many scientists to sound the alarm bells over the potential for a cyclical out-of-control greenhouse effect that could release much of this trapped methane and rapidly warm Earth, dooming much life.

Yet one planet’s poison is another planet’s ichor. A new study published in Astrophysical Journal suggests that the habitable zone — the region around a host star in which an orbiting planet could harbor liquid water, which suggests Earth-like life could thrive — may extend much further than previously thought once the potential presence of methane in an atmosphere is considered. The theory has many implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

“Methane expands the [Habitable Zone] outwards for host stars with effective temperatures above about 4500° Kelvin,” the paper’s co-authors, Ramses M. Ramirez and Lisa Kaltenegger, note. For context, the sun’s surface temperature is around 5,800° Kelvin, and the habitable zone in our solar system starts between Venus and Earth and extends just beyond Mars; evidently, the presence of a methane-rich atmosphere could theoretically extend that habitable zone a bit further in our solar system. Specifically, the authors say that methane concentrations that replace 10% of carbon dioxide composition can make the habitable zone wider by 20%.

Interestingly, the same is not true for stars cooler than that. For the coolest stars in the scientist's model, which glowed at around 2600° Kelvin, the habitable zone actually shrinks 20% given a comparable methane composition in a planet’s atmosphere.

In our own solar system, the warming effect of greenhouse gases can be seen most dramatically in Venus. While Venus may have been a much cooler world at one point, an out-of-control greenhouse effect turned it into a dense, choking hellscape. Venus’s atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, with clouds of sulphuric acid that rain down acid on its surface, where the temperature is a lead-melting 800-plus degrees Fahrenheit.

One intriguing prospect of the paper is the possibility that some exoplanets previously dismissed as lifeless may be reconsidered as possibly habitable, and vice-versa. Wikimedia actually has an excellent diagram showing some exoplanets that we have discovered that are in or near their stars’ respective habitable zones; I’ve reproduced it below, if you’re curious.

Specifically, take a look at Kepler 186f, which appears towards the outer edge of its star’s habitable zone, and is one of few Earth-size planets in a habitable zone. If Kepler 186f has some methane in its atmosphere, its habitability potential could change dramatically; although, as its host star is cooler than 4500° Kelvin, a methane-rich Kepler 186f may not be habitable at all.

 

Is there a planet nine?
Is there a ninth planet in our solar system? Dr. Jackie Faherty is here to discuss the possible existence of this so-called "super-Earth" and what it would mean for our solar system.

Young people of color most affected by police killings: study

AP/Jim Mone

It's an old refrain uttered by police officers who realize they shot an unarmed victim: “I thought he had a gun in his hand.”

Indeed, that is what police officer Jeronimo Yanez said after fatally shooting 32-year-old Philando Castile in Minnesota in 2016. Police killings, often times driven by racial bias, have become an all-too-familiar American narrative. Indeed, a new study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health validates what many have speculated: “Police violence disproportionately impacts young people, and the young people affected are disproportionately people of color,” as the study notes.

Researchers landed on the conclusion through a different approach to quantifying the tragedies of lives lost to police killings. Rather than looking merely at the stated number of deaths, they used a public health calculation that is often used to approximate the impact of a disease — htus comparing deaths of police killings to a public health crisis.

Using data collected by The Counted, a media-based source compiled by The Guardian, the authors of the report quantified the rate of years of life lost (or "YLLs," as the study writes) as a result of police violence by race/ethnicity from 2015 to 2016. The formula required researchers to subtract the age of death from the corresponding life expectancy.

As the study acknowledges, the results are troubling and significant.

“There were 57,375 and 54,754 YLLs due to police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively,” the report explains. “People of colour comprised 38.5% of the population, but 51.5% of YLLs. YLLs were greatest among those aged 25–34 years, and the number of YLLs at younger ages was greater among people of colour than whites.”

Comparing the results to other YLLs of different causes of death was an eye-opening endeavor.

“The burden is similar in magnitude to those due to meningitis (50,166 YLLs) and maternal deaths (56,490 YLLs), and greater than those due to cyclist road injuries (38,478) and unintentional firearm injuries (40, 752),” researchers explain.

In other words, people of color between the ages of 25–34 overall will lose more years of their lives to police killings than bicycle accidents.

“Yet many of these conditions receive more attention than police violence, in terms of grant funding, for example,” the study says.

Between 2015, according to the data analyzed, there were 1,146 deaths  due to police violence in 2015, and 1,092 in 2016. A little over 50 percent of those deaths were of white people; 25.6 percent were of black people; 16.9 percent of Hispanics.

The researchers hope that positioning “police violence” as a cause of death can provide “another valuable lens to motivate prevention effort,” in their words.

“Quantifying the burden of police violence is critical to mobilising adequate public health, legal and policy responses,” researchers write. “YLLs extend the framing of police violence as a population health issue, beyond what death counts and rates provide.”

Researchers say they hope that by calculating YLLs for police violence can serve as a tool for advocates and public, political leaders, and public health agencies.

While this study explicitly asks for a public health response, it is unclear if that is going to happen. From 1996 to 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were restricted from funding gun violence studies. Former President Obama ordered the CDC to re-engage with research, though it is unlikely the current presidential administration is interested.

According to a separate report by the Center for American Progress, American youth suffer the most from gun violence in America — not only gun violence inflicted by police.

“The United States’ gun violence epidemic disproportionately ravages young people, particularly young people of color,”  the Center for American Progress explains.

More civic and political leaders are speaking up about racist police violence. In March 2018, Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento police. The 22-year-old was unarmed and holding a cellphone.

Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton gave a eulogy at Clark’s funeral.

