Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
WATCH: It’s so cold in Chicago today that they have to set the railroad tracks on fire to keep trains moving. https://cbsn.ws/2CVL8fG
Chicago train tracks on fire during polar vortex
WATCH: It's so cold in Chicago today that they have to set the railroad tracks on fire to keep trains moving. https://cbsn.ws/2CVL8fG
Posted by CBS News on Wednesday, January 30, 2019
HALLELUJAH: To announce a snow day, these school officials sang their own rendition of “Hallelujah” – and their voices will blow you away ❄️https://cbsn.ws/2CQVpcU
School officials announce snow day with epic "Hallelujah" rendition
HALLELUJAH: To announce a snow day, these school officials sang their own rendition of "Hallelujah" – and their voices will blow you away ❄️ https://cbsn.ws/2CQVpcU
Posted by CBS News on Wednesday, January 30, 2019
January 30, 2019
Happy Birthday President Roosevelt! In 1935, FDR signed Social Security into law. Today, Rep. John Larson introduces the #Secure2100 Act, which would increase benefits and ensure that our Social Security system remains solvent for generations.
January 30, 2019
If the force of gravity disappeared, floating off into space would be the least of your worries.
What If Gravity Suddenly Went Away?
Posted by What.If on Monday, March 19, 2018
The season’s most wintry roar threatened to paralyze a wide swath of the nation Tuesday as temperature records began falling fast. Parts of New York braced for up to four feet of snow, and Atlanta awaited a blast of rain, snow and cold that could bring chaos to travelers headed for the Super Bowl.
Temperatures will plummet and winds will howl as parts of the Midwest and East are overwhelmed by the polar vortex swooping down from the North Pole.
Weather.us meteorologist Ryan Maue predicts that a whopping 250 million people in the continental U.S. will experience freezing temperatures by week’s end. And 90 million will see below-zero temperatures.
In Chicago, schools were already ordered shut for Wednesday because of wind chill temperatures that AccuWeather meteorologist Elliot Abrams said could make it feel like 50 to 60 degrees below zero. That would be colder than Antarctica.
“It’s never been -50 in Chicago so we can’t really say it ‘feels like’ – nobody really knows what that feels like,” Abrams said. “But you can get frostbite within four or five minutes.”
Cold weather: 8 things you shouldn’t leave in your car during polar vortex
The wind chill in Minneapolis was forecast to reach a stunning 54 degrees below zero Wednesday morning, prompting the University of Minnesota to cancel classes.
In Wisconsin – another state familiar with brutally cold winters – parts of the state were hit with a foot of snow or more Monday. School districts, government agencies and businesses were poised to remain closed deep into the week due to the cold, and Gov. Tony Evers declared a state of emergency because of the snow and cold.
“The intensity of this cold air, I would say, is once in a generation,” said John Gagan, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Sullivan, Wisconsin.
More: ‘Life-threatening’ Arctic blast to freeze nearly 200 million
President Trump chimed in on Twitter, citing the ominous wind-chill temperatures.
“People can’t last outside even for minutes,” he tweeted. “What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!”
In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, officials warned that school will be canceled Wednesday if wind chill temperatures fall below 34 degrees below zero. Wind chill temperatures for the city were forecast to reach 48 below Wednesday.
Indianapolis could see record-breaking cold Tuesday night, with wind chills as low as 40 degrees below zero expected, the weather service warned, adding that frostbite could occur on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.
“This is polar air,” said Mike Koch, a senior meteorologist with the weather service in Indianapolis. “That should tell you something.”
More: Polar vortex? Back in the day, we called it ‘winter’
Late Monday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency to “help address threats to public health and safety related to forecast sub-zero temperatures over the next few days.”
“Keeping Michiganders safe during this stretch of dangerously cold temperatures is our priority. Such widespread, extreme conditions have not occurred in Michigan for many years and it is imperative that we are proactive with record-low temperatures being predicted by the weather service,” Whitmer said in a statement.
In Buffalo, AccuWeather warned that heavy lake-effect conditions could pound the city with up to 2 feet of snow. Up to 4 feet of snow may fall just 5 to 10 miles south of the city, AccuWeather forecast. Watertown and Sandy Creek, New York, could receive between 3 and 6 feet, AccuWeather said.
As cold and snow slam into the North, a snowstorm pasted portions of the Deep South on Tuesday.
AccuWeather meteorologist Rob Richards said, “Atlanta could receive a coating to an inch of snow.” Sleet and ice were also expected. Hundreds of flights in and out were canceled, days before the Super Bowl, in a city not accustomed to combating such weather.
Sunday, a prelude to the polar plunge slammed into the Upper Midwest with temperatures reaching below zero in the morning. The low of 45 degrees below zero in International Falls, Minnesota, smashed a record that stood for more than half a century.
