A few days ago, the hurricane forecasts looked good. Dora was going to miss Hawaii, passing by far to the south. And yet the storm still ended up wreaking havoc on the islands, not as a rain-bearing cyclone but as wind—hot, dry wind, which, as it blew across the island of Maui, met wildfire.

A fire with no wind is relatively easy to control; a fire on a gusty day, especially in a dry, mountainous area with a town nearby, is a worst-case scenario for firefighters. And so it was. Fires began burning Tuesday, and by that night, they had reached the tourism hub of Lahaina, eventually burning it flat. Power was knocked out; 911 went down. Residents swam into the cool ocean to avoid the flames. At least 36 people have died so far.

[Read: Hawaii is a warning]

This is the worst wildfire event in Hawaii’s modern history, in terms of lives lost and structures burned. It is the state’s version of California’s 2018 Camp Fire; experts I spoke with also compared it to recent fires on the Greek island of Rhodes and a 2017 fire in Sonoma, California, that spilled into the city of Santa Rosa. The Maui fires are another reminder that we have entered a fire age—a “pyrocene,” as the emeritus professor and wildfire expert Stephen J. Pyne has called it. Humans are still figuring out how to live in this new reality, playing catch-up as the world burns around us.

Though fires are a natural part of many landscapes—and have been for centuries—some areas of fire and smoke science are in their relative infancy. Best practices for mass evacuations in a fire still don’t exist; Maui’s evacuation was further complicated by the loss of power, the state’s lieutenant governor said. Hawaii doesn’t have the same history with wildfire as a fire-prone state like California, which means fewer preparations are in place, according to Clay Trauernicht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He expressed particular concern about two potential contributing factors to fire in the state: old, poorly maintained former plantations and non-native plant species that increase the fuel loads.

In general, dead vegetation fuels fires. On Maui, brush fires spread into a densely built-up area, where homes and other structures fed the blaze; a similar dynamic played out during the Tubbs Fire, in Sonoma County, back in 2017. “Once you’re going [from] burning building to building, there’s not a lot you can do,” Trauernicht told me. I asked him whether this was Hawaii’s wake-up call to prepare for more intense wildfires in the future. “If it’s not, I don’t know what’s going to be, honestly,” he replied.

To see fire weather—hot, dry, windy conditions—in Hawaii this time of year is not unusual, Ian Morrison, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Honolulu forecast office, told me. The NWS had issued a red-flag warning for the area, which indicates to local residents and officials alike that wildfire potential is high. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the majority of Maui is also abnormally dry or in drought; the western side in particular was parched, and ripe for a fire.

You might think those conditions would have been alleviated by Dora: Hurricanes usually mean water, and wet things do not burn as easily. But even this dynamic is shifting. An investigation by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa found that 2018’s Hurricane Lane brought both fire and rain to Hawaii at the same time, complicating the emergency response—dry and windy conditions spread the fire on the edges of the storm, while elsewhere, rainfall led to landslides. In 2020, researchers pointed out that Lane was only one of three documented cases of a hurricane worsening wildfire risk. With Dora, we likely have a fourth.

[Read: A clear indication that climate change is burning up California]

Climate change is projected to make hurricanes and tropical storms worse in the coming years, creating the potential for cascading natural disasters—droughts, wildfires, storms—that bleed into one another. It has also been shown to worsen fires. The past five years have been littered with stories of unusual fire behavior: Canada burning at an unprecedented rate, Alaskan tundra going up in smoke like never before, Colorado’s giant December 2021 fire, California’s unthinkable 1-million-acre fire and its deadliest on record all happening within a few years of one another.

“You’ve got different kinds of climate disasters, all reinforcing each other,” Mark Lynas, the author of the book Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, told me. “It’s all reflective of the fact that as the world heats up, there’s just more energy in the system. Water evaporates faster; winds blow stronger; fires get hotter.”

Lynas, for his part, told me he hadn’t thought about this particular dynamic: “A hurricane-wildfire connection had never occurred to me. It just shows, really, the kinds of surprises that climate warming can throw up.” The Maui fires might be a wake-up call for Hawaii. But perhaps they can also serve as a wake-up call for the rest of us, one of many in recent years. The fire age is raging all around us.

Biden also requested funding for border security and disaster relief, as extreme weather continues to ravage US.

