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25/04/2017

North Korea vows to leave ‘NO MAN ALIVE’ in chilling World War 3 threat to Donald Trump

Edited by SEMMA | Updated by 25 APRIL, IST 10:50

Story About :NORTH KOREA has vowed to completely wipe out all US forces and leave "no man alive" as Donald Trump's strike group "armada" nears the hermit nation.Donald Trump has sent the USS Carl Vinson near to the communist stronghold in a bid to deter Kim Jong-un from carrying out more nuclear blasts and missile tests.

Japanese destroyers have joined up with their US counterparts as Pyongyang gears up to carry out another blast – expected today – despite increasing pressure from Washington.North Korea has now promised to launch a deadly strike which would wipe out all military personnel if nuclear warfare was to erupt.

State newspaper Minju Joson reported: "The army of North Korea already declared it will deal merciless destructive blows at the enemies so that they would not come back to life again should they make reckless provocation.

"If our Juche weapons with potentials unimaginable by the US open fire, they will destroy the US forces and their stooges to the last man so that there would not be left even a single man who will sign the surrender document."Drills have been scheduled in a bid to prepare for a mass evacuation of all 230,000 Americans in the Korean peninsula if war breaks out between the two nuclear nations.

The US, China and Japan have held talks in the past few days as Donald Trump weighs up whether to take military action against North Korea.

Minju Joson added: "The group of aggressors can never evade our nuclear strike whether they are on the peninsula, at military aggression bases in the Pacific or in the US mainland across the ocean.It will be useless to regret after taking a single step wrong and bringing ruin to oneself.

"The US Trump administration better behave with discretion.”

President Trump has summoned all 100 senators to Capitol Hill today for an unusual meeting on the secretive regime.

25/04/2017

US submarine arrives in South Korea as tensions rise

Edited by SEMMA | Updated by 25 APRIL, IST 9:50

Story About:US submarine has arrived in South Korea, amid worries of another North Korean missile or nuclear test.

The missile-armed USS Michigan is set to join an incoming group of warships led by aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.
North Korea is celebrating its army's 85th founding anniversary on Tuesday. It has previously marked similar occasions with missile tests.
Tensions have risen on the Korean peninsula in recent weeks as the US and North Korea exchange heated rhetoric.
Meanwhile in an unusual event, the entire US Senate has been asked to attend a briefing on North Korea on Wednesday at the White HouseThe USS Michigan is a nuclear-powered submarine carrying 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles and 60 special operations troops and mini-subs, reported the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.
It is expected to take part in military exercises with the Carl Vinson warship group dispatched by the US in a show of force.
The warships were briefly at the centre of some confusion when they did not immediately head to the Korean peninsula, but US Navy officials said it is now proceeding to the region as ordered.Pyongyang has reacted angrily, threatening to sink the aircraft carrier and to launch a "super-mighty pre-emptive strike" against what it calls US aggression.
US President Donald Trump said earlier this month in a TV interview he was sending an "armada" and that the US had submarines which are "very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier".
China has repeatedly urged for calm, with President Xi Jinping speaking to Mr Trump on Tuesday urging all parties to "maintain restraint and avoid actions that would increase tensions".

24/04/2017

Russia Boosts Military Spending Despite Sanctions: Study

Edited by SEMMA | updated on April 24, 2017 06:37 IST

Story About:Russia became the world's third largest military spender in 2016 despite low oil prices and economic sanctions, as the global expenditure rose for a second consecutive year, a study said on Monday.

Russia's military spending was $69.2 billion (around 64 billion euros) in 2016, a 5.9 percent rise over 2015, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in a report, adding this was the highest proportion of its GDP since it became an independent state.

"This increased spending and heavy burden on the economy comes at a time when the Russian economy is in serious trouble due to low oil and gas prices and the economic sanctions imposed since 2014," (by the West over the Ukraine conflict), SIPRI said.

Saudi Arabia was the third largest spender in 2015 but dropped to fourth place in 2016 as its expenditure fell by 30 percent to $63.7 billion, "despite its continued involvement in regional wars", it added.

"Falling oil revenue and associated economic problems attached to the oil-price shock has forced many oil-exporting countries to reduce military spending," SIPRI researcher Nan Tian said, adding Saudi Arabia had the largest drop in spending between 2015 and 2016.

The US remained the top spender as its expenditure grew by 1.7 percent between 2015 and 2016 to $611 billion while China boosted its expenditure by 5.4 percent to $215 billion, a lower rate than in previous years.

