Also on today’s menu:
Pence Criticizes Trump As He Enters Presidential Race
Pat Robertson Dead At Age 93
Dam Design Does Not Normally Consider War
Forest fires in Canada have forced thousands of people from their homes and burned about 9.4 million acres, sending a smoky haze over the United States. The burned acreage is roughly 15 times the 10-year average, according to federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair, and the warm, dry conditions are expected to persist over the coming months.
The first wildfires appeared in Alberta last month and, while the fires have affected both eastern and western Canada, some of the worst fires have sprung up in the eastern province of Quebec, according to Reuters. More than 11,000 people had to evacuate their homes in Quebec.
The smoke is expected to intensify in Ottawa, Toronto, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh while remaining thick in other cities along the east coast of the United States, including New York. The BBC reports that people in several cities across the U.S. woke up this morning to hazardous air quality conditions, including in Philadelphia and other parts of Pennsylvania. Large swaths of the Midwest and the South also are under air quality alerts.
More than 600 U.S. firefighters, along with their French counterparts, have joined Canadian officials in battling the spreading flames.
Pence Criticizes Trump As He Enters Presidential Race
Former vice-president Mike Pence launched his 2024 presidential campaign on June 7 in Ankeny, Iowa, attacking former president Donald Trump for encouraging the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump had claimed that Pence had the power to overturn the 2020 election result, “but the American people deserve to know that on that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the constitution,” Pence said. “Now, voters will be faced with the same choice: I chose the constitution and I always will.”
Pence argued that Trump’s actions on January 6 should disqualify him from returning to power. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asked someone else to put them over the constitution should never be president of the United States again,” he said.
Later in the day, he criticized Trump for having called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius”. “I know the difference between a genius and a war criminal, and I know who needs to win in the war in Ukraine,” Pence said.
Pat Robertson Dead At Age 93
The Christian Broadcasting Network announced that Evangelical Christian leader Pat Robertson has died at the age of 93.
The founder of the Christian Coalition, Robertson campaigned for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, finishing second in the Iowa Caucuses, behind Kansas Senator Robert Dole. Robertson’s campaign lost steam after George H.W. Bush won the New Hampshire primary, and Bush went on to win the election.
Robertson served as host of a talk show called the 700 Club, which combined religious news and political commentary with light entertainment. The Christian Coalition provided endorsements and support to candidates sharing their views on issues like abortion, religious liberty and “traditional values”.
Dam Design Does Not Normally Consider War
Rafael Moran of the Technical University of Madrid, a professor of civil engineering who specialises in dam protection, said, “Normally, we don’t design dams thinking about war or explosives. It’s not a hypothesis for designing.” The breach of the Kakhovkadam in Ukraine may change that, influencing future dam designs, according to the BBC.
After mines placed on the dam exploded, releasing huge volumes of water from the Kakhovka reservoir, Moran explained, “This reservoir holds [4.7 trillion gallons] of water. That’s one-third of all reservoir capacity in Spain.”
According to Moran, what made the Kakhovka dam vulnerable was that water flow was controlled by metal gates, which would have been relatively easy to breach with mines. That led to a dam failure on a scale not seen in Europe for decades.
Moran believes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has conducted tests to determine how vulnerable U.S. dams might be to explosive sabotage, but they have not made the results public.
Ukraine blames Russia for the dam sabotage, while Russia says it was Ukraine that set the explosives. The breach caused catastrophic flooding that has left hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without drinking water and it destroyed farms and towns downstream from the dam.
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