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I really wish every part of this was somehow surprising.

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Today, the Biden-Harris Administration announced that NOAA is designating 4,543 square miles of coastal and offshore waters along 116 miles of California’s central coast as America’s 17th national marine sanctuary. Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary will conserve the area’s diverse range of marine life and celebrate Indigenous peoples’ connections to the region. It is the third largest sanctuary in the National Marine Sanctuary System.

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“The recent decision by commissioner-appointed committee members has outraged not just our community, but the country as a whole,” said Teresa Kenney, a Montgomery County resident and founder of the Village Books store. “Nowhere in the approved policy is it under the committee’s purview to determine whose history is fact or fiction.”

At an Oct. 22 meeting, the Montgomery County Commissioners Court issued a stay against all actions of the citizens reconsideration committee since Oct. 1 and put any future decisions on hold.

The commissioners also created another committee to review and revise library policy, including the rules around the citizens reconsideration group. It will be made up of employees from different commissioners' offices and advised by the county attorney’s office.

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I haven't donated money, but I can confirm that the messages are constant and very pleading in tone. Honestly they turn me off from donating at all.

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archive.is

Climate scientists are in clear agreement that in order to avoid ever-worsening disasters and disruptions to our societies, the world must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policies put in place over the next few years will determine what the future climate looks like and what threats the world will face. The U.S. is crucial to this effort. And in the 2024 presidential election contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, voters have a choice between diametrically opposed visions of what the country must do. “When it comes to climate change, the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be more stark,” says Leah Stokes, a University of California, Santa Barbara, political scientist who focuses on energy and climate.


To provide a broad look at how potential policies under Harris or Trump would shape future U.S. emissions, Orvis’s team at EI used its Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model. The researchers compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with more ambitious policies that achieve a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and with the policies laid out in Project 2025. They found that the latter scenario “basically stops the progress that’s been made,” Orvis says. And even if current policies aren’t enough to meet international climate goals, any progress that can be made is crucial because “each tenth of a degree [of warming] is more damaging than the previous one.”

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I have no words.

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A hopeful and unexpected drop in U.S. drug overdose deaths appears to be gaining speed. Fatal overdoses are down 12.7%, according to data released this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It marks another significant improvement from last month, when surveys showed roughly a 10.6% drop in fatalities from street drugs.

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This year’s flu shot will be missing a strain of influenza it’s protected against for more than a decade.

That’s because there have been no confirmed flu cases caused by the Influenza B/Yamagata lineage since spring 2020. And the Food and Drug Administration decided this year that the strain now poses little to no threat to human health.

Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion.

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Here's the salient line: As soon as a Democrat loses the popular vote but wins an Electoral College victory thanks to the support of Black and brown people in currently red states, Republican white folks will suddenly become very interested in getting rid of the Electoral College.

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If Roberson’s execution goes forward, he will be the first person executed on the basis of the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis in the history of the United States.

Texas lawmakers say they passed a law to prevent miscarriages of justice like this from occurring. In 2013, they approved Article 11.073, known as the junk science writ law. The statute allows people to challenge their convictions based on developments in forensic science that “contradicts scientific evidence relied on by the state at trial.”


Several people testified at the hearing including Brian Wharton, the former lead detective on Roberson’s case. Wharton now says Roberson is innocent.

“We should apologize to Robert and send him home,” Wharton told Texas lawmakers. “Don’t make my mistake. Hear his voice.”

Roberson’s legal team says that his daughter died from a severe case of viral and bacterial pneumonia which developed into septic shock. Her condition was exacerbated by dangerous levels of promethazine in her system, which two doctors prescribed to her in the days before her death.

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On Monday, the Rutherford County sheriff’s office released a statement confirming that it had arrested an armed suspect for making threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency employees but had concluded that the suspect had acted alone and that there were not “truck loads of militia” targeting relief workers.

Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with FEMA, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, N.C., to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops ‘had come across ... trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.’”

“The IMTs [incident management teams] have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel in that county,” the email added.

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If passed, the measure would give authority back to local governments to enact or change laws on rent control. For advocates, passing Proposition 33 would be a critical opportunity to address California’s housing crisis head-on. For the real estate industry, defeating Proposition 33 would mean maintaining the status quo in a market that has made billions for corporate landlords.

While rent control — caps on rent increases — provides relief to tenants, some economists suggest there are significant trade-offs: Rent control policies can lead to higher rents for uncontrolled units, reduce landlords’ incentive to maintain units, and dampen the creation of new rental housing — exacerbating affordable housing shortages.