For the second time in less than a month, US car safety regulators are investigating the crash of a Tesla car potentially engaged in its autopilot mode, according to a Reuters report.

Read more...

American demand for self-storage rose sharply in 2021 during the covid pandemic. Rent for an average storage unit in the US cost, at its lowest, $86.51 per month in 2019, according to data by SpareFoot, an online marketplace that aggregates storage units for rent. That figure jumped to $105.33 in 2021 and went even…

Read more...

Over the past several weeks, Israeli and American officials have teased a possible deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such an agreement has the potential to be a diplomatic triumph: Successive U.S. administrations, going back decades and from both parties, have considered the security of both Israel and the Arabian Peninsula to be vital interests that Americans would fight and die for if necessary. A deal that advances both objectives by normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be—should be—greeted with much fanfare and near-universal approval in Washington.

Precisely because they will come under pressure to celebrate any deal that’s announced, however, U.S. policy makers need to be clear about what is and is not a “win.” Congress in particular should be prepared to ask hard questions about any deal. A deal that commits the United States to an undiminished or even a growing presence in the region, whether in the form of troop numbers or policy attention, is a bad deal. So is one that rests on any Saudi motive other than a genuine desire to normalize relations with Israel.

[From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power]

A good deal is one that formalizes already warming relations between Israel and the Gulf states while allowing the United States—which has spent immeasurable blood and treasure on the region over the past three decades—to focus less time and money on the Middle East.

A shotgun marriage between Israel and Saudi Arabia, then, is not a win. The peace deal between Israel and Egypt offers a cautionary example. At the time, the accord was welcome, because the two countries had fought four disastrous wars in three decades, and the deal, backed by U.S. military aid to the Egyptians, peeled the Arabic-speaking world’s most populous country away from the Soviet orbit. But the Egyptian people largely detest Israel today. The two countries have very few meaningful social or economic ties, and Egypt—which is currently entangled in a mess of political and financial problems—views Israel with suspicion rather than as a partner.

The peace between Israel and Jordan is similar. The two relationships depend on U.S. dollars, autocratic regimes in Amman and Cairo, and cooperation among the affected countries’ military and security services. And both peace deals have fostered a sense of entitlement among their participants: Governments in Egypt, Israel, and Jordan all believe they are owed billions of dollars in annual military aid and react angrily at any suggestion that such aid might be reduced. The problem is especially acute with Egypt, whose military is the country’s most powerful political actor but depends on aid in order to provide jobs and protect its economic interests.

The burgeoning relationship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, following the 2020 Abraham Accords, somehow feels different from those with Egypt and Jordan. Leaders in Israel and the UAE see the rest of the Middle East similarly to one another (and often, it should be said, differently from Washington). Mohammed bin Zayed and his sons and brothers view the threats posed by Iran and Sunni Islamists, for example, with as much alarm as any Israeli does, and the synergies between the UAE’s ambitious sovereign-wealth funds and Israel’s start-up ecosystem hold promise too. Israelis have reason to visit Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and Emiratis have reasons to visit Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Each country has something to contribute—capital from the Emiratis, innovation from the Israelis—to the other.

The same should be true of Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf, in general, is one of the very few economic bright spots in the world at the moment. Flush with cash from oil and gas revenues, the sovereign-wealth funds of the Gulf are spending liberally both at home and abroad, while Western private-equity and venture-capital firms seek to raise funds in the region.

Saudi Arabia has the largest consumer base of any wealthy Gulf state, which is why retailers and makers of consumer goods spend more time there than in, say, Qatar or the UAE. The economic reforms of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have made doing business in Saudi Arabia much more attractive than in years past, and more Western companies—under pressure from Riyadh, to be sure—are basing their regional operations in Saudi Arabia rather than in the UAE.

Israelis may wish to invest in Saudi Arabia, and Saudis will almost certainly want to invest in Israel. That incentive for normalizing relations between the two countries should be enough, and the United States should not feel obligated to offer much more.

[Read: Israel and Saudi Arabia–togetherish at last?]

Nevertheless, rumors have circulated that the U.S. plans to increase its commitment to Saudi and Israeli security, and this prospect worries me. Peace between Israel and its neighbors should allow the United States to base fewer resources in the region, not more. But U.S. diplomats often underestimate the commitments they are making on behalf of the Pentagon.

