Author Archives: Pat Turnbaugh

L.A. Schools Cancel Classes Due To Threat

The Los Angeles Unified School District cancelled all classes and closed all schools on Tuesday after receiving an unspecified threat.

Congressman Adam Schiff (D-California), who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the threat now appears to be a hoax.

“The investigation into LAUSD threat is still ongoing,” Schiff wrote on his verified Twitter profile. “Preliminary assessment is it was a hoax to disrupt school districts in large cities.”

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday morning, the district’s superintendent, Ramon Cortines, told reporters that the threat was made against “not one school, but many schools in this school district.”

The district’s Twitter account said the schools received a “credible threat,” but did not elaborate.

Cortines told reporters the threat involved “backpacks and other packages,” and he decided to close every school in the district, the second-largest in the nation, as a precautionary measure.

“I think it is important that I take the precaution based on what has happened recently and what has happened in the past,” Cortines said at the news conference.

The announcement came about two weeks after the Dec. 2 mass shooting in nearby San Bernardino in which 14 people were killed. The shooting has been called an act of terrorism.

According to its website, the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 900 schools and more than 640,000 students.

Cortines said he wanted every school in the district to be searched by the end of the day.

New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters in New York that the city’s schools received a similar threat Tuesday, but determined it was not credible.

Capitol Hill Lawmakers Trying to Use Social Media Profiles in Visa Reviews

Lawmakers say they’re drafting new legislation that would tighten up the visa screening process and give officials the power to review an applicant’s social media profiles in background checks.

The House Judiciary Committee is currently working on the proposed bill, officials said Monday.

There has been widespread call for United States visa program reform in the wake of the Dec. 2 mass shooting that left 14 people dead and 21 more wounded in San Bernardino, California.

FBI officials have publicly said that the shooters, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, were discussing jihad and martyrdom over the Internet in 2013, yet Malik was still allowed to enter the United States on a fiancee visa after these conversations. Malik was living in Saudi Arabia when she met Farook, a United States citizen living in California, on an online dating website.

President Barack Obama has called the shooting an act of terrorism.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) specifically mentioned the San Bernardino shootings in a statement announcing the proposed legislation, saying that more could have been done to check Malik’s background — including checking her social media pages.

ABC News reported that U.S. officials had a policy not to review applicant’s social media profiles during visa background checks because there were concerns about civil liberties. The news agency reported that immigration officials pushed early last year for social media profiles to be included in background checks, particularly as foreign terrorist organizations used social media to spread their message, but Homeland Security officials ultimately decided against a policy change because they feared there might be a negative public perception if a switch was disclosed.

Homeland Security’s social media posting policy is now under review, ABC News reported. While some pilot programs to review postings are in place, it’s still not a widespread practice.

In his statement, Goodlate mentioned published reports saying that Malik “posted her radical views on social media prior to obtaining a visa, yet it seems that the Obama Administration’s policies may have prevented officials from reviewing her account.” The proposed bill would now require officials to review social media profiles in background checks, as well as other changes.

“As terrorists continue to adapt and evolve in order to carry out their heinous plots, we have a duty to strengthen the security of our immigration system so that we keep bad actors out of the United States,” Goodlatte said in the statement, adding the bill would be introduced soon.

Crude Oil Prices Rise Slightly After Hitting 8-Year Lows

Crude oil prices bounced slightly back Monday after hitting their lowest price in nearly a decade.

Oil prices have been closely monitored since Dec. 4, when the Order of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced at a meeting it would not place a cap on its oil production. That has allowed the organization’s 12 members to keep flooding an oversaturated global market with more of the commodity, sending the prices tumbling to levels not previously seen in years.

Monday’s developments were the first hint of a rebound since that meeting, Reuters reported.

The price of U.S. crude rose 69 cents and closed at $36.31, an increase of 1.94 percent.

However, the price of Brent crude, which is widely seen as a benchmark for global oil purchase prices, dropped a penny to $37.92. The Wall Street Journal reported it was the seventh straight day Brent crude saw its price decline, the commodity’s longest losing streak since July 2014.

Barrels of both oils were trading below $35 earlier Monday. Before the rebound, Reuters reported the prices were as cheap as they’ve been since the 2008 financial crisis started.

OPEC hasn’t capped its oil production because it wants to retain its share in the global market, Al Jazeera reported. If OPEC limited its output, other countries are in a position to produce oil that the organization otherwise could.