"No, this is not a local matter — they've been killing young black men all over the country," Rev. Sharpton said. "It's time for preachers to come out of the pulpit, it's time for politicians to come out of the office, it's time for us to go down and stop this madness."

 

The importance of “Vida” outweighs its imperfections

Starz/Erica Parise

Few things are more efficient than surfacing difficult truths and bringing secrets to light than a death in the family. Straightaway “Vida,” Starz’s new half-hour drama airing new episodes on Sundays at 8:30 p.m., proves this by showing the title character collapsing in a heap on the bathroom floor.

Soon after her reluctant, estranged eldest daughter Emma (Mishel Prada) returns to the East Los Angeles apartment building that houses her mother’s bar and a life she wishes to be done with. Waiting for her are her carefree younger sister Lyn (Melissa Barrera), her mother’s “roommate” Eddy (Ser Anzoategui) and tables laden with every imaginable variety of flan.

Emma is having none of it . . . literally. One of Emma’s first proclamations is that she’s off sugar, although this is the least of her reasons for an estrangement that makes this homecoming difficult for reasons other than the death in the family.  And that tension only sharpens when it’s revealed that Eddy was not Vida’s housemate, but her wife.

“Vida” derives its title is the mother’s nickname — short for Vidalia — but the world itself means life. Creator Tanya Saracho uses that interpretation to branch off into a variety of revelatory tales about Latinx culture and a world not often explored with meaning and profundity on television. This by itself makes “Vida” worth considering; the fact that its first season consists of six half-hour episodes makes it a light commitment.

Within those six episodes, Saracho opens a doorway into a community fighting to stay alive in a city that, like many bustling urban metropolises, is pushing people of color out of neighborhoods where they’ve lived, worked and built businesses for generations.

“Vida” aspires to be achieve much within a short period of time, and that makes its execution feel a bit rough and tumble, especially when the series departs from the central focus on the sisters to follow characters who are tangential to their lives.

Emma and Lyn’s mother own the building housing the bar Vida and Eddy ran together but each left to create their own lives far from East L.A. Emma is a white-collar executive for a firm in Chicago, while the aimless Lyn trades on her good looks to shack up with a series of rich white guys in San Francisco.

Coming home for each means reconciling with the lives they left behind, as well as their reputations. Some of the first interactions they have with the people they grew up with are far from welcoming. But it also means figuring out other aspects of their identity as well, especially as each relate to their neighborhood and what their family means to it.

At the same time, the people who have lived in their neighborhood have more to worry about than who Lyn is sleeping with and how Emma feels about her mother’s sexual identity. One family friend, Marisol (Chelsea Rendon), channels her anti-gentrification passion into an online presence and questionable guerilla tactics. Another, Johnny (Carlos Miranda) has his life plans disrupted by Lyn’s return, while Emma’s old friend Cruz (Maria Elena Laas) coaxes her to embrace the core truth of who she is.

Embracing examinations of identity as a main narrative arterial can be a tricky business for a series, even one with the latitude typically granted by premium cable. And this is how and where “Vida” bumps up against a few walls.

A main element of the plot follows a map set out by other series about adult children who suddenly have the responsibility of their family’s legacy thrust upon them. Vida’s secret marriage isn’t the only truth she kept hidden from her children. From the perspective of the business-minded Emma, it quickly becomes the least of her concerns.

This recognizable device provides a strong spine for a series whose subplots don’t mesh particularly smoothly. At times “Vida” can feel like watching a jumble of mismatched shows from different networks hanging together inside one closet. Lyn in particular behaves like a CW soap vixen at times, which can be entertaining but becomes a distraction at times as well.

That could be because the social and cultural themes with “Vida” are presented with such fortitude and assurance as to make the frothier elements of story feel less poignant. Barrera is appealing in her role, even when Lyn is at the height of her selfishness, and balances Prada’s brittle, tightened portrayal of Emma quite well.

The two shoulder the weight of their family drama well enough, although given the central importance of Anzoategui’s Eddy it’s odd to see how limited of a range these first episodes give her to express…though she does depict the simultaneous pressure of mourning and exclusion exquisitely.

If that part of the tale leaves a viewer wanting, that perhaps speaks to the need for more queer voices, especially those belonged to queer women of color, to have a forum on television. When “Vida” is at its most beautiful, it shows the care and compassion Vida and Eddy exercised within a community that responded with more tolerance than acceptance.

Although the people who turn out for Vida’s memorial cover Lyn’s face with lipstick kisses, an exchange in an upcoming episode reveals that some of this display masks a deeply rooted homophobia. These sad truths do need to be shown but not leaned upon, and in this sense the series triumphs, allowing Emma and Eddy to be shown as people coming to terms with great loss and deal with their inability to come to an understanding of where they fit in one another’s lives.

In her capacity of representing the gentrification struggles of the storylines, Rendon’s Marisol starts out as almost an extraneous character in the series, a brash and dissonant reminder of the world spinning just outside the borders of the family’s grief. Her part of the plot is important, but it takes a while to meld with the others.

It’s hard to say how, exactly, Saracho and her writing team could tell these stories differently without adulterating the emotional authenticity of “Vida.”  Their perspective as Latinx creatives allows the audience to understand the economic and cultural stakes of Emma’s, Lyn’s and Eddy’s next steps. The care with which they’ve written this world guides us into its complications with a level of understanding that one hope can also earn the audience’s patience.

