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Columns/Opinion

Audubon has quantified threat

For serious birders who regularly observe birds in the wild, ignoring climate change isn’t possible. We have been seeing and documenting the effects of a warming climate since the 1950s. In recent decades, that has meant a consistent northward shift in where species are found. Glossy black great-tailed grackles, previously found primarily in the tropics, first reached southeastern California in 1964; they now stalk and squawk around lowland ponds throughout most of the state. Big tropical seabirds named boobies (because early sailors took their tameness for stupidity) rarely ...

‘That couldn’t happen here in America’

I was maybe 10 years old when this happened. Mom is driving, I’m in the back seat. It’s night. She’s trying to cross a busy L.A. thoroughfare, from a side street. Southbound traffic is jammed, but a guy in a truck makes a hole and waves us through. We’ve almost cleared the intersection when a car, speeding northbound, clips us. We go spinning up over a low brick wall onto somebody’s lawn. My head smacks the window hard enough to crack it. And I remember thinking “This can’t happen to us!” As a child I had a morbid fear of accidents. So somehow, I convinced myself we ...

Why don’t the feds care about animal cruelty?

Nearly 300 raccoons bred and slated to be sold as pets or for use in experiments swelter in stacked cages as the temperature hits 100 degrees. A circus is cited for more than 100 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act — including for failing to provide animals with adequate veterinary care, minimum space, shelter from the elements and clean water. A roadside zoo keeps an Asiatic black bear who suffers from dental disease and is at least 400 pounds overweight in a cramped cage. Why are these outfits still allowed to continue conducting business as usual? And more importantly, ...

Reaping the whirlwind in Syria

President Donald Trump, according to his Twitter feed, has made a deliberate policy decision to cut America’s losses and withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. “The endless and ridiculous wars are ENDING!” he tweeted Monday. “We will be focused on the big picture, knowing we can always go back & BLAST!” Like a lot of the president’s tweets, that’s not entirely accurate. The new U.S. posture in northeastern Syria is a response to the obduracy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, U.S. officials tell me, who was unmoved by the pleading and pressure of U.S. diplomats and ...

Our 90-second culture can save lives and ruin them

A lot can happen in 90 seconds. In 2013, it took the flight attendants on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 only 90 seconds to evacuate nearly 300 people off of a plane that had crashed at San Francisco International Airport — despite their personal injuries and the flames and smoke in the cabin. In February 2016, a high school senior named Jessica Fitzgerald saved her co-worker’s life at the pizzeria where they worked when he went into cardiac arrest right after a pizza delivery. She pulled out her cellphone, dialed 911 and started performing chest compressions. From the moment she ...

Trump attempting to invade the Democratic Party

President Trump’s path to re-election goes through the Democratic Party. Goal No. 1 is to get Democrats to eliminate his greatest threat: Joe Biden. It’s not the Iowa and New Hampshire polls that freak out Trump. These contests are dominated by the white liberal gentry, not Biden’s huge base of moderates and African Americans. The general election polls are what keep him up at night. They show the former vice president beating Trump like a drum. The most recent national Fox News poll puts Biden ahead of Trump by 14 points. The ABC News/Washington Post poll gives him a 15-point ...