Samantha Power, administrator of the U.S. development agency USAID, announced new aid to tackle Somalia’s humanitarian crisis Sunday after meeting with Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mahmud.

Power was accompanied by the U.S. Ambassador to Somalia, Larry Andre, for the talks with Somalia’s president.

After the meeting, Power announced that USAID will contribute $476 million to help Somalia fight the prolonged drought that has devastated many parts of the Horn of Africa country.

In a statement issued by USAID and sent to VOA via email after the meeting, Power said with the new announcement, the United States has provided nearly $707 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Somalia in fiscal year 2022.

Power said Somalia is the epicenter of the food crisis gripping the Horn of Africa, in a video posted on Twitter Sunday.

“This isn’t like other droughts, this isn’t like other emergencies when four straight rainy seasons do not produce sufficient rain, we are looking at potentially an unprecedented catastrophe with millions of lives hanging in the balance,” she said.   

Power appealed to other countries and donors, including private citizens, to step up and support the people of Somalia.

However, at a news conference inside the U.S. embassy in the Somali capital Mogadishu, she said the U.S. has several concerns about delivery of the aid and is taking steps to alleviate them.   

“I want to stress this is both to avoid corruption and siphoning of resources to individuals who put their own welfare above of those of starving people,” she said.

The U.N. Office of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) Somalia office said Sunday nearly half of Somalia’s population — 7.7 million people — require humanitarian or protection assistance.  

The U.N. says one out of eight children in Somalia are dying before turning five and one in 100 women of child-bearing age die due to pregnancy-related complications.  

U.N. Food and Agriculture agency deputy emergency coordinator Ishaku Mshelia told VOA that food insecurity in Somalia has him worried.

“The severity of the food shortages is really troubling and might be the worst I have seen,” he said. “What is unique about it that with fourth failed rainy season so the usual local supplies that cool down demand is not available.”   

Somalia’s president has appointed a drought response envoy who on Friday said that the droughts in Somalia are caused by the combined multiple effects of climate change, deforestation, and conflict.

He said in the last decade, more than ten million trees have been cut down and that people are consistently degrading the environment and risk turning the country into a desert.
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It’s not exactly flowing with milk and honey — just ask the area’s struggling black bears — but Promised Land offered respite Sunday for city folks in the Northeast trying to escape a nearly weeklong hot spell that only threatened to intensify.

Those with the resources fled to pools, beaches and higher elevations like Promised Land State Park, at 550 meters in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains and a drive of about 2½ hours from New York City and Philadelphia.

From the Pacific Northwest to the southern Great Plains to the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor, more than 85 million Americans were under excessive heat warnings or heat advisories issued by the National Weather Service. The agency warned of “extremely oppressive” conditions from Washington to Boston.

Even in Promised Land, temperatures were forecast to soar above 32 Celsius, but with shade from the forests, cool lake water and mountain breezes, it was more than tolerable, visitors said.

Rosa Chavez, 47, a high school teacher in Manhattan, applied sunscreen at a beach on Promised Land Lake. She and friend Arlene Rodriguez, who accompanied her, had just experienced Europe’s own heat wave while vacationing last week in Florence, Italy.

“The heat is following us,” said Rodriguez, 47, a real estate agent and property manager.

Numerous record highs were expected to be tied or broken in the Northeast, the weather service said.

Philadelphia hit 37 C (98 F) Sunday even before factoring in humidity. Newark, New Jersey, saw its fifth consecutive day of 38 C (100 F) or higher, the longest such streak since records began in 1931. Boston also hit 38 C (100 F), surpassing the previous daily record high of 37 C (98 F) set in 1933.

At least two heat-related deaths have been reported in the Northeast, with officials warning of the potential for more.

Philadelphia officials extended a heat emergency through Monday evening, sending workers to check on homeless people and knock on the doors of other vulnerable residents. The city also opened cooling centers and stationed air-conditioned buses at four intersections for people to cool off.

Forecasters urged people to wear light clothing, drink lots of water, limit time outside, and check on elderly people and pets.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu declared a heat emergency through Monday and kept a dozen cooling centers open.