Contributing: Meg Jones and Nathan Phelps, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Vic Ryckaert, Indianapolis Star
The US midfielder talks about why women are at the forefront of fighting injustices and whether she feared for her football career after taking a knee during the national anthem
“As I’ve grown older I’ve really got to understand how powerful one voice can be, my voice can be, or the team’s voice can be. So to hold that back or not to use that just seems selfish in a way.”
If that is the case, Megan Rapinoe is anything but selfish. A World Cup winner and Olympic champion with the US women’s national team, Rapinoe could easily be satisfied with her lot. But just enjoying the spoils of her success is not enough.
Rapinoe has been a vocal advocate for LGBT rights groups since coming out before the 2012 Olympics. She set out to raise $100,000 for those affected by the Carr fire that ripped through her home county, Shasta, last summer, destroying 1,604 buildings as it became the sixth most destructive fire in California history. And, on 4 September, 2016, before kick-off against Chicago Red Stars, the Seattle Reign midfielder went down on one knee during the playing of the national anthem in solidarity with the protest of the San Francisco 49er’s player Colin Kaepernick.
“I think I want the same for myself,” says the 33-year-old, who 11 days later knelt again before USA played Thailand. “Being a white, female, gay athlete. Obviously not everybody is that but it doesn’t mean I don’t want the support for everyone in all of the things I’m fighting for.
“We understand that athletes are idolized and glorified in our culture and it was about using that platform to just support and give support to what he was saying. It became a very racialized issue, a black versus white thing, but it’s not.
“We all should be supporting what he’s saying. The statistics don’t lie – people of color in prison, people of color that are disproportionately arrested, monitored by police, police brutality against people of color.
“It’s not really an issue of whether police brutality exists or not, or whether racism is still an issue or not. It very much is and I think it’s foolish to say it’s not.
“The more we reckon with that quickly, recognize that these things are happening and believe the people that are standing up and telling their stories, then the quicker we can find solutions and start to make progress in breaking down those barriers that are so harmful to so many people.”
Did she ever fear for her career? Kaepernick has not thrown a football professionally since his release by the 49er’s and has a case pending alleging NFL bosses have colluded to keep him out of the game for his stance. “Yeah, I mean as soon as I kneeled they made a rule that you had to stand,” says the creative midfielder nicknamed Rapinho or Rapinodinho.
“I don’t know what would have happened if I had continued to kneel, maybe the same thing that happened to Colin. I kind of feel like that’s sort of what they were after. They made it very clear that they were not going to respect my free speech or my decision to peacefully protest in that way and made it very clear that it was unacceptable and that I should be privileged or feel privileged to play for the country. I personally thought it was a very patriotic thing that Colin started.”
Despite growing up in the small conservative northern Californian town of Redding, Rapinoe’s social conscience was a natural progression of values ingrained from an early age. “It wasn’t like I grew up in a super liberal household or anything,” she says. “But you never know where people come from, or what their situation is. So you shouldn’t judge people. Give them the benefit of the doubt and be willing to extend yourself and stand up for people who maybe can’t stand up for themselves and just stand up for the right thing. It was never explicitly spoken about in our household but that was just how we were raised.”
Rapinoe was a natural fit for Juan Mata’s Common Goal. The organisation which encourages those around football to donate 1% of their earnings to organisations using the social weight of the sport to make real changes to communities and lives. She and her teammate Alex Morgan were the first women footballers to sign up.
“I just really love the whole concept. It’s first of all really simple. It’s 1% of your salary, so whether you make a dollar or a million you can do something that’s impactful. It can also be hard to research charities and vet different organisations and they do that for you which makes it really easy for the player. And it’s about being part of the bigger team of players all around the world.
”Obviously we’re at the highest level of this game and it’s given us so much, so to be able to harness that and give back to all these organisations that are already doing the work, already have boots on the ground, is just really cool to be a part of.”
The number of female players signing up, despite earning significantly less than their male counterparts, she believes, has its roots in the constant battle for equality at every level of the women’s game. “Women are always at the forefront of all this kind of stuff, racial inequality or pay inequality, maybe because we’re always having to fight for something and we truly understand what gender discrimination looks like and pay inequity looks like. It’s very close to home for us.
“We very much understand that it takes bold voices and bold steps to make things change. Our game is changing so much but it also has so much room to grow and we want to be a part of that and we really feel a responsibility to ensure we leave the game in a better place than where we found it. So, I don’t know what it is but maybe women are just better than men in that way.
“It’s like men have run the world for all these years, maybe they should just take a few hundred years off,” she laughs. “And we can just take it for a few hundred years and we’ll see where we are.”
Has having football in perspective made her a better player? “Yeah, it definitely has.”
✨Inspiring & Easy Way to Make a Huge Difference #LandfillChallenge ✨
We challenged you to hold on to your trash for 21 days! Here’s the results of that challenge in an informing live talk show.
Also, we will be announcing the date of the next challenge! Stay tuned.
