Credit: Niantic Labs
It's Earth Day in Pokémon GO as it is in the rest of the world, and we've got a "Mission Blue" event to go with it -- even if it's a little bit different from events that we've seen in the past. This year Niantic is encouraging people to check into sponsored cleanup events in order to unlock some in-game Stardust bonuses. The number of events is relatively small compared to the extensive global reach of the game, but you should check this list to see if there's an event near you. If there is, you can go work towards unlocking some Pokémon GO rewards and do some cleaning up, while you're at it.
The in-game rewards are tied to how many people check into these events. So if 1,500 people check in, we'll all get double Stardust from Ground, Water and Grass-type catches for a limited time. If 3,000 players check in, we'll get triple Stardust from those same types. Rewards should be released sometime today and will last for 48 hours.
This Earth Day event is an interesting extension of Pokémon GO's real world/virtual world duality. We've had similar unlockable rewards in the past -- November's Global Catch Challenge being the largest example -- but in the past we've always had in-game activities tied to in-game rewards. This is an instance of out-of-game activities being tied to in-game rewards, which is a nice way to further blur the line between normal reality and its augmented counterpart.
It's a great idea, but a bit of a tricky proposition. Taking the challenge out of the game means that you need to work with sponsored events to make things work out, but 68 worldwide events really aren't all that many. So while all trainers will be able to take advantage of the rewards once unlocked, only a relatively limited subset of players will actually be able to work towards unlocking them. It's not unlike the concept of Pokémon GO Fest last year, though that didn't exactly turn out as planned.
We'll let you know when rewards are unlocked, though I imagine we'll be able to hit the 3,000 trainer threshold handily, especially with this number of events: it's not hard to imagine a couple hundred players turning out at some of the events in larger population centers. It seems like Winter may have finally relinquished its icy death grip on the Northeast, so I'll be out.
(CNN) Earth Day turns 48 this year and millions of people in roughly 200 countries will unite Sunday to find ways to protect and celebrate the planet.
In the past year, we've had environmental victories as well as defeats, all of which will have effects on the planet in some way. Here are five significant events that happened since the last Earth Day:
We lost one rhino subspecies
The world's last male northern white rhino died last month , leaving the future of the subspecies in doubt.
At 45, Sudan was fraught with age-related issues and multiple infections. He lived in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya surrounded by armed guards who protected him 24 hours a day.
Rhinos are targeted by poachers, fueled by the belief in Asia that their horns cure various ailments. Experts say the rhino horn is becoming more lucrative than drugs.
When Sudan died, he left behind his daughter Najin, 28, and granddaughter, Fatu, 17. The future of the rhinos remains uncertain as scientists look into multiple alternatives to sustain the subspecies, including artificially inseminating one of the two females left.
We are saying goodbye to plastics
A woman sorts plastic bags after washing them for re-use in a river in Nairobi, Kenya.
Plastic-free supermarkets, a deposit on plastic bottles and jail time for using plastic bags. These are just some of the efforts leaders are making to curb the world's plastic addiction.
In February, the very first plastic-free supermarket aisle was unveiled in Amsterdam. Shoppers there are buying their groceries in "new compostable bio-materials as well as traditional materials" such as glass, metal and cardboard.
Plastic straws, drink stirrers and cotton swabs could be banned in England as part of the government's plan to eliminate all avoidable plastic waste by 2042. The UK government is also planning to introduce a deposit on plastic bottles, requiring customers to pay an extra tax when buying single-use drink containers that will be refunded once those items are recycled.
We met a punk-rock turtle
The Mary River turtle is native to Queensland, Australia.
The good news is we discovered an Australian river turtle with a distinctive green punk-rock hairstyle, two spikes under its chin and the ability to breathe through its genitals. The bad news is, it may not be around for long because it's on a new list of endangered reptiles.
The Mary River turtle is native to Queensland, Australia. It has the ability to stay underwater for up to three days. Its vibrant green mohawk is the result of algae growing on its head because of the extended time spent submerged.
The turtles were often kept as pets in the 1960s and '70s and by the 1990s, they were already at risk of being endangered, according to Rikki Gumbs, a reptile biologist at Zoological Society London.
Leonardo DiCaprio to the rescue
JUST WATCHED Vaquita: The Business of Extinction Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Vaquita: The Business of Extinction 24:59
There are only 30 vaquita porpoises left on Earth, and Leonardo DiCaprio wants to save them.
The vaquita, which looks very similar to a dolphin, calls the Gulf of California home. The species has become endangered due to illegal fishing.
The actor and activist used Twitter and Instagram to get his millions of followers to sign a petition asking Mexico's President to take immediate action to protect the endangered vaquita porpoise.
And the president was all ears. DiCaprio met with President Enrique Peña Nieto, securing an agreement to work together to protect the vaquita and other marine life.
These nets are designed to catch the giant totoaba fish, whose swim bladder is considered a culinary delicacy in China and sold for more than $4,500 per pound.
