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San Francisco Bay Area residents woke up to some bad news for their Friday commute. Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, the region’s main commuter rail system, which connects San Francisco’s peninsula with the East and South Bay, systematically shut down due to a “computer networking problem” affecting train control. The agency announced it was closing all 50 stations at 4:24 a.m. on Friday morning, the East Bay Times reported. As of this writing on Friday morning, BART said that train service had resumed, although passengers should expect “major delays.” Technicians are on site trying to get to the bottom of the situation, but right now, that is the information that we have, BART communication officer Cheryl Stalter told KQED shortly after 6 a.m local time. We have a computer networking problem that is systemwide . . . it is affecting all operations, so we cannot put trains into service. Chris Filippi, a spokesman for BART, said in a statement to the New York Times, that the last time this happened, it took several hours to resolve. The incident left tens of thousands of commuters looking for new ways to get to work, with many reportedly clogging the Bay Area’s freeways, while the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates Muni bus and rail services, assisted remaining passengers at some BART stations, per the Times. The San Francisco Bay Ferry also ran larger ferries from the North and East Bay, per the East Bay Times. Some 170,000 area residents use BART on weekdays, with ridership just half of what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the American Public Transportation Association, as reported by the New York Times.
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Global equity funds attracted the smallest weekly inflows in four weeks in the week through May 7, amid concerns about the impact of tariffs on the global economy and as investors awaited anticipated U.S.-China trade talks for more clues. According to LSEG Lipper data, investors bought just $856 million worth of global equity funds during the week, when compared with their $6.13 billion worth of net purchases in the previous week. European equity funds witnessed robust demand for a fourth successive week with investors ploughing in a net $12.81 billion into these equity funds. Asian funds also saw a net $3.32 billion worth of inflows while in the U.S., there were outflows for a fourth consecutive week, to the tune of $16.22 billion, on a net basis. Sectoral funds, meanwhile, saw net selling for a ninth successive week, grossing approximately $2.6 billion for the week. The financial sector with $1.19 billion and the metals and mining sector with $478 million in net sales, led sectoral outflows. Global bond funds, however, gained popularity during the week as these funds saw weekly inflows totalling a net $11.4 billion, the highest in nine weeks. Dollar-denominated bond funds witnessed a revival in demand with investors allocating a net $4.33 billion to these funds, the biggest amount in eight weeks. Global short-term and high yield funds also witnessed a significant $1.91 billion and $1.29 billion worth of net purchases, respectively. Global money market funds saw a hefty $66.3 billion worth of weekly inflows, the biggest since February 5. At the same time, gold and precious metal commodity funds experienced their second weekly outflow in 13 weeks, to the tune of $655 million. Data covering 29,582 emerging market funds showed, equity funds received approximately $1.48 billion while bond funds gained a net $1.56 billion, a second successive weekly inflow in each segment. Gaurav Dogra and Patturaja Murugaboopathy, Reuters
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will no longer track the cost of climate change-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heat waves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change. NOAA falls under the U.S. Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service. The agency said its National Centers for Environmental Information would no longer update its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database beyond 2024, and that its information going as far back as 1980 would be archived. For decades, it has tracked hundreds of major events across the country, including destructive hurricanes, hail storms, droughts and freezes that have totaled trillions of dollars in damage. The database uniquely pulls information from the Federal Emergency Management Agencys assistance data, insurance organizations, state agencies and more to estimate overall losses from individual disasters. NOAA Communications Director Kim Doster said in a statement that the change was in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes. Scientists say these weather events are becoming increasingly more frequent, costly and severe with climate change. Experts have attributed the growing intensity of recent debilitating heat, Hurricane Milton, the Southern California wildfires and blasts of cold to climate change. Assessing the impact of weather events fueled by the planet’s warming is key as insurance premiums hike, particularly in communities more prone to flooding, storms and fires. Climate change has wrought havoc on the insurance industry, and homeowners are at risk of skyrocketing rates. One limitation is that the dataset estimated only the nation’s most costly weather events. The information is generally seen as standardized and unduplicable, given the agency’s access to nonpublic data, and other private databases would be more limited in scope and likely not shared as widespread for proprietary reasons. Other datasets, however, also track death estimates from these disasters. Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections, pointed to substitutes from insurance brokers and the international disaster database as alternative sources of information. Still, The NOAA database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather, Masters said, and its a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses. These moves also dont change the fact that these disasters are escalating year over year, Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at nonprofit climate organization Climate Central. Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people.” Its critical that we highlight those events when theyre happening, she added. All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change. The move, reported Thursday by CNN, is yet another of President Donald Trumps efforts to remove references to climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the weather from the federal governments lexicon and documents. Trump has instead prioritized allies in the polluting coal, oil and gas industries, which studies say are linked or traced to climate damage. The change also marks the administration’s latest hit overall to the weather, ocean and fisheries agency. The Trump administration fired hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal NOAA employees on probationary status in February, part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency efforts to downsize the federal government workforce. It began a second round of more than 1,000 cuts at the agency in March, more than 10% of its workforce at the time. At the time, insiders said massive firings and changes to the agency would risk lives and negatively impact the U.S. economy. Experts also noted fewer vital weather balloon launches under NOAA would worsen U.S. weather forecasts. More changes to the agency are expected, which could include some of those proposed in the president’s preliminary budget. The agency’s weather service also paused providing language translations of its products last month though it resumed those translations just weeks later. ___ The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Alexa St. John, Associated Press Data journalist Mary Katherine Wildeman contributed to thi report.
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