Through the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When slavery was abolished across ...most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The ancestors of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today.A group of Caribbean countries are suing ten European nations for a total of 4 trillion dollars for the damage inflicted on them. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter and other activists groups are causing increasing numbers of white people to reflect on how this history of abuse and exploitation has benefited them.Blood Legacy explores what inheritance - political, economic, moral and spiritual - has been passed to the descendants of the slave owners and the descendants of the enslaved. He also asks, crucially, how the former - himself among them - can begin to make reparations for the past.
Climate change may accelerate the water cycle on the global scale, resulting in more frequent extreme climate events. However, very few studies are available on the effect of global warming on winter ...extreme precipitation and its causes. In this investigation, the effect of global warming on winter extreme precipitation in the high-latitude regions of Northeast China and the changes in large-scale circulation patterns are studied using the data recorded by 62 meteorological stations in Heilongjiang Province from 1961 to 2018, along with daily NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data. The results reveal an abrupt change in the winter temperature of Heilongjiang Province in 1986, and the onset of a period of relatively warm winters during which a temperature rise of 1.7 °C was discovered. The winter precipitation increased by 5.4 mm during the warm period, which is a significant change from that in the cold period, and included an abrupt change in precipitation in 1995. 75% of the years with extreme precipitation and 100% of the years with high-extreme precipitation occurred during the warm period. The interannual variability of precipitation in the warm period was large. During the warm period, changes were observed in the Arctic polar vortex, the East Asian trough, and the circulation at 850 hPa. The strength of the Arctic polar vortex decreased significantly at a rate of 56.2 hPa/10a, with an abrupt change occurring in 2002. The strength of the East Asian trough decreased noticeably by 6.8 hPa during the warm period, and was located 40 degrees west longitudinally compared to the cold period. These changes led to weakened downdrafts and enhanced updrafts, and an increased warm, humid air current flowing over Heilongjiang Province in winter. More cold air and warm humid air currents converged above this region due to changes in the circulation at 850 hPa, increasing winter precipitation. The greater interannual variability of the strength of the Arctic polar vortex and East Asian trough during the warm period increased the number of years with winter extreme precipitation in the province, and resulted in larger precipitation variability. The changes in the large-scale atmospheric circulation pattern are attributed to the temperature rise in the Arctic and its surrounding high-latitude areas.
•The mean atmospheric circulation has been changed during the warm period.•The general circulation situation affecting the extreme precipitation in winter have been determined.•It is easier to form a circulation pattern which is favorable for the cold and warm currents meeting in the warm period.•Temperature of the Arctic and the Equator and its influence on the atmospheric circulation have been analyzed.•The change characteristics of extreme precipitation in winter under the background of climate warming have been analyzed.
Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another-links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth-then sinks ...into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by its tribal makeup and has become a perfect breeding ground for insurgent and terrorist movements.
Clark returns to the country where she was born to discover a perilously fragile state that deserves more of our understanding and attention. On a series of visits to Yemen between 2004 and 2009, she meets politicians, influential tribesmen, oil workers and jihadists as well as ordinary Yemenis. Untangling Yemen's history before examining the country's role in both al-Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement today, Clark presents a lively, clear, and up-to-date account of a little-known state whose chronic instability is increasingly engaging the general reader.
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•Long- term trends in fog occurrence at 12 Czech sites in 1961–2018 analysed using GAM.•Non-linear behaviour for both year-to-year trends and annual seasonality confirmed.•Significant ...decreasing trends detected though pattern differed among individual sites.•Significant seasonality in fog occurrence though pattern differed among individual sites.•Fog’s seasonal profile at some sites has deformed substantially over the long term.
Fog is a very important and complex atmospheric phenomenon of the utmost importance for the environment and for human society. For practical reasons, fog occurrence is observed regularly at meteorological stations worldwide. Decreasing trends in fog frequency reported from numerous regions have been often associated with either decreasing pollution or climate change, including increasing temperature and changes in atmospheric circulation.
