James' World 2

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“By the grace of God, I’m still here,” Glasgow said. But Kenya and Kennedi could not be saved.

Margate Police said in a press release that first responders immediately performed CPR on Kenya and Kennedi when they arrived at the home and sent them to the hospital. But the two died shortly after they arrived.

“Worst feeling in the world, and to turn around and see your wife and your daughter there lifeless is even worse,” Glasgow recalled of the moments after the lightning strike.

While roughly 37 million lightning strikes hit the ground in the U.S. each year, the odds of being struck are less than one in a million, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s even rarer to die from a lightning strike, as nearly 90 percent of victims survive.

“The biggest heart in the world, puts everybody before herself, everybody. My daughter, my wife, amazing, amazing people,” he said. The father also gushed about Kennedi’s love of musician Benson Boone and how she could sing his songs word for word. Glasgow is now left to pick up the pieces of his life and stay strong for his surviving two-year-old daughter, Kensli.

“I just lost my best friend. My daughter just lost her best friend,” Glasgow wrote in a Facebook post Monday. “After I lost my father a few years ago I learned a very valuable lesson and that’s to never question God.”

Addressing Kenya and Kennedi, Glasgow said, “We will make you both our story and take it one day at time because I know you both are guiding us.”

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Florida father Kameron Glasgow has been left heartbroken after his wife, Kenya, and two-year-old daughter, Kennedi, were killed in a lightning strike over the weekend (Kameron Glasgow via Facebook)

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A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

In an emergency order, the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order. But with little more than two months until Election Day — and considerably less before early voting begins in many states — it remains unclear whether the White House’s rules will be in effect for a midterm election in which control of both chambers is at stake.

The order by the court was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency rulings. The majority wrote that it agreed with the government’s argument that it should be able to move forward with its plans, finding that the Trump administration was “likely to suffer irreparable harm” unless the justices lifted a freeze that had been imposed by lower courts.

The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warning that the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

The majority said the states that challenged the president’s order could not demonstrate that they were sufficiently harmed by voting rules that had not yet taken effect. The justices cautioned that their order was preliminary and not a final decision about whether the administration’s order “will necessarily be lawful” once the plans are complete. “On that score, time will tell,” the majority said in the 10-page, unsigned order.

That could mean the legal battle will return to the justices, perhaps quickly, as the administration moves to implement the president’s order before the midterms.

Mr. Trump signed the executive order in March as part of his broader attempts to curtail voting by mail. It directed federal agencies to create “state citizenship lists” of people who will be 18 or older as of Election Day. Federal officials were then directed to send those names to state election officials, who administer the vote, purportedly so they could use them to purge voter registration lists of anyone who is not a citizen. The order also instructed the Postal Service not to mail ballots on behalf of anyone whose name was not on the approved list.

Several court challenges immediately followed, including a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts brought by Democratic state attorneys general. The challengers argued that the president exceeded his authority because the Constitution gives Congress and the states power over elections, not the executive.

In late June, Judge Indira Talwani, a Federal District Court judge in Massachusetts, temporarily blocked the president’s order, finding that it violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. She also determined that Congress had not delegated authority to the Postal Service to determine which voters should receive mail ballots, and that the executive order did not allow enough time before November for the Postal Service to follow the legally required process for agencies when they adopt new rules.

Judge Talwani issued a separate broader ruling in a related case this month, blocking any enforcement of the executive order for the 2026 midterms. She again emphasized that the Constitution does not grant authority over elections to the executive branch. She also noted that, contrary to Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, the government had not provided “evidentiary support of illegal or fraudulent absentee voting.”

A federal appeals court earlier upheld Judge Talwani’s temporary block. At that point, Trump administration lawyers filed an emergency application asking the justices to step in. Several Republican state attorneys general filed a separate, parallel request.

In a brief to the court, the Democratic state attorneys general wrote that the executive order “would allow the federal government to rush out an unprecedented, legally indefensible voter-verification and ballot-interception program that would, among other things, give the U.S. Postal Service far-reaching new powers and responsibilities.”

They also argued that allowing the order to be implemented would mean a chaotic rollout not long before states begin to send out absentee ballots.

And they wrote that voters could be confused and disenfranchised, given that the federal government was likely to make errors in compiling citizen lists and that valid voters would have little time to challenge the government’s determinations.

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Volunteers processing mail-in ballots on Nov. 5, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. Credit…Nick Hagen for The New York Times

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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You might find these videos enlightening!