Athletic events were shortened or postponed. Organizers of the New York City Triathlon cut the distances that athletes had to run and bike. This weekend’s Boston Triathlon was put off until Aug. 20-21.

On the West Coast, forecasters warned of extreme heat arriving early this week and lingering until the weekend. Temperatures could break daily records in Seattle, Portland and Northern California by Tuesday and climb to the highest level since a heat wave last year that killed hundreds of people across the Pacific Northwest.

Many homes in the often-rainy region lack air conditioning, and authorities cautioned that indoor heat is likely to build through the week, increasing the risk of heat-related illnesses, something emergency medical officials in Boston also warned of.

The heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest last June toppled records with temperatures that hit 47 C (116 F) in some places and killed an estimated 600 or more people in Oregon, Washington state and western Canada.

Back in Promised Land, Chavez said she has asthma and needs to keep her inhaler around, especially “when the heat is so thick I can’t breathe.” The breezes and clearer air in the mountains help, she said.

It was already over 27 C (81 F) at midmorning as Mhamed Moussa Boudjelthia, a 31-year-old Uber driver from Queens, fired up a grill at the beach to make kebabs. He and another friend from Queens had fled the hot chaos of the city for the day.

“There, it’s really hot,” Boudjelthia said. “There’s too much humidity, too.”

His friend, Kamel Mahiout, 35, agreed as he stood in a cooling breeze: “It’s crazy in New York City.”

The heat was withering even less than an hour away, at lower elevations. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Sunday’s high was expected to be 36 C (97 F) , and not punching below 21 C (70 F) at night.

“That also leads to the danger. People aren’t getting that relief overnight,” said weather service forecaster Lily Chapman. “That stress on the body is kind of cumulative over time.”

The area also has been drier than usual, she said.

Regular campers and cabin residents in Promised Land attribute unusually numerous bear sightings to the dry conditions. The animals roam neighborhoods and campsites for scraps as streams and berries dry up.
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A bill to boost semiconductor production in the United States has managed to do nearly the unthinkable — unite the democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and the fiscally conservative right.

The bill making its way through the Senate is a top priority of the Biden administration. It would add about $79 billion to the deficit over 10 years, mostly as a result of new grants and tax breaks that would subsidize the cost that computer chip manufacturers incur when building or expanding chip plants in the United States.

Supporters say that countries around the world are spending billions of dollars to lure chipmakers. The U.S. must do the same or risk losing a secure supply of the semiconductors that power the nation’s automobiles, computers, appliances and some of the military’s most advanced weapons systems.

Sanders and a wide range of conservative lawmakers, think tanks and media outlets have a different take. To them, it’s “corporate welfare.” It’s just the latest example of how spending taxpayer dollars to help the private sector can scramble the usual partisan lines, creating allies on the left and right who agree on little else.

Sanders said he doesn’t hear from people about the need to help the semiconductor industry. Voters talk to him about climate change, gun safety, preserving a woman’s right to an abortion and boosting Social Security benefits, to name just a few.

“Not too many people that I can recall — I have been all over this country — say: ‘Bernie, you go back there and you get the job done, and you give enormously profitable corporations, which pay outrageous compensation packages to their CEOs, billions and billions of dollars in corporate welfare,'” Sanders said.

Sanders voted against the original semiconductor and research bill that passed the Senate last year. He was the only senator who caucuses with the Democrats to oppose the measure, joining with 31 Republicans.

While Sanders would like to see the spending directed elsewhere, several Republican senators just want the spending stopped, period. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican, said the spending would help fuel inflation that is hurting the poor and middle class.

“The poorer you are, the more you suffer. Even people well-entrenched in the middle class get gouged considerably. Why we would want to take money away from them and give it to the wealthy is beyond my ability to fathom,” Lee said.

Conservative mainstays such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, the Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks have also come out against the bill.

“Giving taxpayer money away to rich corporations is not competing with China,” said Walter Lohman, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.

The opposition from the far left and the far right means that Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and fellow Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will need help from Republicans to get a bill over the finish line. Support from at least 11 Republican senators will be needed to overcome a filibuster. A final vote on the bill is expected in the coming week.

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney is among the likely Republican supporters. Asked about the Sanders’ argument against the bill, Romney said that when other countries subsidize the manufacturing of high technology chips, the U.S. must join the club.