Rage, then hope, over Eric Schneiderman: #MeToo is working — at least on the left

AP/Seth Wenig

It's been seven months since a New York Times story about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's long history of sexual abuse kicked off the movement that pushed Tarana Burke's #MeToo campaign to prominence, but the outing of powerful men for sexual harassment and abuse shows no real signs of slowing down. Despite claims from some, such as liberal writer Jonathan Chait,  that seeing stories of such treatment reported is a "big win" for women because of all the attention it brings them, the reality is that for most women, supporting #MeToo brings a large amount of stress. This is especially true when one of the men that is reported on is one you've long considered "one of the good ones."

It was a gut punch reading the New Yorker story by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, published late Monday, about New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman being accused of extremely serious abuse by four women. The details are sickening; the reporting includes claims that he slapped women, choked women, and was so emotionally abusive that one of his girlfriends starved herself sick in a futile effort to please him.

Even more upsetting was the distance between Schneiderman's public persona, backed up by quite a bit of action, as one of a stalwart feminist and progressive advocate, and the reports of his alleged behavior. Just last week, as the New Yorker story indicates, he was commended with a "Champions of Choice" award at a luncheon for the National Institute of Reproductive Health. I personally attended that luncheon and can attest that he received a warm welcome from the mostly female audience, who applauded his fierce rhetoric defending a woman's right to bodily autonomy.

I find myself angry on behalf of those women, who of course had no idea at the time that journalists were already working on a story that would expose Schneiderman in this way. And I'm angry for all the women, many I know socially or through work, who have had to speak out about the abusive treatment they've received at the hands of progressive men who proudly touted their feminist credentials in public while harassing or abusing women in private.

It's demoralizing. I saw the news about Schneiderman after coming home from seeing a movie and stomped around my Brooklyn apartment, ranting about how frustrating it is that so many so-called "feminist" men are scum. I worried about the mental health of other women who, like me, are struggling to deal with all these stories. I thought about all my own unpleasant, even traumatic memories of "feminist" men who have a very different face in private.

But amidst all this sadness and rage, there's reason to actually feel pangs of hope. It's important to remember that there's a reason for all these stories coming out, a reason so many women are sucking up their terror and desire to forget and speaking their truths: Because in doing so, there's a real possibility of change.

The Schneiderman story is a good example. Within hours of the New Yorker piece coming out, Schneiderman himself was out, a resignation that happened so quickly that I learned of it before I even read the story that caused it. This follows the larger pattern, at least among progressives and Democrats, of these incidents being taken seriously and real consequences following for the men who are accused. Sen. Al Franken, Rep. John Conyers, publisher Don Hazen, Rep. Ruben Kihuen, publisher Hamilton Fish, and other men on the left have been outed and faced the loss of their jobs.

In contrast, conservative and Republican circles have not been as good at policing their own, which is unsurprising given that the GOP is hostile to women's equality generally and women's right to bodily autonomy in particular. The most prominent example right now, of course, is the ongoing presidency of Donald Trump, a man who was caught on tape bragging about how he likes to "grab them by the p**sy" and "when you’re a star, they let you do it." This apparent confession of sexual assault has been backed up by 16 women making accusations that he behaves just this way, but congressional Republicans haven't even had a hearing about the issue.

And while many lower level Republicans have just bowed out after sexual harassment or abuse accusations, plenty of Republican men find that simply hanging in defiantly means not losing conservative support. After Alabama judge Roy Moore was credibly accused of preying on teenage girls, the Republican National Committee backed his candidacy in a special Senate election and Trump campaigned for him. And after Republican governor Eric Greitens of Missouri was accused of blackmail and sexual assault, state Republicans publicly contemplated impeaching him, but then failed to actually do so.

All of which makes it more annoying to see Republican figures like Donald Trump Jr. and  White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway, as well as NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, publicly gloating about Schneiderman and attempting to imply there's some kind of liberal hypocrisy going on here.  Not to say that the left doesn't have its problems — there are plenty of stories about men on the left getting away with this kind of behavior for far too long — but this story simply doesn't illustrate that.

In fact, the opposite is true. The swiftness with which Schneiderman got the boot suggests a consistency and strength in liberal values. This is a story about liberals opposing abuse, and backing that belief up with action. It's actually a story about what should be happening, but often is not.

Meanwhile, of course, Loesch, Conway, and Trump Jr. all support President Trump, who admitted on tape to doing what women say he does.

I'd call them hypocrites, but that implies they have values to violate. It's clear, however, that Trump and his goons don't care one single bit about women being abused or harassed. They only see it in terms of trolling liberals and scoring political points. They have no regard whatsoever for the real people who suffer at the hands of abusive men, whether those men are Republicans like Trump or Democrats like Schneiderman. And that inability to see women as people worthy of care, instead of as cards to play in a cheap political game, is a far greater moral transgression than garden variety hypocrisy.

Turning Activism Into Action
"The fact that 2017 started with the Women’s March and ended with the #MeToo movement is not an accident."

At what age does our ability to learn a new language like a native speaker disappear?

AP

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is — at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted — a viral internet survey that drew two thirds of a million respondents — researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker.

To parse this problem, the research team, which included psychologist Steven Pinker, collected data on a person’s current age, language proficiency and time studying English. The investigators calculated they needed more than half a million people to make a fair estimate of when the “critical period” for achieving the highest levels of grammatical fluency ends. So they turned to the world’s greatest experimental subject pool: the internet.

They created a short online grammar quiz called Which English? that tested noun — verb agreement, pronouns, prepositions and relative clauses, among other linguistic elements. From the responses, an algorithm predicted the tester’s native language and which dialect of English (that is, Canadian, Irish, Australian) they spoke. For example, some of the questions included phrases a Chicagoan would deem grammatically incorrect but a Manitoban would think is perfectly acceptable English.

