Japan had the first bullet train more than 60 years ago.  It was 10October1964, when the opening ceremony was held in Tokyo in anticipation of Japan's first-ever Olympic Games, which began that day. The  Shinkansen,  meaning  new mainline , with a separate track, arrived when normal train traffic had reached the limit for carrying passengers and freight.   A train trip between Osaka and Tokyo dropped from 6 hours and 40 minutes to 4 hours, shortened to 3 hours and 10 minutes by 1964, and is now 2 hours and 30 minutes.  From the Shin-Osaka Station to the Shin-Yokohama Station only takes a little more than 2 hours. In 1964 the track was 320 miles long.  Today, it's up to 1484 miles.  The original itinerary incorporating Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka now carries 159 million passengers/year.  In this 6 decade period, more than 10 billion passengers have been safely handled.  CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT NOT ONE PASSENGER HAS YET BEEN KILLED IN A DERA...

  For one, Planet Earth is hot.    Europe had more heat deaths last year on record .   The tally was  61,000 deaths .  Will it be worse this year? A high-pressure system from north Africa called Cerberus could bring temperatures exceeding  113 F degrees  this weekend, particularly in the the Mediterranean region.  Sicily and Sardinia could reach the highest ever recorded here,  118.5 F !!! On July 9 Death Valley National Park's Furnace Creek Visitor Center hit  130 F (54.4 C),  beating the previous high set here in 2020.   In comparison, medium-rare steak has an internal temperature of 130-135 F. The hottest temperature ever, however, is contentious, for the 136.4 F (58 C) reading from Al Azizia in 1923 was officially decertified. Thus the current official world record is 134 F (56.7 C) set on July 10, 1913 in Death Valley. Yet, experts today insist that those early records are 100% bogus, and there seems to be s...

The continuing saga of the Russian mini-revolt is well-explained by  Leonid Bershidsky,  a former columnist of  Bloomberg Europ e.   He is a 51-year old Russian journalist now based in Berlin, having moved there in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.  Has previously worked at  Newsweek  and  The Moscow Times .  He has written several books.   But to the topic of the day, is this that impactful summer that will finally convince decision-makers to take global warming seriously?  Possible, but unlikely, for a key reason to be provided. The  New York Times  yesterday said: Today, New Orleans will reach 113 degrees in the heat index. Houston will reach 111. Mobile, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., will also surpass 110. And those are only a few of the places that will experience dangerous heat this week. Summer technically just began, and parts of the U.S. are already seeing the unusual heat that   experts warned about ...