The Yellowstone National Park area’s weather forecast the morning of June 12 seemed fairly tame: warmer temperatures and rain showers would accelerate mountain snow melt and could produce “minor flooding.” A National Weather Service bulletin recommended moving livestock from low-lying areas but made no mention of danger to people. 

By nightfall, after several inches of rain fell on a deep spring snowpack, there were record-shattering floods. 

Torrents of water poured off the mountains. Swollen rivers carrying boulders and trees smashed through Montana towns over the next several days. The flooding swept away houses, wiped out bridges and forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 tourists, park employees and residents near the park. 

As a cleanup expected to last months grinds on, climate experts and meteorologists say the gap between the destruction and what was forecast underscores a troublesome aspect of climate change: Models used to predict storm impacts do not always keep up with increasingly devastating rainstorms, hurricanes, heat waves and other events. 

“Those rivers had never reached those levels. We literally were flying blind not even knowing what the impacts would be,” said Arin Peters, a senior hydrologist with the National Weather Service. 

Hydrologic models used to predict flooding are based on long-term, historical records. But they do not reflect changes to the climate that emerged over the past decade, said meteorologist and Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters. 

“Those models are going to be inadequate to deal with a new climate,” Masters said. 

Another extreme weather event where the models came up short was Hurricane Ida, which slammed Louisiana last summer and then stalled over the Eastern Seaboard — deluging parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York with unprecedented rainfall that caused massive flooding. 

The weather service had warned of a “serious situation” that could turn “catastrophic,” but the predicted of 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimeters) of rain for New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania was far short of the 9 to 10 inches (23 to 25 centimeters) that fell. 

The deadly June 2021 heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest offered another example. Warmer weather had been expected, but not temperatures of up to 116 degrees (47C degrees) that toppled previous records and killed an estimated 600 or more people in Oregon, Washington state and western Canada. 

The surprise Yellowstone floods prompted a nighttime scramble to close off roads and bridges getting swept away by the water, plus rushed evacuations that missed some people. No one died, somewhat miraculously, as more than 400 homes were damaged or destroyed. 

As rockslides caused by the rainfall started happening in Yellowstone, park rangers closed a heavily used road between the town of Gardiner and the park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming. The road was later washed out in numerous places. 

The rain and snowmelt was “too much too fast and you just try to stay out of the way,” Yellowstone Deputy Chief Ranger Tim Townsend said. 

If the road hadn’t been closed, “we probably would have had fatalities, unquestionably” park Superintendent Cam Sholly said. 

“The road looks totally fine and then it’s like an 80-foot drop right into the river,” Sholly said. 

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was scheduled to visit Yellowstone on Friday to survey the damage and ongoing repairs. 

Within a matter of hours on June 12, Rock Creek, which runs through the city of Red Lodge and normally is placid and sometimes just ankle deep, became a raging river. When the weather service issued a flood warning for the creek, the water already had surged over its banks and begun to knock down bridges. 

By the time the warning was sent, “we already knew it was too late,” said Scott Williams, a commissioner for Carbon County, Montana, which borders Yellowstone. 

Red Lodge resident Pam Smith was alerted to the floods by something knocking around in her basement before dawn. It was her clothes dryer, floating in water pouring through the windows. 

Smith says her partner keeps track of the weather on his computer and they were aware rain was coming and that the creek was running high. But they were not aware of flooding threat when they went to bed the night before, she said. 

In a scramble to save belongings including her violins, the music teacher slipped on the wet kitchen floor and fell, shattering a bone in her arm. Smith recalls biting back tears and trudging through floodwaters with her partner and 15-year-old granddaughter to reach their pickup truck and drive to safety. 

“I went blank,” Smith said. “I was angry and like, ‘Why didn’t anybody warn us? Why was there no knock on the door? Why didn’t the police come around and say there’s flooding, you need to get out?'” 

Local authorities say sheriff’s deputies and others knocked on doors in Red Lodge and a second community that flooded. But they acknowledged not everyone was reached as numerous rivers and streams overflowed, swamping areas never known previously to flood. 

While no single weather event can be conclusively tied to climate change, scientists said the Yellowstone flooding was consistent with changes already documented around the park as temperatures warm. 

Those changes include less snowfall in mid-winter and more spring precipitation — setting the stage for flash floods when rains fall on the snow, said Montana State University climate scientist Cathy Whitlock. 

Warming trends mean spring floods will increase in frequency — even as the region suffers from long-term drought that keeps much of the rest of the year dry, she said. 