The researchers got a huge response by providing respondents with “something that is intrinsically rewarding,” says Josh Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, who led the study while he was a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The small gift to the respondents was a guess about their background. According to Hartshorne: “If it correctly figures out that you are in fact a German-American, people are like, ‘Oh my god, science is awesome!’ And when it’s wrong, they’re like, ‘Ha ha, stupid robot.’ Either way, it’s entertaining and interesting and something that they can think about and talk about with their friends.”

Hartshorne’s tactic worked. At its peak, the quiz attracted 100,000 hits a day. It was shared 300,000 times on Facebook, made the front page of Reddit and became a trending topic on 4chan, where a thoughtful discussion ensued about how the algorithm could determine dialect from the grammar questions. The study brought in native speakers of 38 different languages, including 1 percent of Finland’s population.

Based on people’s grammar scores and information about their learning of English, the researchers developed models that predicted how long it takes to become fluent in a language and the best age to start learning. They concluded that the ability to learn a new language, at least grammatically, is strongest until the age of 18 after which there is a precipitous decline. To become completely fluent, however, learning should start before the age of 10.

There are three main ideas as to why language-learning ability declines at 18: social changes, interference from one’s primary language and continuing brain development. At 18, kids typically graduate high school and go on to start college or enter the work force full-time. Once they do, they may no longer have the time, opportunity or learning environment to study a second language like they did when they were younger. Alternatively, it is possible that after one masters a first language, its rules interfere with the ability to learn a second. Finally, changes in the brain that continue during the late teens and early 20s may somehow make learning harder.

This is not to say that we cannot learn a new language if we are over 20. There are numerous examples of people who pick up a language later in life, and our ability to learn new vocabulary appears to remain constant, but most of us will not be able to master grammar like a native speaker — or probably sound like one either. Being a written quiz, the study could not test for accent, but prior research places the critical period for speech sounds even earlier.

Although the study was conducted only in English, the researchers believe the findings will transfer to other languages, and they are currently developing similar tests for Spanish and Mandarin.

Perhaps even more important than when one learns a language is how. People who learned via immersion — living in an English-speaking country more than 90 percent of the time — were significantly more fluent than those who learned in a class. Hartshorne says that if you have the choice between starting language lessons earlier or learning through immersion later, “I'd learn in an immersion environment. Immersion has an enormous effect in our data — large even relative to fairly large differences in age.”

The enthusiasm for the study is not shared by everyone in the field. Elissa Newport, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University who specializes in language acquisition, remains a skeptic. “Most of the literature finds that learning the syntax and morphology of a language is done in about five years, not 30,” she says. “The claim that it takes 30 years to learn a language just doesn’t fit with any other findings.”

Newport says that although the premise of the study — seeking critical periods for learning a language — is warranted, she thinks the surprising results emerged because the measure the researchers used is flawed. “Testing 600,000 people doesn’t give you a dependable, reliable outcome” if you’re not asking the right questions, she says. Instead of creating a new test, Newport says she would have preferred the researchers use an existing assessment of language proficiency to ensure they are really gauging how well people know English.

Hartshorne is hoping to re-create the success of Which English? in a new online vocabulary test, but says he has struggled to create the same level of viral response because people are less willing to share their results if they perform poorly. “When you find out, ‘I'm in the 99th percentile of vocabulary,’ you’re like, ‘Okay, click, share.’ But you know 50 percent of people are below average. And they're going to be less likely to want to share that.”

Meghan McCain orders fellow Republican Orrin Hatch to “chill out” after he talks about her father

YouTube/The View

Meghan McCain issued a plea for Americans "to take a collective breath and chill out" in the wake of the media frenzy surrounding funeral preparations for Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), who is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer — "especially" her father's Republican colleague Orrin Hatch — who openly criticized his reported desire for President Donald Trump to not be present at his funeral.

Doctors diagnosed John McCain, 81, with cancer in July of last year after it was determined that a brain tumor called a glioblastoma had caused a blood clot to appear near his left eye. Sources close to the Arizona senator revealed to the New York Times that he did not want the president to attend his service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

The influential Republicans have had a contentious relationship ever since Trump's campaign for president. During the 2016 presidential primary, Trump mocked John McCain, who was imprisoned during the Vietnam War for almost six years when he was a member of the U.S. Navy. "He's not a war hero," Trump said of John McCain. "He's a war hero, because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured."

John McCain has reportedly requested that Vice President Mike Pence attend his funeral in Trump's place. Meanwhile, former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush have been asked to eulogize him.

In response, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told CNN he thought that John McCain's wish was "ridiculous." "He's the president of the United States," Hatch added. "He's a very good man, but it's up to John."

Hatch also said that he would encourage John McCain "to change his mind, and ask the president to speak at his funeral," according to CNN.

Meghan McCain, who co-hosts "The View," returned to the ABC program Tuesday after spending the weekend in Arizona with her father. She shared that the senator is doing well. "He's just making jokes, talking, standing, doing a great recovery," she said. "He has a great team around him."

.@MeghanMcCain tells us her father is having a "great recovery" and is "making jokes."

Then she adds: "I'd like everybody to take a collective breath and chill out on my dad for a second—especially Orrin Hatch." https://t.co/Vhegu08m1B pic.twitter.com/p8Ml0HJpwp

— The View (@TheView) May 8, 2018

"I'd like everybody to take a collective breath and chill out on my dad for a second — especially Orrin Hatch," Meghan McCain added with some bite to her tone. "Take many seats right now."

"We're all doing good and hanging in," the eldest McCain daughter continued. "It's a process, as anyone knows if you know anyone who has cancer. So, please be kind and respectful of the fact that there's a family here."



Following Meghan McCain's remarks, Hatch apologized for his comments. "I agree with the daughter," the Republican Senator told The Washington Post on Tuesday. "I shouldn’t have said anything yesterday. I agree a hundred percent with her."



