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The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was the deadliest in nearly two decades

Published

1 month ago

November 29, 2024

The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was the deadliest in nearly two decades

Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm at the time of this photograph, is pictured in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Yucatan Peninsula on October 8, 2024 seen from the International Space Station as it orbited 257 miles above.

NASA/via Getty Images

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NASA/via Getty Images

MIAMI — One of the deadliest and most costly hurricane seasons ever seen in the Atlantic officially comes to a close on Saturday.

The six-month season brought 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes, five of which made landfall in the U.S. There were hundreds of deaths in the U.S., Central America and the Caribbean.

In the U.S., more than 150 people died from direct causes in the season’s deadliest storm, Hurricane Helene, which tore through Florida and Georgia and brought severe flooding and destruction to North Carolina and in eastern Tennessee.

Before the season began, scientists warned there were likely to be a lot of hurricanes. Record-high ocean temperatures in the Atlantic two to three degrees warmer than normal and other atmospheric conditions set the stage for the above-normal activity.

In late June, Hurricane Beryl formed in the Atlantic and strengthened into a Category 5 storm with 165-mile-per-hour winds. It was the earliest in the season that a Category 5 hurricane had ever formed. It weakened significantly before landfall but caused severe flooding and deaths in the Houston area.

In September, the season’s deadliest storm left a path of destruction from Florida to North Carolina. Hurricane Helene came ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a category 4 storm with 140-mile-per-hour winds. It weakened as it moved inland but dropped as much as 30 inches of rain on some parts of western North Carolina. There was severe flooding throughout the region with extensive damage in Asheville and many smaller communities in North Carolina and Tennessee. In North Carolina, as many as 90 people died in Helene’s floodwaters.

Helene’s impact and number of fatalities were the greatest seen in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina almost two decades ago.

An aerial view of flood damage wrought by Hurricane Helene along the Swannanoa River on October 3, 2024 in Asheville, N.C. At least 200 people were killed in six states in the wake of the powerful hurricane which made landfall as a Category 4.

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Mario Tama/Getty Images

Days before it hit, the Hurricane Center’s forecasts were remarkably accurate. Meteorologists warned there would be catastrophic flooding in western North Carolina days in advance. But, the director of the National Hurricane Center, Michael Brennan says, “It’s difficult when you have an event that’s never been seen before in a community to convey what that impact is going to necessarily look like on the ground. And it’s also challenging because that level of flooding happened over such a large area.”

Helene was one of five major hurricanes this season, two of which reached Category 5. Just two weeks after Helene, Hurricane Milton strengthened to a Category 5 storm, but weakened before making landfall. It came ashore on Florida’s Gulf coast as a Category 3 storm with 120 mile-per-hour winds.

Workers, community members and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, N.C., on Sept. 30.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania says climate change is making hurricanes more powerful and deadly. He says, “We are headed towards a larger number of extremely intense storms that do far more damage and lead to far greater levels of mortality driven by the warming of the oceans from carbon pollution.”

One factor is the warm sea temperatures that are helping storms strengthen dramatically over the course of several hours, a phenomenon known as rapid intensification. Mann says, “It can be a tropical depression one day and all of a sudden within 24 or 48 hours it’s a major hurricane. And it becomes extremely difficult to plan for.”

A man dries a mattress after Hurricane Oscar hit the town of Imias in Guantanamo province, Cuba, on October 30, 2024. Oscar strengthened from a depression to a hurricane in just five hours.

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In October, Hurricane Oscar went from a small tropical depression to hurricane strength in just five hours. The National Hurricane Center had to scramble to issue warnings to Cuba and other Caribbean islands.

Climate scientist Daniel Gilford says warming ocean temperatures are pushing hurricane intensities up by an average of 18 miles per hour. In a recent study, he analyzed the last several seasons. He says, “Five out of every six hurricanes had this really strong statistically robust signal where human-caused climate change was really clearly increasing the intensity of these storms.” Gilford says because of climate change, hurricanes are now a full category higher than they would have been in earlier decades.

Map of the French Broad River watershed and Asheville, North Carolina

Penn climatologist Michael Mann says that with the laws of physics, “If you have 10% increase in wind speeds from human-caused warming, that will lead to a 33% increase in the destructive potential of these storms.” Fueled by the extra heat from the ocean, storms are also picking up more moisture and then dropping it in heavy rainfall events, such as that seen when Helene hit North Carolina.

Gilford, a researcher with Climate Central says, as hurricanes grow larger, stronger and wetter they’re posing an increased threat to inland areas far from the coast. “Hurricane Helene is especially a lesson that certain places that maybe wouldn’t have been experiencing these intense effects before really are today because of climate change,” he said.

Along with hundreds of deaths, damage from all storms this season is estimated at more than $190 billion. That’s second only to 2017, the year of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

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Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

Published

7 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

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The strange world of the Euro-Gulf

Published

9 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Waiting for the Tube, I see a poster for an upmarket gym chain. Locations? “City of London. High Street Kensington. Dubai.” What a shame to choose a setting that is so disfigured with bad taste and clueless expats. Still, the City and Dubai branches must be first-rate.

Soon after, I am in Doha, and again the Euro-Gulf linkage is inescapable. The emir of Qatar is back from a state visit to Britain, where the hosts were angling for a trade deal. Swiss-headquartered Fifa has just given the World Cup hosting rights to Saudi Arabia. Even in skyscraper-free Muscat, where alleys that might have been rationalised elsewhere in the Gulf twist freely behind the corniche, three restaurants in my hotel are outposts of Mayfair brands.

