Also on today’s menu:
Zapping Plants For Better Food Production
Hawaii’s Governor Wants To Prevent Victimization
Texas Woman Charged With Threats To Federal Judge
An August 10 freight train derailment in the world’s longest rail tunnel — the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland — will take months to repair, shutting down passenger services. Around 8 kilometers (4.9 miles) of track and 20,000 concrete sleepers need to be replaced, and a week after 16 wagons derailed, they are still stuck inside, with thousands of products — including wine, lemonade, and tinned chopped tomatoes — strewn across the tracks.
Opened in 2016, the Gotthard rail link took 20 years to build and cost more than $12 billion. National Swiss rail operator SBB chief executive Vincent Ducrot said Gotthard was one of the safest tunnels in the world. “The fact that an accident like this could happen has hit us very hard,” he said. “Fortunately, there were no injuries, though significant material damage was incurred.”
Last year, more than two-thirds of rail freight traffic in the Alps went through the tunnel. The route through the Alps provides a high-speed link between northern and southern Europe. Passengers will have to travel alternate routes, adding at least 60 minutes to their journeys, and international passengers will have to change trains in Chiasso. Only trains to and from Genoa and Venice will run directly, SBB said.
Zapping Plants For Better Food Production
The Plant Morphogenesis Laboratory at Imperial College London, Salvalaio, is using electricity to improve efforts at vertical farming. Using cubes made of hydrogel, with electrodes on each side, researchers are electrically stimulating seeds to increase crop yields. Other efforts include shocking seeds to hasten germination and zapping the water they are doused with. In the United States, the National Science Foundation has spent millions of dollars to research the agricultural uses of cold plasma — essentially controlled lightning delivered at room temperature.
Electroculture was tried in 19th century to make plants produce better flowers, leaves, and fruit, and to get rid of pests, but with mixed results. Today’s researchers use terms like “smart farming" and “fourth agricultural revolution” to describe their work, but the the theory is much the same. Using electricity for plant growth is succeeding, with the hope that the processes can be brought to bear in the global food crisis, reducing the environmental consequences of mass-scale agriculture.
Some scientists are employing versions of inventions inspired by the “electro-vegetometer” invented by a French physicist in the 1780s, likened to a lightning rod. In Beijing, researchers are using a device that resembles the original to infuse their plants with electricity, reporting excellent results. In the U.S., scientists noted that, in nature, lightning generates superheated matter that forms a kind of ionised gas and, using new tools from the microchip age, they have been able to develop that plasma at room temperature, known as cold plasma, to use in agriculture.
Hawaii’s Governor Wants To Prevent Victimization
Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, has vowed to protect local landowners from being “victimized” by opportunistic buyers following Maui’s deadly wildfires that destroyed a historic island community and killed more than 100 people. Green said he asked the state attorney-general to seek a moratorium on land transactions in Lahaina. “People are right now traumatized,” he said on August 16. “Please do not approach them with an offer to buy their land. Do not approach their families saying they’ll be much better off if they make a deal. Because we’re not going to allow it.”
Local residents fear that the island will be rebuilt to cater to the wealthy. Green said he would announce details of a moratorium by August 18, adding that he also wants to see a long-term moratorium on sales of land that won’t “benefit local people.”
Meanwhile, residents are questioning why the Maui Emergency Management Agency failed to sound sirens during the fire, given that Hawaii claims to have the largest system of outdoor alert sirens in the world, created after a 1946 tsunami that killed more than 150 on the Big Island. Administrator Herman Andaya explained, “We were afraid that people would have gone mauka,” a Hawaiian navigational term that can mean toward the mountains or inland. “If that was the case, then they would have gone into the fire.”
Meanwhile, skeptics are questioning whether the fire was due to climate change or something else. James Grundvig is among those advancing a theory that the fire was caused by a directed-energy weapon. “Only microwave technology as in DEW — whether military lasers or HAARP [High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere] — can explain how the structures not only burned down, but melted kitchen appliances, bathtubs, metal alloy wheel rims, and far more.” Proponents of that theory point out that video of the devastation shows trees still standing, while buildings are leveled. “The houses cooked from the inside out. They often burned from the top of the roofs, incinerating the walls, floors, and appliances, and cladding down to the foundation. Yet, 90 percent of the trees on the properties remained standing with leaves on the branches — not burnt, merely dried out. It was as if a neutron bomb had detonated burning everything manmade, but leaving the greenery alone.”
The Associated Press said that an analysis of records at the Federal Emergency Management Agency indicate that Hawaii is increasingly at risk from natural disasters, with the risk of wildfires rising fastest, but the cause of Maui’s wildfires — the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century — remain under investigation.
Texas Woman Charged With Threats To Federal Judge
Police have charged Abigail Jo Shry of Alvin, Texas, with threatening to kill the federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former president Donald Trump and a member of Congress, telling U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, “You are in our sights, we want to kill you” if Trump does not get elected in 2024. She also threatened to kill U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat running for mayor of Houston.
Trump has publicly assailed Chutkan, calling her “highly partisan” and “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!” based on her past comments in a separate case during the sentencing of one of the defendants charged in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Robert B. Hubbell has noted that Trump has attacked federal judges' reputations as early as two weeks into his presidency, when he referred to the “so-called judge” who stayed Trump’s immigration ban. His recent threat, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” resulted in a request for a protective order. It was seen as an attempt to intimidate witnesses and inspire his followers to engage in violence if the criminal charges went forward.
Several observers have noted that earlier interpretations of Georgia’s RICO law which outlines possible prison sentences of 5-20 years if convicted were wrong in saying Trump’s conviction in that state would result in a minimum five-year sentence. The judge has discretion in sentencing, and could release a convicted person on probation.
Even if Trump were released on probation, a conspiracy conviction would make him ineligible to continue his bid for the presidency based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Would Congress make an exception for Trump?
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