US leaves Paris climate accord
JUST WATCHED Trump withdraws US from Paris climate accord Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Trump withdraws US from Paris climate accord 03:11
President Donald Trump put the US at odds with nearly every other nation on Earth when he decided to pull out of the Paris climate accord.
"We're getting out," Trump said of his decision during an event held in the White House's Rose Garden.
At the time, Trump even suggested it was a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese government, despite scientific evidence that contradicted those beliefs.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is aimed at cutting emissions and keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And experts say the departure of the US would make that significantly harder due to the country's climate footprint.
It’s been a difficult 15 months if you care about the environment. Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, he’s made fracking easier on public lands, decimated the Environmental Protection Agency and renounced the Paris climate accord.
These are just a few reasons millions of Americans will pledge their support for the environment on April 22 for Earth Day.
But this year, that is not enough. This year, if you care about the environment, you should spend April 22 and every other day working toward a more important date ― Nov. 6, Election Day. That’s when we can force policymakers to protect our climate and natural resources. Nov. 6 is this year’s Earth Day, and all of us need to show up.
The environmental movement has a turnout problem, but this problem also presents an enormous opportunity.
Unfortunately, we haven’t always shown up in the past. According to Environmental Voter Project research, 69 percent of registered voters cast votes in 2016, but only 50 percent of environmentalists did. In the 2014 midterms, 44 percent of registered voters went to the polls, compared with only 21 percent of environmentalists.
Simply put, the environmental movement has a turnout problem, but this problem also presents an enormous opportunity. By some estimates, over 20 million registered voters list climate change and the environment among their top priorities. This could be a powerful constituency on Election Day, particularly in midterm elections where barely 80 million people vote. Nonvoters are the low-hanging fruit of the climate movement. They are already-persuaded environmentalists in a society where it’s increasingly hard to persuade anybody of anything.
Over the past few years, behavioral scientists have come to bemoan the difficulty of political persuasion in a “post-truth” world, and they reference our growing tendency to evaluate information based not on conformity with common societal standards (like evidence or logic), but simply on whether it supports the values of our “tribe” (i.e., what is good for our team equals the truth).
Unfortunately, political persuasion is even more difficult when we discuss climate change. In this context, recent studies have even documented a phenomenon called the “backfire effect,” which reveals that confronting climate-deniers with facts and science often doesn’t persuade them of anything, but rather causes them to cling to their wrong views even more tenaciously than before.
In short, it is extraordinarily hard to persuade people to start caring about climate change, so it’s all the more important for those of us who already care to vote.
If we vote, politicians will follow – we need only look back to the first Earth Day for proof.
The good news is this: We have overwhelming numbers of voters who value environmental issues. And if we vote, politicians will follow ― we need only look back to the first Earth Day for proof.
On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, protesting smog-choked air and toxic water in the largest demonstration in American history.
At the time, this took much of the nation by surprise. Neither Richard Nixon nor Hubert Humphrey had focused on environmental issues in the 1968 presidential campaign. And in May of 1969, only 1 percent of Americans named “pollution/ecology” as one of the country’s most important problems. Yet by 1971, that number had soared to 25 percent.
Even back then, politicians knew how to read polls and respond accordingly.
With astonishing speed, Nixon worked with Congress to form the Environmental Protection Agency, and then enact the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act, all before a single ballot was cast in the 1972 election.
If we choose to, environmentalists could overwhelm the electorate.
2018 is looking eerily similar to 1970. The effects of climate change are being felt like never before, and millions of registered voters count the environment as a priority. Yet, one thing is strikingly different: Politicians aren’t responding like they did in the 1970s. Climate change wasn’t mentioned once in the State of the Union address, nor in the Democratic response. And no more than a handful of candidates are mentioning environmental issues on the stump.
Why the change? Politicians certainly still care about getting elected, but now they have a secret weapon: Now they know which people are going to vote on Election Day and which people are going to stay home. And, recently, environmentalists have been staying at home, which makes them easy to ignore.
Since the early 2000s, campaigns have been able to search each citizen’s voting history on easy-to-access voter file software from companies like NGP VAN or the GOP Data Center. Don’t worry: Whom you vote for is secret, but which elections you vote in is public information. For obvious reasons, these public voting histories are now the lifeblood of modern campaigns, allowing candidates to focus their limited resources on polling and communicating with only those people who are likely to show up on Election Day.
This means that politicians now only care about the policy priorities of voters, not nonvoters. This shouldn’t surprise us: We wouldn’t expect Starbucks to care about people who don’t drink coffee, so why would campaigns care about people who don’t vote? And, unfortunately, environmentalists aren’t voting.
But this is not a reason for despair; it is a reason for hope. In a world of big, scary problems like climate change, altering our voting habits is actually a pretty easy problem to fix. It takes the average American only 14 minutes to vote, and it can have an enormous effect.