The Iran deal of 2015 provides a useful example. The Pentagon was, for some very good reasons, excluded from the negotiations between the United States and Iran, which the more optimistic members of the administration hoped might lead to a new era in U.S. policy toward the region. But the deal itself effectively locked in a robust U.S. force posture nearby to enforce Iranian compliance: Shifting U.S. troops from the Gulf to East Asia became harder, not easier, following the deal.

I worry that any formal security commitments made to either Saudi Arabia or Israel might similarly promise tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East for decades more. Moving U.S. forces into the Gulf in a conflict is harder than you might imagine, so to respond to contingencies, much of what you would need has to be deployed to the region in advance. (Approximately 35,000 U.S. troops were semipermanently garrisoned in the Gulf at the end of the Obama administration.) The U.S. should not make a new security commitment to the Middle East—the scene of yesterday’s wars—at the expense of prioritizing the Pacific theater.

I understand the enthusiasm in Jerusalem and Washington, though. Despite my worries about the ill-advised and ultimately unnecessary commitments the United States might be tempted to make in order to bring the deal across the finish line, the Biden administration—and, yes, the Trump administration before it—deserves a lot of credit for having gotten us this close to what would be a momentous achievement for Israel, for Saudi Arabia, and for U.S. diplomacy.

US news outlets say transfer marks first step in potential prisoner swap deal between Washington and Tehran.

Internationally wanted Riad Salameh resigned from post he held for 30 years after graft charges were filed against him.

Third anniversary of Beirut blast and six months since Turkey and Syria's earthquakes: here’s the Middle East this week.

Something that always bothers liberal Britons is that Americans might believe a TV series such as Downton Abbey is a semi-documentary, and that the United Kingdom is still a class-ridden society in thrall to ideas of inherited rank and social position. Because liberal Britons know this is unfair and untrue. Or rather, it is unfair and untrue with one extraordinary exception: the British honors system, the customary practice of awarding medals and titles to citizens.

This exception of ancient privilege has helped create a summer of misery for the British government and its newish prime minister, Rishi Sunak. It is a saga both funny and slightly shaming.

Almost all countries have honors systems—public virtue is rarely its own reward. Every year, some 2,000 Britons are recipients of one level of honor or another (Italy and France dish out more). Like several of our invented traditions, the British honors system stretches back only as far as the early years of the 20th century. During this tumultuous period—when organized labor was on the march, the Irish wanted Home Rule, and suffragettes were breaking windows—the ruling class was necessarily at its most resourceful in finding ways of cementing the people to the state.

Accordingly, the Order of the British Empire was established in 1917, as a way of decorating the king’s subjects for noncombat services during the Great War. Imperial associations aside, the award is quite harmless. All of those honored have the excitement of going to a royal palace to receive their medal from the monarch or a member of the Royal Family. They then have the cachet of using the title in their formal address; tables in otherwise booked-out restaurants are suddenly found for lords and knights. Photographs of the awardee meeting royalty appear on study walls—and everyone thus blessed gets to have a story about how the late Queen smiled at them or how Charles laughed at their jokes. Notoriously, rebellious actors become royalists overnight.  

[From the August 1863 issue: An American in the House of Lords]

This part of the honors system is surprisingly democratic—or at least no less benign than belonging to a Rotary Club, say. Anyone can nominate someone, even themselves. The nominations are collected, sifted into categories, and whittled down by civil servants into short lists that are presented to committees of the great and good from relevant areas of public life: science and technology, culture and the arts, the charity sector, and so on. The vetting is no doubt thorough and in good faith, but this being Britain, a degree of possibly envious cynicism is sometimes heard—about an Order of the British Empire, or OBE, being awarded for Other Buggers’ Efforts.

I recently met a woman member of the House of Lords who was emailed out of the blue by someone applying for an honor; they asked if she might provide a reference. “But I’ve never heard of you,” she objected. “Oh, that’s all right,” the emailer replied. “I’ll take you to lunch, and we can get to know each other.”

The OBEs are not the side of the honors system that’s been causing trouble. Nor even are the more prestigious knighthoods. To be knighted might not strike one as a natural way for a democracy to demonstrate its socially inclusive, multicultural values, but in the past couple of years, two of my friends have been knighted: One is Black, and the other is gay. Both naturally professed a slight embarrassment, but this was offset by the pleasure their elderly relatives supposedly took in the award.