The Post reported:



"Hatch also sent a letter to McCain apologizing for his comment and for suggesting that McCain would not return to the Senate, according to a person familiar with its contents. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private exchange."



John McCain has had several visitors at his ranch in Arizona, where he is currently staying, among them former Vice President Joe Biden. "Here John knows he's in a very, very, very precarious situation. And yet he's still concerned about the state of the country," Biden told the New York Times. "We talked about how our international reputation is being damaged, and we talked about the need for people to stand up and speak out."



McCain has both a forthcoming memoir, "The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations" and an HBO documentary about his life coming out later this month. In an excerpt obtained by ABC News, McCain wrote of Trump, "He has declined to distinguish the actions of our government from the crimes of despotic ones. The appearance of toughness, or a reality show facsimile of toughness, seems to matter more than any of our values."

Trump makes it official: U.S. will withdraw from Iran deal, and it’s all Obama’s fault

Getty/Saul Loeb

President Donald Trump formally announced on Tuesday afternoon that the United States will leave the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, calling it “defective at its core.”

Trump began his speech on Tuesday by denouncing the Iranian regime, and the deal, which (perhaps not coincidentally) was negotiated under Barack Obama.

“A constructive deal could have easily been struck at the time, but it wasn’t,” Trump said during his speech. “At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction that a murderous regime only desired a peaceful nuclear energy program.”

The president continued by referring to last week's publication by the Israeli government of purported intelligence documents “long concealed by Iran,” in Trump's words, which allegedly showed that the Tehran regime had a long history of pursuing nuclear weapons.

“The fact is, this was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never ever been made,” Trump continued. He added that the deal was a “great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.”

Trump had until May 12 to decide whether or not he wanted to waive sanctions against Iran, as the agreement specified. Following his official announcement, Trump signed a presidential memorandum to reinstate "the highest level of economic sanctions" against the Iranian government.

“In the years since the deal was reached, Iran’s military budget has grown by almost 40 percent — while its economy is doing very badly,” he said. “After the sanctions were lifted, the dictatorship used its new funds to build its nuclear-capable missiles, support terrorism, and cause havoc throughout the Middle East and beyond.”

Trump positioned the move as one supported by European allies like France, a dubious claim given widespread reports that Western leaders were trying to convince him to stick to the original terms of the 2015 agreement. Shortly after Trump's announcement, French President Emmanuel Macron responded on Twitter.

“France, Germany, and the UK regret the U.S. decision to leave the JCPOA,” Macron tweeted. “The nuclear non-proliferation regime is at stake.”

France, Germany, and the UK regret the U.S. decision to leave the JCPOA. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is at stake.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) May 8, 2018

Trump said during his speech on Tuesday, however, that the U.S. had engaged “extensively with our allies and partners around the world, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom.”

“We have also consulted with our friends from across the Middle East,” Trump said. “We are unified in our understanding of the threat and in our conviction that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon.”

He claimed the move should signal a “critical message” to the world: “The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them.”

Trump had one more surprise up his sleeve on Tuesday, confirming rumors that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was en route to North Korea and that the planned summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un was moving forward.

“In fact, at this very moment, Secretary Pompeo is on his way to North Korea in preparation for my upcoming meeting with Kim Jong-un," the president said. "Plans are being made, relationships are building. Hopefully, a deal will happen, and with the help of China, South Korea and Japan, a future of great prosperity and security can be achieved for everyone.”

Former President Obama posted a lengthy statement on Facebook shortly after Trump's decision was announced, calling it "misguided," and emphasizing that it likely puts America in a vulnerable position.

"Walking away from the JCPOA turns our back on America’s closest allies, and an agreement that our country’s leading diplomats, scientists, and intelligence professionals negotiated," Obama said in the statement. "In a democracy, there will always be changes in policies and priorities from one Administration to the next. But the consistent flouting of agreements that our country is a party to risks eroding America’s credibility, and puts us at odds with the world’s major powers."

Some House Democrats are calling the move an “international crisis,” in a statement drafted collectively by Reps. David Price, D-N.C., Gerry Connelly, D-Va., Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, John Yarmuth, D-Ky., Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore.

"In refusing to waive sanctions that were lifted as part of the Iran Nuclear Agreement, President Trump has manufactured an international crisis that risks an armed conflict with a nuclear Iran,” they said in a statement. “President Trump has consistently demonstrated his ignorance of the complexity of the world's challenges and today's decision further highlights his inability to protect U.S. interests abroad."

Jon Rainwater, executive director of Peace Action, also criticized the move. “Trump’s short-sighted, politically motivated abdication of U.S. commitments under the Iran agreement is cause for alarm,” he said in a statement. “Iran has warned that it may withdraw from the agreement if Trump’s actions deprive it of economic benefits it was promised under the deal, so this move could spell doom for the successful nuclear pact, and with it all of the restrictions and checks on Iran’s nuclear program.”

Midlife isn’t a crisis: Why the second half of your life will the happiest

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You rarely hear about anybody enthusiastically anticipating hitting late middle age and beyond. Midlife is so deeply synonymous with nonspecific irrelevance — especially for women — that entire industries describe a demographic as being "over fifty," as if the second part of life was one big swan dive off a cliff.

But author Jonathan Rauch disputes the trope of inevitable, miserable decline. As the last of the boomers and the first wave of genxers muscle their way into their AARP years, Rauch says they have plenty to look forward to — and that research bears it out. Salon spoke recently to Rauch about his new book, "The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50."

I am a middle-aged woman. I am a mother of two. In my hero's journey, I would put myself in the abyss, Jonathan. What is your elevator pitch for how it gets better?