Masters and other experts noted that computer modeling of storms has become more sophisticated and is generally more accurate than ever. But extreme weather by its nature is hard to predict, and as such events happen more frequently there will be many more chances for forecasters to get it wrong. 

The rate of the most extreme rainstorms in some areas has increased up to a factor of five, Masters said. So an event with a 1% chance of happening in any given year — commonly referred to as a “one in 100-year” event — would have an approximately 5% chance of happening, he said. 

“We are literally re-writing our weather history book,” said University of Oklahoma Meteorology Professor Jason Furtado. 

That has widespread implications for local authorities and emergency officials who rely on weather bulletins to guide their disaster response approaches. If they’re not warned, they can’t act. 

But the National Weather Service also strives to avoid undue alarm and maintain public trust. So if the service’s models show only a slim chance of disaster, that information can get left out of the forecast. 

Weather service officials said the agency’s actions with the Yellowstone flooding will be analyzed to determine if changes are needed. They said early warnings that river levels were rising did help officials prepare and prevent loss of life, even if their advisories failed to predict the severity. 

Computer-based forecasting models are regularly updated to account for new meteorological trends due to climate change, Peters said. Even with those refinements, events like the Yellowstone flooding still are considered low-probability and so often won’t make it into forecasts based on what the models say is most likely to occur. 

“It’s really difficult to balance that feeling that you’ve got that this could get really bad, but the likelihood of it getting really bad is so small,” Peters said. He added that the dramatic swing from drought to flood was hard even for meteorologists to reconcile and called it “weather whiplash.” 

To better communicate the potential for extreme weather, some experts say the weather service needs to change its forecasts to inform the public about low probability hazardous events. That could be accomplished through more detailed daily forecasts or some kind of color-coded system for alerts. 

“We’ve been slow to provide that information,” North Carolina State University atmospheric scientist Gary Lackmann said. “You put it on people’s radars and they could think about that and it could save lives.” 

 
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Bangkok, where Myanmar is expected to feature prominently in meetings Sunday with Thailand’s leaders.

The main topic of their discussions will likely be the crisis in Myanmar, said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink, adding the U.S. would continue to “condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the Burmese military regime’s brutal actions since the coup d’état, the killing of nearly 2,000 people and displacing more than 700,000 others.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

Blinken is to meet with Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai. Expanding health and climate cooperation are also on the agenda, as is next year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting, which the U.S. will host, according to the State Department.

The State Department announced Sunday that Blinken will travel to Tokyo on Monday to offer condolences to the Japanese people on the death of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and to meet with senior Japanese officials.

Blinken arrived in Thailand a few days after his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who was on his own tour of Southeast Asia. Over the weekend, Wang visited Myanmar, his first visit to the country since the military seized power last year.

Blinken and Wang met Saturday at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, and spoke for several hours.

The top U.S. diplomat told his Chinese counterpart during those meetings that China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is complicating U.S.-Chinese relations at a time when they are already beset by rifts and enmity over numerous other issues.

Wang blamed the U.S. for the downturn in relations and said American policy has been derailed by what he called a misperception of China as a threat.

“Many people believe that the United States is suffering from a China-phobia,” the Chinese foreign minister said, according to a Chinese statement. “If such threat-expansion is allowed to grow, U.S. policy toward China will be a dead end with no way out.”

Blinken said he conveyed “the deep concerns of the United States regarding Beijing’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity toward Taiwan.”

Blinken also noted he addressed U.S. concerns over Beijing’s use of the strategic South China Sea, the repression of freedom in Hong Kong, forced labor, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, and the genocide in Xinjiang.

Additionally, the U.S. secretary of state said that he and Wang discussed ways in which there could be more cooperation between the two countries in areas such as climate crisis, food security, global health and counternarcotics.

For his part, Wang said China and the United States need to work together to ensure that their relationship will continue to move forward along the right track.

Blinken’s meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was their first in-person since the chief U.S. diplomat unveiled the Biden administration’s strategy to outcompete the rival superpower. In his remarks at the time, Blinken said the U.S. was not seeking to decouple from China and the relationship between the world’s two largest economies was not a zero-sum game.

On Friday, the G-20 talks were dominated by discussion of the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and food supplies.

Indonesia, as the meeting’s host country, called on ministers to “find a way forward” in discussing the war and its impact on rising food and energy prices.

“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner rather than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not at the battlefield,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said at the opening of the meeting, invoking the U.N. Charter to urge multilateralism and trust.

