Nation & world news – at a glance – for Sunday, September 3, 2023

Jimmy Buffett, roguish bard of island escapism, is dead at 76

Jimmy Buffett, the singer, songwriter, author, sailor and entrepreneur whose roguish brand of island escapism on hits like “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” made him something of a latter-day folk hero, especially among his devoted following of so-called Parrot Heads, died Friday. He was 76. The Caribbean and the Gulf Coast were Buffett’s muses, and no place was more important than Key West, Florida. The locales provided Buffett with more than just grist for his songwriting. They were also the impetus for the creation of a tropical-themed business empire that included a restaurant franchise, a hotel chain and tequila, T-shirt and footwear lines. Forbes this year estimated his net worth at $1 billion.

Biden team isn’t waiting for impeachment to go on the offensive

On Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted a video of herself declaring that she “will not vote to fund the government” unless the House holds a vote to open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. It took just 68 minutes for the White House to fire back with a blistering statement. The White House is not waiting for a formal inquiry to wage war against impeachment. With a team of two dozen attorneys, legislative liaisons, communications specialists and others, the president has begun moving to counter any effort to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors with a best-defense-is-a-good-offense campaign aimed at dividing Republicans and taking his case to the public.

Bill Richardson, champion of Americans held overseas, dies at 75

Bill Richardson, who served two terms as governor of New Mexico and 14 years as a congressman before devoting himself to the cause of Americans who were being held hostage or who he believed were being wrongfully detained overseas, died Friday at his summer home in Chatham, Massachusetts. He was 75. Under President Bill Clinton, Richardson was ambassador to the United Nations, and then secretary of energy. After Richardson completed his second term as governor, he honed the quasi-public and freelance diplomacy skills, with his humanitarian missions on behalf of some 80 families, winning the release of hostages and American service members in countries hostile to the United States, including Iraq and Cuba.

In Florida, even a Hurricane can’t sweep away presidential politics

President Joe Biden offered his support and condolences to a Florida community hit hard by Hurricane Idalia after being snubbed by Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor and a potential rival for the presidency. Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, took an aerial tour of Live Oak, a small town east of Tallahassee; received a briefing from federal and local emergency medical workers; and met with members of the community. DeSantis did not greet Biden at the airport or join him for the briefing and tour of the damage, choosing instead to hand out donated Chick-fil-A meals to people in Horseshoe Beach, about 70 miles away.

California beach town is desperate to save its vanishing sand

In Oceanside, California, a coastal suburb, the palm trees sway and the temperature is almost always perfect. There is just one problem: The sand is disappearing. Where residents once played beach volleyball, there are now berms of natural cobblestones. Visitors who could once sprawl on wide stretches of sand near the pier must now compete for space on a narrow stretch studded with rocks. A beach town cannot exist without a beach, and only about one-third of the city’s 3.7 miles of coastline still has enough sand for people to enjoy. Leaders here are now rushing to re-imagine the shoreline in hopes that Oceanside can transform itself into a new kind of California beach town — before it is too late.

Ship that sank in 1881 is found nearly intact in Lake Michigan

On the morning of May 11, 1881, Capt. John Higgins and his eight-man crew scurried onto a lifeboat and caught a final glimpse of their schooner, Trinidad, as it disappeared into the icy waters of Lake Michigan. After 142 years, its wreckage has finally been discovered. In July, shipwreck hunters Brendon Baillod and Robert Jaeck found the impressively intact wreckage of Trinidad lying underneath roughly 300 feet of water, about 10 miles off the shoreline of Algoma, Wisconsin. Baillod said he hoped to have the wreck added to the National Register of Historic Places next year and planned to release the exact location of the site.

Russia says it thwarted another Ukrainian attack on Crimea bridge

The Russian military said Saturday that it had thwarted another attack on a critical bridge linking the occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia that Kyiv has vowed to keep attacking until it is unusable. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that three Ukrainian “semi-submersible unmanned boats” targeting the Kerch Strait Bridge were destroyed in the Black Sea overnight. The claims could not be independently verified, and Ukraine’s military did not comment Saturday on whether its drones had targeted the bridge. But Ukrainian officials have said that they consider the destruction of the bridge a strategic priority.

Nobel Foundation reverses prize ceremony invite for Russia and Belarus

The Nobel Foundation reversed course on Saturday and said it would not invite the ambassadors of Russia and Belarus to the Nobel Prize award ceremony. Both Russia and Belarus were disinvited from the ceremony last year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But this past week, the foundation said it would again invite representatives to the December ceremony in Stockholm, saying it aimed to increase dialogue between states amid deepening geopolitical division. The move drew immediate backlash, and on Saturday, the Nobel Foundation backpedaled, acknowledging that it had “provoked strong reactions” that had “completely overshadowed this message.”

India launches its first solar mission

A little over a week after successfully landing a rover on the moon, India on Saturday launched its first solar mission aimed at studying the outer layers of the sun. Aditya L1, as the mission is called, weighs about 3,300 pounds and will travel a distance of about 930,000 miles over four months. It is then to continue orbiting for several years, all the while sending data back to Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study the sun’s outer layers, its chromosphere and corona, to better understand the physics and dynamics of our local star.

Crackdown on free speech in one of the freer corners of the Mideast

The lavish wedding of Jordan’s crown prince this spring was breathlessly anticipated for months in the kingdom’s state media. The writers at AlHudood, a satirical website that is the Arab world’s answer to The Onion, poked fun at the June affair in a series of articles. For a decade, the site had carefully navigated the red lines of what could and could not be published in the kingdom. But in July, Jordanian authorities blocked AlHudood — Arabic for “The Boundaries” — making it the latest casualty in an escalating clampdown on free speech, which has included the passage of new cybercrime legislation that could be used against critics of the monarchy.

Nation of few Catholics grandly welcomes Pope

Pope Francis’ four-day trip to Mongolia is the first ever by a Roman Catholic pontiff. Francis has made visiting places where his flock is often forgotten a hallmark of his papacy, but even by that measure, Mongolia — a largely Buddhist and atheist country with barely 1,400 Catholics — is especially off the radar. On Saturday, a couple of hundred pilgrims, most of whom had come from other countries, barely registered in the immense Sükhbaatar Square in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, where Francis bowed before a huge statue of Ghengis Khan and reviewed a parade of cavalry soldiers dressed in ancient Mongolian armor.

Europe’s boars still hold radioactivity. What surprised scientists is why.

Although scientists have long known that flora and fauna in Central Europe still carry traces of radiation stemming from the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, a new study on wild boars roaming the forests of Bavaria in southern Germany has turned up unexpected findings. The peer-reviewed study, published this past week, found in the boars high levels of radiation that the researchers believe come from nuclear weapons tests carried out long before the Chernobyl meltdown. It also explains why the radiation in the wild boar population is relatively high, when most other wildlife are uncontaminated, many generations after the accident: It’s because they eat deer truffles.

By wire sources