My book is about the fact that the whole way we think of aging and happiness in America in wrong, and because we think about it wrong, we make ourselves miserable. We waste huge human potential. How do we think about aging wrong? And why do we assume that as we get older we're going to get less and less happy, and that the prime of life — when we're at our maximum of mastery and competence — is when we should feel most satisfied with our lives? We've succeeded, hopefully, at our achievements. We have a lot to be grateful for, and then we decline and we become disabled and old and miserable. That's what we think. The result of that is we expect middle aged people to be invulnerable and emotionally just great. When we see that they're not, we call it a midlife crisis and we mock them for that, or we tell them to go see a doctor because, it's abnormal to be middle-aged and dissatisfied with your life. . . . Why aren't you more content with life and shouldn't you feel terrible that you're not?

My book says, the story I just told — the conventional wisdom — is almost entirely wrong. First of all, aging works against contentment until about age 50, and then it flips sides and actually works toward contentment and helps you be contented and grateful for the entire rest of your life. That's number one. Number two is as a result of that, there's this long patch in the middle where people are not as satisfied with their accomplishments as they expect to be. Their dissatisfaction makes them think there's something wrong with them, which makes them feel even worse and then they don't tell anyone because they're embarrassed. Or they're isolated and that makes them feel even worse. Lots of people are in this trap, and I was too when I was in my forties.

One of the things that is consistent throughout the book is that the things that we think are going to give us satisfaction and the things that we think are going to make us happy are not necessarily in the places that we, particularly in our western culture, think that they are.

Yes, and particularly in our younger years. When we’re 25, we're wired to be ambitious and to want to do great things. The motivator for that is that evolution tells us, "If I meet my goals, I'll be incredibly happy." But in fact ambition wires us to always want the next goal, to not be satisfied. After 20 years of meeting our goals and not being satisfied, we get pretty demoralized. "Why am I not happy? I guess nothing will ever make me happy. I guess I'm doomed to being a malcontent." Now you're disappointed in how happy you been in your path. You're pessimistic about how happy you could ever be in the future and you're sitting there at age 45, being disappointed and pessimistic. That is not a fun place to be. People say, "Well, this is a first world problem. You're not entitled to it, or get over it." First of all, it's not a first world problem. This pattern, the happiness curve, is found in countries and cultures all over the world. It's even found in chimps and orangutans.

But second, it is true that midlife malaise is often literally about nothing. It's happening because of changes in the brain and changes in our values, not necessarily changes in our lives. That doesn't make it any easier to cope with. In fact, it makes it harder. At least if you've got a health issue, you know what to try to go out and do about that.

One of the things that is also true is that this is a time in life where there are a lot of stressors coming down at once in a different way than we have at other points in our lives.

It's important to remember that the happiness curve is just the effect of aging all by itself. It's independent of income, education, employment, health, children, marital status and everything else. It's actually something time is doing all by itself. One of the things that happens to successful people who are having a smooth journey on the river of life, is they're the ones who are feeling this undercurrent because there's not a lot of other things going on.

That was my story. I had a great life, I was knocking all my goals out of the park, but I still wasn't happy. That was time's effect, but I didn't realize that. Yes, there are a lot of stressors at midlife, but even if you don't have a lot of major stresses, even if things are going really well — in fact, often especially if things are going really well — you will feel this undertone of discontent that time itself is causing. Just remember, it's not your fault. It's not abnormal, there's nothing wrong with you. This is just a natural transition through this portion of life.

You use the example in the book of your friend who was out there killing it. It turned out he had really gotten into this great crisis in his life and had bottomed out with his substance abuse at a moment when he was achieving a great deal.

He's in the book because he's kind of in some ways the exception. Some people have a quote-unquote "midlife crisis," a big disruption in their lives, and that happened to him. . . . That happens because humans are not very good at attributing the causes of our happiness and unhappiness. If I'm sitting here at age 43 or 44 and I'm not content with my life and I can't figure out why, I might lose control of the situation like my friend did. I might think I must need to change up my whole life and make some kind of disruptive move, like leaving a marriage and quitting a job. What I tell people is most of the time for most people, it's not a crisis. It's a persistent dissatisfaction. If you go on with your life, you soldier through it. The thing is people need more help with it, but usually it's not a crisis. It feels like the new normal and that's what's upsetting about it. It's like, man, is this going to last forever?

This gets to where you start explaining why it gets better. When you're 20, when you get your heartbroken for the first time, it feels like death. When you're 50 and you have a few heartbreaks under your belt, you have the lesson of time that you will survive this. The things that make it better when we get older have a lot to do with experience.

They are partly to do with experience. I was more interested in the things that we have less control over. Why does this thing happen to us and why does it end the turnaround? What accounts for this strange new shape, the effect of time on happiness? It seems like three things are going on at once, because humans are always complicated.

The first is that our expectations change as we age. When we're young, we overestimate how satisfied we’ll be by achieving status in life and becoming a big deal. In fact that's not something that really makes you all that happy; that just primes us to want even more. Once we get to about middle age, we begin to readjust our expectations and it become more realistic. We're less disappointed going forward.

Another thing is it our values change. As we get older, our values tend to shift. When we're young, we tend to look for achievement, status. The things you get from social competition, because, evolution. That would give you mating opportunities. This is true by the way of men and women.

