The current general rise in food prices will continue for another year and a half, according to a US-based media outlet, citing an analyst.

"We haven't seen anything yet," said Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst and the editor of the website SuperMarketGuru.com, on recent climbs in grocery bills, warning of more increases yet to come, CBS News reported on Wednesday.

"Prices are going to continue to go up for a good year and a half," he warned. "The biggest increases we will see has to do with anything with animals, whether it's eggs or milk or pork or beef."

Wholesale prices increased by 8.3% year-on-year in August, the US Labor Department has reported, marking the steepest gains since it started tracking the figure more than a decade ago.

Observing limited store supplies of products like milk, butter, soda, snacks, paper products, and baking supplies, CBS Los Angeles said record-high wholesale prices and scarcity of certain items have drawn shoppers' attention.

While the climbing food price are due in part to massive losses in feed supplies because of the wildfires earlier this year in California, other supply chain issues like bottlenecks at the Port of Los Angeles and labor shortages also contributed.

Pointing out also a "major lack of truck drivers," Lempert said the cost of refrigerated transport was up by about 10.4%.

"Retailers who are filling out their orders to fill their shelves are not getting what they order," he explained, adding that they were only receiving an estimated 50-70% of their orders.

Amid the falling supplies and rising prices, the report also cited a shopper, Kathleen Postal, who said she was having "a hard time" finding the things she wanted while grocery shopping.

"Everything just seems to be a dollar to two dollars higher," she said. "This creep has just happened and it's very expensive."/agencies

At least 16 people were killed when a light aircraft crashed in Russia's Republic of Tatarstan on Sunday, authorities said.

The Russian Health Ministry said six people were taken to hospital with injuries, confirming the fatalities.

There were 22 people aboard the plane, mostly parachutists, according to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov said that the aircraft crashed due to engine failure.

"After the plane took off when it was at an altitude of 70 meters, the pilots reported that the left engine failed and they requested emergency landing permission,” he said.

He also declared a day of national mourning on Oct. 11 due to the incident./aa

The head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said two parts of the world have been warming more than the global average, the Arctic, followed by the Mediterranean region.

Petteri Taalas told Anadolu Agency that the Mediterranean region is getting drier along with climate warming.

"So, it rains less and, and we also see more evaporation. And, we have also studied fairly dramatic forest fires in several Mediterranean countries -- Greece, Portugal, Spain, and of course now Turkey," said Taalas.

The WMO chief will speak before a special session of the WMO next week in Geneva, followed by COP26, the Conference of the Parties on climate change being held in Glasgow, Scotland, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 12.

What is happening in the Arctic and the Mediterranean is also happening in several other places in the world, said the climate group chief.

"In North America, we have seen record-breaking forest fires; also in Australia, and, also in Russia, for example.

"So, this is one of the indicators of climate change. And because of climate change, we expect to see such events even more in the coming years because the negative trend and climate will continue for the coming decades."

Reversing negative trend

Taalas said the "negative trend" could have been reversed from 2016 "if we were successful in the implementation of the Paris Agreement."

The accord signed in the French capital is an international treaty that was inked by almost all countries at COP21 in Paris in 2015.

The WMO chief asked how the world treats its forests and handles forest fires they face is another question in climate change. And the risk is growing.

So, when it came to Turkey, its metrological agency is a "vital partner for the WMO" as it has sophisticated early warning services, said Taalas.

"Turkey is also contributing to the success of such services in its neighboring countries. So, Turkey is a strong player in the region," he said.

He noted Turkey has the weather and water services and the kind of information needed "to be able to mitigate climate risk."

The WMO said on Oct. 6 that the World Meteorological Community and the international science community hailed the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics to three pioneering climate scientists who laid the foundations for the world's understanding of the role of human activities and greenhouse gases in climate change.

American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe from Princeton University in the US, Germany's Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany won "for the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.”

Also cited was Italian theorist Giorgio Parisi from Sapienza University in Rome "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."/aa

A shootout early Sunday at a Minnesota bar left one woman dead, at least 14 people injured and prompted panic and "madness" amid the hail of bullets, St. Paul police said.

Three men were arrested later Sunday and were being treated at a hospital for injuries, Police Chief Todd Axtell said. No motive for the rampage was immediately released.

