Wildfires Taint West Coast Vineyards With Taste of Smoke
TURNER, Ore.—Smoke from the West Coast wildfires has tainted grapes in some of the nation’s most celebrated wine regions with an ashy flavor that could spell disaster for the 2020 vintage. Wineries in California, Oregon, and Washington have survived severe wildfires before, but the smoke from this year’s blazes has been especially bad—thick enough to obscure vineyards drooping with clusters of grapes almost ready for harvest. Day after day, some West Coast cities endured some of the worst air quality in the world. No one knows the extent of the smoke damage to the crop, and growers are trying to assess the severity. If tainted grapes are made into wine without steps to minimize the harm or weed out the damaged fruit, the result could be wine so bad that…
For years, the Chinese Communist Party has aggressively sought to modernize its military, with a focus on anti-satellite weapons, hypersonic missiles, and cyberspace. “What China has been doing, really since the 90s, is invest heavily in the kinds of weapons systems specifically to target where the United States is weakest,” says nuclear deterrence and missile defense specialist Rebeccah Heinrichs.
The goal is to push the United States out of the Asia-Pacific region and eventually supplant America.
In this episode, we sit down with Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics, to discuss how the U.S. should tackle the national security threats posed by China and also by Russia.
This is American Thought Leaders ??, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
American Thought Leaders is an Epoch Times show available on YouTube, Facebook, and The Epoch Times website. It airs on Verizon Fios TV and Frontier Fios on Channel 158.
Focus News: Communist China Exploiting Gaps in US Military: Rebeccah Heinrichs
DOJ: More Than 300 Charged With Crimes Committed Near or at Protests Since May
More than 300 people have been charged for committing crimes “adjacent to or under the guise of peaceful demonstrations since the end of May,” the Department of Justice announced Thursday. The crimes were committed in 29 states and Washington, authorities said. Assaulting a law enforcement officer, attempted murder, arson, and damaging federal property are among the charges filed. Approximately 80 people have been charged with offenses relating to arson and explosives; 15 have been charged with damaging federal property. Rioters inflicted millions of dollars of damage to city and federal property across the United States in recent months, including the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct, the Nashville City Hall in Tennessee, and the聽Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, a federal building, in Portland, Oregon. Criminals have also targeted small and big businesses,…