SIPRI said the rise in US military spending in 2016 "may signal the end of a trend of decreases in spending" caused by the 2008 economic crisis and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

On April 13 the US dropped its largest ever non-nuclear bomb, hitting Islamic State group positions in a remote area of eastern Nangarhar province in Afghanistan.

"Future spending patterns remain uncertain due to the changing political situation in the USA," Aude Fleurant, Director of the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure (AMEX) programme, said in a statement.

Hit by a series of terror attacks since 2015, Western Europe raised its military expenditure for the second consecutive year, up by 2.6 percent in 2016.

Overall military spending in Central Europe jumped by 2.4 percent in 2016.

"The growth in spending by many countries in Central Europe can be partly attributed to the perception of Russia posing a greater threat," said senior SIPRI researcher Siemon Wezeman in the statement.

"This is despite the fact that Russia's spending in 2016 was only 27 per cent of the combined total of European NATO members," he added.

24/04/2017

Saudi Arabia, A Kingdom Built On Oil, Plans A Future Beyond It

Edited by SEMMA | updated on April 24, 2017 12:03 IST

Story About:Ever since oil was discovered in the Arabian desert in 1938, Saudi Arabia has been the world's premier petro-state and the dominant force within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Flush with oil revenue, the country has had neither income taxes nor corporate taxes while bestowing on its people heavy subsidies for food and fuel. And the royal family has built spacious palaces at home while buying swanky houses abroad in places like London and yachts in the south of France.

But now the oil-rich kingdom wants to look beyond oil. The crash in crude oil prices that began in 2014 has left the country with a gaping budget deficit. And while oil prices have recovered, climate activists have tried to bring the end of the hydrocarbon age closer and many analysts have predicted the approach of "peak demand" that would mark the end of a long climb in global oil consumption.

The 31-year-old deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, son of the king, has set out to reinvent the Saudi economy by the year 2030. His plan, called Vision 2030, would foster new private businesses, improve education and trim the budget deficit by cutting subsidies and introducing a 5 percent value-added tax.

Most startling of all: The government has proposed selling off a chunk of its crown jewel, the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco. The company, which for decades was in the hands of four big U.S. oil companies and whose nationalization became a powerful political symbol, is widely believed to be worth as much as $1 trillion to $2 trillion; its share offering could be the biggest in history. And many analysts think the secretive giant holds closely guarded secrets such as the true cost of a Saudi barrel and the size of payments made to the royal family.

Many of the reforms in Vision 2030 have been discussed before, but they suddenly seem pressing. The kingdom's population has soared 50 percent since 2000, with large numbers of young people unemployed. The government has been borrowing abroad to cover domestic spending, which spiraled upward when oil prices were high.

In March, it set terms for a multibillion-dollar Islamic bond, which gives investors a return while complying with the Muslim prohibition of interest.

And costs are believed to have soared on the war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has backed the beleaguered president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Military spending makes up a quarter of the official budget, and analysts say the true cost of the Yemen fighting could be concealed in a supplemental appropriation.

"It's all about stability," said Bassem Snaije, a financial adviser who teaches Mideast economics courses at two major French universities. "Vision 2030 sounds like a positive project, but I would call it Obligation 2030. Extremely high oil prices over a number of years allowed them to build in a spending system. When oil prices came back down to a more reasonable level, they were burning capital faster than they were breathing."

Ultimately, Mohammed wants the kingdom to be able to run a balanced budget and more balanced economy - without counting oil revenue, which in 2015 accounted for 72.5 percent of government revenue.

"Vision 2030 comes as a response to challenges that we are facing in the medium to long term," said Mohammed al-Jadaan, who became the Saudi finance minister in November. "We need to come up with something different that basically ensures that by 2030 we are independent of our current dependence on oil only. It also comes as a response to a young population that is looking for a better lifestyle, a better footprint in the world."

Jadaan, who was in Washington for the International Monetary Fund spring meetings, added that "there are significant opportunities that we are not tapping. Maybe it's about time we started figuring it out."

The Saudi government has used the IMF meetings to carry on a public-relations campaign, a tall task for a nation that does not treat women equally, where the extremist clerical establishment is strong, where executions are sometimes carried out by beheading, and where political opposition is tightly controlled and often suppressed.