Foreign ministers shared concerns about getting grain shipments out of Ukraine and avoiding devastating food shortages in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. But talks were marked by sharp tension: Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat at the same table but did not speak directly. 
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his Chinese counterpart Saturday that China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is complicating U.S.-Chinese relations at a time when they are already beset by rifts and enmity over numerous other issues. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi blamed the U.S. for the downturn in relations and said American policy has been derailed by what he called a misperception of China as a threat.  

 

“Many people believe that the United States is suffering from a China-phobia,” the Chinese foreign minister said, according to a Chinese statement. “If such threat-expansion is allowed to grow, U.S. policy toward China will be a dead end with no way out.”

 

The top U.S. diplomat—now in Bangkok where he is expected to talk about the situation in Myanmar—said he conveyed “the deep concerns of the United States regarding Beijing’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity toward Taiwan.”

 

Blinken also noted he addressed U.S. concerns over Beijing’s use of the strategic South China Sea, the repression of freedom in Hong Kong, forced labor, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, and the genocide in Xinjiang.

Additionally, the U.S. secretary of state said that he and Wang discussed ways in which there could be more cooperation between the two countries in areas such as climate crisis, food security, global health and counternarcotics. 

For his part, Wang said China and the United States need to work together to ensure that their relationship will continue to move forward along the right track.  

“This is part of an ongoing, and I think important, series of conversations with our Chinese counterparts across the government to make sure that we are responsibly managing the relationship,” a senior State Department official said Thursday, adding that the relationship has “different aspects to it, from profound competition being at the heart [but also] elements of cooperation, and there are elements of contestation.” 

Blinken’s meeting with the Chinese foreign minister is their first in-person since the chief U.S. diplomat unveiled the Biden administration’s strategy to outcompete the rival superpower. In his remarks at the time, Blinken said the U.S. was not seeking to decouple from China and the relationship between the world’s two largest economies was not a zero-sum game.

On Friday, the G-20 talks were dominated by discussion of the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and food supplies.

Indonesia, as the meeting’s host country, called on ministers to “find a way forward” in discussing the war and its impact on rising food and energy prices. 

“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner rather than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not at the battlefield,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said at the opening of the meeting, invoking the U.N. charter to urge multilateralism and trust. 

Foreign ministers shared concerns about getting grain shipments out of Ukraine and avoiding devastating food shortages in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. But talks were marked by sharp tension: Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat at the same table but did not speak directly.  
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The U.S. State Department announced visa restrictions Saturday against 28 Cuban officials that it said were implicated in a crackdown on peaceful protests in Cuba about one year ago.
In a statement, the department said the restrictions would apply to high-ranking members of the Cuban Communist Party and officials who work in the country’s state communications and media sectors.

The State Department accused party officials of setting policies that subjected hundreds of people involved in the July 11, 2021, protests to violent and unjust detentions, sham trials and decades-long prison sentences. The demonstrations were the biggest anti-government protests seen in the Communist-run island in decades.

The Cuban government also employed “Internet throttling” to prevent people in Cuba from communicating with each other and block communications with the outside world, the department said.

“State media officials continue to engage in a campaign against jailed July 11, 2021, protesters and their family members who speak publicly about their loved ones’ cases,” the State Department said.

Washington imposed the visa restrictions under a Reagan era policy that suspended non-immigrant entry to the United States by officers and employees of the Cuban government and the Cuban Communist Party.
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China has demanded the U.S. cease what it called military collusion with Taiwan.

During a virtual meeting Thursday between the joint chiefs of staff from the two countries, General Li Zuocheng told General Mark Milley that China had “no room for compromise” on issues affecting its “core interests,” which include self-governing Taiwan. Beijing claims Taiwan as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary. 

“China demands the U.S. … cease reversing history, cease U.S.-Taiwan military collusion and avoid impacting China-U.S. ties and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” Li said. 

The Chinese military would “resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said. “If anyone creates a wanton provocation, they will be met with the firm counterattack from the Chinese people.” 

Such language is fairly routine, and Li was also quoted in a Defense Ministry news release saying China hoped to “further strengthen dialogue, handle risks and promote cooperation, rather than deliberately creating confrontation, provoking incidents and becoming mutually exclusive.” 

China routinely flies warplanes near Taiwan as a reminder of its threat to attack, and the island’s Defense Ministry said Chinese air force aircraft crossed the middle line of the Taiwan Strait dividing the two sides on Friday morning. It said measures were taken in response, including the scrambling of Taiwanese jets. 

Such “provocative behavior … has seriously damaged regional peace and stability,” the ministry said. 

Asked about the incident, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said, “This exercise by China is directed at external interference and separatist Taiwan independence forces.” 