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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is causing more extreme heat in Europe, contributing to the major heatwaves experienced there so far this year.

The surge of cold meltwater into the North Atlantic is altering ocean temperatures and shifting the jet stream to favour heatwaves in western Europe and the Mediterranean, a study undergoing peer review has found. As Greenland ice loss accelerates, Europe may suffer more frequent and intense heatwaves than climate models currently predict.

This newly discovered “atmospheric bridge” played a major role in the unprecedented heatwaves this summer, according to Marilena Oltmanns at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, who is one of the study’s authors.

“Europe heats up faster. This is because of the jet stream shift,” she says. “In future years… it will be even more extreme. In the future we will think this [year’s heatwave] was not a heatwave; this was nice.”

The steady rise in global temperature has increased heatwaves. But it’s still debated whether changes in prevailing weather patterns are also contributing.

In the past 30 years, high-pressure ridges – large areas of elevated air pressure that look like a ridge or upside-down U on weather maps – have been forming more frequently over Europe, the study finds, leading to sunny skies and extreme heat. These ridges are caused by waviness in the jet stream, the band of strong winds that circles the northern hemisphere. When the more or less straight-flowing jet stream meanders northward around western Europe, it allows warm air from the central Atlantic and Sahara desert to pour into the ridge that’s been created.

Years with extensive high-pressure ridges over Europe have resulted in heatwaves like the one that killed 70,000 people in 2003.

The researchers say the formation of the ridges can be traced back to Greenland through a cascade of climate events. In the summer before years of extensive ridging, an average of 81 billion tonnes more meltwater rushes off the ice sheet, they found. The cold meltwater lowers sea surface temperatures as it spreads through the North Atlantic in the autumn and winter. Its freshness inhibits mixing with saltier, warmer deep layers, further cooling the surface.

These pulses of meltwater cooling come on top of the “cold blob,” a long-term decline in ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic that some scientists blame on the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) system of currents. Together, they create a sharp temperature front between the cold waters and the warmer surface waters further south in the Atlantic.

As warm air masses rise to the south of the front and cold masses descend to the north of it, they begin to swirl and generate cyclones. This makes the jet stream wavier. It tends to meander southward of these cyclones, then back northward over western Europe, creating the persistent, high-pressure ridges and heatwaves there.

Most worryingly, climate models don’t fully capture this process, according to Oltmanns.

“This is a big problem,” she says. “It’s going to be even more intense in terms of heatwaves and droughts, in particular in the Mediterranean region, so the weather extremes are likely underestimated.”

A study in July found that the jet stream has shifted southward in the Atlantic in recent decades, similar to the pattern shown in the study. But it concluded that this was due to natural fluctuations in the climate and would eventually reverse.

Meltwater from Greenland could be forcing the jet stream to meander, according to John Methven at the University of Reading, UK, who was one of the authors of the July study. But the weakening of the AMOC or changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic could also be causing this shift.

“That’s the weak link as far as I’m concerned; the link between the cold blob and whatever’s melting in Greenland is not established, and there might be other things going on,” he says.

If North Atlantic cooling continues to affect the jet stream, it could cause not just heatwaves but also other extreme weather, according to Oltmanns. The research linked it to an unprecedented derecho, a stream of thunderstorms and strong winds, in the Mediterranean in 2022. Winds reached more than 60 metres per second, and fist-sized hail killed 12 people.

“We [will] have more droughts at some locations, flooding events at others, and the variability on top of this increases,” she says.

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The diplomats’ letter states: ‘Nothing justifies Israel’s systematic policy of destruction of Gaza and its population.’ Photograph: Mahmoud Issa/Reuters

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The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers, and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly. It’s not just the U.S., either. Globally, there is $350 trillion in debt, roughly treble global G.D.P. It’s like snowpack on a mountainside. It may look stable right now, but it’s creating the conditions for an avalanche. We are past the point where we can deal with our current debts in normal ways. The options open to us are extremely unlikely or highly destructive: Grow our way out of it, raise taxes, inflate the debt away, or wait for the economic fallout.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money. They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That’s why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict. Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled. (Amargi typically left debts between merchants in place.) People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors. The campaign itself was called “return to mother,” the origin of the Sumerian word “amargi.” The word loses something in the translation across eons and languages, but essentially it’s a synonym for “freedom.” The concept was codified in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which decreed a “year of the Lord’s favor” every 50 years.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society. Get enough citizens sold into slavery and enough abandoned farms and society crumbles. Nobody to grow the crops. Nobody to serve in the armies. The amargi was a relief valve, a final rebalancing tool. It was declared in the ancient Near East regularly when new rulers came to power. These actions were magnanimous but also practical. They allowed society to reset rather than being forced into monetary collapse.

