ATTENTION! Our previously scheduled lunchtime photo has been postponed to bring you breaking news. EXCLUSIVE MUST CREDIT MOTHER JONES. Armageddon hit London today as the skies turned brown and the sun blazed a sullen orange at midday!

The Gherkin was so brown it looked like a cigar!

The Monument looked as if the city were on fire again!

The view from Earl’s Court tube station was Satanic!

These photos are unretouched, and no, I did not forget to reset the white balance on my camera. So what was going on? Apparently it was due to Britain catching the edge of Hurricane Ophelia:

According to the Met Office, the red sun is caused by winds pulling up Saharan dust….BBC weather presenter Simon King said: “Ophelia originated in the Azores where it was a hurricane and as it tracked its way northwards it dragged in tropical air from the Sahara….Because the dust is so high, light from the sun is scattered in the longer wavelengths, which is more the red part of the spectrum, so it appears red to our eyes.”

Ophelia has pulled in unseasonably warm air up from Spain and North Africa, bringing temperatures in the early 20s over the weekend….The air is safe to breathe, according to the Met Office, as the particles are high up in the atmosphere.

So there you have it. From London, I’m Kevin Drum reporting.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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