✨Inspiring & Easy Way to Make a Huge Difference #LandfillChallenge ✨We challenged you to hold on to your trash for 21 days! Here's the results of that challenge in an informing live talk show.Also, we will be announcing the date of the next challenge! Stay tuned.
Posted by EcoWatch on Saturday, January 26, 2019
Including the world’s first bike path made from recycled plastic.
Here are 3 innovative ways the Netherlands is creating a society where nothing goes to waste
Including the world's first bike path made from recycled plastic. World Economic Forum
Posted by EcoWatch on Friday, January 25, 2019
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S temper tantrum over Congress’s refusal to fund a border wall paralyzed much of the government for five weeks, sapped the morale and wallets of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and low-wage contractors, left millions of Americans disgusted and dismayed, and diminished the United States in the eyes of the world. The impasse was proof of the president’s stark incapacity for leadership, which he reconfirmed Friday by threatening to re-shutter the government in three weeks.
In announcing his non-deal with Congress — in fact, it is more cease-fire than solution — Mr. Trump rehashed his tired and truth-free arguments, asserting against logic and evidence that building a massive new border wall, to supplement hundreds of miles of barriers already in place along high-trafficked segments of the border, would cause crime to plummet and drug trafficking to dry up.
He has lost that argument with the American people, a majority of whom oppose building the wall and blame him and Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, according to the latest Post-ABC News poll. Mindful of that, of the cascading economic costs related to the government closure and of the latest shutdown-related calamity — Friday’s massive flight delays along the Eastern Seaboard owing to a shortage of air traffic controllers — the president agreed to reopen the government until Feb. 15, with no new funding for a border wall for now. Score one for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), though no one is going to celebrate a national debacle such as this.
In the aftermath of such a pointless episode, the best hope is for Congress to step forward and shape a deal. It might include a new law, valid for at least the next two years, to prevent another shutdown. It would deliver back pay to low- and moderate-wage contract workers, such as security guards and cafeteria cooks, as Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and others have proposed. And it would combine some rational border security with some merciful immigration reform.
In that last arena, the contours of a way forward are no secret. If Mr. Trump continues to insist on funding for a piece of wall, which he says is a matter of “no choice,” he should offer serious concessions on immigration to the Democrats — not the phony package peppered with poison pills that he rolled out a week ago, but a secure future for two groups whose protections from deportation he has tried to rescind: “dreamers” brought to this country as children by their parents, and migrants who have been living legally in the United States on temporary protected status, having fled unrest and natural disasters at home. For the dreamers, that would mean a path to legal status for 1.5 million or more of them who are eligible for the Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
If Mr. Trump resists that — if he reverts to another shutdown in which he again treats as pawns hundreds of thousands of the “incredible” federal workers he lauded on Friday — he will simply pile failure upon failure. If he declares an emergency as a means to divert federal funds for building a wall, he will invite litigation in what amounts to a profoundly undemocratic end run.
Mr. Trump has failed as a dealmaker. Congress might yet salvage something worthwhile from this sorry episode.
But not everything will go back to normal. The shutdown will have some lasting damage.
For one thing, some federal contract employees won’t get back pay. While Congress routinely approves back pay for federal workers during shutdowns, people who work for companies that provide services ― such as thousands of janitors and security officers who work in federal buildings ― don’t receive the same consideration.
For another, millions of Americans will have to stretch their food budgets. The federal government ordered states to distribute February’s food benefit payments several weeks early because of the shutdown. More than 38 million Americans receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, and they’ll now have to wait until March for their next payment. Some beneficiaries may have already spent the February allotment, thinking it was some kind of accidental bonus.
States had to rush to get the money out and didn’t have time to focus on informing beneficiaries. Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, said she heard stories about confused SNAP recipients from several organizations in her state.
“They thought that because of the shutdown, if they didn’t spend them all now the government is going to take them back,” Hamler-Fugitt said.
Hundreds of people in subsidized housing received eviction threats because nobody in the federal government could tell their landlords the program hadn’t lapsed. One renter told a local TV station he would try to borrow money to make payments.
Some Transportation Security Administration workers may have taken new jobs. How many people want to take a position that often pays less than $40,000 per year that doesn’t actually guarantee a regular paycheck?
And it could take years to reschedule some of the immigration court hearings that were canceled because of furloughed judges.
The monthlong shutdown will also have larger-scale consequences, such as reduced consumer confidence and economic growth. The government shutdown of 2013, which lasted less than three weeks, reduced gross domestic product by at least 0.1 percent and as much as 0.6 percent, according to a range of estimates.
When President Trump announced Friday that he would give up on his quest to make congressional Democrats support a border wall that he previously said Mexico would pay for, he threatened to shut down the government yet again “if we don’t get a fair deal from Congress.”
But Trump has just proven that his “fair deal” strategy was totally ineffective ― except for disrupting thousands of people’s lives.
ABC – 7
Midwest braces for polar plunge as Bay Area enjoys mild temperatures