While U.S. drivers are certainly enjoying the cheap oil — AAA reported the national average dropped to $2.014 per gallon, about 55 cents cheaper than this time last year — the low price represents a significant challenge to some countries that depend on oil for their revenue.

CNN reported Monday that Russian finance officials were anticipating oil could drop to $30 a barrel in 2016. The country, which is not an OPEC member, based its budget on an oil price of $50 per barrel and the country’s oil and gas exports represent about 50 percent of its revenue.

AAA said the national average gas price has not fallen below $2.00 a gallon since 2009.

Russian Gunship Fires Warning Shots at Turkish Fishing Vessel

A Russian gunship fired warning shots at a Turkish fishing boat over the weekend to prevent the two vessels from colliding into each other, Russian government officials said in a news release.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said the incident happened on Sunday morning in the Aegean Sea.

It’s the latest in a series of tense interactions between the countries since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border on Nov. 24. The nations believe conflicting sets of circumstances about the incident, which has led Russia to impose several sanctions on Turkey.

According to the Russian statement, its Smetlivy destroyer was anchored near Lemnos Island in the northern Aegean Sea when sailors noticed the Turkish vessel approaching at about .62 miles off the starboard side. Smetlivy fired some signal rockets and tried to hail the ship via radio, but received no response. When the Turkish ship got within .37 miles, Smetlivy utilized its “naval small arms … at the distance of guaranteed survivability of the target” to prevent a collision.

Russia says the Turkish ship immediately changed course after that, but never hailed Smetlivy.

The Russian Ministry of Defense summoned the military attache at Turkey’s embassy in Moscow to discuss the incident. But Turkish leaders were reportedly not thrilled with Russia’s reaction.

Citing comments he made an Italian newspaper, Reuters reported that Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said firing warning shots at a fishing ship was unnecessary.

“Ours was only a fishing boat, it seems to me that the reaction of the Russian naval ship was exaggerated,” Cavusoglu reportedly told Corriere della Sera. “Russia and Turkey certainly have to re-establish the relations of trust that we have always had, but our patience has a limit.”

Nations Approve Landmark Climate Change Deal

A group of 195 nations has reached an unprecedented agreement on global climate change.

Delegates from the nations had spent the past two weeks at the COP21 conference in Paris, working to finalize details on a pact aimed at scaling back global greenhouse gas emissions.

On Saturday, they announced they had come to a consensus.

The conference was aimed at preventing average global temperatures from reaching 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above their counterparts during the Industrial Revolution, when greenhouse gas emissions surged. Scientists have publicly warned that eclipsing that long-feared threshold could yield catastrophic results, including massive flooding and droughts.

The nations agreed they would try to do even better and set a goal of keeping temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which provides more of a buffer.

“We have entered a new era of global cooperation on one of the most complex issues ever to confront humanity,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said in a statement. “For the first time, every country in the world has pledged to curb emissions, strengthen resilience and join in common cause to take common climate action. This is a resounding success for multilateralism.”

There’s still some work to be done before the agreement takes effect. It must be individually ratified by 55 countries that produce at least 55 percent of global carbon emissions. And there’s also work to be done before the world feels the effects of the Paris Agreement, as each nation must develop plans to cap its individual emissions as soon as possible and keep reducing them.

U.N. officials said in a news release that 188 countries have already submitted so-called climate action plans toward the Paris Agreement. Now, the countries will be required to submit new plans every five years. Those plans are required to become gradually more proactive over time, with nations working to further reduce emissions to keep temperatures below the feared levels.

But the agreement wasn’t universally hailed. Some climate change activists wanted to see a quicker transition away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy like wind and solar power.

“Every government seems now to recognize that the fossil fuel era must end and soon. But the power of the fossil fuel industry is reflected in the text, which drags out the transition so far that endless climate damage will be done,” Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said in a statement. “Since pace is the crucial question now, activists must redouble our efforts to weaken that industry. This didn’t save the planet but it may have saved the chance of saving the planet.”

Nearly 725,000 Evacuated as Typhoon Slams Philippines

Nearly 725,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a powerful typhoon brought heavy rain and winds as high as 115 mph to the Philippines on Monday.

Typhoon Melor, known within the Philippines as Typhoon Nona, made landfall at 11 a.m. local time Monday, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said.

The NDRRMC reported that 724,839 people had been evacuated ahead of the storm, with 589,235 of them in the Albany province that’s located near where the storm made landfall.