As we age, our values naturally shift toward cooperation and community and ways that we can give back. There are evolutionary reasons why that might be the case as well. We age long past our reproductive years. The value of that seems to be a kind of the grandmother effect. We can contribute to society in another way. We become more directed to other people as we get older and that turns out to be good for our emotional well being and good for other people too. Our values change and our priorities change. We invest more in the key relationships that we really care about

The third thing that happens is our brains change. This is neuroscience. We're getting into the hard wiring. Older people are less prone to regret. They have a more positive outlook. If you show them happy faces and sad faces in an fMRI machine, their brains will respond more way to happy faces than younger brains do. They're not more prone to depression. They're better at regulating their emotions. They have strong emotions, but they're better at regulating them and the storms don't last as long when they do. There are all kinds of ways in which it turns out that aging is good for us emotionally.

None of what I mentioned has to do with whether there are kids in the house or how your marriages are, your stresses. What I'm talking about is stuff that seems to be ticking along in the background because we're human.

One of the things you talk about that is so important is being able to cultivate gratitude within all of these changes and that's a very good indicator of satisfaction.

I played at one point with actually calling the book not "The Happiness Curve" but "The Gratitude Curve." It seemed so hard to feel grateful when I was in middle age. I had so much to be grateful for and I didn't want to be an ungrateful person, but it turns out this was time playing tricks on me. In my 50s, I founded it steadily easier to feel grateful and savor the more important things in life. The relationships, the little things that you can do from what day to the next, those take on added meaning and depth.

In my case, I found that reminding myself, of all the reasons I should be grateful, counting my blessings did not help. It might've made it worse because the more I counted my blessings and carried on all the great things in my life, the more it made me think about how insufficiently grateful I was for those things. I think counting one’s blessings is a good thing on moral principle, because we should understand our blessings. But to deal with this trap that we're in emotionally, it's not enough just to know intellectually that we should be grateful. You might not be able to feel as grateful as you know you should be. That’s to the nature of this period of life. What the book is about is how to deal with these cognitive issues that are going on.

I wanted to ask you about the way that these happiness curves shake out between genders, because being a woman over 50 in our culture does mean something different than being a man over 50. It's different to be George Clooney than a comparable 50-year-old woman. At the same time that women are entering their fifties, as you pointed out, they are going through changes in their reproductive lives. They are dealing with enormous physical changes around that. What do you think the differences in the happiness curve are for men and women?

I can give you a firm and clear answer to that. There are no differences by gender in the happiness curve. You would think there would be. Everyone looks for it. We now have literally millions and millions of data points from a hundred fifty countries around the world. Gender does not show up as different between men and women. Now remember if you get the happiness curve, you’re factoring out all these other things in life that aren't gendered like education, income and so forth. A lot of the gender things are going away. All we're talking about with the happiness curve is the effect of aging by itself and that is not gendered.

That leads us of this interesting question. Then why do we assume culturally that's say midlife crisis is a bigger problem for men? If you look at the culture around midlife crisis, it's disproportionately about men leaving their marriages, buying a sports car, connecting with seemingly inappropriately younger people, whatever. I think the reason for that is probably the culturally men have just had a lot more freedom and resources to act out. We see it more. I think a lot more women have had to suffer in silence, you know, be a good mom and have not been in that position. I think that's a question of how people express the happiness curve.

There is this time in life where we see ourselves approaching physical limitations. You talk about your skier friend who says, "I get older but the mountain stays the same." We reached these, these moments where we are frustrated with these limitations that we find. We have to find other outlets, other things, other alternatives, things to fill that space in our lives. How do you address that?

In terms of the fact that we get older and we begin to see things getting worse for us physically. Fifty is typically about when it turns around the age effect in your life, your mileage will vary. At 50 we start to figure, well, I can start to sense my body's not going to be able to let me do the things I used to do and I see a future of decline and I'm probably at my career peak right now. I've probably achieved most of what I'm going to and probably don't have that much more growth potential. Isn't it all downhill from here? Here's the thing — that turns out to be wrong.

People way underestimate the power of this emotional turnaround. It typically begins in the 50s. It turns out that the positivity effect I mentioned actually helps protect us emotionally from the physical downside of aging. People who are like giving up lots of physical stuff that they used to do in their 60s and 70s on into their 80s. They say, "You know what? I would not trade. This is better."

It becomes easier to be content as you get older and you begin to find more richness in these small things that you can do. You begin to feel more gratitude. People experienced that not as like settling or diminution of life or giving things up. The experience as actually acquiring a new ability to save her life. It's really a very cool thing.

We can think of this time or the time before this in almost the same way that we do adolescence. We understand this is a discrete time in life and we all are somewhat on the same page about recognizing it and giving it visibility. What happens is our youth-obsessed culture is there is this feeling that we're going to diminish. We're going to go away and become invisible and we can't talk about the things that we're going through. But there is this community of people who are all sharing the same experiences and as you point out, sharing our experiences is a huge component of satisfaction.

One takeaway from my book is it's not a midlife crisis. It’s a midlife transition, and it's totally normal. It's not fun to go through, but it's in some ways analogous to adolescence. OK, adolescence hard for some people, not so hard for others, but we don't run around saying, "Wow you're having adolescence crisis." People are just having an ordinary transition, which is challenging for a lot of people.

Then the second takeaway is the one you just said: We have got to take midlife transition out of the closet. People are dealing with it in shame and isolation. I'm gay — I went through this with being gay. I don't need it again with being middle aged. People are keeping it inside and people are not getting the support they need.

Takeaway number three is, retire the stereotypes about aging late adulthood being a time of kind of loss, diminution, sadness. Our generation has the miraculous gift of 15 or more additional years of healthy life in what turns out to be the most emotionally rewarding, pro-social time of life. I mean, good heavens, what homo sapiens in history would not have given their eye teeth for what you and I are going to have?