Since January 2021, states and localities across the country have implemented more than 300 new tenant protections, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that pushes for housing affordability.

And some housing advocates think that if Californians approve the ballot question, other states could follow suit, expanding rent control in the coming years as a way to prevent large rate hikes that can force out low- and middle-income tenants.

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Tenants at four Omaha-area apartment complexes voted to unionize this summer, and they all share a common landlord: Minnesota-based Elevate Living.

Now renters with a local landlord are preparing to follow their lead.

Though tenant unions have deep roots in cities like New York and Los Angeles, there’s little precedent in Nebraska for the organizations.

Driving the unionization trend in Omaha is a growing feeling among tenants that landlords are charging more in rent but doing less to address issues at their properties, said Seth Cope, a founding organizer with OTU.

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The first time many Americans heard about Springfield, Ohio, came during the September 2024 presidential debate when Donald Trump falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in the city were eating other residents’ cats and dogs.

[...]

What has gone mostly overlooked is the effect these racist lies have had on energizing Ohio’s nearly 50 white extremist groups.

Members of the white supremacist group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield on Aug. 10, 2024, with with swastikas on their signs.

Since then, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys have each marched in separate demonstrations through Springfield.

[...]

[Researchers] have found that the rapidly changing social conditions in Ohio have played a significant role in the growth of extremism.

Between 1990 and 2019, for instance, manufacturing jobs shrank from 21.7% of all employment in the state to 12.5%, a loss of nearly 360,000 jobs. As a result, income disparities between the professional and working classes have widened – as has the heightened sense among some alienated white men that white conservatives are the real victims of bias in a society growing more racially and culturally diverse.

For many of these alienated men, particularly those in rural areas that lack significant numbers of Black and Hispanic residents, extremist ideologies offer easy answers to complex questions that involve their sense of disenfranchisement

[...]

Though the emergence of white extremist groups goes far beyond the borders of Ohio, [researchers] have found that community-based, educational initiatives are effective in understanding and ultimately eradicating the root causes of racial and ethnic hatred on the local level.

[...] Community engagement that emphasizes dialogue and understanding across different racial groups is crucial for demonstrating the dangers of intolerance – and the benefits of diversity.

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When tornadoes swept through Rockdale County, Georgia, this past spring, residents complained they had little warning. There was a similar silence when Buffalo, New York, was buried in multiple feet of snow in 2022. In Maui, Hawaii, and Paradise, California — the sites of the two deadliest wildfires in modern U.S. history — survivors believe a lack of warning contributed to the loss of dozens of lives.

Each of these disasters was unique, but they also speak to shared, underlying issues that cut to the core of this system. Because when it comes to the who, what, when, where, and why of warnings, there’s no single, official standard. Instead, there is a patchwork of approaches, often relying on a few people shouldering the responsibility to warn thousands or even millions of others. And while money, attention, and energy are being poured into addressing the technological side, the very human challenges of bureaucracy, communication, trust, and fear are often ignored — until the next disaster.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by theangriestbird to c/usnews
 
 

Brandon Marlow walks through surge waters flooding the street after Hurricane Milton came ashore in the Sarasota area in Fort Myers, Florida.

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The complicated regulatory and financial requirements are some of the reasons why it has taken months for the consortiums to start dishing out green bank funds. But somebody eventually had to go first.

That honor goes to Climate United, the consortium in charge of nearly $7 billion in federal green bank funding, more than any other group. On Tuesday, it announced what is both its first investment and the first project financed by the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund: a $31.8 million loan for Scenic Hill Solar, a Little Rock, Arkansas–based solar developer.

That money will provide pre-construction financing for solar installations that will help lower the utility bills and carbon footprint of the University of Arkansas system. At 66 megawatts across 16 sites, the project will be the largest commercial solar deployment in Arkansas and the fourth-largest university renewable energy deployment in the country.

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Intense Debate Over Solar: A large solar farm proposed in Knox County, Ohio, has drawn about 4,000 public comments — more than any other solar project in the state.

Newspaper Misinformation: After the local paper was sold to Metric Media, part of a “pink slime” network, the Mount Vernon News published one-sided coverage and dubious claims about solar power.

Fossil Fuel Influence: Opposition to solar was stoked by a group whose major donor — a retired gas-industry executive — also leads a pro-gas dark-money organization.

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