The problem lies in the peerages. To be “ennobled” and become a member of the House of Lords is simultaneously to be honored and to be appointed to the legislature of the United Kingdom. A lord or lady not only gets the best restaurant reservations, but also sits in the Palace of Westminster and holds a significant degree of political sway, the House of Lords being the deliberative second chamber to the elected House of Commons. Much as the House of Representatives and the Senate form the U.S. Congress, the U.K.’s two chambers form Parliament—with the important difference that, unlike the Lords, the U.S. Senate is an elected body. Although the initiative in lawmaking belongs to the Commons, the Lords nevertheless wields influence by debating, revising, and ratifying legislative proposals.

Once elevated to the leather-upholstered benches of the Lords chamber, you can join the 90 or so hereditary peers (dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts) left over from an uncompleted reform during the Tony Blair years, and the two dozen bishops of the Church of England, including the archbishop of Canterbury. Hereditary peerages are rarely created; nearly 40 years have passed since the previous three. But peers for life (their title nonheritable) are made all the time—and whoever gets to nominate people for the House of Lords thus exercises considerable powers of patronage. Peers, like the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, sit for life.

Lord-making usually happens twice a year, in a New Year’s honors list and in the monarch’s birthday honors list. In practice, the prime minister of the day comes up with a collection of people he or she wants ennobled, including, by convention, some nominees from the opposition parties and a few others put forward by the civil service. These nominees are then checked for wholesomeness by an independent committee.

[Read: A tale of two legislative chambers]

In addition, however, is another list that follows the calling of a general election: the so-called dissolution list, which features politicians who are retiring from the House of Commons and might have some residual usefulness. Finally, and most poisonously, there is the list granted to an outgoing prime minister. This one is hard to describe as anything other than a way of rewarding old comrades and close cronies.

Enter—or rather, exit—Boris Johnson. Even before he quit as prime minister last summer, Johnson created characteristic mayhem by using honors lists to elevate obviously unsuitable people to the Lords. In 2020, against the advice of the MI5 security service, he controversially raised to the peerage Evgeny Lebedev, the newspaper-owning son of a Russian oligarch and former KGB officer. Some critics suspected that Lebedev’s support for Johnson while the latter was London mayor, as well as his hospitality during Johnson’s reported visits to Lebedev’s luxurious Umbrian pile, were factors in the decision.

Not all departing prime ministers submit an honors list. Blair didn’t; nor did Gordon Brown. Johnson, however, put forward the names of at least 16 people to become peers. Some were young, underqualified former aides; a number had been implicated in the “Partygate” scandals during the pandemic lockdown, the issue most responsible for the public’s loss of confidence in Johnson; and four of them were sitting Conservative MPs, loyal to Johnson.

The immediate problem with the last category, aside from the appearance of cronyism, was a straightforwardly political one: To take up their peerages, these parliamentarians would have to resign their Commons seats, triggering special elections that Sunak’s government, dealing with the mess left by Johnson and his successor, Liz Truss, might easily lose.

One of these MPs was Nadine Dorries. A combative Liverpudlian from a working-class family, Dorries is an unusual Tory. Well to the right of the party mainstream, Dorries was passed over for government office for 14 years after her first election, in 2005. Only in 2019 was she given a brief as a junior health minister—by Johnson, whom she had supported for the party leadership that year. Before, she was best known for her participation in a reality TV show set in an Australian jungle, where she was obliged to eat a camel’s toe and an ostrich’s anus. She succeeded in parlaying that celebrity into a series of potboiler novels set in 1950s Liverpool. By the time of Johnson’s fall, Dorries had gained cabinet rank as culture minister.

[Read: Boris Johnson meets his destiny]

When, last July, Johnson’s senior cabinet colleagues—Sunak included—were abandoning their leader by resigning and making his position untenable, Dorries stood firm. To some, her defense of her boss spoke of an almost romantic devotion, but he alone in his party had recognized her abilities and rewarded them, where his snobbish predecessors had not.

So Johnson nominated Dorries for a peerage. But when the final list was published, her name was not on it. “I was born into poverty and clawed my way out of it … and then carved out a role in public service,” a deeply disappointed Dorries wrote in the Daily Mail. “A seat in the Lords was recognition of that.” Instead, she went on, “sinister forces conspired against me and have left me heartbroken.”