Axtell said in a statement that he had spoken with the family of the woman who was killed and they were "absolutely devastated."

"Hearts are broken – victims, families, community and officers," he said. "I am incredibly proud of the exhausted women and men of the SPPD. We will bring justice to the victims."

Axtell said multiple 911 callers frantically begged for help after more than a dozen people were shot inside the Seventh Street Truck Park bar. He said officers responded at about 12:15 a.m. local time to find a "chaotic scene" with 15 people suffering gunshot wounds.

Officers worked with good Samaritans to help the wounded while securing the scene and making sure it was safe for medics, Axtell said. Preliminary information from the scene had indicated there were several shooters, he said.

A woman in her 20s was pronounced dead, the 32nd homicide of the year in St. Paul, a city of 300,000 people. The city is on pace to exceed last year's total of 34 homicides, which tied a record that stood for almost 30 years.

“My heart breaks for the woman who was killed, her loved ones and everyone else who was in that bar this morning,” Axtell said. “In an instant, they found themselves caught in a hellish situation."

The Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office will conduct an autopsy to determine the exact cause of death and positively identify her. The wounded were transported to area hospitals for treatment but were expected to survive, Axtell said.

John Maloney told the St. Paul Pioneer Press he was in his living room in the Oxbo Urban Rental apartments above the bar when he heard the gunfire.

“All of a sudden, I lost count, I heard multiple gunshots, pop, pop, pop, pop,” he said.

He went out on his patio overlooking the bar and saw a “mass influx of people" pouring out onto the street.

"People were screaming and hollering and yelling and running everywhere," Maloney said. "I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Police spokesman Steve Linders said the bar was crowded with people "just enjoying themselves and then we had a few individuals who decided to pull out guns and pull the trigger indiscriminately, with no regard for human life. I think about the poor woman who was just out enjoying herself. One minute she’s dancing, smiling and laughing, and the next she’s dying in her friend’s arms."

Mayor Melvin Carter said the community was "devastated by the shocking scenes" from the shooting.

“Our work to build more proactive and comprehensive public safety strategies is more urgent than ever," Carter said on Twitter. "We will never accept violence in our community.”

Rep. Betty McCollum pledged to work with community leaders to get guns off the street and out of the hands of criminals.

“The epidemic of gun violence plaguing the Twin Cities has hit us in St. Paul with a mass shooting event that can only be described as a horror,” McCollum said in a statement. “We must never allow this kind of criminal act to happen again.”

Investigators put out a call for anyone with information to come forward. A team of homicide investigators were working with patrol officers, the forensics services unit, the video management unit and others to piece together what led to the shooting, Axtell said.

The scene was being processed for evidence and a shooting reconstruction was conducted. The victims were being interviewed for clues, Axtell said.

"I want them to know that we have the best investigators in the country, and we won’t stop until we find the people responsible for this madness," he said. "We will do our part to hold them accountable.”

The Seventh Street Truck bar is in an entertainment district just south of the Xcel Energy Center, where the NHL’s Minnesota Wild play. Linders said he doesn’t recall any recent previous calls for police service to Seventh Street Truck Park bar.

“It’s just not on our radar as a spot where we see this type of thing,” Linders said. “We don’t see this type of thing anywhere.”/US TODAY

The 150-foot-tall white "bathtub ring" along the red rocks of Lake Powell is the first sign that something isn't right.

Other signs are everywhere: Boat ramps left high and dry. Rock arches emerging from their decadeslong submersion. Boat wrecks uncovered by the receding water. Vast mudflats sprawling where water once pooled.

Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest reservoir, is about 30% full and dropping, a water level not seen since the reservoir was first filled when the Glen Canyon Dam blocked up the Colorado River in 1963.

Two hundred miles downstream, the situation is almost identical at Lake Mead, the nation's biggest reservoir: same bathtub ring, same high-and-dry boat ramps, same mudflats. The historically low levels prompted federal authorities this week to formally declare a water shortage for drought-stricken southwestern areas served by Lake Mead, cutting water supplies to Arizona by nearly 20% and 7% for Nevada.

The water shortages are signs of an increasingly dire and dry climate across the West. Experts said these conditions will lead to higher food prices across the country, bigger and hotter forest fires and potentially significant lifestyle changes for tens of millions of Americans, who depend on the water to drink, irrigate their lawns and wash their cars.

