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Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS

Published: 17 June 2023

DAVIS — California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Rep. Mike Thompson, along with state and local leaders, stood together on Friday in solidarity to address the need for bold state and federal action to address gun violence.

The call to action is part of Gun Violence Awareness Month, a month to bring awareness to the urgent need for stronger gun violence protections nationwide.

California has long been a national leader in effectively preventing gun violence — with one of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the country.

“There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, and gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children. Enough has long-been enough.” said Attorney General Bonta. “Gun safety laws work, and yet time and time again, they’ve been stopped or delayed from being implemented on a national scale by the gun lobby and the politicians in their pockets. I stand with leaders, including Representatives Thompson and Bera, as we call for bold and decisive action against gun violence. A crisis of this magnitude deserves creative and collaborative solutions, including investing in lifesaving violence intervention programs that work to break cycles of retaliatory shootings. Whether by seizing firearms from potentially dangerous individuals, holding the gun industry accountable in court, or seeking a constitutional amendment, California is committed to ending gun violence and keeping our people safe.”

“Gun violence is an epidemic that requires a response from every level of government, including local, state, and federal level,” said Rep. Thompson. “As Chairman of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, I am working in Congress to advance commonsense gun violence prevention legislation that will save lives and help keep our communities safe. I am proud to have stood with leaders like Attorney General Bonta who are leading efforts in California to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals and modeling how sensible gun laws can reduce gun violence.”

Despite efforts at the state level, in 2020, firearms were the leading cause of death for children in the United States. Gun violence is a true public health crisis that requires immediate and proactive attention.

Attorney General Bonta in 2022 established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention within the California Department of Justice, or DOJ, to advance California’s efforts to adopt a more holistic approach to reducing gun violence, inviting stakeholders from throughout California to assist in these efforts.

Attorney General Bonta is committed to ending gun violence through collaborative and holistic approaches. Through ongoing gun violence reduction efforts led by the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, DOJ’s Bureau of Firearms and several litigation teams, the Department of Justice has seized firearms from dangerous individuals using the Armed and Prohibited Persons System, prosecuted firearms trafficking cases, and advanced and defended California’s commonsense gun laws.

Gun violence remains a growing threat to public safety throughout the nation. On average, there are over 110 gun deaths each day and nearly 41,000 each year in the U.S. Guns are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents; with U.S. children being more likely to die from gun violence than in any other comparable country.

California continues its efforts to advance laws and policies that save lives and prevent gun deaths. In 2021, California saw a 37% lower gun death rate than the national average. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California has one of the lowest rates of firearm mortality in the country — 44th out of 50, with 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000 people — compared to 13.7 deaths per 100,000 nationally, 28.6 in Mississippi, 20.7 in Oklahoma, and 14.2 in Texas.

Children in California are less likely to be killed by guns, with California’s gun death rate for children lower than other states, and 58% lower than the national average.

Despite this, there is much work to do. While Californians are less likely to die as a result of a firearm, too many Californians still suffer the harm of gun violence:

• Someone is killed with a gun every three hours in California.
• Californians who live with handgun owners are more than twice as likely to die of homicide.
• California women living with handgun owners are more likely to die by suicide.
• More than half of those killed by firearms in California die as a result of suicide.
• From hiring police to detect and investigate gun crime to paying medical expenses for gun injuries, gun violence is expensive. Annually, gun violence costs the state approximately $18 billion — just under $500 per Californian.

More about Attorney General Bonta’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention can be found here.

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Written by: Ryan Herzog, Gonzaga University

Published: 17 June 2023

 

The Federal Reserve’s decision to hold rates steady signals that central bankers believe it is time to hit pause, at least temporarily, on their aggressive campaign to tame runaway inflation.

The latest data, not to mention several other factors, however, suggests it’s time for a full stop.

