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Long the hottest place on Earth, Death Valley put a sizzling exclamation point Sunday on a record warm summer that is baking nearly the entire globe by flirting with some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded, meteorologists said. Temperatures in Death Valley, which runs along part of central California’s border with Nevada, reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit (53.33 degrees Celsius) on Sunday at the aptly named Furnace Creek, the National Weather Service said. The hottest temperature ever record was 134 F (56.67 C) in July 1913 at Furnace Creek, said Randy Ceverny of the World Meteorological Organization, the body recognized as...

Despite skeins of bank regulations supposed to prevent another financial meltdown, Silicon Valley Bank, the country’s 17th-biggest bank, went down in flames last week. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but when a financial institution goes under, you have to wonder: where were the regulators? After all, there were more red flags than you see at a CCP convention. Consider the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the body created in 2010 after the financial crisis, which was meant to avert just this sort of collapse. The council is chaired today by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and includes 9 other voting...

Two of Silicon Valley Bank’s top chiefs dumped millions of dollars worth of stock just two weeks before the firm collapsed Friday, records show. CEO Greg Becker offloaded over $3.5 million worth of stocks — which amounted to nearly 12,500 shares — in a pre-planned, automated sell-off on Feb. 27, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That same day, the bank’s third-in-command CFO Daniel Beck sold $575,180 in stocks, Newsweek reported. Silicon Valley Bank, the once leading tech lender, was shut down by federal authorities just 11 days later. Becker and Beck sold off their massive stakes...

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill Friday that would remove the word “squaw” from all geographic place names in California, declaring the term to be a “racist and sexist slur” — and leaving the town of Squaw Valley in an uproar. AB 2022 declares: “The term ‘squaw’ is a racist and derogatory term that has historically been used as an offensive ethnic, racial, and sexist slur, particularly for indigenous women.” It says the word must be removed from over 100 names in the state.

A reader directed me to this Twitter thread from someone who goes by the name Hazard Harrington, who works in Silicon Valley. I have no way of verifying the truth of the person or his position, but it certainly squares with a lot of other accounts of how woefully woke Silicon Valley has become—the more so in the time of COVID—so I am reasonably confident it is authentic: I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now. Obviously insanely radically...

The 1991 Oakland Hills fire, which consumed 2,900 structures, would likely still rank No. 1. Four members of a Cal Fire helicopter crew were burned Saturday when they were overrun by flames in the initial attack and are recovering at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. Berlant said two had been moved out of the burn unit. The fire consumed the beloved Harbin Hot Springs, where few buildings were left standing Monday, and damaged cooling towers, communication equipment and power distribution lines at The Geysers geothermal energy complex. The project’s main operator, Houston-based Calpine, generates about 60 percent of the...

A reporter candidly questioned the wisdom of allowing children access to cans, listing the ways it could go wrong: • Children could use the cans on each other, in rapid succession, as assault-can play weapons; • An intruder might get extra angry at can throwers, who would be like canaries in a coalmine; • The intruder might hurl the cans back at the children, cancelling this brilliant progressive idea. The administrator erupted volcanically, “Yeah, cans kill people, and spoons make people fat! The original use of canned food is to nourish, not to kill people (just like spoons.) Therefore, cans...

A middle school principal in eastern Alabama wants to stockpile cans of food such as corn and peas in classrooms so that students could hurl them as weapons in a last-resort confrontation with a school intruder. In a letter Friday, W.F. Burns Middle School Principal Priscella Holley asked parents to have each student bring an 8-ounce canned item. "We realize at first this may seem odd; however, it is a practice that would catch an intruder off guard," she wrote in the letter, published by TV station WHNT in Huntsville. "The canned food item could stun the intruder or even...

Veiled by the yellow willows and brush along a forgotten creek bed in San Jose, hundreds of people jerry-built a treehouse and constructed underground bunkers and ramshackle lean-tos to form one of the nation's largest homeless encampments. The 68-acre shantytown is just minutes away from downtown and the high-tech giants that made Silicon Valley one of the world's most opulent locations. For years, the city turned a blind eye to "the Jungle." But the camp along the muddy bank of Coyote Creek has become more crowded in recent years and is awash in rotting trash, rats and human waste —...