This week, longtime Colorado River climate researcher Brad Udall was shocked to see water levels in Lake Powell have dropped 50 feet from a year ago. In addition to his work as a climate scientist, Udall has rafted down the Grand Canyon 45 times, giving him a water-level view of the Colorado River's flow.

"I mean, you go to the boat ramps, and they just end, and in some cases, they're nowhere near the water," said Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University whose uncle was the U.S. interior secretary while the lake filled. "You've got to go back to 1969 – six years into filling it – to find an equivalent level."

The Lake Mead emergency declaration came as 10 governors asked President Joe Biden to provide federal disaster funding for the West, parts of which have been in a drought for 22 years.

Lake Mead provides drinking water for 25 million people, from Phoenix to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The low water levels across the West also could mean higher food costs for anyone who enjoys Colorado beef, California almonds or lettuce from Arizona.

Federal officials said nearly 60 million Americans are living in drought-stricken areas, which cover 99% of the West. And it's getting worse: Last year, only 2.5% of the area was in extreme or exceptional drought, leaping to almost 60% this year.

In addition to their role in allowing crops to flourish in the otherwise arid West, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are major tourist attractions, drawing a combined 10 million visitors a year, according to federal estimates.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, one of the 10 governors who sent the letter to Biden, said national solutions are needed, given the number of states affected. Noting that Colorado saw three of its largest wildfires in history last year, and California has seen several this year, Polis said smoke and ash falling from burning drought-stricken forests affect Midwestern and Eastern states.

Though water issues in the West have pitted states against each other over who is entitled to how much, Polis said it's time for more regional and national cooperation. He said federal drought assistance would help farmers keep food in grocery stores, and federal engineers could help develop reservoirs to "bank" water when it's available, along with encouraging more efficient farming irrigation systems.

"Western states are tired of fighting like dogs over a shrinking pie," Polis said. "We need to change the game."

Though the West has both wet and dry spells, experts such as Udall said climate change is responsible for at least a third of the overall drop in rain and snow.

They said millions of Americans will have to permanently adjust to how they water their lawns, feed their families and deal with forest fires caused by the drought. Because most states have more than one source of drinking or irrigation water, there's no immediate impact expected from the cuts, but experts predict that to change in coming years.

"It's a lot warmer, it's a lot drier," Udall said. "Droughts are temporary. This is not temporary."

Concerns about the growing water shortages are spreading: California Gov. Gavin Newsom asked residents and businesses to curb water use by 15%, a request that was largely ignored this summer. The state backs a $100 million research effort to turn salty ocean water into water to drink and grow food.

California alone grows one-third of the country's vegetables, and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts, from nearly $5 billion in grapes to $2.7 billion worth of beef and more than $1 billion in tomatoes, according to state officials. Little of that agriculture would happen if the Colorado River didn't provide irrigation water, largely to the southern Imperial Valley and neighboring southern Arizona.

In Yuma, Arizona, farmer John Boelts, 44, said he's thankful he's got water enough to raise crops of spring and fall melons and lettuce over the winter. Yuma, the winter lettuce capital of the world, helps produce 90% of leafy greens in the USA during the winter months, even though it averages only 2.5 inches of rain annually.

To raise those crops, farmers such as Boelts, who co-owns the 2,000-acre Desert Premium Farms, depend heavily on water pulled from the Colorado River. He's thankful that Lake Mead and Lake Powell have done their job of storing up water for farmers, but he worries what will happen if they run dry.

"If we didn't have the dams and the storage, we'd have been toast a long time ago," he said.

Like many of his fellow farmers, Boelts takes pride in knowing he helps feed the country. He said keeping food production within U.S. borders contributes to national security. The COVID-19-created supply shortages drove that point home last spring, he said.

Boelts said Yuma-area farmers have increased production by 30% over the past several decades, while reducing their water use by 30%. He remains hopeful that the climate will turn wetter again.

"The old adage that food grows where water flows is real," he said. "We all live and die the same when the glass is less than half full."

If farmers such as Boelts can't grow as much because there's not enough water to irrigate their crops, Americans will pay more for food or import more from foreign countries.