The Saudis, who differed with President Barack Obama over human rights and his unwillingness to intervene militarily in Syria, have reached out to the Trump administration. Prince Mohammed had lunch with President Donald Trump in March. CIA Director Mike Pompeo's first trip abroad was to Saudi Arabia, where he was given an award. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis traveled to Riyadh this past week.

In a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the longtime chief executive of ExxonMobil, said that the Trump administration is looking for deals for U.S. companies in Saudi Arabia and that he had met several times with the Saudi ambassador.

The Vision 2030 plan is packed with targets. There are 755 "initiatives" for the national transportation program alone, Majed Bin Abdullah al-Qasabi, the Saudi minister of commerce and investment, said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Jadaan noted that the plan calls for doubling the number of tourists, including pilgrims to Mecca, by building a new railroad between Mecca and Medina, and a new airport.

The Public Investment Fund, which will become a more active sovereign wealth fund, has unveiled plans for a new entertainment city the size of Las Vegas south of the capital, Riyadh. It would feature a Six Flags theme park and a safari park, an effort to get Saudis to vacation in the country instead of abroad. The Financial Times reported that in a bid to bolster the popularity of the deputy crown prince the government allowed the popular Saudi singer Mohamed Abdo to perform publicly. He sold out four concerts - though they were for men only.

But in the United States, much of the attention has been focused on the initial public offering for Saudi Aramco.

Pavel Molchanov, energy analyst at the advisory firm Raymond James, has called Saudi Aramco a "complete black box" and in a note to investors a year ago said that "if they are truly willing to open the doors . . . that will mark a colossal policy shift."

Investors are champing at the bit to know Saudi Aramco's true crude oil production costs, believed to be in the mid-single digits per barrel because of the nature of their prolific reservoirs. They also wonder what the kingdom's true maximum production capacity is, an important component of calculating how much spare capacity there is for world markets. Saudi officials have pegged reserves at 266 billion barrels - a figure that has changed little even as the country has remained the world's largest exporter.

There have already been some changes in anticipation of greater transparency. The government disclosed that Saudi Aramco had been paying an 85 percent tax rate and 20 percent royalty rate, and that it was cutting the tax rate to 50 percent to make it more attractive to investors.

The most sensitive issue of all is the unanswered question of how money is allocated and delivered to the House of Saud and its many princes.

Jean-Francois Seznec, who teaches at Georgetown University and has worked extensively on banking and finance in the Middle East, says that his own theory is that oil receipts are all paid to an account at Chase Bank, a relationship that goes back half a century to the Rockefeller family. Chase is now part of JPMorgan. From there, the money that belongs to the family is transferred to Switzerland and elsewhere according to instructions given to only one or two people. He estimates the payments to be in the range of 5 to 7 percent of oil revenue. Then the rest is paid to Saudi Aramco accounts, he said.

The Saudi finance minister Jadaan said, "There is no income that goes anywhere but the treasury. Everything else gets out from the budget."

Seznec believes that one item holding up the Saudi Aramco IPO might be these payments, but that without the IPO the entire Vision is endangered.

"I think it's vital to any kind of efforts to modernize the economy," he said. "The key is to make sure transparency is imposed at all levels - especially for the biggest company in the kingdom - so you can ask the population to make sacrifices."

A year later, investors are still waiting.

The kingdom appears to be serious. It has hired investment banker Ken Moelis, who began his career at Drexel Burnham Lambert and whose clients have included casino tycoon Steve Wynn, Bain Capital and the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda. The Financial Times quoted a rival who dubbed Moelis "Ken of Arabia."

"I actually think that being able to be a shareholder in Saudi oil assets is a pretty attractive thing for a lot of folks in the energy industry," said Sarah Ladislaw, director of the energy and national security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Chinese companies, eager to curry favor with a reliable source of crude, are likely to buy significant portions. China is the kingdom's top trade partner. Ladislaw noted that even if oil demand drops, production costs are so low in Saudi Arabia that investors could still make money.

That modifies the risk of the price of oil, which has lurched over the past nine years from a high of $147 a barrel in 2008 to a low of less than $27 a barrel in 2016.

In a speech at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy on April 14, Saudi Aramco's chief executive Amin Nasser predicted a rebound in prices in the medium term. He said that since 2014, $1 trillion of oil and gas investments had been deferred or canceled and that the volume of conventional oil discovered in the past four years was half the amount discovered in the previous four years. The supply required for the coming years was "falling behind," he said.

"There can be little or no doubt that the future direction of the market is upward," he said. Asked whether demand was peaking, Nasser said, "Our belief is that peak demand is not in sight."