Dorries did not name her presumed persecutors, but control over an outgoing prime minister’s honors list ultimately lies with the new incumbent. So for now, she has stayed on as an MP, though she may simply be biding her time for a moment when her resignation and another special election will be maximally inconvenient for Sunak.

The Dorries affair has had an entertaining reality-show vibe, but the sorry business of Johnson’s list has brought renewed scrutiny to a peerage system already fallen into disrepute. And this sense of institutional crisis has only intensified with the news this week of Truss’s leaving list: Of her four reported nominees for the House of Lords, one was her deputy chief of staff for her 49-day tenure as prime minister, and another was a think-tank ally who supported the disastrous economic plan that sealed her fate.

Back in 2021, The Sunday Times reported that “in the past two decades, all 16 of the party’s main treasurers … have been offered a seat in the Lords.” One anonymous source even told the newspaper about a donor “who had been enticed into giving £1 million to the party” because that would lead to a peerage. According to a 2022 estimate by The Guardian, nearly a tenth of Conservative peers had donated more than £100,000 ($127,000) to the party.

The use of peerages for patronage, a phlegmatic constitutional historian wrote some years ago, may be a useful “lubricant” to help a prime minister achieve their objectives. But one consequence of the unchecked practice has been the ballooning membership of the second chamber. As it is, we have to be grateful for the absentees: If all 779 members turned up at once, there’d be no room.

A second, more serious consequence has been growing public support for reform of the Lords—including calls for its abolition. Where the Blair government failed, today’s leader of the opposition Labour Party has proposed to take on the cause of reform. But the task for Sir Keir Starmer—knighted in 2014 for his work as the head of the government prosecution service—is fiendishly difficult. Such constitutional reform would absorb an immense amount of political capital, time, and energy, with very little assurance that regular voters would reward the effort.

This creates an impossible conundrum: Opinion polling shows that Britons have little faith in a system that corrodes their trust, yet they’re unlikely to thank their political leaders for fixing it. Senior members of the House of Lords worry about the institution’s reputation, and have for some time argued for reductions in its size and susceptibility to political patronage.

Not long ago, I was invited to a party at the House of Lords thrown for an old friend who had been awarded a major honor—to protect this person’s privacy, let’s call it the Order of the Bedchamber (the honors system furnishes stranger antiquarian titles than that, in fact). I do admire this person’s achievements, but I was brought up in a communist family, and so, at this function, I felt a bit like Richard Dawkins at a Quaker meeting: love the people but wonder if they’ve secretly been raiding the drinks cabinet.

The room at the Palace of Westminster was high-ceilinged, its walls lined with large 18th-century paintings of sea battles, its mullioned windows overlooking the Thames. The physical setting was the perfect embodiment of nostalgia for imperial glory combined with an air of unfit-for-purposeness in the modern world. I remarked on this to a hard-working Labour baroness I know. “It’s why so many of them want to be in the Lords,” she said. “Move out of this place, and half of them would give up their peerages.”

[Christopher Hitchens: Almost noble]

Moving the legislature out of the Palace of Westminster—which is literally crumbling, with major leaks from its roof and pipes and falling masonry—is what any less hidebound polity would do. MPs and peers will not consider this and instead spend billions of pounds shoring up the building. It should, of course, be turned into a museum.

If this sounds iconoclastic, it is partly because, though I have never been offered an honor, I am one of a fairly large number of Britons who wouldn’t accept one anyway. Far from being posthumously delighted, my late mother would revolve in her biodegradable casket were I to accept a “gong.” In turning down an honor, I would join such surprising refuseniks as Rudyard Kipling, T. E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Paul Scofield, David Bowie, and Nigella Lawson.

Others have refused honors or, in some cases, theatrically returned them because of the association with imperialism. But the Order of the British Empire could be renamed sometime soon. There’ll be a culture-war battle about it, but Britain can’t go on with an award named for a political entity that no longer exists and serves only as a reminder of an inglorious history of subjugating other peoples. But even that limited reform of the honors system will require a reckoning with the desire of British people—including those who are not Old Etonians like Johnson but who, like Dorries, have had to strive—to live upstairs in the great house and look down on others.

Intercept cites alleged 'cypher' to suggest US official told a Pakistani envoy 'all will be forgiven' if Khan is sacked.