A giant valley deeper than the Grand Canyon is buried beneath several miles of glacial ice in West Antarctica, according to a new study by British scientists. The sub-glacial canyon is nearly two miles deep, 200 miles long and 15 miles wide.

SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON – Some of the first information gleaned from Osama bin Laden's compound indicates al-Qaida considered attacking U.S. trains on the upcoming anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. But counterterrorism officials say they believe the planning never got beyond the initial phase and have no recent intelligence pointing to an active plot for such an attack. As of February 2010, the terror organization was considering plans to attack the U.S. on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. One idea outlined in handwritten notes was to tamper with an unspecified U.S. rail track so that a train would fall...

Most of Antarctica has about 2 1/2 miles of ice covering it, and that cold, white wasteland is what most people picture when they think of the South Pole. But a series of dry valleys in Antarctica, about 4,000 kilometers square, have no ice on them at all. The moisture is sucked from the dry valleys by a rain shadow effect — winds rushing over them at speeds up to 200/mph — leaving a bizarre and fascinating landscape, which looks more like Mars than the rest of our planet...

Here is an update for those of you in the Tennessee Valley. Here is the latest high-resolution model and what it is showing for the Valley. Notice the band of potential heavy snow that pushes across from west to east. This would be due to convective nature of the system. New models start to roll in around 9 PM so I will try to post another updated thought late this evening.

Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities... she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just...

While the exact route of the Great Wagon Road has not been preserved, as such, we know that in Virginia and West Virginia, from the Potomac to the Roanoke Valley, it is either under or parallel to Route U.S. 11. Because the highway has been regraded, straightened, widened, and sometimes relocated and sometimes expanded to three and four lanes, it is often hard to know whether you are on, or simply driving parallel to, the Great Wagon Road. Except . . . there are places where you can be relatively certain that you are on the old road. [Pictures]

LOWER HELMAND RIVER VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN (Reuters) – U.S. Marines launched a helicopter assault early on Thursday in the lower Helmand river valley in southern Afghanistan, spokesman Capt. Bill Pelletier said. A Reuters correspondent in the valley saw flares in the sky over the town of Nawa, south of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah. The valley of irrigated wheat and opium fields along the Helmand river is largely in the hands of Taliban fighters who have resisted British-led NATO forces for years. The United States has sent 8,500 Marines to Helmand province in the last two months, the largest wave of...

NORTH HOLLYWOOD -- Two people were shot dead and five others were wounded by gunfire in three separate shootings Tuesday night that had police searching neighborhoods door to door for gunmen, finding one suspect in a backyard. The two fatal shootings were related and took place within three blocks of each other in North Hollywood at about 7 p.m., LAPD's Deputy Chief Michel Moore told reporters. About an hour earlier, a man was shot in Northridge by a gunman riding with a number of men in a car near Wilbur Avenue and Parthenia Street, said LAPD Lt. Bill Maarschalk. His...

More than a dozen suspected members of a ruthless Norteño street gang allegedly responsible for four murders, several attempted murders and assaults in San Jose are behind bars, the result of a 1 1/2-year police investigation. A five-week grand jury proceeding culminated Tuesday with indictments being issued against 13 suspected members of El Hoyo Palmas, described by police as a multi-generation gang that has operated in San Jose for about 30 years.

From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu T.S. Subramanian Strong resemblances between graffiti symbols in Tamil Nadu and the Indus script Continuity of tradition: Megalithic pots with arrow-work graffiti found at Sembiankandiyur village in Nagapattinam district. CHENNAI: In recent excavations in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu, megalithic pottery with graffiti symbols that have a strong resemblance to a sign in the Indus script have been found. Indus script expert Iravatham Mahadevan says that what is striking about the arrow-mark graffiti on the megalithic pottery found at Sembiyankandiyur and Melaperumpallam villages is that they are always incised twice and together, just...

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA engineers have adjusted the flight path of the Phoenix Mars Lander, setting the spacecraft on course for its May 25 landing on the Red Planet. "This is our first trajectory maneuver targeting a specific location in the northern polar region of Mars," said Brian Portock, chief of the Phoenix navigation team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's two prior trajectory maneuvers, made last August and October, adjusted the flight path of Phoenix to intersect with Mars. NASA has conditionally approved a landing site in a broad, flat valley informally called "Green Valley."...