People who were owed money were, predictably, not always happy about the amargi. In Athens, the ruler Solon instituted a series of reforms around 594 B.C. that canceled debts. The changes were bitterly opposed by the ruling elite. Solon managed to make the reforms stick, but only after leaving town for a decade and making his people promise not to change the new laws in his absence. Three centuries later, a Spartan king wiped out debt by dragging all the city’s records into the public square and burning them. The city’s elite, aghast, had him arrested and hanged — along with his mother and grandmother. Another two centuries later, the Roman Gracchi brothers were both killed, largely in response to their proposed social reforms. After centuries of elite opposition, the amargi disappeared into obscurity.

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

It’s hard to predict what will happen if we don’t address our debt, but it’s not hard to predict that the outcome will be bad. Governments can borrow to cover up other problems only for so long. Sometimes what comes next is a hyperinflationary spiral and economic collapse, as in Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. Sometimes it’s a national default that rocks financial markets, such as in Egypt and Anatolia under the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. And sometimes it’s just a steadily slipping quality of life as debt saps people’s ability to build their own wealth.

Money represents resources, or at least access to resources. When so much of it is going to debt repayment, it means money that could be spent on goods or services is diverted. The federal government now spends over $1 trillion a year on debt interest — money that could otherwise be spent on roads, schools or health care. Rising debts also result in investors demanding higher interest rates to buy that debt; higher government debt rates push up rates across credit markets, including for mortgages. Public debt financing contributes to inflationary pressure, too.

Widespread public debt forgiveness should be taken seriously, at least as a mechanism to reframe economic thinking. While its recent track record is patchy — including both failed debt relief for developing countries and the extremely positive debt relief for the defeated Axis powers — it is an important tool for policymakers to consider. We are unlikely to see a modern amargi, but as a set of principles for reconsidering our relationship with money, its applicability is rich.

Our debts aren’t going to just disappear. Absent a conscious effort, we are just waiting for an increasingly likely economic meltdown. The ancient world had a different understanding of the nature of money, which is why debt forgiveness became a standard feature of their cultures. We need to start seeing money and debt the way people saw it back then: As a system to distribute resources that, like any system, can be periodically reset.

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Illustration by The New York Times

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The already superlative El Niño that began earlier this year is looking to be the largest El Niño in living memory and likely the strongest since the 19th century, the U.K. Met Office reports.

“We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event,” said Adam Scaife, the Met Office’s head of long-range forecasting, in a statement. “I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts.”

El Niño is a cyclical climate phenomenon where a “warm pool” in the tropical Pacific shifts from its usual spot in the west to the east. This El Niño has steadily gained steam since it was declared in early June, setting a sea surface temperature record for that time of year. And because El Niño typically peaks in late fall to early winter, this event is likely to be a blockbuster.

During an El Niño, temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific generally rise by about one to two degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, “with 2^o C being a really big event,” Scaife said. This year’s event is predicted to hit around three degrees C (5.4 degrees F) above normal, well into the territory of what is colloquially termed a “Super El Niño.” If that forecast bears out, “then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Niño and its worldwide climate influences,” he added. The most recent very strong El Niños occurred in 1982–1983, 1997–1998 and 2015–2016.

El Niño changes the weather around the world by adjusting where heat is released into the atmosphere, which alters major wind patterns. In fact, this event has already juiced Hurricane Lala, whose rainfall devastated Hawaii (though it is keeping a lid on Atlantic hurricane activity) and has contributed to well-below-normal rainfall from the Indian monsoon.

The strength of this El Niño could cause 2026 to become the hottest year on record—it will certainly be among the hottest years. But 2027 may be more likely to take the top slot because the effects of El Niño’s heat release happen on a delay. (Both 1998 and 2016 were record hot years, but both have since fallen down the rankings as climate change has made record hot years more likely.) Either way, 2027 will probably be “another year to temporarily exceed +1.5 C above the preindustrial period,” the Met Office’s Nick Dunstone said in the statement.