The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), which is monitoring the typhoon, reported the storm features 93 mph sustained winds and gusts of up to 115 mph. The weather service forecast “heavy to at times intense” rainfall within a 150-mile radius of the storm, and cautioned of the chance for flash floods and landslides.

For comparison’s sake, 93 mph sustained winds would make the storm a category 1 hurricane.

The storm is expected to weaken as it trends further west over the Sibuyan Sea, according to a PAGASA forecast, but meteorologists were expecting wind gusts could still reach 105 mph on Tuesday and 75 mph on Wednesday. The weather service warned the high winds could damage or destroy buildings in other provinces, as well as impact local banana, rice and corn crops.

The NDRRMC reported that the eastern and northern portions of the island of Samar, as well as the Sorsogon province lacked power because the typhoon brought down transmission lines. Additional outages were possible, PAGASA warned. The weather service also issued flood advisories throughout the central Philippines and warned of the chance for 10-foot storm surges.

The storm was also wreaking havoc on travel, as the NDRRMC reported that 42 flights were cancelled as a result of the typhoon, and some 6,800 would-be sea travelers were stranded because of abnormally rough sea conditions. A host of shipping channels were also disrupted.

California Hospital Warns 350 Newborns May Have Been Exposed to Tuberculosis

A California hospital is warning that about 350 infants might have been exposed to tuberculosis.

Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose issued a news release Friday saying that a female employee who worked near the newborn nursery had been diagnosed with the potentially deadly disease.

The hospital said in the news release that it is contacting mothers who visited its Mother & Infant Care Center between mid-August and mid-November of this year. The hospital will screen them and their infants for tuberculosis and give them antibiotic medicine that kills the disease.

The hospital said its employee underwent an annual tuberculosis test in September and did not show any signs of the disease — including any symptoms. But when the employee later saw her doctor for an unrelated issue, the physician discovered the employee had in fact been infected.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tuberculosis is transmitted when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. Nearby people can breathe in the bacteria. If the bacteria multiplies enough, they can develop symptoms like a bloody cough and chest pain.

The CDC said tuberculosis was once the leading cause of death in the United States, but there were fewer than 10,000 reported cases of the disease in 2013. Tuberculosis usually affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body including the brain, kidneys and spine.

Santa Clara Valley Medical Center said it placed the infected employee on leave to cut down the risk of exposing its patients, visitors and staff.

“While the risk of infection is low, the consequences of a tuberculosis infection in infants can be severe,” the hospital’s pediatrics chair, Dr. Stephen Harris, said in a statement. “That’s why we decided to do widespread testing and start preventative treatments for these infants as soon as possible.”

Authorities Investigating Batches of Suspicious Cell Phone Purchases in Missouri

The FBI is investigating multiple reports of bulk purchases of prepaid cell phones in Missouri.

According to various local media reports, law enforcement officials in at least six Missouri towns reported that customers bought a large quantity of the prepaid phones at local Walmart stores.

Prepaid cell phones are popular for a number of reasons, including that they can be bought with cash and don’t require a contract or a credit check like many wireless plans. People can pay for the minutes as they use them, and buy more calling time whenever they need it. But the phones are also attractive in other circles because they’re difficult to trace and can be easily disposable.

Criminals have been known to use prepaid phones, often called burners, to avoid police detection because they can be purchased anonymously and don’t require disclosing a lot of personal information. Terrorists have also been known to use cell phones to detonate explosives.

The first batch of bulk cell phone buys was on Dec. 5, when buyers reportedly went to a Walmart in Lebanon around 4 a.m. and bought 59 cell phones. Law enforcement officials in Macon, Ava, Jefferson City, Columbia and Cape Girardeau also reported similar phone buys on that weekend. Fox News reported that more than 200 prepaid cell phones were purchased in total at the stores.

The purchases came days after a husband and wife killed 14 people and injured 21 more in a Dec. 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in what has been called an act of terrorism.

The American public has been on high alert since that attack.

Searches for concealed carry permits, which allow people to carry hidden handguns in public, have surged to record levels, and a Public Religion Research Institute survey released last week found 47 percent of all Americans fear they or someone in their family will be a terrorism victim.

Americans have long been encouraged to report any kind of suspicious activity through the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. That’s exactly what the Walmart stores and local law enforcement authorities appear to be doing.