That might work out well for Saudi Arabia as it mulls when to launch its IPO. Jadaan said that the initial public offering would be launched both on Saudi markets and one or more international ones. Asked about estimates that the government would initially offer about 5 percent of the company, Jadaan said, "It could be more, it could be less or it could be more."

What will the kingdom do with the proceeds of a Saudi Aramco stock sale?

Jadaan said the money would go into new investments, such as mining, which the government believes can turn into a huge industry.

"We have a mining industry that is significantly underutilized.

Because we had the oil we didn't have to do much about that," he said. He said the government could act as an "anchor investor" to ease investors' qualms and do some initial research into projects.

The money could also go into helping meet new targets for renewable energy. Last week, the government announced a target of building 9,500 megawatts of renewable power capacity by 2023, up from virtually nothing now. Thirty utility-scale solar and wind projects will be developed over the next decade as part of a broader $50 billion program aimed at diversifying the electricity mix and freeing up for export oil now used for electricity generation.

The energy minister said at an industry conference that 10 percent of the domestic electricity mix will come from renewables by 2023.

Whether Mohammed bin Salman's grand plans can win popular support remains unknown.

"There are some real barriers to their overall goals in terms of converting the economy and moving it away from reliance on oil exports," said Gregory Gause, a professor at the Texas A&M University.

The private sector, for example, has been growing in recent years and employment has risen by a million jobs from 2004 to 2014, but businesses are mostly hiring foreign workers, not local ones.

And cutting subsidies and raising taxes have rarely been popular planks.

Jadaan said that half the country has been registered to receive welfare payments large enough to cover a portion of the increases in electricity and gasoline prices from cutting subsidies. And besides, the government needs revenue from somewhere.

"We can't sell gasoline at prices less than water prices," said Qasabi, the Saudi commerce minister. "I think the time has come to correct this."

20/04/2017

If Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif Has To Quit Today, Imran Khan Can Take Credit: 10 Facts.

Edited by SEMM | update on 20April 2017, 11:35 IST

Story Highlights:
1. Sharif family accused of using dodgy funds to buy London real estate,
2. Sharif says legit family businesses paid for the property,
3. Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan alleges money laundering.

New Delhi: Pakistan's Supreme Court will decide today if Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has to quit over corruption allegations, as a drawn-out investigation related to the "Panama Papers" leaks approach conclusion. Mr Sharif, 67, has denied any wrongdoing, but the Supreme Court agreed to investigate his family's offshore wealth late last year after opposition leader Imran Khan threatened street protests.

Here is your 10-point cheat-sheet to this story:

1. The Supreme Court could take a range of steps. It could clear the Prime Minister, or order a further judicial commission of inquiry or even declare him ineligible to hold office, as it did in 2012 with then-Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani over a contempt of court case.

2. Even if Mr Sharif is disqualified, his party would remain in power, but the move cause intense turmoil at a time when Pakistan is in the midst of problematic relations with India and as its civilian government and powerful military appear to have come to uneasy terms. The general election must be held by next year.

3. The controversy erupted with the publication of the so-called Panama Papers last year; 11.5 million secret documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca which documented the offshore dealings of many of the world's rich and powerful.

4. Among the global elite implicated were three of Mr Sharif's four children -- his daughter and presumptive political heir Maryam, and his two sons.

5. At the heart of the matter is the legitimacy of the funds used by the Sharif family to purchase several high-end London properties via offshore companies.

6. Mr Sharif is an industrialist serving his third term as Prime Minister after the first two were interrupted by interventions from the country's powerful military.

7. The ruling PML-N party insists that the wealth under review was acquired legally through family businesses in Pakistan and the Gulf.

8. But lawyers for Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan argue the paper trail for the funds is non-existent, and say the onus is on Mr Sharif to prove his relatives did not engage in money laundering.

9. In 2014, Mr Khan led a months-long protest that paralysed the government quarter in the capital, Islamabad, after rejecting Mr Sharif's decisive election win a year earlier.

10. Thought Mr Sharif enjoyed a good rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, relations between India and Pakistan have plunged to their worst in decades on account of a series of deadly attacks by Pakistani terrorists on Indian army bases. India has also blamed Pakistan for inciting civilian unrest in Kashmir which is seeing near daily and often violent demonstrations against security forces.

18/04/2017

For the first time in the U.S., a doctor is charged with female ge***al mutilation. Here's how the law came to be

Story About: A doctor is charged with female ge***al mutilation.