On June 14, 2023, the Fed chose not to lift rates for the first time in 11 meetings, leaving its target interest rate – a benchmark for borrowing costs across the global economy – at a range of 5% to 5.25%. Over 10 consecutive hikes beginning in March 2022, the Fed had raised rates a whopping 5 percentage points.

“Holding the target range steady at this meeting allows the committee to assess additional information and its implications for monetary policy,” the central bank said in a statement. The Fed indicated it still expects to raise rates two more times by the end of the year.

As an economist who follows the central bank’s actions closely, I believe there’s good reason to think the Fed’s brief hiatus is likely to turn into a permanent vacation.

Inflation is lower than it appears

The fastest rate of inflation since the 1980s is what prompted the Fed to hike interest rates so much. So it makes sense that inflation would be a key indicator of when its job is complete.

The latest consumer price index data, released on June 13, showed core inflation – the Fed’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile food and energy prices – falling to an annual rate of 5.3% in May 2023, the slowest pace since November 2021. That’s down from a peak of 6.6% in September 2022.

While the data shows inflation remains well above the Fed’s target of around 2%, there’s good reason to believe that it will continue to fall regardless of what the Fed does.

Shelter, a measure of the cost of owning or renting a home, is the largest component of the consumer price index, accounting for more than one-third of the total. In its latest report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported shelter costs rose 8% from a year ago. After stripping that out, inflation was up just 2.1%.

The thing is, the data reported by the bureau doesn’t reflect the reality of what’s happening in the current housing market.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on a survey that gauges rental prices from 50,000 leases, many of which were signed during the rental bubble in 2021 and 2022. A better measure of current market rents is the Zillow Observed Rent Index. That index suggests rates are declining – rents rose 4.8% year over year in May, aligning with pre-pandemic rates.

Comparing the two measures suggests the official consumer price index data lags behind the market by four to six months. Using current rents would put inflation much closer to where the Fed wants it to be. Jason Furman, former chair of the government’s Council of Economic Advisors, created a modified version of core inflation – which uses a market-based measure of shelter prices – at 2.6%.

The risk of more rate hikes

Moreover, it is likely that further rate hikes will do more harm than good – particularly to the banking sector – and without helping lower inflation below its current trajectory.

Several regional lenders, including Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, collapsed earlier this year following bank runs. Combined, they had over a half-trillion dollars in assets.

While there were several factors behind the banks’ demise, an important one was the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes, which caused the value of many of their assets to fall. The banks catered to depositors with accounts that exceeded the US$250,000 threshold protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. These depositors ran for the hills when they learned about the extent of the bank losses.

This turmoil, in tandem with higher rates, is also cooling business activity. This means the Fed doesn’t need to go as high on rates as it otherwise would have.

Further troubles loom over the banking sector. In recent days, notable figures in the finance industry, such as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, have warned that nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate loans will require refinancing over the next three years.

The combination of already high interest rates and low office occupancy rates will likely force banks to absorb hundreds of billions of dollars in loan losses, inevitably putting more banks on the brink of failure.

And if the Fed keeps raising rates, the situation is likely to get a lot worse.

Don’t make the same mistakes

The Fed was behind the curve in 2021 and 2022 in realizing inflation was getting out of control, and it has been historically slow in recognizing the impact of rental rates on inflation.

The June pause in raising rates should give the Fed time to take a break, look at the data and, I hope, realize inflation is closer to its target than it appears.

But if it continues to raise rates, I believe the central bank will be repeating the same mistakes it made in the past.

Ryan Herzog, Associate Professor of Economics, Gonzaga University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Written by: Elizabeth Larson

Published: 17 June 2023

Phosphorus, a key chemical element for many biological processes, has been found in icy grains emitted by the small moon and is likely abundant in its subsurface ocean.

Using data collected by NASA’s Cassini mission, an international team of scientists has discovered phosphorus — an essential chemical element for life — locked inside salt-rich ice grains ejected into space from Enceladus.