If water levels continue dropping, there won't be enough water at Lake Mead's Hoover Dam or Lake Powell's Glen Canyon Dam to generate nonpolluting hydroelectricity for about 1 million homes across Nevada and California. Mead's generators have dropped to 66% of their usual output, and Lake Powell's could stop entirely by January 2023 under a worst-case scenario projected by federal officials.

"One of the things we're learning is that this is likely not a drought anymore. This is the new normal. And it's moving east, creeping up and over east to Minnesota and Iowa," said Taylor Hawes, 52, the Colorado River program director for the Nature Conservancy and a water attorney for more than 20 years. "We are all going to have to tighten our belts to get through this."

Hawes said long-term predictions indicate the West will get drier, potentially raising food costs and causing a host of trickle-down impacts we may not fully understand. For every 1 degree the temperature goes up, there's approximately a 3%-5% reduction in river flows, she said. She said southern Arizona may see unusually heavy rainfall when it isn't needed and dry conditions when water would help most.

"Climate change is water change: too much, too little, the wrong time. And the situation in the West is a manifestation of our challenge with climate change," she said. "It's both a ripple effect and a compounding effect. Right now, you've got ranchers selling off their cattle because there's no forage, no grass. They're having to sell cattle off early, so we may see a glut of beef in the market now and a shortage in the future."

Southern Arizona rancher Dwight Babcock usually sells off about 10% of his cattle each year. To survive last year's drought, he winnowed deeper, selling off a third of the herd. Most became hamburgers, he said.

"When we're missing the grass, we're missing the feed," said Babcock, 74. "As we got no rains last year of any consequences, we didn't develop any grass in the summer months, which usually carries us through the rest of the year."

Although heavy rains this summer swept through the Dragoon Mountains of Cochise County, where Babcock's Three Sisters Land & Cattle ranch sits, the area about 70 miles southeast of Tucson remains in "moderate" drought. Recharged by those rains, the grass is growing back, but it's poor quality compared with normal, Babcock said. That means he's delaying buying cows to rebuild his herd.

"It's harder and harder, particularly out West," he said. "Most of the young folk don't want to work this hard, and a lot of the land gets sold off for real estate development."

Sooner or later, said Paolo Bacigalupi, an author and futurist who has written about Western droughts, the United States must acknowledge that some of its cities, from Las Vegas to Phoenix, are overbuilt in areas that are essentially uninhabitable without massive irrigation systems drawing from the Colorado River. As droughts deepen and water shortages grow, we face a reckoning, he said.

Bacigalupi's 2015 novel, "The Water Knife," is premised on increasingly dire water shortages causing armed skirmishes and government-sanctioned dam sabotages between neighboring states.

"We built our own plumbing system for an entire half of the United States: pipes and tanks and canals, and that all depends on the idea that a certain amount of water will flow," he said. "It turns out that our idea of how much water would flow was completely wrong. And climate change is making us more wrong every year."

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials Heather Patno and Michael Bernado are responsible for helping predict those water flows and for keeping water running down the Colorado River through the two reservoirs to irrigate farms and provide water for residents, along with hydroelectricity.

Patno, a hydraulic engineer who helps manage Lake Powell, worries that the loss of clean hydropower will raise electricity rates for potentially tens of thousands of people, but there's little either can do but watch as snow and rainfall diminish and the soil gets drier, soaking up what little water does fall across the West.

"We had this big savings account, and we've been depleting it," said Bernado, the Lower Colorado Basin river operations manager who helps run Lake Mead. "The risk goes up higher the further in time you go out."

In New Mexico, Dine farmer Graham Beyale, 31, said the worsening water shortages caused by drought and increased demand for the West's fast-growing population could increase conflicts between Indigenous people and white-dominated governments and corporations, either via large agricultural operations or the bottling of drinking water by companies such as Nestle.

According to the 2020 census, three of the top 10 fastest-growing states are in the West: Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Although California lost 182,083 residents last year and its growth rate over the past decade has been slightly less than the national average, it added 2.4 million residents in that decade.

Beyale, who lives in an off-grid tent on the Navajo Nation near Shiprock, New Mexico, raises and distributes heritage corn to other tribal members, using water drawn from the San Juan River. He said the 2015 Gold King Mine disaster upstream in a Colorado tributary to the San Juan sharpened his fears about competition over increasingly scarce water.

The mine spill contaminated hundreds of miles of river for weeks, imperiling crops and drinking water for the Navajo Nation and other residents. Though the Navajo Nation in theory has legal rights to water members have used for thousands of years, political pressure from growing communities threatens that, Beyale said.

"Phoenix and Las Vegas are metropolises growing exponentially, and they want water for lawns in the middle of the desert," Beyale said. "It does make me feel like we've got to be preparing because there are going to be fights."

Farmers and experts who see the evidence of droughts and climate change firsthand acknowledge the challenge they face: The rest of the country seems unwilling or uninterested in addressing their concerns. Udall said he's warned of the growing risks for years and rarely found anyone east of the Mississippi River willing to listen. That's changing as bigger drought-exacerbated wildfires in California and Oregon have inundated the East Coast with smoke, he said.

"We can't really accept things from experts – we seem to have to experience things for ourselves. And for something like climate change, it makes reacting to it all the more difficult," Udall said. "In the last two years, it hasn't been the water shortages that's woken people up, it's the wildfire smoke."

  USA TODAY

Students adjusting to another school year disrupted by COVID-19 also face a different kind of public-health threat: record gun violence.

Between Aug.1 and Sept. 15, at least 30 instances of gunfire occurred on U.S. school grounds, according to data from the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. The shootings killed five people and wounded another 23.

That marks the highest number of campus shootings in a back-to-school season since Everytown began tracking data in 2013. All in all, there have been nearly twice as many shootings in schools so far this fall compared to pre-pandemic levels. From the beginning of August through the first week of October at least 36 shootings wreaked havoc in schools in 21 states, according to Gun Violence Archive data. Over the same time period from 2016 to 2019, the country averaged 17 shootings in schools.

Such violence has left countless other witnesses and community members traumatized – all at a time when students and educators are already struggling emotionally. In some cases, schools’ responses may unintentionally make the trauma worse.

Families depart a performing arts center Wednesday in Mansfield, Texas, after being united with students from Timberview High School. Police in Texas arrested a student suspected of opening fire during a fight at the Arlington-area high school, leaving four people injured.More

Last week, four people were injured in a shooting at a school in Arlington, Texas. The accused perpetrator, charged with opening fire during a fight at the high school, was a fellow student who’d reportedly been bullied.

The pandemic has fueled a mental-health crisis across the country. Schools are grappling with heightened levels of depression and anxiety among both students and staff. Frank Kitzerow, the police chief for Florida’s Palm Beach County School District, points to a possible correlation between this trend and the increase in school-based gun violence.

“Schools are a microcosm of their communities,” Kitzerow said, citing FBI data showing an uptick in homicides. “It should be a clue and a wake-up call for us. … What we see in the communities is coming into our schools.”

On Sept. 1, the eighth day of classes, one student fatally shot another inside a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, high school, causing campuses throughout the district to lock down for hours. Recovery from the shooting has been “long and difficult,” Laurie Schaefer, a teacher at Mount Tabor High School, told USA TODAY. And the school’s healing process became particularly difficult when a gun was found in a student's backpack late last month and another in a nearby middle school the following week, she said.

Active shooter drills could make trauma worse

Incidents like these are a reminder that schools ought to explore a suite of preventative measures that prioritize mental health, according to Kitzerow. Yet reactive, potentially traumatizing practices such as active shooter drills have grown in popularity.

In the most extreme version of these drills, the school stages an active shooting unannounced, leading students to believe they’re actually under attack. Research shows an association between the drills and significant, lasting increases in depression, stress and anxiety among students, parents and educators.

“As a high-school student, when we go through these drills, they’re really traumatizing – it’s hard for us to adapt to learning afterwards, for us to sit through the drill,” said Peren Tiemann, a volunteer with Lakeland High School Students Demand Action, a gun-control advocacy group in Oregon.

In Tiemann’s experience, miscommunication surrounding such drills can leave students feeling helpless and confused. Once her school staged a drill in which the hypothetical shooter was supposed to be off school grounds, but she and her peers were under the impression that person was on campus. Chaos ensued, she said, with different classrooms responding in different ways.

Tiemann has led efforts at her school to change its safety practices. Among the reforms: removing simulation-based drills, improving communication and ensuring students have a “breathing period” after a drill before resuming their learning.

Such reforms are especially urgent now, Tiemann said. “For so many of us, going back to school added a whole other level of stress,” she said. “Now, it’s possible to have school at home. … When we have these drills, it just reminds so many of (us) that there could have been another option if we had just stayed home.”

For Justin Funez, a University of Chicago student and volunteer with Students Demand Action, an organization that works to end gun violence, reforms should also extend beyond school grounds. Most of the gun violence that children experience occurs off-campus – and that’s particularly true in low-income communities, where students often learn in classrooms with the sounds of sirens in the background.

“How can you do your homework if you’re worried about that?” Funez posed. “How many clubs can you actually participate in if you know you have to be home before” the gunfire erupts?

  USA TODAY.

The Earth’s average global temperature is 1.2 degrees Celsius (around 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in preindustrial times, causing shifts in weather patterns and more frequent and severe extreme weather events such as storms and droughts.

This global warming, also known as climate change, is the result of humans filling the air with gases that intensify a process called the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect occurs when the sun’s rays reach the Earth’s atmosphere and the majority of the radiation bounces back out into space. When this happens, a small portion is absorbed by chemicals in our atmosphere. These are known as greenhouse gases.

By looking at air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago until today, scientists have found that temperatures go up or down in lockstep with the amount of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide.

Human activity has started to change the delicate balance of chemicals in our atmosphere.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas for energy. When these substances are burned, they emit excess greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide.

According to measurements taken in February and March from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now reaching levels 50 percent higher than in the preindustrial period. More greenhouse gases means more heat trapped in the atmosphere and, over time, a warmer planet.

When the average temperature of the Earth is raised, even by just a few degrees, we see some pretty dramatic effects. For example, it can cause a rise in ocean temperatures that can lead to more extreme storms and flooding.

Klaus Jacob, a special research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, explained one consequence of warmer oceans.

“As the ocean gets warmer, it expands,” Jacob said. “So as sea level rises, you need only smaller and smaller storms to reach the same elevation in New Orleans, or New York City, or anywhere else where we have storms. ... And so you get much more frequent flooding.”

At the same time, some areas are dealing with long droughts because warmer temperatures cause more evaporation and dry out the land and vegetation, which leads to problems like crop shortages and widespread forest fires.

The severe current, and potential future, consequences of climate change were laid out in a landmark report conducted by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in August.

The assessment found that if the world follows the scenario of very low greenhouse gas emissions, it’s plausible that warming of greater than 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures can be avoided.

But if that scenario — which involves very drastic, rapid and sustained cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, enforced by governments and businesses — is not followed, the world could be heading toward being 3 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

In all cases, there will be more extreme events like hurricanes and heat waves that cause flooding, wildfires and droughts. It’s only a question of how severe we allow the situation to become.

When it was published, the report was described as “a code red for humanity” by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

The U.N. timed the report’s release to lead into the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. The ongoing fight to limit global warming and to deal with its effects hinges on successful talks between world leaders at the conference, which will take place in early November.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on ABC's "This Week" that Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans are playing with "catastrophe" over a pending fight to raise the debt ceiling.

While the Senate reached a deal on Thursday for an emergency hike of the debt ceiling by $480 billion to pay the nation's bills through Dec. 3, McConnell has warned of a battle brewing over raising it further.

Pressed by "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos about what would happen if McConnell keeps his word that Republicans won't help the Democrats next time, Yellen painted a picture with drastic consequences.

"Fifty million Americans wouldn't receive Social Security payments. Our troops won't know when or if they would be paid. The 30 million families that receive a child tax credit, those payments would be in jeopardy," Yellen said.

She said such a scenario "could result in catastrophe."

While no Republicans voted on Thursday to raise the debt ceiling, 11 voted with Democrats to break a Republican filibuster so the measure to raise the debt ceiling could advance./GMA

• Cutting Democrats' spending bill to $1.5 trillion could mean millions of fewer jobs each year.
• Sen. Joe Manchin has said he will not support a reconciliation bill more than $1.5 trillion.
• Democrats need all 50 senators to support the bill in order for it to pass.