So this Earth Day, circle Nov. 6 on your calendar and pledge to vote. If we choose to, environmentalists could overwhelm the electorate. And, yes, politicians will take notice because nothing motivates a politician more than the prospect of winning ― or losing ― an election.
When it’s completed in the coming months, it will be used to monitor or strike extremists in West and North Africa, regions where most Americans have no idea the country is fighting.
The mission in Niger is expected to come under scrutiny in a long-awaited Defense Department investigation into the deadly Oct. 4 ambush that killed four American soldiers.
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3. As Kim Jong-un, the reclusive leader of North Korea, above right, prepares for a landmark meeting with President Trump, he has seized the diplomatic high ground. He’s made conciliatory gestures on nuclear testing and American troops that have buoyed hopes in South Korea and won praise from Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Kim’s moves are also unsettling officials in the U.S., Japan and China. Some suspect he is merely posturing in advance of the meeting, as well as before a separate one with South Korea’s president. Others worry that his gestures could put Mr. Trump on the defensive in the grinding negotiations over the future of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
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4. Four of the five living former American presidents gathered at a Houston church on Saturday to remember Barbara Bush, the former first lady, who died on Tuesday at the age of 92. (Read our obituary here.)
The current first lady, Melania Trump, went on behalf of the White House. Her predecessors Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and of course Laura Bush also attended.
On Friday, thousands of mourners paid tribute at a public viewing. “She’s kind of America’s grandma,” said Houston’s police chief, Art Acevedo. “Barbara Bush is about as close to Texas royalty as you can come.”
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5. We reported that there’s a strong possibility that President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, above left, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate to work he did for Mr. Trump.
And James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, talked to Michael Barbaro, host of our podcast “The Daily,” about the memos he kept on his interactions with Mr. Trump, and his new book, “A Higher Loyalty.”
For more on another head-spinning week in Washington, check out our roundup of the biggest stories in American politics.
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6. Tens of thousands of feet above the earth, the passengers clasped hands with strangers, prayed together and got ready to die.
That was the scene aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 from New York to Dallas on Tuesday after an engine exploded in midair. Shrapnel blew out a window, sucking Jennifer Riordan, a Wells Fargo executive from Albuquerque, partly out of the plane. She died from her injuries.
But the pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, a veteran Navy pilot, was able to pull off a smooth emergency landing, displaying what one passenger would later call “nerves of steel.” Above, investigators inspected the plane.
On Friday, the maker of the engine that failed on the Southwest flight issued new guidelines that call for more frequent and thorough inspections of its engine fan blades.
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7. For months, members of Congress have been demanding answers about how many immigrant families are being split up when they arrive at the southwest border. Above, an apprehension near McAllen, Tex.
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Now we know: More than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October, including more than 100 children under the age of 4, according to federal data obtained by The Times.
Lawmakers were asking, in part, because the Trump administration has said it was considering taking children from their parents as a way to deter migrants from coming to the U.S. Homeland Security officials say no such policy is currently in effect.
We also reported that some immigrants with old deportation orders are being arrested when they show up for green card interviews about their marriages to American citizens.
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8. Our Interpreter columnists went to Sri Lanka to investigate Facebook’s role in mob attacks against the minority Muslim population there earlier this year, which led the government to impose a nationwide state of emergency. A mob stormed the house above, setting a fire and killing a man inside.
Many users spread misinformation and hate speech on the site, and even used it to plan attacks. But Facebook ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, even from the government. It’s a pattern that’s been repeated in other developing countries around the world, with deadly outcomes.
“There needs to be some kind of engagement with countries like Sri Lanka by big companies who look at us only as markets,” one Sri Lankan official said. “We’re a society, we’re not just a market.”
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9. For the first time in decades, Cubans have a president whose last name is not Castro.
Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, above left, a longtime Communist Party stalwart, took the reins from Raúl Castro in a modest ceremony in the National Assembly. Here’s what we know about Mr. Díaz-Canel.
Our correspondent in Havana saw little fanfare to mark the transition. The Cubans he spoke to were doubtful that a new leader would change much, and a sense of apathy pervaded the capital.
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10. Arizona educators voted in favor of a statewide walkout, as teacher protests over low pay and school budget cuts continue to sweep across the country. Above, a rally in Phoenix earlier this month.
We got thousands of responses to our callout asking teachers to describe those cuts. Educators sent us photos of decrepit classrooms and 25-year-old textbooks.
And lots of other readers wrote in asking how they can help. There’s plenty you can do, even if you have only a few dollars to spare. Here are some ideas.
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11. Finally, a deep dive into corruption in South Africa, the actor Antonio Banderas, above, as Picasso and San Francisco’s big seismic gamble. We have those stories and more of our signature journalism in this collection of 11 of our best weekend reads.
For more suggestions on what to watch and read, may we suggest our list of eight Netflix originals worth your time, our music critics’ latest playlist (don’t miss Prince’s rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U”) or a glance at The New York Times Best Sellers.
Have a great week.
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