Speaking to the Kansas City Star, FBI spokesperson Bridget Patton said law enforcement officials were “acting out of an abundance of caution” in alerting the FBI about the phone buys.

“We have seen similar purchases of bulk cell phones in the past, and it has been concluded that these transactions were unrelated to terrorism,” Patton told the newspaper.

The Kansas City Star also spoke to law enforcement officials in Macon. Sheriff’s Sgt. Curt Glover noted that people have been known to purchase burner phones and resell them at higher prices.

“I do not feel there’s an immediate threat to the community,” Glover told the newspaper. “This has been going on for the last 15 years. They sell them and make a whole lot more money.”

There weren’t any arrests this month because buying a lot of cell phones at once isn’t illegal, and retired FBI Agent Jeff Lanza told the Kansas City Star that a link to terrorism appears unlikely.

“If you were planning to use those in a terrorist act, you wouldn’t be buying in bulk and attracting attention to yourself,” Lanza told the newspaper. “It would be a stupid way to start buying things to be used as bomb detonators because the first thing people do is call the police.”

The FBI has also been notified about a theft of propane canisters in Kansas City, Patton told the Kansas City Star, but the bureau is leaving the investigations of those thefts to local authorities.

The fact that propane can be used in improvised explosive devices raised some alarm bells, particularly because they reportedly occurred around the time of the prepaid phone purchases. But there’s currently no evidence suggesting the propane thefts and phone buys were related.

Americans are asked to remain vigilant and tell police if they notice suspicious activity.

Strong El Nino’s Impacts Expected to Stretch into 2016

This year’s El Niño remains on track to be one of the three strongest in the past 65 years, according to an update from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

El Niño is a weather phenomenon that occurs when part of the Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual. It sets off a far-reaching ripple effect that brings atypical weather throughout the world.

El Niño is already being blamed for Ethiopia’s worst drought in 50 years, for amplifying seasonal rains that brought devastating floods to India and for multiple other cases of extreme weather.

The latest update, published Thursday, indicates that El Niño “has matured,” though its effects are expected to last throughout the winter before ultimately weakening in the summer of 2016.

That backs earlier findings from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, which reported Tuesday that although water temperatures were still near record values, the weather pattern had shown some signs of easing. But the bureau also forecast El Niño’s impacts would be felt well into 2016.

Generally, NOAA meteorologists expect the South should receive more precipitation than usual, while the North should receive a less-than-normal amount of precipitation. It’s also generally expected to be hotter in the West and North while colder in the Southern Plains and Gulf Coast.

That’s not all-inclusive, though.

A barrage of rainstorms killed two people in Oregon and led the governor of Washington to declare a state of emergency this week. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, a climate scientist at Stanford University, Daniel Swain, said that the rainfall in that region was off to a record start.

“Of all the years in which there was a strong El Niño present in the tropical Pacific Ocean, this is the wettest start to any of those years that we’ve observed in the Pacific Northwest,” Swain told the newspaper.

The most potent El Niño on record occurred in 1997-98, and CNBC reported the weather pattern had a global economic impact of up to $45 billion that year. Beyond bringing unusual weather, strong El Niños have been known to impact agriculture, fish catches and public health.

The next three-month seasonal outlook for this year’s El Niño is due to be published on Dec. 17.

Syrian Opposition Agrees to Meet Government for Peace Talks

Syrian opposition forces have agreed to meet with the government for peace talks next month.

A wide variety of critics of President Bashar al-Assad, consisting of both political opponents and rebel forces, had spent the past two days in the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh trying to develop a unified vision as to how they could politically put an end to the country’s ongoing civil war.

On Friday, the Syrian Coalition released a statement saying the group was successful.

Its members said they’re seeking a new, pluralistic democracy built upon equality, transparency, accountability and law. The coalition said in the statement that it will form a committee that will pick the delegates to attend the meeting with Assad, but neither the president nor those in his current regime could participate in the transition process “or any future political settlement.”

The coalition said it wants equal rights in Syria, and wants to craft a regime “that represents all sectors of the Syrian society, with women playing an important role and with no discrimination against people, regardless of their religious, denominational or ethnic backgrounds.”

Reuters reported the peace talks will take place in the first 10 days of January.

Syria has been in turmoil since 2011, when Assad’s opponents began a rebellion that developed into a civil war. The BBC reported Friday that at least 250,000 people have died and about 11 million additional people have been driven from their homes as a result of the ongoing conflict.