What a shame the word “Eurabia” is taken. And by such cranks. (It is a far-right term for a supposed plot to Islamise Europe.) Because we are going to need a word for this relationship. The Arabian peninsula has what Europe lacks: space, natural wealth and the resulting budget surpluses to invest in things. For its part, Europe has “soft” assets that Gulf states must acquire, host or emulate to carve out a post-oil role in the world. This isn’t the Gulf’s deepest external connection. Not while 38 per cent of people in the UAE and a quarter in Qatar are Indian. But it might be the most symbiotic, if I understand that word correctly.

True, the US has a defence presence in all six Gulf Cooperation Council states. This includes the Saudi footprint that Osama bin Laden wasn’t super-stoked about. But everyday contact? America is a 15-hour flight away. Its soft assets are either harder to buy or less coveted. Its citizens have little fiscal incentive to live in tax havens, as Uncle Sam charges them at least some of the difference.

In the 1970s, when Opec profits gushed through London, Anthony Burgess wrote a dystopia in which grand hotels became “al-Klaridges” and “al-Dorchester”. What a mental jolt it was for even the worldliest Europeans to see — we mustn’t pussyfoot around this — non-white people with more money than them. Still, they could condescend to the Gulf as being no place to live. Half a century on, their grandchildren would call that copium. In fact, their grandchildren might literally live there for economic opportunities. (Al-Dorado?) As a banker friend explains it, the time zones allow you to sleep late, trade the European markets, then dine late, so it is the young ones who do a Gulf stint, not the burnouts who are my age.

For how long, though? It is the sheer unlikelihood of this tryst, between a universal rights culture and monarchical absolutism, between a mostly secular continent and the home peninsula of an ancient faith, that distinguishes it from anything I can think of. A relationship can be both necessary and untenable. It wouldn’t take much — some intra-GCC violence, say, which seemed close in 2017 — for Europe’s exposure to the Gulf to age as badly as its former openness to Russia. If Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City are found to have committed financial chicanery, a chunk of Premier League history will be tainted. Because it is “just” sport, I sense people are underprepared for the backlash.

And it is parochial to assume that the relationship could only ever break down on one end. It is the Gulf side that has to make the awkwardest cultural adjustments. Because Europeans associate 1979 with Iran and perhaps with Margaret Thatcher, they sometimes pass over the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by zealots who thought the House of Saud had grown soft on western habits. Governments in the region assuredly don’t forget.

How far a place can liberalise without tripping a cultural wire occupies (and is answered differently in) each state, or emirate. Everyone is very nice to “Mister Janan” in his Doha hotel. But the metal scanners that must be passed on each re-entry to the building stand as a reminder of the stakes here. I wonder if Europe and the Gulf throw so much into their liaison out of a niggling doubt that it can last.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Published

9 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Fox News appears headed for trial over false election fraud claims made after the 2020 election, after a New York state appellate court chose not to dismiss a lawsuit brought by voting tech company Smartmatic.

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Fox News appears to be headed once more to court over the lies involving election fraud it aired about the 2020 presidential race. This time, it’s over the false claims that election tech company Smartmatic sabotaged the re-election of then-President Donald Trump.

In April 2023, on the eve of a trial in Delaware in which Fox founder Rupert Murdoch was set to testify, the network and its parent corporation agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems

A flood of revelations from the pre-trial process of discovery yielded damning internal communications. The judge found that network figures from junior producers to primetime hosts, network executives, Murdoch and his son Lachlan knew that Joe Biden had won the election fairly. Yet, they allowed guests to spread lies that Trump had been cheated of victory to win back Trump viewers. Some hosts amplified and even embraced the claims.

Now, an appellate court ruling in New York state is allowing Smartmatic’s parallel, $2.7 billion suit to press ahead. The same ruling also dismissed some counts against the network’s parent company, Fox Corp.

Pro-Trump Fox hosts including Maria Bartiromo and the late Lou Dobbs invited guests making unsubstantiated and wild claims about Smartmatic on the air, and at times appeared to endorse those allegations themselves.

Fox forced Dobbs off the air just a day after Smartmatic filed its suit in February 2021. Two weeks later, Fox News and Fox Business Network ran an awkward segment with a voting tech expert, Edward Perez, to present viewers with a rebuttal to those outlandish claims. Newsmax, a right-wing channel in competition with Fox for viewers who supported Trump, did much the same.

“Today, the New York Supreme Court rebuffed Fox Corporation’s latest attempt to escape responsibility for the defamation campaign it orchestrated against Smartmatic following the 2020 election,” Smartmatic’s lead attorney, Erik Connolly, said in a statement. “Fox Corporation attempted, and failed, to have this case dismissed, and it must now answer for its actions at trial. Smartmatic is seeking several billion in damages for the defamation campaign that Fox News and Fox Corporation are responsible for executing. We look forward to presenting our evidence at trial.”

Unlike Dominion, whose voting machines were used in two dozen states, Smartmatic says its technology was used only in Los Angeles County in 2020. Fox has sharply questioned the value of Smartmatic and the contracts it says were jeopardized and lost.

“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial,” a network spokesperson said in a statement. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

In the Dominion case, Fox also relied on arguments that its shows and hosts were simply relaying inherently newsworthy allegations from inherently newsworthy people — the then-president and his allies. The presiding judge in Delaware, Eric M. Davis, rejected that argument; he found that Fox’s executives, stars, and shows had broadcast false claims and defamed Dominion in doing so.

Fox has said that the New York case offers a new venue, with slightly different implications, although Davis applied New York defamation law in his Delaware proceedings.

Fox settled, as it has in many other cases, before opening arguments of the trial with Dominion. It maintains it will fight the allegations Smartmatic is making in court.