This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Climate scientists have confirmed the first half of July marked the hottest two weeks in recorded human history — and there are no signs that the summer of climate extremes is set to end any time soon. In Greece, evacuations are underway from the fire-scorched island of Corfu. This follows the largest mass evacuation in Greek history as some 30,000 people fled what survivors described as “hellish” wildfires in Rhodes in recent days. European holiday-goers who spent nights on the floors of airports and emergency shelters described harrowing scenes.
Helen Pickering: “Smoke had been traveling over our pool for quite some time at the Princess Sun Hotel. And it was just getting worse and worse, and we started to hear the helicopters. And then, basically, you could see the fire, eventually, on the mountaintop. Panic, everyone dashing about, fleeing for buses.”
At least 82 wildfires are blazing across Greece during this summer’s unprecedented heat wave, displacing thousands of people and burning down homes.
In Italy, record-breaking heat was followed Friday by a fierce hail storm in the north, where ice the size of tennis balls fell on the streets of Seregno, just north of Milan, inundating the streets in icy floodwaters.
In India, authorities have ended a rescue mission after a monsoon-triggered landslide in the western state of Maharashtra killed at least 27 people and flattened homes. At least 57 are still missing and presumed dead. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, flash floods and landslides have killed at least 44 people in recent days. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is warning global heating has pushed cases of dengue fever to near record highs.
In Bangladesh, authorities say the mosquito-borne viral infection has already reached epidemic proportions, killing 176 people this year, many of them children.
In Canada, authorities in Nova Scotia say the region was deluged in less than 24 hours with the amount of rain it typically gets in three months. Here in the U.S., the Newell Road wildfire in Washington’s Klickitat County grew to nearly 52,000 acres Sunday, prompting evacuations. Authorities say the fire threatens farms, crops and livestock, as well as solar and wind farms and a natural gas pipeline. If it continues to grow, it could also threaten the Yakama Indian Reservation.
In Baghdad, the arguments usually start off small, says Marama Habib, a long-time resident of the Iraqi capital.
"In the village, like the one I come from, people do not accept strangers sitting outside their property or on their walls," explains the journalist, who lives in Baghdad's affluent Karada neighborhood but is originally from a small town outside of Karbala; she did not want to give her real name for fear of upsetting her family back home or her neighbors.
"But in the city, everybody does it. It's OK just to sit on the street outside somebody's house. It's normal. But the farmers from the country don't understand this and they come out and start arguing. I've seen people get into fights," she told DW.
Habib offers a further example of the growing rural-urban culture clash in Iraq. Rural families are not accustomed to seeing women wearing Western-style clothes, she says. Habib is religious herself and wears a headscarf but the rest of her wardrobe involves modest garments like long-sleeved shirts and jeans, a common look in Baghdad.
"In the villages, women are more covered," she explains, referring to long tunics and robes that show even less of the female figure. "So the farmers come to Baghdad and they think the women wearing Western clothes are prostitutes," Habib says, laughing a little. "That can also cause problems. I mean, I'm from the countryside originally so I understand where they're coming from. I try to talk to them. But it does cause problems."
These are the kinds of societal problems that Iraq is likely to see more of.
The United Nations says Iraq is one of the five countries in the world worst affected by climate change. Around 92% of Iraqi land is threatened by desertification and temperatures here are increasing seven times faster than the global average. This makes agriculture difficult, if not impossible, and causes farming families to migrate to Iraq's cities in search of work and opportunity.
"Rural towns in Iraq already face a number of issues," says James Munn, country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council's Iraq office. Due to long periods of conflict in Iraq, rural areas are already resource starved, he told DW. "So there are fewer jobs, not much working infrastructure, scarcity of water, few schools, few hospitals. That's the backdrop to what's happening now. And then climate change is supercharging all those vulnerabilities further, forcing even more people to leave."
A spokesperson from the UN's International Organization for Migration, or IOM, in Iraq, told DW that between June 2018 and June 2023, it had identified at least 83,000 people displaced "due to climate change and environmental degradation across central and southern Iraq."