“If you don’t play like they play, then you are not going to be manufacturing high technology chips, and they are essential for our national defense as well as our economy,” Romney said.

The most common reason that lawmakers give for subsidizing the semiconductor industry is the risk to national security from relying on foreign suppliers, particularly after the supply chain problems of the pandemic. Nearly four-fifths of global fabrication capacity is in Asia, according to the Congressional Research Service, broken down by South Korea at 28%, Taiwan at 22%, Japan, 16%, and China, 12%.

“I wish you didn’t have to do this, to be very honest, but France, Germany, Singapore, Japan, all of these other countries are providing incentives for CHIP companies to build there,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We cannot afford to be in this vulnerable position. We need to be able to protect ourselves,” she said.

The window for passing the bill through the House is narrow if some progressives join with Sanders and if most Republicans line up in opposition based on fiscal concerns. The White House says the bill needs to pass by the end of the month because companies are making decisions now about where to build.

Two key congressional groups, the Problem Solvers caucus and the New Democrat Coalition, have endorsed the measure in recent days,

The Problem Solvers caucus is made up of members from both parties. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, the group’s Republican co-chair, said Intel Corp. wants to build its chip capacity in the United States, but much of that capacity will go to Europe if Congress doesn’t pass the bill.

Rep. Derek Kilmer, a Democrat, said he believes the legislation checks a lot of boxes for his constituents, including on the front-burner issue of the day, inflation.

“This is about reducing inflation. If you look at inflation, one-third of the inflation in the last quarter was automobiles, and it’s because there’s a shortage of chips,” Kilmer said. “So this is about, one, making sure that we’re making things in the United States, and two, about reducing costs.”
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Congresswoman Liz Cheney, one of the leaders of the investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year, said Sunday that Donald Trump engaged in the “most serious misconduct” of any U.S. president in history by inciting the mayhem and then refusing for more than three hours to call off the rioters.

Trump is broadly hinting at another run for the White House in 2024 but Cheney, the vice chairperson of the congressional investigative committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show on Sunday there is “no doubt in my mind he’s unfit” for elected office and “should never be close to the Oval Office again.”

Cheney, a vocal Trump critic, unleashed her latest broadside against her fellow Republican days after witnesses told the House of Representatives panel that Trump ignored entreaties from White House aides, Republican congressional supporters, conservative television commentators and family members to call off about 2,000 Trump-supporting rioters last year as they tried to keep Congress from certifying that Democrat Joe Biden had defeated him in the 2020 election.

Trump has often assailed the committee investigating his role in fomenting the riot by urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He has called the nine-member panel the “Unselect Committee of political Thugs and Hacks.”

Trump has criticized several of his former aides for turning against him and testifying about what they saw in the White House on the day of the riot as he watched it unfold on television while sitting in the dining room next to his office.

Trump told a political rally in Arizona on Friday night, “If I announced that I was not going to run any longer for political office, the persecution of Donald Trump would immediately stop. They’re coming after me because I’m standing up for you.”

The rioters rampaged into the U.S. Capitol, vandalized the building, scuffled with police and sent lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence fleeing for their safety. In the midst of the insurrection, Trump derided Pence for not having “the courage” to block certification of the Electoral College vote showing Biden had won.

Trump never inquired about the well-being of his second-in-command even as some of the rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” and erected a gallows within eyesight of the Capitol. The committee said some of Pence’s security detail called their loved ones to say goodbye for fear they may not make it out of the Capitol alive as the rioters came perilously close to the vice president.  

Trump had privately and publicly demanded that Pence send the election results back to the states Trump narrowly lost so new electors favoring the 45th president could replace the official ones favoring Biden. Constitutional experts say that would have been illegal.     

In the United States, presidents are effectively chosen in separate elections in each of the 50 states, not through the national popular vote. Each state’s number of electoral votes is dependent on its population, with the biggest states holding the most sway. The rioters who stormed the Capitol tried to keep lawmakers from certifying Biden’s eventual 306-232 victory in the Electoral College.    

Last Thursday’s hearing was the eighth over the last two months, with the committee promising to hold more public sessions in September.