The meeting between Li and Milley followed fiery comments by Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe at a regional security conference last month that was also attended by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. 

Wei accused the United States of trying to hijack the support of countries in the Asia-Pacific region to turn them against Beijing, saying Washington is seeking to advance its own interests “under the guise of multilateralism.” 

At the same meeting in Singapore, Austin said China was causing instability with its claim to Taiwan and its increased military activity in the area. 

And in May, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called China the “most serious long-term challenge to the international order” for the United States, with its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the strategic South China Sea, prompting an angry response from Beijing. 

The U.S. and its allies have responded with what they term “freedom of navigation” patrols in the South China Sea, also prompting angry responses from Beijing. 

Despite not having formal diplomatic relations in deference to Beijing, Washington remains Taiwan’s chief ally and supplier of defense weapons. U.S. law requires the government to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern,” although it remains ambiguous on whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan if it were attacked by China. 

The latest round of heated rhetoric came ahead of a meeting between Blinken and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on Saturday at a gathering of foreign ministers from the G-20 bloc of industrialized nations in Indonesia that is expected to be overshadowed by disagreements over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Along with Taiwan and the South China Sea, Washington and Beijing are also at odds over trade, human rights and China’s policies in Tibet and toward mainly Muslim Turkic minorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
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Elon Musk’s tumultuous $44 billion bid to buy Twitter was on the verge of collapse Friday after the Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter’s board saying he was terminating the acquisition. 

The chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, tweeted Friday that the board was “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.” 

Twitter could have pushed for a $1 billion breakup fee Musk agreed to pay under these circumstances. Instead, it looks ready to fight over the deal, which the company’s board has approved and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate. 

The possible unraveling of the deal is just the latest twist in a saga between the world’s richest man and one of the most influential social media platforms. Much of the drama has played out on Twitter, with Musk — who has more than 100 million followers — lamenting that the company was failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech. 

On Friday, shares of Twitter fell 5% to $36.81, well below the $54.20 that Musk had offered to pay. Shares of Tesla, meanwhile, climbed 2.5% to $752.29. 

Request for data

Musk lawyer Mike Ringler wrote in the letter to Twitter dated Friday that for nearly two months, Musk has sought data to judge the prevalence of “fake or spam” accounts on the social media platform. “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information,” the letter said.  

It also said the information was fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance, and it was needed to finish the merger agreement. 

“From the beginning this was always a head scratcher to go after Twitter at a $44 billion price tag for Musk and never made much sense” to the investment community, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote in a note to investors after the letter was published, “now it ends (for now) in a Twilight Zone ending with Twitter’s Board back against the wall and many on the Street scratching their head around what is next.” 

On Thursday, Twitter sought to shed more light on how it counts spam accounts in a briefing with journalists and company executives. Twitter said it removes 1 million spam accounts each day. The spam accounts represent well below 5% of its active user base each quarter. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter said it reviews “thousands of accounts” sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active, to determine whether an account is real. 

Last month, Twitter offered Musk access to its “firehose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets, according to multiple reports at the time, though neither the company nor Musk confirmed this. Private data, which isn’t available publicly and thus not in the data “firehose” that was given to Musk, includes IP addresses, phone numbers and location. Twitter said such private data helps avoid misidentifying real accounts as spam. 

Ringler also alleged that Twitter broke the agreement when it fired its revenue product leader and general manager of consumers, as well announcing the layoff of one-third of its talent acquisition team. The sale agreement, he wrote, required Twitter to “seek and obtain consent” if it deviated from conducting normal business.

How it began 

Musk’s flirtation with buying Twitter appeared to begin in late March. That’s when Twitter has said he contacted members of its board and told them he was buying up shares of the company and interested in either joining the board, taking Twitter private or starting a competitor. Then, on April 4, he revealed in a regulatory filing that he had become the company’s largest shareholder after acquiring a 9% stake worth about $3 billion. 

At first, Twitter offered Musk a seat on its board. But six days later, Agrawal tweeted that Musk would not be joining the board after all. His bid to buy the company came together quickly after that. 

Musk had agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. He sold roughly $8.5 billion worth of shares in Tesla to help fund the purchase, then strengthened his commitments of more than $7 billion from a diverse group of investors.

Inside Twitter, Musk’s offer was met with confusion and falling morale, especially after Musk publicly criticized one of Twitter’s top lawyers involved in content-moderation decisions.

As Twitter executives prepared for the deal to move forward, the company instituted a hiring freeze, halted discretionary spending and fired two top managers. The San Francisco company has also been laying off staff, most recently part of its talent acquisition team.
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