Edited by SEMMA | Updated by 18APRIL, IST 21:00

Men grabbed a little girl in a white dress at a celebration in Egypt, then spread her legs and pulled out a cutting instrument. Blood pooled beneath her.“I can still see it in my mind’s eye, right now,” said Reid, now 77.

Back then, as a second-term U.S. senator, he was so horrified by the image that he took up the fight against female ge***al mutilation and authored a law criminalizing it.While international health authorities say that the ritual has been performed on more than 200 million girls, primarily in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the 1996 U.S. law remained largely symbolic — until now.

On Wednesday, federal authorities accused Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, an emergency room physician in Detroit, of performing ge***al mutilation on two 7-year-old girls at a medical clinic in Livonia, Mich.

Charged with female ge***al mutilation, transportation with intent to engage in criminal s*xual activity and making a false statement to a federal officer, she faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on all counts.

The girls were told they were brought to Detroit from Minnesota for a “special” girls trip, according to a court filing. After arriving at a hotel, the girls were taken to the doctor “to get the germs out” because “our tummies hurt.”Both girls told authorities that they were instructed not to talk about the procedure.

One said she was given a pad to wear in her underwear, while the other told authorities that after the procedure she could barely walk and felt pain down to her ankle. The second victim’s parents told investigators that they took their daughter to Nagarwala for a “cleansing” of extra skin.

Authorities say other girls may have been victimized by Nagarwala between 2005 and 2007.The doctor, a U.S. citizen born in Washington, denied that she had ever engaged in the practice, telling a federal officer during a voluntary interview that she knew it was illegal, according to a court document.

She pleaded not guilty. Her attorney did not return calls for comment.

According to her online bio at Henry Ford Hospital, where Nagarwala practices, she attended Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and speaks Gujarati, a language of western India.

Nagarwala has been placed on administrative leave and her clinical privileges have been suspended, according to Henry Ford spokeswoman Brenda Craig.

“The alleged criminal activity did not occur at any Henry Ford facility,” Craig said in a statement. “We would never support or condone anything related to this practice.”

The procedure may involve a partial or total removal of the cl****is, excision of the inner and outer folds of the v***a or the narrowing of the vaginal opening. Carried out mostly on girls between infancy and age 15, the procedure can be intended to reduce s*xual pleasure and promiscuity, and to prepare a girl for marriage.

The World Health Organization says ge***al cutting has no health benefits for girls or women. The procedure can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and infections, while increasing the risk of complications in childbirth and newborn deaths.

It is unknown how many girls have undergone the procedure in the U.S., but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes the number at risk has risen as more people emigrate from countries where the practice is common, including Egypt, Ethiopia and Somalia.

Reid said he was never swayed by those who defended the practice as a cultural rite and said it’s not supported by religious texts.

“You want a way to hold women back? Just make it so to have s*x is a painful thing, not any fun,” he said. “That’s what they’ve done for generations. It’s a way that men suppress women.”

Back in the 1990s, his staff had dissuaded him from getting involved in the issue, arguing that politically it made more sense for a woman to do it.

“I accept that — except no one else would take the cudgel,” he said. “It was just me. I figured I’m a lot better than nothing.”

So he persisted. His bill slipped through, he said, without much fanfare.

The prosecution of Nagarwala 21 years later is “clear evidence” the practice is happening in the U.S., according to activists.

“There’s a myth that this is only happening to people in India or Africa,” said Shelby Quast, director of the women’s rights organization Equality Now. “It’s happening everywhere and we’re beginning to learn that.”

She also said the arrest could lead to others: “It was very quiet. People were not talking about this…. Where this practice is occurring, if there are other doctors that are performing this, I would expect people might start speaking up.”

Though authorities say no one else has been charged under the 1996 law, at least two other criminal cases have been brought against people suspected of or who agreed to perform ge***al cutting in the U.S.

In 2002, a Santa Clarita man was caught in an FBI sting when he agreed through an undercover agent to perform ge***al mutilation on children ages 8 and 12.

The man told investigators he had performed more “female circumcisions” than anyone in the Western world, though authorities were unable to corroborate that. He and his girlfriend pleaded guilty to conspiracy and possessing child po*******hy.

In 2006, an Ethiopian immigrant was convicted of aggravated battery and cruelty to children for removing his 2-year-old daughter’s cl****is with scissors at the family’s Atlanta-area apartment.