A midlife second act
When time caught up with a ballerina, she learned to pivot

Is air pollution making you sick? 4 questions answered

AP Photo/Andy Wong, File

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Not a day seems to go by without a story of an “airpocalypse,” usually somewhere in a developing nation. It’s hard not to empathize with the people in the smoggy images of New Delhi or Ulaanbataar or Kathmandu, often wearing masks, walking to school or work though soupy cloudiness.

Last year, a study found that more than 8 million people per year die early from air pollution exposure. This amounts to more deaths than diarrheal disease, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined.

As a researcher in air pollution and its health effects, I know that even if you don’t live in these places, air pollution likely still affects your quality of life. Here’s what you need to know.

1. What exactly is air pollution?

Air pollution is a general term that usually describes a mixture of different chemicals that circulate in the air.

Invisible gases, like ozone or carbon monoxide, and tiny particles or droplets of liquids mix together in the atmosphere. Each molecule is impossible to see with the naked eye, but when trillions gather together, you can see them as haze.

These chemicals are almost always mixed together in varied amounts. Scientists do not yet understand how these different mixtures affect us. Each person responds differently to air pollution exposure — some people have few effects, while others, such as kids with asthma, might become very ill.

What’s more, air pollution mixtures in a given location change over time. Changes can occur quickly over a few hours or gradually over months.

Short-term increases in air pollution from, for example, heavy traffic in rush hour, can make us sick. Such pollution occurs year-round. But seasonal pollutants, such as ozone, usually occur only in the warmest and sunniest parts of year. What’s more, the amount of ozone in air also goes up and down through the day — generally highest in the afternoons and lowest in the early mornings.

These variations can make it quite difficult for environmental health scientists and epidemiologists to know precisely how air pollution can affect humans.

A calendar showing particulate matter concentration in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia in 2017. Note the highest concentrations appear in wintertime. The unusual increase in pollution in July corresponds with a Mongolian holiday.

2. Where does air pollution come from?

You might imagine air pollution as smoke pouring out of a factory chimney or the tailpipe of a car.

While these are important sources of air pollution, there are many others. Air pollution includes chemicals humans put into the atmosphere and chemicals released by natural events. For example, forest fires are a large source of air pollutants that affect many communities. Dust that’s picked up by wind can also contribute to poor air quality.

Ronald Reagan famously said that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” While this myth has been debunked, he was right in at least some ways. Trees do release certain gases, such as volatile organic carbon, that are ingredients in air pollution chemistry. This, when mixed together with emissions from cars and industry, leads to increases in other types of pollution, such as ozone.

There isn’t much that scientists can, or should, do about tree emissions. Public health researchers like myself focus most on the ingredients from human activities — from burning petroleum to emissions controls on industrial facilities – because these are sources located close to where people live and work.

There are also many chemical reactions that occur in the air itself. These reactions create what are known as secondary pollutants, some of which are quite toxic.

Finally, it’s important to realize that air pollution knows no boundaries. If a pollutant is emitted in one location, it very easily moves across borders — both regional and national — to different places. New Delhi, for example, experiences seasonal pollution, thanks to extensive burning of agricultural fields some 200 miles away.

New Delhi is an extreme example. But, even if you live in a less polluted environment, pollutants emitted elsewhere often travel to where other people live and work, as seen in recent wildfires in California.

3. How do we know that air pollution causes problems?

This is a tricky question, because air pollution is a hidden problem that acts as a trigger for many health problems. Plenty of people suffer from asthma and lung diseases, heart attacks and cancer, and all of these are linked to particulate matter exposure. The best evidence to date suggests that the higher the dose of air pollution, the worse our response will be.

Unfortunately, there are many other things that lead to these diseases, too: poor diet, your inherited genes, or whether you have access to high quality medical care or you smoke cigarettes, for example. This makes figuring out the cause of a specific illness attributed to air pollution exposure much more difficult.

Every health study provides a slightly different result, because each study observes a different group of people and usually different types of air pollution. Scientists usually report their results based on any change in risk of developing a disease from air pollution, or based on whether your odds of developing a certain disease might change.

For example, a study in Taiwan looked at concentrations of particulate matter averaged over two years. The researchers found that, for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in particulate matter, the odds of developing high blood pressure increased by about 3 percent. This could suggest that if an increase of particulate matter concentration in any community might lead to an increase in high blood pressure.

Conversely, scientists usually assume that decreases in air pollution lead to decreases in diseases.

4. Why does this matter to you?

A typical adult takes around 20,000 breaths per day. Whether or not you become sick from air pollution depends on the amount and type of chemicals you inhale, and whether you might be susceptible to these diseases.

For someone living in polluted New Delhi, for example, those 20,000 breaths include the equivalent of around 20 grains of table salt worth of particulate matter deposited in their lungs each day. While this may not seem like much, keep in mind that this particulate matter isn’t harmless table salt – it’s a mixture of chemicals that come from burning materials, unburned oils, metals and even biological material. And this doesn’t include any of the pollutants that are gases, like ozone or carbon monoxide or oxides of nitrogen.

The U.S. and Europe have made excellent progress in reducing air pollution concentrations over the past couple of decades, largely by crafting effective air quality regulation.

However, in the U.S. today, where environmental laws are being methodically dismantled, there is a bigger worry that policymakers are simply choosing to ignore science. One new member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board is Robert Phalen of the University of California, Irvine, who has suggested that “modern air is too clean for optimum health”.

This goes against thousands of research papers and is certainly not true. While some components of air pollution have little effect on human health, this should not be used to muddy our understanding of air pollution exposure. This is a common tactic to confuse the public with unimportant statistics in order to sow confusion, presumably with an underlying intent to influence policy.

The evidence is clear: Air pollution exposure is lethal and causes death across the world. That should be important to all of us.

Richard E. Peltier, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst