Latest news with #1936
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Another calamity: The closest forerunner in San Angelo's history of floods was decades ago
The July Fourth floods in San Angelo will go down in the record books as the wettest day in the city's history. The only other days that came close were recorded nearly 100 years ago in 1936. In mid-September of 1936, the city of San Angelo experienced downpours for multiple days, resulting in massive flooding from rainfall — an estimated 25.22 inches, according to Standard-Times archives. The rain began Sept. 15 with 11.75 inches, the most recorded in a single day for San Angelo at that point. Then the rainfall continued for another three days: 1.18 inches Sept. 16 4.64 inches Sept. 17 7.64 inches Sept. 18 More: Waking up to disaster: How San Angelo is weathering a flood. What happened and what now? As a result, the North Concho River overflowed with water on Sept. 17, 1936, wiping away entire blocks of houses and flooding most of the downtown area. Some estimates reported that nearly 300 homes were washed away in the flood. Water levels were reported to reach 10 feet in the lobby of the Naylor Hotel. In response, the city built two reservoirs: O.C. Fisher Dam and Lake on the north side of town inside the San Angelo State Park and Twin Buttes Reservoir in the south, mainly to control the water levels for both the north and south Concho rivers should the area see that much rainfall again. According to the Standard-Times archives, the 1936 flood claimed two lives and left over 2,000 people homeless. It destroyed two of the three bridges in town, wreaking damage of over $5,000,000. The July Fourth rainfall did not overflow the North Concho River as it did in 1936. But the reported 14 inches on Independence Day is the most recorded rainfall in a single day the city has seen since then. More: What to know about getting help after the flood, making donations in San Angelo area Paul Witwer covers high school sports and Angelo State University sports for The San Angelo Standard-Times. Reach him at sports@ Follow him on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, @Paul_Witwer. This article originally appeared on San Angelo Standard-Times: San Angelo July Fourth flooding draws similarities to 1936 disaster
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Only known colour footage of extinct Toolache wallaby revealed after 90 years
The film shows one of the female marsupials fenced in a paddock, likely the last living representative of her species when the footage was shot in 1936. This is the only known colour footage of a living Tulla wallaby taken almost 90 years ago. The film shows one of the female marsupials fenced in a paddock, likely the last living representative of her species when the footage was shot in 1936. A digital copy of the film has been held at the South Australian Museum for 20 years, but that version is entirely in black and white. What's incredible about the newly digitised National Film and Sound Archive copy is that it contains 34 seconds of colour footage at the end while the colour section of the film has deteriorated and turned a deep magenta in colour, it still helps viewers imagine what this fascinating creature was like to see in real life.
CNN
14-06-2025
- General
- CNN
He once rebuked billionaires for not paying enough taxes. Now this historian says we need ‘moral ambition' to fight tyranny
It is one of the most inspiring photographs in modern history, one that reveals the worst and best of human nature with a click of a camera shutter. It is a black-and-white image of a crowd of workers at a shipbuilding factory in Nazi Germany. It shows hundreds of them tightly packed in virtual military formation, extending a Nazi salute to Adolf Hitler — all except for one man. He stands in the middle of the throng, coolly defiant, with his arms folded across his chest and a sour look on his face. Historians have debated the identity and fate of the man in the photo, which was taken in 1936. But the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman uses the image in his new book to ask two questions: What innate characteristic enabled that man to resist the fear the Nazi state instilled in so many of its citizens? And what can people today learn from him, and others who are fighting new forms of state-sponsored fear? Bregman says one antidote to that fear is 'moral ambition.' It's his term for people who blend the idealism of an activist with the ruthless pragmatism of an entrepreneur to make the world a better place. In his new book, 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,' Bregman uses the example of that German shipyard worker and other ordinary people to critique what he sees as a common failing of people on the left: They fall for the 'illusion of awareness,' a belief that simply exposing people to injustice will inspire them to act. 'Awareness doesn't put food on the table. Awareness won't keep a roof over your head,' writes Bregman, a vegan who has spoken out against animal factory farming. 'With awareness, you don't cool down the planet, you're not finding shelter for those 100 million refugees, and you won't make a bit of difference for the 100 billion animals at factory farms worldwide. Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.' Bregman has built a global audience by making others face uncomfortable truths. He shot to prominence following his 2017 TED talk about overcoming poverty by offering a universal basic income. Two years later, he went viral at a 2019 Davos panel discussion for his scathing rebuke of billionaires for not paying their fair share of taxes. ('Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullsh** in my opinion,' he said). In a conversation from his home in New York City, Bregman spoke to CNN about why the Black Lives Matter movement failed to generate transformational change, why he gets most of his criticism from the left, and how his parents — Peta, an activist and special needs teacher, and his father, Kees, a minister — inspire his work. His remarks were edited for brevity and clarity. As a young boy, I was already obsessed with the Second World War. The country in which I grew up, the Netherlands, was occupied by the Nazis. I always wondered, what would I have done? There's huge literature around the people who actually did something. I was interested in the psychology of these resistance heroes. I thought that they were more altruistic, or maybe more extroverted, or maybe they have had certain privileges in the sense that sometimes you need resources to do the right thing. But none of that turned out to be true. It turns out that resistance heroes were really a cross-section of the population: rich, poor, young, old, left-wing, right-wing. A group of researchers looked at the evidence and said, hey, wait a minute, there is actually one thing that seems to be going on here. In 96% of all cases, when people were asked to join the resistance, they said yes. And then I had a epiphany. This (the resistance) was actually an idea that was spreading, almost like a pandemic. People were inspiring each other. This also explains why the resistance was a very local phenomenon; it wasn't evenly distributed over the country. People gave each other courage. That's super simple, but I think it's a quite profound lesson for us today. We often imagine that people do good things because they are good people. But it's exactly the other way around. You do good things, and that makes you a good person. You just got to get started or be inspired by others, and that's how you get there. Resistance is incredibly important. My fellow historian, Timothy Snyder, always says that we should not obey in advance, right? We shouldn't, even before the order goes out, start behaving as if we live in an authoritarian system. I was very glad to see Harvard show some courage, especially after the very cowardly behavior of some of the big law firms. Acts of resistance can be highly contagious, just as cowardice can be contagious. As a historian, I'm reminded of other periods in our history. It's often said that we live in a second Gilded Age (a tumultuous period of shocking income inequality and concentration of corporate power in the US). And if I look at the first one in the late 19th century, I see very similar things. I see an incredible amount of immorality and amount of political corruption. I see elites that were utterly detached from the realities of ordinary people's lives. But what gives me hope is that after the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, with people like Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate (and a powerful progressive reformer), someone who grew up in a privileged environment. And then so many things happened in such a short period of time that were unthinkable: the (introduction of) income tax, labor and environmental regulations, the shorter work week, the breakup of big monopolies and corporate power. It was quite incredible. I'm not predicting that this will happen or anything like that, but I do think it is time for a countercultural revolution. It should be led by people from the bottom up, but also very much by elites who have a certain sense of noblesse oblige (the belief that people with wealth and power should help the less fortunate). This is really what you see in the progressive period. Take Alva Vanderbilt. She used to be this pretty decadent woman who was married to Cornelius Vanderbilt. She wanted to get into the Four Hundred, the most wealthy and elite families in New York. But then her husband died, and she did the same thing as MacKenzie Scott (the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She turned into an activist and became one of the main financiers of the women's rights movement. This (the Progressive era) was very much a revolt among elites who were just utterly fed up with the total decadence, immorality, and also frankly the unseriousness of the people who were in power. I see the exact same thing today. At some point, it's time to get fed up with it and provide an alternative. But that really starts with doing the work yourself. I'm too much of a historian to be a real optimist. I know that things can go downhill very quickly. If you study Germany in the 1930s or the 1920s, you see a society that is one of the most civilized and technologically advanced countries in the world. There was this idiot named Adolf Hitler, but most people didn't take him seriously. We are living through an extraordinary moment. The next five to 10 years are going to be incredibly important for the future of the whole human race. The Industrial Revolution in 1750 was the most important thing that happened in all of human history. We are living through a similar moment. It's easy to see the dystopian possibilities, and I really do not want to dismiss them. But at the same time, some of the utopian possibilities that I sketch out in my first book, 'Utopia for Realists,' which were often dismissed as quite naïve — they become more realistic by the day. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says that 50% of entry-level jobs could be gone five years from now (because of AI). We are going to have to rethink so many basic aspects of the social contract. This whole idea that you have to work for your money, that you're not a valuable human person if you don't have a job — we have to get rid of that idea quite soon, because it's going to be very cruel to hang on to that if we keep automating our jobs so quickly. All of this could lead to some wonderful utopian possibilities. We will finally be able to ditch the whole idea that you have to work for a living. Then we will finally be able to figure out what life is all about. Will we get it right? I don't know. Yes, I'm afraid so. I spend a lot of time studying the civil rights movement, and what really strikes me about that movement is just how effective it was in translating awareness into tangible results. They got these huge packages of legislation through Congress that made such a massive, tangible difference in the lives of real people. And then look at Black Lives Matter. It's incredibly impressive on one hand — it was the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States. But then look at the actual results. It's not nothing — some police forces changed a little bit. But compared to the amount of energy around that movement, it's been pretty disappointing. Prev Next This is not true for BLM alone. It's true for many protest movements of the last two decades. And this is probably because in this online era, it's easy to start up the empathy and the anger. We see it in Los Angeles (where people are protesting the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdown) right now. You get people out in the streets very quickly. But is there an actual plan, an actual strategy? Changing the world is very difficult. It takes enormous perseverance, and coalition building, which is quite difficult. You have an online environment where people are calling each other out all the time over purity politics. I often find it funny but also depressing that I get the most criticism from my friends on the left. It can be all kinds of things. I'm currently building an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. We are building fellowships for ambitious, talented people to take on some of these very pressing global issues, whether that's animal factory farming or tax avoidance by billionaires. But that stuff needs to be financed. So we work with groups like Patriotic Millionaires, for example — wealthy people who say, hey, tax me more. But for some on the left, it's like, ewww, you're working with rich people. In my book, I talk about the noble loser, those people who like to say, 'I stood on the right side of history. We didn't vote for Kamala (Harris), because Kamala was pro-Israel.' Well, look what that got us. Whether we're talking about people who are currently suffering in Palestine, animals who are suffering or people who are being oppressed — they don't care if you're right. They want you to win. I think so. I've always been very proud of my dad. I remember very well sitting in church, looking at my dad, and thinking he has the coolest job. I looked at my friends, and one's dad was an accountant and another was a marketer. And my dad is a minister, who talked about the biggest questions of life. I don't give the same answers (as him) to all those questions, even though I think we've become closer philosophically and spiritually as I got older. But I've always believed that those are the right questions to ask. We have only one life on this precious planet, and it's very short. No matter how rich we get, we can never buy ourselves more time. A lot of my secular and progressive friends love to dunk on religion, and sometimes for good reasons. But I've always appreciated those parts of religion that force us to reckon with the bigger questions of what life is actually about. My mother is an incredible woman. She is the only one who keeps getting arrested in our family. The other day she was arrested again as a 68-year-old climate activist. For her, it's always been very natural and logical to live in line with your own ideals. A lot of people think certain things, but they don't act on it. Many of my friends on the left care so much about poverty and inequality, and then I'll ask, 'How much do you donate to effective charities?' and very often, the answer is nothing. What I've learned from my mother is that you can just do what you say. She's also never been afraid to use the power of shame. A lot of people say that shaming is toxic, and I tend to disagree. I think there's a reason why we humans are pretty much the only species in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush. They thought it was hilarious. Those are the moments when I make my mother proud. John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.'
Washington Post
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Berlin wants to host the Olympics again as 100th anniversary of 1936 Games looms
BERLIN — Berlin is making a bid to host the Olympic Games again, possibly 100 years after the city hosted the 1936 edition under the Nazis. Berlin mayor Kai Wegner is to present plans to bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, with help from four other German states, on Tuesday at Berlin's Olympic stadium.
Hans India
01-05-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Protecting the Worker: An Overview of India's Labor Laws
Introduction Workers and employees are one of the most important elements in running India's economic engine. Millions of employees, from daily wage earners to corporate professionals, contribute significantly to the country's growth. To promote fair treatment, safety and dignity in the workplace, the government created labor laws not only regulate the terms of employment, but also protect the rights of employees and ensure that employers follow ethical many employees are unaware of these legal rights and often become victims to exploitation or uncertain working purpose of this article is to provide a basic understanding of Indian labor laws and why it is essential for all employees to know about them. What Do We Understand By Labor Law? Labor laws, also known as employment laws, are a set of legal rules that regulate the relationship between employers and employees. The goal of these laws is to ensure social justice and fair treatment in the workplace by regulating not only employee rights but also standards for working conditions, wages, occupational safety, health and security. In India, the Labor Laws cover a wide spectrum - ranging from industrial conflicts and minimum wages to maternity benefits and working hours. The law applies to various categories of employees, including contract workers, factory workers, employees, and informal sector employees. Types of Labor Laws in India India has a complex and vast framework of labor simplify, these laws can be divided into the following categories: 1. Wage Laws These laws deal with the payment of wages and ensure that employees are paid fairly and on time. The Minimum Wages Act ,1948 - It ensures that all employees receive the minimum wage, as prescribed by the government. The Payments of Wages Act,1936 regulates timely payments of wages without any unauthorized deductions. The Equal Remuneration Act ,1976 - It promotes gender equality by ensuring equal payments for equal work. 2. Social Security Laws Social Security laws provide financial protection and benefits to the employees and their families: Employees Provident Fund ,1952 - It provides benefits of retirement through the Contributory Provident Fund where employer and employee both contribute voluntarily. The Employees State Insurance Act ,1948 - It provides medical care, disability and maternity benefits. Payments Gratuity Act, 1972 - This act provides a lump-Sum payment to employees upon leaving the job after a minimum of five years of continuous services. 3. Working conditions and Welfare laws As the name implies, these laws regulate working hours, rest periods and workplace security. The Factory Act,1948 - It ensures safe and healthy working conditions in factories. The Shops and Establishments Act,1954 - This act regulates working hours, weekly holidays, and working conditions for commercial institutions. The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 - It protects the interests of contract workers. 4. Industrial Relations Laws To build relationships between employers, employees and trade unions, the government created laws which are called Industrial Relations Laws. The Industrial Disputes Act,1947 - It includes dispute resolution between employers and employees, lays down procedures for strikes, layoffs and retrenchments. Trade Union Act ,1926- This act recognizes all the registered trade unions and regulates their rights and responsibilities. 5. Laws Protecting Vulnerable Workers A special law has been issued to protect women, children and unorganized sector workers. The 1961 birth law grants maternity leave and other benefits during pregnancy. The Child Labor Act of 1986 (prohibition and regulation)- According to this act, any child under the age of 14 is prohibited for employment. The Unorganized Workers Social Security Act, 2008 - This act offers social security and social welfare programs to unorganized workers. Why Is It Important to Know About Labor Laws? Many workers in India are not aware about their legal rights, specifically workers in the informal or unorganized sectors which often leads to: Exploitation - Workers may be underpaid, overworked or denied benefits. Unsafe Conditions - Without knowledge of safety laws, workers may suffer from poor health and injury. Legal Vulnerability - Ignorance can prevent employees from standing up for themselves or seeking redress in case of disputes. Being informed about labor laws empowers workers in the following ways: 1. Protects basic rights : Understanding the law ensures that workers know their entitlements such as minimum wage, paid leave, working hours, and more. 2. Promote security in the workplace : Knowing security standards helps workers to recognize unsafe practices and demand appropriate working conditions. 3. Strengthens Job Security : Familiarity with provisions against wrongful termination or unfair labor practices provides a legal safeguard. 4. Encourages fair treatment Workers can approach trade unions or labor courts when they face discrimination or harassment. 5. Helps Access Social Benefits Many labor laws entitle workers to pension, medical care, insurance, etc., but only if you know how to claim these services. Conclusion The Indian labor Law is vital to run the economy. It maintains fairness, justice and safety in the government and employers play an important role in the creation and maintenance of these laws, employees must also remain informed of their rights and duties. It is important for everyone to understand the labor laws so that you can keep your dignity and protect your interests. India continues to grow, but a legally strengthened workforce is not just a need. It is the foundation of sustainable development. So get to know your rights, talk when you see the violation of these laws and encourage others to do the same.
