BBC:

A wildfire near Yosemite National Park in California is spreading quickly, threatening thousands of homes.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection described it as being „zero per cent under control“ on Saturday morning local time.

Central and North Eastern regions of the US are also sweltering under extreme heat.

Temperatures of 38C (100.4 F) are forecast in Washington DC and Dallas, with New York only slightly cooler.

An official in Oklahoma – where the temperature is expected to reach 41C on Sunday – said heat was the main cause of weather-related deaths in the US.

Dubbed the Oak Fire, the blaze in California started on Friday afternoon local time and had grown to 10.2 square miles (26.5 sq km) by Saturday morning, the Associated Press reports.

Climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.

The world has already warmed by about 1.1C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

This is the entire BBC „story“, disjointed as it appeared, with a Yosemite headline over all of two short sentences about a fire near Yosemite. The remainder of the „article“ seems to be fire and weather related sentences grouped perhaps by algorithm. I can’t really imagine a human writing this, but then my powers of imagination are perhaps those of an engineer, rather than an artist or poet.

I don’t think we’re going to get out of this situation with media like this.

Branko Marcetic, Jacobin:

It’s a major shift. That the party of Franklin Roosevelt has managed to remain unpreoccupied with an economy where everything is becoming astronomically more expensive, workers’ wages are stagnant, and child poverty has spiked 41 percent suggests that the realignment in process has only solidified, making it ever more inhospitable to a left-wing policy program.

Guardian:

“This is not a drought, this is aridification,” Rhett Larson, a water law professor at Arizona State University, told the Denver Post, reflecting on the decline of the Colorado River. “This is not something we can wait out. This is not something we can survive,” he said. “This is the new world we live in.”

Robert Habeck, SZ:

„Was hättest du getan?“ – Das ist die Frage, die der 20. Juli seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs an uns Deutsche richtet. Die Routine des Festaktes kann die Dringlichkeit, ja Eindringlichkeit der Frage, manchmal stumpf machen. Zeit seines Lebens dann doch nicht wirklich vor die Wahl gestellt zu werden, war schließlich implizite Gewissheit.

Mit dem Erstarken autoritärer, totalitärer Systeme in unserer Nachbarschaft – aber auch der Populismus in den liberalen Demokratien erstarkt – bekommt die historische Frage nun eine Unmittelbarkeit.

Aus der Frage „Was hättest du getan?“ ist die Frage „Was kannst du tun?“ geworden. Sie müssen wir nun beantworten, jeder und jede Einzelne von uns, wenn wir unsere Demokratien verteidigen wollen. Geschichte wird von der Gegenwart eingeholt.

Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle:

Traveling can be fun and adventurous, but it can also be instructive in how some cities seem to be work better than San Francisco. There’s no question that when it comes to public transportation, London and many other cities in Europe and Asia have San Francisco squarely beat.

“You must have been riding the Tube a lot and seeing what it’s like to have a functional transit network,” Hayden Clarkin, a former San Francisco resident who now lives in New York, told me when I described my trip. He’s a transportation engineer and founded TransitCon, an annual gathering devoted to public transportation and the people who love it.

“And San Francisco is one of the best cities in America for transit, so what does that tell you?” he added with a laugh.

Die gefährlichen Wörtchen »uns« und »wir« erwiesen sich aber bald schon als schwammige Begriffe, kindische Verklärungen und Verkleisterungen der politischen Abgründe zwischen uns und den Bonzen der Partei.

—Wolf Biermann, »Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!«, (Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, 2016), 91.

Endlich by der [Helene] Weigel, in ihrem kleinen Büro, war ich der Einzige. Die Patronin residierte in einem antiken Gestühl hinter einem antiken Schreibtisch. Sie fragte: »Was willst du?« Und ich, genauso direkt: »Ich will Regisseur werden. Ich will hier lernen.« Sie: »Was machst du jetzt?« – »Ich studiere Politische Ökonomie an der Humboldt-Universität.«

—Wolf Biermann, »Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!«, (Berlin: Propyläen, 2016), 75.

Guardian:

The Reuters Institute revealed last month that 42% of Americans actively avoid the news at least some of the time because it grinds them down or they just don’t believe it. Fifteen percent said they disconnected from news coverage altogether. In other countries, such as the UK and Brazil, the numbers selectively avoiding it were even higher.

“In the United States, those who self-identify on the right are far more likely to avoid news because they think it is untrustworthy or biased, but those on the left are more likely to feel overwhelmed, carry feelings of powerlessness, or worry that the news might create arguments,” the institute said.

The Reuters Institute said that alongside the rising number of people avoiding news is a drop in trust in reporting in the US to the lowest point yet recorded at just 26% of the population.

Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle:

It can be refreshing to leave San Francisco’s misery behind and see cities that take care of people better than we do. I saw about a dozen homeless people in a week in London, a city that has a “No Second Night Out” initiative to get people who fall into homelessness inside as quickly as possible. Of course, countries with universal health care and more substantive social safety nets than ours will fare better on that score.

David Chu, a Sunset resident and product manager, visited family in Seoul in May said he saw very little homelessness and no obvious drug dealing or use.

“No, not at all,” he said. “I’m sure you could find it if you looked really, really hard, but it’s nothing like the Tenderloin.”

He said that in Seoul, there’s more civic pride and a sense of the common good. In San Francisco, he said, people regularly fight to prevent new housing or services near them and often get their way at City Hall, making our entrenched problems even worse.

“How is this our level of governance?” he asked. “San Francisco’s a place that should be 100% world-class, and oftentimes it’s sadly the exact opposite.”