"These movements are largely rural to urban, and over short distances," IOM said. And, the spokesperson confirmed, "host communities in urban areas have cited tensions."
Many of the climate-displaced end up living in shanty towns or informal settlements in and around larger cities.
"New arrivals tend to fall at the margins of a system that local populations are already accustomed to," the IOM spokesperson said. "Then a majority of the displaced population is also employed in low wage jobs in the informal sector — things like daily labor, informal commerce, small businesses or in workshops — while local residents mostly have government jobs."
The newcomers compete with long-term residents for already-stretched infrastructure and may find it difficult to access things like transport, healthcare or education. Even sewage systems and clean drinking water can be hard to come by. Social support networks may be limited and there's more chance of mental illness and substance abuse.
The heat waves simultaneously broiling the southwest United States and southern Europe would have been “virtually impossible” if not for climate change, according to a group of scientists who study the probability of extreme weather events. A third heat wave, in China, could have been expected about once every 250 years if global warming weren’t a factor.
“The role of climate change is absolutely overwhelming” in producing all three extremes, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, who contributed to the new research, which was published Tuesday by the World Weather Attribution group.
The group is a loose consortium of climate scientists who study extreme weather and publish rapid findings about climate change’s role in major events. Their research methods are published and peer-reviewed, but this specific, rapid analysis has not yet undergone a typical academic review process. Previous analyses by this group have held up to scrutiny after their initial release and were ultimately published in major academic journals.
Global warming has increased the likelihood of extreme temperatures so significantly that heat waves as powerful as the ones setting records in places like Phoenix, Catalonia and in China’s Xinjiang region this July could be expected once every 15 years in the U.S., once every 10 in southern Europe and once every five in China, the research found.
“This is not a surprise. This is absolutely not a surprise in terms of the temperatures, the weather events that we are seeing,” Otto said at a news conference. “In the past, these events would have been extremely rare.”
The analysis provides another example of how shifts in global average temperatures can create conditions for new, harmful extremes. The scientists warned that the extremes observed this year are expected to worsen as humans continue to emit heat-trapping gasses and rely so heavily on fossil fuels.
Of course, according to Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist and second-most-corrupt Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, this is all political. Alito—who took at least one undisclosed vacation with a Republican billionaire—and the gaggle of white-wing pundits who would have you believe that paying tuition for another man’s secret ward is just what “friends” do, argue that reporting on the Supreme Court’s corruption is motivated by “liberal” media outlets who disagree with the court’s rulings.
In Ohio, newly released body-camera video shows a police officer unleashing a police dog on an unarmed Black truck driver after a traffic stop south of Columbus on July 4. The footage shows 23-year-old Jadarrius Rose had his hands in the air when a handler directed the dog to attack him. Rose was bitten, dragged by the arm, hospitalized and later released to be booked at the Ross County Jail on felony charges of failure to comply. So far there’s no sign the officer responsible for the attack has faced any disciplinary action.
In California, surveillance video shows a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy brutally beating a 23-year-old transgender man outside a convenience store in February. Emmett Brock was driving home from his job as a teacher when he was followed by Deputy Joseph Benza to a 7-Eleven parking lot, where the officer tackled Brock to the pavement and punched him repeatedly in the head, accusing him of resisting arrest even as Brock cried out for help, struggled to breathe and made no move against the officer. A police report said Brock was pulled over because he had an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror; Brock says he was assaulted because he held up his middle finger when driving past Benza’s patrol car.
Here are some simple, historical facts: Africans already were skilled before they were enslaved. And, in many cases, enslavers sought and purchased people coming from specific African societies based on skills common in those societies. Decades of research — slave ship manifests, plantation ledgers, newspaper articles, letters, journals and archaeological digs — by dozens of scholars supports this, much of it compiled in the 2022 book “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer.
Transatlantic slavery was an economic model proposing that skilled laborers, who were benefiting themselves and their communities, be abducted, transported and forced to use those skills to benefit others. Other skills such as literacy, ministry and music-making were often banned, because they did not benefit — and even threatened — the enslaver.
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