As Democrats continue to squabble over the final cost of President Joe Biden's massive spending bill, new research shows the ultimate price tag will play a long-lasting role in US employment numbers.

Slashing the proposed $3.5 trillion package to $1.5 trillion - a figure centrist Sen. Joe Manchin has repeatedly demanded - would result in nearly 2 million fewer jobs per year, according to Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

EPI visiting economist Adam S. Hersh determined that acquiescing to Manchin's demands would have a significant impact on his home state of West Virginia, in addition to the country as a whole.

West Virginia would see 9,880 fewer jobs under Manchin's proposed $1.5 trillion bill, according to Hersh, which constitutes 1.33% of the state's total employment. Cuts to the spending would mean 900 fewer manufacturing jobs, 400 fewer construction jobs, and 3,800 fewer health care and social assistance jobs, the institute said.

Constituents of the other Democratic holdout, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, would also feel the effects of a cheaper bill.

Arizona would see 35,564 fewer jobs each year, equaling 1.17% of the state's overall employment, according to Hersh. The cuts would mean 2,500 fewer manufacturing jobs, 1,600 fewer construction jobs, and 11,400 fewer health care and social assistance jobs, the institute said.

While Sinema hasn't publicly demanded a $1.5 trillion price tag, she has objected to the $3.5 trillion figure that Biden and progressive Democrats originally touted.

Democrats need all 50 senators to support the bill in order for it to pass.

"Further reducing the scale and scope of the budget reconciliation package unequivocally means the legislation will support far fewer jobs and deliver fewer benefits to lift up working families and boost the economy as a whole," Hersh said in a press release.

"Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema's efforts to scale back Build Back Better can only leave working families worse off and America's economy less resilient to the challenges we face now and in the future," he added.

A previous EPI report estimated that the Build Back Better legislation combined with Biden's proposed infrastructure bill would support more than 4 million jobs each year. But cutting the package to $1.5 trillion means a loss of 1.9 million of those hypothetical jobs.

Hersh's analysis assumed a proportional cut across all the bill's proposed initiatives, as total cuts to specific programs Manchin has opposed would still mean a final bill costing more than $1.5 trillion.

 Business Insider

There has been a rise in the theft of vehicle catalytic converters recently, allegedly by workers at some auto repair shops as well as from parked cars. The catalytic converter is an important part that controls emissions produced from the vehicle to protect the environment and curb pollution. The part is expensive, ranging from KD 250 for a Mitsubishi Pajero up to KD 490 for the Nissan Z and even higher for more expensive vehicles.

One of the main reasons catalytic converters are stolen is because they contain expensive metals like platinum, palladium and rhodium. They are also sold to used spare part dealers in the scrap area or to garages. A catalytic converter is an exhaust emission control device that converts toxic gases and pollutants in exhaust gas from an internal combustion engine into less-toxic pollutants by catalyzing a redox reaction.

In February this year, the Environment Public Authority signed a memorandum with interior ministry that added a new condition to the technical inspection of vehicles – that car emissions should conform with special standards while renewing car licenses. But according to a car inspection center, this law has not yet come into force.

A mechanic in Shuwaikh said police have conducted several raids at garages in Shuwaikh industrial Area and confiscated catalytic converters found at these garages. “The police warned garage workers that it’s not allowed to remove this part from the vehicles. I guess this came after customers complained catalytic converters were stolen from their vehicles, especially after it was announced that emissions tests will be done during the technical checking, for which this part is essential,” he told Kuwait Times.

“Some drivers used to remove the catalytic converters from their vehicle based on the advice of the garage, as the vehicle apparently runs faster without it. The garage even used to pay the customer around KD 50 for the converter. But after the police raids, most garages won’t remove it even if the customer pays for it,” he added.

A salesman at an auto dealership confirmed more people are now asking for catalytic converters. “I’ve heard many people in Salmiya, Maidan Hawally, Hawally and Jleeb Al-Shuyoukh were victims of theft of this part from their vehicles. The driver will realize the catalytic converter is missing when they start hearing loud noises from the exhaust,” the salesman told Kuwait Times. Another mechanic at a garage in Shuwaikh said he knows a customer whose converter was stolen by a tow truck driver while transporting the car to the garage./KT