In 2013, President Obama signed an amendment to Reid’s law that made it illegal to send a girl to another country to have the procedure done.

For Reid, that the alleged perpetrator in Detroit was a trained physician makes the case hard to comprehend, but he was happy to see his law being enforced.

“I hope it focuses attention on a problem we have in America,” he said.

18/04/2017

Human-Caused Climate Change Has Rerouted An Entire River

STORY ABOUT:A team of scientists Monday documented what they're describing as the first case of large-scale river reorganization as a result of human-caused climate change.

EDITED BY SEMMA | UPDATED:APRIL 18, 2017 12:50 IST

They found that in mid-2016, the retreat of a very large glacier in Canada's Yukon territory led to the rerouting of its vast stream of melt water from one river system to another - cutting down flow to the Yukon's largest lake, and channeling freshwater to the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska, rather than to the Bering Sea.

The researchers dubbed the reorganization an act of "rapid river piracy," saying that such events had often occurred in the Earth's geologic past, but never before, to their knowledge, as a sudden present-day event. They also called it "geologically instantaneous."

"The river wasn't what we had seen a few years ago. It was a faded version of its former self," said lead study author Daniel Shugar of the University of Washington, Tacoma of the Slims River, which lost much of its flow due to the glacial change. "It was barely flowing at all. Literally, every day, we could see the water level dropping, we could see sandbars popping out in the river."
The study was published in Nature Geoscience. Shugar conducted the study with researchers from six different Canadian and U.S. universities.

The study found that the choking of the Slims River in turn deprived Kluane Lake, the largest body of water in the Yukon Territory. The lake level was at a record low last August, and two small communities that live on the lake may now have to adjust to the lower water levels.

"The Kluane lake level dropped last year and is likely to continue dropping," Shugar said. "If it drops enough that the lake level is below its other outlet, at the north end, it becomes what is called a closed basin. That will have changes to the chemistry, the structure of the lake, the biology."

The precipitating event for all of this happened in summer 2016, when meltwater from the retreating Kaskawulsh glacier burst through a channel of ice, suddenly draining a glacial lake that had fed Slims river and directing waters into a different river that ultimately heads south toward the Gulf of Alaska. Previously, these waters had ultimately fed into the vast Yukon river, which empties on Alaska's west coast.

The researchers found only a minuscule probability that the retreat of Kaskawulsh glacier - which retracted by nearly half a mile from 1956 to 2007 - could have occurred in what they called a "constant climate." They therefore inferred that the events in question could be attributed to human-caused climate change.

The beneficiary of the change, in hydrologic terms, is the Alsek River, known for its whitewater rafting. It saw far higher flows than normal as a consequence - and empties eventually into the Gulf of Alaska, which should now be seeing a new infusion of freshwater.

It's important to underscore the scale of the changes this represents: The Kaskawulsh glacier is around three miles wide at its front, or "toe." The river it used to fuel, the Slims River, had a floodplain a mile wide and a flow that ranged from .2 to .4 miles in width. The lake that it fed - Kluane Lake - is 45 miles long and more than 250 feet deep in places. Now, all of this is changing.

These events have occurred in a relatively sparsely populated wilderness area, and so will not have ramifications for large human populations - but they give a sense of just how dramatic and sudden climate-linked changes can be. Similarly, recently mountain glacier changes in the Bolivian Andes have created the risk of dangerous outburst floods that could imperil communities below them.

The current study represents "a great example of a threshold response to warming over the last century-and-a-half," said Ken Tape, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who was not involved in the research. "The glacier has been retreating gradually, but at a threshold encountered in summer 2016, the drainage abruptly changed in a matter of weeks and completely reorganized downstream ecosystems."

Tape cautioned that "most glaciers, when they retreat, do not have downstream consequences as dramatic as in the case presented here. Flows increase or decrease commensurate with glacier mass balance, but rivers are not usually lost or gained in the process, and change is more gradual."

The Kaskawulsh glacier, at only 60 degrees north latitude, is in a relatively temperate region well below the Arctic circle, helping to make it particularly susceptible to climate change. The researchers provided measurements suggesting that just before the river reorganization, the glacier was experiencing quite warm temperatures for the springtime, which seems to have triggered a large burst of meltwater.

Shugar said that the researchers do not expect the glacier and the river system that depends on it to flip back - rather, it has entered a new state.

"We did some preliminary estimates of what it would take for the Slims River to be reestablished," said Shugar, "and it seems unlikely to occur in the current climate."