The small moon is known to possess a subsurface ocean, and water from that ocean erupts through cracks in Enceladus’ icy crust as geysers at its south pole, creating a plume. The plume then feeds Saturn’s E ring (a faint ring outside of the brighter main rings) with icy particles.

During its mission at the gas giant from 2004 to 2017, Cassini flew through the plume and E ring numerous times. Scientists found that Enceladus’ ice grains contain a rich array of minerals and organic compounds — including the ingredients for amino acids — associated with life as we know it.

Phosphorus, the least abundant of the essential elements necessary for biological processes, hadn’t been detected until now.

The element is a building block for DNA, which forms chromosomes and carries genetic information, and is present in the bones of mammals, cell membranes, and ocean-dwelling plankton.

Phosphorus is also a fundamental part of energy-carrying molecules present in all life on Earth. Life wouldn’t be possible without it.

“We previously found that Enceladus’ ocean is rich in a variety of organic compounds,” said Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, who led the new study, published on Wednesday, June 14, in the journal Nature. “But now, this new result reveals the clear chemical signature of substantial amounts of phosphorus salts inside icy particles ejected into space by the small moon’s plume. It’s the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth.”

Previous analysis of Enceladus’ ice grains revealed concentrations of sodium, potassium, chlorine, and carbonate-containing compounds, and computer modeling suggested the subsurface ocean is of moderate alkalinity – all factors that favor habitable conditions.

Enceladus and beyond

For this latest study, the authors accessed the data through NASA’s Planetary Data System, a long-term archive of digital data products returned from the agency’s planetary missions. The archive is actively managed by planetary scientists to help ensure its usefulness and usability by the worldwide planetary science community.

The authors focused on data collected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument when it sampled icy particles from Enceladus in Saturn’s E ring. Many more ice particles were analyzed when Cassini flew through the E ring than when it went through just the plume, so the scientists were able to examine a much larger number of compositional signals there.

By doing this, they discovered high concentrations of sodium phosphates – molecules of chemically bound sodium, oxygen, hydrogen and phosphorus – inside some of those grains.

Co-authors in Europe and Japan then carried out laboratory experiments to show that Enceladus’ ocean has phosphorus, bound inside different water-soluble forms of phosphate, in concentrations of at least 100 times that of our planet’s oceans. Further geochemical modeling by the team demonstrated that an abundance of phosphate may also be possible in other icy ocean worlds in the outer solar system, particularly those that formed from primordial ice containing carbon dioxide, and where liquid water has easy access to rocks.

“High phosphate concentrations are a result of interactions between carbonate-rich liquid water and rocky minerals on Enceladus’ ocean floor and may also occur on a number of other ocean worlds,” said co-investigator Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist and geochemist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “This key ingredient could be abundant enough to potentially support life in Enceladus’ ocean; this is a stunning discovery for astrobiology.”

Although the science team is excited that Enceladus has the building blocks for life, Glein stressed that life has not been found on the moon – or anywhere else in the solar system beyond Earth: “Having the ingredients is necessary, but they may not be sufficient for an extraterrestrial environment to host life. Whether life could have originated in Enceladus’ ocean remains an open question.”

Cassini’s mission came to an end in 2017, with the spacecraft burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere, but the trove of data it collected will continue to be a rich resource for decades to come. When it was launched, Cassini’s mission was to explore Saturn, its rings, and moons. The flagship mission’s array of instruments ended up making discoveries that continue to impact far more than planetary science.

“This latest discovery of phosphorus in Enceladus’ subsurface ocean has set the stage for what the habitability potential might be for the other icy ocean worlds throughout the solar system,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who was not involved in the study. “Now that we know so many of the ingredients for life are out there, the question becomes: Is there life beyond Earth, perhaps in our own solar system? I feel that Cassini’s enduring legacy will inspire future missions that might, eventually, answer that very question.”

The Cassini-Huygens mission was a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, managed the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL designed, developed, and assembled the Cassini orbiter.

For more information about Cassini, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.