We have examined the data on fog occurrence from twelve Czech sites representing different environments (urban, rural, mountain), geographical areas, and altitudes across the country. For our analysis we used long-term records from the time period of 1961–2018, covering both the ambient air’s heavily polluted periods of the 1970s and 1980s and the cleaner period, following the adoption of new, more stringent legislation and effective countermeasures after the 1990s. We applied a generalised additive model (GAM) framework as a flexible, semiparametric regression approach to address nonlinear trend shapes in a formalised and unified way. In particular, we employed a penalised spline approach with cross-validated penalty coefficient estimation.
Our study confirmed non-linear behaviour for both year-to-year trends and annual seasonality. Our results showed further that over the analysed, almost sixty-year period, fog occurrence has decreased significantly at all the examined sites, though the pattern of the long-term change differed among individual sites. Moreover, we have found significant seasonality in fog occurrence, though it is different at individual sites. Furthermore, apart from the overall annual fog probability change over the years, at some sites the fog’s seasonal profile has also deformed substantially over the long term.
In one of the most detailed and powerfully argued books published
on American intervention in Vietnam, Fredrik Logevall examines the
last great unanswered question on the war: Could the tragedy have
...been averted? His answer: a resounding yes. Challenging the
prevailing myth that the outbreak of large-scale fighting in 1965
was essentially unavoidable, Choosing War argues that the
Vietnam War was unnecessary, not merely in hindsight but in the
context of its time. Why, then, did major war break out? Logevall
shows it was partly because of the timidity of the key opponents of
U.S. involvement, and partly because of the staunch opposition of
the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to early negotiations. His
superlative account shows that U.S. officials chose war
over disengagement despite deep doubts about the war's prospects
and about Vietnam's importance to U.S. security and over the
opposition of important voices in the Congress, in the press, and
in the world community. They did so because of concerns about
credibility-not so much America's or the Democratic party's
credibility, but their own personal credibility. Based on six years
of painstaking research, this book is the first to place American
policymaking on Vietnam in 1963-65 in its wider international
context using multiarchival sources, many of them recently
declassified. Here we see for the first time how the war played in
the key world capitals-not merely in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi,
but also in Paris and London, in Tokyo and Ottawa, in Moscow and
Beijing. Choosing War is a powerful and devastating
account of fear, favor, and hypocrisy at the highest echelons of
American government, a book that will change forever our
understanding of the tragedy that was the Vietnam War.
ABSTRACT
We present highly resolved and sensitive imaging of the five nearby massive spiral galaxies (with rotation velocities $\rm \gt 300\, km\, s^{-1}$) observed by the UltraViolet Imaging ...Telescope onboard India’s multiwavelength astronomy satellite ASTROSAT, along with other archival observations. These massive spirals show a far-ultraviolet star formation rate in the range of ∼ 1.4 – 13.7 ${\rm M}_{\odot } \, \mathrm{yr}^{-1}$ and fall in the ‘Green Valley’ region with a specific star formation rate within ∼ 10−11.5 – 10−10.5 yr−1. Moreover, the mean star formation rate density of the highly resolved star-forming clumps of these objects is in the range 0.011 – 0.098 ${\rm M}_{\odot }\, \mathrm{ yr}^{-1}\, \mathrm{kpc}^{-2}$, signifying localized star formation. From the spectral energy distributions, under the assumption of a delayed star formation model, we show that the star formation of these objects had peaked in the period of ∼ 0.8 – 2.8 Gyr after the ‘Big Bang’ and the object that has experienced the peak sooner after the ‘Big Bang’ show relatively less star-forming activity at z ∼ 0 and falls below the main-sequence relation for a stellar content of $\rm \gtrsim 10^{11} \, {\rm M}_{\odot }$. We also show that these objects accumulated much of their stellar mass in the early period of evolution with ∼ 31 – 42 per cent of the total stellar mass obtained in a time of (1/16) – (1/5)th the age of the Universe. We estimate that these massive objects convert their halo baryons into stars with efficiencies falling between ∼ 7 and 31 per cent.
Thousands of Black troops served in South Africa's security forces in Namibia and Angola during apartheid. Bolliger's new research leads him to reject their common depiction as "collaborators," ...challenge the portrayal of the wars in which they fought as struggles for national liberation, and reveal the complexity of South Africa's military culture.
