Facing fight from Sanders, Clinton embraces Obama
COLUMBIA, S.C. – Facing fresh campaign anxieties, Hillary Clinton is attaching herself to President Barack Obama, hoping to overcome liberal enthusiasm for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with a full-throated embrace of her one-time rival and boss.
Central to that strategy: shoring up her standing with African-American voters who helped make Obama the first black president and who could determine her fate if she falters in the first-to-vote contests of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Clinton, Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the steps of the South Carolina statehouse – which, for the first time, was celebrated with no Confederate flag flying overhead. The event was replete with Obama’s influence: as Clinton’s two main challengers marched to the Capitol, hundreds of faithful chanted the president’s campaign mantra, “Fired Up. Ready to Go!”
Clinton’s alignment with Obama, who remains popular with Democrats, was on full display at Sunday night’s final debate before the Iowa caucuses.
Study: Heat put in oceans has doubled since 1997
WASHINGTON – The amount of human-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.
Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from human-made global warming goes into the world’s oceans instead of the ground. And they’ve seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much human-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.
The world’s oceans absorbed approximately 150 zettajoules of energy from 1865 to 1997, and then absorbed about another 150 in the next 18 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
To put that in perspective, if you exploded one atomic bomb the size of the one that dropped on Hiroshima every second for a year, the total energy released would be 2 zettajoules. So since 1997, Earth’s oceans have absorbed man-made heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second for 75 straight years.
Calls for boycott of Oscars grow over lack of diversity
NEW YORK – Calls for a boycott of the Academy Awards are growing over the Oscars’ second consecutive year of all-white acting nominees, as Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith each said Monday that they will not attend this year’s ceremony.
In a lengthy Instagram post, Lee said he “cannot support” the “lily white” Oscars. Noting that he was writing on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Lee – who in November was given an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards – said he was fed up: “Forty white actors in two years and no flava at all,” he wrote. “We can’t act?!”
In a video message on Facebook, Pinkett Smith also said she wouldn’t attend or watch the Oscars in February. Pinkett Smith, whose husband Will Smith wasn’t nominated for his performance in the NFL head trauma drama “Concussion,” said it was time for people of color to disregard the Academy Awards.
Last year’s all-white acting nominees also drew calls for a boycott, though not from such prominent individuals as Lee and Pinkett Smith. Whether it had any impact or not, the audience for the broadcast, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, was down 16 percent from the year prior, a six-year low.
Associated Press