Cheney said the committee is still seeking testimony from Steve Bannon, a one-time Trump aide who was convicted Friday of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the panel’s subpoena to testify. Shortly before his trial last week, Bannon said he was now willing to testify but no appearance has been scheduled.  

“I think it’s clear Steve Bannon has information the committee needs,” Cheney said.

She cited his commentary days ahead of the November 2020 election that Trump would declare victory the night of the election no matter the vote count at the time, which indeed Trump did. In the early hours after polls closed, Trump was ahead in the vote count but days later lost the election as mail-in ballots heavily favoring Biden were counted.

Cheney also noted that Bannon predicted on January 5, 2021, that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” leaving the investigative panel to wonder exactly what Bannon knew beforehand about the riot at the Capitol and from whom.

She said the committee is in negotiations to hear testimony from Virginia [Ginni] Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who worked with Trump aides to overturn the Biden victory.

Cheney said the committee hopes Ginni Thomas “will come in voluntarily,” but will consider issuing a subpoena if she does not.

 
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Virtually all the contiguous United States experienced above normal temperatures in the past week, with more dangerously hot weather forecast. 

The U.S. heat wave followed record heat that killed hundreds if not thousands of people and sparked wildfires in Europe.

Following is an explanation of what is causing the heat waves, according to scientists.

What is a heat wave?

A heat wave has no single scientific definition. Depending on the climate of a region, it can be determined by a certain number of days above a specific temperature or percentile of the norm.

Arctic warming and jet stream migration

The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the globe as a whole, meaning there is ever less difference between northern temperatures and those closer to the equator.

That is resulting in swings in the North Atlantic jet stream, which in turn leads to extreme weather events like heat waves and floods, according to Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Heat domes

Warmer oceans contribute to heat domes, which trap heat over large geographical areas. This weekend the heat dome is stretching from the southern plains of the Oklahoma/Arkansas area all the way to the eastern seaboard, according to the U.S. Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists have found the main cause of heat domes is a strong change in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter.

“As prevailing winds move the hot air east, the northern shifts of the jet stream trap the air and move it toward land, where it sinks, resulting in heat waves,” the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its website.

El Niño and La Niña

Every few years, the climate patterns known as El Niño and, less frequently, La Niña occur. El Niño brings warm water from the equatorial Pacific Ocean up to the western coast of North America, and La Niña brings colder water.

At present, La Niña is in effect. Because summer temperatures trend lower during La Niña, climate scientists are concerned about what a serious heat wave would look like during the next El Niño, when even hotter summer weather could be expected. 

Human-influenced climate change

Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is a global phenomenon that is certainly playing a role in what the United States is experiencing, scientists say. 

“Climate change is making extreme and unprecedented heat events both more intense and more common, pretty much universally throughout the world,” said Daniel Swain, climate scientist at UCLA.

“Heat waves are probably the most underestimated type of potential disaster because they routinely kill a lot of people. And we just don’t hear about it because it doesn’t kill them in, to put it bluntly, sufficiently dramatic ways. There aren’t bodies on the street.”

Francis, of the Woodwell Center, said with climate change the world is seeing changing wind patterns and weather systems “in ways that make these heat waves, like we’re seeing right now, more intense, more persistent, and cover areas that just aren’t used to having heat waves.”

Alex Ruane, researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said as the world warms, “it takes less of a natural anomaly to push us into the extreme heat categories. Because we’re closer to those thresholds, it’s more likely that you’ll get more than one heat wave at the same time. We’re seeing this in the United States.”
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When Disney reopens its Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique shops at resorts in Florida and California next month, the workers who help children dress up as their favorite animated characters will have new, more gender inclusive titles.

That is because men are going to work at the shops for the first time.

The workers will be referred to as Fairy Godmother’s Apprentices instead of Fairy Godmothers-in-Training, as they were called before the shops closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The decision to allow men to work at the shops was made before the pandemic but hadn’t been implemented before the closures.

The Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique shops at Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California are scheduled to reopen at the end of August after being closed for two years, according to a Disney blog post.

Workers at the shops provide hairstyling, makeup, costumes and accessories to help children between ages 3 and 12 transform into their favorite characters.
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