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As the mom to a lively nine-year-old autistic boy, I know how following a predictable routine can make or break our day. When we move through our tasks and chores smoothly, we both feel more confident. Other days it feels like getting my son to walk 10 feet to the car will break me. I want him to put on his shoes; he wants to roll on the floor. I want to go to school; he wants to play one more game on his Pop It—as though we haven’t already done this 900 times.

As we head back to school, here’s what I’m doing to save my sanity.

Routines Help Us All Thrive

Back-to-school season can be especially hard. Summer routines are changing. There are new teachers and after-school activities. Our kids may be waking up earlier or doing homework for the first time. “Kids rely on structure to regulate their emotions and feel safe. When a child knows what’s coming next, they’re calmer and more confident,” says Nathalie Stratton, the co-founder of the digital calendar Hearth Display. And checking the schedule helps me remember that I set an intention, we’re on track, and even though life feels chaotic in the moment, when I step back, I can see we are making progress and meeting our goals. On rushed mornings, that’s almost as valuable as the schedule itself.

I’m not naturally drawn to keeping a strict schedule. I don’t time block my calendar, and I stopped using a planner years ago. But I still have grown-up responsibilities, like helping my son get ready for school, and it’s easy for both of us to spiral when our routine is disrupted. So I’ve found it helpful to surrender to the idea of following a schedule. As Stratton told me, “You’re already running a family calendar. It just lives in your head. The first step is getting it out.”

Transitions are especially hard for my son, but most young kids need help shifting from what they want to be doing to whatever comes next. Speech-language pathologist Lauren Salles Gumpert, says, “Kids move gradually from concrete to abstract thinking during elementary school, which explains why time is so difficult to grasp.” While there are no magic buttons or perfect solutions, using simple visual cues has made it easier for me and my son to follow the daily routine, whether it’s during the chaos of summer or a big transition like the first week back at school.

A visual schedule can reduce the back and forth we all struggle with. Parent coach Shelley Miller uses visual schedules to “break down complicated, multi-step routines for children, like in the morning when kids have to get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, and pack a backpack.” And, she adds, “Visual schedules don’t solve problems that stem from deeper stressors like sensory overwhelm. But they can be an amazing tool that brings stability and structure to the family routines.”

How I Started Creating Schedules For My Kid

I’ve been using the Lil Planner app this summer, which tells us what’s up next on the schedule. For example, this summer my goal was to read and tidy up with my son before iPad time. Opening an app and saying, “The schedule says we need to read” lands differently than me unexpectedly declaring that we need to read. Instead of “Surprise! It’s time to do a hard thing,” it became “Let’s follow the schedule.”

Maybe when my son is older we’ll make the schedule together, but for now he seems to see the schedule more as a guide than as the trigger for a power struggle. Allie Klein, the co-founder of the personalized Charmspring boards, notes, “Once a schedule’s in place, it saves countless reminders, negotiations, and repeated directions, because children have a visual tool they can rely on instead of needing a parent to tell them what comes next.” When less energy is directed to predicting what will come next, more energy can be directed to getting ready and following the rules. That feels good for everyone.

I find it helpful to check in regularly and see when the schedule is being used, if it reflects reality, and how it’s being received. I make changes as needed. Stratton says, “Give yourself permission to adjust. Kids can change so much in just three months. A schedule that worked in spring might not fit who they are in September. Treat it like a living document, not a contract.” I don’t update our schedule every day, but I do check in each night to see if it makes sense for the next day. Miller recommends trying a few options and setting up a version a couple weeks before school starts to ease the adjustment.

Back-To-School Doesn’t Have to Feel Like A Daily Emergency

Our current schedule lives on my phone. I open the Lil Planner app when I need to give my son a quick overview of the day. We look at it together throughout the day, and my son taps the checkmark when each task is done. I’ve also used mini schedules when there’s something out of the ordinary, like we’re going to the doctor, then home, and on to a birthday party. In that case, I might just draw something or put a couple pictures on a Velcro strip and take it with us in the car. I keep this dry-erase version on the table in my son’s room, so he can see it as he gets ready for bed. I like that I can customize it with my son’s phrasing and interests. I’ve also had my eye on these Mighty and Bright stay-on-task bracelets too. The Skylight Buddy is designed to make routines feel engaging without being distracting. The truth is that the best visual schedule is the one you’ll actually use. It doesn’t have to be beautiful—it just has to make tomorrow morning a little easier.

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Routines and visual reminders keep all of us on track.

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